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Here is a summary of the video I posted on Facebook yesterday:

Facebook has come up with a device that is capable of transforming our thoughts into text and images. Technological advancements are surpassing even the wildest imaginations of George Orwell. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has developed a device that, with the help of artificial intelligence, can replicate almost identical copies of the images we see, solely by reading our brain signals. The device doesn’t even require any surgical procedures like Elon Musk’s brain chips, as it reads our brain signals remotely.

The video also discussed a device developed by researchers at a Texas university, which similarly reads our thoughts remotely and transforms them into text. If a person hears, reads, or thinks a phrase such as “I just ate a delicious apple,” the device is able to encode it from our brain signals and convert it into text on a computer. The result is not always 100% accurate, but it captures the main idea and sometimes entire sentences verbatim. It’s a convenient invention for those who have lost their ability to speak and for the rest of us who dislike current slow text input methods.

However, it also signifies the end of our privacy as our thoughts are no longer safe from criminal hackers, big corporations, or governments.

Content

1. Transhumanism, Hitler, and the Serpent of Paradise
2. Homo Deus
3. Was Sir Francis Bacon an early transhumanist?
4. Christian Transhumanism
5. Dr. James Tour enables paralyzed to walk again
6. Eschatological Realism versus Eschatological Fantasy
7. Conclusion
8. Footnotes

Transhumanism, Hitler, and the Serpent of Paradise

These kinds of technological advancements evoke more fear than excitement in many of us. Each of us has seen Hollywood science fiction movies depicting a dystopian future society where privacy is a relic of the past, and the masses live in a technocratic dictatorship controlled by governments and big corporations. In many ways, such a society is already a reality today in China, and it is taking shape before our eyes in the West as well. Although I have believed since childhood that technological progress would lead the world towards the totalitarian society of the beast predicted in Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, today my thoughts are somewhat more nuanced. I would go so far as to call myself a Christian transhumanist.

I am already well-versed in the history of the transhumanist movement. I wrote about it in my first book ten years ago, which was freely available on my website for over eight years. In it, I documented how the origin of the movement was in the “scientific racism” and social Darwinist eugenics of the early 20th century and how it was an updated version of eugenics for the 21st century. While eugenics sought to create a master race through selective breeding and racial hygiene, transhumanism seeks to do so through fields such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and genetic technology. Cyborgs, more commonly known from science fiction (like my favorite childhood character Robocop), which are hybrids of human and machine, are one example of the “enhanced” humans envisioned by transhumanists. The fusion of technology and biology is believed to enhance human physical and cognitive abilities and ultimately even create new senses.

Some of the ideas promoted by transhumanists already verge on utopia, promising eternal life and the evolution of the human race into gods. Transhumanist Patrick Wood has stated: “Transhumanism is the application of science to the human condition to achieve characteristics of immortality, omniscience, and omnipresence to produce a god-like post-human race.” For this reason, transhumanism is also called the posthumanist movement. It aims to create a new human. Such utopian ideas are not at all a new phenomenon. Adolf Hitler, who supported eugenics, the 20th Century predecessor of transhumanism, and justified the Holocaust with it, also stated:

Humans are becoming gods. Those who see national socialism as just a political movement know very little about it. It is even more than a religion. It signifies the will to recreate humanity.

In fact, thousands of years before Hitler, the serpent of Paradise tempted humanity into sin with the same promise:

The serpent said to the woman, “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil.”¹

Homo Deus

How can I then say that I support such a satanic idea? Because Satan is just a mimic, seeking to steal from God what originally belonged to Him, and corrupt it into his own image. First of all, all the above-mentioned satanic lies are mere distortions of the attributes that God Himself associated to the human race in Creation of man and and to those who are adopted as children of God in the redemptive work of Christ. Below are a few examples:

• So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.²
• I said, “You are gods, and all of you are sons of the Most High.³
• What is man that You think of him, and a son of man that You are concerned about him? Yet You have made him a little lower than God [KJV: “little lower than the angels”] and You crown him with glory and majesty!⁴
•  Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?⁵

These passages may even shock some Christians. However, likeness of God does not mean equality with God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). The Bible says that humans are mere worms and maggots in comparison to God’s superiority.⁶ But at the same time, God elevates humans to incomprehensible value by calling us His image. Jewish founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has said that this biblical story of humans being created in God’s image has inspired him in his technological innovations and is one of the reasons why he abandoned the atheism of his youth.

