1 Intro

Underneath all human thought lies a metaphysical question:

What is this reality are we living in? What are its features? How does it work?

Every ethical system, political theory, scientific project, theology, and anthropology rests on an answer to that question. Some answers are explicit. Many people just ignore the question or assume the default “apatheism” (apathy+atheism) somehow answers everything.

But no one escapes metaphysics. Even the person who says, “I don’t do metaphysics; I only follow the science,” adopts several metaphysical commitments: that reality is intelligible, that observation can disclose truth, that logic is trustworthy, that causation is sufficiently stable, that minds can track the world, and that human inquiry is not merely noise generated by meat.

Physics explains how reality behaves. Metaphysics asks what reality is.

Christian Transhumanism must be more than a position on life extension, artificial intelligence, gene editing, mind-machine interfaces, and human enhancement. Those are downstream questions. The deeper question is what sort of cosmos could make those questions meaningful, and how to unite the best insights of Christian and secular philosophies, to enable us to approach this coming revolution proactively, confidently, embracing the great opportunities but doing so with discernment, justice and as rigorous an understanding as we are humanly able to achieve.

2 The best analog of the Universe is an Engineered Artefact

The first point of Christian Transhumanism’s posited metaphysical framework to be articulated in this essay is:

We are living inside a created, intelligible, Engineered Artefact.

Artefact in this context meaning a constructed or manufactured item engineered for a purpose.

Or, in other language:

The universe is not just suddenly-appearing matter. It is technology created with intention.

Not technology in the modern sense of silicon, rockets, or software. Those are our latest and best, yet still crude forms of technology. The claim is deeper. Technology is ordered means directed toward ends. It is the arrangement of reality into purposeful functioning structures.

Therefore, the universe itself is the underlying primary technology: a generative Artefact capable of bringing into being stars, chemistry, life, consciousness, culture, morality, science, and human technology.

The Christian claim is not merely that God exists somewhere beyond the cosmos. It is that the rational source of the cosmos has entered the cosmos. The Logos (John 1:1) through whom all things were made has become flesh, that is, Jesus. The Engineer has inhabited the Artefact.

But before we get to Christology, we must begin with the Artefact.

3 Why “Engineered Artefact” Is Better Than “Simulation”

The 21^st century West Coast tech-bro version of this discussion begins with “simulation” theory. Nick Bostrom’s famous question in his 2003 paper, “Are you living in a computer simulation?” captured the imagination of technologists because it expressed metaphysics in the latest technological metaphor. Elon Musk showed the same instinct. He would question a hypothetical superintelligence, “What’s outside the simulation?” (Lex Fridman podcast, 2017).

But simulation of what? Bostrom suggested maybe a simulation of ancestors of an advanced race, but to what end? Simulation as a description is narrow. It imports assumptions from video games, virtual reality, graphics rendering, computing hardware, and digital environments.

Earlier generations used different but related metaphors. William Paley had the watchmaker. The universe looked like the finest technology of his age: a watch. Before that, the world was imagined as a great chain, a book, a temple, a garden, a hierarchy, a theatre, an organism (e.g. Gaia), or a cosmic order.

Each metaphor reveals something. Each distorts something.

The watchmaker or machine metaphor captures design but risks mechanistic explanations, when we now know the universe is not clockwork (see below). The simulation metaphor captures implemented reality but risks a lack of purpose, or that nothing really matters, or that it is a game or an experiment. The organism metaphor captures growth and change but contradicts the fundamental order at the base of reality. The temple metaphor captures sacred order but suggests stasis. The book metaphor captures intelligibility but risks passivity.

Let’s move beyond metaphor to careful observation, then see how best to characterise our Universe.

Firstly, modern cosmology indicates that our observable universe emerged from an extremely hot, dense state around 13.8 billion years ago. While physicists continue to debate whether the Big Bang represents the absolute beginning of reality or merely the beginning of our cosmic epoch, the evidence for the hot Big Bang itself is overwhelming.

Current evidence also suggests the universe will continue expanding, with entropy steadily increasing toward a distant heat death as even the last black holes eventually evaporate through Hawking radiation. Maybe a firework analogy fits: it starts in a hot state and peters out to low energy photons, separated widely, almost nothingness.

Historically, the idea of a universe with a finite past proved uncomfortable for several philosophical systems that assumed an eternal cosmos. Soviet Marxists resisted Big Bang cosmology because it conflicted with dialectical materialism. During China’s Cultural Revolution, teaching the Big Bang theory was a career limiting move for physicists. Atheist objectivist Leonard Peikoff likewise defended Ayn Rand’s eternal universe as a philosophical necessity for Objectivism.

When a worldview requires the universe to be eternal, evidence suggesting a finite past is naturally met with resistance. The same psychological mechanism appears across many ideologies. Evidence is sometimes rejected outright; if not, it is filtered, reinterpreted, or assigned lower confidence until the worldview can accommodate it.

Secondly, with today’s latest physics, an argument which has gained ground is the fine-tuning argument. The constants in physics are closely tuned to allow the emergence of life. This is said to be supportive evidence of at least some kind of design. This argument has both supporters and detractors, but basically all agree that if these constants were changed, even a miniscule change, would result in a very different universe. Extensive arguments against this being evidence of design exist, but all seek to ground their outcome in some kind of non-intelligent origin or source of the Universe. Simpler is to posit an intelligent source.

Causation as we experience it (more on this in the next section) seems to work within the standard model of particle physics. This only starts working one Planck-time after the big bang, therefore is probably not the ground of the Artefact. Standard model particles are much larger than the posited ‘quantum foam’ which seems to exist at distances smaller the Planck length.

The laws of physics are therefore operating regularities within the Artefact, not self-explanatory necessities. Time, matter, energy, quantum fields, spacetime geometry, and mathematical structure may be internal features of the created system rather than the final metaphysical substrate.

“Engineered Artefact” is therefore more useful because it is broader. It includes law, structure, information, constraint, intelligibility, emergence, and purpose. It does not require that reality be literally digital like our latest technology. Thus the argument that the universe appeared as a ‘random fluctuation’ in a ‘special kind of nothing’ (‘nothing is not nothing to a physicist’), becomes less tenable with time.

This causal order appears implemented rather than ultimate.

This is why “what caused God?” is a category error. It assumes that whatever grounds the causal order must itself be one more object inside the causal order. But if causation is part of the Artefact, an in-built feature of how it operates, then the source of the Artefact need not be causally related to the universe in the same way that one billiard ball is causally related to another.

The response to the classic conjecture, “There must be an un-caused cause at the beginning of the chain of cause and effect,” cannot be, “What caused that?” because it was posited it was uncaused, at least in terms of our understanding of causation, in our universe of three dimensions of space and one of time.

Thus Richard Dawkins’ conjecture that God, if he exists, must have evolved somehow, makes no sense, because evolution is something inside the Artefact. Outside, the processes are unimaginably different.

That does not prove any religion. But it’s a strong challenge to the complacency of brute physicalism. The universe is not obviously self-explanatory. The more deeply we examine it, the less plausible it becomes that reality is merely a pile of facts that just happen to be mathematically ordered, generative, intelligible, and productive of minds capable of mathematics.

The Christian Transhumanist therefore begins with this disciplined conjecture:

The best description of Reality is that it behaves like an Engineered Artefact.

Or, for the west-coast technophiles, “Causation is a feature of the Simulation”

The observed properties and inferences of the telos of this Engineered Artefact are set out in the rest of this essay. But first, this idea is not actually new.

4 A Convergence Across Traditions

The engineered Artefact hypothesis is not a strange invention of modern technophiles. It is a contemporary restatement of an ancient family of metaphysical intuitions, based on the latest scientific insights.

Thinkers from antiquity until today who have argued for the existence of God, or a force of intelligence external to the visible universe include Plato, Aristotle, Islamic scholars such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Hindus such as Ramanuja and Sri Aurobindo, Zen Buddhist Huang Po, Maimonides (Jewish), enlightenment thinkers Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant, and Christians from Aquinas, Duns Scotus, through contemporary thinkers like CS Lewis and William Lane Craig.

These thinkers do not all agree. They do not give identical arguments. Some are theists, some are not. Some have a personalist view of God, some impersonalist. Some emphasise divine will, others divine intellect, others emptiness, others Platonic form, others necessity, others pure actuality.

Despite their different takes. their convergence matters.

Across cultures, serious minds have repeatedly found the visible world insufficient as its own explanation. The world appears dependent, ordered, intelligible, and contingent. It appears to point beyond itself. The human mind naturally asks why there is anything at all, why it has order, why reason tracks it, why mathematics works, how moral obligation emerged, and why consciousness exists.

The modern materialist often treats these questions as embarrassments to be ignored or explained away rather than answered. But that move is not scientific. It is metaphysical. It is a worldview protecting itself from rival explanations.

Christian Transhumanism does not need to claim certainty. It should be Popperian enough to reject sealed systems of thought. But it can claim that the engineered Artefact hypothesis is a live, rational, and increasingly interesting conjecture.

Reality is law-governed.
Reality is information-dense.
Reality is mathematically tractable, at least to a large extent.
Reality generates intelligence.
Reality produces beings who can get closer to truth of understanding reality.
Reality produces beings who ask moral questions.
Reality produces beings who create further Artefacts.

A universe that produces physicists, poets, prophets, engineers, saints, and artificial intelligence systems requires some explanation, rather than dismissive gestures, be they populist or academic.

In the following sections this essay will support this position by considering the observable features of the universe. But first, a little further philosophy.

5 Some further philosophical underpinnings

5.1 Hume, Uniformity, and the Discontinuity at the Beginning

David Hume placed a permanent brake on naïve scientific confidence. We do not directly observe causation. We observe patterns, sequences, regularities, correlations, and repeated conjunctions. Then we infer necessity. But the necessity itself does not appear in sensory experience. We infer cause because the pattern is stable.

Science depends upon this stability. It assumes that nature is sufficiently uniform for experiment, prediction, falsification, measurement, instrumentation, and replication to mean something.

Hume’s characterisation of the problem of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature is an important underpinning of science. Science is powerful inside a lawlike order. It cannot, by its own methods, explain why there is lawlike order at all.

This assumption of lawlike order can only be observed and used. It is the key structure by which we make experience intelligible at all. Popper, later, avoided naïve induction (pattern recognition) by treating science as conjecture and refutation rather than repeated observations being confirmation. But even Popperian falsification requires enough uniformity for a test to count as a test.

So Hume and Popper together drive us toward a disciplined boundary:

Scientific reasoning requires a stable order. That stable order is not itself a scientific discovery, rather, something we have observed repeatedly, and created formulas and explanations to describe. It is the condition under which scientific discovery becomes possible.

As far back as observation and inference can take us, the universe appears lawlike. But when our models approach the earliest boundary of the observable universe, our physics reaches a frontier. We have no way to know what is past this point, therefore we have no basis on which to assert the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature can continue to hold true where there is such a large discontinuity.

That is, causation as we perceive it inside the Engineered Artefact is a designed feature.

5.2 A rational principle undergirding the universe

The need for a rational organising principle is recognised by all sides in the theist/atheist debate. The point of difference is whether that principle is an equation or a person. In around 500 BC, the concept of “Logos” emerged from Greek thought.

The concept of Logos (Greek: “word,” “reason,” “account”) originated with the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE), who used it to describe the rational principle governing cosmic order and change, that is, the underlying structure that makes the universe intelligible rather than chaotic.

The Stoics later developed this significantly, conceiving Logos as the active, rational force pervading and animating the entire universe. A kind of divine reason immanent in nature, ordering all things according to a coherent plan.

Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher (c. 20 BCE–50 CE), bridged Greek philosophy and Jewish monotheism by identifying Logos with divine Wisdom and as God’s intermediary agent in creation.

John’s Gospel adopted and transformed this philosophical heritage, opening with “In the beginning was the Logos” (John 1:1), identifying this cosmic rational principle not as an abstract force but as a person: Jesus Christ, the eternal Word (‘organising principle’) who was both with God and was God, through whom all things were made, and who became flesh.

The ordered and rational principle behind the universe (“Logos”) that allows humans to make scientific discoveries may exhibit attributes of personhood, or may, in the eyes of some, not. Hard to prove, but seems most likely on balance that there is intentionality and agency in the founding principles of the Universe. Therefore, the Christian assertion, that Christian Transhumanism endorses is:

Causation explains events. Logos is posited as the explanation as to why causation works and is intelligible to humans, allowing the creation of powerful explanatory knowledge.

It seems inevitable that some kind of rational ordered source of principles exists. That is a reasonable inference from rational observation of the Universe.

6 Key objections answered: Infinite Regress and Brute Fact

There are two main alternatives to some form of Creator or ground outside the perceptible universe.

The first is infinite regress. The universe is caused by something, which is caused by something else, which is caused by something else, and so on forever. In modern cosmology this sometimes appears as a multiverse generator, or a landscape of universes, or an eternal inflationary process, or some deeper mechanism that produces universes.

But if a multiverse is invoked to explain the universe, the multiverse itself requires explanation. If a multiverse generator is invoked to explain the multiverse, the generator requires explanation. A multiverse generator generator can be posited, and so on. But repetition is not explanation. At some point, one either reaches a necessary ground or admits that the explanatory chain is being extended rather than completed.

The second alternative is brute fact. The universe, multiverse, quantum field, mathematical structure, or totality simply exists. No further explanation is available. There is no reason. Reality just is. Indeed, infinite regression is a species of brute fact.

This option is possible. It cannot be disproven. But it is philosophically difficult. The question was, “What is at the beginning of the chain of cause and effect?”. If the riposte is, “Why can’t the universe be its own necessarily self-existent entity?”, the response is simple: because nothing we observe in the universe has that that property, and that’s why we asked the question in the first place.

Brute fact asks reason to stop precisely at the most important question. It tells us that every event inside reality may be investigated, but reality itself must be exempt from speculation. It allows explanation everywhere except at the foundation of explanation.

It is a metaphysical wager that, despite nothing in the universe apparently existing without a cause, that there is nothing outside the chain of cause and effect that we observe.

The Deist or Christian wager is different. It says that reality is intelligible because intelligibility is grounded in Logos. The universe is not self-explanatory. It is derivative. It is created. Its causal order is real, but not ultimate. Its laws are stable, but not self-grounding.

As stated above, the question “What caused God?” misunderstands this claim. God, in classical Christian theology, is not one more contingent object. God is not an item in the inventory of reality. God is the reason there is an inventory at all. God is not an event requiring an earlier event. God is the necessary ground of events. That external to the Engineered Artefact, external to the observable universe, causation is so different as to be best portrayed to limited human minds as grounded and eternal.

But even if a brute force or infinite regress is used as a rejection of the existence of an externality of the Artefact, such rejection should be honest. It is not replacing superstition with science. It is replacing one metaphysical foundation with another.

The options are not Christianity / Deism versus reason, but one metaphysical assumption versus another.

The fact that there are rival metaphysical accounts of why reason works should not be a surprise. All such accounts are, by Hume, unfalsifiable. All therefore require faith, in the sense of “the assurance we feel about what we cannot prove”, to contemporise Hebrews 11:1. Therefore, whilst all options to understand what occurred prior to the earliest detectable or computable instant after the big bang are veiled, we must choose something to base our lives on. In the context of this coherent metaphysics, the Christian Transhumanist assertion is that “Engineered Artefact” and “Causation is a feature thereof” is more plausible than either infinite regression or brute fact.

7 Features of the Engineered Artefact – observed and inferred

This section sets out from first principles five key features of the Engineered Artefact. The first feature is labelled not first, but zeroth, since it exists independent of the Artefact, yet influences it.

7.1 The Artefact’s Zeroth Feature: Forms and Concepts, which are independent of the Artefact.

Plato theorised this feature of reality: the existence of forms.

Take a triangle. No physical triangle is perfect. Every drawn triangle is approximate. Every manufactured triangle has defects at sufficient magnification. Yet the concept “triangle” is exact. It is understood, even though the precise perfect triangle is rare.

If the universe itself is an Artefact, then its forms may be internal operating structures, or they may be grounded beyond it. A triangle may be part of the created mathematical order. Or triangularity may be an eternal feature of rational possibility grounded in Logos. Either way, the existence of forms means reality is not limited to physical matter-in-motion.

On balance, it seems the concept of a triangle would still exist, even if the universe did not.

The same is true of numbers, logic, proportion, symmetry, and mathematical structure. Are these merely human conventions? Are they discovered? Are they eternal forms? Are they features of the Artefact? Are they grounded in divine mind?

The options are ancient. Platonism says forms have a reality independent of physical instances. Nominalism says they are names we impose. Conceptualism says they exist in minds. Christian Platonism says forms are grounded in the divine Logos.

Moral forms intensify the question.

Justice, courage, mercy, truthfulness, holiness, beauty, wisdom, and love are not simply chemical events. They are not reducible to personal preference. Humans may disagree about them, but cross-culturally the research holds up, at least in general terms.

Pushing deeply into the question of moral forms as part of the future form of humanity is necessary to set directions for emerging technologies.

Thus the zeroth feature: Forms and Concepts exist independent of the Engineered Artefact.

7.2 The Artefact’s First Feature: Laws of Physics, as our approximations of the underlying functioning of reality are mis-named.

If the universe is an engineered Artefact, its laws are not human laws. Human “laws of physics” (a terrible misnomer) are our descriptions of regularities we have discovered. They are powerful approximations of deeper reality.

Newtonian mechanics remains good enough to build bridges, calculate projectiles, and model ordinary mechanical systems. But it is not ultimate. Relativity corrects it at high velocities and strong gravitational fields. Quantum mechanics corrects classical intuitions at small scales. The Standard Model explains enormous domains of particle physics but does not include gravity. General relativity describes gravity magnificently but is not yet reconciled with quantum mechanics. Dark matter and dark energy remain huge unresolved placeholders in cosmology.

The use of the term “law” is unfortunate. Newton’s “law” of gravity should be called “Newton’s formula for gravity”. The problem with the concept of a “law” based on observation of repeated patterns is our language entrenches it as some kind of given, and can slow future growth in understanding. All such “laws” should be better labelled as formulas or empirical approximations. We observe patterns, and from them we build explanatory knowledge, as David Deutsch would put it.

Engineers use empirical approximations in all calculations. A model can be accurate enough for purpose without being identical to reality. Such models are disciplined compressions of the world, useful because they capture enough of the relevant causal structure for prediction and action.

Scientific laws are like that. They are not arbitrary. They are not mere social constructions. They are truth-tracking approximations. But they are still approximations.

Christian Transhumanist metaphysics therefore treats science with both reverence and humility. Reverence, because science discloses real structure, and humility, because science is not omniscience.

The first feature: The Engineered Artefact functions using regular laws. Humans observe patterns and create formulas with ever-improving accuracy of reflecting them.

7.3 The Artefact’s Second Feature: Intelligibility

The universe is intelligible to us, partially and progressively.

That is astonishing, as has been noted by numerous philosophers and scientists.

Christian Transhumanism recognises that abstract intelligibility is not a minor issue. Mathematics is “unreasonably effective” (Eugene Wigner) because the world is structured in ways mathematics can capture. Engineering works because abstract forms can be materially instantiated. A bridge is made not only of steel and concrete, but of geometry, engineering formulas, material science, economics, and human purpose.

Technology is the materialisation of form. A design exists first as concept, then as drawing, model, schedule, procurement package, construction, operation, maintenance, and social effect. The Artefact begins in mind and becomes reality through intention.

Humans emerged on a small planet around an ordinary star, after billions of years of cosmic history, with brains shaped by survival pressures. Yet these brains can infer black holes, quantum fields, DNA, plate tectonics, stellar nucleosynthesis, prime numbers, non-Euclidean geometry, and the age of the universe. We can build equations that predict phenomena no one had observed when the equations were written. We can detect invisible particles, image distant galaxies, edit genomes, simulate weather, and land machines on other planets.

The human mind is not omniscient. It is error-prone, tribal, self-deceiving, proud, and often ridiculous. But it is also truth-tracking. Not perfectly. Not automatically. Not without correction. But genuinely longing for truth.

This is where the scientific method, and critical rationalism (Karl Popper) matter.

We do not possess infallible reason. We possess conjectural reason under criticism. Knowledge grows through error correction. We observe patterns of cause and effect, then propose explanations, test them, criticise them, discard them, revise them, and build better ones. The power of science is not that scientists are pure rational angels. They are not. The power of science is that its best methods expose errors to reality and to criticism.

Christian Transhumanism should therefore reject both scientism and anti-science.

Scientism says science is the only real knowledge. That fails because science depends on logical, mathematical, metaphysical, and moral assumptions it cannot itself prove, notwithstanding the assertions of the failed ‘new atheist’ movement.

Anti-science says science is merely human arrogance or cultural construction. It asserts that ‘other ways of knowing’ are just as valid, even though not subject to basic tenets of falsifiability. It allows assertions that are not tested to survive through political pressure and tribalism. Anti-science fails because aircraft fly, antibiotics work, bridges stand, GPS corrects for relativity, and vaccines train immune systems. Reality pushes back. Bad models fail.

The Christian Transhumanist position is stronger again. Science is one disciplined mode of participating in the Logos-structured intelligibility of creation. It is a form of general revelation (theologian’s label for Romans 1:20) insofar as creation discloses order, rationality, and possibility.

We can also discern, as noted above, moral truths from the world of Forms, external to the Engineered Artefact. An imperative therefore exists to improve the human condition using science, as the Imago Dei in each of us seeks to mirror the heart of the Creator to better the world, as Francis Bacon said, ‘by the sweat of our brow’.

Therefore, our truth-tracking minds must be guided by clear ethics and morals in the transhumanist age. We must become the kind of creatures who can handle intelligibility to create new powerful knowledge and technology in a manner that reflects the nature of the Creator.

The artefact’s second feature: the laws of the Artefact are intelligible and humans can model them. But only with disciplined and ethical minds.

7.4 The Artefact’s Third Feature: Mixed Causation: Deterministic and Non-Deterministic.

Causation inside the universe is not one thing.

Let’s begin at the level of physics. For a few hundred years until the early 1900s, the deterministic ‘billiard ball’ view held sway. This came from Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe, and was formalised by Pierre Laplace in the “Laplace’s Demon” thought experiment (1814). Laplace theorized that if a supreme intellect knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in existence and the laws of physics, it could perfectly calculate the entire past and future. This implies that everything, including every human action, is predetermined.

Despite determinism still holding some populist assent, the clockwork view of the universe has not held water for generations now, due to the following scientific facts:

1. The structure of the atom, and random decay of nuclei. For example, Carbon 14 is formed in the upper atmosphere when cosmic-ray generated neutrons strike a Nitrogen atom’s nucleus. It then lasts somewhere between nearly zero and many tens of thousands of years, the half-life being 5,740 years. Numerous lab experiments find no deterministic mechanism to fix the life between the neutron strike and the beta-decay of C14 back to N14.

