Wednesday, August 13, 2025

Part I

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The Transhumanism Quest Never to Die: The Technological Revolution to Overcome Death

“Don’t die,” that’s the admonition that’s taken as a motto by some in the transhumanist movement who argue that it is possible that human beings can basically live forever. And thus you have Bryan Johnson, for example, who is considered to be one of the prophets of the transhumanist movement, who just has adopted as a motto he wants to sell to others, “don’t die.”

The entire issue of transhumanism is something that has arisen fairly recently in terms of worldview analysis, in terms of contemporary conversation, and in terms of a national conversation. It’s newer than in some isolated places such as Silicon Valley. It’s really interesting. There’s a very revealing aspect of this in which a lot of this has been coming from Silicon Valley and people who have been so committed to the digital world that they have envisioned a world in which we simply live forever. And right now, there are some who are looking at artificial intelligence and are saying that that’s the way we’re going to live forever. We’ll basically be downloaded into a form of continuing identity through artificial intelligence. There are others who are saying, “Look, it is also possible that we’re going to find biological breakthroughs, medical breakthroughs, dietary breakthroughs, unimaginable breakthroughs in medicine so that we can just continue to press the limits of human longevity.”

But the worldview issues here are just thick. And the fact is that this is increasingly a part of our national conversation. It’s breaking out in Time magazine. It’s in WIRED Magazine, of course, but that’s where you find a lot of these things. The fact that it is jumped to the front pages of our papers tells us something else. 

Ross Douthat in a very interesting conversation, Ross Douthat of the New York Times with Peter Thiel, very, very important figure in high-tech, very important figure in cultural argument, a billionaire who has invested a lot in these questions as well. This is now a part of our conversation, and a lot of people are just asking, “What is there behind this? What is there to this? What is the significance of it?”

Well, transhumanism as an ideology is something that basically came into shape about the 1980s and the 1990s. And I think, not coincidentally, it came along with the digital revolution and such things as the development of personal computers on the small scale and just massive, massive scale intelligence, as it has been called, in terms of the computing capacity that really emerged in the digital age. And then, of course, you have the development of the internet and the World Wide Web. And there were people even very early in terms of the internet age who were declaring, “This is the transfer of intelligence.” Intelligence is now transferring from human beings into the digital world. It’s no longer atoms and molecules. It’s no longer blood cells and organs. It’s no longer a brain. It is now the World Wide Web. It is what would later be described as The Cloud. It is a digital world in which intelligence now takes a digital shape and will be perpetuated indefinitely.

Now, I want to point out from a Christian worldview perspective before we get any further, that I think we can explain the urgency behind so much of this because of secularization. The secularization of the culture means that around us, increasingly, are people who are distant from, and in many ways, almost in a quantum sense. They are distanced from the Christian biblical worldview. Even in terms of humanity, what it means to be human, the Imago Dei, temporality, the sovereignty of God, all those things are now just gone. Even you might say the space-time continuum in a sense is gone as is anchored in creation order, anchored in the very being of God revealed to us in holy Scripture. That being gone, you’ve got to have some explanation for what it means to be human. And furthermore, you have to have some way of channeling what is an innate desire for a continuing existence and for a deeper meaning to life than just living a few decades of life and then disappearing into nothingness.

And, of course, if you leave the biblical worldview, you’ve got to come up with something. And I think this is why some of the places in this country where the departure from the biblical worldview, the development of a secularized culture where that was advanced in places such as Silicon Valley, I think it’s explainable that a lot of this energy would come out of that cultural context. And, of course, you have to add all of the high-tech emphasis, incredible technological knowledge, the spirit of innovation, and the vast sums of money that have flown through Silicon Valley and continue to do so.

Centering on two people, Peter Diamandis and Bryan Johnson. Peter Diamandis is featured in a really significant article that just appeared at The New Yorker. The New Yorker is one of those magazines, tells us a lot about the cultural direction. It’s an intellectual thought magazine read by a lot of people, and the headline in the article is, “Brave New World Department, Live Long and Prosper: The Quest to Extend the Human Lifespan and Get Rich Doing it.” Tad Friend is the reporter on the story, and he tells us about Peter Diamandis and the fact that he is putting big money and big energy behind the effort to forestall death. We are told, “He promotes the inevitability of longevity through a multitude of channels. There’s the clinic, which he started with two doctors and the motivational speaker, Tony Robbins. There’s a newsletter to podcasts and books on the future and how to stick around for it. There are partnerships in venture funds devoted to AI [That’s artificial intelligence] and biotech an annual conference, Abundance360, which showcases advances in nanotechnology and brain computer interfaces, and a semi-annual platinum trip where for $70,000 a piece, people get to meet imminent longevity scientists invest in their experimental therapies and secure those therapies for personal use.”

