Christian Transhumanist Metaphysics

Facing reality squarely.

1 Intro

Underneath all human thought lies a metaphysical question:

What is this reality are we living in? What are its features? How does it work?

Every ethical system, political theory, scientific project, theology, and anthropology rests on an answer to that question. Some answers are explicit. Many people just ignore the question or assume the default “apatheism” (apathy+atheism) somehow answers everything.

But no one escapes metaphysics. Even the person who says, “I don’t do metaphysics; I only follow the science,” adopts several metaphysical commitments: that reality is intelligible, that observation can disclose truth, that logic is trustworthy, that causation is sufficiently stable, that minds can track the world, and that human inquiry is not merely noise generated by meat.

Physics explains how reality behaves. Metaphysics asks what reality is.

Christian Transhumanism must be more than a position on life extension, artificial intelligence, gene editing, mind-machine interfaces, and human enhancement. Those are downstream questions. The deeper question is what sort of cosmos could make those questions meaningful, and how to unite the best insights of Christian and secular philosophies, to enable us to approach this coming revolution proactively, confidently, embracing the great opportunities but doing so with discernment, justice and as rigorous an understanding as we are humanly able to achieve.

2 The best analog of the Universe is an Engineered Artefact

The first point of Christian Transhumanism’s posited metaphysical framework to be articulated in this essay is:

We are living inside a created, intelligible, Engineered Artefact.

Artefact in this context meaning a constructed or manufactured item engineered for a purpose.

Or, in other language:

The universe is not just suddenly-appearing matter. It is technology created with intention.

Not technology in the modern sense of silicon, rockets, or software. Those are our latest and best, yet still crude forms of technology. The claim is deeper. Technology is ordered means directed toward ends. It is the arrangement of reality into purposeful functioning structures.

Therefore, the universe itself is the underlying primary technology: a generative Artefact capable of bringing into being stars, chemistry, life, consciousness, culture, morality, science, and human technology.

The Christian claim is not merely that God exists somewhere beyond the cosmos. It is that the rational source of the cosmos has entered the cosmos. The Logos (John 1:1) through whom all things were made has become flesh, that is, Jesus. The Engineer has inhabited the Artefact.

But before we get to Christology, we must begin with the Artefact.

3 Why “Engineered Artefact” Is Better Than “Simulation”

The 21^st century West Coast tech-bro version of this discussion begins with “simulation” theory. Nick Bostrom’s famous question in his 2003 paper, “Are you living in a computer simulation?” captured the imagination of technologists because it expressed metaphysics in the latest technological metaphor. Elon Musk showed the same instinct. He would question a hypothetical superintelligence, “What’s outside the simulation?” (Lex Fridman podcast, 2017).

But simulation of what? Bostrom suggested maybe a simulation of ancestors of an advanced race, but to what end? Simulation as a description is narrow. It imports assumptions from video games, virtual reality, graphics rendering, computing hardware, and digital environments.

Earlier generations used different but related metaphors. William Paley had the watchmaker. The universe looked like the finest technology of his age: a watch. Before that, the world was imagined as a great chain, a book, a temple, a garden, a hierarchy, a theatre, an organism (e.g. Gaia), or a cosmic order.

Each metaphor reveals something. Each distorts something.

The watchmaker or machine metaphor captures design but risks mechanistic explanations, when we now know the universe is not clockwork (see below). The simulation metaphor captures implemented reality but risks a lack of purpose, or that nothing really matters, or that it is a game or an experiment. The organism metaphor captures growth and change but contradicts the fundamental order at the base of reality. The temple metaphor captures sacred order but suggests stasis. The book metaphor captures intelligibility but risks passivity.

Let’s move beyond metaphor to careful observation, then see how best to characterise our Universe.

Firstly, modern cosmology indicates that our observable universe emerged from an extremely hot, dense state around 13.8 billion years ago. While physicists continue to debate whether the Big Bang represents the absolute beginning of reality or merely the beginning of our cosmic epoch, the evidence for the hot Big Bang itself is overwhelming.

Current evidence also suggests the universe will continue expanding, with entropy steadily increasing toward a distant heat death as even the last black holes eventually evaporate through Hawking radiation. Maybe a firework analogy fits: it starts in a hot state and peters out to low energy photons, separated widely, almost nothingness.

Historically, the idea of a universe with a finite past proved uncomfortable for several philosophical systems that assumed an eternal cosmos. Soviet Marxists resisted Big Bang cosmology because it conflicted with dialectical materialism. During China’s Cultural Revolution, teaching the Big Bang theory was a career limiting move for physicists. Atheist objectivist Leonard Peikoff likewise defended Ayn Rand’s eternal universe as a philosophical necessity for Objectivism.

When a worldview requires the universe to be eternal, evidence suggesting a finite past is naturally met with resistance. The same psychological mechanism appears across many ideologies. Evidence is sometimes rejected outright; if not, it is filtered, reinterpreted, or assigned lower confidence until the worldview can accommodate it.

Secondly, with today’s latest physics, an argument which has gained ground is the fine-tuning argument. The constants in physics are closely tuned to allow the emergence of life. This is said to be supportive evidence of at least some kind of design. This argument has both supporters and detractors, but basically all agree that if these constants were changed, even a miniscule change, would result in a very different universe. Extensive arguments against this being evidence of design exist, but all seek to ground their outcome in some kind of non-intelligent origin or source of the Universe. Simpler is to posit an intelligent source.

Causation as we experience it (more on this in the next section) seems to work within the standard model of particle physics. This only starts working one Planck-time after the big bang, therefore is probably not the ground of the Artefact. Standard model particles are much larger than the posited ‘quantum foam’ which seems to exist at distances smaller the Planck length.

The laws of physics are therefore operating regularities within the Artefact, not self-explanatory necessities. Time, matter, energy, quantum fields, spacetime geometry, and mathematical structure may be internal features of the created system rather than the final metaphysical substrate.

“Engineered Artefact” is therefore more useful because it is broader. It includes law, structure, information, constraint, intelligibility, emergence, and purpose. It does not require that reality be literally digital like our latest technology. Thus the argument that the universe appeared as a ‘random fluctuation’ in a ‘special kind of nothing’ (‘nothing is not nothing to a physicist’), becomes less tenable with time.

This causal order appears implemented rather than ultimate.

This is why “what caused God?” is a category error. It assumes that whatever grounds the causal order must itself be one more object inside the causal order. But if causation is part of the Artefact, an in-built feature of how it operates, then the source of the Artefact need not be causally related to the universe in the same way that one billiard ball is causally related to another.

The response to the classic conjecture, “There must be an un-caused cause at the beginning of the chain of cause and effect,” cannot be, “What caused that?” because it was posited it was uncaused, at least in terms of our understanding of causation, in our universe of three dimensions of space and one of time.

Thus Richard Dawkins’ conjecture that God, if he exists, must have evolved somehow, makes no sense, because evolution is something inside the Artefact. Outside, the processes are unimaginably different.

That does not prove any religion. But it’s a strong challenge to the complacency of brute physicalism. The universe is not obviously self-explanatory. The more deeply we examine it, the less plausible it becomes that reality is merely a pile of facts that just happen to be mathematically ordered, generative, intelligible, and productive of minds capable of mathematics.

The Christian Transhumanist therefore begins with this disciplined conjecture:

The best description of Reality is that it behaves like an Engineered Artefact.

Or, for the west-coast technophiles, “Causation is a feature of the Simulation”

The observed properties and inferences of the telos of this Engineered Artefact are set out in the rest of this essay. But first, this idea is not actually new.

4 A Convergence Across Traditions

The engineered Artefact hypothesis is not a strange invention of modern technophiles. It is a contemporary restatement of an ancient family of metaphysical intuitions, based on the latest scientific insights.

Thinkers from antiquity until today who have argued for the existence of God, or a force of intelligence external to the visible universe include Plato, Aristotle, Islamic scholars such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Hindus such as Ramanuja and Sri Aurobindo, Zen Buddhist Huang Po, Maimonides (Jewish), enlightenment thinkers Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant, and Christians from Aquinas, Duns Scotus, through contemporary thinkers like CS Lewis and William Lane Craig.

These thinkers do not all agree. They do not give identical arguments. Some are theists, some are not. Some have a personalist view of God, some impersonalist. Some emphasise divine will, others divine intellect, others emptiness, others Platonic form, others necessity, others pure actuality.

Despite their different takes. their convergence matters.

Across cultures, serious minds have repeatedly found the visible world insufficient as its own explanation. The world appears dependent, ordered, intelligible, and contingent. It appears to point beyond itself. The human mind naturally asks why there is anything at all, why it has order, why reason tracks it, why mathematics works, how moral obligation emerged, and why consciousness exists.

The modern materialist often treats these questions as embarrassments to be ignored or explained away rather than answered. But that move is not scientific. It is metaphysical. It is a worldview protecting itself from rival explanations.