The same point of man being created in God’s image was raised by the leading Jewish intellectuals in America to Elon Musk, who said it spoke directly to his heart as the world’s leading technologist, whose primary goal is to promote the well-being and positive future of humanity through his technological innovations. We can unpack this idea into the following deductive reasoning.

• God is the creator of the universe.
• God created man in His own image.
• Thus, man is also a creator.

Or,

• God created man in his own image.
• Humans have an innate ability and need to create new things.
• Thus, the human desire to create reflects God’s creative nature.

Human innate creativity encompasses almost everything from science to art and philosophy. Humans have had the need to create new tools, buildings, cities, civilizations, books, ideas, culture, devices, technology, etc. If we deny this innate need of humans, we deny a part of ourselves. All our creations from pyramids to SpaceX’s reusable rockets have emerged as a result of this human creative impulse. Thus, our technological inventions are not any less natural, but merely an extension of our humanity, enabling us to become rulers of the creation, as God entrusted to humanity in the Garden of Eden.

God did not command humanity to live in some kind of harmony with nature like Tarzan with his chimpanzees, but to take control of nature as rulers of the creation. Taking control of nature includes, among other things, its scientific observation and exploration, which is often encouraged by Hebrew scriptures at many points.

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.⁷

Was Sir Francis Bacon an early transhumanist?

Animals only act according to their instincts and basic needs, but only humans were given the ability to observe the starry skies to read from them the times, days, and years and to explore from them life’s greatest mysteries of why we are here and what is our place in the universe. This is how the fathers of the scientific revolution also understood the relationship of the natural sciences to the Holy Scriptures. Known as the father of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon, stated the following in the early 1600s:

With the fall into sin, man fell at the same time from the state of innocence and from dominion over creation. However, both losses can still be partially corrected in this life; the former can be redeemed through faith, and the latter through art and science.

The industrial and technological revolution of the 1700s and 1800s emerged as a result of the new ideas that revolutionized the world following the preceding scientific revolution. The ongoing era of the fourth industrial revolution is thus a continuation of the scientific revolution of the 1500s and 1600s. Francis Bacon did not believe that the scientific and technological revolution would free humanity from its own sin, or make us more moral beings, as that would only be possible through the finished work of Jesus Christ at Golgotha and our faith and trust in His atonement of our sins.

However, the return of this biblical view of humanity as image of God to the center of our worldview would help us achieve dominion over creation, which was taken from us as a result of the expulsion from Paradise. With the return to this God-given dominion, we would ultimately have the opportunity to undo the curse placed on creation during the Fall, which had made nature the ultimate enemy of humanity. This seemed to be the core belief of Christians like Francis Bacon in the 1600s. After discussing the topic with the AI program ChatGPT, it said the following:

It is true that some early thinkers of the scientific revolution can be interpreted as forerunners of posthumanism or early transhumanists when considering their views on science, technology, and the human relationship to these.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), known for promoting the scientific method, expressed views that could be seen as anticipating later posthumanist themes. Bacon emphasized the connection between knowledge and power and advocated for the use of technology and science to improve human life. His ideas about human control and nature have been interpreted in ways that also relate to transhumanist themes.

As you mentioned, some early thinkers of the scientific revolution believed that scientific and technological progress could free humanity from many diseases and sufferings. This view may have been based on the idea that the increase of scientific knowledge and technological development could help restore humanity to its original glory or free it from the consequences of sin.

