A Note from Our Editor: “Transhumanism?” -- By: John Warwick Montgomery
Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 16:1 (Jun 2019)
Article: A Note from Our Editor: “Transhumanism?”
Author: John Warwick Montgomery
A Note from Our Editor: “Transhumanism?”
Just before Easter (2019), I attended a seminar sponsored by the Paris bar on the subject—I translate—“Transhumanism: the Human Being Raised to a New Level.”
The speakers included impressive scientific experts in the realms of cerebral stimulation, exoskeletal research, and genetic manipulation.
You may well ask why generally conservative lawyers would be flirting with such a subject. The answer, aside from the legal implications of the topic (more on that later), is probably—at least in part—that these days everyone wants to be on the cutting edge of futuristic ideas. “Of making many books”—and mod seminars—“there is no end.”
One would have thought that the impending Easter celebration might have suggested at least a word about fallen human nature (the first Adam) and the new creation instituted by the incarnation and the conquest of death by the Second Adam, the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.
Ah, no. Instead, we were presented with theories of human transformation. The evolutionary process, based on natural selection, is just too slow. Humans must take control, thereby moving beyond humanity as is to a hyper-humanity—a stage beyond mankind as we have known it (him? her?). By the application of the scientific wonders of our time, illness can be a thing of the past; perhaps death itself can be conquered.
A half-century ago, secular humanist Julian Huxley put it this way:
Up till now human life has generally been, as Hobbes described it, “nasty, brutish and short”; the great majority of human beings (if they have not already died young) have been afflicted with misery in one form or another—poverty, disease, ill-health, over-work, cruelty, or oppression. They have attempted to lighten their misery by means of their hopes and their ideals. The trouble has been that the hopes have generally been unjustified, the ideals have generally failed to correspond with reality.
The zestful but scientific exploration of possibilities and of the techniques for realizing them will make our hopes rational, and will set our ideals within the framework of reality, by showing how much of them are indeed realizable. Already, we can justifiably hold the belief that these lands of possibility exist, and that the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted. We are already justified in the conviction that human life as we know it in history is a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance; and that it could be transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge and comprehension, just as our modern control of physical nature based on science transcends the tentative fumblings ...
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