The God Machine: What Transhumanism Gets Wrong About Salvation

Transhumanism promises to overcome death, transcend the body, and achieve something like divinity, all through technology. But is it really a new religion in secular clothing? And does Christianity already have a far better answer?
In this episode of The Examined Faith, Tuppy Morrissey is joined by Reverend James Lawrence, Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral and PhD researcher specialising in transhumanism and Christianity, for a searching look at Silicon Valley's salvation story and how Christians might respond to it.
Topics covered:

What is transhumanism, and why does it function as a full-blown soteriology?
The six "doctrines" of transhumanism: creation, humanity, salvation, eschatology, and the divine
Charles Taylor's A Secular Age and the "buffered self" cut off from transcendence
Technology and salvation: why transhumanism looks like a parody of Christian soteriology
Bryan Johnson and the anti-ageing "rule of life": asceticism without a cross
Gnosticism and Christianity: how transhumanism echoes the ancient impulse to flee the body and escape matter
The Eucharist as a Christian counter-narrative: embodied, relational, and cyclical
Why forming communities of practice matters more than winning arguments

Chapters:
0:00 Cold Open
0:34 Introduction
1:01 From Tool to Saviour
3:21 Defining Transhumanism
5:22 Charles Taylor and the Secular
11:42 The Nova Effect and Modern Spirituality
15:25 Tolkien, Lewis and the Porous Self
17:03 Transhumanist Soteriology
21:15 The Six Doctrines
22:17 The Big Bang to the Singularity
27:35 Story Over Ethics
31:12 A Christian Response
33:16 Return to the Eucharist
45:54 Bryan Johnson and the Death Cult
48:04 Resurrection Through Death
50:30 Embodiment and Worship
54:17 Gnosticism and the Body
1:00:20 Wrap Up

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Have you actually overcome death? Or have you become by plugging yourself with technology, have you become some sort of cyborg zombie? If it's any religious project, it's a death cult. The idea that you would inject your son's plasma in you, that is that is zombieism and necrophilia kind of writ large. What Johnson is doing is killing himself trying to find a workaround the cross.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Welcome to the Examined Faith. My name is Tuppy Morrissey, and joining me today is the Reverend James Lawrence. James is canon missioner at Blackburn Cathedral, which is where I go to church on Sundays. So good to see you, James. And today we're going to be discussing a Christian response to transhumanism. So, James, thanks for chatting with me today.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Great to be here. Good to see you, Tuppy. And uh yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

My pleasure. So, James, like I said, we're talking about transhumanism, which is the subject of your forthcoming PhD thesis. Um, my first question: how has technology moved from being a tool that we use in our everyday lives to perhaps some kind of saviour in our culture?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yes. So uh humans have always used tools since uh Aristotle. Aristotle talks about techne, uh the the the Greek term that from where we get our English words technology. So you know, and and not only do humans use tools, but animals. You know, you think about a monkey using a piece of straw to get ants out of a hill, you know, so uh everything from a hammer to a pen, uh these are all tools that humans have been using since before the dawn of time. Actually, one of the reasons that humans have been able to extend their influence over the whole globe is because of our capacity to use the material world around us uh in engineering and science to create tools that allow us to uh go to places where we wouldn't naturally survive, like the Antarctic or Mount Everest uh or the Sahara Desert. So um the problem isn't the use of the humans using tools. So I should say I'm writing a theological critique of transhumanism. So I'm coming at this as someone who is critical of a technological philosophy called transhumanism. But uh the the problem is not the use of tools, the problem, as your question indicates, is when those tools start to take on uh metaphysical and sociological uh implications such that they become the vehicles for our salvation. And at that point, as a Christian theologian, I start to get concerned because my tradition says that salvation is only found in one location, and humans have always tried to find salvation in lots of other locations, and my challenge, therefore, is to say, well, in this location, what's going on? Why is it a problem? And uh what could Christians do about it?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

So, what exactly is that location? Could you just define transhumanism for us?

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Yes, yes. So, transhumanism is the technological philosophy that says we can upgrade, transcend the human condition through the use of technology. So that the the trans in transhumanism is to transcend, and uh sometimes uh it's known as humanity plus. So, how can we take and so they see uh transhumanism sees itself as part of the humanist movement, that the the human is the center of the human project, but it wants to go above and beyond in in one way or another, and its vehicle for doing that is a whole range of technologies. So often I'll say you might never have heard the term transhumanism, but you've almost certainly heard of the technologies associated with that movement. So uh it could be cryogenics, where people will put their body on ice in the hope that 100 years from now the technology will be available to cure them of whatever disease they're currently dying of, or it could be genetic engineering so we can extend human lifespan or uh get rid of certain diseases by meddling with the genetic code, or it could be um cybernetics where we stick probes in our minds that gives us direct access to the internet, or uh um we even take our mind out of our brains and upload it to the cloud somehow. So there's there's a whole range of different technologies there, and uh I'm suggesting that across that diversity there is an underlying soteriology, an underlying narrative about salvation that remains consistent and plays itself out in different ways because of these different technologies, but there's there's a unity underneath all of that diversity.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Great. And I think to sketch the landscape a little, you write about uh Charles Taylor, his work on secularism. Who who is Charles Taylor? Why have you focused on his work, and I guess what does he mean by the secular?

