Abstract
Transhumanism suggests that we should use technologies to enhance human beings, particularly to reduce illness, unnecessary suffering, and social ills. In this regard, there is a natural conversation between transhumanism and Christianity. To begin a substantive conversation with transhumanism, a re-conception of “technology” is needed, one that expands our understanding and can provide criteria for evaluating its function in our lives. This chapter suggests that, read in a narrative fashion, biblical texts can serve as a resource for deliberating about this and related challenges. Such an approach show both the destructive and constructive nature of technology for human communities and therefore the need to recognize the relationship between technology and human aspirations, especially religious ones.
This chapter was composed while I was a fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University (2015–2016) and I would like to express my appreciation for the opportunities this afforded me. All Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.
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Notes
- 1.
See Winner , The Whale and the Reactor, 5–10; Marcia-Anne Dobres, “Meaning in the Making: Agency and the Social Embodiment of Technology and Art,” in Schiffer, Anthropological Perspectives on Technology. Seminal essays on this matter are, Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 3–35, and Hans Jonas, “Toward a Philosophy of Technology,” 34–43.
- 2.
Hayles, N . Katherine, “Wrestling with Transhumanism,” in Hansell and Grassie, Transhumanism and its Critics, 216.
- 3.
See Mary Tiles and Hans Oberdiek, “Conflicting Visions of Technology,” in Scharff and Dusek , Philosophy of Technology, 249–259. See also, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology.
- 4.
Lewin, David, Technology and the Philosophy of Religion, 4.
- 5.
Ibid., 5.
- 6.
The human-technology intersection has always been a matter of existential concern. Certainly, however, it has become more prominent in the latter half of the twentieth century. See Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity.
- 7.
I am aware that there are different forms of transhumanism and that there are indistinct lines between transhumanists and posthumanists. For a discussion of the terminological difficulty see, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Religion,” in Ranisch and Sorgner, Post-Transhumanism, 49–71.
For the purposes of this paper I am using the term “transhumanism” in the most general way possible. In this regard Nick Bostrom’s description is helpful because it sets the claims of transhumanism without overly restricting its varied applications. Bostrom notes, “Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades, and can be viewed as an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment. It holds that current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science and other rational methods, which may make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control over our own mental states and moods.” Bostrom, “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity,” 202–203.
- 8.
The complexities are helpfully discussed by Allenby and Sarewitz in The Techno-Human Condition.
- 9.
Cole-Turner , “Going Beyond the Human,” 22.
- 10.
By “conversation” I mean something like Hans-Georg Gadamer’s idea that when we are in a conversation, “we have encountered something in the other that we have not encountered in the same way in our own experiences of the world... Where a conversation is successful, something remains for us and something remains in us that has transformed us.” In Vessey and Blauwkamp, “Hans Georg-Gadamer : The Incapacity for Conversation (1972),” 355.
- 11.
I have made an initial attempt to raise these questions in Kraftchick, “Bodies, Selves, and Human Identity,” 47–69.
- 12.
Hefner , Technology and Human Becoming, 12.
- 13.
Quine, W. V., Word and Object, 258–259 as quoted in Jeffrey Stout, “What is the Meaning of a Text?,” 2.
- 14.
Stout , “What is the Meaning of a Text,” 2.
- 15.
My reasoning is similar to William Sweet’s in his essay, “Technology, Religion, and Human Destiny,” in Feist, Beauvais, and Shukla, Technology and the Changing Face of Humanity, 192–204. Sweet notes that technology not only bears on human possibility but also on how we understand human life itself. As these are central to Christian faith a conversation is actually unavoidable.
- 16.
This is not to say that the two groups agree on the qualities or means to achieve these goals, only that they share interests. On the intersection see, Cole-Turner, Transhumanism and Transcendence , and for the issues raised by human enhancement see Savalescu, Human Enhancement and Mehlman, Transhumanist Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares.
- 17.
Not surprisingly, these arguments raise questions about the nature of the human being, its ends, and the means by which it attains them, all of which are fundamental to our conceptions of ethics and community. I want to emphasize that these arguments are not raised simply by those who stand outside the transhumanist perspective, but also from those within such as Buchanan, Better Than Human, Roden, Posthuman Life, and Agar, Humanity’s End.
- 18.
Hayles, N. Katherine , “Wrestling with Transhumanism,” in Hansell and Grassie, Transhumanism and its Critics, 216.
- 19.
Cole-Turner , “Going Beyond the Human,” 20–26.
- 20.
As with many people these are personal as well as intellectual matters for me. Over the last three years five of my colleagues, friends, and family have been diagnosed with life threatening illnesses. None of these people were or are egregious abusers of their bodies, indeed one is an infant. The ethics and ethical use of technologies requires serious conversations with other people who are searching to understand our future relationships to these mediating tools and to technology as a mode of existence. See, for example, Hughes, Citizen Cyborg.
- 21.
See for only one example, Schneider, Science Fiction and Philosophy.
- 22.
See on the different modes of Scripture reading, Morgan and Barton, Biblical Interpretation, and on the role of theology as communal deliberation, Tanner, Theories of Culture.
- 23.
Note that God’s garments made from animal skins replace the temporary “fig leaf” garments (Gen 3:7) made by the primal couple. Even when the human technology fails, the divine gift can redeem the situation. In contrast to the majority of ancient texts that treat the origins of human technologies as a divine gift , the Genesis account focuses on their human invention. This is not to say that the divine agent never introduces technology in Genesis, only that technology is understood as a source of both the progression and regression of humankind. See, Robert Di Vito, “ The Demarcation of Divine and Human Realms in Genesis 2–11,” in Clifford and Collins, Creation in the Biblical Tradition, 39–56 and David P. Melvin, “Divine Mediation and the Rise of Civilization in Mesopotamian Literature and in Genesis 1–11,” 1–15.
- 24.
Further connections between the Genesis creation account and Exodus 25–31 are considered by Levenson in Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 82–86.
- 25.
Propp , Exodus 19–40, 487.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Janzen , Exodus, 368.
- 28.
See on this Burdett , Eschatology and the Technological Future.
- 29.
Revelation 21–22 follows a pattern found in Ezekiel 40–48 where the Temple is restored along with Jerusalem. However, the Ezekiel narrative is a rehearsal of the Exodus materials since the Tabernacle is a prototype for the Temple. In effect, the author of Revelation has appropriated the Temple/Jerusalem traditions to make them universal. Cf. Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of John, 597.
- 30.
See on the allusion, Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of John, 617, and Aune, Revelation 17–22, 1187.
- 31.
Cf. Ephesians 2:11–22 where similar imagery is used to illustrate that the people of God include both Jew and Gentile and that together they form the Temple where God dwells.
- 32.
The last term in Exodus 32:6—“revel”—is suggestive of orgiastic activity as Paul indicates when he used the incident as an example to warn the Corinthians against idolatry (1 Cor 10:7) See Moberly , At The Mountain of God, 46.
- 33.
This is the logic behind Paul’s comments in 2 Cor 3:18. Christ, the “image of God” (2 Cor 4:4) reflects the glory of God, transforming humans into the same image “from one degree of glory to another.”
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Kraftchick, S.J. (2018). From Lamech to Bezalel: Biblical Reflections on the Polyvalence of “Technology”. In: Donaldson, S., Cole-Turner, R. (eds) Christian Perspectives on Transhumanism and the Church. Palgrave Studies in the Future of Humanity and its Successors. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90323-1_2
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