However, it is important to note that the context of these thinkers was strongly linked to the cultural, religious, and philosophical currents of their time. While they may have supported scientific progress, their views may not necessarily fully align with modern transhumanist ideas, which emphasize the possibilities of technology to surpass human biological and intellectual limits.

Christian Transhumanism

Today, some Christians who are scientists and theologians also identify as transhumanists. There are already many reflections by Christian scientists, theologians, and philosophers on this topic. For example, on the website https://www.christiantranshumanism.org/blog/, you can find numerous writings on this subject. Even the origin of the term “transhumanism” can be traced back to the writings of the Catholic Dante in the Middle Ages, rather than to the British eugenicist and atheist Julian Huxley’s writings, as is commonly believed. Christian (and secular) transhumanists often draw from Isaiah’s prophecies of the future messianic age.

Then the eyes of those who are blind will be opened, and the ears of those who are deaf will be unstopped. Then those who limp will leap like a deer, and the tongue of those who cannot speak will shout for joy. For waters will burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.⁸

Transhumanists believe that this prophecy will come true through scientific and technological breakthroughs, the emergence of which is already visible to all people closely following technology. The device mentioned at the beginning of the article is capable, for example, of making it possible thast “the tongue of those who cannot speak will shout for joy.” The device converts thoughts into text, and AI now also enables the conversion of text into spoken speech with different intonations and tones of the natural human voice. Even the “eyes of the blind” can now be opened using biotechnology, i.e., bionic eyes (see the video below). All of these technologies are still in their infancy, but within a few decades, they can fully replicate our natural vision or speech capabilities.

Dr. James Tour enables paralyzed to walk again

Dr. James Tour is a renowned messianic Jew (a Jew who believes in Jesus Christ) chemist and nanotechnology pioneer at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He has a YouTube channel with over 100,000 subscribers and is one of the leading Christian apologists today, alongside Oxford mathematician Professor John Lennox, philosopher William Lane Craig, and other notable figures. In 2014, he was voted as one of the “50 most influential scientists in the world today.” He specializes in nanorobot research, and in 2017, his research group won the first-ever nanocar race held in France. These molecular machines, with four wheels, are even 20,000-50,000 times thinner than a human hair (just slightly thicker than a strand of DNA), can travel at speeds of up to 0.014 millimeters per hour at their best. Tour has stated:

I build molecules for a living and I can tell you how challenging it is. I have deep respect for how God has created this through creation. Only a beginner who knows nothing about science would say that science takes away faith. If you truly study science, it brings you closer to God.

In his lecture on the complexity of cell and molecular function, Tour will talk about his work:

We want to do the work of Jesus Christ. We want to make the lame walk and the blind see. We have already made the deaf hear. We are trying to build technologies that can do this. This is real. We do these kinds of things. We can cut a rat’s spinal cord in half and within three weeks the rat will have 21 degrees of mobility from a possible maximum of 19 degrees. So we restore almost full mobility within three weeks.

Dr. Tour recently appeared as a guest on the popular Tim Cast IRL podcast’s co-host Ian Crossland. They discussed the miraculous possibilities of graphene, a carbon atom, as a building material and superconductor. Graphene is the world’s strongest known material, and James Tour’s research team was able to use it to reconnect a rat’s severed spinal cord, resulting in nearly full mobility within three weeks. Crossland, who does not believe in the Bible or Jesus Christ, exclaimed, “It’s like the paralyzed are walking, the dead hear, and the blind see,” loosely referencing Isaiah 35:6 and Matthew 11:5.

