Ghost in the Cloud

More than the death of God, I was mourning the dissolution of this teleological narrative

Notice what she says she lost: not first God, but a shape. At Bible school she studied dispensationalism, which divides history into successive eras of God's self-revelation, ending in the Millennial Kingdom. Then a bartender lends her Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, which divides evolution into successive epochs ending in transformation beyond recognition. Same architecture, different furniture. She grew up with pastors announcing dates for the Rapture and should have been immunized against prophecy — except this one arrived with Moore's law behind it. She is at her most vulnerable here and says so; that honesty earns the argument later.

Though few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology.

The chain, compressed: transhuman enters English in an 1814 translation of Dante, at the moment the poet's flesh is changed. Roger Bacon, a 13th-century friar, tries to brew an elixir reproducing the properties of the resurrected body. Nikolai Fedorov, a Russian Orthodox ascetic reading Darwin, makes resurrecting everyone who ever died humanity's proper task — knowledge and labor, not miracle — requiring space travel to house the returning dead. Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist, proposes in 1949 that machines will link into a global network, minds will merge, and an intelligence explosion will complete the resurrection. Then the hinge: Julian Huxley coins transhumanism in 1951 by keeping his friend Teilhard's structure and dropping the theology. Subtraction, not invention.

After a memoir passage on the physical experience of unbelief, the argument returns. Kurzweil calls himself a "patternist": consciousness is a pattern that could in principle run on other hardware — not a soul, she grants, but doing the same work. Other transhumanists object that you are not you without your body, so only bodily resurrection counts: the early church's argument with the Gnostics, settled in favor of the flesh. Her strongest point: not two movements sharing a hope, but one problem recurring in the same shape.

I began to wonder whether I could pray to beings outside the simulation.

Nick Bostrom's paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" argues that we may be inside an ancestor-simulation run by posthuman descendants — which, he notes, would permit an afterlife. What she sees is that theodicy comes back with it: the problem of evil under a good and powerful creator, the question that broke her faith. Substitute programmers for God, and Pascal, Leibniz, and Augustine all run again. Here the essay becomes a case study of one mind, reported without self-flattery.

Was it possible there were now Christian Transhumanists? Actual believers who thought the Kingdom of God would come about through the Singularity?

Christopher Benek is a Florida pastor with a Princeton divinity degree, chair of the Christian Transhumanist Association and author of a dissertation titled "The Eschaton Is Technological." His position: the borrowing is neither hidden nor accidental — the disciples expected bodily transformation on this earth, so technology having a role in redemption is old rather than heterodox. Watch two things. She went as a journalist and admits, by the end, that she was hoping for a way back. And when Benek reaches for quantum superposition to illuminate the hypostatic union — Christ fully human and fully God — she feels her own reason loosening.

What else could lie behind these impulses but the ghost of that first hope?

The last turn is inward: cleanses, interval training, the glycemic index of exotic fruits, a virtual trainer — the same longing in a form respectable enough to pass for health. She knows the ladder of upgrades leads nowhere and climbs it anyway. Then the closing image, bodies in motion at dusk moving over a bridge toward the ocean. Ask what she has claimed: she poses the alternative — delusion, or Solomon's dust blowing in the wind — and declines to answer.