2. Physics has probed to the level of the quantum matrix, smaller than the Planck length, which is 20 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. At this level, there seems to be the random appearance and disappearance of particles and anti-particles. This initially was thought to be a theoretical construct of quantum field theory. However, laboratory analogue experiments have reproduced important features of predicted Hawking radiation. Under the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, the spontaneous emission of individual Hawking quanta is fundamentally probabilistic, rather than deterministic.

3. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that there is a limit to the accuracy with which we can know both the position and momentum of particles, single-handedly defeats Laplace’s demon, at least, the simple causal deterministic version that held popular support for generations.

4. Downwards causation. Any complex system with emergent effects (see below) has some kind of downwards causation, which defeats pure determinism from moving upward in the emergence hierarchy. It can be argued determinism moves up, and across, then down, but on the downwards path there are observable disconnects. An organised whole imposes constraints on its components. There are multiple layers of emerged behaviour and constraints between particle physics and a political system.

5. Downward causation in human becoming. Consciousness and free will (explored further below) enable us to instantiate higher ideals within ourselves and our shared world. Religious and cultural archetypes, as Jung recognized, take on a living dynamism within the human collective, exerting real downward influence that shapes individual lives and societies amid underlying indeterminacy and chaos. This is not mere metaphor but participatory co-creation: we choose which Forms to embody, turning our choices to either good or evil.

6. Near-random chaotic processes (e.g. weather, mammalian conception) are in theory deterministic, just hard to calculate. But these are subject to non-deterministic processes such as nuclear decay and downwards causation, as well as, of course, being limited by Heisenberg.

7. Interaction with the world of forms and thought. Plato posited the world of forms as existing independent of physical reality, that is, external to the Engineered Artefact. Consciousness (more on that below) can be conceived as an imposer of forms on chaos. Or if you don’t think forms exist independently of the Creation, then maybe this formulation may be closer to truth: Conscious agents form mental representations of possible futures, evaluate them against goals and values, inhibit some impulses, select others, and organise physical matter toward intended ends.

8. Quantum mechanics further disrupted the clean mechanistic picture. Bell inequality experiments in quantum entanglement won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, reinforcing that classical local realism cannot be retained in its old form, falsifying the popular interpretation of Einstein’s “God does not play dice”.

Some determined determinists remain, but their numbers are thinning. For the layperson, the non-physicists, some believe the universe was random during the inflation period just after the big bang, and has since been deterministic. Some believe this universe is one of many. Then, at the creation of each universe, the fine-tuned physics constants are set randomly, then it’s deterministic. Such ideas stretch plausibility.

For the physicists, the 2022 Nobel prize proved that if reality contains determinism, then it cannot be both local, that is, signals cannot travel faster than light, and real, that is, objects have definite properties before they are measured. So any determinism cannot be ‘locally real’. But some deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics remain.

The top three serious deterministic quantum theories supported by real physicists who support determinism are:

1. Many Worlds: that at every observation event, a new slightly different copy of the current universe is spawned. It’s a mathematically precise consequence of quantum physics. Some really clever people take this seriously. Doesn’t pass the pub test very often.

2. De Broglie - Bohm / Pilot Wave: that particles really do exist in a single precise location prior to observation. This theory invokes faster-than-light information sharing instantly throughout the universe.

3. Gerad t’Hooft’s “Celular automaton” that basically upscales Conway’s game of life to the entire universe, suggesting it really is a simulation.

These three theories, and their genre, seem to make the following philosophical errors:

1. Reification. Whilst maths is “unusually effective” in modelling reality, there are many solutions to equations with no bearing on physical reality. And mathematical things with no reality that make sense physically. When an equation leads to an absurdity, like an infinite number of splitting universes every time an electron moves, it is highly likely that we have reached beyond our model’s validity.

2. Maths is not a flawless, complete mirror of absolute truth. It is a human-constructed logical system. Gödel proved that any consistent mathematical system will always contain statements that are true but cannot be proved within the system. At the other extreme, electrical engineers rely on the square root of minus one. If maths itself has inherent limits, quirks and blind spots, it is a massive philosophical gamble to assume that a mathematical equation (like the Schrödinger equation) can perfectly and exhaustively describe every corner of physical reality without breaking down.

3. Another huge problem for determinists is explaining how the universe could ever have come into existence. Arguing for determinism all the way back through infinite eons simply creates an infinite regress, again demanding an endless chain of deterministic causes with no actual beginning, exacerbating the problem of infinite regress and brute fact above. Pure determinism is an extra bar for those who believe in a multiverse, since some multiverse theories believe the constants of physics (or maybe even the formulae) are reset at each big bang.

To conclude this section:

The conclusion that the universe is deterministic was a false turn during the enlightenment. It was not believed before, and is not defensible today.

That matters politically and morally. Hard determinism corrodes agency. Marxist historicism treated social outcomes as scientific inevitabilities and helped license violence in the name of history. Biological determinism can excuse vice or despair. Technological determinism tells us that our technology will define our societies, and we have no control over it.

Christian Transhumanism rejects all such fatalisms. The universe contains law, but also contingency, constraint, and also agency, that is, free will, as at least an emergent phenomenon (more on that below). Causation does not mean inevitability. The next section will focus more closely on the concept of ‘emergence’ to give further arguments against determinism and in favor of the scientifically-supported mixed view of causation, having both deterministic and non-deterministic processes.

7.5 The Artefact’s Fourth Feature: Emergence

Emergence is a confusing word in contemporary thought. It’s a label for a process we don’t understand, a black box.

It is used as a placeholder to link different sciences which use different principles. Chemistry emerges from Physics. Biology emergers from Chemistry. Consciousness is somehow intertwined with Biology, but does it “emerge” or is it somehow self-existent? Language emerges from consciousness, although much consciousness does not involve language^[i]. Society emerges from consciousness, languages, and human nature. Society gives emergent birth to worldviews, religions, cultures, and various ways of knowing.

The most efficient ways of knowing bring the greatest power, therefore science emerges. Science gives birth (emergence?) to technology, which as above is always deployed with the aim (sometimes mis-aimed) of improving the human condition.

At each transition someone waves a hand and says, “emergence.” The critic is right to complain. Sometimes “emergence” is just “then a miracle occurs” in secular clothing. It’s a deus ex machina solution, the wave of a wand.

But the concept cannot be dismissed. The universe clearly has layered structure. Higher-level realities arise from lower-level realities while exhibiting patterns not visible at the lower level alone. The higher levels are real and, in some sense, independent, working downwards causation.

Weak emergence occurs when higher-level patterns arise from lower-level rules and could, in principle, be derived or simulated from them. Conway’s Game of Life is the standard toy example. Simple local rules generate complex patterns. Nothing spooky is added, yet surprising structures appear.

Strong emergence is more controversial. It suggests genuinely novel properties or causal powers that are not reducible to lower-level interactions even in principle. Consciousness is the usual candidate. Free will, intentionality, life, social systems, ecosystems, economies, and immune systems are also canvassed.

Christian Transhumanism should use the word with care. It is probably not one process, but a group of processes we don’t understand yet. Once we understand a process, we may cease to so label it. The populist dividing line between weak and strong emergence is probably a classification artefact based on current limits of understanding.

Consciousness and free will are considered a completely different class of phenomenon, but if pan-psychism is true, then consciousness is not an emergent phenomenon, but our perception and experience of consciousness is.

Despite the problems with the concept, emergence matters because it allows creation to be dynamic and creative, overarching the mix of determinism and non-determinism. A created order can be lawful at lower levels and open to novelty at higher levels. This fits both the biblical worldview and common human experience.

Creation is not merely manufactured as something static. It is fruitful. It brings forth new things. The earth produces vegetation, life multiplies, humans name, cultivate, and build.

The universe appears designed not only to contain matter moving according to various laws, but to generate new orders of being.

Humanity is not a finished statue. We are not in the same state we were 5,000 years ago, or 50,000, or 300,000. Humanity is an evolved or emergent creature within the Engineered Artefact. The future improvement and perfection of humanity is envisioned in Christian scripture, as well as secular thinking and aspirations.

Humans already build artefacts with internal rules from which greater complexities emerge. They are primitive compared with the universe, but they give analogies.

Game worlds have rules-based equivalents of physics. Characters can move only in certain ways. Boundaries exist. Objects have properties. Some behaviours are deterministic; others are probabilistic.

A legal system is also a human designed artefact. It generates permissions, obligations, rights, penalties, roles, and institutions. None of these are reducible to atoms, although all are enacted through physical bodies, documents, courts, police, buildings, servers, and memory. The legal system gives birth to many things, for example, intellectual property which routinely gives birth to entire new sectors of the economy.

A language is an artefact with grammar, meaning, history, and generative power. From a finite alphabet and finite rules, human beings generate unbounded expression. Different languages impact thought patterns and cultures in different ways.

A city is an artefact that generates emergent phenomena. Roads, zoning, markets, schools, sewage systems, police, families, churches, sports clubs, and coffee shops produce patterns no individual planner fully controls. A city is designed at different levels: zones, transport systems, but is not wholly determined. Its rules are engineered, but it has emergent life, reflecting a mixture of determinism (rules) and non-determinism (developers creating).

A corporation is an artefact. It has purposes, rules, assets, liabilities, culture, memory, agency, and legal personhood. Yet it is also made of people and documents and systems. It emerges from them while exerting downward causal force upon them.

A computer operating system is an artefact in which lower-level constraints generate higher-level possibility. At one level there are voltages and transistors. At another there are machine instructions. At another there are applications. At another there are human intentions expressed through the machine.

A political system is an artefact. Many attempts are made to impose laws to meet the hierarchy of all humans needs as well as we are able. From efforts to meet human needs has emerged ethical, social and political systems.

Each analogy matters because it prevents a common mistake: assuming that if a reality is engineered, it must be rigid, dead, deterministic, simplistic, or externally manipulated.

But the best artefacts are not like that. They are generative. They create spaces for possibility. They allow emergence. A good artefact is not merely a thing. It is a world of possible actions.

The universe looks like the greatest such artefact. It does not merely contain objects. It generates new possibilities at multiple levels of emergent phenomena.

But emergence is not automatically good. Cancer is emergent. Addiction is emergent. Online mobs are emergent. Totalitarian bureaucracies are emergent. Algorithmic manipulation is emergent. Nuclear weapons are emergent. The emergence of power is not the emergence of righteousness.

Thus the fourth feature of the artefact: the emergence of complex phenomena. The nature of this emergence is not one thing, not one process, but many, most of which are hard to define, but it is real.

7.6 Are Good and Evil emergent?

If emergence is a feature, then what is the ethical quality of what is emerging? Clearly, both good and evil things emerge. Foremost amongst them is an evaluation function of good and evil. This is valuable for survival, therefore the knowledge of good and evil is good in itself. Nothing appears more universal across humanity that good and evil must be defined as such, despite definitions varying.

Christian Transhumanism (Micah Redding, 2016 blog) asserts intuitively that “good wins”. In a sense this is tautological, in that the best for human flourishing will tend to be more popular. But good cannot be defined solely by success. It is a well-understood archetype.

What Redding asserts intuitively, evolutionary biologists and game theorists have long noted: moral concepts appear wherever humans (and even non-human animals) face the basic survival problem of needing each other. Good-faith cooperation makes all parties better off. Humans must eat. To get food the options are to find or grow it, to steal it, or to trade. Trade turns out to be the best for everyone. Selfish defectors or unfair traders may win in the short term, but invariably lose in the long run, outcompeted by cooperators who can trust each other.

This is, in miniature, the Christian Transhumanist thesis: Good Wins, not because the universe is sentimental, but because cooperation, creativity, and compassion are structurally superior survival and flourishing strategies once intelligence emerges.

Ethics of reciprocity emerge in many ways. The best known is “love your neighbour as yourself”, but the same idea emerges in other religions and cultures. John Rawls claimed to derive from first principles the idea of the “veil of ignorance” (invent the rules of society not knowing where you will be in that society) yet this occurred in a Christian or post-Christian context so seems less original than Rawls asserts.

The complexity in everyday life means there is usually competition between one individual flourishing and the family, tribe or species flourishing. Yet, on balance, good wins.

For the Christian Transhumanist argument above, this convergence is significant: it suggests reciprocity isn’t a culturally contingent invention but something more like a discovered feature of cooperative intelligence itself: an ethical attractor that any sufficiently reflective, socially interdependent species seems likely to stumble upon, because it’s what stable cooperation requires.

Self-interested rational agents would still choose principles of fairness and equal basic rights, because they lift the society for everyone.

No one argues passionately about whether their favourite ice cream flavour is objectively superior. But people argue about justice as if justice is real. Even the most ardent moral relativists become moral realists the moment someone mugs them and steals their nice new Nikes.

The Christian claim is that moral reality is grounded in the character of God. The Logos is not merely mathematical. The Logos is moral. It calls for response.

Good is defined as beneficial for humanity in terms of maximising our flourishing in the context of a flourishing environment on Earth. But this is from a human perspective so how do we know if the emergent human perspective mirrors the perspective of the Creator?

Christian Transhumanism argues that such an ‘invisible hand’ of a bending towards cooperation gives a telos to evolution. Or maybe that is also part of the design of the engineered Artefact, to reveal the moral nature of the Creator, most perfectly revealed in Jesus.

So concepts of Good and Evil are not just emergent or culturally created for pragmatic reasons. They are part of our human world because they are part of the world of Forms, part of the Logos, the operating system of our reality, and indeed the operating system of the Creator reality that gave birth to ours.

8 The Epistemic Distance from the Creator

If the Artefact has these features, what has it generated?

We are made from the ashes of stars, literally the remains (dust?) of supernovae. Read into that what you will from the allegory of Genesis, but that fact does not reduce human dignity. It increases wonder. Dust became self-aware. Matter began asking metaphysical questions. The universe generated creatures capable of studying the universe.

But this also creates an enormous epistemic gap between us and the Creator. We are unable to see beyond the cosmic microwave background, 380,000 years after the big bang. Beyond that we can develop formulas and infer models, but not collect physical evidence (light).

Since the Creator stands outside the causal order of the universe, and since humans emerge billions of years later inside that order, our knowledge of the Creator from nature will be indirect. We are recently-emerging agents inside an ancient system, inferring the system’s source from its structure, laws, boundary conditions, and outputs.

This is why the engineered Artefact argument only gets us so far. We can reasonably infer intelligence, order, and possibly that a purpose exists, yet what would that purpose be? We may infer something like Deism. We may infer that reality depends upon a source beyond itself. But we may well question the morality of such a Creator. Many do, seeing in the world much suffering to go with the great joys and beauty. We will need much more information before we can infer the nature of the Creator(s). Triune, covenantal, redemptive, or incarnate are words we cannot use based on this General Revelation.

The general revelation points to intelligence in the foundation of the universe, but it cannot give us a complete picture of the nature of this intelligence.

So let’s consider features of life, intelligence and purpose, features we are able to discern from observation, and see what direction that leads us.

9 Life, Consciousness, Intelligence and Free Will

9.1 Life Emerges

Life appears far down the track of cosmic history. Whether one considers abiogenesis, self-organisation, metabolism-first models, RNA hypotheses, lipid membranes, hydrothermal vents, or other proposed pathways, the honest statement is the science of life’s origin remains speculation. This leaves some version of guided evolution popular in some Christian circles.

Evolution by natural selection explains the diversification of life with extraordinary power. But evolution does not eliminate metaphysics. It relocates the question.

Six-day literalism or other crude versions of creationism imagine God must directly manufacture organisms because otherwise they are not designed. That is too small a view of divine action. A deeper view says that a universe capable of evolving life is a more impressive Artefact than a universe requiring constant ad hoc assembly.

Evolution looks precisely like what one might expect if the Creator preferred process over coercion, emergence over fiat, and creaturely development over static manufacture.

But again, no naivety is allowed. Evolution is not sentimental. It is wasteful, violent, contingent, adaptive, and indifferent at the biological level. It produces beauty and parasites, cooperation and predation, immune systems and cancer, maternal tenderness and infanticide, altruism and dominance hierarchies.

Evolution generates the biological substrate for moral agency. It gives us bodies, nervous systems, social instincts, attachment, perception, memory, language capacity, fear, desire, kinship, competition, cooperation, and eventually culture.

Humans emerge as animals who can ask whether animal impulse should be obeyed. That is a metaphysical revolution.

Agriculture, language, music, tools, cities, law, medicine, architecture, and eventually computation are not violations of creation. They are downstream from the command to cultivate, guard and steward the creation.

9.2 Consciousness Exists

Of many counterintuitive facts inside the Engineered Artefact, this may be the strangest.

There are many theories of consciousness: physicalist, functionalist, biological, panpsychist, idealist, dualist, quantum, informational, emergentist, illusionist, mysterian, and combinations of these.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness showcases over three hundred theories of consciousness, showing how unsettled the field remains. Despite the uncertainty, we have no shortage of individuals expressing high levels of confidence in their pet theory of consciousness.

David Chalmers (coiner of the term “the hard problem” of consciousness) makes the following argument:

1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.

2. If reductive physicalism is true, there is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness do not hold [the zombie conjecture]. That is, everyone behaves the same, but no one experiences anything.

3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above physical facts.

4. So, materialism is false. [at least in the fundamentalist populist view]

The hard problem remains hard: why should physical processing be accompanied by subjective experience? Why is there something it is like to be a creature? Why does pain hurt rather than merely register damage? Why does music move us? Why does truth feel compelling? Why does guilt accuse? Why does prayer transform?

Some physicalists insist consciousness will eventually be explained in terms of neural computation. They may be right. But “eventually” is not an argument, just “science of the gaps”. Theories the reader may have encountered include integrated information, global workspace, predictive processing, biological naturalism, quantum consciousness, panpsychism, idealism, or dual-aspect theories. Some deny phenomenal consciousness altogether, which is the most desperate move: explaining consciousness by explaining it away; that all of us are deluded. Yet what exactly is being deluded?

Christian Transhumanism should be cautious here.

It should not rush into Cartesian dualism, as if the soul were a ghost driving a meat vehicle and should be careful with the source: the populist Platonism in Christianity. The biblical human being is embodied. We are not souls trapped in bodies. We are living creatures, dust and breath, psychosomatic unities, as demonstrated by brain-injury studies which map functionality and personality impacts.

But Christian Transhumanism should also resist reductionist computationalism. A software model that behaves like a person is not that person. A map of brain areas showing where consciousness arises does not solve the question of what it is or why it feels the way it does. A digital copy of your memories is not you. Indeed many today are creating avatars of themselves. This author has promised to try to leave his children an emulation of himself which will hopefully keep growing in knowledge and understanding.

This matters for mind uploading, AGI personhood, brain-computer interfaces, cryonics, neural prosthetics, and digital resurrection scenarios.

The Christian hope is resurrection, not backup. That is, our continuity of consciousness depends on technology from external to the Engineered Artefact. We conclude further advanced technology must exist outside the universe, if the universe is technology instantiated by intelligence.

That does not mean substrate questions are closed. The resurrection body itself warns against simplistic biological essentialism. The risen Christ is continuous with the crucified Jesus, yet transformed. Embodiment is essential, but current biological substrate may not be final. The future body is still body, but a body glorified body.

So the Christian Transhumanist position should be neither “carbon is magic” nor “computation is consciousness.”.

A better formulation is:

Consciousness is a deeply embodied and morally significant feature of the Engineered Artefact. Whether it can be instantiated in non-biological substrates remains an open question requiring metaphysical, scientific, and theological caution.

Right now, none of us can falsify the assertion that no one else is conscious. Maybe this assertion will remain forever unfalsifiable. We must not confuse intelligence with consciousness, nor with personhood.

As to machine consciousness, the question, “What is it like to be ChatGPT?” will most likely remain unanswerable, whatever our level of technology and science. Iain M Banks’ Culture novels speculate on a future with huge Minds that operate human habitations (mostly orbital ring worlds and giant travelling ships) for the benefit of humans. Their consciousness is deeper and richer than humans’. They hold free will, voluntarily remaining present with humans and managing their environment. If machine consciousness (the hard version) ever becomes plausible, Christians will need to ask hard questions about its status as a created (co-created by humans?) or emerged person. For now, we must assume not (subject of a later blog)

As to a future of uploading consciousness to another substrate? We may never be able to fathom the nature of consciousness, as we may never be able to surpass the speed of light. Secular transhumanist thought experiments such as replacing one neuron at a time and substrate-independent consciousness cannot yet be reliable in the context of over three hundred theories of consciousness in Kuhn’s Landscape.

For a future of resurrection or re-instantiation, we know there are limits to what is possible with technology inside the Artefact. We don’t know what those limits are, but we know approximately the limits of the number of elements that can be formed, and the limit of the speed of light. From our observations of the universe, it is plausible to infer the engineer has superior technology outside the Artefact.

What we do know: a feature of the Engineered Artefact is consciousness. We do not yet know exactly what that means.

An important feature of Matrix Epistemology, to be dealt with in a later blog in this series, is that when you aren’t certain of something, stop. Do not reform world views and societies based on unfalsifiable assertions. This has already caused much suffering.

9.3 Free Will

Intellectual honesty again requires admitting upfront that nobody has solved this question irrefutably. Not neuroscientists, philosophers, nor theologians. But based on balance of probabilities from emerging science, in the context of Christian Transhumanist metaphysics, we can take a position that is both most likely to be true, and observed to be empirically effective in engaging with future technologies.

First: the deterministic fallacy still haunts us. Benjamin Libet’s^[ii] ‘readiness potential’ from 1983 empowered elements of the failed new atheist movement, and was a central feature of Sam Harris’s polemic ‘Free Will’ (2012) which posited a fundamentalist deterministic view of human decision making. The neuroscience of volition had moved on a long way since 1983, but sadly many people, including Harris, did not get that memo.

Libet had people flick their wrist randomly, then measured a ‘readiness potential’, which appeared before they self-reported the decision. Aside from the self-reporting, this experiment was deeply flawed in several other ways. ‘Readiness potential’ is now considered by some to be background noise in our convoluted mental processes^[iii]. The phenomenon appears to be strikingly absent in deliberative choices^[iv] (values based), appearing only in arbitrary ones. In summary, the Libet experiments were massively overhyped.

The extrapolation many populist interpreters made from flicking your wrist to deciding what University course to study or who to marry was just wild. Further, one should note that decisions are made by different parts of our brain on different matters. A choice about what to eat, or where to throw a ball in sport, avoiding a pothole on a bicycle, or even to how hard to breathe are made by varieties of non-verbal neural circuits.

And, of course, now, determinism in physics is on very shaky scientific ground. This author takes some satisfaction at having had good enough bullshit filters to not believe Libet when the paper was first published.

Compatibilism, the prevailing view of free will since Hume in the 1700s, believes that determinism and free will aren’t actually in conflict. But you only need to hold that position if you believe in the physics of determinism, which we don’t, nor should anybody, for good reasons set out above.

