back
05 / 06
birds birds birds
Media > Reasonable Faith Podcast > Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life

Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life

April 26, 2015     Time: 17:45
Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life

Summary

Will science and technology eventually solve the human quest for meaning?

Transcript Transhumanism and the Meaning of Life

 

KEVIN HARRIS: We’ve done podcasts, Dr. Craig, on transhumanism. We are going to look at a couple of articles from John G. Messerly who taught at the University of Texas at Austin. He has a PhD in philosophy who talks about how transhumanism is the answer to the meaning of life. He says[1],

The Meaning of Life in Brief

The Question and Possible Answers – The question of the meaning of life is the most fundamental question of human existence. It asks “what is the meaning, significance or purpose of an individual life in the context of all that was, is, or could be?”

 

I think that is pretty thorough there.

Answers to this question come in many varieties: supernaturalists argue that meaning derives from a god or gods; skeptics doubt that an answer to the question exists, or that we could know the answer even if it did; nihilists claim that life has no meaning; while naturalists claim that we create our own meaning (subjectivists), or that we find meaning in the good things in the world (objectivists). None of these answers is entirely satisfactory.

 

Bill, what are some of the answers that he starts to break down here?

DR. CRAIG: I think it is interesting that he regards all of those answers as unsatisfactory. We need not look at things like skepticism and naturalism and so forth because these are not the ones that we would defend. I think what we’ll want to look at will be his critique of supernaturalist answers. Then we will want to look at by contrast his own attempted answer in transhumanism to provide the meaning in life.

KEVIN HARRIS: Something that I see often – and it always kind of jumps out at me – when he writes a paragraph on religious answers he says, “If you are told that life is meaningful because you will live forever with the gods after you die, you might wonder how that makes life meaningful.” He makes several references here to “the gods” (small ‘g’). He wants to equate finite contingent old hat gods who are now unemployed, like Thor, . . .

DR. CRAIG: The gods of polytheism.

KEVIN HARRIS: . . . with the God of Christian theism, or the God of the philosophers, or the God of classical theism. Therefore, it is a rhetorical denigration of the concept of God by saying it is in the same category as these finite gods who have gotten the boot.

DR. CRAIG: I think that is right, Kevin. It is very different from St. Anselm’s concept of God as the greatest conceivable being. That should not be put in the same category as these polytheistic gods.

KEVIN HARRIS: I am not going to say for sure that that is what Dr. Messerly is doing because questioning his motivations is beyond what we want to do. But I do question it a little.

DR. CRAIG: I do, too, because even when he uses the word in the singular he uses a lowercase ‘g’.

KEVIN HARRIS: That is a real meme. That has really gotten into the literature. He says,

Religious (supernaturalist) answers are the most popular, but they depend on problematic assumptions about the nature and existence of a supernatural realm. Religious claims may be false. And even if religious claims are true, it isn’t clear how a god grounds meaning. For instance, if you are told that you are a part of a god’s plan you might ask, how does being a part of some god’s plan give my life meaning? Being a part of your parent’s or your country’s plan doesn’t necessarily do that. If you are told that the gods just radiate meaning you might ask, how do they do that? If you can’t be the source of your own meaning, how can something else be?

 

What do you think about that?

DR. CRAIG: I think here we see that equation that you mentioned between these finite gods and the God of Christianity and of St. Anselm – the greatest conceivable being. I would argue, and I think I can support this from what he himself writes, that the two necessary (and I think sufficient) conditions for objective meaning in life will be God and immortality. We need immortality because apart from immortality everybody simply winds up the same. Your actions and choices make no ultimate difference to your fate. He himself makes this critique in dealing with the answer to the problem that death is the answer to the meaning of life.[2] Let’s read here what he says. He says,

Death – Yet this is not enough—because we die. How can anything truly satisfy, even subjective engagement in objectively good things, if all leads to nothingness? Death limits the meaning we can experience, since fully meaningful lives necessitate that we live forever. Lives can be meaningful without the proviso of immortality, but they cannot be fully meaningful since they would be limited in quantity. Death puts an end to our meaning and our lives. The defenders of death may claim that death is for the better, but we know in our bones that it is not, as the wailing at funerals reveals.

 

I agree absolutely that death at the end of life’s trail puts a question mark behind everything we have done in life because it means that we all wind up the same no matter what we’ve done and no matter what kind of life we lived. Ultimately our lives and choices are without significance.

