Panelists: Transhumanism is not just latest tech advance but seeks to one day replace humans

(OSV News) -- It's a term with a lot of contemporary currency: transhumanism.

Online, on TV, in print -- it repeatedly surfaces, both intriguing and yet somehow vaguely threatening.

So just what is it? And how does it look when viewed through the lenses of philosophy, science and theology?

A May 15 discussion of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America in Washington offered immediate insight with its title, "Transhumanism: The Last Heresy?"

To this, it added the thoughts of its panelists, institute scholar Jan Bentz, lecturer and tutor at Blackfriars Studium in Oxford, England; Wael Taji Miller, editor at the Axioma Center, the first Christian, faith-based think tank in Hungary; and Legionary of Christ Father Michael Baggot, a professor of theology and bioethics currently teaching at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome.

Each argued through the experience of their respective disciplines that transhumanism is not simply a technological project, but rather a modernist heresy seeking to replace the human person with a machine-enhanced, artificially engineered being.

And if that sounds like the stuff of science fiction, it still largely is -- but that doesn't mean it's not an eventual threat to human dignity Catholics can comfortably ignore.

As a sort of ideological twin to transhumanism, Jan Bentz said, Utopianism views man as self-sufficient and independent from the divine; it rejects any permanence of human nature; it confuses progress with redemption; and it substitutes metaphysics -- questions about reality and existence -- with ideology.

"Utopianism," Bentz proposed, "is the obstinate post-Christian denial of the fallen condition of man -- and the rejection of historical, social and moral limits that must be acknowledged in any just political order or," he continued, "it is likewise an obstinate confusion of temporal progress with eschatological (end times) redemption."

In short, it's a kind of religion without the religion.

Indeed, as the panel description itself succinctly noted, "The modern transhumanist movement presents itself as the next stage in human evolution -- an inevitable leap toward superintelligence, immortality, and the transcendence of biological limitations. Yet beneath the veneer of technological optimism lies a deeply anti-human ideology: an attempt to reject nature, morality, and the created order in favor of a self-deifying utopia."

But why is the idea of utopia -- which we are perhaps conditioned to think of as a positive good, an equivalent of bliss -- a heresy?

"Utopia is a perennial heresy because … it tries to realize the city of God on earth, simply said," said Bentz. "It tries to establish paradise on earth. Most of the utopian rhetoric thrives on this core idea -- the utopian and the transhumanist will rarely talk about the negative side effects," he added, "and the collateral damage that comes with their political agenda and their even ideological or philosophical agenda. They will talk about the positives, but not the negatives."

Wael Taji Miller -- who is also a cognitive neuroscientist -- noted the transhumanist obsession with death as a sort of defect, a genetic fault or malfunction erroneously written into human existence.

"Somehow, in this fear of death that transhumanists seem to embody -- consciously and unconsciously -- there seems to be this desire to leave the rest of us behind," said Miller. "We will be left behind, and they will achieve transcendence -- transcendence of the only sort that really matters to them, which is the escape of death."

And how to do that?

"Surely if the body fails, we can just transfer our consciousness into some meat-machine or meat-carrier, repeating this process each time the new body fails. Or maybe even better," Miller said, taking the role of a transhumanist, "we could simply transfer our consciousness into machines of some kind -- upload it, into the cloud."

It's not a project Miller endorses.

"Coming at this from the perspective of neuroscience, my response to this proposition is not ‘no' but ‘why'? Neither I nor any scientist with any credibility in the field has managed to demonstrate that consciousness itself is transferable," he said. "It's wishful speculation -- that is to say, Utopianism -- (and) the pursuit of it, itself, can have very dangerous consequences."

Transhumanism, Miller noted, seeks to achieve perfection without repentance; to be saved without a doctrine of salvation; and to live forever.

"To me," said Miller, "the way to perfection is through salvation, and not through information."
The perceived societal failure of religion, said Father Michael Baggot, has encouraged some to embrace transhumanism.

"For many, religion is an outdated set of myths -- dreams that have not been fulfilled," he observed. "But ironically enough, we find quite often, a kind of quasi-religious tendency or thrust in many secular transhumanists today."

While their ideology seems to share some of the same goals and projects as religion, transhumanism claims to actually make progress, rather than offering unfulfilled dreams of a better world.

Transhumanism, Father Baggot said, ultimately hopes to remedy "the perennial difficulties of human nature" -- aging, sickness, suffering and death.

And as they pursue a sort of digital immortality -- a post-humanity through the full-scale liberation of the limits of the body -- transhumanists counsel patience.

"For now," Father Baggot said they propose, "we need to be content with our meager efforts to extend, little by little, this life -- until finally, we can achieve that kind of breakthrough of human-machine merging, and that exponential explosion of intelligence that will bring about this great liberation from all of the weakness and frailty of the body."

But again, there is irony.

"The transhumanists have an acute sense of the consequences of sin. Unfortunately, they've lost all notion of the rest of the story of salvation," he added.

"There's no clear sense of a Creator; of any objective, intrinsic order to this creation; and therefore, no hope of being liberated through divine grace from the consequences of these sins," Father Baggot noted. "We are, in many ways in this view, cosmic orphans -- we're left to our own devices."