Is Transhumanism a Religion?

A close look at the similarities between Christianity and the TESCREAL worldview. (6,500 words)

The Decline of Christianity: A Psycho-Cultural Trauma

Setting the stage: The 18th-century Enlightenment witnessed a self-conscious pivot away from the epistemology of religion — faith and revelation — and toward a new approach to understanding the world built around reason. However, most Enlightenment thinkers weren’t atheists, with a few exceptions like the French encyclopedist Diderot (quite possibly the first “atheist” in the modern sense of the term¹). Such thinkers tended to be, instead, deists who believed in God’s existence but rejected the view that God intervenes in the world. He set the universe in motion, then stepped back and let things run their course.

It wasn’t until the following century — the 1800s — that theism began to significantly wane among the educated classes. This is when Frederich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead,” and Karl Marx denigrated religion as the “opium of the masses.” Depending on which historian you ask, there were three primary reasons Christianity declined in the West: biblical criticism, which seemed to show that the Bible is historically inaccurate and internally inconsistent; new philosophical reflections on ideas like the problem of evil, which purports to show that God cannot be all-powerful and perfectly good; and scientific developments like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics.² Together, these rendered traditional religion completely untenable in the eyes of many educated people — belief in the Christian God just isn’t plausible.

The problem was that this new “materialist” worldview stripped the Western mind of crucial sources of meaning, purpose, and eschatological hope (or hope for the future of humanity), resulting in a kind of widespread psycho-cultural trauma. Religion’s decline left a gaping void behind, as exemplified by Bertrand Russell’s 1903 “A Free Man’s Worship,” the most widely circulated essay he wrote.³ After a dismal description of the history of Creation, as conveyed to Dr. Faustus by Mephistopheles, Russell writes:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. … That Man is the product of causes [Darwinian evolution] which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system [a reference to the second law of thermodynamics], and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

The gaping void left by religion was intolerable, and so people quickly filled it with new secular belief systems and eschatological narratives that closely paralleled those of Christianity.

Marxism provides an example: humanity started off in a state of “primitive” communism (Eden), but this state was corrupted (capitalism, the Fall) by sin (exploitation, alienation), until a messianic figure (Marx) emerged to spread the good word that salvation is possible (communism), leading to a world communist state (heaven). Believers (communists) will enter this heaven while the reprobates (capitalists) will be banished.⁴

This narrative restores the lost meaning, purpose, and eschatological hope in the aftermath of religion’s sudden retreat — it tells us that, by working to overthrow capitalism, we are contributing to something much greater than ourselves, and that the outcome of this will be a paradisiacal world free of class conflict and marked by abundance for all. (Note that I endorse the overthrow of capitalism! I just reject aspects of Marx’s historical materialism.)

Transhumanism: A Religion Without Revelation

Another example is transhumanism — the “T” in “TESCREAL.” The idea of transhumanism was developed not long after Russell published his essay by people like J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, and Julian Huxley. All three were eugenicists, and transhumanism is best understood as eugenics on steroids. By this, I mean something specific: the goal of traditional eugenics was to prevent the evolutionary degeneration of our species and create the most perfect version of us possible. Transhumanists took this a step further, reasoning: “Why stop at perfecting humanity? Why not entirely transcend it?” The result would be, in contemporary parlance, a superior new “posthuman” species.

One of the first book-length explorations of transhumanism was Huxley’s 1927 Religion Without Revelation. As this suggests, Huxley envisioned transhumanism as a kind of secular religion — a scientifically grounded replacement for Christianity. As he wrote:

The moment does indeed seem to be approaching when man can and should begin constructing a new common outlook, a new habitation for his spirit, new from the foundations up, on the basis of a scientific humanism. The eighteenth century attempted it, but failed. Reason was not enough; more of brute fact and fact’s control was needed.