I have never heard James Tour call himself a transhumanist, but fundamentally he is also a Christian transhumanist because he believes that scientists and technologists can fulfill some messianic prophecies of Isaiah. I myself have come to the same conclusion entirely logically. If humans were originally created in the image of God and as His co-rulers in Paradise, why would it be unscriptural or blasphemous to teach that humans will have an equally significant role as the co-rulers with God in Christ millennial kingdom of the earth when the lost conditions of Paradise will be restored on earth? Diminishing the role of humankind to something much lesser would not be consistent with the biblical view of humanity whom God “made a little lower than God [or angels] and crowned them with glory and majesty” (Psalm 8:-5). Many of us may have a tendency to spiritualize the prophecies about the coming Messianic age.

Eschatological Realism versus Eschatological Fantasy

We may think that Jesus will establish on earth some kind of medieval fantasy or fairytale world where He rides on His white horse from village to village laying His hands on the blind, deaf, and paralyzed to heal them. But He did all of this already during His first visit on earth. In fact, Matthew 11:5 states that He already fulfilled the prophecies of Isaiah about the deaf, blind, and lame. However, biblical prophecies often have both an initial fulfillment and a final fulfillment. In first-century Judea, Jesus had to confirm His message and claims about who He was through supernatural miracles.

In the coming millennial kingdom, there will no longer be a need for miracles because all who dwell on the earth will already know that Jesus Christ has conquered death and returned to earth as the Lord of lords and King of kings. He will no longer need to prove this by raising the dead or healing the sick. However, Jesus did promise that His followers would eventually do even greater works than He did:

Truly, truly I say to you, the one who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I am going to the Father.⁹

As Dr. Tour said, “We want to do the work of Jesus Christ. We want to make the lame walk and the blind see. We have already made the deaf hear. We are trying to build technologies that can do this.” In addition, an alternative view of eschatology would seem quite nonsensical to me. It suggests that when Jesus returns to Earth, he would come as an angry Luddite or eco-terrorist. When our Lord realizes – like many others – that machines, artificial intelligence, and medical advances have taken away His work as the miracle worker, He will crush all human-made machines and restore the Earth to a pre-industrial “medieval idyll.”

The anti-technology manifesto of eco-terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” becomes the new Bible of that society. Perhaps then, “arrogant scientists” like James Tour will be thrown into the fires of hell for “mocking God” with their technoutopian and post-humanist heresies. This vision of the future sounds to me like an Amish version of Islamic eschatology. According to Islamic eschatology, Jesus returns and first breaks the crosses of the Christian churches and then kills all the pigs on Earth (I have no idea what that “Jesus” has against pigs).

I have nothing against the Amish per se. I think it would be quite refreshing to withdraw from civilization for a while and go back in time 200 years. I just aim to be an eschatological realist. Many of us might live under very romantic and mistaken ideas about what life was like on Earth before the comforts brought by modern technology (who among us would be willing to live without electricity, running water, or modern healthcare). This does not mean that the rapid progress of technology does not also bring many social problems and challenges. The negative impacts of social media on the mental health of young people have been observed in quite a few studies already. However, all the problems related to technological development are also solvable by humans. We can build better security mechanisms against criminal hackers or viruses, and we can improve privacy with virtual private networks (VPNs).

I do not believe that new technology needs to automatically lead to increased government control and corporate dominance, even if we were to give it an Orwellian license to read our thoughts. When considering, for example, large language models, there are already 100% private models like PrivateGPT available, which allow for completely private conversations without the user’s input data being used to improve the model, and it doesn’t even require an internet connection to function. In the best-case scenario, future AI will be the personal and confidential assistant of each individual, not some “gossip-monger” that shares all private conversations with third parties, such as advertising firms, governments, or intelligence services.

Ultimately, how much we let technology control our lives and relationships should be entirely within our power. But in my view, Christian eschatology encourages us to approach technological development optimistically, even though in the short term we have reason to be very cautious about the direction in which we allow it to evolve and whom we allow it to serve. In the short term, it may indeed contribute to the emergence of the worst technocratic dictatorship and surveillance society in history, but in the long term, we have no reason to fear it. It can help us to create the peace, abundance, and prosperity on the earth that is foretold in the Book of Isaiah, and as discussed by Elon Musk and Benjamin Netanyahu in their September panel discussion about the dangers and opportunities of the age of AI. Prophet Isaiah and apostle John did not prophesy a thousand-year dystopia or post-apocalyptic hell but a thousand-year utopia and Paradise.

