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Chapter Five Progress and Provolution Will Transhumanism Leave Sin Behind? ted฀peters “Ilike new things,” my mother said one day during my youth. She was sitting on the sofa, running her hand over the upholstery and feeling the texture. The sofa was brand new. It had just been delivered by the department store. My mother did not experience such new things very frequently. This was a special day. My father, in contrast, worked daily in the world of the new. He was an engineer for General Motors. Each day he awoke, dressed, and drove to work with the express intention of inventing something new—a gadget that hitherto had never existed in the history of the world. He finished his professional career with his name on twenty-two patents. Now my dad simply thought he was earning a living. He did not think often about the ontological implications of the new, the novum. The theologian Jürgen Moltmann believes that the capacity of nature and history to experience the new and invent the new comes from God. God’s creation is ever changing; and we as God’s creatures have the capacity to accelerate and direct the course of this change. To attune ourselves to the God of the new, says Moltmann, we should open ourselves to the possibility of a transformative future, and we thus should adopt a “provolutionary” mindset: “In provolution, the human ‘dream turned forward’ is combined with the new possibility of the future and begins consciously to direct the course of human history as well as the evolution of nature.”1 Provolution is prompted by God’s promise of eschatological transformation; and this promise inspires transformative human creativity. Evolution in nature can be extended and enhanced through distinctively human creativity. The transhumanists and posthumanists among us exude the provolutionary spirit. Like runway lights guiding a pilot to the airport, the vision of the novum guides technoenthusiasts toward a future with a new kind of human being. Tomorrow’s human being will be regeneticized, nanotechized, cyborgized , and perhaps even immortalized. Genetic science hybridized with 64฀ ted฀peters nanotechnology and robotics will carry modern medicine well beyond our current occupation with healing the sick. In the next generation we will devise bodily systems that avoid disease, enhance our capacities, and qualitatively improve our physical and intellectual well-being. The transhumanist vision includes immortality. Two roads might lead to overcoming death, one via the body and the other via the mind. First, perhaps with just the right genetic selection and genetic engineering, our enhanced physical health may make us immune to aging and ward off the diseases that might kill us prematurely. We will live forever (unless we get run over by a truck) in our bodies. But if this fails, second, technogeniuses might find a way to upload our brain capacity, including our self-consciousness , into a computer. Then, in our minds, we could live forever as software within computer hardware. We could sustain our immortality just as long as someone backs up our aging computer, of course. What I like about the technoenthusiasts among us is the unapologetic extravagance of their vision. I like their zeal for transformation. I like their celebration of the new. Without knowing it, they are manifesting an important dimension of the image of God (imago Dei) within our civilization: the dimension of creativity and transformativity. Yet a level of naïveté here risks a loss of realism. Good physical health, increased intelligence, and even the immortality of either the body or the mind would constitute a transformation, to be sure. It would mark a change. It would mark progress. It would lead to something new. And yet an item of looming significance is missing from this vision: a realistic appreciation for the depth and pervasiveness of what theologians call sin. As sinful creatures, we humans never lose our capacity to tarnish what is shiny, to undo what has been done, to corrupt what is pure. As a theologian I ask: On the one hand, how can we appreciate and even encourage the inventiveness of our medical scientists and nanotechnologists while, on the other hand, we draw upon theological wisdom regarding human nature to tailor our expectations with human sinfulness in mind? How can we hope for change through human creativity while being realistic about what can and cannot be changed? How can we fuel technological and medical progress while recognizing that the ultimate human transformation —the ultimate provolution—will come as an...

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