The Original Sin of Transhumanism: The Desire to Be Like God

Matija Stahan, Crisis Magazine, 11/20/24

With the first successful implementation of Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface, Neuralink, at the beginning of the year, perhaps we will one day consider that the era of transhumanism was officially begun in 2024. What is transhumanism, though? It is a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to science. It’s not just an ideology either. Nor is it a philosophy or even (only) a hidden secular religion. Transhumanism is all that and more—it is the spirit that pervades numerous phenomena of our time. As I will try to demonstrate, that spirit is anti-Christian. 

Let’s start with the etymology. One of the paradoxes of our era is that we define ourselves less by nouns—let’s leave pronouns aside for now—and more by their prefixes. A decade or two ago, the prefix post was dominant; in the last ten years, it was replaced by the prefix trans. Post meant recognizing the fact that, as a civilization, we are no longer what we once were; instead, we are now postmodern, post-Christian, post-metaphysics, post-secular, post-truth, and so on. Trans, however, could be interpreted as an attempt to actively manage what we will become. In transhumanism, humanism is less important than trans because it is not the foundation that matters but constant change. That is the core of the current brand of progressivism. 

Although today there are concepts such as transage, transrace, and transgender, the term transhumanism surpasses them by its importance. So, what is the definition of transhumanism? I think that it could most succinctly be: an attempt at human self-transcendence through technology. And what is its goal? In my interpretation: first to dehumanize a human being, and then to deify him. How is this achieved? In today’s context, through three main ideas: transcending gender with the help of technology (here transgenderism morphs into transhumanism), transforming man from organic to cyborg being, and trying to achieve earthly immortality.

If we want to understand transhumanism from a Christian perspective, there are a few points that we need to keep in mind. 

First, transhumanism is not so new an idea—or, better, it is new only in its technological aspect. Different philosophers of modernity advocated some kind of proto-transhumanism in one way or another, regardless of their differences of opinion.  

For example, Descartes radically separated the spirit from the body. Nietzsche conceived a “superman” or “Übermensch” driven by the will to power. Sartre established that “existence precedes essence,” which is why man creates his own essence (a particularistic echo of his universalistic thought is offered by Simone de Beauvoir, claiming that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”—which acquires a somewhat dark undertone within the framework of transgender ideology), while Foucault understood man as a historically given concept that will disappear over time. 

Perhaps the most apt phrase that captures the essence of transhumanism is that offered by Yuval Noah Harari: homo deus. Harari—although as a thinker considerably weaker than the aforementioned—argues that the man of the future will be as different from the man of today as homo sapiens is from the homo erectus, developing abilities that we would consider divine from today’s perspective. (Although, it should be said that, in Harari’s view, the divine powers are more like the Greek gods than the Abrahamic vision of God; but that is of secondary importance in this analysis.)

Second, transhumanism should be distinguished from the worship of technology as a golden calf. An example of this is the now-defunct “church” Way of the Future, which was started by former Google employee Anthony Levandowski. Or, after all, Google founder Larry Page’s dream of creating a “digital god” as an entity linked to the idea of ​​a superior artificial intelligence that—like God—knows us better than we know ourselves, as well as to the idea of ​​the omniscient “internet of things” or the “singularity” as a moment in to which the power of artificial intelligence irreversibly surpasses human intellect, thus becoming godlike. 

Transhumanism is not that; it is more dangerous because it does not simply imply the worship of technology as a deity but the conception of man united with technology as a deity. (Harari’s homo deus is a religious concept, even if Harari is not aware of it.) 

Third, in the political sense, transhumanism is a product of liberalism—extreme self-love, egoism, and hedonism, but also in the idea that an individual can determine what is moral and what is true as if these were subjective and not objective categories. However, the idea of ​​the “new man” that lies at the foundation of transhumanism is not only characteristic of liberalism but of all political projects of modernity, such as National Socialism (an adaptation of Nietzsche’s “Übermensch”) or Communism (the “new Soviet man”).