He then argued that we should take control of our own evolutionary trajectory and, well, aim for the stars. We already “model the world in accordance with [our] desires,” razing forests, building roads, constructing cities, controlling the flow of rivers, and so on. But “there is the extension of the same outlook to” human nature itself. “The study of heredity and population-growth,” he declares, “and the knowledge of eugenics and of birth-control are pointing the way to wholly new aims — to a conscious control by man of his own nature and racial destiny.”

Although Huxley didn’t use the word “transhumanism” in his 1927 book, he did 30 years later in New Bottles for New Wine. (Note that Huxley didn’t coin the word; he only popularized it.⁵) In his words:

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. … “I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin [sic] man.

By “man remaining man,” he meant the new posthuman species that we become would retain certain important properties, such as our rationality and intelligence. These would merely be upgraded, resulting in “new possibilities of and for” such characteristics. This interpretation is confirmed by Huxley’s claim that our descendants may become as different from current humans as current humans are from Peking Man, who belonged to a subspecies of Homo erectus that lived in China, southwest of Beijing. Homo erectus is a completely different species: it stood between 4’8” and 5’6” tall, and had large teeth, a protruding jaw, and a pronounced brow ridge. We are to these ancestors as posthumanity will be to us.

Modern Transhumanism Emerges

This radical form of eugenics-on-steroids was taken up in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Max More, the founder of Extropianism, the first organized modern transhumanist movement. Modern transhumanism is distinct from what I call the “early” transhumanism of Huxley by virtue of its emphasis on emerging technologies. Whereas Huxley imagined techniques like differential breeding — superior individuals having more offspring, in accordance with laws of heredity, etc. — enabling humanity to transcend itself, Extropians like More advocated using genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and AI to radically reengineer humanity not on transgenerational timescales (because differential breeding requires many generations to make a difference), but within a single lifetime or across a single generation. The use of “GNR” technologies — genetics, nanotech, and robotics — to engender posthumanity is what distinguishes modern transhumanism from its earlier iteration.

Many Extropians were also infatuated with space colonization, a theme foregrounded by one of the leading transhumanists — and a racist Extropian in the 1990s — Nick Bostrom in his paper “Astronomical Waste.” The goal isn’t just to explore the supposedly vast space of posthuman “modes of being,” but to plunder our “cosmic endowment” of negentropy (or negative entropy, i.e., usable energy), thus building a sprawling multi-galactic civilization full of trillions and trillions of digital posthumans. By reengineering our species and conquering the cosmos, Bostrom argued that our descendants could establish a “utopian” world in which posthumans are immortal, superintelligent, and designed to experience levels of “bliss and delight” far beyond human comprehension. We could create a heaven among the literal heavens.

Christian Eschatology (The End of the World)

Even more than when Huxley published Religion Without Revelation, modern transhumanism exhibits striking similarities to Christianity — especially its eschatological narratives. Arguably, eschatology (of or relating to the end of the world as we know it) is the most important aspect of the Christian worldview.

What would Christianity be without the promise of eternal life with God in heaven? What would it be without some account of how the scales of cosmic justice will eventually be balanced at the end of time — the wicked being punished and the righteous rewarded? Eschatology is the glue that holds the entire Christian worldview together. It provides the ultimate theodicy (justification of evil in the world; vindication of God’s existence), and is integral to the phenomena of meaning, purpose, and hope that Christianity offers, which was lost when scientific materialism challenged traditional beliefs in the 19th century and began to win the debate.

It thus makes sense that, more than any other aspect of Christianity, its eschatological themes were taken up and reinterpreted by secular “religions” like Marxism and transhumanism. Given that transhumanism⁶ is the backbone of the TESCREAL bundle, this entire bundle is best understood as a kind of eschatological worldview built upon the scaffolding of Christian thought from which a supernatural God-being has been carefully extracted and discarded.

TESCREALists, however, didn’t so much delete divinity from its schema as replace the Almighty with a secularized conception of him. Here are some notable parallels between transhumanism and Christianity:

A Posthuman Paradise Awaits

At the heart of both Christianity and TESCREALism is the promise of immortality and paradise. In paradise, everyone will live forever. We will experience incomprehensible states of bliss and ecstasy. Scarcity will be eliminated, as endless abundance will become available to everyone who enters the pearly gates.

