Volume 50 | Number 1 | January—March 2022

Inglés Español

Transhumanism: Its Presuppositional Ideology


By Dr. H. T. Spence

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do (Gen. 11:5, 6).

Likewise, we may ask when will God “come down” to see what man is doing today? How far will God permit man to go? How far is “too far”? When will it be said, “her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities” (Rev. 18:5)? The twenty-first century is becoming more and more a century of atheism, more specifically new atheism. By denying the very existence of God, man rejects God in his origin, his sustained existence, and even his destiny of judgment. Man has confidently mapped the human DNA sequence; he now seeks to reorganize and manipulate it for his own vain desires and purposes. Man has entered areas once assumed to be reserved to Sovereignty. Man proudly asserts that he can create, sustain, and destine the course of humanity!

Man’s massive epistemological accrual in science and technology catapults him into powers and capacities heretofore believed impossible. His thrill of accomplishments has deceived his arrogant imagination to believe he can take the place of God, even creating “an image and likeness” of himself. He seeks to perpetuate eternally his image and likeness into a realm free from all weakness, illness, aging, and death. These are the passionate pursuits of modern man.

“Every Imagination of the Thoughts of His Heart”

Since the aftermath of World War II, we have witnessed a number of radical paradigm shifts in various areas of human living. Paralleling a population increase from two billion (1960) to nearly nine billion (2022) have been accelerated advances in science and technology. Deepening powers of sin throughout society have eroded wisdom and morality to the point that man boasts of bridging the infinite gap between fallen humanity and Deity. There has been a paradigm shift not only in the concept of what a human is but also in the philosophical and presuppositional thinking that has welcomed a transhuman imaginary hope.

God made man’s brain and mind with the ability to process thought through linear logic that included opposites and absolutes. Throughout the past three hundred years, man has been casting off linear-logical thinking to curiously explore the wastelands of dialecticism and existentialism. When one’s presupposition becomes false and illogical, everything that is built upon that presupposition will be false. The history of philosophy records that mankind has often followed illogical thinking. These forms of philosophy have created a diversity of thought that has drifted into day-by-day human living. This drifting is increasingly evident in our present generation: we have entered a dark chasm of the most irrational form of logic; it has become the pervasive presupposition in every compartment of epistemology and logic. This philosophical wasteland of existentialism has birthed the present-day darkness and wilderness of Postmodernism. This final frontier of deathly thinking has become an era radically changing the perspective of a multitude of human concepts, including that of humanity itself.

Postmodern man is now determined to enter a new and unprecedented scientific movement concerning the very definition of man himself, thereby creating a new philosophical system. Man is determined to make null and void the confining weaknesses that plague him; he is seeking a posthuman existence permanently delivered from these weaknesses, aging, and even death.

As observed in our previous article, man believes he has been limited in the evolutionary process across the past 10,000 years; therefore, he must now transcend into what he believes to be the next evolutionary phase of humanity. The ruling presupposition of evolution is that all living things have been evolving into more complex species since the first life form emerged; man today is curious about his next potentially more complex evolution.

Man has reached a height of epistemology that has convinced him this is the time to take control of natural evolution, for man cannot wait additional millions of years for nature to run its course. The ensuing duty of the transhumanists is to assist evolution in accelerating the process, especially in the species of man. Is the ever-growing knowledge of man at a pinnacle of power that it is now possible for man to “create” a human that would be far beyond anything that even nature could ever produce?

The Ideological Presuppositions Controlling Transhumanism

One presupposition from their worldview arises in anthropology. How do they define man and with what perspective is the subject of man approached? In 1982, Time magazine declared the computer its “Man of the Year.” This revealed that the elite world simply viewed man as a complex “bio-machine,” merely a higher link in the chain of evolution. Still, he acknowledges that at this point in the evolutionary chain he is limited both physically and intellectually by his genetic properties. Could man be chemically manipulated through technology to improve himself and even to surpass his human limitations?