The friends and colleagues of Peter Diamandis refer to the world of his invention as the “Peterverse.” And it basically revolves around him and his quest for longevity. It’s really, really clear that what you have here is a human quest, never to die. And this one, again, is associated with Silicon Valley and with the wealth and the culture of Silicon Valley. He says, mindset’s very important. “Optimists live 15% longer than pessimists,” not 12%, not 17%, but 15%. You notice how everything here is quantified.

And with Peter Diamandis, it’s also clear that he lives in order not to die. I think it’s the clearest way to put it. He lives his entire lifestyle is around not dying. Listen to this, “Diamandis rises each morning at 5:30 and assesses his overnight biometrics gathered by an aura ring, an Apple Watch, and a continuous glucose monitor. Then as he meditates, he employs three red light therapy devices. One for healthy skin, one for lustrous hair, and one to kill oral bacteria. Along with, [I have no idea how to pronounce this,] shake, he consumes the first of five daily pill packs. This includes GLP-I agonist, a mitochondrial stimulant, a stress dampener, and a nootropic for cognitive enhancement. After using a toothpaste tailored to his oral microbiome, he begins his morning Zooms while pedaling a stationary bike. He also pumps iron and pins his daily protein intake at 150 grams, one gram for each pound he weighs.”

I think you see what I mean. The people who are really given to this movement and they think this is the big movement of the future, you basically have to live in order, at least by the thinking of this movement, not to die. There is a background to this, of course, and you could say, “Well, that even gets down to the fountain of life. It gets back to ancient Greek mythology. It gets back even to something like Tower of Babel where, ‘We would be as God.'”

And human longevity is something, I think, we can also understand simply because the gift of life is precious, and thus extending that or indeed just rejecting death, adopting the motto, don’t die, appears to be a way of at least trying to extend what is the goodness of life. But again, you’re also redefining it by the way you’re living in order not to die. Ray Kurzweil is behind this as well, very well-known transhumanist figure, and he is now the principal researcher in AI visionary at Google. And even the New Yorker says he’s the leading biotech futurist, “Decades ago, he predicted that aging would be dramatically slowed by 2029, the same year that computers would achieve consciousness. Personalized immune therapies and organ replacements would propel us nearly to longevity escape velocity.”

So this is what you’re looking for. You’re looking for longevity, escape velocity. A lot of these technological terms end up here. It’s a utopian quest. With Ray Kurzweil, it’s called “the singularity.” The transhumanists are a movement, and there are a lot of different forms of it. But it is all basically now coming down to the idea that there are advancements in health technologies that can at least delay death. And then there’s the possibility there’ll be some massive technological breakthrough that will extend life or at least will extend you and extend your consciousness.

Now, I think these folks will be the first to say, “This isn’t at all theological.” Yeah, keep telling yourself that. Don’t tell me this isn’t theological. This is inescapably theological. You may be rejecting the one true and living God. You may be rejecting the gospel of Jesus Christ. You may be confusing all these issues, but you are seeking some form of eternal life. You are definitely afraid of the end of human consciousness. You are definitely afraid of the end of you. And by the way, I think that is a very human impulse. I think that it is one that we, as Christians, can come to understand in very clear biblical terms.

When it comes to Bryan Johnson, I mean, the stuff they do is just absolutely amazing. WIRED Magazine ran a piece, “The Immortal Dreams of Bryan Johnson,” but Time Magazine. So now you’re jumping into this quintessential, mainstream American middlebrow culture. Time Magazine has given a lot of attention to Bryan Johnson. Similarly, he intends not to die. He’s the one with the T-shirts, “don’t die”. And even as we looked at Peter Diamandis and his daily ritual, when it comes to Bryan Johnson, it’s very, very similar. He claims to have the body of an 18-year-old, even as he has a son, 18 or 19 years old. And the extension of life is his absolute fascination. It is his absolute determination. And again, he comes up here with all the different kinds of metrics and all the different kinds of things one does to try to extend that lifespan.

