Transhumanism, Religious Engineering, and the Weird World of William Sims Bainbridge Part I

1. Introduction to Transhumanism and its Goals

Transhumanism is a movement—popular with and sponsored by tech elites and others in the global superclass—that advocates the technological “enhancement” of human beings, largely through biotechnology and AI. The stated goal of the movement is to engineer the posthuman, a super-enhanced organism or species that can no longer be classified in any meaningful sense as human. Without exception, this posthuman is envisioned as a sort of superhuman, and a growing number of prominent transhumanists, Yuval Harari among them, openly apply the language of deification, of becoming a god or God, to the pursuit of posthuman superhumanity.

2. Eschatological Visions and Historical Precedents

The Singularitarian wing of the movement, led by Ray Kurzweil, envisions the leap into posthuman superhumanity in terms directly analogous to Christian eschatology. The immediate precursor to Kurzweil’s technological Singularity is the eschatological scenario offered in Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (1994). Tipler anticipates the main features of Kurzweil’s program—a technology-induced eschatological Singularity in which humans attain immortality through the “emulation of each and every long-dead person…in the computers of the far future”—but he does so in the most explicit Christian theological terms.¹ Both Kurzweil’s and Tipler’s pseudo-Christian eschatologies are, in turn, direct descendants of Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point” concept, according to which the evolution of consciousness, self-directed through scientific knowledge, will eventually produce a sort of super-conscious hive mind, a unified “noosphere” that will for all intents and purposes correspond to God or Christ coming into being.

While Teilhard’s “Omega Point” is therefore an alpha channel for the immanentization of the Eschaton within the intellectual history of transhumanism, it is crucial to understand that Teilhard’s religious project was a sister religious engineering program to that of his close friend and collaborator Julian Huxley, the arch globalist and founder of UNESCO who is often credited with coining the contemporary word “transhumanism.” As far as Huxley was concerned, the two men were “pursuing the same quest,” that is, of “linking science and religion across the bridge of evolution.”² As such, they transferred this esoteric, spiritualized evolutionism to transhumanism. As Huxley explains, in the 1951 lecture where he first uses the term, the “central ordering concept” of transhumanism is the idea that “human destiny” lies in steering the process of evolution, which he, like Teilhard, understands as a spiritual and not merely material process.³ The telos of this evolutionary process, in transhumanism and in various other manifestations of the post-60s spiritual counterculture influenced by Teilhard, is an immanentized, counterfeit form of Christian eschatology.

3. The Intellectual and Religious Foundations of Transhumanism

Beginning around the turn of the millennium, Nick Bostrom, Max More, James Hughes, and David Pearce—to name some of the most prominent founders of transhumanism—established transhumanism’s intellectual credibility in large part by contributing to debates in the field of bioethics, doing their best in the process to emphasize transhumanism’s roots in utilitarianism and the Enlightenment. But transhumanism is not a secular philosophy; it is, I argue, a type of new religious movement revolving around apotheosis, or self-deification.

4. Transhumanist Religions and Their Proponents

And even apart from Harari and Kurzweil, there are some explicitly religious forms of transhumanism, including a number of self-styled transhumanist religions. One of these is the Terasem Movement created by billionaire Sirius/XM founder Martine Rothblatt, born Martin Rothblatt, a biological male who openly “transitioned” in 1994. The long-term project of Terasem is the achievement of immortality by uploading minds into computers. This particular scenario is based on what I call a dataist ontology, which conceives of man and indeed all reality in terms of data or patterns of data. This transhumanist concept of the self, which itself grows out of the cybernetic concept of the self as a kind of elaborate computer, is at the foundation of all transhumanist fantasies of immortality. Its most visible proponent has probably been Kurzweil (a “patternist,” as he calls himself), who not coincidentally has been a supporter of Terasem, even writing the foreword to Rothblatt’s Virtually Human: The Promise—and the Peril—of Digital Immortality (2015).⁴