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Yes. So Charles Taylor defines secular under three headings, and he calls them secular one, secular two, secular three. And the first two are really to describe things that he's not interested in, but just to kind of get them off the table, and then he spends his uh massive tome, which I've I've got up there, you know, it's it's four inches thick, focused on secular three. So secular one is the way the word secular came about in the medieval period to describe the difference between the religious life and the life of an ordinary carpenter. So uh the you had the religious, which was the rule of life done by the m the monks essentially, were held to a religio, a rule, a way of living that meant that they weren't able to do the ordinary jobs that the rest of society needed. But they were set they were kind of set aside for this higher purpose called religio, and then the seculum was where everyone else lived, where the ordinary things happened, and that's why you get things like secular priests, which to us today sounds like a misnomer, but meant a priest living in the secular world, as opposed to a priest engaged in the religious and you would be a secular priest, sorry to interrupt. I yes, yes, but uh and and all all our categories are a bit blurred now because uh lots of uh lots of Christians uh since particularly the work of someone like John uh John Mark Coma, is that his name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he talks about a rule of life, and that phrase actually etymologically comes from religious so but he's not interested in joining a monastery. So so the the categories are getting blurred, but that's secular one. There is a there's a historical kind of thing, and uh John Milbank uh in his book uh Theology and Social I've forgotten the name of the book, but I was just trying to look for it. Um John Milbank's kind of big book on this starts with the kind of famous phrase, once there was no secular. Um, and and in that point he's referring to kind of secular too, which is a world removed where God has been removed. Well, you and I are fairly uh similar age. We grew up in a Britain that was essentially secular, where God had been evacuated from the story, and uh this is what Charles Taylor calls a substr a subtraction story. That what the new atheists in the early 2000s thought was uh uh British culture is great as it is, it just needs God removed from it, and that's what that's often what we mean by secular. We say it's it's a um well yeah, it's the in opposition to religion. Thank you, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have uh secular meaning atheist and religion meaning god loving. And uh and then Charles Taylor is interested really in secular three, by which he means the conditions of belief. He starts his book by saying, why is it that 500 years ago your average person, most people just naturally believed in God? And why is it that now, 500 years later, your natural person, your ordinary folk on the man on the street probably doesn't believe in God? What has happened in 500 years that the conditions for belief have changed that dramatically? Because that's a huge difference. That's not like going from chocolate to vanilla, that's like that that is a complete metaphysical change in the in what you believe about the world. And how could a culture do that in such a relatively short amount of time? Uh, and he points to us uh a set of things that have happened around immunitization and and the ways in which we have gone from uh excuse me, I'm gonna turn over my page. I want to get these terms right and I'm losing them. Charles Taylor, in when he's describing secular three and this transition on the conditions of belief, says that we've gone from a framework in which the world was uh naturally transcendent, that everything from God to nymphs and fairies were just kind of part of the medieval person's world, and they were kind of open to those things in a way that was kind of porous to the outside world, and that now what we have is people growing up with a kind of buffered self, they are buffered from that transcendent reality, and they live within a container that is materialist and imminent, and uh so so we live inside a box called the material world, and the only things that exist to us are the things that you can measure, touch, and feel. And what that means is that we are buffered from the transcendent and also ill-equipped to handle it. So um we live with a sense of kind of haunting. He says we the the the secular world is haunted by the transcendent. Because we we we kind of instinctively know it's there, and uh we many people will say things like, Well, I'm I'm I'm spiritual, but we don't really have the grounding to um manage that environment because we because we don't uh it's not kind of inbuilt into our framework, the conditions within which we believe.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

Got it. So if you're living within secular three, as you put it, is that where your your desperate need for something transcendent leads you to transhumanism as opposed to Christianity, because you're saying we can't live without the transcendent, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Y Yes. So so and not just transhumanism, basically, basically everything and anything. Charles Taylor calls this the Nova effect. That one of the reasons we can see plainly that the subtraction thesis is wrong, that it's not possible to just remove God from the story and and allow culture to carry on in a kind of secular atheist framework, is bec is because of the the absolute proliferation of religious experience across the board. And so that's everything from witch talk. I don't know if you've come across this, that there's a there's a growing interest in on TikTok of Wiccan and Witches and and all of that sort of stuff, Ouija boards through to experiencing Eastern or or taking ayahuasca and having a you know it's not like we had Christendom and then we got rid of God and now we've got Christendom minus Christ. It's that we we tried that for that lasted a decade, and then just this massive proliferation of different religious experiences or different religious enterprises and novelty and entrepreneurialism in the religious space kind of took over. And and so it's in that context that I'm interested in how has it become the case that our approach to technology itself has taken on these religious overtones, um, or or or a religious narrative has developed around these technologies.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