The article in Time Magazine described his vision this way, “Johnson walks into the room wearing a green T-shirt and tiny white shorts. He has the body of an 18-year-old and the face of someone who had spent millions attempting to look like an 18-year-old.” I’m going to give Time Magazine credit for excellent writing in that sentence. In case you missed it, let me repeat it. “He has the body of an 18-year-old and the face of someone who had spent millions attempting to look like an 18-year-old.” The article continues, “His skin is pale and glowing, which is partly because of the multiple laser treatments he’s done and partly because he has no hair on his entire body.”

So here, his daily routine. This is on the previous day as reported here by Time Magazine. “He woke up at 4:53 AM, but delayed most of his routine until 7:00 AM in order to be observed by time. His bedroom has almost nothing in it, no photos, no books, no television, no glass of water, no phone charger, no chair with piled up clothes that he tried on once, no dry cleaning he meant to put away, no towels, no mirror, no nothing. ‘I only sleep in here,’ he says. No work, no reading. The only two objects in the room beside his bed are a laser face shield he uses for collagen growth and wrinkle reduction and a device [I’m not going to describe. Let’s just say it’s a uniquely male device, he thinks, measures his health.]”

Anyway, once he wakes up, he records all these measurements and then a good many more. I’m not going to go into detail. He checks something called pulse wave velocity. Time Magazine’s reporter says he didn’t exactly grasp what that was. He said, “I’m in the top 1% of ideal muscle fat.” Then he turns on his light therapy lamp, which mimics sun exposure for two or three minutes to reset his circadian rhythm. He takes his inner ear temperature to monitor changes in his body and starts off with two pills of ferritin to boost his iron along with some vitamin C. He washes his face, uses a cream to prevent wrinkles, and puts on a laser light mass for five minutes with red and blue lights designed to stimulate collagen growth and control blemishes. By this time, it’s typically about 6:00 AM and Johnson walks downstairs to start his day.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to inflict you with the rest of the day. Let me just say it’s pretty much like what came before it. This is downright crazy. But you know what? He is absolutely serious about the fact that he thinks he’s going to live forever. He is absolutely serious about the moral seriousness of saying “don’t die.” Johnson says, Most people assume death is inevitable. We are just basically trying to prolong the time we have before we die.” He says, “I don’t think there’s been any time in history where homo sapiens could say with a straight face that death might not be inevitable.” He thinks that time has arrived now.

Now, to the credit of Time magazine, they got a response. I love the next sentence, “Experts strongly disagree.” One of the first experts to whom they turned was Pinchas Cohen, dean of Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at the University of Southern California. He said, “Death is not optional. It’s written into our genes.” Dean Cohen emphasizes that living longer in the future is certainly possible. Over the course of the 20th century, human life expectancy rose from about 50 to more than 80, but living forever is not.” He said, “There’s absolutely no evidence that it’s possible and there’s absolutely no technology right now that even suggests we’re heading that way.”

Part II

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‘If You Want to Live Forever, Go to Church’: The Promise of Eternal Life is Found in Christ Alone

Okay now the next expert is Dr. Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. He gets credit for the best line, “If you want immortality, you should go to church.” He said, “If I believed even a little bit that it would be possible, I would be excited.” That is this transhumanist vision. He says it’s a pipe dream. 

So let’s just remind ourselves of some basic biblical truth. And this is right in the shape of scripture beginning in Genesis 1. It’s right in the text of scripture. Death entered human experience because Adam sinned. In Adam, we sinned. That’s the federal headship of Adam. And with sin came death. “The wages of sin is death.” That’s just very clear. And death thus is programmed into each one of us because even as the curse was addressed to Adam, once again, Adam is our federal head. In Adam, we all sinned. In Adam, we all bear mortality. We all bear the sentence of death even in our bodies. It’s interesting that you have secular people who say, “Death’s encoded in our DNA.” Well, regardless of exactly how it’s encoded, let’s just say it was theologically decreed. It was decreed by God himself. “It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that, the judgment.” You’re not going to get that from Silicon Valley, but that is the absolute truth as revealed in God’s Word.

And there’s an affirmation here of biblical Christianity in the sense of the inevitability of death. There’s also an affirmation here of the Imago Dei, of the image of God in the consciousness of time and the fear of death. Those are also God’s gifts to us made in his image that consciousness of time and that awareness of death, very sobering awareness. That is a very important part of God’s grace to us, to give us the grace of that sense of death and even the sense of impending judgment, and also, the sense of a hope for everlasting life. Jesus did not come and say that human beings are wrong to long for everlasting life. He just makes very clear there is only one way whereby that everlasting life may be made ours. And that is through faith in himself who is the way, the truth, and the life, and who’s given to us the promise that death is not the end for those who are in him, who are in Christ by God’s grace, by the power of the gospel.