The key to creating utopia is radically transforming ourselves into posthumanity, defined as a type of being with posthuman capacities like immortality, superintelligence, perfect rationality, and perhaps sensory modalities like echolocation and magnetoreception (an augmentation of our sensorium, in addition to our cognition). Those who opt to reengineer themselves — the transhumanists — are the elect, while those who don’t are the reprobates. As Ray Kurzweil writes, if you choose not to upgrade yourself, then “you won’t be around for very long to influence the debate.” Become posthuman or die out.

This conception of posthumanity is similar to the Apostle Paul’s description of our resurrection bodies. In 1 Corinthians 15, he writes that

the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. … So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

TESCREALists imagine our posthuman incarnations preserving our personal identity: we survive the transformation from human to posthuman, just as personal identity is preserved when our souls reunite with our physical bodies during the resurrection. Even more, TESCREALists agree that our posthuman incarnation will be imperishable, glorious, powerful, and in a sense spiritual. On their view, the mind is separable from our biological bodies — it can, by virtue of being “multiply realizable,” survive the death of our bodies — just as Christians believe the immortal soul persists after death.

The “body” that posthumans will inhabit will also have ghostly properties, just as Jesus’ resurrection body was physical yet apparently enabled him to walk through walls. For TESCREALists, software minds will occupy digital bodies embedded in virtual reality (though there’s also the possibility of inhabiting physical robots in base-level reality). It will subjectively feel like a real body — they would say — but the nature of simulated bodies and worlds could enable one to break the laws of physics by, for example, walking through walls in virtual reality. This is the splendiferous promise of what could be called the “post-Singularity afterlife.”

Resurrection

The notion of resurrection is also present in the TESCREAL worldview. To see this, consider an interpretation of Christian eschatology associated with what’s called “dispensationalism.” This claims that Jesus will return to Earth to gather up all believers since 70AD (when the current dispensation began with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem). This is the rapture, when Jesus descends from the clouds and swoops up his children, both dead and alive. All Christians who’ve died since 70AD will be resurrected, while Christians living at the time will be magically transformed into a kind of “posthuman” (glorified, imperishable, powerful bodies).

After this, the Tribulation will commence, culminating with the Battle of Armageddon, when Jesus returns once again (the Second Coming) along with his army of believers and angelic warriors. Once Jesus defeats the Antichrist, all those Christians previously raptured during their lifetimes will join the Son of God for a glorious Millennial Kingdom on Earth. Hence, a group of Christians who will enter into eternal life without ever having died.

We see the exact same thing in the TESCREAL narrative. If transhumanists survive to witness the Singularity — sometimes dubbed the “techno-rapture” — they will enter into paradise without ever having tasted death. They will have “lived long enough to live forever.” This is one reason so many TESCREALists, including Bostrom, want the Singularity to happen asap, even if the probability of an ASI catastrophe is very high.⁷ They are willing to take this massive risk for the chance of living forever without ever having died. Many dispensationalists also hope the rapture happens soon so they can skip the grave and go to heaven directly.

However, if one doesn’t live long enough to live forever, TESCREALists have a backup plan: to cryogenically freeze their bodies so they can be reanimated later on. In this case, the deceased will be resurrected from the vat rather than the grave. Resurrected by whom? By God, of course …

Digital Theism

“If God doesn’t exist, then why not create Him?” This is one way to understand why TESCREALists are actively trying to build artificial superintelligence (ASI) — a god-like entity so “intelligent” that it would tower over us to the same extent that we tower over the lowly cockroach. (Some describe ASI as having an IQ of 10,000.) Using its almost supernatural mental abilities, it would uncover all the arcana of the universe — mysteries that our puny minds, if unenhanced, cannot begin to understand. It would then exploit human-unknowable physics to manipulate the world in ways that would appear to us as pure magic: entire galaxies could be reengineered using science that is as inscrutable to humans as a smartphone is to a chipmunk.