That's speaking into what you are sorry.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah, no, Caro, sorry.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Well, you were saying about these sort of alternative religious paths. I was reading just the other day about how um pub psychics are apparently a sort of growing phenomenon. People going to a pub event where someone sort of you know picks you picks you out of the crowd and says, Oh, you're I'm hearing from your recently deceased uh partner, and you know, people and apparently people are being quite traumatized by it in some situations, thinking it's all a load of fun, and then actually it's quite intense.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Yeah. Um and and Darren Brown is fascinating on this.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Do you know do you know the guy Darren Brown that Yeah, yeah, I used to watch some of his TV. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:17

Because because he is so explicit, he says, I'm not a psychic, I know nothing. I'm a magician, I'm using a ton a bunch of tricks to you know manipulate you. And he he will say all of that to the person he's about to con, and then he cons them, and they're weeping, saying, You uh you helped me reconnect to my father. Like that's that's a classic example of the buffered self that we uh we ostensibly live in this material framework, and then the the barest touch with the transcendent or the the extra or the other, and we are completely ill ill-equipped to handle it. And and that the the kind of medieval uh peasant girl running through the village and going into the forests and meeting with the nymphs and the and the fairies and and all that stuff, but we just go, obviously, that's Tosh. They they had a they had a porous relationship with the transcendent and uh and were therefore much better equipped in those environments.

unknown 15:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

It reminds me sort of of Lewis and Tolkien. They're trying to recapture that sense of the porous barrier um that actually the world around us is uh imbued with uh something transcendent, spiritual.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Um and and Tolkien Tolkien didn't get to see the other side of the transition. You know, they're both at the front end of secularisation post the second world war. So uh after 1945, heading into the 1960s, and you have this big secularisation move with um uh and and uh Tolkien's the the the the Lord of the Rings series is actually uh on its on a um kind of under the surface, it is mourning the uh destruction of Oxfordshire. And he's he's he's going he's watching these towns like Milton Keynes being built, and he's watching industrialism kind of take over the beautiful countryside that he remembers as a kid, and that is the elves going off to the west and the age of man coming in and the hobbits kind of disappearing, and like that all of that is him and and why is it Saruman? Why is Saruman basically an industrialist? Like you're like chopping down the trees and creating weapons, uh nice.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

Is that another thesis on the horizon, or has this been written about before?

SPEAKER_01 16:52

That's uh that's that I'm I'm quibbing off other people, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Yeah, I'm sure. Okay. Um well let's turn to this narrative that um you know transhumanist thought or Silicon Valley culture is preaching. What what are they offering on a salvation or soteriological level?

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Yeah, yeah. So we've said that soteriology is just the fancy theological word for a narrative about salvation. Uh and uh uh for a lot of Christians, the soteriology debates that they'll be familiar with are to do with um Christus victor versus penal substitution versus Christus exemplar, um, and these these which atonement theory is the right one. You know, if if you come from a particular wing of the church, and I spent a number of formative years having those battles and enjoying the debates, uh that's when when Christians tend to think about soteriology, it's in the question of uh atonement theology and uh what uh uh what is the narrative within which the Christian discipleship lives. Uh I expand the definition of soteriology uh just slightly because I want to say that all of those things that we're talking about are stories in which humanity is saved. And the question becomes well, every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so every story starts with a problem, or or or maybe in the case of Genesis 1 and 2, starts with everything was good and made by God, but then very quickly introduces the problem in chapter 3 of sin, and then tells a story about God saving us from sin in through Israel and Yom Kippur and the the covenant with Abraham, uh, or with Christ dying on the cross, taking the wrath that we deserved, and in our place, uh that the um the wrath that we deserved was put on Christ and as our substitute, and then uh his righteousness is imputed to us, you know. That's kind of penal substitution story, but and then there's an end, you know, so that one day we can all go to heaven, or if you've read enough anti-right, you say so that the new creation can come uh to earth and and we can be surprised by hope. You know, so so all of those stories, all of those debates within the or uh sorry, let me give you another one, Christus Victor, is that actually what happened on the cross was Christ was victorious over sin, death, and we get to live in his victory, or the ransom narrative, which is probably one of the earliest ones found in Mark's gospel, that uh um we were ransomed by Jesus, he paid the ransom price to the devil in his own body so that we could be set free. Uh all of those are stories that have a beginning, a middle, and end. Or let me give you an ex another example. When I say Jesus saves, you are doing the work of adding in the beginning, the middle, and the end, whatever it might be. Which which, if I used a different example, you would immediately say, Well, I need more information. So Superman saves.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