5. William Sims Bainbridge and the Concept of Religious Engineering

The more important influence on Rothblatt, however, is transhumanist and sociologist of religion William Sims Bainbridge, who is not only a mainstay in the leading circles of religious transhumanists but authored the de facto blueprint for the “engineering” approach to religion that characterizes religious transhumanism as a whole. Though a semi-obscure figure, Bainbridge, like many other important transhumanists, is well connected and highly credentialed. Holding a PhD in Sociology from Harvard, he was the head of the “social informatics unit” at the National Science Foundation (an independent federal agency) from 1992 to 1999, and his Wikipedia page still lists him as the co-director of Cyber-Human Systems at NSF.⁵

From the beginning of his career as a sociologist of religion, Bainbridge has been preoccupied with the standard array of transhumanist themes, from mind uploading and virtual reality to space exploration and nanotechnology. His dissertation, published in 1976 under the title The Spaceflight Revolution, argues that the space programs in the US and elsewhere arose out of highly contingent social circumstances and that spaceflight would not have occurred at all without the support of a visionary, quasi-religious social movement.⁶ In a 2005 follow-up essay published by NASA, he reiterates the need for some such “irrational impetus” in order to revive the dormant space program.⁷ His published work referring to what is nowadays called mind uploading, or what he prefers to call “personality capture,” goes back to the mid-80s, predating Hans Moravec’s Mind Children (1988), the book that popularized the subject to a niche audience.⁸ For Bainbridge subscribes to the same dataist ontology mentioned above, and while he regards the eschatological projects of Kurzweil and others as “a false hope,” he nonetheless believes that personality capture will enable a form of digital “immortality.”⁹

6. Bainbridge’s Theories and Impact on Transhumanism

Notwithstanding his promotion of religious transhumanism, Bainbridge is an atheist who holds a reductionist theory of religion—the Stark-Bainbridge model—according to which “compensators,” or “intangible substitutes for a desired reward,” are made to account for every describable religious phenomenon.¹⁰ He is led to conclude, based on the theory, that “supernatural” religion will most certainly endure, even against the best hopes of secularists since the Age of Reason, for the simple reason that no other “compensators” can replace it.¹¹ Transhumanists, too, must reckon with the persistence of religion, whether they like it or not—a conclusion drawn very sharply by Yuval Harari as well. In a 1982 essay titled “Religions for a Galactic Civilization,” in which he outlines his own blueprint for engineering transhumanist religion, Bainbridge puts the matter bluntly:

Since we are going to have religion, whether we want it or not, we’d best have religions which promote scientific discovery and space progress rather than retrograde faiths which oppose them and might even lead to a new Dark Age. Indeed, I suggest that societies will not develop interplanetary civilizations without the transcendent motivations and perspective which religion can best provide.¹²

What these “retrograde faiths” are he makes abundantly clear in another source: “A war may be brewing,” he warns, “in which the Christian establishment seeks to suppress transhumanism, energized by the agonies of a falling civilization.”¹³

7. Religious Engineering and the Galactic Civilization Concept

The term religious engineering—by which I mean scientific or pseudo-scientific attempts to restructure or replace a society’s established religion or prevailing spiritual values—comes from Bainbridge’s work in the 1970s on the infamous Process Church of the Final Judgement. In the “Galactic Civilization” essay, published by the NASA-affiliated American Astronautical Society, Bainbridge argues that, since religion is not going to disappear and since “societies will not develop interplanetary civilizations without the transcendent motivations and perspective which religion can best provide,” it is imperative to create “a galactic religion, a Church of God Galactic.”¹⁴ As Roberto Manzocco notes, in a discussion of Bainbridge’s contributions to religious transhumanism, the “link between Transhumanist immortality and spacefaring depends on the notion that, if you pursue the first project, you must pursue the second as well,” and by the late 2000s, Bainbridge had updated his program for creating a new technological religion to explicitly support that second project.¹⁵ “Actual everlasting life will be possible in the future,” he declares, in an expanded version of the essay, retitled “Religion for a Galactic Civilization 2.0” (2009) and published by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a transhumanist thinktank.¹⁶

8. The Role of Science Fiction in Religious Innovation

Both versions of the essay focus on “the power of science fiction” to “stimulate religious innovation,” i.e., to reconfigure the religious values of society at large to support a spacefaring civilization.¹⁷ In 1986, Bainbridge even devoted a monograph to the topic: Dimensions of Science Fiction, published by Harvard University Press. And Rothblatt was directly influenced by Bainbridge in taking the Earthseed religion in the science fiction of Octavia Butler as an inspiration for Terasem.