Christian Transhumanism does not need to claim certainty. It should be Popperian enough to reject sealed systems of thought. But it can claim that the engineered Artefact hypothesis is a live, rational, and increasingly interesting conjecture.

Reality is law-governed.
Reality is information-dense.
Reality is mathematically tractable, at least to a large extent.
Reality generates intelligence.
Reality produces beings who can get closer to truth of understanding reality.
Reality produces beings who ask moral questions.
Reality produces beings who create further Artefacts.

A universe that produces physicists, poets, prophets, engineers, saints, and artificial intelligence systems requires some explanation, rather than dismissive gestures, be they populist or academic.

In the following sections this essay will support this position by considering the observable features of the universe. But first, a little further philosophy.

5 Some further philosophical underpinnings

5.1 Hume, Uniformity, and the Discontinuity at the Beginning

David Hume placed a permanent brake on naïve scientific confidence. We do not directly observe causation. We observe patterns, sequences, regularities, correlations, and repeated conjunctions. Then we infer necessity. But the necessity itself does not appear in sensory experience. We infer cause because the pattern is stable.

Science depends upon this stability. It assumes that nature is sufficiently uniform for experiment, prediction, falsification, measurement, instrumentation, and replication to mean something.

Hume’s characterisation of the problem of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature is an important underpinning of science. Science is powerful inside a lawlike order. It cannot, by its own methods, explain why there is lawlike order at all.

This assumption of lawlike order can only be observed and used. It is the key structure by which we make experience intelligible at all. Popper, later, avoided naïve induction (pattern recognition) by treating science as conjecture and refutation rather than repeated observations being confirmation. But even Popperian falsification requires enough uniformity for a test to count as a test.

So Hume and Popper together drive us toward a disciplined boundary:

Scientific reasoning requires a stable order. That stable order is not itself a scientific discovery, rather, something we have observed repeatedly, and created formulas and explanations to describe. It is the condition under which scientific discovery becomes possible.

As far back as observation and inference can take us, the universe appears lawlike. But when our models approach the earliest boundary of the observable universe, our physics reaches a frontier. We have no way to know what is past this point, therefore we have no basis on which to assert the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature can continue to hold true where there is such a large discontinuity.

That is, causation as we perceive it inside the Engineered Artefact is a designed feature.

5.2 A rational principle undergirding the universe

The need for a rational organising principle is recognised by all sides in the theist/atheist debate. The point of difference is whether that principle is an equation or a person. In around 500 BC, the concept of “Logos” emerged from Greek thought.

The concept of Logos (Greek: “word,” “reason,” “account”) originated with the Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE), who used it to describe the rational principle governing cosmic order and change, that is, the underlying structure that makes the universe intelligible rather than chaotic.

The Stoics later developed this significantly, conceiving Logos as the active, rational force pervading and animating the entire universe. A kind of divine reason immanent in nature, ordering all things according to a coherent plan.

Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher (c. 20 BCE–50 CE), bridged Greek philosophy and Jewish monotheism by identifying Logos with divine Wisdom and as God’s intermediary agent in creation.

John’s Gospel adopted and transformed this philosophical heritage, opening with “In the beginning was the Logos” (John 1:1), identifying this cosmic rational principle not as an abstract force but as a person: Jesus Christ, the eternal Word (‘organising principle’) who was both with God and was God, through whom all things were made, and who became flesh.

The ordered and rational principle behind the universe (“Logos”) that allows humans to make scientific discoveries may exhibit attributes of personhood, or may, in the eyes of some, not. Hard to prove, but seems most likely on balance that there is intentionality and agency in the founding principles of the Universe. Therefore, the Christian assertion, that Christian Transhumanism endorses is:

Causation explains events. Logos is posited as the explanation as to why causation works and is intelligible to humans, allowing the creation of powerful explanatory knowledge.

It seems inevitable that some kind of rational ordered source of principles exists. That is a reasonable inference from rational observation of the Universe.

6 Key objections answered: Infinite Regress and Brute Fact

There are two main alternatives to some form of Creator or ground outside the perceptible universe.

The first is infinite regress. The universe is caused by something, which is caused by something else, which is caused by something else, and so on forever. In modern cosmology this sometimes appears as a multiverse generator, or a landscape of universes, or an eternal inflationary process, or some deeper mechanism that produces universes.

But if a multiverse is invoked to explain the universe, the multiverse itself requires explanation. If a multiverse generator is invoked to explain the multiverse, the generator requires explanation. A multiverse generator generator can be posited, and so on. But repetition is not explanation. At some point, one either reaches a necessary ground or admits that the explanatory chain is being extended rather than completed.

The second alternative is brute fact. The universe, multiverse, quantum field, mathematical structure, or totality simply exists. No further explanation is available. There is no reason. Reality just is. Indeed, infinite regression is a species of brute fact.

This option is possible. It cannot be disproven. But it is philosophically difficult. The question was, “What is at the beginning of the chain of cause and effect?”. If the riposte is, “Why can’t the universe be its own necessarily self-existent entity?”, the response is simple: because nothing we observe in the universe has that that property, and that’s why we asked the question in the first place.

Brute fact asks reason to stop precisely at the most important question. It tells us that every event inside reality may be investigated, but reality itself must be exempt from speculation. It allows explanation everywhere except at the foundation of explanation.

It is a metaphysical wager that, despite nothing in the universe apparently existing without a cause, that there is nothing outside the chain of cause and effect that we observe.

The Deist or Christian wager is different. It says that reality is intelligible because intelligibility is grounded in Logos. The universe is not self-explanatory. It is derivative. It is created. Its causal order is real, but not ultimate. Its laws are stable, but not self-grounding.

As stated above, the question “What caused God?” misunderstands this claim. God, in classical Christian theology, is not one more contingent object. God is not an item in the inventory of reality. God is the reason there is an inventory at all. God is not an event requiring an earlier event. God is the necessary ground of events. That external to the Engineered Artefact, external to the observable universe, causation is so different as to be best portrayed to limited human minds as grounded and eternal.

But even if a brute force or infinite regress is used as a rejection of the existence of an externality of the Artefact, such rejection should be honest. It is not replacing superstition with science. It is replacing one metaphysical foundation with another.

The options are not Christianity / Deism versus reason, but one metaphysical assumption versus another.

The fact that there are rival metaphysical accounts of why reason works should not be a surprise. All such accounts are, by Hume, unfalsifiable. All therefore require faith, in the sense of “the assurance we feel about what we cannot prove”, to contemporise Hebrews 11:1. Therefore, whilst all options to understand what occurred prior to the earliest detectable or computable instant after the big bang are veiled, we must choose something to base our lives on. In the context of this coherent metaphysics, the Christian Transhumanist assertion is that “Engineered Artefact” and “Causation is a feature thereof” is more plausible than either infinite regression or brute fact.

7 Features of the Engineered Artefact – observed and inferred

This section sets out from first principles five key features of the Engineered Artefact. The first feature is labelled not first, but zeroth, since it exists independent of the Artefact, yet influences it.

7.1 The Artefact’s Zeroth Feature: Forms and Concepts, which are independent of the Artefact.

Plato theorised this feature of reality: the existence of forms.

Take a triangle. No physical triangle is perfect. Every drawn triangle is approximate. Every manufactured triangle has defects at sufficient magnification. Yet the concept “triangle” is exact. It is understood, even though the precise perfect triangle is rare.

If the universe itself is an Artefact, then its forms may be internal operating structures, or they may be grounded beyond it. A triangle may be part of the created mathematical order. Or triangularity may be an eternal feature of rational possibility grounded in Logos. Either way, the existence of forms means reality is not limited to physical matter-in-motion.

On balance, it seems the concept of a triangle would still exist, even if the universe did not.

The same is true of numbers, logic, proportion, symmetry, and mathematical structure. Are these merely human conventions? Are they discovered? Are they eternal forms? Are they features of the Artefact? Are they grounded in divine mind?

The options are ancient. Platonism says forms have a reality independent of physical instances. Nominalism says they are names we impose. Conceptualism says they exist in minds. Christian Platonism says forms are grounded in the divine Logos.

Moral forms intensify the question.

Justice, courage, mercy, truthfulness, holiness, beauty, wisdom, and love are not simply chemical events. They are not reducible to personal preference. Humans may disagree about them, but cross-culturally the research holds up, at least in general terms.

Pushing deeply into the question of moral forms as part of the future form of humanity is necessary to set directions for emerging technologies.

Thus the zeroth feature: Forms and Concepts exist independent of the Engineered Artefact.

7.2 The Artefact’s First Feature: Laws of Physics, as our approximations of the underlying functioning of reality are mis-named.

If the universe is an engineered Artefact, its laws are not human laws. Human “laws of physics” (a terrible misnomer) are our descriptions of regularities we have discovered. They are powerful approximations of deeper reality.

