The Future of Faith

For the last half century, we have been told about the decline of religion in America. Church attendance is low, the numbers identifying as religious nones are rising. The trends speak to a waning of religiosity.

Yet in the modern age religious feeling abounds. The faithful are among us. They don’t wear robes or tunics. They won’t don palliums or wield scepters. There is no threat of sandalwood incense accosting your nares. In fact, most of the adherents of this faith are outwardly unrecognizable even to themselves. They cannot grasp the religious sentiment that guides them because they have not yet named it.

The religion I speak of is transhumanism. In my estimation, it is the most prolific yet least acknowledged religion that man has ever espoused. Who is a transhumanist? It is someone who believes in the primacy of progress and technology in augmenting the health, well-being, intelligence, and dominance of the human species. The transhumanist believes that we can utilize technology to alter or hack our own evolution and become better beings than nature alone would allow.

Recall that the most well-known western movement away from faithfully bowing to the heavens was the humanist tradition. It represented a break from the traditional theism of Europe, one that looked to God, and specifically Judeo-Christian texts, for moral, historical, philosophical, and scientific clarity. Humanists instead were interested in the contours of a lived life to make meaning of mankind’s experiences. They admired man: fallible, fraudulent, and ephemeral as he was. But I can’t say they worshipped him. Man wasn’t deified with the same gestures that theists honored God. After all, how could you worship a thing that doesn’t last?

Transhumanism resurrects a sort of religious spirit that humanism lacked. Consider how many of our daily rituals require an interaction with a digital device. How many mornings do you grab your phone and check the feeds before greeting your spouse? How many nights are lit by the hypnotic glow from cybertemples of information and entertainment? Instead of bowing to deities, we bow to screens to tell us what is meaningful and good about our existence. The faithful are so indoctrinated in their belief in the importance of their smartphones and smart TVs, so suffused by those enchantments that they strain to acknowledge any other version of reality. Go ahead and steal a loved one’s phone for the day and see what sort of misery he’ll conjure up, how lost he’ll appear, how untethered.

What happens when a superintelligence arises that is ubiquitous, that regulates and converges all thought, which is made of components that can travel across infinite space and still survive intact? Civilizations have called such an entity by many names in the past, but no tribe ever said that they were responsible for creating this ever powerful being. Part of their reverence arose from seeing themselves as derivative, as creations of the entity. But the thing we’ve created, the vast network of information and knowledge and power and wealth and surveillance (yes, the internet is all those things) is very quickly becoming something that we cannot live without.

Something we cannot live without. That sure seems like a characterization given to God. What are the attributes of this superbeing and how do they differ from the characteristics we’ve historically ascribed to God? It’s all-seeing (how embedded is the NSA in your phone?), all-knowing (we’re mere decades away from the sort of AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey), all-pervasive (smart phone in every pocket, but also, you can’t take a sledgehammer to the internet), and all-powerful (we’ll get there, i.e. robot overlords, sooner than you’d imagine).

Although transhumanists state that technology will enhance human capacities, it’s clear that the machines are winning here. They are becoming more powerful, more adroit, more capable than we are. And we love that. We envy them. We admire them. And we bow to them.

We have entered a new eon of human experience. We are in the midst of crafting an entity with all the characteristics of what the theists have always called God, yet it pains us* to call it that. Why? Is it so absurd to believe that our mammalian minds, programmed by evolution or social engineering to have a predisposition toward religious affinity, would conjure up yet another religion to adhere to in the so-called post-religious age? The sooner we accept our fellowship in this new system of belief, the sooner we can consider challenging our admission. For what’s more human than questioning and confronting structures of thought and power seemingly beyond our control?

*I’ll now consider anyone baptized by the lustrous LED glow of a smartphone a transhumanist, to some extent