Origins of Transhumanism: W.D. Lighthall
For several years now, I’ve been hunting the origins of transhumanism. One of the significant mysteries in this story is the first time the word “transhumanism” shows up in English. Until recently, th…
Transhuman
The Kingdom of God has a biotechnological research agenda
The Kingdom of God has a biotechnological research agenda. We must cultivate all life, starting from the bottom up. We must learn how life works, how evolution unfolds, how ecosystems function—and we …
Environmentalism Mandates Transhumanism
In one billion years, life on Earth will be gone. Five billion years from now, the Sun will expand to encompass the Earth. But long before that happens, the rising temperatures of the Sun will boil th…
Black Panther is the Transhumanist Future We Need
I’ve just returned from seeing Black Panther, and not only is it a great superhero movie, it is one of the most tech-positive movies I’ve seen in a long time. Its story-telling offers to reorient the …
Christian Transhumanism is the Next Reformation
Published at the Huffington Post Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a German church, kicking off one of the most significant movements in Christian history: the Prot…
The Resurrection is Technological
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lays out an argument that many believe is at the heart of the Christian faith—an argument for the ultimate resurrection of all people, and the eradication of death itself. Pa…
Wireheading, Faith Healing, and Why the Placebo Effect is the Most Important Thing in the World
If you could flip a switch and experience more pleasure than you have ever felt in your entire life—would you do it? What if that switch also made you feel incredibly happy and joyful? What if it made…
How to Become Immortal
In the last few years, a number of different organizations have launched projects to end aging and radically extend human longevity. Google’s Calico Labs is perhaps the most well-known effort, followe…
The Omega Point Theory
One of the reasons that science has been widely regarded as an atheistic enterprise over the years, is that for quite a while now, it has preached a future of relentless annihilation. Ever since the l…
The Three Jobs in Our Future
The other day I posted a hypothesis I was working on, and stirred up some wide-ranging discussion on Twitter. After a while, this kind of thing becomes difficult to squeeze into 140-character chunks, …
Why Christians Should Support Radical Life Extension
“Never again will there be… an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child” (Isaiah 65:20, NIV) In Isaiah…
The New God Argument and A New Apologetics
Recently my friend Lincoln Cannon released the third version of his groundbreaking New God Argument. This argument is a philosophical justification for trust in God, laying the technical groundwork fo…
Transhumanism is a Mars Hill opportunity
In Acts 17, the apostle Paul does something remarkable. He walks onstage at Mars Hill in Athens, the center of the philosophical tradition of the Greek world, and begins to talk about an unknown god. …
What’s up with the word Transhumanist?
Many of you know that I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to support and grow the Christian Transhumanist Association, an organization devoted to creating a better relationship between religion…
Against Consumerism
I’ve written before about my love for Iron Man 3. In it, Tony Stark faces the hard question of personal identity. Who is he? Who is Iron Man? At first glance, the answer would seem to revolve around h…
What is Technology?
A few days ago, I published an essay attempting to explain and define transhumanism. At root, I said, transhumanism is the idea that we can make things better. One comment suggested that I should add …
What is Transhumanism? And why should Christians care?
In the past year, a strange new idea called “transhumanism” has started to show up in documentaries, tv series, and blockbuster movies. It’s often coupled with stories of amazing new medical developme…
Embodiment
Lately, a lot of people have been talking about embodiment. From theologians and philosophers, to environmentalists and activists, there is a lot of concern with how we think of ourselves, and our rel…
Three strains of religious transhumanism
I think that there are three strains of religious and spiritual transhumanism. The first seeks to understand and commit more deeply to its own religious heritage, and in doing so, discovers a call to …
Philosophical Foundations for Understanding AI
These are my thoughts in response to this question: Would a dominant pantheistic or pagan cultural tradition have prepared the West better for the reality of intelligent machines? The way I tend to …
Interested in Christian Transhumanism?
Transhumanism is the ethical use of technology to extend human ability, and to improve the human condition. Transhumanism holds that we should not be limited by the way things are, or by the way they …
A Better Apocalypse
On May 21, 2011, I was sitting in a steel-roofed building as a powerful storm pounded down outside. This is the day that Harold Camping had said the world would end. After decades of bible study, he h…
Some Simulation Argument flowcharts
The simulation argument conversation. Finite or Infinite?
Broadcast From The Singularity
Since our second official episode just went up, I thought it would be good to point out that I’m doing a podcast. This podcast is about the future, the Singularity, and what it’s like to experience li…
Christianity is Transhumanism
Wesley J. Smith has written a short piece entitled Christian Transhumanism is an Oxymoron. For those of you who are interested in either Christianity or transhumanism, I want to make this very clear: …
Miracles and the Anthropic Principle
The universe appears to have been fine-tuned for life. It’s astonishing, really. The physical constants (like the strength of gravity or the number of spatial dimensions) seem to have really improbabl…
Why I am speaking at the Mormon Transhumanist Conference
Late last year, I explained why I (a non-Mormon) had joined the Mormon Transhumanist Association. I felt like religious people hadn’t been interfacing with the future to any appreciable degree, and th…
The Most Powerful Being and the Simulation Argument
As a disclaimer, this is a thought experiment, not an attempt at a scientific argument. Okay, so continuing my thoughts on the Simulation Argument, I’d like to throw in some possible additions to it.…
The Simulation Argument, remixed
The other day I published my Introduction to the Simulation Argument, to some interesting reactions. Although it’s a very simple argument, the mental contortions one has to jump through make it diffic…
An Introduction to the Simulation Argument
In 2003, Nick Bostrom published his Simulation Argument, and shook the landscape of philosophy. The basic idea is easy to describe. For the past few decades, we’ve been building simulations of the wor…
Why I joined the Mormon Transhumanist Association
Recently, I’ve become convinced that the singularity is upon us. I don’t mean this in the sense of an impending mass human upload, or a cyborg takeover, or some other apocalyptic scenario; I mean that…
How to believe in Immortality
I’m aware that this may turn off some people. That’s okay. Jump to the bottom if this is you. // For a few hundred years now, the general scientific consensus has been that immortality is at best unkn…
Philosophy of information
Going forward, the world will be increasingly centered around information. And so it is necessary to understand a few things about information. Information has no location. At a fundamental level, i…
The Structure of Human Hope: speculations on immortality
In my previous posts (1, 2, 3), I’ve tried to be careful not to offer any speculation on the actual nature of resurrection or immortality. Instead, I’ve tried to follow the scriptures, and simply hold…
The Structure of Human Hope
There are many philosophies of the future, many perspectives on how society progresses, and many thoughts on what gives us hope. It seems by now to have been well-established that humans need hope in …
Life, The Multiverse, and Everything
I’m a big believer in the multiverse. I can’t quite explain why, but from the first time I heard the concept, I knew it was true. It just made deep, intuitive sense. Sometimes I have trouble understan…
The Physics of Immortality
When I was about 13, I read a book called “The Physics of Immortality”. Now, 12 years later, the author (Frank Tipler), has released a sequel called “The Physics of Christianity”. I recently bought it…
Computer Science and Eternal Life
Kevin posed an interesting question about post-mortem fate and eternal life. Why are humans fascinated with this subject?Let me answer by going as nerdy as I can, and approaching this question from t…