Holy Ghost in the Cloud: Christian transhumanism and simulation theology

Giulio Prisco
Turing Church
Published in
3 min readApr 19, 2017

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Christian transhumanism — the fusion of Christianity and transhumanism spearheaded by the Christian Transhumanism Association — is not very popular — yet. But that could begin to change soon.

A story by Meghan O’Gieblyn published yesterday in The Guardian, titled “God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism,” could bring Christian trahshumanism to the masses. The story is an abridged version of an essay published in n+1 Magazine, titled “Ghost in the Cloud: Transhumanism’s simulation theology.”

O’Gieblyn is a former evangelical Christian who, after losing her faith, found transhumanism and then Christian transhumanism. With the crystal clarity of some beginners, she sees transhumanism as essentially religious. I had exactly the same impression upon first contact.

Excerpts:

“[Although] few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology… Calling on biblical prophecies, [Fedorov] wrote: ‘This day [of resurrection] will be divine, awesome, but not miraculous, for resurrection will be a task not of miracle but of knowledge and common labour’… Transhumanists have acknowledged Teilhard and Fedorov as forerunners of their movement, but the religious context of their ideas is rarely mentioned… What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated.”

“If we are essentially software, [Nick Bostrom noted in ‘Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?’], then after we die we might be ‘resurrected’ in another simulation. Or we could be ‘promoted’ by the programmers and brought to life in base reality. The theory was totally naturalistic — all of it was possible without any appeals to the supernatural — but it was essentially an argument for intelligent design. ‘In some ways,’ Bostrom conceded, ‘the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation.’”

In fact, the simulation hypothesis described by Bostrom (and others), and recently catapulted to the forefront of public attention by celebrities like Elon Musk, is not just similar to religion: it is totally equivalent, exactly the same thing, and can play the same role.

O’Gieblyn discovered Christian Transhumanism in in an episode of The Daily Show with John Stewart, with a satirical video titled “Future Christ.” The video is also on YouTube.

Rev. Dr. Christopher Benek, a pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and a founding member and Board Chair of the Christian Transhumanist Association, is featured in “Future Christ” and in O’Gieblyn’s story.

“The Daily Show had been a disaster, Benek told me. He had spoken with them for an hour about the finer points of his theology, but the interview had been cut down to his two-minute spiel on robots.”

I remember the media buzz about Christian robots, started with a Gizmodo article titled “When Superintelligent AI Arrives, Will Religions Try to Convert It?,” by Zoltan Istvan, which went viral in 2015 and inspired a wave of media coverage.

Rev. Benek’s theology was somewhat more detailed in the Gizmodo story, but not much more. I was also quoted.

Well, press and media in the age of the internet — and God — work in mysterious ways. Istvan’s story focused on marginal aspects of Christian transhumanism — “It’s not like I spend my days speculating on how to evangelise robots,” Benek told O’Gieblyn — and “Future Christ” is just a satirical video, but O’Gieblyn’s story on The Guardian will make many readers aware of Christian transhumanism, and some readers will look for in-depth coverage.

Perhaps they will find the works of Eric Steinhart, also quoted by O’Gieblyn, or my essay on “Christianity and Transhumanism are much closer than you think.”

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

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Writer, futurist, sometime philosopher. Author of “Tales of the Turing Church” and “Futurist spaceflight meditations.”