Max More (born Max T. O’Connor) is considered a philosopher and futurist who speaks and writes much on the impact of emerging technologies. He was born in 1964 in Bristol, England, attended Oxford University, but ultimately received his doctorate from the University of Southern California. His dissertation was entitled The Diachronic Self: Identity, Continuity, and Transformation. This dissertation examines several issues that concern present-day transhumanists. He is also the founder of Extropy Institute and is a spokesman for the Transhumanist movement.

Max More summarizes his presupposition concerning man:

This body is not sacred. The way we are is not some kind of God-given plan; it’s really a pure, random accident. We take two sets of genes, and we shuffle them, and something comes out. Sometimes it’s a wonderful product. Sometimes it has a hole in the heart . . . or tendencies towards extreme anger, has addictive problems, can’t concentrate. . . . To say that’s normal, that’s sacred, that’s good, to me is rather absurd. It’s random, it’s not a plan. . . . So genetic engineering seems to be one of the most moral things we can do.

More is telling us that there is no identification of man with a Supreme Being, that we are no different from other living things, that there is no “intrinsic value” to humanity, and that he is no better than “any other animal.” This is what the transhumanists believe about man.

The transhumanists’ heroes are men such as Friedrich Nietzsche. Ironically, Nietzsche is a monument to final imbecility in his life. He was a man of physical and mental weakness who longed for a “superman” that must ideally come to mankind. Nietzsche idealized physical and mental strength; these became the axiology of his life, the value or worth of human existence. Such a belief is another presupposition of the transhumanists.

The transhumanists also presuppose the universe is the product of evolution, its vastness being the result of random process. With no God behind its existence, there is no purpose for its existence; there is to be no continuity of meaning of its present with the future. Their view of cosmology is one of having nothing to do with other forms of life including man. What man does will not affect other parts of cosmological existence.

Another presupposition of the transhumanists is the matter of “knowledge.” Since man is not identified with God nor has a soul or any accountability to a metaphysical Being, man himself is the great complex machine that is capable of a vast increase of knowledge, perhaps even coming to omniscience. There is no realm where epistemology is unlimited; therefore, there is a point in the accrual of knowledge where a limit is reached. Is there a possibility that man could gain through an enhanced brain a storage of all knowledge that exists?

But what about the mind? And is there a soul to be reckoned with? Dr. Robert J. White (the first neurosurgeon to perform a full-head transplant on a monkey) is a believer in the Transhumanist movement. His concept of the soul of a man is that it is a product of the tangible electrical signals of the brain. He further states,

Consciousness can be transplanted, obviously personality . . . can be transferred, and so you might ask, where does this bring us as far as the human spirit or soul goes? I guess you could argue, it can be transplanted.

To him, basically the brain tissue is the essence of the human person.

Is it ethical for man to enter these “God” venues through science and technology? Or, if man is coming to the knowledge of these things, should man even be concerned with bioethics amidst his increasing abilities and desires to exterminate that which hinders him from being the greatest evolutionary species? These are the questions that at one time caused some concern, but now they are being laid aside. We must remember that transhumanists do not believe in God, and therefore there are no true ethical standards above man himself.

Another spokesman for the Transhumanists movement is Kyle Munkittrick. He wrote the following in an article entitled “When Will We Be Transhuman? Seven Conditions for Attaining Transhumanism”:

Using a scaled system based on traits like sentience, empathy, self-awareness, tool use, problem solving, social behaviors, language use, and abstract reasoning, animals (including humans) will be granted rights based on varying degrees of personhood. When African grey parrots, gorillas, and dolphins have the same rights as a human toddler, a transhuman friendly rights system will be in place.

How will all these pursuits be seen and received by society? Within evolution there is the belief of the “survival of the fittest.” How far will this be taken in the future? If an individual is weaker than another in his body, will the weaker one be annihilated? Will the weaker in mind be exterminated while the stronger in mind is permitted to live? Who gives the final decision concerning who lives and who dies? In evolution the strong live and the weaker die. And yet, the presupposition is made clear: “Man’s only inherent freedom is the freedom to survive, using whatever means available.”