In this context, the political perspectives of transhumanism—mostly in the part that concerns transgenderism, at least for now—acquire the threatening outlines of new totalitarianism. Broadly speaking, the idea of ​​the “new man” in the West is an inversion and perversion of the new man—or person, or creature—in Christ, as articulated by St. Paul (2 Corinthians 5:17). The problem, of course, is that the transhumanist “new man” is a parasite on the body of Christianity, desacralizing the element of salvation and turning it into a path to destruction. 

It could also be said that it turns Christianity upside down, thus making itself similar to the pre-Christian paganisms. After all, what is paganism than relativization of the man-God relationship by making God perceived as too manlike and man perceived as too godlike? Christianity turns the pagan logic upside down by making a clear distinction between God and man and then transcending that distinction with Jesus of Nazareth. Homo deus brings us back to the pagan logic again. 

This brings us to the final and most important point: the oldest polemic against transhumanism is already contained in the Bible. 

The concept of homo deus immediately evokes several biblical associations. The first is the Garden of Eden, the second is the appearance of Jesus Christ, and the third is the apocalypse. Let’s start from the Book of Genesis: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Because man commits original sin by listening to the serpent, who tells him that he can become “like God” (Genesis 3:5), God takes away man’s capacity of reaching earthly immortality (Genesis 3:22). By the anthropology derived from the Bible, man is not immortal in the earthly domain; he exists only as a male or female, and—of course—is not God. It is God who creates man and determines the limits of his nature. Man is not a self-builder who can override these fundamental limitations.  

Trying to transcend the limitations that God imposes on His beings is a Luciferian trait. In the Book of Genesis, it is the serpent—defined in the Book of Revelation as “the old serpent, he that is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9)—who leads man to commit original sin. And all the elements of the original sin can be boiled down to trying to surpass the God-given limits of human beings. And every human characteristic that is determined in the Book of Genesis—be it the difference of the sexes, mortality, or being made “in the image of God” but not being “like God”—are the key limits that transhumanism seeks to overcome. 

After the Bible offers us a distinction between what man is and what he is not—and explicitly names the advocate of the transformation of man into what he is not as the devil—the polemic of the biblical authors with transhumanism does not end but continues through the presentation of the divine and human nature of Jesus Christ.  

All the implications of the phrase homo deus were recognized a hundred years ago by Nikolai Berdyaev, writing in his work The New Middle Ages that “against the God-man is not a man(…), but a man-god, a man who has placed himself in the place of God.” Of course, Berdyaev’s point is derived from the warning uttered by St. Paul about “the man of lawlessness” who “will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). 

Here, then, is the crux of the matter. According to the Bible, Jesus Christ is the only true Homo Deus, and every other “homo deus” is not a God-man but could more precisely be described as a “man-god,” or—in biblical terms—Antichrist. Because, after all, who is the one that can determine the limits of his own nature, of his own existence; who can determine what is true and what is false by the sheer power of his will—who can determine and proclaim what is good and what is evil? Only God can do that. When man tries to do it, he is doing Antichrist work.

All this does not mean that the Antichrist will be transhuman in the banal sense of the word—remember that St. John writes about “many antichrists” (1 John 2:18), in the plural —but it means that transhumanism as seen by Harari and many others is one of the historical manifestations of the Antichrist’s logic. It also does not mean that we can say that at this moment we are on the threshold of the end times because the “day and hour” of the end of the world are not known (Matthew 25:13), but it means that it is grounded in the Bible to believe that the appearance of Antichrist from the Book of Revelation will be substantially connected to the impulse that lies at the foundation of transhumanism—that is, the attempt to transcend one’s humanity in order to reach godliness. 

When we think about transhumanism today, we are facing again the temptation that the serpent put Adam and Eve through. It’s just that the serpent appears in different forms today. So, when existentialist philosophy wants to present man as a supreme self-builder of his own nature, or when gender theory promotes “non-binary” and the multiplicity of “gender identities,” or when Silicon Valley wants to turn a man into an omnipotent cyborg or annul aging or defeat death, they collectively perform the function that the serpent performed in the Book of Genesis. In today’s vocabulary, they entice humankind by telling us: you will become homo deus.  

Are we going to give the wrong answer again?

Matija Štahan writes about politics, culture, and religion for a number of Croatian periodicals. In English, he has written for Crisis Magazine, The European Conservative, Providence, Merion West, and Our Culture Mag.

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