Conclusion

I’ll attempt to crystallize my view on trans- or posthumanism. Christians should discern between two forms of transhumanism: Satanic transhumanism and Christian transhumanism. Dr. James Tour isn’t biblically wrong in suggesting that Christians are tasked to follow in their Master’s footsteps and perform the same deeds He did, such as restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, mobility to the paralyzed, resurrecting the dead, preaching the gospel to the poor, and liberating the oppressed. The Christian church has been doing this for 2000 years. But today, for the first time in history, many of these messianic promises can also be achieved through science and technology.

This doesn’t preclude God from performing miracles today or in the future. It doesn’t mean that Christians shouldn’t lay hands on the sick and pray for their healing. These two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, just as Christians shouldn’t prevent people from seeking medical help after they’ve prayed for healing of some person. God can heal us by using medical doctors and He can heal us without medical doctors. Technological and medical advancements not only promise more effective treatments for the sick and disabled but also help us to overcome many physical limitations that have constrained humanity for thousands of years. In this sense, transhumanists aren’t entirely wrong in suggesting that this will enable the birth of a god-like superhuman or “human 2.0.”

This notion isn’t contradictory to the Holy Scriptures, which say that God made humans “a little lower than God,” crowned them with glory and honor, and made them rulers over His creations. Paul spoke of all creation groaning and in labor pains until the children of God are revealed to govern this creation cursed by our sins.¹⁰ He also spoke of a new human, a new Adam, which is Jesus Christ, and how through Him we might also partake in this new and improved type of human being. ¹¹This biblical concept about the man and his role in the Creation of God, helped give rise to the humanist movement during the Renaissance and should therefore guide also post-humanism movement in the 21st century.

The prefix “post-” in post-humanism shouldn’t imply the corruption of the human race. The “new human” should not be a “Frankenstein’s monster” created according to our sinful desires and impulses. It should be “better” only in the sense that it brings humanity closer to the original state of innocence and perfection God created for humans in the Garden of Eden. For this reason, I distinguish Christian transhumanism from its satanic variant. The latter seeks to create Frankenstein’s monster without setting Judeo-Christian ethical boundaries on what is permitted and what is not. If we can create a human-animal hybrid using genetic technology, Satanic transhumanism sees no ethical barriers for such experiments.

It is also noteworthy that in Christian transhumanism, the primary promise isn’t that humans might become gods but that God became human and through Him, everyone might become one with Him by accepting the reconciliation with God that He offers us through the cross of Calvary. Satanic transhumanism is a rebellion against the Creator of the universe. It boasts, “we shall not surely die, but become like God, knowing good and evil.” We have already seen where that lie leads humanity. When Satan offers us divinity independent of God, God offers us His likeness, that is achievable only in communion with Him. The only way to communion with God is through the atoning blood of His Son Jesus Christ. The proud and godless won’t inherit the blessings of the coming world, but to the humble, He gives grace.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the gentle, for they will inherit the earth.¹²

Footnotes

1. Genesis 3.4-5 ↩︎
2. Genesis 1:27 ↩︎
3. Psalm 82:6 ↩︎
4. Psalm 8:4-5 ↩︎
5. John 10:34-36 ↩︎
6. Job 25:6, Isaiah 41:14 ↩︎
7. Proverbs 25:2 ↩︎
8. Isaiah 35:5-6 ↩︎
9. John 14:12 ↩︎
10. Romans 8:21 ↩︎
11. 1 Corinthians 15:47, Ephesians 4:24 ↩︎
12. Matthew 5:3-5 ↩︎