Newtonian mechanics remains good enough to build bridges, calculate projectiles, and model ordinary mechanical systems. But it is not ultimate. Relativity corrects it at high velocities and strong gravitational fields. Quantum mechanics corrects classical intuitions at small scales. The Standard Model explains enormous domains of particle physics but does not include gravity. General relativity describes gravity magnificently but is not yet reconciled with quantum mechanics. Dark matter and dark energy remain huge unresolved placeholders in cosmology.

The use of the term “law” is unfortunate. Newton’s “law” of gravity should be called “Newton’s formula for gravity”. The problem with the concept of a “law” based on observation of repeated patterns is our language entrenches it as some kind of given, and can slow future growth in understanding. All such “laws” should be better labelled as formulas or empirical approximations. We observe patterns, and from them we build explanatory knowledge, as David Deutsch would put it.

Engineers use empirical approximations in all calculations. A model can be accurate enough for purpose without being identical to reality. Such models are disciplined compressions of the world, useful because they capture enough of the relevant causal structure for prediction and action.

Scientific laws are like that. They are not arbitrary. They are not mere social constructions. They are truth-tracking approximations. But they are still approximations.

Christian Transhumanist metaphysics therefore treats science with both reverence and humility. Reverence, because science discloses real structure, and humility, because science is not omniscience.

The first feature: The Engineered Artefact functions using regular laws. Humans observe patterns and create formulas with ever-improving accuracy of reflecting them.

7.3 The Artefact’s Second Feature: Intelligibility

The universe is intelligible to us, partially and progressively.

That is astonishing, as has been noted by numerous philosophers and scientists.

Christian Transhumanism recognises that abstract intelligibility is not a minor issue. Mathematics is “unreasonably effective” (Eugene Wigner) because the world is structured in ways mathematics can capture. Engineering works because abstract forms can be materially instantiated. A bridge is made not only of steel and concrete, but of geometry, engineering formulas, material science, economics, and human purpose.

Technology is the materialisation of form. A design exists first as concept, then as drawing, model, schedule, procurement package, construction, operation, maintenance, and social effect. The Artefact begins in mind and becomes reality through intention.

Humans emerged on a small planet around an ordinary star, after billions of years of cosmic history, with brains shaped by survival pressures. Yet these brains can infer black holes, quantum fields, DNA, plate tectonics, stellar nucleosynthesis, prime numbers, non-Euclidean geometry, and the age of the universe. We can build equations that predict phenomena no one had observed when the equations were written. We can detect invisible particles, image distant galaxies, edit genomes, simulate weather, and land machines on other planets.

The human mind is not omniscient. It is error-prone, tribal, self-deceiving, proud, and often ridiculous. But it is also truth-tracking. Not perfectly. Not automatically. Not without correction. But genuinely longing for truth.

This is where the scientific method, and critical rationalism (Karl Popper) matter.

We do not possess infallible reason. We possess conjectural reason under criticism. Knowledge grows through error correction. We observe patterns of cause and effect, then propose explanations, test them, criticise them, discard them, revise them, and build better ones. The power of science is not that scientists are pure rational angels. They are not. The power of science is that its best methods expose errors to reality and to criticism.

Christian Transhumanism should therefore reject both scientism and anti-science.

Scientism says science is the only real knowledge. That fails because science depends on logical, mathematical, metaphysical, and moral assumptions it cannot itself prove, notwithstanding the assertions of the failed ‘new atheist’ movement.

Anti-science says science is merely human arrogance or cultural construction. It asserts that ‘other ways of knowing’ are just as valid, even though not subject to basic tenets of falsifiability. It allows assertions that are not tested to survive through political pressure and tribalism. Anti-science fails because aircraft fly, antibiotics work, bridges stand, GPS corrects for relativity, and vaccines train immune systems. Reality pushes back. Bad models fail.

The Christian Transhumanist position is stronger again. Science is one disciplined mode of participating in the Logos-structured intelligibility of creation. It is a form of general revelation (theologian’s label for Romans 1:20) insofar as creation discloses order, rationality, and possibility.

We can also discern, as noted above, moral truths from the world of Forms, external to the Engineered Artefact. An imperative therefore exists to improve the human condition using science, as the Imago Dei in each of us seeks to mirror the heart of the Creator to better the world, as Francis Bacon said, ‘by the sweat of our brow’.

Therefore, our truth-tracking minds must be guided by clear ethics and morals in the transhumanist age. We must become the kind of creatures who can handle intelligibility to create new powerful knowledge and technology in a manner that reflects the nature of the Creator.

The artefact’s second feature: the laws of the Artefact are intelligible and humans can model them. But only with disciplined and ethical minds.

7.4 The Artefact’s Third Feature: Mixed Causation: Deterministic and Non-Deterministic.

Causation inside the universe is not one thing.

Let’s begin at the level of physics. For a few hundred years until the early 1900s, the deterministic ‘billiard ball’ view held sway. This came from Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe, and was formalised by Pierre Laplace in the “Laplace’s Demon” thought experiment (1814). Laplace theorized that if a supreme intellect knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in existence and the laws of physics, it could perfectly calculate the entire past and future. This implies that everything, including every human action, is predetermined.

Despite determinism still holding some populist assent, the clockwork view of the universe has not held water for generations now, due to the following scientific facts:

1. The structure of the atom, and random decay of nuclei. For example, Carbon 14 is formed in the upper atmosphere when cosmic-ray generated neutrons strike a Nitrogen atom’s nucleus. It then lasts somewhere between nearly zero and many tens of thousands of years, the half-life being 5,740 years. Numerous lab experiments find no deterministic mechanism to fix the life between the neutron strike and the beta-decay of C14 back to N14.

2. Physics has probed to the level of the quantum matrix, smaller than the Planck length, which is 20 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. At this level, there seems to be the random appearance and disappearance of particles and anti-particles. This initially was thought to be a theoretical construct of quantum field theory. However, laboratory analogue experiments have reproduced important features of predicted Hawking radiation. Under the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, the spontaneous emission of individual Hawking quanta is fundamentally probabilistic, rather than deterministic.

3. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that there is a limit to the accuracy with which we can know both the position and momentum of particles, single-handedly defeats Laplace’s demon, at least, the simple causal deterministic version that held popular support for generations.

4. Downwards causation. Any complex system with emergent effects (see below) has some kind of downwards causation, which defeats pure determinism from moving upward in the emergence hierarchy. It can be argued determinism moves up, and across, then down, but on the downwards path there are observable disconnects. An organised whole imposes constraints on its components. There are multiple layers of emerged behaviour and constraints between particle physics and a political system.

5. Downward causation in human becoming. Consciousness and free will (explored further below) enable us to instantiate higher ideals within ourselves and our shared world. Religious and cultural archetypes, as Jung recognized, take on a living dynamism within the human collective, exerting real downward influence that shapes individual lives and societies amid underlying indeterminacy and chaos. This is not mere metaphor but participatory co-creation: we choose which Forms to embody, turning our choices to either good or evil.

6. Near-random chaotic processes (e.g. weather, mammalian conception) are in theory deterministic, just hard to calculate. But these are subject to non-deterministic processes such as nuclear decay and downwards causation, as well as, of course, being limited by Heisenberg.

7. Interaction with the world of forms and thought. Plato posited the world of forms as existing independent of physical reality, that is, external to the Engineered Artefact. Consciousness (more on that below) can be conceived as an imposer of forms on chaos. Or if you don’t think forms exist independently of the Creation, then maybe this formulation may be closer to truth: Conscious agents form mental representations of possible futures, evaluate them against goals and values, inhibit some impulses, select others, and organise physical matter toward intended ends.

8. Quantum mechanics further disrupted the clean mechanistic picture. Bell inequality experiments in quantum entanglement won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, reinforcing that classical local realism cannot be retained in its old form, falsifying the popular interpretation of Einstein’s “God does not play dice”.

Some determined determinists remain, but their numbers are thinning. For the layperson, the non-physicists, some believe the universe was random during the inflation period just after the big bang, and has since been deterministic. Some believe this universe is one of many. Then, at the creation of each universe, the fine-tuned physics constants are set randomly, then it’s deterministic. Such ideas stretch plausibility.

For the physicists, the 2022 Nobel prize proved that if reality contains determinism, then it cannot be both local, that is, signals cannot travel faster than light, and real, that is, objects have definite properties before they are measured. So any determinism cannot be ‘locally real’. But some deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics remain.

The top three serious deterministic quantum theories supported by real physicists who support determinism are:

1. Many Worlds: that at every observation event, a new slightly different copy of the current universe is spawned. It’s a mathematically precise consequence of quantum physics. Some really clever people take this seriously. Doesn’t pass the pub test very often.

2. De Broglie - Bohm / Pilot Wave: that particles really do exist in a single precise location prior to observation. This theory invokes faster-than-light information sharing instantly throughout the universe.

3. Gerad t’Hooft’s “Celular automaton” that basically upscales Conway’s game of life to the entire universe, suggesting it really is a simulation.