The transhumanists do believe in a concept of depravity, but certainly not from the biblical view. To them, because the problem in man is physical, man needs a physical solution. Man believes he has now come to an hour where he can overcome these limitations and enter a posthuman species rising above this “depravity” and saving himself from weaknesses and limitations. This is his fallen view of “salvation.”

Another presupposition of the transhumanists concerns their view of God. To them a sovereign, supreme, personal God does not exist. Yet they do believe in an imminent transition from transhumanist to posthumanist, whereby man himself will attain deity and become materialistically a god. Man, he believes, could become as the God presented in the Bible with all His “omni” attributes. In speaking of this matter, transhumanist Belinda Silbert, a TV and radio psychic-medium (as well as an opera singer), wrote an article entitled “Transhumanism as a Bridge to Divinity.” In this article she stated,

To “see eternity in a grain of sand” is all very well, but to LIVE in that eternity and to experience it multi-dimensionally (with senses that are not dulled by the confines of the present human paraphernalia) would be true bliss. Responsible Omniscience; Omnipresence; Omnipotence; and Benevolence would be the totality of the sensory apparatus of the new human.

Wesley J. Smith, an American lawyer, author, and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, commented on Silbert’s statement in his article called “Transhumanists Want to Become God”:

Transhumanism is a collective of (mostly) naked materialists who hope science and technology will replace the deeper meaning they lost by rejecting metaphysical beliefs. Transhumanists harbor futuristic dreams of making themselves immortal and possessing what would now be thought of in superpowers through technological recreation. . . . I find it all rather sad. And worrying. Transhumanism harbors blatantly eugenic ambitions and as part of its theology . . . it angrily rejects human exceptionalism. . . . I used the word “theological” above because in many ways transhumanism is a quasi religion. It has dogma, eschatology, and yearns for a material New Jerusalem of immortal life. And if Belinda Silbert is to be believed, they want to become gods.

Perhaps this is the purest essence of transhumanism.

Charles Robert Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Julian Huxley

Charles Darwin’s writings prove he saw evolution as a system rather than a science, a philosophy rather than a history. As a child, Darwin was noted for his incessant lying; this habit likely followed him throughout life. His father shuffled him from school to school, endeavoring to train him in the classics, and even in medicine. Academic poverty plagued his youthful endeavors. As a final possibility, his father sent him to Cambridge University to prepare for Holy Orders in the Church of England. But this time only enlarged his increasing sense of emptiness. Most of his time was spent sporting around with the wrong crowd. In 1831, Charles Darwin accepted an invitation on the HMS Beagle for a five-year voyage. He went as an undistinguished candidate for the Holy Orders of the Church of England, not as a distinguished scientist. His observations commingled with excessive plagiarism of other authors (including Robert Chambers, Patrick Matthew, and Edward Blyth) produced his critical work On The Origin of Species (1859). This writing was founded upon the premise that man can explain God’s creation without acknowledgment of God and His revealed Word. According to his own writings (particularly his letters to Joseph Hooker), Darwin had become so obsessed with his inaccurate presupposition that his mind daily ground out distorted views just to prove his point. His presentation on evolution was prime material for an emerging post-Enlightenment modern world that empowered abounding humanist philosophies directed against God. Darwin wrote the following concerning the Bible:

The Old Testament . . . from its manifestly false history of the earth . . . and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred book of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian. . . . The New Testament . . . indeed I hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. V, 1979, p. 495).

It is interesting to note that Darwin ultimately died from bites received on this initial voyage that commenced his war against the Creator. God simply used the bug named triatoma infestans that injected the slow-killing trypanosoma parasite that causes Chagas disease. Found in one’s blood even many years after infection, the disease causes lassitude and heart blockage and prevents normal function of the intestines. In 1873, Darwin suffered a heart attack from the disease and died of another attack in 1882. Yet Darwin was buried in the prestigious Westminster Abbey, and among the pallbearers were his mutual cohorts of error, Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley. Ironically, a man who hated Christ received a Christian burial with atheistic advocates leading the procession.