Therefore, Christian Transhumanism holds that human free will is real. We hold this position from science, and also from scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Consider the experience of professions such as education, psychology, and many others, even politics and activism, not to mention the judiciary. All of which function successfully on the principle that humans have agency in conscious choices for self-improvement, group affiliation, or simple obedience. Even going back to Socrates, his critique of “the unexamined life” requires you to examine and make changes, deliberate changes, which the latest neuroscience of volition supports.

But defining a Christian Transhumanist position on free will is going to take quite some work. Here’s a start. More in a later essay.

How then do we conceive of free will? Firstly, we have to acknowledge the context and constraints on everyone’s life. We are all born into such different circumstances, and we all have limits on our agency, due to resources, as well as genetic predispositions and family dynamics that may be more or less conducive to us resisting the forces around us.

Secondly, the choices life offers each of us vary widely. The language we learn impacts our mental processing in substantial ways. Access to education, the spirituality and disposition you are born with, or acquire through habit, family and social influences will limit how you express your God-given agency.

Whilst the science remains unsettled, recent experiments seem to indicate that our choices are more often a choice to NOT do something that we feel an impulse for. Therefore, much free will is “free won’t”: the disciplined capacity to inhibit impulse, to redirect desire, flee temptation, and refuse stupidity. For example, nearly all humans report imagined conversations with co-workers in which they express anger and superiority, only later to decide to either grin and bear it or to politely and winningly state our case, maybe choosing to use of some training in assertiveness or bridge-building communication skills.

Our frontal cortex spends enormous energy preventing the rest of our beings from acting like fools. This is the biology of moral formation, the foundations of psychology and therapy, and the undergirding of economic and social principles. This ‘frontal cortex control’ is the way our consciousness expresses our free-will agency. This is how we have the opportunity to impose Forms on chaos. The fact we have the choice to control impulses is central to our beings, and brain-injury studies show the scary negative outcomes when that faculty is impaired.

So free will is often us stopping ourselves from making poor choices. Or making choices driven by forces we might better choose to stand against. It is a continual struggle in the face of challenges to our physical and mental health, our lower nature and the forces around us that threaten our career, family or well-being.

The psychology of self-improvement, from Tony Robbins through James Clear through mainstream psychology, in fact the entire self-help section of the bookshop operates on all or a subset of the following:

· Repeated acts become habits. Just deliberately do something to start the change.

· A collection of habits modifies your character, or at least how you express it.

· How you identify yourself reflects your character, therefore your heroes will impact your future. Choose them carefully.

· Character and Identity become destiny.

The science (and industry) of psychology has excellent empirical data on the effectiveness of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and various other talk therapies, all of which require some form of coaching in the use of free will. Or, as Romans 12 says, “do not be conformed to the image of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” implying an active decision to actively live in that spiritual transformation.

Exactly how free will emerges is just as big a mystery as consciousness. But the fact we all experience both, and the fact most of human societies have them as functional foundations should make us much slower to dismiss either. The likes of Harris and Dennett do so in the face of Chalmers’ refutation of pure materialism, the evidence of numerous fields of science and industry, and most people’s common sense. Surely the first act of free will ought to be to fight against motivated reasoning both in ourselves and others.

But then is free will just random non-determinism? Surely not. It feels so purposeful, as we pursue beauty, feelings, excellence and pleasure. It is, as yet, a mystery, as is consciousness.

We believe we have the agency of free will, notwithstanding the limits placed on it by social, biological and practical pressures. Our free will is not the absence of causation. It is rightly-ordered agency within causation, as consciousness seeks to place order on the chaos around us, reflecting eternal forms of goodness, in the face of many constraints.

Christian Transhumanism should therefore avoid naïve libertarianism as we have determinism. Human beings are formed creatures. We are formed in part by choices we make ourselves, in part by our genes, society and parenting. But formation is not fatalism. Grace, discipline, technology, education, rituals, contemplation, meditation, friendship, suffering, and repentance all participate in shaping agency and shaping our future selves.

A metaphysics of free will being real, but imperfect and constrained, mirrors out status as fallen image bearers. It is more Christian, more scientific, and more humane than a deterministic machine model. It is essential to human flourishing and the good order of society.

9.4 Archetypes, Reproduction, and Moral Aspiration

From life, consciousness and free will emerge human reproduction, family structures, tribes, societies, myths, institutions, and archetypes.

Carl Jung’s archetypes shed a vital insight. The hero, the mother, the wise old man, the trickster, the king, the martyr, the redeemer, the garden, the flood, the journey, the fall, the sacrifice. These patterns recur because human beings share bodies, fears, desires, developmental stages, kinship structures, mortality, sexuality, vulnerability, and social needs.

Archetypes are not merely invented stories floating above biology. Nor are they simply genetic programs. They are emergent patterns at the intersection of biology, reproductive choices, culture, memory, myth, and moral imagination. Our reproductive choices have influenced our genes, not only in fitness for survival, but in accordance with a vision of the ideal human, (much as that ideal varies widely).

Mate selection is driven by numerous factors: kinship systems, status games, child-rearing potential, warfare, cooperation, religion, law, and economic life. Across generations, biological and cultural selection interact. Humans shape institutions, institutions shape humans, and both influence future human trait selection.

But we must be careful. It is too strong, and too easily misunderstood, to say that archetypes are biologically “heading toward moral excellence.” Nature does not automatically select for holiness. It often selects for reproductive success, coalition-building, deception, dominance, or survival.

The stronger claim is this:

Human cultures generate and preserve archetypes of moral excellence because human beings are not satisfied with mere survival.

· We admire courage even when cowardice would be safer.

· We admire truthfulness even when lying would be useful.

· We admire sacrificial love even when selfishness would preserve us.

· We admire justice even when power could dominate.

· We admire mercy even when vengeance would satisfy appetite.

· We admire the saint, the wise ruler, the faithful mother, the suffering servant, the protector, the healer, the teacher, and the martyr.

This moral admiration is not trivial. It reveals something about us.

We vote for these positive archetypes, even when we fail to live up to them. We punish leaders who betray them. We build myths around them. We tell children stories about them. We select spouses based on them. We condemn hypocrisy because we know there is a form of goodness being violated.

At the centre of Christian Transhumanist metaphysics stands the claim that these archetypes are not random projections. They point toward moral reality. More specifically, they find their fulfilment in Christ.

Jesus is not merely one religious figure among others. Within Christian metaphysics, he is the convergence of the highest moral archetype and ontological Logos. He is the suffering servant, wise teacher, true king, healer, prophet, priest, sacrifice, judge, and resurrected human. He is what moral aspiration was reaching for before it knew his name.

If the universe is an engineered artefact undergirded by Logos, then incarnation is not incoherent. The Engineer can inhabit the machine.

Thus Jesus is at least the highest emergent moral archetype in a universe designed for emergence. Christians believe he is much more, but it is pure denialism to say Jesus is less than that. Jesus is therefore worthy of emulation, and should be the guiding archetype for all humanity, even for atheists.

10 Technology Emerges

Eventually technology emerges.

Technology is most often treated as artificial, as if humans were originally natural and only recently became technological. This is false. Humans are technological animals. Tool use, language, culture, clothing, fire, shelter, ritual, agriculture, writing, law, medicine, music, mathematics, and machinery are not optional add-ons to human nature. They are expressions of our nature, and have modified it over our evolutionary history.

Humans are not the only animals to use some kind of tool. Far from it. Birds build nests. Spiders build webs. Beavers build dams. Bower birds build a bower. Their technology is an extension of their physical body make up, and natural selection amplifies genes that enable this tool creation and use.

Similarly, humans have tools, symbols, institutions, stories, and sciences. The history of human development has amplified these, as the gifts of consciousness and agency drive continual improvement.

Technology is best conceived as ordered human purpose to improve the world embodied in material means. It is form made operative. It is intelligence acting upon the world.

From stone tools through wheels, writing, glasses, vaccines, telescopes, a written constitution (social technology), art to think about the world, and artificial intelligence: all these are tools uniquely crafted by humans as an extension of their intelligence and purpose towards their conception of flourishing.

Christian Transhumanism contends that the natural/artificial distinction is blurred, and people using that to decry various technologies are doing so from the point of view of a naturalistic fallacy.

That is, because something is natural, it must be good. This fails on two fronts: firstly the definition of what someone using that fallacy means is usually some kind of bucolic idealism, romanticising a pre-technological life that was in reality “nasty, brutish and short”. Or in a Christian sense, part of the fallen world that has missed out on the best of God’s plan.

The second way this fails is as above: that humans are natural tool-makers. Just as some other animals use technology in primitive ways, it is natural for us to use technology.

Douglas Adams stated, “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Thus we see the naturalistic fallacy failing by the definition of what is natural changing and evolving over time. It’s now “natural” for babies to get vaccinated. A natural human diabetic naturally receives artificial insulin. A natural child is taught artificial symbols of writing to become ‘naturally’ more rational. A natural eye given artificial lenses sees more truthfully. It’s natural we should want that. A natural society governed by artificial law may become more just, and a better place for human flourishing.

So do humans using these technologies become more or less ‘natural’? At this point we are playing with the definition of the word natural. Therefore, let’s take a step back and appreciate that tool use for the purpose of self-improvement and human flourishing is in fact an intrinsic (and therefore within the definition of natural) part of human nature.

Now we stand on the cusp of massively transformative technology. Brain-computer interfaces now restore a small part of the agency lost to quadriplegics, and may soon do much more. Biotechnology improves our immune system to fight cancer directly, and emerging RNA drugs can change the way our bodies operate. For example, Inclisiran causes the degradation of damaging messenger RNA to lower dangerous LDL cholesterol.

Thus Christian Transhumanism must see the use of technology to modify ourselves as ‘natural’ for humans. This is not unusual elsewhere in Creation where tool use is part of many species’ nature. The difference is only one of scale.

Moreover, if the universe is technology, then human technology is not rebellion by default. It is imitation of the Creator, and participating in the work of restoring, preserving, stewarding and maximising the future of the creation.

Of course not all technology is inherently beneficial, and almost any tool can be wielded for either good or evil. This will be discussed further below.

Does this technology heal, restore, liberate, educate, connect, strengthen, clarify, and serve? Or does it addict, dominate, surveil, infantilise, exploit, deceive, and deform?

Even destructive technology is usually ordered toward some perceived good, however disordered. Nuclear weapons are built ostensibly for deterrence, or equally for domination, national survival, revenge, or strategic advantage. Totalitarian surveillance systems are built for order, control, security, ideological purity, or regime preservation. Propaganda systems are built to unify, mobilise, or conquer. These are not good uses of technology, but they are still intelligible as technology: means ordered toward ends.

The Christian critique is not that such technologies lack purpose. It is that their purposes are morally corrupt, partial, idolatrous, or subordinated to false goods.

That is why Christian Transhumanism must never become blind techno-optimism.

But neither should Christians retreat into anti-technological piety. To heal disease, extend healthy life, repair disability, augment cognition, reduce drudgery, improve governance, and expand knowledge are acts of obedience to the command to subdue and steward the creation. God’s command is reflected in the view of consciousness seeking to impose forms on chaos. This is how humanity participates in the Creator’s own ordering work.

11 From Artefact to Deism, From Logos to Theism

The engineered Artefact argument gets us to a Creator or Creator(s). Or to speculation that the universe is the product of a weekend hackathon at something like a fifth-tier university.

We may infer that reality is derivative, intelligible, and engineered. We infer that causation (as we know it inside the Artefact) is a feature of the Artefact. We conclude that lawlike order needs metaphysical grounding. We infer that consciousness and intelligence inside the universe make higher intelligence beyond the universe plausible.

But even if we accept that Jesus is the highest emergent moral archetype, none of this proves Christianity’s claims. That is, we have reached the limit of the ‘general revelation’ and now must seek to understand what we can infer from the claims of ‘special revelation’.

Christianity’s primary claim is that the Logos, as previously conceived by Greek philosophers around five hundred years before Christ, is not merely the rational ground of the Artefact, but the Logos became flesh.

This claim transforms metaphysics. And we posit here this claim is not at all unreasonable nor incoherent.

If Christ is the Logos, then the source of the universe is not abstract intelligence alone, or an abstract set of formulas on which the universe operates: the ‘god’ conceived by Spinoza and Einstein. But we can conclude that the Logos is purposeful. That is, it has free will and agency in creation.

Therefore, the Logos is personal, moral, self-giving, and redemptive. The structure of reality is not merely mathematical. Power is revealed in self-giving love. Glory is revealed through humility and servanthood. The moral forms humans are intended to evolve into are demonstrated practically.

But then, if Christianity’s claims about the incarnation of the Logos in the person of Jesus are false, then the person of Jesus reflects the highest moral forms yet evolved. This is a lower-bound conception of Jesus, below which any claims about him are senseless.

For Christian Transhumanism as a world view this is decisive. Either all humans should follow Jesus because he is God, or all humans should seek to emulate him, deeply in their lives, rather than paying lip-service, because he is the highest emergent moral archetype.

For Christian Transhumanists, we must continue to warn that without Christ, transhumanism risks a sole focus of self-salvation. It seeks to overcome limits by power alone. It treats intelligence as the highest good, and self-empowerment and promotion as our both our inalienable right and highest purpose. Sanctification is replaced by entitlement to optimisation, resurrection by the unfalsifiable dream of uploading, wisdom (meaning wise acts) by processing speed, and communion is replaced by connectivity.

With Christ (as either God or moral exemplar), enhancement is judged by love and moral excellence. Intelligence is subordinated to wisdom. Power is crucified before it is glorified. Life extension is good, but not ultimate. Death is an enemy, but survival is not salvation.

Technology is not only permitted but commanded. But it is never an end in itself, and always to be under the control of human consciousness as we seek to impose the highest and best forms for human flourishing on the emergent chaos that is contemporary human society.

12 Eschatological Options

Metaphysics points toward eschatology (the theology of the end of the universe) because every account of reality implies some account of where reality is going.

Christian Transhumanism must reject several inadequate eschatologies. This section is addressed more to Christians than secular transhumanist readers, but please bear with us here to understand common misconceptions within the Church and ways forward out of them.

Escapist Eschatology

This view treats the world as essentially doomed and Christian hope as escape to heaven. Its practical question is: why bother building? Why cure ageing? Why repair institutions? Why develop civilisation? Why extend human flourishing if the planet is only a waiting room before destruction?

This view captures some biblical themes of judgment and discontinuity, but it badly underweights resurrection and new creation. The Christian hope is not the abandonment of matter. It is the redemption of creation, and the expectation that Christians should be shining as lights in the darkness now, by making a real difference in the world, not just by huddling and waiting.

Naïve Progress Eschatology

This view imagines that human beings gradually build the kingdom through science, politics, education, and technology. It has energy, but it is morally shallow.

The twentieth century destroyed simplistic progressivism. Science gave us antibiotics and gas chambers. Physics gave us medical imaging and nuclear weapons. Industrial systems gave us abundance and mechanised slaughter. Digital systems gave us global knowledge and mass distraction. Artificial intelligence will give us both cures and civilisational manipulation.

Progress is real. But it is not self-sanctifying.

Technology advances means. It does not purify ends.

Catastrophe Eschatology

This view expects technological civilisation to culminate in domination: Antichrist, surveillance, global control, idolatry, beast systems, dehumanisation, and collapse.

The archetype of the tower of Babel or the Golden Calf can now be built with machine learning, persuasive interfaces, biometric surveillance, and synthetic media. A centralised artificial superintelligence aligned with domination would be the most beast-like Artefact ever built.

Christians who ignore this are naïve. So we have to trumpet the risk, and argue for artificial superintelligence to reflect the highest archetypes known to humanity, archetypes that have come to be expressed in art and religion: the Wise King, the Madonna and Child, the Good Shepherd, the Suffering Servant, the ever-present and indwelling Holy Spirit. These archetypes are, to Christians, God’s plan for individual flourishing. Atheists should at least admit that these archetypes co-evolved with us, and therefore should be included in the planned behaviour of artificial superintelligence.

Participatory New Creation

This is the strongest Christian Transhumanist eschatology.

God alone consummates the kingdom. Human beings do not engineer resurrection. We do not upload our way into eternal life. We are not yet able to engineer a better species.

But we participate. We heal because God is healer, and we learn because God is Logos. We build because creation was entrusted to image-bearers. We resist death because death is an enemy. We seek justice because righteousness belongs to the kingdom. We extend healthy life because life is good. We enhance cognition because wisdom is good. We create technology because humans are created co-creators.

Participatory new creation avoids both secular techno-utopianism and religious passivity.

It says God saves, humans respond, and creation is healed. Technology becomes one instrument of that response.

This is not to resort to a technological human-driven future. God can still intervene in one of the many traditional eschatologies: pre-millennial, post-millennial, or where the Christian Transhumanist Association members generally sit, something like a-millennial.

There is the future that humans create and that emerges as we move with technology. This is known as “futurum”. Then there is the future that arrives from external to the creation, as envisaged by some theological interpretations of the book of Revelations. Such a future is an “adventus” future – it abruptly arrives, and not by human doings.

An overwhelming theme in scripture is we should be found ready and doing the best works possible to reflect the nature of Jesus when this adventus future arrives. That means ushering in the futurum future, a future of peace, tranquillity and human flourishing to reflect the Kingdom of God, (or the “Reign of Christ’s Principles” for the atheists and republicans).

Such thinking of the “Kingdom” or the “Reign of Christ’s Principles” can give a future vision to heal the Earth, notwithstanding religious differences.

13 If the Universe Is Technology, What Follows?

If the universe is a kind of technology, set up for emergence, with consciousness and free will as features of the Engineered Artefact whose purpose is the imposition of forms on chaos, several consequences follow. Note: this is not yet a Christian position, just a clearly stated Deist (or General Revelation) position.

First, since there is both intelligence and forms (both mathematical and moral) external to the Engineered Artefact, there is an opportunity (and maybe an imperative) to reflect those within each of our own lives and the society we build. Each human should be given the opportunity to flourish and reach their maximum potential.

Second, science gains a better metaphysically grounding. We study the universe because it is intelligible. We expect order because the Artefact has order. We expect deeper coherence because Logos grounds the system. And we expect emergence to give very unexpected results. We need not feel constrained by fundamentalist materialism. Scientific investigation becomes one way finite minds participate in divine intelligibility, one way consciousness uses forms to improve reality.

Importantly, we understand limitations hold theories lightly. We don’t have to shoe-horn expectations from one field into others. For example, Newton’s “Law” (better, Newton’s empirical approximation) of gravity led to a mechanistic view of the universe that was not debunked for over two centuries. The extrapolation of questionable neuroscience by Libet contributed to a troubling trend of defeatism and loss of agency by a generation. Instead, we must accept the limitations of understanding and think deeply about evidence from other sciences before hastily leaping to conclusions based on shallow extrapolations of one science. Remember the secular parable of the 6 blind men and the elephant.

Thirdly, all work becomes vocation. Engineering, medicine, law, these are not merely economic utility. They become the disciplined transformation of creation toward humanly meaningful ends. Good work serves life, safety, truth, beauty, resilience, and flourishing. Bad work serves vanity, domination, extraction, addiction, and death. These are the moral forms consciousness works with.

Fourth, human enhancement becomes a matter of discernment rather than taboo. The human body is good, but not current limits are not sacred. What is sacred is reflecting the highest moral forms (for secularists) or displaying the moral nature of Christ (for the Christians).

Fifth, If intelligence-like artefacts can be made, then humans are approaching a deep analogy to creation. AI may help cure disease, expand education, improve governance, and discover truths beyond current human capacity. It may also deceive, centralise power, weaken agency, and mimic omniscience.

Sixth, until we understand consciousness, there will be limitations to enhancement. Before we merge minds with machines, upload identities, emulate brains, or create digital agents, we must understand what kind of beings we are dealing with. It is morally questionable to treat conscious beings as tools. It is also metaphysically unwise to treat tools as conscious beings merely because they speak fluently.

Seventh, and overwhelmingly – we must not fall into the trap of thinking the universe is simple, or that it will ever be fully understandable from inside it. When confronted with phenomena, using reductionism because we feel clever is a bad idea.

In summary, the fact that the universe is created, an engineered artefact, a simulation (but of what?) means our life should be filled with wonder and meaning. With inquisitiveness, hope and plans to build a greater future not only on Earth but as we establish viable settlements elsewhere in the solar system, and in future, beyond.

Now is the time to move from Deism (general revelation) to the special revelation of Christ. For this, Christian Transhumanism can offer all the traditional Christian arguments, from the many traditions and denominations our members come from. But in addition, we can offer a clearer vision of how faith in Christ is absolutely relevant to the latest technological challenges, and completely in accord with the latest science. Hebrews 11:1 states that faith is the assurance we feel about what cannot be verified scientifically (to contemporise). It is certainly not ‘believing things in spite of evidence’ that is folly, and indeed is committed by some Christians. True faith is the acceptance, on the reasonable balance of probability, that Christ was the Logos incarnate, and that he is worth following.

In a universe that is a created engineered artefact, this is suddenly plausible.

14 Summary: A Christian Transhumanist Metaphysical Thesis

Here, then, is the basic Christian Transhumanist metaphysics in a compressed form:

· The universe is a created, intelligible, law-governed, engineered Artefact.

· Its laws are real, and humans develop ever-improving approximations of them.

· The intelligibility of the Universe permits truth-tracking minds to develop explanatory knowledge and to further express and explore ideas, concepts and forms.

· Causation processes include (at least) those which deterministic, non-deterministic, chaotic, and emergent, (as processes). Then downwards causation functions most powerfully through consciousness.

· Consciousness and free will are real features of the universe and should not be downplayed or denied. This is how intelligence chooses to impose forms on chaos, or, in the words of Genesis, to subdue and steward the Earth. Intelligent agents utilize abstract conceptual frameworks to instantiate ideas, and to constrain and structure physical systems.

· Humans generate moral archetypes and aspire toward them because we are moral creatures, reflecting Imago Dei. We aspire to build better lives, better communities and better humans in future through mate selection, education, institutions, culture and spirituality.

· Christ is the Logos incarnate, or if we are wrong about this, Christ is at least the highest evolved or emergent moral archetype. In the latter case, he is still fully worth emulating. As Christians we believe he is more than that: he is the Logos, the creative, self-expressing rational undergirding principle through which the universe was created.

· Technology is therefore neither saviour nor enemy, but power which must be brought under control. Its legitimacy depends on whether it heals or deforms the creature, strengthens or bypasses moral agency, serves or dominates the neighbour, witnesses to or parodies true religion, and if it remains ordered under Christ.

The Engineered Artefact, or Creation, is more technological, more intelligible, more emergent, more spiritual, and more unfinished than we imagined.

A Christian Transhumanist should make this a bold conjecture, not a brittle proof. Reality is more mysterious than our best metaphors. The Artefact hypothesis is powerful because it explains intelligibility, emergence, contingency, and mind. But it must remain open to criticism and further development in the best traditions of critical rationalism.

