Constantine’s Christendom and Transhumanism Are on a Collision Course. I Don’t Think the Church Is Ready.

by John Ellis

Prompted by a conversation about transhumanism with a friend yesterday, I revisited some of the books in my library by the likes of Nick Bostrom and William MacAskill. As I was rereading this morning, it hit me that the transhumanist/longtermist[1] agenda eerily parallels an anthropocentric reading of the Biblical creation story.

In that story, blinded by the exciting possibilities presented by the pinnacle of his creation, the Creator – God – failed to do the necessary calculus prior to creating humans. Because of this failure on his part, humans presented a threat to his power. This problem led to the solution of God expelling humans from the Garden of Eden and preventing our access to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

(You may find the above account strange and foreign, but aspects of it, to varying degrees, are embedded in many of the philosophies that shape our society and, by extension, us.)

For the transhumanists/longtermists, humans have now reached the point in our evolution that we’re on the precipice of creating something that can/will supplant us. Learning from God’s failure, they are calling for the implementation of controls and checks and balances that will ensure the preservation of humanity as the apex of creation. They want to ensure that humanity’s creation – AI – will only have access to our Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in ways that will benefit humanity. One of the main solutions they argue for is human enhancement – transhumanism. While also being just another form of eugenics, something rich white dudes have been lusting after ever since Thomas Malthus, transhumanism will turn humanity into a type of super-God, one that won’t need to knock over his creation’s Tower of Babels because we will have done the appropriate calculus first.

Now, and this may bother some of you: Everything above is all bullshit.

By that I don’t mean that my accounting above is inaccurate; I believe it is very accurate (although many of the transhumanists would likely scoff at it – but I do not care what Elon Musk and his buddies think about me). It’s bullshit because it’s a deeply erroneous understanding of who God is and what/who his image bearers are. And it reads the Creation story through the same idolatrous lens that got our first father and mother kicked out of the Garden to begin with.

So, look, here’s my point: As AI technologies continue to advance, ontological and ethics conversations are going to become more and more dominated by transhumanists/longtermists perspectives and agendas. In turn, our collective conversations around ontology and ethics are going to become increasingly a response – either positively or negatively – to the conversations being had by the techbros.[2] And the techbros are fundamentally undeserving of being at the center of the conversation, but that’s where we’re at in the 21^st century. My concern is not really with them, though, it’s with the Church.

My still developing perspective and belief is that the Church (and our collective churches) are ill-equipped to resist being idolatrously reshaped by the technological advances of society and the accompanying conversations. We have built our house on the combines sands of Classical anthropologies and post-Enlightenment epistemologies instead of on the rock of Jesus Christ. This encourages us to embrace the porridge of power, control, and comfort that we traded our birthright for to Constantine instead of viewing it for what it is: slop not fit for the daughters and sons of the King. In short, so long as we continue to falsely view power, control, and comfort as our birthright, we will be highly susceptible to whatever aberrant secular theologies reshape larger society. This is the inheritance left to us by Constantine’s Christendom. This means that one of the solutions we should adopt for the coming battle over transhumanism is rejecting the anthropocentric cosmologies and epistemologies of Christendom that ironically dehumanize us.[3]

We tend to think that Dostoevsky’s parable of “The Grand Inquisitor” isn’t about us. It is. And if we’re not careful, we – the Church – will embrace transhumanism/longtermism as the best way to preserve and extend what we believe is God’s Kingdom. Ruling and exercising dominion over the world for God with the devil’s principles is the original sin.

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[1] Another name for longtermism is effective altruism.

[2] Techbros, in many ways, are the secular version of Christian nationalist theobros. Eventually, we won’t be able to tell the two groups apart.

[3] I’ve written many, many articles about this.