Darwin provided the End Time with a pseudo-scientific soil in which to plant the seeds of atheism, evolution, and the prelude philosophy of transhumanism. Though Darwin died, his malignant philosophy infiltrated all aspects of modern thinking. Sir Julian Huxley, the British biologist, gave the following perspective of Darwin:

The concept of evolution was soon extended into other than biological fields. Inorganic subjects such as the life-histories of stars and formation of the chemical elements on the one hand, and on the other hand subjects like linguistics, social anthropology, and comparative law and religion, began to be studied from an evolutionary angle, until today we are enabled to see evolution as a universal and all-pervading process. Our present knowledge indeed forces us to the view that the whole of reality is evolution, a single process of self-transformation. (The Twilight of Evolution, Henry Morris, 1963, pp.14,15).

We earlier wrote of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who was a strong defender of Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection. In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche introduced the idea of what he called Ubermensch, the German word meaning “Overman,” “Superman,” or “Superhuman.” In this work, Nietzsche’s main character declares,

I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?

Amidst his insanity Nietzsche believed that man could evolve into this Overman, this superman, or superhuman species. Is evolution to be blamed for selecting the wrong traits from the gene pool? Has man come to an hour where he must utilize science and technology to select the perfect traits? Does man now believe that it is possible to create a superhuman species?

A third man must be noted in this trilogy of early voices for transhumanism. Rising from the Huxley family was Julian, a twentieth-century biologist who laid hold of Nietzsche’s diabolical philosophy to become one of the founding fathers of the Transhumanist movement. His father Aldous and his grandfather Thomas were Neo-archaeologists, or the more contemporary term anthropologist. It was his grandfather Thomas who first coined the term Neanderthal. But many believe that Julian was the one who influenced contemporary thought. In the early 1950s, Julian became the first Director-General of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, Cultural Organization). It was in this appointment that he was exposed to the modern technology that had been developed during the recent World War. In fact, he was partnered with Charles Galton Darwin, the grandson of Charles Robert Darwin, to investigate technology’s potential to evolve mankind into Nietzsche’s Uberman. In 1927, Huxley wrote the book Religion Without Revelation, which became a classic writing of his contemporary times. In his updated version of 1957, he made the following marks:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way—but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps Transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.

Transhumanism versus Christianity

It should be clear now that transhumanism is not only atheistic in its conception but also aggressively anti-God in its fabric of belief. As in so many areas of life, transhumanism is endeavoring to explain the problems of humanity; it is willing to invest tens of billions of dollars to eradicate the problems of man. But this vain hope cannot happen: the solution is endeavoring to work it out without God. Yes, it is true that we all deteriorate with age, we all suffer from disease and illness, and we all will die. No one in the natural can live forever.

Nevertheless, within man there is an unconscious desire for “eternity” of existence; even Ecclesiastes 3:11 reveals that God has placed this “eternity” in our hearts as part of our creation. But the transhumanist is heading in the wrong direction to find the root of our humanity and the root of our weaknesses. Behind all of man’s problems is the problem of sin; man brought sin into existence because of his disobedience to God. Suffering and death are the result of sin; and until the problem of sin is addressed, suffering and death will not be defeated and destroyed.

The transhumanists believe the problem is man’s biological limitation, not his spiritual condition. But we are all finite creatures and will always be so. God alone is infinite and eternal; He alone has the power to give life. Man can perform many wonders with the world of chemical drugs and from the realm of technology; but he will never be able to create life. Only the God of Heaven can do so.