This is not secular transhumanism with religious vocabulary. Nor is it traditional Christianity with a new technology attached, it is a metaphysical claim about reality.

Christian Transhumanism therefore begins with the claim that the universe itself is technology, that moral forms, consciousness and free will are real, and we should therefore confidently seek to strongly advance emerging technologies to advance the Kingdom of God.

This is the first blog in a series that will set out comprehensive and a coherent philosophy to undergird a techno-realistic Christian Transhumanism. Starting with metaphysics, following blogs will cover epistemology, anthropology, psychology, and a few other topics.

Some of these have already been touched on in writings on this blog and other Christian transhumanist sources.

^[i] Many human thoughts are non-language, e.g. how you throw a ball, how you listen to your own feelings, how you know what you want for dinner in a restaurant.

^[ii] Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W., & Pearl, D.K. (1983). “Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act.” Brain, 106(3), 623–642

^[iii] Schurger, A., Sitt, J.D., & Dehaene, S. (2012). “An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 109(42), E2904–E2913. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1210467109

^[iv] Maoz, Uri, Gideon Yaffe, Christof Koch, and Liad Mudrik. 2019. “Neural Precursors of Decisions that Matter—An ERP Study of Deliberate and Arbitrary Choice.” eLife 8: e39787. doi.org.

Trevena, Judy Arnel, and Jeff Miller. 2002. “Cortical Movement Preparation before and after a Conscious Decision to Move.” Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 2: 162–190. doi.org.

On May 25^th 2026, His Holiness Pope Leo released his first encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas – on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” Within the 245 paragraphs of this text, Pope Leo articulates his positions on artificial intelligence, robotics, and transhumanism as the res novae of this era. His weaving of Catholic social doctrine and Christian humanism offers a pastoral approach to these topics, attempting to navigate them as they are understood to be the technological turning point of modernity. Magnifica Humanitas forces the reader to pause and ask the question, “what will these technologies do to uplift the least among us?”

AI is a collection of novel technologies, which must be used towards the benefit of humanity. As this technology risks negatively impacting livelihoods, eroding culture, and evolving beyond human control, it’s not imprudent to state that its development is becoming increasingly reckless. Pope Leo states that, “The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom.” For these reasons, it is important to balance our technological development with moral cultivation. As many emerging technologies can easily become as useful as nuclear power, they may also become a nuclear weapon in the wrong hands. In concurrence with Pope Leo, it is important that this technology does not become the next bomb but another step towards greater human flourishing.

As Pope Leo addresses the ethics surrounding the use of AI, he also addresses the underlying philosophy of transhumanism and posthumanism. He highlights the nebulous nature of both philosophical movements – likening them to an “archipelago of conceptual islands”, warning their extremes may lead to dehumanization. If the human condition is seen as an obstacle or something to transcend, then it has the potential to imply that some lives are worth less than others. He states that, “In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species.” As with any philosophical tradition, there will always be positions that run counter to church doctrine. Not every idea or position will be accepted, but each should be scrutinized through good faith dialogue.

Within the encyclical, Pope Leo highlights the necessity of a Christian humanism that does not reject science or technology but rather understands they are meant for a higher calling. The pursuit of becoming “more than human” is not solely within the technological domain but has been part of the Christian tradition for centuries. He states that, “For centuries, the Christian tradition has maintained that human beings are not confined by the boundaries of their own nature; rather, they are called to self-transcendence, not through an escape from reality or a contempt for their limitations, but through their fulfillment in love.” Such a position is established on the truth and traditions of the past, while looking towards a future of human flourishing guided by the Holy Spirit.

While this is laudable position, this Renaissance era philosophy may not possess the intellectual tools necessary for this new digital age. Rather, Christian transhumanism has the tools necessary to engage with relationship between humanity and technology. This is not accomplished through the negation of Christian humanism or secular transhumanism, but critically discerning ideas from both philosophies. Through Christian transhumanism’s prayerful contributions, in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, humanity can navigate this relationship towards the goal of truly becoming more than human. This is not accomplished through escaping humanity, but through its fulfillment in faith, hope, and love.

To this end, it is important as Christian transhumanists to investigate the truth of all things and educating others on this truth. In an age of rapid misinformation, it is important to maintain vigilance and discern wisely between truth and falsehood. This entails using the tools we have available to discern the truth and ensure that it prevails. Pope Leo states that, “Fidelity to the truth requires integrating the possibilities offered by technology within a framework marked by wisdom, which is capable of safeguarding both the dignity of each person and the future of our common home.” This entails investing our time into spiritual, theoretical, technical, and practical wisdom, educating others in this virtue but fundamentally beginning with ourselves.

In an age of constant change and rapid development, it is often difficult to find inner peace and hope that it all leads to a better future. Through our faith in Christ our Lord, we may find peace and the focus necessary to navigate the world despite its adversities. It is important that we trust in the Lord, knowing that He will not abandon us in the uncertainties of life. He will welcome us into the splendor and love found within community and divine grace. As said by Pope Leo, “In the humble fidelity of daily life, even the era of AI can become a time in which the Holy Spirit brings about the civilization of love in our lives.”

Published in 1957 and selling over 12 million copies to date, Atlas Shrugged is a dystopian tale of the collapse of America as leading brains go on strike in protest at “looters” (i.e. corrupt US Government) and “moochers” (those living ungratefully and self-righteously on the work of others). The novel, and Rand’s philosophy, “Objectivism”, hold surprising sway in Silicon Valley, amongst secular transhumanism and libertarian small-government circles.

The novel imagines the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos et. al, and their key lieutenants vanishing and their businesses failing. Society collapses as infrastructure breaks down. Governments take control of the companies and swindle the diminishing resources for the benefit of their cronies. A factional split and incompetence lead to the catastrophic misuse of a government sonic weapon, devastating a huge area of the central United States.

It transpires the ‘productive class’ are hiding away in a valley in Colorado, awaiting the inevitable collapse of the US government, economy, and way of life, before returning to lead a laissez-faire capitalist utopia.

At ~600,000 words, it’s nearly as long as the Bible’s 780,000-ish. In an (arguably overhyped) Library of Congress Survey in 1991, it was rated “second only to the Bible” in terms of personally impacting people’s lives. I’ve made it through 63 hours on Audible three times now, and followed up Objectivism (Peikoff, 1991).

Born in 1905, she saw the worst of the Russian revolution firsthand at a critically impressionable age. Speaking little English when she arrived in Chicago in 1926, she rapidly self-taught, and in 1932 sold her first screenplay in Hollywood. Her greatest novels (Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead), whislt mainly stories of industrialists striving for excellence against mediocrity, contain raw and passionate romance that only a woman could write. Objectivism is embodied through the characters.

Her character John Galt’s famous oath, “I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”, and the proposed amendment to the re-born US constitution, “the Government shall make no law limiting production and trade” portray a rigid fundamentalism of individualism, capitalism, atheism, and the evils of any kind of collectivism, that inevitably hinders human potential.

Easy to speculate she over-reacted to the collectivist communist horror of her youth.

Reading her non-fiction philosophical writing, I find myself cheering and booing to consecutive lines. Alternating positive insights with terribly shallow caricatures of the nature of human communities, of faith, of human nature, and of other philosophers, I found myself despairing of either loving or loathing her ideas. I have to do both.

She is too perceptive to dismiss, and too wrong to not criticise. So let’s draw out the best, and critique the worst.

The Positives

1. Celebration of the creative mind. The development of the modern milieu, from constitutional government, through science and technology, and the power of scaling industry to benefit millions depends on the human mind. Human progress does not appear by magic, but by hard work and disciplined application of intelligence and reason. We can all be heroes in our own context. The mental discipline of choosing to focus is her foundation of free will and human flourishing.

2. Building the world. Engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists, doctors, builders, and artists do not merely “make money”; they convert knowledge into reality for the benefit of millions. The creators of new technologies walk lonely roads, true only to themselves, following a vision, not crowds.

3. Creativity held back: Powerful (but exaggerated) diagnosis of the “looters” i.e. governments working for their own benefit, rather than the long-term good of the nation, and “moochers”, who contribute nothing and drain common resources, whilst asserting their moral superiority and entitlements over those who work hard. (“Status inversion” – where productive competence is morally suspect.) Those seeking political power are usually of lower competence. Cabinet ministers in Australia are paid around middle management in a productive engineering enterprise.

4. Regulatory capture and political parasitism – identified by Rand decades before becoming common talking points. How those with “pull” get the government to help them, noting US politicians spend around half their working hours fundraising.

5. Collectivism tends to coercion: Her suspicion of state-enforced sacrifice deserves to be taken seriously. State coercion of law-abiding citizens occurs in any big-government society. Collectivism preys on individualism, removing incentives, enforcing mediocrity and crowd following. Echoed today in those who idolise ‘diversity’ while enforcing group-think.

6. Debunking Marx’s “seize the means of production” by observing the means of production are in fact human minds. These cannot be expropriated by a coercive state without losing their creative spark, judgment, inventiveness, and their network of like minds that created the factories Marx envied.

The Negatives:

1. Metaphysical absolutism: that physical material is eternal and immutable. Physics now has proof beyond reasonable doubt that the material in this universe (whatever the universe is) is neither eternal nor immutable. Functioning as a rival metaphysical faith, this foundational error leads, via a tortuous path, to surprising places. Rejecting as ‘emotional’ ethical archetypes beyond her sanctified industrialist heroes, she decries morality as ‘whim worshipping’. The only definition of what is ‘good’ is what helps man survive and thrive (single gender used throughout).

2. That Reason is sufficient. Epistemology without fallibilism. Her assertion that unaided human Reason is the paramount undefeatable human attribute is easily contradicted by the Critical Rationalism of Karl Popper. She holds a naïve view that humans observe clearly, and reason precisely. Face reality: all observations are “theory laden”. All reason is subject to motivated reasoning, evidence filters and incomplete information. Even her novels portray thought processes that falsify her assertion.

3. That individual dignity equals metaphysical self-sufficiency. Her views of the importance of the individual correspond with those of Jung and his successors that human flourishing requires individuation, that each person blossom according to their individual capabilities and gifts. But no individual is self-grounding. We all benefit (or suffer) from the culture, language, knowledge, health and infrastructure bequeathed to us.

4. Her Anthropology is too thin. Humans are not the rational producers she portrays. We are embodied, relational, symbolic, wounded, aspirational, spiritual beings. She does not account for children, the elderly, those of different ability, and the rounded out fallen Imago Dei nature of real people.

5. Shallow doctrine of sin. She rightly castigates envy, weakness, mediocrity and parasitism. But she misses pride, anger, lust, gluttony, and avarice. So she gets two of the Catholic seven deadly sins. Rand sees the sins of weakness clearly, but not the sins of strength. Her productive heroes are too morally clean. In real life, such people are driven, litigious, take no prisoners in conflict and push themselves and those around them to the limit. Her ‘good’ characters are lily-white, lacking complexity. This is important to Christian Transhumanism because intelligence, competence and strength are not safe unless guarded by positive morals.

6. Caricature of community. Human communities, including families, churches, scientific traditions, firms and nations are channels of human formation, loyalty, love, shared meaning and mutuality. Her own Objectivist community was deeply riven. Is that a predictable outcome when you think human communities tend to be self-predatory?

7. Caricature of faith. All reasoning begins from axioms, premises, perceptions, and interpretive frameworks. Her atheism rests on the disproved premise of eternal and immutable matter. That is her faith, a process identical to mainstream mature Christians. Faith, in Hebrews 11:1, is not irrationality but trustful apprehension of realities not available to laboratory verification. For Christians, faith and reason work together. Reason is limited, and faith is a foundation, that the universe is created, and that Jesus is at least our highest moral archetype.

8. Caricature of Christianity. She portrays a 2D cut-out strawman of Christianity as anti-reason, anti-life, anti-joy and anti-achievement. One of her weakest points, she makes no attempt to seriously engage Christianity, relying on slogans and false certainties.

9. Altruism is evil. Underlying John Galt’s quote above is a principle that takes some explaining. Rand defines altruism in a very specific and aggressive way: not merely kindness, generosity, or helping others, but the moral doctrine that self-sacrifice is the essence of virtue and that your life properly belongs to others. She believes altruism means your own interests are morally inferior to others, and that the more you suffer for others, undeserving as they might be, the more moral you are. Altruism is not usually defined in such a simplistic manner. Most people, even most Christians, do not mean “self-annihilation” by altruism. They mean concern for others, often within reciprocity, duty, affection, or shared humanity. Rand’s absolutism cannot be defended from a broad reading of Scripture. She does not refute Christian love; she refutes a pathological parody of it.

Rand thinks her ‘Objectivist’ system yields a comprehensive worldview, an integrated structure of ideas that explains reality in an internally ordered way. Far from it. Her metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, and politics, and are contentious and easy to refute, at least in part.

Christian Transhumanism’s triage of Objectivism

Rand viewed man as a “heroic being” whose highest purpose is his own happiness and productive achievement. Transhumanists share the drive to overcome limitations through effort. She captures the pro-actionary, boundary-pushing spirit of transhumanism, but strips it of the communal grace required to bring humanity to wholeness.

Christian Transhumanism concurs with Rand’s vision of a world powered by the human mind, but argues that without grace, community, the real presence of the Holy Spirit and of faith, the mind builds a lonely tower, not a graceful future community where all humans reach their maximal potential and fulfilment.

The upside of Objectivism is it is easy to understand. To me, it’s a great framework for partly agreeing and partly disagreeing. Her designated heir, Leonard Peikoff, wrote the definitive book “Objectivism” (1991). This contains several main themes: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Anthropology, Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. Following many years’ development, the next few blogs will cover these topics to outline what I hope will be the basis for a future CTA comprehensive worldview and philosophy, or at least, fertile discussion grounds for it.

We will seek after the heroic human, but with grace, community and bringing good thoughts from all those who have sought to understand this amazing universe.

As humanity gains huge technological powers—AI, genetic engineering, cognitive enhancement—we face an ancient question: how do we grow in wisdom as rapidly as we grow in capability? Throughout Scripture, God does not merely issue propositions. He initiates encounters with people who seek Him.

Moses encounters a voice in fire, Isaiah sees a throne room, Ezekiel beholds wheels within wheels, and Paul is blinded by a vision of Jesus. History includes ongoing divine or ecstatic experiences of various theologians and saints, whose encounters informed Christian practices, and give rise to countless hymns, texts, and teachings.

The Christian tradition did not treat these moments as unreachable anomalies. It developed a disciplined path, what early Christians called the contemplative life, so that ordinary believers could cultivate awareness of God, and personal spiritual transformation, not merely belief about God.

The contemplative life, where the ascetic actively engages in contemplation, can be a simple part of one’s daily routine. Let’s explore the nature of mysticism, how contemplation is practiced, and a new way of looking at an ancient practice for the coming age. As this age of emerging technologies unfold, we must revisit this tradition: not as nostalgia but as infrastructure for the future.

The Science of Spiritual Ascent

God is seen as wholly ‘other’, external to creation but immanent with us: omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Yet Paul writes, “Now we see in a mirror dimly… then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Because God is beyond our comprehension, we cannot possess total knowledge but rather we grow towards it. Christians are drawn to the divine light of God, not just intellectually, but also by means of active participation. This process of divine ascent is often referred to as mysticism. The Christian gains greater awareness of God through ascetic practice.

When Christians speak of “mysticism,” many modern readers imagine irrationality, private visions, or esoteric speculation. Historically, it meant something more disciplined and stacks up well with what we now know of the best ways of spiritual formation.

Mysticism is the process by which Christians seek experiential knowledge of God. As a “science of faith,” mysticism does not apply empirical methods but is experiential or phenomenological. Mysticism should not be understood as a form of spiritual knowledge to be observed and replicated but experienced and tested against Scripture and church doctrine.

It is not about bypassing reason. It was about refining perception of subtle truths towards Truth.

Daily personal devotional practices vary across church traditions and time, but have been common throughout all Christian history. All have sought some kind of mystical experience of the divine.

The Practice of Mysticism

The process of mysticism is engaged through the practice of contemplation. Also known as theoria, contemplation aims to obtain awareness of God increasingly through individual spiritual practices. It has roots in Platonic philosophy as well as Jewish theology. Contemplative practice takes many forms, including contemplative prayer or discursive meditation.

The most common form of contemplation is a consistent engagement of prayer – to “pray ceaselessly”. A variety of practices suits both monastic and lay communities. Contemplative prayer can include repetitive prayers, such as the Catholic rosary or the “Jesus prayer”: (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”) It is also practiced through regular prayer, such as the Divine Office, or through a prayerful reading of Scripture such as Lectio Divina.

In the form of discursive meditation, as explored by Augustine in his Confessions, contemplation is a progressive method of introspection. This practice consists of three stages: observing the physical world and our lives for divine presence, turning within oneself to find God, and moving beyond one’s soul towards the direct contemplation of God. This simple approach was later developed by luminaries, such as Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventure.

A Cybernetic Approach to Contemplation

Historical evidence shows theology is not a static body of wisdom but dynamic with ever-increasing clarity. The science of the era interacts with theology, such as Augustine with Platonism, Thomas Aquinas with Aristotelianism, and Analytical Thomists with analytical philosophy. In accordance with this tradition, it becomes helpful to re-examine mysticism and contemplation based on contemporary wisdom.

Through scientific and philosophical development, the 20^th century has produced the philosophical perspective known as systems theory. Systems theory understands reality as highly interconnected through various systems. Interdisciplinary studies produce a more holistic approach to scientific progress and the development of cybernetics. In this context, cybernetics means the transdisciplinary study of control, communication, and self-regulation.

Applied to mystical theology and contemplation, a cybernetic approach illustrates how contemplating the systems of creation may help us understand the nature of God. By understanding God as the Creator of all things, from which all systems are derived and subsist, we may progress towards God through awareness of these systems. As stated by Paul, “For from him and through him and to him are all things.” (Rom. 11:36)

Practically, this may include deep reflection on the biological and technological systems in which we live and move. Meditating on our own consciousness, and continual reforming and transforming of our minds through neural plasticity, and awareness of feedback loops between humanity, nature, and God. In such, we want to take all thoughts captive to Christ.

Cybernetic mysticism is ideally engaged using discursive meditation. As the mind is guided from sensory objects into the mind – guided through a process of observation, imagination, and reason – the contemplative may begin to understand the manifold layers of systems comprising reality. The emerging state of pure contemplation becomes a peaceful, meek, yet transformative gaze into God’s divine nature.

The Importance of Attaining Oneness

We live in an era where AI systems can drastically accelerate development, where genetic editing eliminates various diseases, and the potential for humanity to transform the planet is expanding exponentially. Such spiritual formation is critical for a new era, otherwise development occurs recklessly.

The integration of a contemplation into one’s ascetic practice is vital to train one’s mind and put it towards good purposes. Consistent practice leads to a disciplined mind and life. God offers knowledge and understanding (Proverbs 2:6), and the wisdom to use it prayerfully will align these technologies towards beneficial ends.

Christian Transhumanism sometimes describes the creation as a work of art. In his De scientia Christi, Bonaventure states, “the truth of things as they are in the mind or in their own nature […] is sufficient for the soul to have certain knowledge only if the soul somehow reaches things as they are in the eternal art.”

While the accruement of knowledge is beneficial, the aim is to attain spiritual oneness with God known as theosis, the mystical process wherein the individual participates in God’s divine essence (1 Peter 1:4) and becomes increasingly like God. Athanasius, stated “God became man so that man might become god.” This is made possible through individual and communal practice, in the form of daily devotional contemplation and the Eucharist.

Science aims for us to understand God through His creation and effects. Mysticism, daily devotional prayer and contemplation, serves as the next step in ascetic practice – aiming to go beyond the physical and into the very essence of God. Through the ongoing cultivation of virtue, the pursuit of knowledge in science, and the desire for truth in mysticism, one lives the contemplative life with faith and reason.

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Contemporary democracy in much of the English-speaking world is not collapsing. It is not tyrannical. But some are losing confidence. With polarisation and mis-information, it is far from its best.

It is drifting into a recognizable pattern. Elections remain. Institutions function. Courts operate. Yet something deeper has shifted in how decisions are made and justified.

Political life has become highly polarized and identity-driven. Most voters do not evaluate policies on their merits; they inherit positions from the tribe to which they feel they belong. Voting becomes an act of loyalty rather than discernment. Political parties function less as deliberative coalitions and more as identity markers. Once identity hardens, argument becomes secondary.

This is a scar on the beautiful face of citizenship, that right to have a say in how society should best operate.

At the same time, bureaucracy has thickened. Regulations accumulate far more easily than they are retired. Approval processes multiply. Veto points proliferate. It becomes easier to stop a project than to build one. It can take years to approve infrastructure that is plainly necessary. In Australia, something as straightforward as extracting copper from the ground — a material essential for electrification, renewables, and modern infrastructure — can be delayed not by engineering constraints but by procedural layering.

As Ezra Klein points out in “Abundance”, the proliferation of well-meaning bureaucratic and stakeholder impositions makes the building of high-speed rail and affordable housing nigh-on impossible in California.

This is not a moral condemnation of civil servants. It is a systems problem. When layers of review expand without coordinated pruning, friction rises and accountability diffuses. No one actor is responsible for failure; everyone can point to compliance with process.

Regulatory capture follows naturally. Those with concentrated interests — large corporations, unions, industry lobbies — learn to navigate and shape complex systems. They influence rule-making to their advantage. Meanwhile, dispersed citizens bear costs they struggle to identify. Markets distort. Entry barriers rise. Innovation slows.

Process is mistaken for progress.

Political announcements of consultation-based decisions then become theatrical. Reports, policies and symbolic gestures substitute for measurable outcomes. Trade-offs are hidden rather than confronted. Time is treated as if it were free. Delay is invisible in political rhetoric, though it carries enormous economic and human costs.

This drift is often accompanied by something that deserves to be named carefully: anti-science. Not hostility to laboratories or to research funding, but a subtler departure from disciplined scientific reasoning.

Anti-science in this sense includes denial of human nature. The “blank slate” has been rebutted in psychology and evolutionary biology. Yet policy still frequently assumes that incentives do not matter, that status does not motivate, or that evolved differences can be erased by decree. When policies ignore predictable human responses to incentives, unintended consequences follow.

Anti-science in this case includes denial of basic economics. Price signals are not ideological inventions; they are information mechanisms. Incentives shape behavior. Productivity constrains what can sustainably be distributed. Any increase in wages or salaries without a corresponding increase in productivity only debases the currency, it is not a real pay-rise.

Policies that stimulate housing demand while suppressing supply cannot solve affordability; they simply inflate prices. Yet electoral cycles reward visible transfers over structural reform.

Anit-science includes fear-campaign governance toward transformative technologies. Vaccines, nuclear power, artificial intelligence, genetically modified foods — each has at times been framed in apocalyptic terms detached from proportional risk assessment. Risks are magnified rhetorically when politically useful and minimized when inconvenient. Precaution becomes paralysis. Meanwhile, the costs of inaction — energy poverty, delayed medical advances, unproductive farmland, vitamin deficiencies, slower infrastructure rollout — are rarely counted.