These three theories, and their genre, seem to make the following philosophical errors:

1. Reification. Whilst maths is “unusually effective” in modelling reality, there are many solutions to equations with no bearing on physical reality. And mathematical things with no reality that make sense physically. When an equation leads to an absurdity, like an infinite number of splitting universes every time an electron moves, it is highly likely that we have reached beyond our model’s validity.

2. Maths is not a flawless, complete mirror of absolute truth. It is a human-constructed logical system. Gödel proved that any consistent mathematical system will always contain statements that are true but cannot be proved within the system. At the other extreme, electrical engineers rely on the square root of minus one. If maths itself has inherent limits, quirks and blind spots, it is a massive philosophical gamble to assume that a mathematical equation (like the Schrödinger equation) can perfectly and exhaustively describe every corner of physical reality without breaking down.

3. Another huge problem for determinists is explaining how the universe could ever have come into existence. Arguing for determinism all the way back through infinite eons simply creates an infinite regress, again demanding an endless chain of deterministic causes with no actual beginning, exacerbating the problem of infinite regress and brute fact above. Pure determinism is an extra bar for those who believe in a multiverse, since some multiverse theories believe the constants of physics (or maybe even the formulae) are reset at each big bang.

To conclude this section:

The conclusion that the universe is deterministic was a false turn during the enlightenment. It was not believed before, and is not defensible today.

That matters politically and morally. Hard determinism corrodes agency. Marxist historicism treated social outcomes as scientific inevitabilities and helped license violence in the name of history. Biological determinism can excuse vice or despair. Technological determinism tells us that our technology will define our societies, and we have no control over it.

Christian Transhumanism rejects all such fatalisms. The universe contains law, but also contingency, constraint, and also agency, that is, free will, as at least an emergent phenomenon (more on that below). Causation does not mean inevitability. The next section will focus more closely on the concept of ‘emergence’ to give further arguments against determinism and in favor of the scientifically-supported mixed view of causation, having both deterministic and non-deterministic processes.

7.5 The Artefact’s Fourth Feature: Emergence

Emergence is a confusing word in contemporary thought. It’s a label for a process we don’t understand, a black box.

It is used as a placeholder to link different sciences which use different principles. Chemistry emerges from Physics. Biology emergers from Chemistry. Consciousness is somehow intertwined with Biology, but does it “emerge” or is it somehow self-existent? Language emerges from consciousness, although much consciousness does not involve language^[i]. Society emerges from consciousness, languages, and human nature. Society gives emergent birth to worldviews, religions, cultures, and various ways of knowing.

The most efficient ways of knowing bring the greatest power, therefore science emerges. Science gives birth (emergence?) to technology, which as above is always deployed with the aim (sometimes mis-aimed) of improving the human condition.

At each transition someone waves a hand and says, “emergence.” The critic is right to complain. Sometimes “emergence” is just “then a miracle occurs” in secular clothing. It’s a deus ex machina solution, the wave of a wand.

But the concept cannot be dismissed. The universe clearly has layered structure. Higher-level realities arise from lower-level realities while exhibiting patterns not visible at the lower level alone. The higher levels are real and, in some sense, independent, working downwards causation.

Weak emergence occurs when higher-level patterns arise from lower-level rules and could, in principle, be derived or simulated from them. Conway’s Game of Life is the standard toy example. Simple local rules generate complex patterns. Nothing spooky is added, yet surprising structures appear.

Strong emergence is more controversial. It suggests genuinely novel properties or causal powers that are not reducible to lower-level interactions even in principle. Consciousness is the usual candidate. Free will, intentionality, life, social systems, ecosystems, economies, and immune systems are also canvassed.

Christian Transhumanism should use the word with care. It is probably not one process, but a group of processes we don’t understand yet. Once we understand a process, we may cease to so label it. The populist dividing line between weak and strong emergence is probably a classification artefact based on current limits of understanding.

Consciousness and free will are considered a completely different class of phenomenon, but if pan-psychism is true, then consciousness is not an emergent phenomenon, but our perception and experience of consciousness is.

Despite the problems with the concept, emergence matters because it allows creation to be dynamic and creative, overarching the mix of determinism and non-determinism. A created order can be lawful at lower levels and open to novelty at higher levels. This fits both the biblical worldview and common human experience.

Creation is not merely manufactured as something static. It is fruitful. It brings forth new things. The earth produces vegetation, life multiplies, humans name, cultivate, and build.

The universe appears designed not only to contain matter moving according to various laws, but to generate new orders of being.

Humanity is not a finished statue. We are not in the same state we were 5,000 years ago, or 50,000, or 300,000. Humanity is an evolved or emergent creature within the Engineered Artefact. The future improvement and perfection of humanity is envisioned in Christian scripture, as well as secular thinking and aspirations.

Humans already build artefacts with internal rules from which greater complexities emerge. They are primitive compared with the universe, but they give analogies.

Game worlds have rules-based equivalents of physics. Characters can move only in certain ways. Boundaries exist. Objects have properties. Some behaviours are deterministic; others are probabilistic.

A legal system is also a human designed artefact. It generates permissions, obligations, rights, penalties, roles, and institutions. None of these are reducible to atoms, although all are enacted through physical bodies, documents, courts, police, buildings, servers, and memory. The legal system gives birth to many things, for example, intellectual property which routinely gives birth to entire new sectors of the economy.

A language is an artefact with grammar, meaning, history, and generative power. From a finite alphabet and finite rules, human beings generate unbounded expression. Different languages impact thought patterns and cultures in different ways.

A city is an artefact that generates emergent phenomena. Roads, zoning, markets, schools, sewage systems, police, families, churches, sports clubs, and coffee shops produce patterns no individual planner fully controls. A city is designed at different levels: zones, transport systems, but is not wholly determined. Its rules are engineered, but it has emergent life, reflecting a mixture of determinism (rules) and non-determinism (developers creating).

A corporation is an artefact. It has purposes, rules, assets, liabilities, culture, memory, agency, and legal personhood. Yet it is also made of people and documents and systems. It emerges from them while exerting downward causal force upon them.

A computer operating system is an artefact in which lower-level constraints generate higher-level possibility. At one level there are voltages and transistors. At another there are machine instructions. At another there are applications. At another there are human intentions expressed through the machine.

A political system is an artefact. Many attempts are made to impose laws to meet the hierarchy of all humans needs as well as we are able. From efforts to meet human needs has emerged ethical, social and political systems.

Each analogy matters because it prevents a common mistake: assuming that if a reality is engineered, it must be rigid, dead, deterministic, simplistic, or externally manipulated.

But the best artefacts are not like that. They are generative. They create spaces for possibility. They allow emergence. A good artefact is not merely a thing. It is a world of possible actions.

The universe looks like the greatest such artefact. It does not merely contain objects. It generates new possibilities at multiple levels of emergent phenomena.

But emergence is not automatically good. Cancer is emergent. Addiction is emergent. Online mobs are emergent. Totalitarian bureaucracies are emergent. Algorithmic manipulation is emergent. Nuclear weapons are emergent. The emergence of power is not the emergence of righteousness.

Thus the fourth feature of the artefact: the emergence of complex phenomena. The nature of this emergence is not one thing, not one process, but many, most of which are hard to define, but it is real.

7.6 Are Good and Evil emergent?

If emergence is a feature, then what is the ethical quality of what is emerging? Clearly, both good and evil things emerge. Foremost amongst them is an evaluation function of good and evil. This is valuable for survival, therefore the knowledge of good and evil is good in itself. Nothing appears more universal across humanity that good and evil must be defined as such, despite definitions varying.

Christian Transhumanism (Micah Redding, 2016 blog) asserts intuitively that “good wins”. In a sense this is tautological, in that the best for human flourishing will tend to be more popular. But good cannot be defined solely by success. It is a well-understood archetype.

What Redding asserts intuitively, evolutionary biologists and game theorists have long noted: moral concepts appear wherever humans (and even non-human animals) face the basic survival problem of needing each other. Good-faith cooperation makes all parties better off. Humans must eat. To get food the options are to find or grow it, to steal it, or to trade. Trade turns out to be the best for everyone. Selfish defectors or unfair traders may win in the short term, but invariably lose in the long run, outcompeted by cooperators who can trust each other.

This is, in miniature, the Christian Transhumanist thesis: Good Wins, not because the universe is sentimental, but because cooperation, creativity, and compassion are structurally superior survival and flourishing strategies once intelligence emerges.

Ethics of reciprocity emerge in many ways. The best known is “love your neighbour as yourself”, but the same idea emerges in other religions and cultures. John Rawls claimed to derive from first principles the idea of the “veil of ignorance” (invent the rules of society not knowing where you will be in that society) yet this occurred in a Christian or post-Christian context so seems less original than Rawls asserts.

The complexity in everyday life means there is usually competition between one individual flourishing and the family, tribe or species flourishing. Yet, on balance, good wins.