But if you don’t have that worldview, then I’m going to suggest the Silicon Valley transhumanist worldview is one of the smartest just in terms of at least, say, elongating life, but it really does get crazy. And I mean, it’s already crazy just from what we’ve seen there. And trust me, what I couldn’t read to you on The Briefing is even crazier. Just take my word for it.

Part III

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Do the Claims of A.I. Replace Orthodox Christianity? The Theological Demands of Transhumanism

But I think an even more significant event was the conversation between New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel, very prominent technological innovator, founder and co-founder of some of the biggest technological firms, clearly, someone who is one of the masters of high-tech and at the same time, he’s also very clear about the fact he’s trying to figure out a lot of these big questions. He’s even talking recently a good deal publicly about the Antichrist. And he spoke to Ross Douthat, a very thoughtful person, has been my guest on Thinking in Public, a friend. He talked to him very candidly. And Ross Douthat asked some really important questions. Peter Thiel is also more conservative than a lot of the folks out there in Silicon Valley. It’s a very interesting analysis we need to do one day on The Briefing of how the Silicon Valley world’s really splitting between a far left and a very interesting conservative right. And you saw a little bit of that in the 2024 presidential election, no doubt about that.

It’s a lengthy interview that Ross Douthat does with Peter Thiel. And at one point, he’s asked about anti-aging research, “Does it mean that the FDA a is to step back and say, ‘Anyone who has a new treatment for Alzheimer’s can go ahead and sell it in the open market’? What’s the risk in the medical space look like?” Well, he goes on to say that we’re probably not taking enough risks.

Now, I want to use a longer quote from him to make sure it’s all in context. Speaking of this situation, should we take the risk? He says, “yes, he would take a lot more risk. If you have some fatal disease, there are probably a lot more risks you can take. There are a lot more risks the researchers can take. Culturally, what I imagine it looks like is early modernity where people, they thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would’ve radical life extension. Immortality, that was part of the project of early modernity.”

He mentions Francis Bacon, Condorcet. “Maybe it was anti-Christian,” he says, “Maybe it was downstream of Christianity. It was competitive.” Then he says this, “If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing. But I don’t know. I remember in 1999, 2000,” listen to this, “when we were running PayPal, one of my co-founders, Luke Nosek, he was into Alcor and cryonics, and people would freeze themselves. And we had one day where he took the whole company to a freezing party at a Tupperware party people sell Tupperware policies at a freezing party,” Ross Douthat says, “They sell their… Was it just their heads? What was going to be frozen?” Peter Thiel said, “You could get a full body or just a head.” And Douthat says, “Just a head was cheaper.”

Now we’re talking about cryonics, we’re talking about freezing, and we’re talking about really freezing, freezing the human body or maybe even just the human head in hopes of an eventual extension of life later on. Inevitably, their conversation turned to artificial intelligence. It is very interesting. And if I’m going to trust anybody about this, I’m going to be very interested in what Peter Thiel thinks. He says, we’re going to have to frame just how big a thing this thing is. And he says, “My stupid answer is that it’s somewhere. It’s more than a nothing burger and it’s less than the total transformation of our society.” So that’s a pretty big spectrum between a nothing burger and the total transformation of society. He gives the parallel the development of the personal computer. He says it could well be that it’s on that scale. 

He then refers to a “gating factor,” and that’s a good term for us all to know in worldview analysis. A gating factor is the thing that keeps progress from speeding up or from breaking through. That’s a gating factor like closing a gate. And so he acknowledges there is such a gating factor. A lot of the transhumanists really, I think, don’t want to accept that at all, or they certainly don’t want to accept that it can’t be overcome. But Peter Thiel openly acknowledges that whatever this transhumanism, this techno-optimism is all the confidence in human longevity, Transhumanism, don’t die, the AI ideology that’s basically affecting so much of the world, and he sees it in so many ways in the context of a replacement for the influence of orthodox Christianity. He said orthodox Christianity, the critique of Orthodox Christianity has all of these things–speaking of transhumanism or just humanism–is that it doesn’t go far enough. “That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self.” That’s a pretty key insight. It’s a pretty key insight coming from someone who’s not identified with orthodox Christianity. He does look at orthodox Christianity and say, “It demands more than ‘longer this.’ It demands more than a ‘longer me.’ It demands more and promises more than this continued physical existence. It is total transformation.” And I think it’s a very interesting acknowledgement that that’s what these secular substitutes, at least let’s just say according to their view at this point, can’t bring or promise or do.