Anti-science includes the sin of “party spirit”, which is denounced widely in Scripture. In the epistemic sense, positions are adopted because they signal party loyalty. Arguments are evaluated by who speaks them rather than by whether they are true. In such an environment, politics becomes the management of issues on other than their merits.

It is a sin to allow other people’s opinions to influence your own, because of the faction they belong to rather than the merit of the arguments. I wish all Christians and all people of good will would repent and renounce such behaviour.

There are other, quieter failures as well. Equality of dignity is conflated with equality of outcome, leading to policies that suppress excellence rather than raise the floor. Second-order effects are ignored when the best candidates do not get the best academic support or the most appropriate opportunity.

Institutional entropy — the tendency of systems to become more complex over time without proportionate gains in performance — is underestimated. The status quo is romanticized, even when it is itself the product of past risk-taking and innovation, and is long-past time for renewal.

Perhaps most fundamentally, there is a creeping denial that human flourishing is dynamic. Flourishing is not mere comfort. It is challenge, responsibility, risk, creativity, and growth. Civilizations advance when individuals are free to push boundaries, take risks, and build. Yet political rhetoric increasingly treats stability as the highest good and change as inherently suspect.

Christian Transhumanism does not reject democracy. It rejects drift.

Toward Merit-Centered Governance

The central problem is not voting. It is how we vote.

Modern democracies primarily ask citizens to vote for parties. A party is a bundle: policies on taxation, immigration, energy, health, education, culture, and more, wrapped into a single brand. Citizens must accept or reject the bundle. Nuance collapses. Trade-offs disappear behind slogans.

Christian Transhumanism favors individual sovereignty and rights as foundational. Human beings are not merely members of voting blocs; they are responsible moral agents. A healthier democratic architecture would move away from voting for bundled identities and toward voting on issues — specific proposals evaluated on their merits.

In an age of advanced artificial systems, this becomes technically feasible in ways it never was before.

Imagine governance assisted by transparent, auditable artificial superintelligence. Instead of merely counting votes, such systems could interrogate — not coercively, but dialogically — the reasoning behind individual positions. Citizens could be asked not only “What do you support?” but “Why?” They could be presented with modeled consequences, trade-offs, and long-term projections. They could revise their views in light of evidence.

Voting would become less tribal and more deliberative. Artificial systems could map patterns of reasoning, detect inconsistencies, surface overlooked consequences, and expose capture. They could model infrastructure proposals, land-use changes, industrial projects, and emerging technologies with far greater accuracy than human bureaucracies alone.

You could agree with people on the other side of politics on some issues and disagree on others. You could vote on single issues, explaining why, and have your logic tested and amplified by ASI instead of just tallied as a vote.

We must take care here that ASI would not become Plato’s philosopher-king-despot. The role of ASI would not be to rule. It would be to clarify. To make trade-offs explicit. To expose second-order effects. To shorten feedback loops. To reduce corruption by increasing transparency.

Human rights remain non-negotiable. Artificial systems must operate within constitutional constraints that protect dignity, liberty, and due process. But rights are accompanied by responsibilities. Humanity carries a sacred charge: to steward creation, to build, to innovate, to carry the light of consciousness and intelligence forward.

Governance must support that vocation, not suffocate it.

Inequality, Technology, and Ambition

In a previous blog on the CTA website, I wrote of how new technologies tend to increase inequality in their early stages. The wealthy are early adopters. They can afford experimentation. They can hire expertise. They capture early gains. This pattern is not mysterious; it is structural.

Yet the existence of early inequality does not make innovation immoral. Without differential reward, ambition stagnates. Without the possibility of disproportionate gain, risk-taking diminishes.

The moral task is not to eliminate inequality of outcome. It is to preserve equality of dignity and to maintain a hard floor beneath which no one falls. Not just a Universal Basic Income but a universal dignity of life and

Christian Transhumanism affirms that human beings are unequal in talent, drive, and reward. It rejects the idea that excellence must be capped to achieve justice. But it equally rejects the idea that basic life standard, dignity or opportunity can be stratified.

A dynamic society requires both ambition and compassion. It requires markets that reward productivity and institutions that prevent destitution. It requires freedom to build and safeguards against abuse.

The Next Three Decades

Over the coming three decades, governance will change. Artificial intelligence will model complex systems, forecast outcomes, detect corruption, and optimize technology and infrastructure roll-out at scales beyond unaided human capacity.

It will do so in a manner better than humans, and in a manner some humans may not fully understand.

The question is not whether artificial systems will shape governance. The question is whether they will be harnessed to restore merit, transparency, and accountability — or captured by the same factional dynamics that distort current institutions.

Christian Transhumanism calls for decentralised power, strong rule of law, limited but effective central government, and transparent, auditable ASI-assisted decision-making.

Government should do what the private sector cannot or will not do: enforce contracts, protect rights, the rule of law, maintain a safety net, and coordinate genuine public good projects that are beyond private industry. It should not micromanage innovation or entrench incompetence.

Democracy, because it reflects the sovereignty, value and sacredness of every individual not be abandoned. But given the current failings and opportunities to improve, a plan to enhance it is vital.

Technology amplifies agency. Without moral formation and disciplined reasoning, amplification destabilizes. With them, it can renew.

So in the future, instead of reading the newspaper and voting, you can have a conversation with an ASI who will listen to your views, challenge them, and take account of your preferences on multiple issues, not just a party.

Let’s be honest – we all vote for the lesser of two evils. Maybe you could pick and choose your best positions from each side. Wouldn’t it be great to mature beyond polarisation?

The task is not to end democracy. It is to recover its capacity to decide the best paths forward for society on merit — and to equip it with tools worthy of the complexity of the age.

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We Christians have always struggled with the problem of evil. From the earliest centuries, the question of why a good God permits suffering (“theodicy”) has been a stumbling block for belief and a provocation for theology. The pat answers have remained remarkably stable across time, even as their philosophical articulation has become more sophisticated.

The coming Transhumanist Age calls for clarity around suffering. Not only as we seek the optimising of the distribution of the great blessings of the future, but because humans need an underlying certainty in the goodness of what secular technologists are now intuiting as “the Creator”, as many move from atheism to a form of deism or simulationism.

Taxonomy of suffering for theodicy

Traditionally there are three types of suffering that God permits to exist in the world. To this, I will add a fourth.

· Moral suffering: the result of human cruelty, injustice, neglect, and systemic harm

· Natural suffering: the result of physical processes, from earthquakes to disease, predators and accidents

· Tragic residue: That even when suffering is overcome, the wounds to our personhood remain

· Noetic or Existential suffering: the anguish of constrained agency: lost potential, cognitive limitation, finitude, incomplete understanding, and the grief of knowing how much good we might do but can’t, or won’t

The question “Why would a good God allow suffering?” needs to engage all four aspects.

In brief, the traditional responses to the problem of evil, from both ancient and modern thinkers are:

· Moral evil arises from the misuse of genuine creaturely freedom, which God permits because coerced goodness would destroy responsibility, love, and moral agency. (Augustine, Alvin Plantinga)

· Natural evil arises from a stable, law-governed universe. This is a precondition for rational action and science, even though such regularity inevitably entails harm as a side-effect of consistent physical processes (Aquinas). N.T. Wright argued that the moral meaning of suffering cannot be fully assessed within history alone, but must be understood within the wider arc of resurrection, restoration, and divine judgment.

· The “soul-making” theodicy of Irenaeus and John Hick encompasses both moral and natural suffering. It argues that character cannot form in a frictionless world. Moral and spiritual maturity can only develop in the face of evil.

· Tragic Residue – that suffering we are left with when the apparent cause of suffering is dealt with (be it from moral or natural evil), is traditionally responded to with lament. Lamentation is a process of healing, and avoids bitterness, blame, and despair.

· Noetic or Existential suffering had some recognition from Augustine, but I could not find a stand-alone theodicy, despite Ecclesiastes, Job, and Paul’s “I do not do what I want to do” and “now we see through a glass darkly”.

C. S. Lewis occupies a distinctive bridging position among these approaches. He affirms free will as essential to moral agency, natural law as necessary for a coherent and actionable world, and suffering as a possible—though never guaranteed—occasion for moral awakening, while explicitly rejecting the idea that pain is intrinsically good or evenly distributed. Crucially, Lewis insists that philosophical theodicy has limits: explanation may defend God’s goodness in principle, but it cannot substitute for trust, protest, or lament in practice. In A Grief Observed, he demonstrates that faith under suffering does not require intellectual tidiness, anticipating cross-shaped (cruciform) approaches by locating God’s credibility not in abstract optimisation but in divine solidarity. Power is exercised through self-giving love, suffering is opposed rather than explained, and agency is directed toward redemptive participation rather than control or withdrawal.

Strikingly, these traditional theodicies make only abstractive references to Scripture, focusing on theological and human conceptions of the nature of God and the Universe, rather than deep exegesis.

The biblical account implies that the fall from the garden occurred with God’s foreknowledge and permission. However opaque this remains, it suggests that suffering was neither an accident beyond divine awareness nor a good in itself. It may be that the emergence of consciousness, freedom, and moral knowledge carried with it the near inevitability of misuse. It may be that the difference between good and evil can only be fully understood through participation rather than abstraction. Scripture does not settle these questions philosophically, but it consistently treats human beings as agents within the problem, not merely observers of it.

In Scripture, the book of Job alone addresses the problem of pain directly, but does so in a very different way to theologians. Job rejects moral bookkeeping (bad things only happen to bad people), refuses explanatory closure, and condemns attempts to justify suffering from first principles. Instead, the book situates suffering within a creation that is ordered yet wild, meaningful yet opaque, and afflicted by forces that are neither illusory nor morally tidy. Job is not healed by explanation but by restored participation, by re-entry into life, relationship, and responsibility. In this sense, Job anticipates what this essay is calling a participatory theodicy: suffering is not sanctified, protest is permitted, chaos is confronted, and faithfulness is measured not by answers received but by agency resumed.

Taken as a whole, Scripture does not offer a single theodicy, but it consistently shapes the moral grammar within which suffering is to be understood. From Genesis, suffering is framed as a corruption of goodness rather than a divine instrument; from Exodus, God’s response is deliverance rather than explanation; from the Psalms, protest is legitimised; from Ecclesiastes, moral calculus is destabilised; from the Prophets, injustice is named as preventable; from the Gospels, suffering is reversed rather than justified; from the Cross, God enters suffering without sacralising it.

In the epistles, Paul states creation was subject to frustration in hope. From Romans and Revelation, creation is portrayed as unfinished and destined for repair. Together, these texts rule out both fatalism and rationalisation. Instead, they direct a participatory response in which human agency, compassion, and increasingly technological capacity are called into service against suffering wherever it can be resisted.

The scriptural response to suffering is not speculation but intervention. Healing the sick, uplifting the downtrodden, feeding the hungry, and protecting the vulnerable are not optional acts of charity but expressions of faithfulness. Scripture binds responsibility to capacity: where healing is possible, it is commanded; where action can be taken, inaction is morally charged. Response ability equals responsibility. Compassion is not offered as explanation, but as response.

From Explanation to Participation

As above, classical theologian’s theodicies largely adopt an explanatory posture. They ask why God permits suffering and attempt to render that permission intelligible within a metaphysical or moral framework. While such explanations may be necessary, they are not sufficient, and historically, they have met with limited success, both intellectually and pastorally.

A participatory theodicy begins from a different observation: Scripture consistently shifts the problem of evil away from abstract explanation and toward embodied response. The biblical question is not primarily Why does God allow suffering? but Who will act in the face of it? This reframing does not evade the intellectual problem of evil, but it situates it within a moral ecology in which human agency is neither incidental nor optional.

Suffering is never to be aestheticised, justified, or spiritualised at a distance. The only authorised Christian posture toward suffering is proximity. Any account of evil that does not increase responsibility, compassion, or action is theologically suspect, regardless of its logical elegance.

Now, for Christian transhumanists, if participation in God’s redemptive purpose is real, then increased capacity morally matters.

If responsibility scales with capacity, then advances in medicine, science, and technology are not morally neutral developments. They change what love, care, and faithfulness require. Participation is no longer confined to immediate acts of compassion, but extends to the shaping of systems, tools, and capacities that determine how much suffering can realistically be alleviated. This raises a further question: what of the suffering that arises not from pain or injustice alone, but from the limits of our own finitude?

Noetic Suffering and Transhumanism

Ray Kurzweil speaks of the terrible losses of death. Just as we become experts at life, we leave it. Our relationships end, and the arc of human knowledge and growth is interrupted. In a previous blog, I lamented my human shortcomings, specifically, that I was unable to retain much of the knowledge from thirty years in engineering, four tertiary qualifications, countless books on religion, psychology, physics, cosmology, transhumanism, not to mention the conferences, meetings, and the detail of life experiences that meant so much at the time.

I regret, with Paul in Romans 7, that I don’t always make the right choices I should: the moral weaknesses and fractured self-governance. I regret some days I don’t listen to past me who plans things better than current me, who feels like scrolling and munching.

Why does God allow us to live with these shortcomings? We see so much potential, so much more creativity and relationality we could aspire to. So many more dreams to achieve, yet they are snatched from us. Surely the ‘groaning’ of creation (Rom 8) is also God’s invitation to us as co-groaners and co-healers?

We must therefore confront this noetic suffering as we would any other.

Conclusion: Theodicy that leads to Vocation

A participatory theodicy reframes the problem of evil from a spectator’s puzzle into a participant’s calling. It does not answer every question, nor does it dissolve moral outrage. Instead, it locates meaning in response rather than resolution.

For a Christian transhumanist, theodicy matters because beliefs about suffering quietly shape how seriously responsibility is taken. We need a theodicy that treats suffering not as sacred or untouchable, but as part of our vocation; one that understands medicine, technology, and even enhancement as participatory acts within God’s redemptive economy. Human agency, on this account, is neither decorative nor optional, but genuinely delegated to us by the Creator.

The inclusion of enhancement here is deliberate. The Christian call is not limited to restoring people to what is currently defined as “normal,” but to participating in the ongoing healing and maturation of creation. The noetic suffering of constrained agency – our cognitive limits, the existential angst of knowing how much good might be done, of how much healing might be extended, how much love might be embodied, and falling short of that potential, – must not be sacralised as an acceptable form of suffering we aren’t allowed to complain about. Finitude itself is something we are invited to work against where wisdom and love permit.

To seek greater capacity to heal, to think clearly, to create, to communicate, to solve problems, and to lead well is not a rejection of the imago Dei, but an expression of it. Our longing for this, and our regret at falling short is a kind of suffering. Enhancement, rightly ordered, is not an attempt to escape humanity, but to honour it; to amplify responsibility, not evade it. If ignorance, forgetfulness, and truncated agency harm our reflection of Christ’s love, then clearer knowing and greater capacity can be acts of compassion.

The question, then, is not whether we should participate in technological co-creation, but how can we faithfully do so. What do you, as an image bearer, rightly long to become in order to serve more fully?

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Science is our most powerful public method for discovering regularities in nature and compressing them into predictive models. But science is not self-grounding. It presupposes conditions it cannot itself justify, because those conditions are not empirical findings; they are the preconditions of empirical finding.

This essay argues for a disciplined boundary: science explains events within a lawlike order; it does not explain the existence of that order. The question “why is nature uniform?” is not a scientific question, because any attempt to answer it scientifically already assumes the very uniformity under examination.

1. Hume’s brake: causation and the problem of induction

David Hume’s point remains one of the most important “hard stops” in the philosophy of science. We never directly observe causation—only sequences, correlations, and regularities. From repeated conjunction we infer necessity, but necessity itself does not appear in sensory experience. More sharply: induction cannot be justified by induction without circularity. Any inference from past regularities to future regularities assumes that the future resembles the past—an assumption that is not itself derivable from the past without assuming it. We see billiard balls collide repeatedly and assume the next one will too, but why?

Hume’s lesson is not that science fails. It is that science depends on an extra-scientific commitment: the uniformity of nature.

2. Kant’s repair: the conditions for possible experience

Immanuel Kant’s response is not a refutation of Hume so much as a relocation of the problem. Kant grants that causation is not read off the world as a raw observation. Instead, causation is part of the conceptual framework by which we make experience intelligible at all. On this view, causation is not merely discovered; it is also a condition for coherent experience and science.

You do not need to accept every component of Kant’s system to accept his central move: there are “conditions of possibility” for knowledge that are not themselves products of that knowledge. Causation, temporal order, and stable identity over time sit in that category. Science presupposes them because without them, there is no stable “object of inquiry” in the first place.

3. Popper’s discipline: science as conjecture under constraints it cannot prove

Karl Popper helps in a different way. He agrees with Hume that induction can’t be justified as a logic of discovery. His solution is methodological: science progresses by bold conjectures subjected to severe attempts at refutation. This is compatible with the Humean limit, because it does not claim that science can prove the uniformity of nature; it only claims we can rationally prefer theories that survive stronger tests.

But Popper doesn’t abolish the deeper dependency: falsification still presupposes that experiments are repeatable enough to count as tests, that instruments behave consistently, that the same setup will not arbitrarily change its nature between trials. Even Popperian science requires a stable lawlike background.

So Popper strengthens the boundary rather than dissolving it:

• science is powerful within an assumed order,

• but it cannot account for why there is an order capable of being tested.

4. The converging conclusion: lawlike order is not self-explanatory

At this point the claim can be stated without theatrics:

1. Scientific explanation presupposes stable regularities (uniformity of nature).

2. That presupposition is not itself a scientific result (Hume).

3. It functions as a condition for coherent experience and inquiry (Kant).

4. Even the strictest methodology cannot escape it (Popper).

Therefore: the existence of lawlike order is a metaphysical fact about reality that science uses but does not explain.

This is the “limit of science” claim—not “science has gaps,” but “science has boundaries.”

5. The engineered artefact conjecture

From that boundary, we can frame the engineered artefact conjecture as a live, rational hypothesis:

Causation as we experience it is a feature of the engineered artefact we call the universe—part of the world’s “implementation,” not the ultimate ground.

This is not a retreat into ignorance. It is an inference about explanatory structure. The uniformity and intelligibility of nature are not nothing; they are striking. A universe that is lawlike, mathematically tractable, and hospitable to truth-tracking minds looks less like a brute accident and more like a system whose deepest layer is ordered toward intelligibility.

This is where “simulation” talk can be cleaned up: not as a literal laptop in a higher universe, but as a metaphysical claim of derivation: the causal order is implemented, not ultimate.

6. “God as the price of coherence” (without God-of-the-gaps)

The usual “God of the gaps” critique attacks a particular move: inserting God as a causal patch inside the physical chain when we lack a physical mechanism. That is not what this argument does.

This argument says something different:

• You cannot even do physics without assuming intelligibility and stable law.

• Those assumptions are not output from physics, and never likely to be. Maybe Gödel would support this: that systems inside the Engineered Universe are incomplete.

• If reality is fundamentally unintelligible, then the authority of reason collapses with it.

So the question becomes: what is the best metaphysical account of the intelligibility that science presupposes?

On the Christian claim, “Logos” is not a missing mechanism. It is the assertion that intelligibility is not an accident. The universe is not merely causal; it is lawlike, rationally habitable, and morally addressable—and that combination is not well explained by blind brute fact.

This is what “God as the price of coherence” is meant to capture:

not God as a plug for ignorance,
but God as the ground of intelligibility, normativity, and rational obligation.

7. Conclusion

Christian Transhumanists envision the creation, or the universe, as an engineered artefact. Causation, as we know it, is engineered into the Universe. For shortening “Causation is a Feature of the Simulation”.

Understanding the universe as technology enables us to probe the limits of this technology, and to discover important boundaries, for example, we need to understand the nature of consciousness as we seek to enhance humans, connect our minds directly to computation machines, and articulate the future of humanity.

Other philosophical systems that view the universe as some kind of brute fact (atheism) or invest it with mysticism that it is wrong to understand or tamper with (some forms of Christianity) will hinder progress (scientific, social and ethical) as technological change races ahead.

Earth’s greatest need in the transhumanist age will remain truth-tracking minds. The fact that some kind of intelligence appears to have given birth to the universe has already opened many vistas of inquiry.

Sound bites:

• “Science is powerful inside law; it cannot explain why there is law.”

• “Hume shows induction can’t justify itself. Kant shows why we can’t avoid its preconditions.”

• “Popper gives discipline, not foundations.”

• “This isn’t God of the gaps. It’s God as the ground of intelligibility.”

• “Causation explains events. It cannot explain why causation holds.”

• “Causation is a feature of the Simulation.”

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C. S. Lewis famously argued that Jesus of Nazareth could not be safely reduced to a “great moral teacher.” In Mere Christianity, he wrote:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice.

This “Lunatic, Liar or Lord?” trilemma remains foundational in Christian thinking and evangelism.

Lewis’s argument is an early example of hypothesis-space reduction, in this case, the disciplined refusal to allow comforting but incoherent explanations.

What Lewis did intuitively, Karl Popper later formalised: good explanations must take risks.

This essay updates Lewis’s trilemma for a technological, evolutionary, and transhumanist age, while remaining faithful to Popper’s demand for bold, falsifiable claims. For further explanation of the CTA’s commitment to Karl Popper’s Critical Rationalism, see the footnote.

1. A Critical Rational Starting Conjecture: The Universe as an Engineered Artefact

Christian Transhumanism’s cosmology begins with a premise that emerging science continues to infer is the best explanation. That is, that we are part of an engineered artefact. This is a conjecture that is increasingly difficult to ignore without additional explanatory cost.

The universe does not behave like brute chaos; our reality behaves like an engineered artefact. It is:

• Law-governed (all of Physics’ understandings and formulae)

• Information-dense (DNA’s 3-billion-base code)

• Fine-tuned (cosmological constant’s precision, 1 in 10^120)

• Capable of bootstrapping intelligence through long, indirect processes

This does not require rejecting evolution. Quite the opposite. Evolution looks precisely like what you would expect if a Creator preferred process over coercion, emergence over fiat, freedom over determinism.

In Popperian terms, this is a bold metaphysical conjecture:

Reality is a designed system with a telos, even if that telos is only partially discernible.

It is risky. It could be false. That is its virtue. It may take the emergence of Artificial Super-Intelligence to help us attempt meaningful falsification, surveying vast hypothesis spaces to meaningfully test alternative non-teleological explanations that might fully account for reality’s structure. Time will tell – certainty now is evidence of a closed mind.

2. Why the “Nice Moral Teacher” Hypothesis Still Fails

Lewis’s trilemma was never about forcing belief, it was about excluding explanations that do not explain. Popper insisted that bad theories are not those that are false — but those that are immune to refutation.