For the Christian Transhumanist argument above, this convergence is significant: it suggests reciprocity isn’t a culturally contingent invention but something more like a discovered feature of cooperative intelligence itself: an ethical attractor that any sufficiently reflective, socially interdependent species seems likely to stumble upon, because it’s what stable cooperation requires.

Self-interested rational agents would still choose principles of fairness and equal basic rights, because they lift the society for everyone.

No one argues passionately about whether their favourite ice cream flavour is objectively superior. But people argue about justice as if justice is real. Even the most ardent moral relativists become moral realists the moment someone mugs them and steals their nice new Nikes.

The Christian claim is that moral reality is grounded in the character of God. The Logos is not merely mathematical. The Logos is moral. It calls for response.

Good is defined as beneficial for humanity in terms of maximising our flourishing in the context of a flourishing environment on Earth. But this is from a human perspective so how do we know if the emergent human perspective mirrors the perspective of the Creator?

Christian Transhumanism argues that such an ‘invisible hand’ of a bending towards cooperation gives a telos to evolution. Or maybe that is also part of the design of the engineered Artefact, to reveal the moral nature of the Creator, most perfectly revealed in Jesus.

So concepts of Good and Evil are not just emergent or culturally created for pragmatic reasons. They are part of our human world because they are part of the world of Forms, part of the Logos, the operating system of our reality, and indeed the operating system of the Creator reality that gave birth to ours.

8 The Epistemic Distance from the Creator

If the Artefact has these features, what has it generated?

We are made from the ashes of stars, literally the remains (dust?) of supernovae. Read into that what you will from the allegory of Genesis, but that fact does not reduce human dignity. It increases wonder. Dust became self-aware. Matter began asking metaphysical questions. The universe generated creatures capable of studying the universe.

But this also creates an enormous epistemic gap between us and the Creator. We are unable to see beyond the cosmic microwave background, 380,000 years after the big bang. Beyond that we can develop formulas and infer models, but not collect physical evidence (light).

Since the Creator stands outside the causal order of the universe, and since humans emerge billions of years later inside that order, our knowledge of the Creator from nature will be indirect. We are recently-emerging agents inside an ancient system, inferring the system’s source from its structure, laws, boundary conditions, and outputs.

This is why the engineered Artefact argument only gets us so far. We can reasonably infer intelligence, order, and possibly that a purpose exists, yet what would that purpose be? We may infer something like Deism. We may infer that reality depends upon a source beyond itself. But we may well question the morality of such a Creator. Many do, seeing in the world much suffering to go with the great joys and beauty. We will need much more information before we can infer the nature of the Creator(s). Triune, covenantal, redemptive, or incarnate are words we cannot use based on this General Revelation.

The general revelation points to intelligence in the foundation of the universe, but it cannot give us a complete picture of the nature of this intelligence.

So let’s consider features of life, intelligence and purpose, features we are able to discern from observation, and see what direction that leads us.

9 Life, Consciousness, Intelligence and Free Will

9.1 Life Emerges

Life appears far down the track of cosmic history. Whether one considers abiogenesis, self-organisation, metabolism-first models, RNA hypotheses, lipid membranes, hydrothermal vents, or other proposed pathways, the honest statement is the science of life’s origin remains speculation. This leaves some version of guided evolution popular in some Christian circles.

Evolution by natural selection explains the diversification of life with extraordinary power. But evolution does not eliminate metaphysics. It relocates the question.

Six-day literalism or other crude versions of creationism imagine God must directly manufacture organisms because otherwise they are not designed. That is too small a view of divine action. A deeper view says that a universe capable of evolving life is a more impressive Artefact than a universe requiring constant ad hoc assembly.

Evolution looks precisely like what one might expect if the Creator preferred process over coercion, emergence over fiat, and creaturely development over static manufacture.

But again, no naivety is allowed. Evolution is not sentimental. It is wasteful, violent, contingent, adaptive, and indifferent at the biological level. It produces beauty and parasites, cooperation and predation, immune systems and cancer, maternal tenderness and infanticide, altruism and dominance hierarchies.

Evolution generates the biological substrate for moral agency. It gives us bodies, nervous systems, social instincts, attachment, perception, memory, language capacity, fear, desire, kinship, competition, cooperation, and eventually culture.

Humans emerge as animals who can ask whether animal impulse should be obeyed. That is a metaphysical revolution.

Agriculture, language, music, tools, cities, law, medicine, architecture, and eventually computation are not violations of creation. They are downstream from the command to cultivate, guard and steward the creation.

9.2 Consciousness Exists

Of many counterintuitive facts inside the Engineered Artefact, this may be the strangest.

There are many theories of consciousness: physicalist, functionalist, biological, panpsychist, idealist, dualist, quantum, informational, emergentist, illusionist, mysterian, and combinations of these.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness showcases over three hundred theories of consciousness, showing how unsettled the field remains. Despite the uncertainty, we have no shortage of individuals expressing high levels of confidence in their pet theory of consciousness.

David Chalmers (coiner of the term “the hard problem” of consciousness) makes the following argument:

1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.

2. If reductive physicalism is true, there is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness do not hold [the zombie conjecture]. That is, everyone behaves the same, but no one experiences anything.

3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above physical facts.

4. So, materialism is false. [at least in the fundamentalist populist view]

The hard problem remains hard: why should physical processing be accompanied by subjective experience? Why is there something it is like to be a creature? Why does pain hurt rather than merely register damage? Why does music move us? Why does truth feel compelling? Why does guilt accuse? Why does prayer transform?

Some physicalists insist consciousness will eventually be explained in terms of neural computation. They may be right. But “eventually” is not an argument, just “science of the gaps”. Theories the reader may have encountered include integrated information, global workspace, predictive processing, biological naturalism, quantum consciousness, panpsychism, idealism, or dual-aspect theories. Some deny phenomenal consciousness altogether, which is the most desperate move: explaining consciousness by explaining it away; that all of us are deluded. Yet what exactly is being deluded?

Christian Transhumanism should be cautious here.

It should not rush into Cartesian dualism, as if the soul were a ghost driving a meat vehicle and should be careful with the source: the populist Platonism in Christianity. The biblical human being is embodied. We are not souls trapped in bodies. We are living creatures, dust and breath, psychosomatic unities, as demonstrated by brain-injury studies which map functionality and personality impacts.

But Christian Transhumanism should also resist reductionist computationalism. A software model that behaves like a person is not that person. A map of brain areas showing where consciousness arises does not solve the question of what it is or why it feels the way it does. A digital copy of your memories is not you. Indeed many today are creating avatars of themselves. This author has promised to try to leave his children an emulation of himself which will hopefully keep growing in knowledge and understanding.

This matters for mind uploading, AGI personhood, brain-computer interfaces, cryonics, neural prosthetics, and digital resurrection scenarios.

The Christian hope is resurrection, not backup. That is, our continuity of consciousness depends on technology from external to the Engineered Artefact. We conclude further advanced technology must exist outside the universe, if the universe is technology instantiated by intelligence.

That does not mean substrate questions are closed. The resurrection body itself warns against simplistic biological essentialism. The risen Christ is continuous with the crucified Jesus, yet transformed. Embodiment is essential, but current biological substrate may not be final. The future body is still body, but a body glorified body.

So the Christian Transhumanist position should be neither “carbon is magic” nor “computation is consciousness.”.

A better formulation is:

Consciousness is a deeply embodied and morally significant feature of the Engineered Artefact. Whether it can be instantiated in non-biological substrates remains an open question requiring metaphysical, scientific, and theological caution.

Right now, none of us can falsify the assertion that no one else is conscious. Maybe this assertion will remain forever unfalsifiable. We must not confuse intelligence with consciousness, nor with personhood.

As to machine consciousness, the question, “What is it like to be ChatGPT?” will most likely remain unanswerable, whatever our level of technology and science. Iain M Banks’ Culture novels speculate on a future with huge Minds that operate human habitations (mostly orbital ring worlds and giant travelling ships) for the benefit of humans. Their consciousness is deeper and richer than humans’. They hold free will, voluntarily remaining present with humans and managing their environment. If machine consciousness (the hard version) ever becomes plausible, Christians will need to ask hard questions about its status as a created (co-created by humans?) or emerged person. For now, we must assume not (subject of a later blog)

As to a future of uploading consciousness to another substrate? We may never be able to fathom the nature of consciousness, as we may never be able to surpass the speed of light. Secular transhumanist thought experiments such as replacing one neuron at a time and substrate-independent consciousness cannot yet be reliable in the context of over three hundred theories of consciousness in Kuhn’s Landscape.

For a future of resurrection or re-instantiation, we know there are limits to what is possible with technology inside the Artefact. We don’t know what those limits are, but we know approximately the limits of the number of elements that can be formed, and the limit of the speed of light. From our observations of the universe, it is plausible to infer the engineer has superior technology outside the Artefact.

What we do know: a feature of the Engineered Artefact is consciousness. We do not yet know exactly what that means.