Part IV

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It’s Christ or Nothing Else: The Battle of the Christian Worldview in Our Ages of Ideas – To Whom Else Will We Go?

I think Peter Thiel is also really onto something. And again, he comes from a very different place that I come from in so many ways. But he’s onto something when he says in worldview analysis of his own that when you look at Europe, for example, it’s the green thing, it’s the environmental thing, it’s Greta Thunberg, basically. He says there are only three major worldviews still available in Europe. He said, “I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe in Europe. They believe in the green thing more than the Islamic Sharia law or more than the Chinese communist totalitarian takeover.” He says, basically, there are only three things in the aftermath of Christianity. There’s the green thing, and we certainly see that on both sides of the Atlantic. And then there’s Islamic theology and Sharia law. And then there is Communism and Marxism. They’re the only three available worldviews. I think that’s very insightful. When Christianity goes into recession, it’s not replaced by nothing. It’s replaced in Europe by these three things. I think he’s absolutely right.

And, of course, the big question is, what’s the trajectory of the United States? I think you could make the argument that something very similar to this could shape up as the contest of worldviews in the aftermath of a declining Christianity. That is something that thoughtful Christians, faithful Christians need to take very much into consideration. If indeed Christianity recedes, and goes into an even more pronounced recession in the United States, it won’t be replaced with nothing. It’s going to be replaced with something. And the limitations upon what those somethings could be, those limitations are very significant. I think we actually already know pretty much what they are.

I think there’s a fascinating turn in the conversation, by the way, and the issue of Calvinism comes up. Who would’ve thought? With Peter Thiel and Ross Douthat, where does this come from? Well, it has to do with God’s intervention in history. And Ross Douthat said that God is behind Jesus Christ entering history because God was not going to leave us in a stagnationist, decadent Roman Empire. So at some point, God is going to step in. Peter Thiel says, “I’m not that Calvinist.” Ross Douthat’s response is, “That’s not Calvinism though. That’s just Christianity. God will not leave us eternally staring into screens and being lectured by Greta Thunberg. He will not abandon us to that fate.” Yeah, make that into a bumper sticker.

Okay in all this transhumanism confusion and all this techno-optimism and all the secularity of this stuff that’s replacing Christianity among so many in the minds and in the hearts of so many, I think it’s really important we do recognize there are limited replacements to Christianity. And I think when you have Peter Thiel say in Europe, it’s the green thing or it’s Islam or it’s Marxism, I think with an awful lot of students going back to school right now, an awful lot of college students, some of them freshmen showing up for the first time, an awful lot of Christian parents taking their kids to college campuses and seeing them off for college experience, I think you need to know that battle for worldviews is exactly what we’re talking about here. And the college campus, even the American public schools, all of education is a battle for hearts and minds and souls. And you need to know that what we’ve been talking about today is just baked into the thinking of a larger number of Americans than you’d like to think. 

And if nothing else, you look at this and you say, “What a battle of worldviews!” You have biblical Christianity against not just one of these options, by the way, but all of these options. But you also understand that the battle for worldviews is going on around us just all the time. And it’s very easy to look at some of this now so much in the media these days and say, “That’s absolutely nuts,” but that’s what they said about something else two weeks ago. That’s the way this culture works, a culture of confusion. It just gets more confused.

One other Christian observation about this, going back to a biblical worldview. The biblical worldview honors age. The biblical worldview honors the elders of the community. The biblical worldview honors that experience within the context of temporality. And we are in an age that actually, I mean, just look at this, worships youth. And you know what? Even the ancient pagan Greeks understood that’s a losing battle.

Lord willing, we’ll get to other things this week from gerrymandering and the increased reality of red and blue America, the battle of worldviews in different ways. But all that we talked about today, I just want to leave with you with the urgent Christian reminder that it’s not Christianity and anything else. It’s the Christian biblical revelation. It’s the gospel of Jesus Christ over against everything else. 

It’s Christ and nothing else because Christ is everything.