You go, well, saves who yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Saves who? From what? Where do they go next? Well, you know, and and so soterology is about the the very careful description and analysis of the various constituent parts that tells a cohesive story. And when I argue that transhumanism, despite the fact that it claims to be a secular technological movement, is actually a soteriology. I I'm I've reached that conclusion by reading an awful lot of transhumanists and saying you have a you're you're you have a story, you have a you have opinions about the beginning of the world and the what the nature of the world is and how that has been shaped and who we are now and what we need to be saved from and how we can be saved, and then what the future will be and and and where we're going next. And uh I I summarise that under six doctrines: a doctrine of history, a doctrine of creation, uh, or matter, a doctrine of humanity or anthropology, a doctrine of salvation, and then a doctrine of eschatology, the end times, where are we going next? And then ultimately, number six is a doctrine of the divine, because uh uh one of the things transhumanists do is in the process of uh humanity transcending and becoming more than it currently is, either it itself becomes divine or it creates divinity. And if it's as Arthur C. Clarke says, if we're if we're able to create divine divinity, then we are. divine and so the there is a right at the end of the story there is a the emergence of uh some sort of divinity so uh a a transhumanist might tell their so their salvation story like this first there was the big bang and for billions of years there was nothing or there were um an almost infinite amount of particles that uh because of some fluctuations in gravitational fields and uh string theory started to clump together into masses that became stars and then black holes and uh which and and uh bigger and bigger stars that allowed for more and more complex uh um atoms to be formed because that's how you get the heavier metals is through uh the um compression that takes place at the center of a star through uh really high uh gravity and then those things explode and send out all of those molecules around the place and and then you get from there you get the creation you get the sun and the earth as we know it and then the what's called abiogenesis the move uh from chemistry to biology it just think just think about that word abiogenesis the um the beginning of life from nowhere a yeah from from from from not bio abio life comes uh a abiogenesis and uh uh and so you have these transitions into greater and greater levels of complexity from physics to chemistry to biology to uh little and amphibians to you know follow the evolution evolutionary story to monkeys to to humans and therefore what I've just done is plotted for you on a graph a a process of it it kind of emerging complexity from simplicity that uh seems to be rapidly accelerating because it took billions of years to go from physics to chemistry and then it took millions of years to go from chemistry to biology and then you I I got my numbers wrong but you uh if you read if you read so Ray Kurtzville in his book uh um the singularity is near uh he he he he literally puts it on a graph logarithmic graph you know he he's got all the numbers there and he can show you that it this emerging complexity is kind of seems to be gathering momentum and steam such that we're we're now right on the edge of uh this kind of what's called the singularity the moment where the graph goes exponential and uh change happens at such a rapidly fast rate that we actually can't see beyond that event horizon and everything is about to change that's what the singularity is a a mo a moment beyond which we can no longer predict what's going to happen next because it's ontologically different from from what we are and and and what we're up to now. And humanity sits right on the cusp of that and has uh experienced all of the kind of um inheritance that we've just been describing it's emerged out of complexity it it it contains within itself this thing that's extremely complex called the mind and consciousness that seems to emerge out of matter we know not where from and uh and and as a result we become this kind of transitional species that has some control over itself and can reach for the stars and can see where things are going and can finally use the kind of dead matter around us to escape from the limitations with which we find ourselves in and actually maybe we even have a moral imperative to escape from uh the the confines of our kind of wetware our kind of biology so that we can do what uh some transhumanists called a technogenesis so we can go from a biogenesis the move from chemistry to biology to a technogenesis the move from biology to technology and it will be a a a similar transition where we have um overcome the limitations of the of the um of the inheritance that we've received from mother nature and from evolution these processes that are natural in the world where uh complexity emerges out of simplicity but we can now grasp those and and move them forward if only we had the confidence to take technology that's the kind of so uh transhumanist soteriology I think yeah okay that's a clear clear arc I think and my immediate impression is what's scary about a story like that is if you don't accept some kind of creator god then it actually makes kind kind of makes sense um I think the same of Peter Singer's ethics that you know if you take that atheist materialistic materialist perspective then yeah his his views on personhood do actually make sense and that makes it quite worrying and the same thought came to me with this soteriology. Totally and and you touch on a point there which I I've thought for a while but I've not had a chance to really cash out. So I'll share it with you and if it's nonsense you can uh shout me down but I tend to think that ethics is always downstream of soteriology or narrative more generally that um the well I first started thinking about this when I when I was thinking through utilitarianism and the way in which utilitarianism makes perfect logical sense it's it's on on one level you look once you start looking at the world through that lens you go of course why are we wasting our resources in X directional or the next but then you try to get someone to actually live like a utilitarian and they can't they don't want to why is that now I think that's because the story they already inhabit doesn't allow them to and it's in that sense story is fundamental that that we are not rational creatures we are storied creatures and so it's not actually good enough to say to someone well this is the obvious thing you should do let me explain it to you you have to tell them a story in which they are compelled to do what what they what what what the story that they have it tells them to and I I actually think one of the reasons why it you say that story makes a lot of sense the transhumanist soteriology is kind of like obvious on one level and really compelling on another level that's also why I'm interested in it because it has become part of to use Charles Taylor's language it's become part of our social imaginary and it's become part of the narrative that just feels natural and uh that isn't the case all over the world uh if you so this is very recent research for me so I I I won't be able to speak authoritatively on this but there are books coming out on transhumanism in China transhumanism in India transhumanism in Russia they're all called different things and they're all very different. The way that those three cultures have engaged with the technological revolution that we're currently living through is not the same. It doesn't have the same assumptions that the Silicon Valley types do with their kind of latent Christianity and then also um so there is no inevitability to this it's um it's become that way because of the culture in which we live and uh and as a Christian pastor I am I I can see some of the pastoral implications of communities that are kind of naturally inclined towards this narrative because it doesn't make any sense it like once you've decided that the world is on this kind of natural um inevitable move towards greater complexity etc etc it there's no it's no good shouting at people but there's a creator God the crew the world was created ex ni hello like no that doesn't change anyone's mind they've that everything happens at the level of story not uh ethics or or or yeah sure so I've got a lot of questions but how do we make our Christian story uh compelling in contrast to this uh soteriology we've been discussing and I mean we're speaking at a good time because uh Pope Leo's recently published his yeah encyclical Magnifica Humanitas which deals with a lot of these issues with AI and transhumanism um what what do you think are some of the practical solutions we can take? Um I I haven't read the encyclical yet I did read a review of it that said uh this it was quite quite a critical review. I I'm I'm from what I've heard I think