An important feature of Matrix Epistemology, to be dealt with in a later blog in this series, is that when you aren’t certain of something, stop. Do not reform world views and societies based on unfalsifiable assertions. This has already caused much suffering.

9.3 Free Will

Intellectual honesty again requires admitting upfront that nobody has solved this question irrefutably. Not neuroscientists, philosophers, nor theologians. But based on balance of probabilities from emerging science, in the context of Christian Transhumanist metaphysics, we can take a position that is both most likely to be true, and observed to be empirically effective in engaging with future technologies.

First: the deterministic fallacy still haunts us. Benjamin Libet’s^[ii] ‘readiness potential’ from 1983 empowered elements of the failed new atheist movement, and was a central feature of Sam Harris’s polemic ‘Free Will’ (2012) which posited a fundamentalist deterministic view of human decision making. The neuroscience of volition had moved on a long way since 1983, but sadly many people, including Harris, did not get that memo.

Libet had people flick their wrist randomly, then measured a ‘readiness potential’, which appeared before they self-reported the decision. Aside from the self-reporting, this experiment was deeply flawed in several other ways. ‘Readiness potential’ is now considered by some to be background noise in our convoluted mental processes^[iii]. The phenomenon appears to be strikingly absent in deliberative choices^[iv] (values based), appearing only in arbitrary ones. In summary, the Libet experiments were massively overhyped.

The extrapolation many populist interpreters made from flicking your wrist to deciding what University course to study or who to marry was just wild. Further, one should note that decisions are made by different parts of our brain on different matters. A choice about what to eat, or where to throw a ball in sport, avoiding a pothole on a bicycle, or even to how hard to breathe are made by varieties of non-verbal neural circuits.

And, of course, now, determinism in physics is on very shaky scientific ground. This author takes some satisfaction at having had good enough bullshit filters to not believe Libet when the paper was first published.

Compatibilism, the prevailing view of free will since Hume in the 1700s, believes that determinism and free will aren’t actually in conflict. But you only need to hold that position if you believe in the physics of determinism, which we don’t, nor should anybody, for good reasons set out above.

Therefore, Christian Transhumanism holds that human free will is real. We hold this position from science, and also from scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Consider the experience of professions such as education, psychology, and many others, even politics and activism, not to mention the judiciary. All of which function successfully on the principle that humans have agency in conscious choices for self-improvement, group affiliation, or simple obedience. Even going back to Socrates, his critique of “the unexamined life” requires you to examine and make changes, deliberate changes, which the latest neuroscience of volition supports.

But defining a Christian Transhumanist position on free will is going to take quite some work. Here’s a start. More in a later essay.

How then do we conceive of free will? Firstly, we have to acknowledge the context and constraints on everyone’s life. We are all born into such different circumstances, and we all have limits on our agency, due to resources, as well as genetic predispositions and family dynamics that may be more or less conducive to us resisting the forces around us.

Secondly, the choices life offers each of us vary widely. The language we learn impacts our mental processing in substantial ways. Access to education, the spirituality and disposition you are born with, or acquire through habit, family and social influences will limit how you express your God-given agency.

Whilst the science remains unsettled, recent experiments seem to indicate that our choices are more often a choice to NOT do something that we feel an impulse for. Therefore, much free will is “free won’t”: the disciplined capacity to inhibit impulse, to redirect desire, flee temptation, and refuse stupidity. For example, nearly all humans report imagined conversations with co-workers in which they express anger and superiority, only later to decide to either grin and bear it or to politely and winningly state our case, maybe choosing to use of some training in assertiveness or bridge-building communication skills.

Our frontal cortex spends enormous energy preventing the rest of our beings from acting like fools. This is the biology of moral formation, the foundations of psychology and therapy, and the undergirding of economic and social principles. This ‘frontal cortex control’ is the way our consciousness expresses our free-will agency. This is how we have the opportunity to impose Forms on chaos. The fact we have the choice to control impulses is central to our beings, and brain-injury studies show the scary negative outcomes when that faculty is impaired.

So free will is often us stopping ourselves from making poor choices. Or making choices driven by forces we might better choose to stand against. It is a continual struggle in the face of challenges to our physical and mental health, our lower nature and the forces around us that threaten our career, family or well-being.

The psychology of self-improvement, from Tony Robbins through James Clear through mainstream psychology, in fact the entire self-help section of the bookshop operates on all or a subset of the following:

· Repeated acts become habits. Just deliberately do something to start the change.

· A collection of habits modifies your character, or at least how you express it.

· How you identify yourself reflects your character, therefore your heroes will impact your future. Choose them carefully.

· Character and Identity become destiny.

The science (and industry) of psychology has excellent empirical data on the effectiveness of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and various other talk therapies, all of which require some form of coaching in the use of free will. Or, as Romans 12 says, “do not be conformed to the image of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” implying an active decision to actively live in that spiritual transformation.

Exactly how free will emerges is just as big a mystery as consciousness. But the fact we all experience both, and the fact most of human societies have them as functional foundations should make us much slower to dismiss either. The likes of Harris and Dennett do so in the face of Chalmers’ refutation of pure materialism, the evidence of numerous fields of science and industry, and most people’s common sense. Surely the first act of free will ought to be to fight against motivated reasoning both in ourselves and others.

But then is free will just random non-determinism? Surely not. It feels so purposeful, as we pursue beauty, feelings, excellence and pleasure. It is, as yet, a mystery, as is consciousness.

We believe we have the agency of free will, notwithstanding the limits placed on it by social, biological and practical pressures. Our free will is not the absence of causation. It is rightly-ordered agency within causation, as consciousness seeks to place order on the chaos around us, reflecting eternal forms of goodness, in the face of many constraints.

Christian Transhumanism should therefore avoid naïve libertarianism as we have determinism. Human beings are formed creatures. We are formed in part by choices we make ourselves, in part by our genes, society and parenting. But formation is not fatalism. Grace, discipline, technology, education, rituals, contemplation, meditation, friendship, suffering, and repentance all participate in shaping agency and shaping our future selves.

A metaphysics of free will being real, but imperfect and constrained, mirrors out status as fallen image bearers. It is more Christian, more scientific, and more humane than a deterministic machine model. It is essential to human flourishing and the good order of society.

9.4 Archetypes, Reproduction, and Moral Aspiration

From life, consciousness and free will emerge human reproduction, family structures, tribes, societies, myths, institutions, and archetypes.

Carl Jung’s archetypes shed a vital insight. The hero, the mother, the wise old man, the trickster, the king, the martyr, the redeemer, the garden, the flood, the journey, the fall, the sacrifice. These patterns recur because human beings share bodies, fears, desires, developmental stages, kinship structures, mortality, sexuality, vulnerability, and social needs.

Archetypes are not merely invented stories floating above biology. Nor are they simply genetic programs. They are emergent patterns at the intersection of biology, reproductive choices, culture, memory, myth, and moral imagination. Our reproductive choices have influenced our genes, not only in fitness for survival, but in accordance with a vision of the ideal human, (much as that ideal varies widely).

Mate selection is driven by numerous factors: kinship systems, status games, child-rearing potential, warfare, cooperation, religion, law, and economic life. Across generations, biological and cultural selection interact. Humans shape institutions, institutions shape humans, and both influence future human trait selection.

But we must be careful. It is too strong, and too easily misunderstood, to say that archetypes are biologically “heading toward moral excellence.” Nature does not automatically select for holiness. It often selects for reproductive success, coalition-building, deception, dominance, or survival.

The stronger claim is this:

Human cultures generate and preserve archetypes of moral excellence because human beings are not satisfied with mere survival.

· We admire courage even when cowardice would be safer.

· We admire truthfulness even when lying would be useful.

· We admire sacrificial love even when selfishness would preserve us.

· We admire justice even when power could dominate.

· We admire mercy even when vengeance would satisfy appetite.

· We admire the saint, the wise ruler, the faithful mother, the suffering servant, the protector, the healer, the teacher, and the martyr.

This moral admiration is not trivial. It reveals something about us.

We vote for these positive archetypes, even when we fail to live up to them. We punish leaders who betray them. We build myths around them. We tell children stories about them. We select spouses based on them. We condemn hypocrisy because we know there is a form of goodness being violated.

At the centre of Christian Transhumanist metaphysics stands the claim that these archetypes are not random projections. They point toward moral reality. More specifically, they find their fulfilment in Christ.

Jesus is not merely one religious figure among others. Within Christian metaphysics, he is the convergence of the highest moral archetype and ontological Logos. He is the suffering servant, wise teacher, true king, healer, prophet, priest, sacrifice, judge, and resurrected human. He is what moral aspiration was reaching for before it knew his name.

If the universe is an engineered artefact undergirded by Logos, then incarnation is not incoherent. The Engineer can inhabit the machine.

Thus Jesus is at least the highest emergent moral archetype in a universe designed for emergence. Christians believe he is much more, but it is pure denialism to say Jesus is less than that. Jesus is therefore worthy of emulation, and should be the guiding archetype for all humanity, even for atheists.