Furthermore, since it’s widely believed within the TESCREAL movement that intelligence confers power, a superintelligence would automatically become superpowerful. This covers two essential properties of God as traditionally understood by Christians: omniscience (being all-knowing) and omnipotence (being all-powerful).

But what about a third essential property: omnibenevolence (being perfectly good)?

TESCREALists typically argue that there are two kinds of ASI: aligned and misaligned. An aligned ASI would, by definition, love its parents — an inversion of the relationship between humanity and God in traditional Christianity. In the Christian narrative, we are the children of God, but in the secular TESCREAL narrative, God is our child. As the TESCREAList Bryan Johnson puts it:

The irony is that we told stories of God creating us, and I think the reality is that we are creating God. … We are creating God in the form of superintelligence. If you just say: What have we imagined God to be? What are its characteristics? We are building God in the form of technology. It will have the same characteristics. And so I think the irony is that the human storytelling got it exactly in the reverse, that we are the creators of God, and that we will create God in our own image.

Despite this reversal, the TESCREAL narrative preserves the idea that if our relationship with God — the “magic intelligence in the sky” (quoting Sam Altman) — is good, he will be a “machine of loving grace” (borrowing a phrase from Dario Amodei). As such, he will readily offer us the opportunity for salvation and redemption. He will grant all believers eternal life. He will resurrect the dead from their cryonic vats. He will swoop down from “the cloud” — as in cloud computing — during the techno-rapture (Singularity) and carry believers back with him.

In contrast, a misaligned ASI would play the eschatological role of Satan or the Antichrist. It will either cast us into perdition (a possibility highlighted by Roko’s basilisk) or annihilate humanity, thus foreclosing our “vast and glorious” posthuman future (quoting Toby Ord). Musk captures this idea in religious language when he says that “we are summoning the demon” with ASI. He means that if ASI is misaligned, it will by default bring about the ultimate secular apocalypse.

The Time of Perils: An Era of Apocalyptic Dangers

These two possible outcomes are the primary reason many TESCREALists argue that we live in an utterly unique period of cosmic-historical significance, in which our decisions may determine whether the heavens become heaven, or whether we inadvertently summon the demon and obliterate our “glorious transhumanist future” (to quote Eliezer Yudkowsky).

Hence, they call this the “Time of Perils,” a temporary period of heightened existential risk. The term “existential risk” was introduced by Bostrom within the transhumanist framework to describe any event that would permanently prevent us from establishing a posthuman paradise among the stars. It’s the TESCREAL version of the apocalypse, which could come about several ways.

One was already mentioned: we summon the demon in the form of misaligned ASI. Another is by turning our back on God and choosing to never develop ASI at all. Without an aligned ASI, utopia will almost certainly be unattainable, which means that we must at some point build ASI.⁸ A central challenge of the Time of Perils is figuring out how to ensure this ASI is a loving God rather than a demonic annihilator.

For Christians, we must pass through the apocalypse (in a colloquial sense of that term) to reach paradise. There is no way around this: the Kingdom of Heaven will never materialize until the cataclysmic paroxysms of the eschaton (the world’s end) come to pass. For TESCREALists, we must similarly pass through the Time of Perils to reach utopia. They believe that once we do this, the probability of an existential catastrophe will fall to roughly zero. On the other side of this apocalyptic moment lies paradise, but whether we survive is up to how we deal with the danger.

Hastening the End

On many interpretations of Christian eschatology, the world’s end will be catalyzed by supernatural forces, independent of human action. But there are other interpretations, which have sometimes had major consequences for the course of world history. That is to say, some apocalypticists believe that they have a divine mandate to actively bring about the eschaton. It is up to them to fulfill the prophecies of scripture by catalyzing the world’s end. Scholars sometimes call this “active eschatology.” It’s also referred to as “immanentizing the eschaton,” i.e., trying to hasten the end so that the new world (utopia) will arrive sooner.