I'm going to enjoy the encyclical when I do read it but this review pointed out it feels like it's been written for a different age uh and and that I think is partly what we're talking about here with the story as being fundamental that if you turn to a culture that we live in and say yeah but guys don't forget liberal western democratic values and um shouldn't we all be worried that AI is going to uh destroy jobs for the for basically everyone and we've got no framework for capitalism outside of everyone working and kind of good uh Catholic social teaching on work is good and good for the soul not you know there's value in the Pope saying that I'm glad he said what he said but if the story has already shifted so that people think well people have become utilitarians or people have said well this is inevitable then um you have to change your mode of approach and there's there's two things that I'm trying to do in my work one is uh to note that this is a parody of Christian soteriology that doesn't succeed on its own terms and partly when I'm doing that I'm I'm agreeing with the transhumanists and then the second thing I'm trying to say in response to transhumanism is uh in short come back to the Eucharist and and I and I I'll I'll cash that out second the the first thing to say is you're right transhumanists we do need we like we are destined to become gods we are supposed to overcome death yes we are less than we should be and you are right to feel the need for salvation and you are right to be haunted by the transcendent all of those things are are are right and good I'm glad that's how you feel because you and I therefore agree you Mr. Transhumanist and I therefore agree that secularity is nonsense um but let's just think about your project are you actually going to be able to transcend anything are you actually going to overcome death are you actually going to uh um become a god well on on the first one let's think about transcendence with uh uploading your mind to the cloud you you haven't gone anywhere all you've done is if you were able to do it because the the jury's out on whether that's even possible but if you did do it where would your mind go? It'd be in a data center under the desert in Nevada you know all you've done is transform move your mind from the from the um prison of your brain to the prison of a data center so uh and and then uh yes we should become like gods yes we should sorry the second the second one was yes we should overcome death but have you actually overcome death or have you become by plugging yourself with technology have you become some sort of cyborg zombie are are you actually living more in in the new reality and then uh thirdly yes we should become gods but have you or have you just created an idol like so so I I want to um point to the transhumanists where I agree with them and where I'm sympathetic with their cause and then kind of as lovingly as possible say but but friend have you actually achieved any of the things that you set out to achieve and and in that I I I feel a little bit like the the prophets of Israel you know these amazing sections in uh the the prophets where they s where they say um you know how that idol was made don't you like you you cut the tree down and then you f fashioned it into a into an animal and then you got the smithy to cover it in gold and then you bow down worship it you know where this thing came from you you sp you half the wood you burnt so that you could cook your food and the other half you turned into an idol to to worship. So so there's a kind of um uh old testament prophet thing going on there and just pointing to the culture around and saying you're not achieving things on your own terms and then the other the kind of biblical warrant is to to look at um Saint Paul in Athens where he says friends I can see that you're spiritual right such a wonderful way to open up that section in when he's at the Ariocabus and he goes guys come on on one level we're on the same project here but think like but let me let me point your project back to the actual and only source of your salvation so that's the that's the kind of first first thing and and then the second is to uh point to the Christian practice of the Eucharist and say uh we we have to recognize that in a postmodern post-Christendom environment Christianity is one option in a marketplace of ideas we do not have the right to and I I mean this both like we shouldn't do this because of kind of uh epistemological humility but also we just don't have permission to say this is what's right and this is what's wrong no transhumanist is going to read my thesis and be convinced they're not going to read it full stop and and so so who am I actually talking to what what is my responsibility well it's my my responsibility is a is a Christian theologian and as a pastor as a priest to care for the people of God and so actually my second response to transhumanism is to is to go back to the people that I've been given responsibility for the for the cure of their souls to say what are we going to do how are we going to live in a technological age where this narrative is so kind of prevalent and uh compelling that we're that what practices are we going to engage in that keep us sane from that st from that stuff and I think the Eucharist uh helps us on so many levels with tackling kind of the the end result of transhumanism so uh it is an embodied action you you you walk to the front you receive bread and wine into your hands by someone who inevitably is also going to touch your hand as they put the bread and wine in and then you eat and smell and taste a sensation that locates you in a place with a person and in that process you're meeting with the incarnate Christ Jesus who was born in in the materiality that we all experience and live so so there's something about the way the Eucharist re-engages you with the matter and creation of the world the the other thing that the creation that the Eucharist does is you do it every week you again and again you return to this thing and so we live on a seven day cycle as opposed to a linear graph and uh this is where the transhumanism is so at least in its western form is so uh tightly linked with capitalism and the need for ever increasing growth and and the the graph has to go up all the time and that again is a very compelling narrative that we have all bought into and so we just expect our 20s to be better than our 30s to be better than our 40s and um we we we just follow the the trajectory along in as if it's inevitable. And that isn't the way people experience time in the ancient world and it isn't the way the liturgical calendar encourages us to experience time. Time is not linear it's circular and um there are times and seasons and you you have uh summer tends to to to fall to to autumn into winter and there are the baked into the cycle is uh death and rebirth and so to the Eucharist in its repetitiveness requires us to rethink our approach to time and our and matter and our bodiment within it hadn't thought about that on the the temporal front that that's a really valuable perspective. So if I understand you correctly whilst you would hope to you know convince a transhumanist bring them to Christ of course you would you think the more pressing realistic mission is to focus on our Eucharistic theology and to ensure that we're uh taking it with reverence and the correct seriousness as Christians and and and in so doing being a a light on the hill so so the the act of doing that forms communities that is compelling and people do want to join and people will become convinced by uh that the sort of community that is shaped by the Eucharist and formed by the Eucharist is more beautiful than the transhumanist community and I and I trust that ultimately that will win out and so I mean the the other thing that the Eucharist does is it's it's a relational act you are part of a community coming forward to receive from receive the Eucharist but you're also and and you know we just uh recently celebrated Trinity Sunday and the and the week before that Pentecost and in the process of a community celebrating the Eucharist they are enfolded in the community of the Godhead Father Son and Spirit becoming uh that diverse unity that the church is enfolded into that is a world away from the atomized individualistic me and my brain going into the clouds and uh or or me paying for my capacity to overcome death and and and the kind of elitism that is kind of baked into transhumanism that it's it's actually uh in a world of ever increasing inequality it's only the absolute filthy rich who will be able to do that and I I I think they are going to come a cropper on this a little bit in the same way that recent trips to the space you know because because again space travel is a is a bit like this in it in its capitalist form. It's about escaping the confines of gravity and this world and who are the people who got to do it the richest people on the planet. And then they came back down to Earth and expected us to all cheer them you know and I mean sorry I I was thinking of