10 Technology Emerges

Eventually technology emerges.

Technology is most often treated as artificial, as if humans were originally natural and only recently became technological. This is false. Humans are technological animals. Tool use, language, culture, clothing, fire, shelter, ritual, agriculture, writing, law, medicine, music, mathematics, and machinery are not optional add-ons to human nature. They are expressions of our nature, and have modified it over our evolutionary history.

Humans are not the only animals to use some kind of tool. Far from it. Birds build nests. Spiders build webs. Beavers build dams. Bower birds build a bower. Their technology is an extension of their physical body make up, and natural selection amplifies genes that enable this tool creation and use.

Similarly, humans have tools, symbols, institutions, stories, and sciences. The history of human development has amplified these, as the gifts of consciousness and agency drive continual improvement.

Technology is best conceived as ordered human purpose to improve the world embodied in material means. It is form made operative. It is intelligence acting upon the world.

From stone tools through wheels, writing, glasses, vaccines, telescopes, a written constitution (social technology), art to think about the world, and artificial intelligence: all these are tools uniquely crafted by humans as an extension of their intelligence and purpose towards their conception of flourishing.

Christian Transhumanism contends that the natural/artificial distinction is blurred, and people using that to decry various technologies are doing so from the point of view of a naturalistic fallacy.

That is, because something is natural, it must be good. This fails on two fronts: firstly the definition of what someone using that fallacy means is usually some kind of bucolic idealism, romanticising a pre-technological life that was in reality “nasty, brutish and short”. Or in a Christian sense, part of the fallen world that has missed out on the best of God’s plan.

The second way this fails is as above: that humans are natural tool-makers. Just as some other animals use technology in primitive ways, it is natural for us to use technology.

Douglas Adams stated, “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Thus we see the naturalistic fallacy failing by the definition of what is natural changing and evolving over time. It’s now “natural” for babies to get vaccinated. A natural human diabetic naturally receives artificial insulin. A natural child is taught artificial symbols of writing to become ‘naturally’ more rational. A natural eye given artificial lenses sees more truthfully. It’s natural we should want that. A natural society governed by artificial law may become more just, and a better place for human flourishing.

So do humans using these technologies become more or less ‘natural’? At this point we are playing with the definition of the word natural. Therefore, let’s take a step back and appreciate that tool use for the purpose of self-improvement and human flourishing is in fact an intrinsic (and therefore within the definition of natural) part of human nature.

Now we stand on the cusp of massively transformative technology. Brain-computer interfaces now restore a small part of the agency lost to quadriplegics, and may soon do much more. Biotechnology improves our immune system to fight cancer directly, and emerging RNA drugs can change the way our bodies operate. For example, Inclisiran causes the degradation of damaging messenger RNA to lower dangerous LDL cholesterol.

Thus Christian Transhumanism must see the use of technology to modify ourselves as ‘natural’ for humans. This is not unusual elsewhere in Creation where tool use is part of many species’ nature. The difference is only one of scale.

Moreover, if the universe is technology, then human technology is not rebellion by default. It is imitation of the Creator, and participating in the work of restoring, preserving, stewarding and maximising the future of the creation.

Of course not all technology is inherently beneficial, and almost any tool can be wielded for either good or evil. This will be discussed further below.

Does this technology heal, restore, liberate, educate, connect, strengthen, clarify, and serve? Or does it addict, dominate, surveil, infantilise, exploit, deceive, and deform?

Even destructive technology is usually ordered toward some perceived good, however disordered. Nuclear weapons are built ostensibly for deterrence, or equally for domination, national survival, revenge, or strategic advantage. Totalitarian surveillance systems are built for order, control, security, ideological purity, or regime preservation. Propaganda systems are built to unify, mobilise, or conquer. These are not good uses of technology, but they are still intelligible as technology: means ordered toward ends.

The Christian critique is not that such technologies lack purpose. It is that their purposes are morally corrupt, partial, idolatrous, or subordinated to false goods.

That is why Christian Transhumanism must never become blind techno-optimism.

But neither should Christians retreat into anti-technological piety. To heal disease, extend healthy life, repair disability, augment cognition, reduce drudgery, improve governance, and expand knowledge are acts of obedience to the command to subdue and steward the creation. God’s command is reflected in the view of consciousness seeking to impose forms on chaos. This is how humanity participates in the Creator’s own ordering work.

11 From Artefact to Deism, From Logos to Theism

The engineered Artefact argument gets us to a Creator or Creator(s). Or to speculation that the universe is the product of a weekend hackathon at something like a fifth-tier university.

We may infer that reality is derivative, intelligible, and engineered. We infer that causation (as we know it inside the Artefact) is a feature of the Artefact. We conclude that lawlike order needs metaphysical grounding. We infer that consciousness and intelligence inside the universe make higher intelligence beyond the universe plausible.

But even if we accept that Jesus is the highest emergent moral archetype, none of this proves Christianity’s claims. That is, we have reached the limit of the ‘general revelation’ and now must seek to understand what we can infer from the claims of ‘special revelation’.

Christianity’s primary claim is that the Logos, as previously conceived by Greek philosophers around five hundred years before Christ, is not merely the rational ground of the Artefact, but the Logos became flesh.

This claim transforms metaphysics. And we posit here this claim is not at all unreasonable nor incoherent.

If Christ is the Logos, then the source of the universe is not abstract intelligence alone, or an abstract set of formulas on which the universe operates: the ‘god’ conceived by Spinoza and Einstein. But we can conclude that the Logos is purposeful. That is, it has free will and agency in creation.

Therefore, the Logos is personal, moral, self-giving, and redemptive. The structure of reality is not merely mathematical. Power is revealed in self-giving love. Glory is revealed through humility and servanthood. The moral forms humans are intended to evolve into are demonstrated practically.

But then, if Christianity’s claims about the incarnation of the Logos in the person of Jesus are false, then the person of Jesus reflects the highest moral forms yet evolved. This is a lower-bound conception of Jesus, below which any claims about him are senseless.

For Christian Transhumanism as a world view this is decisive. Either all humans should follow Jesus because he is God, or all humans should seek to emulate him, deeply in their lives, rather than paying lip-service, because he is the highest emergent moral archetype.

For Christian Transhumanists, we must continue to warn that without Christ, transhumanism risks a sole focus of self-salvation. It seeks to overcome limits by power alone. It treats intelligence as the highest good, and self-empowerment and promotion as our both our inalienable right and highest purpose. Sanctification is replaced by entitlement to optimisation, resurrection by the unfalsifiable dream of uploading, wisdom (meaning wise acts) by processing speed, and communion is replaced by connectivity.

With Christ (as either God or moral exemplar), enhancement is judged by love and moral excellence. Intelligence is subordinated to wisdom. Power is crucified before it is glorified. Life extension is good, but not ultimate. Death is an enemy, but survival is not salvation.

Technology is not only permitted but commanded. But it is never an end in itself, and always to be under the control of human consciousness as we seek to impose the highest and best forms for human flourishing on the emergent chaos that is contemporary human society.

12 Eschatological Options

Metaphysics points toward eschatology (the theology of the end of the universe) because every account of reality implies some account of where reality is going.

Christian Transhumanism must reject several inadequate eschatologies. This section is addressed more to Christians than secular transhumanist readers, but please bear with us here to understand common misconceptions within the Church and ways forward out of them.

Escapist Eschatology

This view treats the world as essentially doomed and Christian hope as escape to heaven. Its practical question is: why bother building? Why cure ageing? Why repair institutions? Why develop civilisation? Why extend human flourishing if the planet is only a waiting room before destruction?

This view captures some biblical themes of judgment and discontinuity, but it badly underweights resurrection and new creation. The Christian hope is not the abandonment of matter. It is the redemption of creation, and the expectation that Christians should be shining as lights in the darkness now, by making a real difference in the world, not just by huddling and waiting.

Naïve Progress Eschatology

This view imagines that human beings gradually build the kingdom through science, politics, education, and technology. It has energy, but it is morally shallow.

The twentieth century destroyed simplistic progressivism. Science gave us antibiotics and gas chambers. Physics gave us medical imaging and nuclear weapons. Industrial systems gave us abundance and mechanised slaughter. Digital systems gave us global knowledge and mass distraction. Artificial intelligence will give us both cures and civilisational manipulation.

Progress is real. But it is not self-sanctifying.

Technology advances means. It does not purify ends.

Catastrophe Eschatology

This view expects technological civilisation to culminate in domination: Antichrist, surveillance, global control, idolatry, beast systems, dehumanisation, and collapse.

The archetype of the tower of Babel or the Golden Calf can now be built with machine learning, persuasive interfaces, biometric surveillance, and synthetic media. A centralised artificial superintelligence aligned with domination would be the most beast-like Artefact ever built.