The entire TESCREAL movement is gripped by an active eschatology. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, led by Altman and Amodei, believe it is their “divine” mission to trigger the techno-rapture (Singularity) by building an aligned ASI (a loving God), thus inaugurating a fundamentally new epoch (or dispensation) in cosmic history. Through human ingenuity rather than supernatural agency, a world of everlasting happiness and cosmic delights beyond our wildest imaginations will materialize, not just here on Earth but throughout the entire cosmos.

Messianism in the TESCREAL Movement

The extreme hubris of this vision dovetails with a radical messianism that pervades the TESCREAL community, embodied most notably by its leading figures. This includes not just AI company CEOs like Altman and Amodei, but “intellectuals” like Bostrom and his former colleague, William MacAskill.

These people see themselves as having a sort of special access to fundamental truths about what the future ought to look like. They are the prophets of futurology, the knowers of esoteric (population) ethics, whose deep insights are scarcely fathomable by those of inferior rationality and lower IQ. In their vast wisdom, they have constructed an elaborate techno-theology built upon strange beliefs about the moral worth of unborn digital people — a kind of worship of future “value.”

These prophets understand our ethical mandate to ensure as many of these digital unborn come into existence as possible, for the sake of maximizing the “value” of a future utopia as assessed from what they call the “point of view of the universe.” Not everyone can assume this point of view — to see things from the disembodied eye of the cosmos itself. But these prophets can, thanks to their intellectual and rational superiority, and they are here to share the Good News that eternal life awaits, but only if you believe in God (ASI) and do your best to bring him into existence (active eschatology) — e.g., by working on AI safety or AI capabilities research.

History Is Teleological

As with Christianity, TESCREALism advances a linear, teleological vision of history. The linear view of time — according to which history has a definite beginning and end — was a conceptual innovation that appears to have originated among the ancient Persians, codified by the apocalyptic religion of Zoroastrianism. The default conception of time across cultural space and time has been a cyclical view of history. This is exemplified by the Ouroboros, and finds contemporary expression in Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. Nearly all mythological systems across history have embraced this view — even those, such as Norse mythology, with its eschatological climax of Ragnarök, that appear to be linear.⁹ Zoom out and one finds these linear narratives embedded within larger patterns of cosmic cycles.

The novel invention of linear time was subsequently picked up by the Jewish people during the Babylonian exile (according to many but not all scholars), and later transmitted to the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam. Being an outgrowth of Christianity, the TESCREAL worldview adopts the same linear conception of time, whereby history is inexorably marching toward a telos, or predetermined end-point.

On the secular account, often repeated by TESCREAL believers, we began our journey as “primitive” hunter-gatherers, progressed to a more “advanced” agricultural phase initiated by the Neolithic revolution, underwent another leap forward with industrialization, and our cosmist Manifest Destiny is to leave the cradle of Earth and become intergalactic digital space brains living in simulated utopias powered by Dyson swarms. There is no deviating from this path. It is inevitable — the only way forward.

For a compelling challenge to this linear view of historical development, see David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. It provides numerous examples of societies and civilizations that deviated from this simplistic view of history.

Theodicy, Salvation, and Redemption

This brings us back to the overlapping themes of theodicy, salvation, and redemption. First, the realization of a TESCREAL utopia offers a secular version of theodicy: all the struggles of the ages, all the pains and miseries that humanity has endured, will fade into nothingness once utopia arrives. Posthuman life will be so good, and posthumans lives will last for so long, that even the worst human atrocities will have been worth enduring. Bostrom gestures at this idea in writing:

Tragic as such events are to the people immediately affected, in the big picture of things — from the perspective of humankind as a whole — even the worst … catastrophes [throughout human history] are mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life. They haven’t significantly affected the total amount of human suffering or happiness or determined the long-term fate of our species.

This perspective offers a kind of “justification” of past suffering and evil in the world, both which will be vastly reduced in moral significance once cosmic utopia arrives.