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Brian Johnson, how his whole uh you know, what did he call that anti-aging process costs over two million dollars a year, apparently. Um, and it's frankly, I mean, it's it's bizarre the sort of stuff he's doing, like you know, putting his son's plasma into himself, um, for example. Um, but you're right with the space uh narrative as well, because Elon Musk, you know, he um is the the CEO of SpaceX, and he's also developing this Neuralink technology that you know will allow us, as he said, you know, I heard him say to synthesize with with uh artificial intelligence um because he sees that as necessary. And you know, going to Mars is the same idea as oh, we're not able to carry on living here on Earth, so let's escape and continue forever on a new planet if we have enough money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:54

Yeah. So um all all of the people you just mentioned are almost certainly transhumanists, even if they don't they might not accept the nomenclature, but it that is the salvation story that they tell, and you can hear it once you're once you're keyed into what the narrative is like, you hear it in almost everything they say. Uh at the latest Google I.O. uh presentation, uh, which was all about AI and how AI is going to transform Google's uh company of over the next year. The uh I've I've forgotten his name, but the final present presenter said in his speech, I think we will look back on this year and realize that we were at the foothold, the foothills of the singularity, and which are a direct reference to transhumanist thought there in a Google presentation for uh investors and uh um people who are building software for their company. And and so we we're seeing those links just happen all the time. Brian Johnson is a is a key person that I reference in my thesis because he's just what he's just one of those people that is constantly saying the quiet bit out loud and in his behaviour demonstrating the degree to which he's engaged in a religious project and the degree to which he's involved in a effectively a death cult, really. If it's any religious project, it's a death cult. Like the the idea that you would inject your son's plasma in you, that is that is zombieism and necrophilia kind of writ large, and and but when you because he puts his regimen online, going back to the very beginning of our conversation, that a religious life, yeah. He is engaged, he is a disciple engaged in a series of sacramental practices that he believes will save him.