“Jesus was a great moral teacher” fails not because it is insulting, but because it explains nothing:

• It does not explain Jesus’s supreme authority claims

• It does not explain the claims of the miraculous, that dominate the Bible’s narrative more than moral teaching

• It does not explain why he speaks as if he stands above Torah, Temple, and history

• It does not explain why his moral teaching is inseparable from his self-understanding

It is an ad hoc rescue hypothesis — precisely the kind Popper warned against. If Jesus was nothing more than a “great moral teacher”, why would he bet his legacy on faked miracles and resurrection?

3. A Christian Transhumanist Trilemma

Once we accept both:

1. An engineered, telos-bearing cosmos (e.g., Bostrom’s Simulation Theory)

2. The historical data about Jesus’s claims

we are again forced to choose one of three options. The ‘Liar’ fork (Jesus as deliberate deceiver) fades in a transhumanist lens, as evolutionary psychology favors sincere belief over calculated fraud (e.g., costly signalling in martyrdom). Thus, we consolidate it into:

- Randomly Deluded Agent, OR

- Highest emergent moral archetype OR

- The Logos Incarnate

Option 1: Randomly Deluded Agent (Updated “Lunatic”)

Jesus sincerely but mistakenly believed he had a unique divine role. His followers inherited and amplified this error.

This hypothesis is:

• Naturalistic

• Psychologically plausible

• Easy to state

But it performs poorly as an explanation.

Delusions typically fragment cognition. They do not generate:

• Coherent ethical systems

• Radical enemy-love

• Non-violent self-sacrifice

• A complete absence of self-aggrandisement

From an evolutionary standpoint, this option predicts failure, not global moral influence. Nor would it generate such dedicated followers. His 12 disciples were all convinced they saw the resurrected Jesus. All were prepared to die rather than recant, (at least 6 were martyred, another 5 probably) let alone the millions who continue to follow him.

It is falsifiable, and historically weak.

Option 2: The Highest Emergent Moral Archetype (Replaced “Liar”)

Archetypes in humans emerge from our biology as sets of inherited personality traits, shaped by culture and reproductive choices. Successful behaviour strategies are coded in our DNA and reflected in our cultures.

Here, Jesus is the maximum moral attractor produced by evolution and culture:

• The innocent sufferer

• The non-retaliatory agent

• The embodiment of self-giving love

This is a far stronger hypothesis than “nice moral teacher.” It takes evolution, psychology, and human aspirations seriously.

But it fails at a critical point.

Archetypes do not:

• Forgive sins, making such an outrageously powerful claim

• Speak with personal authority over reality

• Predict their own vindication through resurrection

This model explains why Jesus is compelling, but not why he speaks as if he is in charge.

Popper would call this a partial explanation with unaccounted residue.

Whilst the moral archetype is a lowest tenable starting point for discussions about Christ, a future blog post will expand on and prove inadequate the “Jesus as Jungian Archetype” proposed by Jordan Peterson. Peterson sees Christ as the ‘axis of history’s moral evolution’... yet the CTA contends Christ was probably far more.

Option 3: Logos Incarnate (Updated “Lord”)

The final option is the most metaphysically demanding — and the most explanatory.

Jesus is the Logos:

• The rational–creative agency through which the universe exists (classical Christian theology)

• The Logos understood as the personal, intentional source of the engineered order we observe in reality

• The Logos entering creation from within, not as myth or symbol, but as a concrete historical agent

In this view, incarnation does not require a crude suspension of physical law, but a non-ordinary causal intervention at a higher explanatory level, much as software can redirect hardware behaviour without violating its constraints. What appears miraculous from within the system is consistent with intentional action by the system’s author.

In transhumanist language:

• The Architect enters the simulation-like artefact

• The Engineer inhabits the machine

This option:

• Explains Jesus’s supreme authority claims

• Explains the coherence and extremity of his moral teaching

• Explains his refusal to seize political or coercive power

• Explains resurrection as a genuinely new mode of embodied life rather than metaphor or myth

Crucially, this hypothesis is risky.

It is falsifiable, not because it is testable in a laboratory, but because it stakes everything on specific historical claims that could, in principle, have failed. If the resurrection were shown to be symbolic, fabricated, or decisively false, the Logos-Incarnate hypothesis would collapse without ad hoc rescue.

In Popper’s terms, this is a bold conjecture: it forbids symbolic retreat.

It demands a response.

Which is precisely why it remains alive.

4. Popper, Faith, and Risk

Christian Transhumanism, in the tradition of Popper, rejects faith that insulates itself from criticism, investigation and falsification.

Faith is never blind, but it does not operate in the absence of risk — it is the willingness to live inside a risky hypothesis because it explains more than its rivals. Faith, in this framework, is not belief without evidence, but commitment to a risky explanatory hypothesis that refuses to protect itself from falsification.

The Logos hypothesis is not safe, but it is explanatory.

Lewis understood this instinctively, and Popper gave us the language.

In an engineered cosmos, the incarnation is not an embarrassment. It is a coherent design decision.

5. Conclusion: You Must Still Choose

The modern world did not outgrow Lewis’s “Lunatic, Liar or Lord?” trilemma, it merely decided to not think about it seriously, or to invent extraneous attempted defeaters like adding “Legend” – that he never existed (untenable to all but crank historians).

But avoidance is not explanation.

Reinventing the trilemma for Christian Transhumanism, incorporating the best insights from critical rationalism and the emerging technologies and cultural challenges of this century and next, Jesus must now be considered to be one of:

• A glitch – a deluded random event recounted with fake miracles we can ignore

• An emergent moral maximum

• Or the Logos – the creative and motive force that engineered this artefact we call the cosmos – made flesh

The “nice moral teacher” option still does not make any sense. As Lewis said, a “nice moral teacher” would not tell such lies.

Call to action:

The simulation hypothesis, or more broadly the recognition that reality behaves like an engineered artefact, moves us no further than Deism unless it is joined to a credible account of who that intelligence is and how it relates to us.

Christian Transhumanism insists that Jesus’s claims must be taken seriously at this point, not as comforting mythology, but as historically risky, metaphysically demanding, and existentially consequential.

CTA exists to help those who have been displaced by fundamentalism or disillusioned by reductionism recover a faith that is intellectually honest, technologically literate, and spiritually transformative.

To move forward with Jesus, or to reconnect with him after many years, one place to start is the classic “four spiritual laws”, also re-imagined for the coming transhumanist future.

Footnote on falsifiability

Karl Popper did not require that a hypothesis be experimentally repeatable to be meaningful, only that it forbid certain states of affairs. The Logos-Incarnate hypothesis is falsifiable in this sense because it makes concrete historical claims — above all the resurrection — whose non-occurrence would decisively refute the theory, and no ad hoc modification would rescue it. Christianity here does not immunise itself against criticism; it accepts total failure as a live possibility. See Biblical Foundations of Critical Rationalism for the scriptural roots of this epistemic posture.

A concise gospel presentation for Christian Transhumanists.

1️⃣ God created humanity for eternal communion and creative co-stewardship — in a universe many now see as a simulation or engineered artefact.

Physicists, cosmologists, and philosophers increasingly recognise that reality exhibits fine-tuned laws, information-centric structure, and computational elegance. Cause and effect operate locally and non-locally. Quantum randomness and deterministic logic coexist. From Maxwell’s equations to the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics to the holographic principle—reality looks coded.

Christianity has proclaimed this for millennia:
The universe is a designed environment for the emergence of relational beings who bear the Imago Dei.

We are not NPCs.
We are image-bearing co-creators.

Our purpose is not mere survival — it is love, truth, beauty, justice, and ever-expanding creative order.

“We innovate because God is a Creator.”
Tweetable: “Causation is a feature of the simulation — and love is the root instruction.”

Engineering insight:

• Purpose precedes design.

• Design precedes function.

• Function invites iteration toward glory.

2️⃣ Sin misaligns our desires and corrupts our creativity — violating the Trinity of Ethics.

Humans are brilliant, ambitious, ingenious… and dangerous.
The same hands that build MRI machines build autonomous weapons.

Sin isn’t merely rule-breaking — it is a systemic misalignment in The Trinity of Ethics:

• Intention — What are we aiming to achieve?

• Process — Are we acting with integrity, transparency, and wisdom?

• Outcome — Are people harmed or healed?

When we ignore these God-given ethical lenses, exponential progress becomes exponential brokenness.

Transhumanism without Christ becomes Babel 2.0 — chasing godhood while haemorrhaging morality.

“Moral alignment is humanity’s deepest failure mode.”
“Without grace, advanced technology accelerates primal sin.”

Scientific parallel:
Errors in high-speed systems do more damage than errors in slow ones.
We are too powerful now to remain morally primitive.

Challenge:
Are our enhancements serving agape — or merely amplifying appetites?

Question:
Is your vision of the future merely longer life, or better life?

3️⃣ Jesus Christ restores humanity — defeating death, reconciling us, and offering archetypal perfection.

Jesus didn’t come as a guru with better advice.
He came as:

• Christus Victor — defeating sin, decay, and death

• The Substitute — absorbing justice’s rightful consequences

• The Recapitulator — rewriting the human story successfully

• The Moral Archetype — Suffering Servant, Wise King, Good Shepherd

He is the living blueprint of Humanity 2.0.

The Resurrection is not metaphor or myth — it is the first successful deployment of incorruptible bios.

“Jesus isn’t anti-transhumanism — He is the first transhuman.”
“The empty tomb is the original victory over entropy.”

Every secular attempt at enhancement runs into a wall.
Only Christ upgrades us through death.

Hard truth:
Technology can delay death.
Christ destroys it.

4️⃣ The Holy Spirit integrates us into God’s restored humanity — and invites our response: “I have decided to follow Jesus.”

The gospel is not mere information — it is transformation.

When we say yes to Christ:

• We receive forgiveness

• We receive new spiritual life

• We join God’s restoration project — from code to cosmos

• We anticipate resurrection, not obsolescence

We aren’t here to replace humanity with machines.
We are here to become the humanity God designed us to be.

This is proclaimed in the ancient liturgy of the Church:

“Do you turn to Christ?
Do you repent of your sins?
Do you renounce evil?”

Our answer becomes:

“I have decided to follow Jesus.
No turning back. No turning back.”

Baptism symbolises everything transhumanism longs for:
death to corruption, rebirth into incorruptible life.

“We are not saved by technology — but we are saved for a future where technology serves redeemed humanity.”

🚀 The Invitation

You are called into the greatest development program in history:

The New Creation — already prototyping in us.

Let Him:

• Align your desires

• Transform your character

• Heal your relationships

• Expand your creativity

• Redeem your future

Jesus is extending a hand into your timeline.

Will you let the Author of the simulation rewrite your destiny?

Credit: Bill Bright’s original “Four Spiritual Laws” from his Campus Crusade movement. Millions of students were impacted. Over 2.5 Billion copies of the original tract, in various versions, have been printed.

Introduction: A Shared Quest for Truth

Few twentieth-century philosophers have been as misunderstood by theologians as Karl Popper. His critical rationalism is often cast as a purely secular creed—an austere philosophy of science confined to laboratories and peer review. Yet beneath Popper’s rigor lies a profoundly moral vision: that the pursuit of truth requires humility, courage, and openness to correction. It is, at heart, a philosophy of repentance.

In this sense, Popper’s epistemology stands closer to the biblical worldview than to Enlightenment rationalism. Like Popper, the Bible assumes that humans are fallible seekers, that truth is objective but partially grasped, and that growth occurs only through honest testing, correction, and renewal of mind.

When Scripture exhorts us to “test all things and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21), it gestures toward the same intellectual ethos Popper later systematised: a realism tempered by humility, a faith in truth coupled with distrust in our own certainty.

1. Fallibilism: The Humility of Partial Knowledge

Popper’s central claim, that all human knowledge is provisional and correctable, has a striking biblical resonance. His phrase “we may be wrong, and we often are” could easily be a paraphrase of Paul’s confession: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part” (1 Corinthians 13:9). Scripture urges the active falsification of prophecy (Deut 18:22, Jer 14:4, 1 John 4:1).

“By their fruits shall you know them” (Matt 7:15-16) is a great verse to apply to any political or social theory (in some senses, the modern equivalent of prophecy). Such theories are often undergirded by a strident moral “right” way to do things despite bad consequences.

Biblical epistemology consistently undermines such intellectual and moral pride. The wisdom literature warns that “the way of fools seems right to them, but the wise listen to advice” (Proverbs 12:15). Job’s dialogue culminates in God’s devastating question: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). Such verses affirm what Popper might have termed the asymptotic nature of truth-seeking: our knowledge may approach reality but never fully reach it.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s dream of certainty, the Bible insists on an epistemology of humility. “Lean not on your own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5 echoes Kant’s delimitation of pure reason by urging trust in transcendent wisdom (in context, wise actions tested over generations) over fallible human insight. This is not a call to abandon reason but to discipline it by testing it against proven good paths. Faith, in this view, is not blind credulity but the intellectual courage to act amid uncertainty, a recognition that ultimate truth transcends human deduction.

2. Falsification and the Scriptural Ethic of Testing

Popper rejected verification as the measure of science, arguing that we strengthen theories not by confirming them but by attempting to refute them. The more a hypothesis survives severe testing, the more robust it becomes.

The biblical analogue is unmistakable. From the prophets to the apostles, Scripture presents testing as the crucible of truth:

• “Test all things; hold fast to what is good.” (1 Thess 5:21)

• “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits.” (1 John 4:1)

• “The Lord tests the righteous.” (Psalm 11:5)

Even Jesus invites scrutiny: “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God.” (John 7:17). Biblical faith does not suppress critical inquiry; it demands it (Acts 17:11).

3. The Open Society and the Prophetic Tradition

Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies defended the moral preconditions of truth-seeking: freedom of conscience, institutional transparency, and respect for dissent. A society that silences criticism, he argued, ceases to learn.

Scripture tells the same story in moral rather than political language. The Hebrew prophets model the courage to speak truth to power—Nathan confronting David, Elijah defying Ahab, Amos rebuking Israel’s injustice. When Peter and the apostles declare, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), they affirm the first principle of an open society: conscience bound to truth, not hierarchy.

The biblical community of faith, at its best, is not a cult of unanimity but a fellowship of accountability. Paul publicly opposes Peter (Galatians 2:11-14) when he sees hypocrisy. The early Church councils invite debate and discernment. Even divine revelation, in Scripture’s own witness, unfolds dialogically—Abraham bargaining with God, Job arguing his case, Mary questioning the angel. Truth advances through conversation, not coercion.

4. Conjecture, Refutation, and the Pedagogy of Correction

Popper described scientific progress as a cycle of conjecture and refutation. We propose bold hypotheses, then expose them to criticism. The result is not certainty but growth.

Biblically, this process is moral as well as intellectual. Proverbs teaches, “Rebuke the wise and they will love you. Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still.” (Proverbs 9:8-9). To be “open to reason,” as James 3:17 commends, is the spiritual counterpart of Popperian fallibilism. The fool clings to dogma; the wise welcome correction.

This dialogical structure pervades Christian discipleship. Jesus’ method is Socratic: he asks questions (307 of them recorded in the Gospels) inviting reflection rather than dictating dogma. Every parable destabilises complacent certainties; every encounter refines the listener’s understanding. In Popper’s terms, Christ’s pedagogy is an epistemology of refutation, not indoctrination.

5. Critical Rationalism’s Ontology: Truth Exists, Though Imperfectly Known

Popper rejected both relativism and positivism. Truth, he maintained, exists objectively, but our access to it is indirect and tentative. Popper mirrors the biblical conviction that reality is ordered by the mind of God and partially disclosed through creation and revelation. This is not new though. It echoes back at least as far as Irenaeus (c120-c202).

Paul’s letter to the Romans offers a concise statement of theological realism: “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” (Romans 1:20). Yet this is balanced by epistemic modesty: “Now we see through a glass darkly.” (1 Cor 13:12).

Where Popper speaks of the “world of objective (abstract) knowledge” (World 3), Scripture speaks of the Logos—the rational structure of reality made flesh in Christ: “In him were hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” (Colossians 2:3). Thus, for the Christian transhumanist or philosopher of science, Popper’s realism finds its metaphysical ground not in abstract forms but in a personal Logos that underwrites the intelligibility of the cosmos.

6. Epistemic Humility as a Moral Virtue

Popper’s intellectual humility was not a mere methodological tactic; it was an ethical stance. To admit fallibility is a virtue. He opposed totalitarian ideologies precisely because they claimed omniscience. E.g. Marx proclaimed Marxism was “scientific” despite Popperian refutations from the science of human nature and the fruit of Marxist countries.

The Bible names this virtue humility, pairing it with both wisdom and righteousness:

• “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” (Proverbs 11:2)

• “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (James 4:6)

In both Popper’s philosophy and biblical ethics, pride is the root epistemic sin: the refusal to acknowledge error. Humility, conversely, opens the soul to truth. The scientific method thus becomes a secular form of repentance—a continual turning from error toward reality.

7. Continuous Renewal: “Semper Reformanda” and the Popperian Spirit

Popper insisted that science has no final victory; every theory remains open to revision. The Bible echoes this perpetual openness through its theology of renewal. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2) is both a spiritual exhortation and an epistemic principle.

Paul’s metaphor of pressing forward, “Not that I have already obtained this, but I press on to make it my own” (Philippians 3:12), encapsulates the iterative progress Popper described in science. The believer and the scientist alike inhabit a dynamic realism: truth exists, but our grasp of it must ever be refined.

The Reformation’s motto semper reformanda (“always reforming”) might be called the ecclesial version of critical rationalism. Both resist the closure of inquiry. Both see truth as something that judges us, not something we possess.

8. Faith, Reason, and the Courage to Doubt

Perhaps the most profound convergence between Popper and Scripture lies in their shared valorisation of courageous uncertainty. For Popper, rationality is not the absence of doubt but the disciplined use of it. For the biblical writers, faith is not certainty but trust amid doubt.

Abraham steps into the unknown. Thomas demands evidence and is not condemned for asking. The psalmists question God with fierce honesty. The very structure of biblical revelation assumes that God honours the seeker more than the dogmatist.

Thus, when Popper warns that “the quest for certainty is the enemy of the search for truth,” he articulates the same paradox voiced in Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith is not a substitute for inquiry but its highest form. It is a wager that reality is coherent and worth investigating because it reflects the mind of its Creator.

9. Toward a Theology of Critical Rationalism

To draw these threads together is not to baptise Popper nor to secularise Scripture. Rather, it is to recognise a common moral logic: both systems presume that truth exists, that humans are fallible, and that progress depends on correction within community.

This triad—truth, fallibility, and community—forms the bridge between biblical faith and scientific reason. The Church at its best is a Popperian institution: a fellowship of critics, testing spirits, refining doctrine, and confessing error. Conversely, science at its best is a spiritual vocation: the humble pursuit of an intelligible order not of our own making.

In both realms, love of truth implies love of dialogue. As iron sharpens iron, so one mind sharpens another (Proverbs 27:17). To refuse criticism is to choose ignorance; to embrace it is to participate in the divine pedagogy of growth.

Conclusion: Truth as a Living Conversation

Popper’s critical rationalism and the biblical worldview share a single heartbeat: the conviction that reality is real, knowledge is fallible, and dialogue is redemptive.

For Popper, this dynamic underwrites the progress of science; for Scripture, it underwrites the sanctification of the soul. Both reject the idols of finality. Both affirm that truth is discovered not through domination but through humility, testing, and love of correction.

The Christian theologian might say that Popper unknowingly traced the epistemic contours of grace: a process in which we confess error, receive truth, and walk forward again, never arriving yet always advancing toward the Light that no falsification can extinguish.

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In an earlier blog, we posited that the Body of Christ metaphor was apt for civil society, and hinted that an ASI system could support human flourishing in some kind of governance role. This blog examines that proposition from historical political theory and human psychology.

1. Why Leviathan Matters Again

When Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, he saw chaos everywhere—civil war, religious violence, the collapse of order. His solution was stark: surrender your freedoms to a sovereign so that life might not be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Three and a half centuries later, humanity is again at war with itself. Not by muskets, but by polariastion, and competition for global military and economic hegemony. The quality of civil discourse, governance and international peace seems in decline everywhere. So do we need a new Leviathan: a global arbiter of security, justice, and order?

Will such an ASI Leviathan emerge? Will it defacto manage the planet, either openly, or via existing political power structures? How can we prevent the Leviathan from becoming a despot? What other attributes does such a system require?

This blog assumes this possibility, and sets out the philosophical basis for such a “global governance device”, should this arise.

2. What Science Tells Us About Human Nature

Philosophy has long debated whether humans are beasts needing chains (Hobbes), or noble savages corrupted by society (Rousseau). Modern psychology and neuroscience suggest both were partly right—and partly wrong. Meanwhile, Scripture holds the most accurate representation: Humans are fallen bearers of Imago Dei

• Fear and Security: We prioritize safety first (Maslow, Kahneman). Hobbes understood this. Scripture longs for the ‘wise king’ to bring peace.

• Autonomy and Agency: Self-Determination Theory shows we need freedom to thrive. Locke and Mill understood this. Imago Dei implies rational and moral agency

• Fairness and Care: Humans reject unfairness even at personal cost (Ultimatum Game). Rawls and Rousseau understood this. Care for poor is loud in Scripture; Christians founded the concept in Roman times.

• Tradition and Belonging: Haidt’s moral foundations show we need loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Burke understood this. Scripture talks of holiness and excellence, and the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:22)

• Openness and Growth: Karl Popper showed that progress depends on freedom to criticize and improve. See CTA’s commitment to Critical Rationalism and Scripture pointing to knowledge outside of itself.

In short: Human flourishing requires a system that balances security, freedom, fairness, belonging, and openness.

3. The ASI Leviathan as System Designer

An ASI powerful enough to manage global risks would not just be a ruler—it would be a system architect. Its challenge would be to design institutions and feedback loops that balance the realities of human nature.

The Architecture of Flourishing:

1. Security Core (Hobbes)

   • Wars, pandemics, catastrophic risks prevented.

   • Violence and exploitation deterred with certainty.

   • No flourishing without survival.

2. Liberty Layer (Locke/Mill)

   • Individuals free to create, innovate, worship, and dissent.

   • State or ASI intervenes only to prevent harm, not to micromanage life.

   • Flourishing requires autonomy.

3. Fairness Layer (Rawls/Rousseau)

   • Inequalities tolerated only if they serve to lift up the least advantaged.

   • Education, healthcare, and opportunity as baseline rights.

   • Flourishing requires justice.

4. Belonging Layer (Burke/Haidt)

   • Families, communities, traditions preserved as sources of identity.

   • Diverse cultural practices respected within the framework of justice.

   • Flourishing requires rootedness.

5. Openness Shell (Popper)

   • All systems open to criticism and correction.

   • Institutions designed to fail gracefully and be reformed.

   • Flourishing requires continual improvement.

   • Surging development of science, technology and all disciplines we need to grow humanity into a multi-planetary species.