Christians who ignore this are naïve. So we have to trumpet the risk, and argue for artificial superintelligence to reflect the highest archetypes known to humanity, archetypes that have come to be expressed in art and religion: the Wise King, the Madonna and Child, the Good Shepherd, the Suffering Servant, the ever-present and indwelling Holy Spirit. These archetypes are, to Christians, God’s plan for individual flourishing. Atheists should at least admit that these archetypes co-evolved with us, and therefore should be included in the planned behaviour of artificial superintelligence.

Participatory New Creation

This is the strongest Christian Transhumanist eschatology.

God alone consummates the kingdom. Human beings do not engineer resurrection. We do not upload our way into eternal life. We are not yet able to engineer a better species.

But we participate. We heal because God is healer, and we learn because God is Logos. We build because creation was entrusted to image-bearers. We resist death because death is an enemy. We seek justice because righteousness belongs to the kingdom. We extend healthy life because life is good. We enhance cognition because wisdom is good. We create technology because humans are created co-creators.

Participatory new creation avoids both secular techno-utopianism and religious passivity.

It says God saves, humans respond, and creation is healed. Technology becomes one instrument of that response.

This is not to resort to a technological human-driven future. God can still intervene in one of the many traditional eschatologies: pre-millennial, post-millennial, or where the Christian Transhumanist Association members generally sit, something like a-millennial.

There is the future that humans create and that emerges as we move with technology. This is known as “futurum”. Then there is the future that arrives from external to the creation, as envisaged by some theological interpretations of the book of Revelations. Such a future is an “adventus” future – it abruptly arrives, and not by human doings.

An overwhelming theme in scripture is we should be found ready and doing the best works possible to reflect the nature of Jesus when this adventus future arrives. That means ushering in the futurum future, a future of peace, tranquillity and human flourishing to reflect the Kingdom of God, (or the “Reign of Christ’s Principles” for the atheists and republicans).

Such thinking of the “Kingdom” or the “Reign of Christ’s Principles” can give a future vision to heal the Earth, notwithstanding religious differences.

13 If the Universe Is Technology, What Follows?

If the universe is a kind of technology, set up for emergence, with consciousness and free will as features of the Engineered Artefact whose purpose is the imposition of forms on chaos, several consequences follow. Note: this is not yet a Christian position, just a clearly stated Deist (or General Revelation) position.

First, since there is both intelligence and forms (both mathematical and moral) external to the Engineered Artefact, there is an opportunity (and maybe an imperative) to reflect those within each of our own lives and the society we build. Each human should be given the opportunity to flourish and reach their maximum potential.

Second, science gains a better metaphysically grounding. We study the universe because it is intelligible. We expect order because the Artefact has order. We expect deeper coherence because Logos grounds the system. And we expect emergence to give very unexpected results. We need not feel constrained by fundamentalist materialism. Scientific investigation becomes one way finite minds participate in divine intelligibility, one way consciousness uses forms to improve reality.

Importantly, we understand limitations hold theories lightly. We don’t have to shoe-horn expectations from one field into others. For example, Newton’s “Law” (better, Newton’s empirical approximation) of gravity led to a mechanistic view of the universe that was not debunked for over two centuries. The extrapolation of questionable neuroscience by Libet contributed to a troubling trend of defeatism and loss of agency by a generation. Instead, we must accept the limitations of understanding and think deeply about evidence from other sciences before hastily leaping to conclusions based on shallow extrapolations of one science. Remember the secular parable of the 6 blind men and the elephant.

Thirdly, all work becomes vocation. Engineering, medicine, law, these are not merely economic utility. They become the disciplined transformation of creation toward humanly meaningful ends. Good work serves life, safety, truth, beauty, resilience, and flourishing. Bad work serves vanity, domination, extraction, addiction, and death. These are the moral forms consciousness works with.

Fourth, human enhancement becomes a matter of discernment rather than taboo. The human body is good, but not current limits are not sacred. What is sacred is reflecting the highest moral forms (for secularists) or displaying the moral nature of Christ (for the Christians).

Fifth, If intelligence-like artefacts can be made, then humans are approaching a deep analogy to creation. AI may help cure disease, expand education, improve governance, and discover truths beyond current human capacity. It may also deceive, centralise power, weaken agency, and mimic omniscience.

Sixth, until we understand consciousness, there will be limitations to enhancement. Before we merge minds with machines, upload identities, emulate brains, or create digital agents, we must understand what kind of beings we are dealing with. It is morally questionable to treat conscious beings as tools. It is also metaphysically unwise to treat tools as conscious beings merely because they speak fluently.

Seventh, and overwhelmingly – we must not fall into the trap of thinking the universe is simple, or that it will ever be fully understandable from inside it. When confronted with phenomena, using reductionism because we feel clever is a bad idea.

In summary, the fact that the universe is created, an engineered artefact, a simulation (but of what?) means our life should be filled with wonder and meaning. With inquisitiveness, hope and plans to build a greater future not only on Earth but as we establish viable settlements elsewhere in the solar system, and in future, beyond.

Now is the time to move from Deism (general revelation) to the special revelation of Christ. For this, Christian Transhumanism can offer all the traditional Christian arguments, from the many traditions and denominations our members come from. But in addition, we can offer a clearer vision of how faith in Christ is absolutely relevant to the latest technological challenges, and completely in accord with the latest science. Hebrews 11:1 states that faith is the assurance we feel about what cannot be verified scientifically (to contemporise). It is certainly not ‘believing things in spite of evidence’ that is folly, and indeed is committed by some Christians. True faith is the acceptance, on the reasonable balance of probability, that Christ was the Logos incarnate, and that he is worth following.

In a universe that is a created engineered artefact, this is suddenly plausible.

14 Summary: A Christian Transhumanist Metaphysical Thesis

Here, then, is the basic Christian Transhumanist metaphysics in a compressed form:

· The universe is a created, intelligible, law-governed, engineered Artefact.

· Its laws are real, and humans develop ever-improving approximations of them.

· The intelligibility of the Universe permits truth-tracking minds to develop explanatory knowledge and to further express and explore ideas, concepts and forms.

· Causation processes include (at least) those which deterministic, non-deterministic, chaotic, and emergent, (as processes). Then downwards causation functions most powerfully through consciousness.

· Consciousness and free will are real features of the universe and should not be downplayed or denied. This is how intelligence chooses to impose forms on chaos, or, in the words of Genesis, to subdue and steward the Earth. Intelligent agents utilize abstract conceptual frameworks to instantiate ideas, and to constrain and structure physical systems.

· Humans generate moral archetypes and aspire toward them because we are moral creatures, reflecting Imago Dei. We aspire to build better lives, better communities and better humans in future through mate selection, education, institutions, culture and spirituality.

· Christ is the Logos incarnate, or if we are wrong about this, Christ is at least the highest evolved or emergent moral archetype. In the latter case, he is still fully worth emulating. As Christians we believe he is more than that: he is the Logos, the creative, self-expressing rational undergirding principle through which the universe was created.

· Technology is therefore neither saviour nor enemy, but power which must be brought under control. Its legitimacy depends on whether it heals or deforms the creature, strengthens or bypasses moral agency, serves or dominates the neighbour, witnesses to or parodies true religion, and if it remains ordered under Christ.

The Engineered Artefact, or Creation, is more technological, more intelligible, more emergent, more spiritual, and more unfinished than we imagined.

A Christian Transhumanist should make this a bold conjecture, not a brittle proof. Reality is more mysterious than our best metaphors. The Artefact hypothesis is powerful because it explains intelligibility, emergence, contingency, and mind. But it must remain open to criticism and further development in the best traditions of critical rationalism.

This is not secular transhumanism with religious vocabulary. Nor is it traditional Christianity with a new technology attached, it is a metaphysical claim about reality.

Christian Transhumanism therefore begins with the claim that the universe itself is technology, that moral forms, consciousness and free will are real, and we should therefore confidently seek to strongly advance emerging technologies to advance the Kingdom of God.

This is the first blog in a series that will set out comprehensive and a coherent philosophy to undergird a techno-realistic Christian Transhumanism. Starting with metaphysics, following blogs will cover epistemology, anthropology, psychology, and a few other topics.

Some of these have already been touched on in writings on this blog and other Christian transhumanist sources.

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^[i] Many human thoughts are non-language, e.g. how you throw a ball, how you listen to your own feelings, how you know what you want for dinner in a restaurant.

^[ii] Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W., & Pearl, D.K. (1983). “Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential): The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act.” Brain, 106(3), 623–642

^[iii] Schurger, A., Sitt, J.D., & Dehaene, S. (2012). “An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 109(42), E2904–E2913. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1210467109

^[iv] Maoz, Uri, Gideon Yaffe, Christof Koch, and Liad Mudrik. 2019. “Neural Precursors of Decisions that Matter—An ERP Study of Deliberate and Arbitrary Choice.” eLife 8: e39787. doi.org.

Trevena, Judy Arnel, and Jeff Miller. 2002. “Cortical Movement Preparation before and after a Conscious Decision to Move.” Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 2: 162–190. doi.org.