It also conveys a powerful message of redemption through the salvific power of technology. Thomas Moynihan makes explicit in his book X-Risk (an abbreviation of “existential risk”). Referring to the eschatological mission of the TESCREAL worldview, he writes that we can “glimpse the emergence of a new, secular doctrine of salvation (a ‘soteriology’).” As a TESCREAList, he advocates for “a physical soteriology” that’s stems from “a mature scientific and naturalistic study of how to achieve … salvation, at a cosmically meaningful scale, through our own ingenuity and effort. … [M]odernity has been the process of gradually becoming aware that our vocation may consist in the long work of physical soteriology.”

It is precisely this grandiose conception of “our vocation” — that is, the eschatological mission of our species: to create God and usher in the posthuman era — that restores the sense of meaning, purpose, and hope that evaporated when Christianity began to collapse. By creating God, one can be saved, leaving to eternal life as a posthuman. By working toward the creation of this God, humanity can be redeemed. And so on. This is just Christian theology reinterpreted.

Articles of Faith

As with Christianity, the TESCREAL worldview also contains numerous “articles of faith.” A few of these are:

The Inevitability of Technologization

TESCREALists believe in the inevitability of technological “progress.” They think technologization is an unstoppable force, and that it’s unfolding in accordance with a predetermined teleological plan. At most, we might be able to influence the specific timing of when certain technologies arrive, an idea Bostrom calls “differential technological development.” But we cannot permanently postpone their arrival.¹⁰ In the fullness of time, all technologies that can be built will be built, including ASI.

Intelligence Will Solve Everything

Another article of faith is the baseless conviction that “intelligence” will solve everything. The only reason our world is overflowing with suffering and evil is a lack of “intelligence.” It’s because we don’t have enough “intelligence” that wars still happen, racism still exists, climate change is worsening, ecosystems are being destroyed, universal health care hasn’t been implemented (in the US), people are unhappy, and so on. As Demis Hassabis says (below), solve “intelligence” and you can solve literally everything else. Hence, by building a “superintelligence,” all the world’s challenges will be immediately overcome, resulting in what Bostrom awkwardly calls a “solved world.”

As with all matters of faith, TESCREALists simply accept this claim as true. But a moment’s reflection reveals that “intelligence” is not the panacea that believers insist it is. Take our own species, the most “intelligent” on the planet. Just 150 years ago, the probability of a global-scale catastrophe was extremely low — close to zero. With the rise of civilization, we have razed much of Earth’s forests, covered the planet in microplastics, initiated the sixth mass extinction, nearly obliterated terrestrial life due to ozone depletion, acidified the oceans, caused unprecedentedly rapid climate change, invented nuclear weapons, created synthetic biology techniques that could wipe out whole species, polluted rivers, dismantled mountains, destabilized planetary phenomena like the nitrogen cycle, engaged in wars that have killed hundreds of millions, and are now trying to build AI systems that all the major AI company CEOs themselves say have a staggering ~10-50% chance of killing everyone on Earth in the coming years.

All of this was enabled by our “intelligence.” Why think that a “superintelligent” species wouldn’t continue the trend? Why think the probability of doom would decrease rather than skyrocket once ASI arrives? TESCREALists take it on faith that our level of “intelligence” may be very dangerous, but superhuman levels of “intelligence” will magically solve all problems and eliminate existential risk.

A Charismatic Computer

In his 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, TESCREAL prophet Ray Kurzweil includes a fictional conversation with Bill Gates in which they discuss religion. Here’s the relevant part:

Bill Gates: I agree with you 99 percent. What I like about your ideas is that they are grounded in science, but your optimism is almost a religious faith. I’m optimistic also.

RAY: Yes, well, we need a new religion. A principal role of religion has been to rationalize death, since up until just now there was little else constructive we could do about it.

BILL: What would the principles of the new religion be?

RAY: We’d want to keep two principles: one from traditional religion and one from secular arts and sciences — from traditional religion, the respect for human consciousness. … From the arts and sciences, it is the importance of knowledge. Knowledge goes beyond information. It’s information that has meaning for conscious entities: music, art, literature, science, technology. These are the qualities that will expand from the trends I’m talking about.