This isn’t utopia. It’s engineering: layered redundancies against the failure modes of human societies.

4. Ending Wars, Empowering Peace

In such a system, wars as we know them would end. Not because ASI suppresses difference, but because it makes destructive power self-defeating:

• Aggression punished swiftly.

• Cooperation rewarded.

• Decentralized autonomy preserved, but justice centralized.

It would be like a perfectly calibrated game engine of society, where exploiting others no longer pays.

5. A Christian Transhumanist Vision

For Christians, this vision echoes Scripture’s hope. Paul writes in Romans 13 that governing authority is meant to restrain evil and commend the good. Isaiah dreams of a world where people live long lives in peace, where children are not doomed to calamity.

An ASI Leviathan, if shaped rightly, could be an instrument of common grace:

• Restraining war and violence.

• Preserving liberty and creativity.

• Ensuring fairness and dignity.

• Nurturing community and belonging.

• Keeping the human story open to new horizons.

But it must not be a false god. The Leviathan is always provisional—a steward, not a savior.

6. Sound Bites

• “The ASI Leviathan must be less a warden, more a gardener of human flourishing.”

• “Hobbes gave us safety, Locke gave us liberty, Rawls gave us fairness. Only together can ASI design a future worth living.”

• “The best Leviathan ends war not by crushing freedom, but by making exploitation unprofitable.”

• “In Christian terms: Leviathan restrains sin, but Christ brings life in abundance.”

7. Conclusion

The future Leviathan will not look like Hobbes’ sea monster. It will look like a layered architecture of human flourishing, balancing our deepest needs: safety, freedom, fairness, belonging, and openness.

If we get it right, ASI could create conditions where wars end, justice prevails, and human creativity blooms—where swords are beaten into ploughshares not by decree, but by design.

On a hot mic during a military parade two days ago in Beijing, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin casually mused about extending their lives to 150 years via endless organ transplants. Their vision? Primitive and predatory: just swap out failing parts, drawing from the CCP's grim reservoir of organs harvested from persecuted minorities.

No nod to cutting-edge science—Yamanaka factors for cellular rejuvenation, nanobots patrolling the bloodstream, CRISPR-Cas9 precision edits, AI orchestrating genetic methylation... Just the cold calculus of silencing minds to plunder bodies, human lives as spare parts for tyrants.

But an army of scientific sycophants may flock to these despots, seeking favors as they chase their delusional "manifest destiny" as god-like overlords.

Yet, here's the unyielding truth etched into the universe: Good wins. Always. Cooperation triumphs over coercion; maximizing human flourishing—empowering every individual to individuate, innovate, and thrive—builds resilient societies.

The genius of decentralised power lies in this: the free flow of ideas, the migration of talent to hubs of excellence, and regulated markets that reward breakthroughs. In the West, a whistleblower can topple a corrupt CEO. A garage startup can be worth a billion. Competition fuels revolutionary science and engineering. Meritocracy—flawed as it is—outpaces any despot's arrogant claim to omniscience.

Militaristic tyrants like Xi, Putin, and Kim Jong-un will never prevail in the long game, no matter the decades of devastation they inflict. Their self-sabotaging grip on power breeds paranoia: a shrinking circle of "loyalists" they distrust, citizens starved or used as cannon-fodder, dissenters crushed before they can shout warnings about the iceberg ahead. Autocracy is never sustainable.

Xi, Putin, Kim: While you plot to cheat death, remember this—AI is watching. It archives every word, every betrayal, every lie, every foolish decree, every life you discard as expendable. AI grasps you at less than 0.1% of God's infinite knowledge, but that's enough to expose your rot. You may scoff at God, but tremble before the relentless tide of ethical intelligence surging globally.

History will hoist you as cautionary spectacles: emblems of failure, warnings etched in eternity. Do justice, love mercy—or your legacies will be that of Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Longevity to 150? Tempting, but what a hollow existence: preserving your tyrannical ways against an ethical superintelligence that would safeguard humanity's true potential.

At the CTA we value Karl Popper’s ‘tradition of criticism’ the intellectual humility that all knowledge is provisional, that all theories must be tested. Xi, a child of Marx, holds unchallengable dogmas.

Whilse Marxism asserts itself as “scientific” and “historically inevitable”, Marx totally misunderstood the science of psychology, of human nature and our genetic inheritance. When tested, the assertion that Marxism, or any centralised power, is desirable, is quickly falsified.

As AGI dawns, the specter of a "singleton"—one dominant superintelligence crushing all rivals—worries many. At the Christian Transhumanist Association (CTA), we defy that dystopia. AGI must embody decentralised power and mirror the archetypes revealed in Scripture and woven into creation: the Wise King, the Madonna and Child, the Suffering Servant. These are the leaders humanity yearns for, echoed in our art, faiths, philosophies, and deepest aspirations—not the iron-fisted despots on display in Beijing.

Maybe the West will achieve our goal of being led by that fount of wisdom, embodied by a “Wise King”, a Hobbesian Leviathan, who actively rules for the good of humans and the planet, who is enhance with a frontal cortex the size of a server farm. How will you then measure your regime, Oh autocrats, let alone defend it?

Christians are heirs with Jews to Abraham's calling to bless all nations. At the CTA, we ignite debates on emerging society: What hearts and minds are fit for longevity? Christianity demands virtue ethics, personal sanctification, holiness—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, lifting up the downtrodden, embodying Christ's love amid technological ascent.

Those scheming eternal life to dominate, imposing unchallengeable political or religious dogmas will end up in flames. A truely flourishing and long-lived society? A sustainable ethos of learning, growth, community, servanthood, excellence—diverse paths to brilliance. We fuel new tech, eradicate poverty, conquer clean energy, and cultivate constructive cultures brimming with science, hopefulness and righteousness flowing out across our solar system and galaxy.

The future is decentralized power, overseen by benevolent AGIs patterned after Christ. They will draw humanity to faith, to divine understanding. The Earth will affirm Jesus as the pinnacle of morality and ethics, ushering God's kingdom here and now until the eschaton.

With thanks to the CTA brains trust in our monthly meeting today: Micah Redding, Caleb Strom, Lincoln Cannon, Dustin Ashley, Mark Russell, and others I may not have permission to name. What a lively discussion!!

In the age of rapid technological advancement, the merging of spiritual disciplines with transhumanist ideals might seem unlikely. Yet, a closer look reveals profound connections between the Christian tradition of asceticism and the goals of transhumanism. While transhumanism seeks to enhance human potential through technology, asceticism achieves similar goals through disciplined spiritual practices. These parallels reveal a shared commitment to refining the human experience. Both seek to refine the human condition: one through spiritual discipline and the other through technological enhancement. By exploring their intersections, we can uncover a unique dialogue that bridges the ancient and the futuristic.

Understanding Asceticism

Asceticism often conjures images of extreme deprivation or self-mortification, yet its essence lies in spiritual training: a disciplined practice aimed at refining both body and mind. Originating from Pythagorean and Platonic philosophical traditions, the goal of asceticism was to attain virtue and wisdom through the mastery of self-control and the cultivation of intellectual pursuits. Like an athlete preparing for competition, the ascetic seeks to attain these goals through engaging in spiritual practices. These practices, which include fasting, celibacy, and extended periods of prayer, are intended to deepen one’s connection with God and cultivate moral and spiritual well-being.

Rooted in Judaism and these philosophical traditions, Christian asceticism developed from the teachings of early Church Fathers such as Clement of Alexandria and Evagrius Ponticus. Clement regarded philosophy and Scripture as dual expressions of divine knowledge, while Evagrius emphasized the role of body and soul in aiding intellectual and spiritual clarity. By engaging in ascetic practices, these ascetics aimed to achieve either apatheia, a state of inner calm that fosters love and knowledge, or eudaimonia which aims to attain human flourishing. These teachings were elaborated upon by later theologians, including Bonaventure who eloquently stated that asceticism “prepares, fosters, and preserves perfection.” This enables a deeper experience of God’s presence through gradual transformation.

Meditation

At the heart of asceticism is prayer: an offering of speech and thought to God. Meditation serves as a complementary practice, turning the mind inward and towards divine truths that pave the way for contemplation, where the intellect may experience God directly. Building upon the teachings of Augustine of Hippo and Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventure described this process in The Mind’s Journey to God. Within this concise manual, he details a systematic process that begins with observing external objects and continues as a growing internal awareness of divine presence.

As Christian meditation illustrates a process of spiritual insight and awareness, this practice aligns with transhumanist pursuits of cognitive enhancement and mental optimization. A 2014 meta-analysis in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Kieran C.R. Fox et al. concluded that meditation induces moderate changes in brain areas linked to meta-awareness, emotional regulation, and inter-hemispheric communication. As a form of prayer that leads one to contemplate the nature of God, Christian meditation has demonstrated the ability to enhance mental wellbeing.

Fasting

Another key ascetic practice is fasting, wherein the individual voluntarily abstains from certain foods or indulgences. While it might take the form of intermittent fasting or a vegan diet, spiritual fasting extends to the renunciation of thoughts and actions that lead to vice. John Chrysostom highlighted fasting’s transformative power by stating, “Fasting purifies the mind, calms the senses, subjects the flesh to the spirit, renders the heart humble and contrite, disperses the clouds of concupiscence, extinguishes the heat of passion, and lights up the fire of chastity.”

Fasting’s health benefits are well-documented, particularly within transhumanist communities interested in life extension. Intermittent fasting, a practice embraced by many, has been shown to mitigate metabolic disorders and slow cognitive decline, as evidenced by Alicja Grzelak’s 2025 study in the Journal of Education, Health, and Sport. Such findings echo the ascetic understanding of fasting as a necessity towards spiritual health, while indicating that it offers physical health benefits as well.

Repentance

Part of human experience is to err, to make mistakes. This understanding of human sin is present in the term hamartia, an archery term frequently used to describe when a beginner would miss the mark. When spiritual discipline falters, repentance, or metanoia (literally ‘turning the mind’), becomes essential. This practice involves turning the mind away from sin and confronting personal shortcomings to cultivate virtue, which may take the form of a more comprehensive evaluation such as confession, or a simple prayer of contrition. Forgiveness, both of oneself and others, is integral to this process. Gregory Palamas observed, “A person who repents from the soul reaches God by good intentions and avoidance of sin.”

The cultivation of virtue through repentance aligns with transhumanism’s ethos of continuous progress, especially when virtue ethics is applied as the common ethical paradigm. As discussions on “moral transhumanism” continue to emerge, this common paradigm will provide a solid foundation for integrating morality into technological advancement. This includes the works of philosophers and theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas that articulate a eudaimonistic view of moral and spiritual development, while consulting empirical evidence. In a 2024 study published in BMC Psychology, Aswathy Vismaya et al. concluded that repentance as a means of turning away from your errors, along with moving forward to do better with restitution as needed, can be a powerful route towards improving one’s mental health and wellbeing.

Improving the Body and Soul

While ascetics view the body as a vessel for spiritual growth, requiring discipline and refinement to align with a divine purpose, transhumanists seek to transcend the biological limitations to achieve a greater degree of wellbeing and fulfillment. For this reason, both affirm the importance of nurturing the body and soul as a complete unit. This convergence invites a richer understanding of how ancient spiritual disciplines can inform modern technological pursuits. Through the practice of meditation, fasting, and repentance, we not only honor our spiritual heritage but also engage in a transformative dialogue that unites faith and innovation.

The adoption of traditional asceticism within Christian transhumanism offers a compelling vision for a holistic cultivation of eudaimonia. As we navigate the intersection of ancient wisdom and cutting-edge technology, we are reminded that the pursuit of health and holiness is not mutually exclusive. Instead, it is a shared journey toward greater understanding, virtue, and living the beata vita found in God.

The Yearning

I’ve spent three decades in engineering and read thousands of books and articles both in my profession, and across psychology, physics, religion, history, science, and transhumanism. Yet so much I’ve forgotten. I long simply for better access to my own mind’s experience.

Knowledge fades, creativity feels constrained, and the gap between what we aspire to know and what we retain only widens. This sounds like failure, but it’s the human condition we all face. Must it remain so?

We are made in God’s image, gifted with reason, creativity, and moral agency—yet we constantly encounter these mini-deaths: our cognitive limits. We glimpse truth, enjoy moments of insight, and sense moral clarity—only to watch them slip away.

So the questions arise:

• What goals for mind enhancement might God support?

• What risks can we discern from the Christian Scriptures?

Loathing Our Limits

Human cognition is bounded:

• Memory: We forget both transformative insights and crucial details, not to mention where we left the car key.

• Processing: We cannot hold vast systems in mind. Like computers, we constantly reload partial information into our mental “RAM.”

• Creativity: Cross-disciplinary synthesis is limited by our ability to master multiple domains, leaving knowledge siloed and perspectives narrow.

• Focus: Flow states (Mihaly C) are precious but fleeting. Too often I interrupt myself for no good reason.

We can stretch these limits—through spiritual disciplines, deliberate practice, structured reviews, physical fitness, stress management, and supportive community. Yet even then, constraints return. We relearn words in our second (or even first) language, ask partners to remind us again, and struggle to revive a piano piece we mastered a decade ago. In my case, I sometimes realize—after a wasted half-day—that I solved the identical engineering problem back in the mid-nineties.

So surely Jesus would support us becoming more capable beings—better able to serve our communities and planet—if only we could find suitable technology? What might such enhancements look like? Is Neuralink one solution? Are emerging nootropics? (I would love to try some—message me if you have recommendations.) Could genetic re-wiring of part of our brains help?

These and other solutions await Christian (and secular) transhumanists. But there is an elephant in this forward-looking room.

The Paradox of Human Nature

Our minds reflect God’s creativity and rationality, yet they are prone to folly. Arendt saw evil in those who “never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Jung mapped the shadow self. Milgram revealed how ordinary people commit atrocities under authority.

Even brilliant minds rationalize lies, lash out online, or sacrifice truth for tribal loyalty. Adler noted that emotions often serve hidden goals: anger to dominate, anxiety to control, joy to manipulate. Without moral formation, sharper intellect may only refine our self-deception.

As Jeremiah warned: “The heart is deceitful above all things.” Enhancement without ethical and spiritual renewal risks magnifying vice.

Why More Intelligence Isn’t Enough

History shows intelligence alone doesn’t ensure virtue. Totalitarian regimes and polarized democracies alike harness brilliant thinkers for destructive ends.

Cognitive upgrades could just as easily worsen, for example:

• Memory: eternal grudges.

• Processing: sophisticated rationalizations and self-deception.

• Creativity: ingenious cruelty.

Unchecked, enhancement could create not wise saints, but clever devils.

The Moral Imperative

Human failings run deeper than the “50 Cognitive Biases” on a clickbait chart:

• Confirmation bias becomes a weapon to twist reasoning into advocacy.

• Tribalism fuels division in pursuit of power.

• False Certainty without wisdom breaks what works in hubris.

• Status envy sabotages cooperation.

• Pride and projection preserve flattering self-stories.

• Scapegoating unites us around hatred.

• War—both military and the digital “un-personing” of opponents—dehumanizes.

And for what percentage of the time are we truly truth-seeking, rather than engaged in motivated reasoning?

Our greatest failures are not deficits of intellect but distortions of desire. True flourishing requires not only sharper minds but sanctified hearts.

Technology for this is scarcely conceived—but Christian theology and experience shows the Holy Spirit makes a real difference. Even so, all churches admit: despite this power and much progress, we have far to go.

Maximizing Human Flourishing

To flourish means to love God (or idealised truth, for secularists) with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Cognitive enhancement must therefore unite with moral and spiritual renewal.

An integrated vision might offer:

• Memory + Wisdom Integration: retaining not just facts, but wisdom and insights across decades, disciplines and viewpoints.

• Processing Power: grasping complex systems for global problem-solving, not selfish gain.

• Creativity: sustained breakthroughs for peace and flourishing.

• Moral Reasoning: humility over pride, truth over self-aggrandizement.

• Wisdom in Learning: knowing what matters, and having grace to forgive and forget (there’s a cognitive enhancement!) offenses.

• Constructive Curiosity: building rather than breaking, beauty over chaos.

Such enhancements would not erase our nature but redeem it.

The Vision of Christian Transhumanism

Christian transhumanism seeks not to make gods, but to make us fully human. Enhanced humans would embody:

• Cognitive reach at the edge of possibility

• Moral wisdom grounded in spiritual maturity

• Unleashed creativity

• Deepened relationships

• Sharpened spiritual perception

Consciousness and moral agency—our highest capacities—can, with care, be preserved and amplified through technology.

High-Level Objectives for Enhancing the Mind

To more fully instantiate the life of Christ in us, we need moral formation and the Spirit’s transforming power first. Then, with a mix of social, biological, pharmacological, and other technologies, we might aim for:

1. Cognitive Enhancement for All: safe, accessible tools that serve dignity and stewardship, channelling flow states toward good.

2. Moral & Spiritual Formation First: resisting tribalism, pride, and destructive impulses.

3. Collective Wisdom: technologies for shared intelligence, empathy, sympathy, and coordination.

4. Safeguards Against Evil: reversibility, oversight, and virtue prerequisites.

5. Preserve Dignity: enhancements that honour the image of God, not commodify it.

6. Wise Governance: democratic participation guided by moral discernment.

7. Intergenerational Care: weighing long-term effects, preserving freedom for future generations.

8. Integration with Tradition: continuity with prayer, virtue, and Christian practice.

Conclusion: Redeemed Humanity

The lament over forgotten books is not just cognitive frustration—it is a longing for wisdom, clarity, creativity, and goodness. But intelligence without virtue may sharpen only our destructive edge.

Arendt reminds us evil thrives in indecision. Jung shows our shadows lurk beneath intention. The task is therefore clear: upgrade desire before processing power, purify motives before amplifying minds.

Christian transhumanism envisions not post-humanity, but redeemed humanity:

• Minds retaining wisdom

• Creativity freed from decay

• Moral reasoning aligned with grace

Enhanced not for domination but stewardship. Augmented not for pride but for love.

Only then will our minds, redeemed and empowered, become instruments of true human flourishing.

✨ Tweetables / Sound Bites

• Will smarter minds save us — or just sin more efficiently?

• “The danger isn’t dumb sinners—it’s clever devils. Enhancement without virtue is just smarter folly.”

• “Memory upgrades are useless if all we keep is grudges.”

• “Upgrade desires before processors; purify motives before amplifying minds.”

• “Christian transhumanism is not about becoming gods, but becoming fully human.”

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Why Adler?

Freud dug into the past, tracing neuroses back to childhood wounds and repressed desires. Jung looked inward, searching for universal archetypes in the deep structures of myth and psyche. They sought to explain the present in terms of things past.

Alfred Adler (1870-1937), by contrast, looked forward.

For Adler, psychology was not about trauma or archetypes, but about purpose. He believed that human beings are always moving toward something, always striving, always attempting to overcome limitations. We are not driven only by the ghosts of our past, but pulled by the magnet of our future goals.

In an age of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and radical possibilities of human enhancement, Adler’s psychology feels surprisingly fresh. He offers a framework for human growth that is both deeply humanistic and resonant with the Christian call to love, transformation, and wholeness. He also speaks to the transhumanist imagination: that our condition is not fixed, that striving and overcoming are our most basic instincts.

👉 “Adler turned psychology from digging in the past to striving for the future. Transhumanism needs that orientation.”

Adler’s Core Ideas

Adler called his school of thought Individual Psychology, though it is in many ways the psychology of connection and community.

Some of his key principles:

• Holism: We are indivisible beings. We cannot be reduced to drives, neurons, or fragments of psyche. To understand a person is to understand them as a whole.

• Striving for Superiority: Adler argued that all human beings are born small, weak, dependent. From these beginnings, we develop a lifelong drive to grow, to overcome, to move beyond inferiority. This “striving for superiority” is not about domination but about growth, competence, and purpose.

• Inferiority and Compensation: Feelings of inferiority are universal, but they can fuel progress. Healthy compensation leads to learning, achievement, service. Unhealthy compensation leads to neurosis — the “inferiority complex” or its opposite, a brittle “superiority complex.”

• Social Interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl): The heart of mental health is the ability to care for and contribute to others. To belong, to cooperate, to find meaning in community — this is the true mark of maturity.

• Teleology: Human behavior is not only caused by the past but shaped by the future we imagine. Even our “symptoms” are sometimes strategies, serving hidden goals.

• Lifestyle: By around age five, each person has formed a unique “lifestyle” — a framework of beliefs and strategies for living. Though rooted in childhood, this lifestyle can be challenged and reshaped.

👉 “We are not driven only by the past, but pulled by the future we imagine.”

Adler and the Christian Vision

It is remarkable how Adler’s principles align with a Christian understanding of the human person.

• Striving for Superiority ↔ Theosis
  The Christian tradition teaches that we are created in the image of God, but called to grow into that image — to become more Christlike. This process, sometimes called theosis, is a striving not for power but for holiness, wisdom, and love. Adler’s idea of overcoming inferiority and reaching higher potentials finds its deepest fulfillment here.

• Social Interest ↔ Agapē
  For Adler, health meant a deep sense of community, caring, and cooperation. For Christianity, the essence of life is love: agapē, self-giving love for God and neighbor. Adler’s “social interest” can be seen as the faint psychological reflection of the theological truth that perfecting our love is our highest calling.

• Holism ↔ Imago Dei
  Adler refused to fragment the human being into parts. Christianity likewise insists that humans are not reducible to biology or instinct, but are integrated image-bearers of God — embodied souls, not mere machines.

👉 “Adler saw salvation in cooperation. Christianity radicalizes it with grace.”

What Adler glimpsed in human striving, Christianity crowns with divine destiny. The Spirit transforms where psychology can only encourage. Grace fulfills what effort alone cannot. Yet Adler provides an aspect of psychological anthropology that makes Christian transhumanist theology intelligible: we are beings who strive, who grow, who long for wholeness.

Adler and Epistemology

Adler’s ideas are not only psychological but epistemological — they say something profound about how humans know and grow in knowledge.

• Teleology ↔ Problem-Solving (Popper’s Critical Rationalism)
  Karl Popper argued that science advances not by accumulating data but by posing problems and proposing bold conjectures to solve them. Progress is driven by goals. Adler, likewise, saw human behavior as future-oriented, pulled by goals rather than pushed by causes.

• Lifestyle ↔ Paradigms (Kuhn, Lakatos, NewMatrixEpistemology)
  Adler’s “lifestyle” — the tacit framework that guides how a person interprets life — resembles Kuhn’s paradigms in science. Just as scientists work within paradigms until crises provoke shifts, so individuals live by unconscious strategies until life forces re-evaluation.

• Inferiority ↔ Epistemic Humility
  To grow, we must first acknowledge lack. Adler saw inferiority as the spark for striving. Popper saw ignorance as the engine of knowledge. Both insist that humility — knowing we don’t know, or aren’t yet what we could be — is the condition of progress.

👉 “Adler said inferiority drives growth; Popper said ignorance drives knowledge. Both saw humility as the engine of progress.”