SPEAKER_00 46:50

This is I was gonna say the exact same thing, the way you know he wakes up and drinks his green chlorophyll or you know, whatever it is, and then he has like an exact amount of exercise he does every day and bed at the same time. It's way more disciplined than even most monks.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

Um you'll you'll be familiar with the um one of the great sneers of the new atheists was these six hundred and sick hundred and how many rules in the old testament regulating your life. He follows way more than six hundred rules. You know, you know, these these people who are you know it's uh it's and yeah, so I I just think point made, he's he's a religious man engaged in a religious project, he's trying to save himself, and yeah, and I and the degree to which he knows he needs saving, I agree with him. But I just want to gently if I had a chance to sit down with him, I say, I are you gonna succeed in on your own terms? Is this project working, or would it be more valuable for you to uh find your salvation in something that can actually last? Okay, can I can I say one more thing about the Eucharist?

SPEAKER_00 48:01

Yeah, please, please, yeah. More important.

SPEAKER_01 48:09

I don't know if it's the I'm gonna end up being hyperbolic here. One of the key insights, I'll say that, not maybe not the fundamental, but one of the key insights of Christianity is that resurrection life is only available to us on the far side of death. That we we're standing here, and what we want over there is resurrection, new new creation, the kingdom of God, transcendence. We want the what's over there, and we're here. How do I get from here to there? That the message of the cross that we reenact at every Eucharist is if you want that, you need to go through death. You need to go with you need to pick up your cross and die to yourself so that Good Friday can turn into Easter Sunday. And uh what Paul Johnson is doing is killing himself trying to find a workaround the cross. He says, I want transcendence, I want to go, I I want to go around the cross, I don't want to die, but in the process he ends up killing himself. And the the the so when we as a Christian community celebrate the Eucharist and break Christ's body and thank him that he took the cross so that we could have access to resurrection life, and we say, and I'm now going to take up my cross so that I can join in that journey to ultimate transcendence and resurrection. We are reminding ourselves of a better soteriology so that the other six days of the week, when we're being attacked or kind of influenced by this soteriology that is so prevalent it's even in Google uh presentations, um, we've got something to kind of hang on to. And I think the communities that we'll create and the people that we'll be will just be more compelling and and more interesting to the people around us, and they'll want to join what we've got.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

Amen. And um do you think therefore it's a problem that you know we're worshipping within the Church of England, excuse me, and many churches will not be celebrate celebrating the Eucharist weekly?

SPEAKER_01 50:24

Um that you'll be slagging off all your colleagues if you I yeah, I look I I I I think uh Jamie K.A. Smith is a I I is a really had a large impact on my thinking on this, and he has this very pithy phrase. He says, um every pedagogy has an implied philosophical anthropology. Every pedagogy has an implied philosophical anthropology. Let me explain what that means. The way you teach someone something implies what you think a human being is, and so so if your worship service is walk into a room, close your eyes, sing, sit down, listen, leave, the kind of that implies a certain thing about what a human being is. Human beings uh are minds that need to be transformed, and uh and they have hearts that need to be worshipped. And uh I have I have benefited a lot from low Anglican, Pentecostal, free church movements. I've I've been formed in those places for a long time uh and very grateful for them. I I wouldn't want to kind of do a full-throated critique of what they're doing at all because it's extremely valuable to the the church broadly. The reason I'm not there anymore is because I started considering the way in which a I I needed to be part of a community that saw the human being as more than just a mind and a heart, but also a body and a person and a relational being, and uh and so sharing the peace is extremely important to me. Kneeling and bowing and uh and smelling incense because it it kind of arrests me because it's the only time in it's the only time a place that I smell that stuff, like wearing certain clothes and like the physicality of that uh I I think is an important part of understanding what it is to be human and how you train a community to live a Christian life. So um, and and to your point about being equipped to respond to transhumanism, if you think that people are just brains and hearts, and uh and another story comes along that says, Well, we could take that brain and put it somewhere else. We so we could take that mind and extract it from the body. Are you equipped to say why that's a bad thing? Or do you find yourself, yeah? I mean, do I really need my body? I mean, this body that is just you know, even St. Paul says, Who will rescue me from this body of death? So you can make a case for it biblically, you know. Look, well, Paul says you need to be rescued from that body, and we know that the main reason Christians sin is because of stuff to do with their bodies. So wouldn't it be better? And if, and this is anti Wright's point, of course, uh, if your salvation story is one day you will die and go to a spiritual place called heaven, and the the kind of non-spirit the the spiritual bit inside you will escape the dirty body that you're in and get to fly off to heaven where everything is uh spiritual and and uh safe, then you you will be ill-equipped to argue against transhumanism because transhumanism shares so much of its grammar with that story that you think Christianity is, you're gonna find it very hard to respond.