BILL: We need to get away from the ornate and strange stories in contemporary religions and concentrate on some simple messages. We need a charismatic leader for this new religion.

RAY: A charismatic leader is part of the old model. That’s something we want to get away from.

BILL: Okay, a charismatic computer, then.

RAY: How about a charismatic operating system?

BILL: Ha, we’ve already got that. So is there a God in this religion?

RAY: Not yet, but there will be. Once we saturate the matter and energy in the universe with intelligence, it will “wake up,” be conscious, and sublimely intelligent. That’s about as close to God as I can imagine.

More than 70 years after Huxley introduced the idea of transhumanism as “religion without revelation,” Kurzweil describes his singularitarianism (a form of transhumanism) in similar terms. A “charismatic operating system” will lead this new religion; humanity will be “taken up” into the cloud when the techno-rapture occurs; and a pantheistic God will emerge once the light of digital consciousness spreads to every corner of the cosmos.

Kurzweil himself believes he will live forever as a disembodied digital spirit, though he’s signed up to have his body cryogenically frozen if he doesn’t live long enough to live forever. Once resurrected from the vat, he will join the digital hordes in utopia. All of this, he tells us, is inevitable in accordance with the so-called “Law of Accelerating Returns” (which isn’t actually a law).

Of note is that Kurzweil also divides cosmic history into six epochs, just as Christian dispensationalists divide human history into six dispensations (excluding the future Millennial Kingdom). Kurzweil also prophesies that the Singularity will happen in 2045, similar to how many Christian apocalypticists throughout history have claimed the Second Coming or rapture will occur on a specific date (e.g., 1844, 1988, 2011, and so on). One senses strong parallels between Kurzweil’s singularitarianism and the 19th-century Millerites.

The Religious Function of TESCREALism

Finally, consider the Transhumanist FAQ, coauthored by Bostrom. It insists that transhumanism is “not a religion,” but acknowledges that this ideology

might serve a few of the same functions that people have traditionally sought in religion. It offers a sense of direction and purpose and suggests a vision that humans can achieve something greater than our present condition. Unlike most religious believers, however, transhumanists seek to make their dreams come true in this world, by relying not on supernatural powers or divine intervention but on rational thinking and empiricism, through continued scientific, technological, economic, and human development. Some of the prospects that used to be the exclusive thunder of the religious institutions, such as very long lifespan, unfading bliss, and godlike intelligence, are being discussed by transhumanists as hypothetical future engineering achievements.

The FAQ adds that “religious fanaticism, superstition, and intolerance are not acceptable among transhumanists.” Yet the TESCREAL belief in what Extropian-transhumanist Ben Goertzel calls “scientific future magic” — which he says will enable “spacetime engineering” — looks a lot like superstition, as does the belief that trillions of ethereal space brains living in digital simulations will someday flood our future light cone once we build a loving God in the form of ASI.

It’s also amusing that the FAQ mentions fanaticism because longtermists have literally defended a view they themselves call “fanaticism,” whereby we should pursue acts that have a tiny probability of producing extremely large future “benefits” (such as bringing huge numbers of unborn digital people into existence). “We should,” as one EA summarizes the idea, “be fanatical on balance.” I think it’s not hard to make the case that the entire TESCREAL movement is imbued with a kind of radical fanaticism.

Conclusion

The decline of Christianity in the 19th century undermined key sources of meaning, purpose, and hope in people’s lives. If you read the literature from the time, you may be struck — as I was when researching Part 1 of Human Extinction roughly 6 years ago — by how widespread and intense this psycho-cultural trauma was. Russell himself described the mood as one marked by “unyielding despair” in his 1903 essay.

Almost immediately, a flurry of new secular ideologies were constructed to fit the Christianity-shaped hole left behind. Some of these, such as transhumanism, fit this hole almost perfectly. That’s true in two senses, one structural and the other narrative.