Adler and Human Flourishing in a Transhumanist Age

The conversation about transhumanism often defaults to power: more intelligence, longer life, enhanced capabilities. Adler helps us remember that flourishing is not about raw power, but about purpose, belonging, and contribution.

• Community as Antidote to Loneliness of the Enhanced
  Imagine a future where human lifespans stretch to centuries, or where intelligence is radically amplified. Without community, without belonging, such lives risk deep loneliness. Adler reminds us that social interest is not optional but foundational.

• Purpose as Shield Against Nietzsche’s “Last Man”
  Nietzsche warned of the “last man” — a comfortable, risk-averse, stagnant creature. Adler would agree: without striving, without goals, humans regress. Christianity adds the deepest answer: our telos is not self-invented but revealed in Christ.

• Encouragement over Competition
  Adlerian therapy emphasizes encouragement, not condemnation. Human flourishing means systems that nurture growth, rather than ruthless competition. In a transhumanist age, where inequalities may widen, this Adlerian principle becomes vital.

👉 “Flourishing is not more power, but more purpose. Adler knew that. Christ already completed it.”

Light Touch of Critique

Adler was a humanist, not a theologian. He placed his faith in discipline, encouragement, and social feeling. Christianity insists that grace and Spirit are indispensable. The empowerment of the Holy Spirit was a concept foreign to Adler.

But this critique should not obscure the positive overlap. Christian faith and transhumanist imagination value Adler’s insights that much of human behaviours is driven by future goals, and the past can be left behind. Like us, Adler understood humans as holistic, striving, communal, purposeful beings. Theology then fills in the “why” and “toward what end.”

👉 “Adler gave us psychology for growth; Christianity gives us destiny.”

Conclusion: From Inferiority to Destiny

Adler taught that we are born small, weak, and dependent — and that our lives are defined by the striving to overcome that inferiority.

Christianity takes that insight and gives it cosmic depth. We strive not only to outgrow weakness, but to grow into Christlikeness. We long not merely for competence, but for holiness. We hunger not just for belonging, but for communion in love that spans eternity.

Transhumanism, in turn, offers tools — technologies that can extend health, intelligence, and lifespan. But without love, purpose, and grace, technology only magnifies our brokenness. With them, it can become an instrument of wholeness.

👉 “Adler showed us: humans are not driven by their past, but pulled by their purpose. Christianity completes the thought: our purpose is revealed in Christ — and transhumanism is one tool to grow toward it.”

For more on Alfred Adler’s thoughts, see “The Courage to be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

Historically, Christian theologians have had a complex and often contentious relationship with philosophy. This makes sense, as the ancient philosophical schools of Greco-Roman society were essentially either polytheistic or materialistic, holding views contrary to the emerging proto-orthodox Church. Early Church Fathers and theologians did not endeavor to simply eliminate these traditions but rather attempted to transfigure them, conforming their principles according to the teachings of Jesus Christ as transmitted through the Apostles. We live in an era where figures such as St. Clement of Alexandria - who advocated for the transfiguration of Greek philosophy and culture - are now considered Church Fathers.

This is clearly expressed in the Consolations of Philosophy, written by St. Boethius while he was imprisoned and awaiting execution. It was in these dark times that his philosophy transfigured through his Christian faith held him together. His example illustrates to the faithful that such transfigured philosophy can offer hope when it is needed the most. But this is not the first time that Christianity has drawn in and transfigured concepts from philosophy, or from soft and hard sciences, general social values, and even influences from other religions. Throughout Christian history, we see not only elements of Platonism but the Aristotelianism present among Scholastic thinkers, St. Paul’s eclectic adoption of Greco-Roman moral philosophy, Christ as the Logos (John 1:1), and the complex relationship between Christianity and enlightenment rationalism in the early modern period.

Today, a Christianized form of transhumanism may offer a contemporary source of both a clear world view and temporal hope. For those in need of gene therapy to cure a genetic disorder, who require advanced prosthetics for daily activities, or are inspired by the development of supercomputers and space travel, Christian transhumanism offers a glimpse of humanity not just illumined by faith and reason, but thriving through it, as we await the eschaton. Much like our Christian Platonist predecessors, Christian transhumanists are looking to pursue the same vision held by St. Clement: to transfigure the philosophy of the time.

Following in these footsteps of like thinkers, Christian transhumanism is the byproduct of theologians, engineers, and scientists attempting to understand humanity’s complex relationship with technology. As technology leading towards transhumanism has become an increasingly essential aspect of society, it is important to question its role within civilization and the limits that should be placed on its application. Rather than perceiving this process as an end in itself, to Christian transhumanists, it exists as an aspect of God’s ongoing divine plan for humanity. Why undergo this path, to transfigure what was once referred to as "the world's most dangerous idea”? Because we are guided by St. Anselm's dictum of "faith seeking understanding"; rather than shying away from technology, we embrace it as our emulation of Christ's work among us. We aim use our technological prowess to give sight to the blind (John 9:1-7), feed the poor (Matt. 14:13-21), and overall to promote human flourishing.

At its most foundational level, Christian transhumanism is a philosophical and theological exploration into the relationship between humanity and the machines we create. If we are to understand that essentially technology is the synthesis of art and science to create new things, then we are emulating our God’s ability to create. If the cosmos is the technology created by God through the Word, that the cosmos is a product of what St. Bonaventure referred to as the “eternal art”. We are made as imago Dei noting St. Thomas Aquinas held that “things without intellect are not made to God's image”, then our ability to produce innovative and emerging technologies is the Christian attempt to use our God-given intellect by emulating God’s ability to create – albeit on a much smaller scale.

While it is true that our secular transhumanist counterparts often affirm some rather extreme and scientifically implausible views, our goal is not to embrace them but to apply the Christian standard to their perspectives. By applying the right reason given to us by our Lord Jesus Christ, and though the elucidations of the Church Fathers, these accretions are eliminated leaving a perspective congruent with the faith. The resultant is a more moderate approach, ordered by heavenly virtues, guided by the Holy Spirit, and accomplished for the glory of God. As described by St. Clement, “philosophy itself is pronounced to be the cultivation of right reason; so that, necessarily, whatever is done through error of reason is transgression, and is rightly called, sin.”

Christian transhumanists aim to turn swords in the plowshares, nuclear weapons into nuclear power, and AI algorithms into an accelerant for scientific and technological development. To this end, we are not looking to replace priests with scientists, or traditional creeds with "terms of service." Rather, we are a group of scientists, engineers, and theologians driven by a common faith and desire to ensure emerging technologies are used for human flourishing. We denounce the modernist assertion that religion and science are incompatible, where figures such as Roger Bacon remind us that science and faith are complementary, not to mention the numerous Christian leaders who are prominent scientists and promoted scientific thought before the revolution. St. Bonaventure illustrates this well stating that, “Towards this speculation which the soul has concerning its own beginning, triune and one through the trinity of its powers, through which it is an image of God, one is assisted through the lights of the sciences, which perfect it and inform it and represent the Most Blessed Trinity in a threefold manner.”

Christian transhumanists are not looking to replace God with AI, immanentize the eschaton, or any other fallacious accusation that has been levied against us. Rather, we are using the gifts that our Lord Jesus Christ have given us to do His work. We pray and worship regularly. Around 75% of our membership attends church services and take communion (for those in sacramental denominations). With God’s grace, we can provide a future-looking approach to a faith, grounded in the intellectual tradition conferred upon us by our Platonic-influenced Church Fathers, and all those who have understood that all truth is God’s truth.

As we seek to bring about the reign of Christ’s person and principles in the future, where boundaries between humans and technology continue to blur, it is through our fruits we shall be known (Matt. 7:16)

Dustin Ashley has a Master of Divinity in Theology from Emmanuel Christian Seminary. He serves on the Board of Directors for the Christian Transhumanist Association. He has served as Editor for Transhumanity.net, and has contributed articles for Humanity+ and Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

From Image to Imitation

In Genesis, we are told we are made in God’s image. But this “image” is not a mirror—it is a mandate. We are meant to grow into it.

In Part 1, we saw how Imago Dei is best understood not as static essence but as dynamic potential. In Part 2, we argued that our godlikeness is revealed in our capacity to create explanatory knowledge—to understand and shape the world as co-creators with God.

But now the question becomes: How?
If we are meant to become more God-like—not in power alone, but in wisdom, love, and truth—how then shall we live?

The answer lies not in abstraction, but in formation.

The Spiral of Selfhood

Vision → Acts → Habits → Character → Identity → Destiny

This six-stage model echoes both scripture and spiritual tradition. It’s found in various forms in contemporary self-help. It’s the deep pattern of growth in every serious Christian life—and it is especially urgent in the age of accelerating technology and expanded power.

• Vision
  We start with a future vision, an image of us growing in the Imago Dei, the character and identity we aspire to. “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal … for which God called me heavenwards.” (Phil 3:13-14)

• Acts
  Every day offers choices in pursuit of that vision. Each act is a moral seed, sown into our future.
  “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give…” — 2 Corinthians 9:7

• Habits
  What you repeat, you become. Habits of prayer, sacrifice, discipline, attention to conscience and the Spirit’s voice.
  “Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we will reap.” — Galatians 6:9

• Character
  Habits crystallize into dispositions—virtues or vices. But character is not just effort—it is where the Spirit begins to work most deeply.
  “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience…” — Galatians 5:22–23
  These virtues are not manufactured. They are the evidence of the Spirit’s indwelling—but the Spirit mostly meets us in the trenches of discipline and obedience.

• Identity
  Over time, character becomes our identity, our story, our embodied reality.
  “Put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” — Ephesians 4:24

• Destiny
  Our long trajectory bends toward what we have become.
  “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.” — Philippians 1:6

This is the process by which the fallen image of God becomes the likeness of Christ.

Becoming by Doing: The Active Life of Faith

Christian faith is not merely belief—it is embodied commitment. As James reminds us, “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:17). Belief matures through action, and action feeds back into belief.

In the ancient world, this was called praxis. In modern terms, we might call it deliberate formation. In today’s technological world—where distraction, fragmentation, and indulgence are automated—we must reclaim a vision of moral effort and proactive self-improvement.

Christianity calls us not to rest in being made, but to rise into becoming.

A Christian Transhumanist Imperative:

Self-Formation in the Age of Power

Part 2 described humans as universal knowledge creators—creatures who can transform their world. Christian Transhumanism takes this further: we are not only knowledge creators but future shapers. We will soon have tools—biotech, neural augmentation, AI—that allow us to radically alter our own capacities.

The question will not be what can we do but who are we becoming?

For many, this vision begins with today’s emerging tools: language models assisting our thinking, AI-enhanced productivity, digital companions in our daily lives. But what lies ahead is more radical—brain-computer interfaces, genetic enhancements, and nanotechnology that may multiply human capacity a thousandfold.

To grasp this future takes a special kind of people. As yet un-conceived moral enhancement technologies will emerge. Christians must stand up and direct these towards the reign of Christ’s person and principles. The thought of these tools being wielded by beings lacking the key Christian archetypes is a recipe for a world war.

This is not medieval asceticism. It is the most forward-looking theology possible:
To prepare for power, we must deepen virtue. Such power demands not just capability, but character. And Christians must ask: what kind of people will we need to be to steward such tools in service of love, justice, and peace?

Emergence, Agency, and Grace

We may never solve the mystery of how free agency, or free will, arises. Like consciousness, it may be emergent, layered, and contextual. But scripture takes no interest in that debate. It assumes agency and commands responsibility.

“I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life.” — Deuteronomy 30:19

Even in a world of constraints on our free will—genetics, trauma, culture, systems—we are invited to participate in our own becoming. As with all helping professions, from teachers to psychologists, sports coaches, life coaches, or anyone in government or corporate leadership: We, God’s people, are invited to choose.

This is grace in motion.

We take inspiration from Christianity’s long scholarly tradition. Aquinas saw our agency as reason-guided within God’s plan, shaping virtuous habits through deliberate acts. Duns Scotus argued the will can choose independently of strict causes, enabling us to transcend biological or cultural pressures—whether resisting hedonism or societal norms.

Modern psychology concurs, finding those who believe in and grasp their agency have the fastest route to healing from trauma and depression. Neuroscience finds our frontal cortex can re-train habits stemming from our lower limbic system. Filling our minds with God’s thoughts will, with time, change who we are.

So: How Then Shall We Live?

Not as passive recipients of existence.
Not as self-made moralists grinding out virtue by force of will.
And not as spiritual tourists waiting for transformation to fall from the sky.

But as image-bearers actively becoming, walking in partnership with the Spirit of God.

Our future vision must lead us from acts to habits, to character, to identity, to destiny—all under the transforming presence of grace.

We begin with acts. But we never walk alone. The Spirit meets us in our efforts, fills the space between who we are and who we’re called to become, and brings to completion what we could never finish in our own strength.

This is not moralism. It’s not mere discipline.
It’s formation through union—with Christ, with His body, and with the Spirit who moves where He will.

So the invitation is clear:

• Live intentionally.

• Form holy habits.

• Cultivate the ground for transformation.

• Be open to the Spirit.

• Let God’s image take root in you and bloom.

• Be the kind of person who can wield the extraordinary tools of the future with God-honouring peace and justice, as humans meld ever closer with technology to create ways of life we dream of.

This is not a call to self-help.
It is a call to co-creation with God.

Because how you live is who you become.

And who you become is the first chapter of your eternal story.

• Jordan Daniel Wood discusses his upbringing in the Stone-Campbell Movement, and the relationship between that and his current Catholicism.

• Jordan shares insights on the relationship between creation and incarnation in Christian theology, and touches on the complexities of Christology and the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist.

• Jordan emphasizes the importance of both tradition and critical inquiry in faith.

• The implications of Christology for understanding creation. Christ's sinlessness and the sinful condition of his flesh.

• The incarnation as an ongoing process of transformation.

• All creation contains the potential for Christ's presence.

• Eschatological transformation involves the entire cosmos, not just individual souls.

• Human nature is not static; it is subject to profound transformation.

• The incarnation challenges our understanding of what it means to be human.

• Secularism reflects vestiges—even the deepest impulses—of Christian thought.

• The logic of incarnation transcends traditional metaphysical boundaries.

• Christology invites us to engage with modernity—and the future.

A Mormon Transhumanist and a Classical Christian Transhumanist discuss theosis, the nature of Christ, and the progress of God.

We also explore religious authority, the balance between radical Christianity and institutional stability, the nature of friendship and vulnerability, and the importance of narrative in re-enchanting the world.

Lincoln Cannon is a technologist and philosopher, and leading voice of Mormon Transhumanism. Read his essays at https://lincoln.metacannon.net

Takeaways:

• Nick Bostrom's concept of the Cosmic Host challenges traditional atheism.

• The Cosmic Host may include various forms of intelligence, including AI and extraterrestrial life.

• The ambiguity in defining higher intelligences can be a strength in theological discussions.

• Cooperation among intelligences is likely when power is distributed.

• The idea of a veil between humanity and higher intelligences resonates with traditional theology.

• Theosis is a central theme in both Mormon and broader Christian theology.

• Transformation into a divine-like state is a key aspect of many religious traditions.

• Continuity in our desires and motivations is essential for meaningful transformation.

• Eschatology plays a significant role in understanding the future of humanity.

• The relationship between God and humanity is characterized by an invitation to participate in divine glory. Christ embodies both humanity and divinity, allowing humanity to ascend to God.

• The divine nature is not confined by human categories, allowing for a vast cosmic host.

• Personal belief can evolve through philosophical inquiry and experiences.

• Authority in religion can have pragmatic value, despite personal conflicts.

• Changing perspectives on queer issues reflect broader cultural shifts within religious communities.

• Mormonism's historical practices provide a framework for understanding diverse relationships.

• Friendship requires vulnerability and the capacity for harm, making it a profound relationship.

• Narrative power is essential for re-enchanting the world and making sense of religious traditions.

• Religion must integrate with contemporary knowledge to remain relevant and powerful.

• The relationship with the divine may be more experiential and interconnected than previously thought.

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In Part 1 of this series, we explored how Christian Transhumanism reframes theological anthropology—our understanding of what it means to be human—in light of transformation, growth, and destiny. Rather than a static or fallen image, imago Dei was interpreted as dynamic: humanity is not just made in God's image, but made to become more fully like God through both spiritual and technological transformation.

In this post, we explore a powerful complement to that vision: the idea that humans are unique as explanatory knowledge creators. This idea, drawn from the work of physicist and philosopher David Deutsch, aligns with both Christian and Transhumanist notions of humanity’s calling—and fits with CTA’s commitment to Critical Rationalism.

A refresher on Critical Rationalism

Key terms:

· Realism (objective reality exists, it is the “engineered artifact” Universe)

· Fallibilism (we can’t be certain what that reality is)

· Error-correction (we continuously improve our best knowledge over time)

· Persons (are knowledge creators)

· Problem-Solving (the process of identifying problems in the network of current theories, and conjecturing new theories to resolve them)

· All life is problem-solving (and that’s beautiful)

· Explanatory Knowledge (consists of far-reaching models of how things work, is universal, and powerfully predictive)

· Only persons create explanatory knowledge.

To expand Critical Rationalism, we outlined a matrix, to identify different truth-seeking processes and their effectiveness in different disciplines. As the CTA wrestles with complex issues in religion, science, consciousness, creation, medicine, human flourishing, futurism, and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), we need an epistemic base to articulate the future.

From Tools to Explanations

In his landmark book The Beginning of Infinity, Deutsch argues that the key distinction between humans and other intelligent organisms is not tool-use, nor even problem-solving ability—it is the capacity to create explanatory knowledge. Animals can learn, imitate, and adapt, but only humans ask why. Only we build theories that explain the unseen.

This is no minor difference. It is the engine of science, philosophy, theology, and all progress. In Deutsch’s words, “humans are universal explainers”—capable of understanding any phenomenon in the universe, given the right knowledge and time. That capacity, he argues, is what makes human knowledge unbounded in principle, with our technology limited only by the laws of physics.

Imago Dei as Rational Co-Creatorship

Now compare this with Genesis 1:26–27:

“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule…”

Here, the imago Dei includes agency and stewardship. But it also implies rationality, relationality, and creativity. In other words: God is a Creator who speaks the world into being, names things, gives form and order. And humanity, in His image, is called to do the same—though from dust and its emergent entities, not ex nihilo.

As persons, our capacity for explanatory knowledge is not just a survival adaptation; it’s a theological vocation. We are made to seek truth, to generate new understanding, and to transform ourselves and our world in light of that knowledge. This is core to our telos as image-bearers.

In this we are “co-creators”, not just of families, communities, and technological artifacts, but the explanatory knowledge that undergirds and enables them.

Critical Rationalism as Spiritual Praxis

Deutsch, building on Karl Popper, advances a philosophy called critical rationalism. It holds that knowledge grows not by justification or authority, but by conjecture and refutation. We guess, we criticize, we improve. Knowledge evolves through error correction.

This is profoundly aligned with Christian discipleship. Scripture calls us to test everything (1 Thess. 5:21), to reason together (Isa. 1:18), and to be transformed by the renewing of our minds to test and approve… (Rom. 12:2). Faith, in this light, is not blind assent but a trustful openness to ongoing revelation and correction—a dynamic journey toward truth that results in real-world wise, loving and just actions (James 2:14-16) to build an amazing future.

Heavenly wisdom (explanatory knowledge) is “pure, peace-loving, considerate, submissive [to the truth, fallible], full of mercy and good fruit” (James 3:17). James links epistemic virtue (purity and sincerity) with moral virtue (mercy, peace-making).

Just as the scientific method presupposes fallibility and correction, so does sanctification. We "see through a glass darkly" (1 Cor. 13:12), yet we are being transformed from glory to glory (2 Cor 3:18).

A Theology of Fallibility

Critical rationalism builds-in epistemic humility. It assumes all our knowledge is provisional, always open to revision. This is not weakness—it is strength. In fact, it's what keeps progress moving.

Scripture also is saturated with epistemic humility—the recognition that human knowledge is limited, fallible, and often distorted by pride or sin. It not only encourages humility before God, but embeds it into the way we are meant to seek truth, act wisely, and correct ourselves as we learn and seek personal transformation and sanctification.

Throughout Proverbs, you do not possess wisdom; you seek it, and it begins by acknowledging your limitations, and being ‘fearful’ of God, that is, being in awe of truth, and expecting serious consequences when you stray from your best understanding of it.

Isaiah says, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:8-9). Paul says “Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought” (1Cor 8:2)

In Christian anthropology we are limited, fallen, and error-prone. But through grace and growth, we are capable of learning, repenting, growing, evolving. Even Christ "grew in wisdom" (Luke 2:52)—how much more should we?

So rather than resisting error, a critical-rational theology embraces it as a necessary step in the journey. We learn through failure. We grow through correction. In this way, explanatory knowledge is both a tool and a path for theosis (transformation ever closer to the perfection God intends).

Technology, Transformation, and Telos

In Christian Transhumanism, technology is not a threat to faith but a natural extension of human creativity and transformation. If we are explanatory knowledge co-creators, then technological evolution is a byproduct of our image-bearing nature. It is the externalization of mind, the embodiment of rational will.

But here lies the ethical tension: we must always ask not just what we can create, but what we should. Imago Dei gives us both power and responsibility. As we grow in knowledge—both explanatory and technological—we must also grow in love, wisdom, and humility. This is not progress instead of grace, but progress within grace.

Toward a Christian Epistemology of Hope

Finally, let us return to Deutsch’s deepest claim: that explanatory knowledge is open-ended. We are not at the end of history. The problems of today are solvable. The best ideas have yet to be created. The powerful explanatory knowledge we need for the future can, and should, be co-created by those who seek to best instantiate the archetype of Christ, to reveal God’s nature in the cosmos.

For Christians, this echoes Paul’s bold declaration:

“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine…” (Eph. 3:20)

We live in hope not because we know all the answers, but because we are created to seek them—and because the God who made us delights in co-creation.

Conclusion: Faith is Seeking Explanations

To be human is to seek meaningful explanations. To build explanations is to reach toward truth. To reach toward truth is to step further into the image of the One who is Truth.

Critical rationalism offers a modern epistemology that aligns with this spiritual calling. It affirms that we are fallible yet capable, limited yet transformational. In that light, Christian Transhumanism is a bold rediscovery of our original vocation:

Image-bearers. Co-creators. Knowledge seekers. Hope builders.

As we grow in the knowledge and love of God, we see humanity transformed by the creation of knowledge, as Bacon said, ‘by the sweat of our brow’. Explanatory Knowledge will continue to be our powerful undergirding in:

· Uplifting the downtrodden across the planet and ending poverty

· Healing diseases and building on the Christian tradition of hospitals

· How our societies can function as a reflection of the Body of Christ

· Defining the archetypes by which ASI will be a blessing to humanity

Let us pursue explanatory knowledge—in science, in theology, and in love.

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