SPEAKER_00 54:17

Yeah, and we perhaps don't have time for a full dive into it, but you link that back to Gnosticism in the early church. Could you very you know quickly explain that connection, what Gnosticism is, why it's relevant to this debate?

SPEAKER_01 54:32

Yeah, so uh the the first two centuries in which the church was kind of birthed and found its own identity was in lots of ways very similar to the Nova effect that we've talked about with Charles Taylor, where there's all sorts of options on the table. Paganism, you know, all everything in between. And so there were lots of Christianities in the first and second century, and some of them were more or less closely related to the Hebrew, the kind of Jewish consensus that um uh and and some of them were more or less impacted by a more platonic or uh um yeah, kind of platonic worldview, which is kind of what I'm describing, this kind of distinction between the spiritual and the physical, a kind of duality between those two. And so you had a series of uh Christian church leaders. Valentinus is the one that I'm most interested in, and uh you know Valentinus was almost made Pope. He he was uh he was very important in the Christian, in the kind of what became the Orthodox Christian world, but a number of his uh positions, theological positions, were criticized by his colleagues, and eventually one side all of this time is it's hundreds of years before the before the creeds are written, and the church is uh spreading out in all these different directions, and there's lots of um religious innovation taking place, and people are riffing on the ideas of Jesus and coming up with new ideas, and and and there's also a kind of self-correcting no, but this is who we are, and this is our identity. So there's a big melting pot going on with lots of different arguments taking place, and uh uh Valentinus had a view that became uh that, at least in modern scholarship, is known as Gnosticism, or uh he was part of a Gnostic sect, and that that word used to describe Valentinus comes from Irenaeus, who was one of the church fathers, and so the way that Irenaeus and Valentinus have this back and forth between what becomes Orthodox Christianity, creedal Christianity, and Valentinianism, which is a kind of subset of a much larger Gnostic communities that was all part of the firmament of uh ancient Christianity in the ancient world. Uh his I I when I when I look at transhumanism, I can map the six narrative, the six kind of doctrines of transhumanism, I can map them in a kind of complicated way to uh uh the six doctrines of the or the the sociological narrative that Valentinus um seems to uh seems to espouse, although it's very complicated because he wrote there there's a whole whole book's being written on what actually is Gnosticism and does it exist as a thing, is is it a kind of um trustworthy analytical tool?

SPEAKER_00 57:49

So they is one of the key points that they sort of denigrate the the physical, the the human body. We should focus on our spirit, our mind.

SPEAKER_01 58:01

Yes, so the the Valentinian narrative is that there is the one uncreated, untouchable, unknowable god, and from that unknowable divinity emanates a series of eons and um divinities, and there's a whole pleroma that is developed, a kind of um gallery of uh different deities that um slowly converge on uh the uh the demiurge, which comes out of an arc a kind of mistake that Sophia makes, a transgression that Sophia makes that results in the demiurge and the demiurge creates the world. And so a a good Valentinian, when asked the question, why is the world the way it is, would say, Well, it wasn't actually created ex nihilo by a good creator, it was created by the demiurge, and he was either um a malicious figure or just an incompetent one, but either way, that's why the world is the way it is. The the transhumanist says, Why is the world the way it is? Well, it's because it's actually just a series of random processes that have developed where complexity has kind of emerged out of uh simplicity, and the Christian says, Well, it's like this because of sin, it was made good, but sin entered the world and and broke everything. And where uh transhumanists talk about emanation coming up from below, from simplicity to complexity, the Gnostics talk about um sorry, uh the Gnostics talk about emanation and the and the transhumanists talk about emergence. But it's it's one is kind of from the top down and the other is from the bottom up, but the result is the same that you end up explaining the world not because of sin, but because of the stuff of materiality is just either certainly broken, probably dirty in some way morally, and the sort of thing that we need to escape from to us to some sort of higher plane.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:20

Great. Well, um I think we'll begin to to wrap up. If Brian Johnson um stumbles across this video, I hope he uh recognises the the reality of of sin and um he's on he's almost on the correct path, but is um far away in another sense. And he should also change the spelling of his name. Brian with a Y, I think, is uh a bit of a travesty. Um James, it's been it's been great to chat with you. Um and if uh pleasure, if um listeners have enjoyed this this podcast, please uh like and subscribe to our to our channel to help it to grow. And James, I guess I'll see you tomorrow.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:02

Thanks, Tuppy. See you tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:04

See you then. Bye.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:05

Cheers, bye.