9. Formation and Influence of the Turing Church

Bainbridge in fact is a charter member of a transhumanist religion known as the Turing Church, formerly known as the Order of Cosmic Engineers. The organization was created by Bainbridge disciple Giulio Prisco, president of the Associazione Italiana Transumanisti and former Executive Director of the World Transhumanist Association. Max More, David Pearce, and Natasha-Vita More, among a bevy of other major transhumanists, signed the OCE/Turing Church “Prospectus” as well. In creating his new transhumanist religion, Prisco used Bainbridge’s “Galactic Civilization” essay as an instruction manual, drawing from science fiction and UFO cults exactly as prescribed by Bainbridge.

10. Hacking Religion and Social Engineering Initiatives

In his manifesto, Tales of the Turing Church, Prisco refers to his and Bainbridge’s method of religious engineering as “hacking religion” and as “meta-religion.”¹⁸ Nor does he shy away from calling such experiments “social engineering initiatives,” aimed, like Teilhard’s system, at “hacking” Christianity in particular. In a 2010 video conference that Bainbridge describes as probably “the first full public announcement of the Turing Church, or the equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount,” Prisco proclaimed it a “meta-religion without central doctrine, characterized by common interest in the promised land where science and religion meet, science becomes religion, and religion becomes science.”¹⁹ Frequently quoting Bainbridge, Prisco recommends that, “Instead of creating entirely new, synthetic religions,” it would be more effective “to use existing religions as ‘viral vectors’ for new spiritual ideas, based on science.”²⁰

11. The Esoteric Basis of Transhumanist Religion

The backbone of the entire project is Huxley’s and Teilhard’s merger of science and religion through an esoteric, spiritualized form of evolutionism. As Prisco explains, naming his “religious framework after a mathematical theory”—the Church-Turing thesis— “emphasizes the compatibility and parallels between science and religion.”²¹ He even cites Teilhard and Tipler as direct influences, and he devotes an entire chapter of his manifesto, Tales of the Turing Church (2018), to the latter’s Omega Point scenario, which he regards as highly plausible, including the technological resurrection of the dead.²² But Prisco also thinks it very possible that physical reality is controlled by “God-like beings” with “all the attributes of the Gods of traditional religions, including the ability to resurrect the dead.” The manifesto “outlines a new cosmic, transhumanist religion” through which humans may become gods themselves and merge with these cosmic super-entities.²³

12. The Theological Ambitions of Transhumanism

The goal of deification is quite explicit, as it is in other transhumanist authors. Prisco, it is worth noting, conceives divinity as something that can be created or brought into being—an idea also encountered in other transhumanist writings. Someday, he says, “we may create God. And if we create God, then We are God.”²⁴ As Robert Geraci observes, “Prisco suggests that immortality, resurrection of the dead, and the apotheosis of humankind allow transhumanism to replace traditional religions. He markets transhumanism in explicitly (and admittedly) theological packaging.”²⁵

13. Transhumanist Associations and Marketing Strategies

Prisco, like many other prominent transhumanists, is a member of the Mormon Transhumanist Association and the Christian Transhumanist Association, even though he professes neither religion.²⁶ Mormonism is open to transhumanism, says Prisco, largely on account of the “Mormon concept of boundless elevation and exaltation of Man, through all means including science and technology, until Man becomes like God.” While he considers “mainstream Christianity” to lack a similar concept, he helped launch the CTA “in 2013 with the objective to reproduce the MTA phenomenon in mainstream Christianity.”²⁷ Several other non-believing transhumanists are involved in these organizations as well, something bound to come off as rather cynical while raising the further question as to how sincere some religious transhumanists are about their own proposed religions. Prisco admits that

…as all good salespersons know, different marketing and sales techniques have to be used for different audiences, and perhaps we should also explicitly address the needs of those who are hard-wired for religion. Doing so will be facilitated by understanding the neurological and social basis of religion—why most humans are religious to varying degrees and why some humans are almost completely resistant to religion. Then we can utilize this understanding in the creation of a religion for the Third Millennium.²⁸

References