Transhumanism with the Episcopal Podcast
While I was working for the Archdiocese of Sydney, I did some behind-the-scenes work in getting The Episcopal Podcast with Bishop Richard Umbers. This series has underwent a number of refinements since my move over to the Diocese of Wagga Wagga and has now launched a third season.
After a while away from podcasting, I was kindly invited to guest host an episode or two. One of those episodes I did earlier this year dealt with the theme of transhumanism, and Bishop Richard and I had the pleasure of interviewing Prof. Jason T. Eberl, who is Director at the Albert Gnaegi Center for Healthcare Ethics in St Louis University in the United States.
The grist for the episode was an article Eberl wrote for the journal Christian Bioethics, provocatively entitled “Enhancing the Imago Dei: Can a Christian be a Transhumanist?”. More provocatively, the article hinted at some of the possible crossovers between orthodox Christianity and the transhumanist orthodoxies that are being disseminated at an academic and popular level.
The episode covered a number of areas, but the heart of the discussion was Eberl’s central point in the article, namely that the notion of the human person, made in the image of God, has to remain the indispensable grounding of the human person, if that human person is not to be lost to the imperatives demanded by many transhumanists.
One of the more fruitful points of discussion hovered around the theme of what Eberl called “substrate independence”, which is the idea of personhood surviving a transfer of consciousness to a different material platform (aka the “substrate”). The popular example given was the uploading of human consciousness from one’s body to a computer server. The question there was whether a person could still be a person after a transfer out of one’s body. This is where we highlighted some anthropological faultlines, such as Locke’s psychological account of personhood - where what matters is a continuity of consciousness in the course of the transfer - and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas’ animalistic account of personhood - for which bodies matter in a way that a person cannot remain a person when removed from one’s body. Within this context, we briefly discussed questions of the soul (ie are we just souls, or are our bodies part of our ensoulment?).
Other topics discussed include the imperative towards artificial enhancement of one’s body (especially those done for therapeutic purposes), and the questions that bioethics must ask concerning the ends of enhancement (ie does the enhancement a default human body, or transform it into another type of organism). In this context, Eberl helpfully made a distinction between “Transhumanism with a small t”, which speaks of enhancing the body to enhance human personhood, and “Transhumanism with a big T”, for which enhancement slides into a radical transformation of human nature, removing things such a mortality.
The latter half of the episode looked at some of the bridging points between Christians and transhumanists. Eberl spoke of the way that both transhumanists and Christians share a drive for perfection, though they differ on the mode by which that perhection is reached, and the place of human agency. For Christians, perfection comes as a result of God’s donation which we receive, which presumes disposition of humility, and treats frailty as actually a gift not to be overcome. By contrast, the transhumanist account of perfection presumes that there is no value in frailty and its accompanying limitations. Because there is no value in those limitations, they must overcome on our own terms, which presumes a disposition of hubris.
In seeking a fruitful bridging point, the question is asked: can there be a possibility of enhancing capacity of being a co-creator with God?
These and other points are covered in the episode, which you can listen to in full here.
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