The transhumanists believe we have come to an hour in history where man soon will be able to create life. The principle of “life” may be given a different definition than what it is now, but that too will be part of the transition from transhuman to posthuman. Amazingly, the medical world now can isolate genes and have them successfully interact with our bodies; some scientists select specific genes hoping to change the makeup of our bodies. Man has bragged of having the ability to select the gender, the eye color, the hair color of a developing fetus; China now boasts of discovering the gene that codes the IQ. Have we come to the hour where we can design our own bodies? Can we truly design our own children? The Christian believes Sovereignty makes these decisions with great and eternal purpose. The transhumanists believe that human gene selection must now become our priority in research. Because of the atheistic heart and the God-like power the transhumanists believe they possess, will they in satanic curiosity dabble in the dark world of experimenting with traits in other species mixing animal and man? Will this also become part of their vision for the Posthuman?

Two spheres of research continue to entice the posthumanists: the hope of biological immortality and neurological “omniscience.” Is it possible for man to eliminate aging? And if so, does the elimination of disease and aging mean there is the possibility of eradicating death? It may be difficult for us to believe how far man in his darkness of sin would go and to what extent his “experiments” in the DNA have gone, but these types of experiments have been performed for decades now. In the United Kingdom alone, more than 150 embryos, containing both human and animal genetic material, have been created since the introduction of the 2008 Human Fertilization Embryology Act. This act legalized cross-species experimentation in Britain. And America is one of the greatest research centers for cross-species genetics. We have been growing human ears on mice, injecting human DNA into pigs, and creating embryos from cow eggs. These are just a few of the many human-animal genetic experiments. We may wonder why such experiments are being pursued. The claim is that the “immediate” purpose for human animal genetic engineering is to find a solution for organ transplantation. If they can create a pig with human DNA whose organs would not be rejected by the human body, they reason we will never have to worry about a shortage of organ donors. But it has gone beyond this concept: they are pondering if it is possible to combine the best of human and animal traits. What if we can create people that can climb walls like Spiderman, shooting out webs from their hands? Will we find the ability to regrow limbs with a regenerative gene from a lizard? The transhumanists believe it all may be possible.

Conclusion

We have only touched the tip of the iceberg concerning what is happening behind closed doors in the realms of science and technology in our world today. The experiments they are conducting on the brain now—manipulating it to control feelings both negative and positive—are part of their hope. Climate control is to bring us to a perfect world and remove the curses God placed upon it. Fallen man vainly seeks perfect living in a perfect world. A perfect world, a perfect mind, a perfect body, perfect thoughts and feelings . . . living forever. This is the transhumanists’ goal. It is a confrontation with God Himself to become “like God” in power and control. Their goal is to ultimately obtain omniscience, man’s mind having access to all knowledge of the universe within his brain.

Already the Blue Brain Project, a branch of the Human Brain Project, comprised of some eighty different European nations, is endeavoring to simulate the human brain. They believe that once the code is created, they will be able to create a microchip to implant into the individual’s brain. They believe that with this microchip and through coding, they will be able to take out feelings of anger, sadness, hatred, etc. and implant feelings of euphoria. In 2012, the atheistic American company Google hired Ray Kurzweil, a leading spokesperson for transhumanism, to be its chief futurist. He seeks to take the index of information from Google, download it into a microchip for brain implantation, and enable humans to have all access to the same information that the Google search engine can access.

It causes one to wonder what the Antichrist will be: Transhuman or Posthuman? We know, according to Revelation 19, that he will be cast into the Lake of Fire; therefore, he must have a soul created by God. But what “kind” of man will he be when he arrives as the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition, the Antichrist? Will he be the product of the transhumanists’ hope of the “perfect man”? Much of him may be the product of man’s best accomplishments from the philosophical and religious worlds of the mystery of Babel. What man believes is “the Gate to God” (Babel) will be the product of man’s “confusion” (Balal) without God. In Isaiah 24:10 we read of the whole earth becoming “the city of confusion” in the End Time. This global confusion will be man’s final destruction and the gate to his final destiny—Hell.

May God give us not only a sound mind in these perilous days but also a biblical mind with a biblical worldview.