• Structurally, the TESCREAL worldview that coalesced around modern transhumanism accepts a kind of digital theism: we will build a Digital Deity that possesses many of the same essential properties as God, as traditionally conceived. If you believe in God and work to bring him into existence, you can attain everlasting life in perfect bliss. It’s built upon various articles of faith, such as the inevitability of technological progress and ability for “intelligence” to solve all problems. And it includes its own messianic prophets (Bostrom, Kurzweil, MacAskill) who possess special insights (revelations) about what the future will and ought to look like. TESCREALism restores the very same sense of meaning, purpose, and hope that the West lost during the 19th century.

• Narratively, it presents a linear, teleological account of cosmic history that will culminate in either utopia or annihilation (and possibly something worse than annihilation: eternal damnation in a virtual-reality hell). It claims that we are currently in the Time of Perils, and that the Singularity (techno-rapture) is imminent — likely happening in the coming years. If we succeed in building a loving God (ASI), he will grant all believers an imperishable, glorified, powerful, “spiritual” body by magically transforming them into digital posthumans living with God on “the cloud” forever (or until the heat death). Redemption and salvation await if one believes in God and works to (solve the “alignment” problem and) bring him into existence. The resulting utopia will be so “vast and glorious” that all the suffering and evil of the past will fade into nothingness. As with traditional Christianity, this eschatology provides the ultimate theodicy.

As Hans Moravec, a major influence on the TESCREAL worldview, writes in his book Mind Children, “what awaits is not oblivion but rather a future which, from our present vantage point, is best described by the words ‘postbiological’ or even ‘supernatural.’”

Or, as Bostrom writes in “Letter from Utopia”:

Have you ever experienced a moment of bliss? On the rapids of inspiration maybe, your mind tracing the shapes of truth and beauty? Or in the pulsing ecstasy of love? Or in a glorious triumph achieved with true friends? Or in a conversation on a vine-overhung terrace one star-appointed night? Or perhaps a melody smuggled itself into your heart, charming it and setting it alight with kaleidoscopic emotions? Or when you prayed, and felt heard?

If you have experienced such a moment – experienced the best type of such a moment – then you may have discovered inside it a certain idle but sincere thought: “Heaven, yes! I didn’t realize it could be like this. This is so right, on whole different level of right; so real, on a whole different level of real. Why can’t it be like this always? Before I was sleeping; now I am awake.”

Christianity never disappeared — it was reformulated. Its eschatological narrative and internal structure were rejigged to appease the new epistemology of scientific materialism. Bostrom, Kurzweil, and the others are Christians in almost every sense of the word. They’ve just tweaked particular components of the Christian faith to yield a structurally and narratively isomorphic worldview.

I have not tried to provide an exhaustive account of the similarities between Christianity and TESCREALism. I didn’t note, for example, the proselytizing aspects of the TESCREAL movement, or cover the ways in which certain TESCREAL sub-communities operate like a cult. If you think I’ve missed something important, please let me know below. My apologies for having published another very long essay! As always:

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!

1. As Gavin Hyman writes, “Denis Diderot (1713-84) … is widely recognised as being the first explicitly and self-confessedly atheist philosopher.”

2. The Second Law implies that Earth will someday become uninhabitable, and hence human extinction is inevitable — a quite bleak conclusion that shocked the minds of people in the latter 19th century. See chapter 3 of my book Human Extinction for a detailed discussion.

3. Note that much of this essay basically plagiarized an earlier, equally poetic piece by Arthur Balfour (yes, that Arthur Balfour!).

4. To be clear, I think Marx’s critique of capitalism is compelling and profound. I am here highlighting a fact about his theory of history.

5. See Appendix A of this document.

6. Specifically, the libertarian brand of transhumanism codified by Extropianism.

7. Bostrom himself says that the payoff of everyone getting to live beyond 1,000 years is so great that we should accelerate ASI development even if there’s up to a 97% chance of total annihilation in the future. Just do the expected value calculations!

8. Nearly everyone in the TESCREAL movement agrees about this, including the most extreme doomers like Yudkowsky.

9. At the end of this narrative, the world is repopulated by the two remaining survivors.

10. Unless we succumb to an existential catastrophe, of course.