If immortality, by itself, isn’t enough however what else is needed? Well, he answers that question in his transhumanist answer. Look what he says in his transhumanist answer. He says, “this is not enough, for immortality is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for full meaning. Complete meaning requires infinite qualitative goodness as well as an infinite quantity of time.”

KEVIN HARRIS: Wow.

DR. CRAIG: That is exactly what theism gives you – infinite qualitative goodness. Because God, as the greatest conceivable being, is the paradigm and locus of moral value – infinite goodness. That is the answer to his critique of religious answers to the question of meaning in life. We are not talking here about finite gods. We are talking about the infinite God who is the good himself. By having an eternal life in relationship to infinite qualitative goodness, our lives are infused with meaning. So oddly enough I find this blog to provide exactly the answers to the critique of the religious answer that he provides in relation to ultimate goodness and eternal life. We have the necessary and sufficient conditions for objective meaning, value, and purpose in life.

KEVIN HARRIS: He thinks, however, (or hopes) that it is going to come about through science and technology and not God.

DR. CRAIG: That’s right. Now the question will be: how well does transhumanism fare in meeting these conditions?

KEVIN HARRIS: As a transhumanist, he thinks that is going to be the answer. Even though it may not affect him, it will affect future generations. Science will give us eternal life eventually.

Here is the transhumanist answer. He says,

Fortunately science and technology may provide our salvation. We might overcome death in the near future using some combination of nanotechnology, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and robotics. But this is not enough, for immortality is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for full meaning. Complete meaning requires infinite qualitative goodness as well as an infinite quantity of time. Yet science potentially solves this problem too. If science can overcome death, why can’t it infinitely enlarge consciousness? With oceans of time for future innovation, it is plausible to think that science could make fully meaningful lives possible; it could make a heaven on earth. Still we have no guarantees. Cosmic evolution reveals the emergence of consciousness and meaning, as well as the possibility of their exponential increase, but it doesn’t imply that a more meaningful reality will necessarily unfold or that a state of perfect meaning will inevitably ensue. We don’t know if science and technology will bring about a utopia or its opposite, or hasten our destruction. And even if a glorious future awaits our descendants, we don’t know if we’ll be part of it.

 

DR. CRAIG: This is a fairy story, isn’t it? He doesn’t seem to realize that even the use of robotics and genetic engineering and nanotechnology will only prolong human life for a while on this planet. Eventually the sun will expand to a Red Giant and incinerate the Earth. Maybe by that time human beings will have fled to other planets in the solar system, or maybe even other galaxies.[3] But as the universe expands, the second law of thermodynamics demands that it becomes colder and colder as its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will go out. All of the matter will fall into dead stars and black holes. The universe will be a corpse of dead remnants of these galaxies, stars, and planets, increasingly dilute expanding into infinite darkness. There will be no life whatsoever. No light. No heat. It will be a universe in ruins. Death is written throughout its frame. It is just a fairy story to think that by having robots you will be able to somehow avoid the heat death predicted by the second law of thermodynamics. The fact is that the laws of nature demand that eventually everything will come to a halt and life will no longer exist in the cosmos.

KEVIN HARRIS: Oh, Bill. It can really get bad here. If science found a way to make you indestructible in a sense, but the planets dissolve under your feet, would you want to float in space for eternity?

DR. CRAIG: But even that wouldn’t be possible. You see that requires energy. But entropy will be increasingly gained and as a result machines couldn’t function anymore either – not just human bodies. After a while the particles – matter itself – will disintegrate into subatomic particles. The universe will just be a rarefied gas of fundamental particles expanding into infinite darkness near absolute zero. This transhumanism is nothing more than a fairy story. Obviously it cannot provide immortality. But neither does it provide infinite goodness either. Merely an enlarging of consciousness doesn’t do anything ethically to endow that with moral worth or moral value. You could have an evil infinite consciousness. There is nothing here that meets the necessary conditions that he lays down for life to be ultimately meaningful and significant.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, I’ll tell you what. He is bold enough to really try to sketch out the purpose of life. This is what he says,

The purpose of life is to diminish all constraints on our being—intellectual, psychological, physical, and moral—and to remake the external world in ways conducive to the emergence of meaning. This implies embracing our role as protagonists of the cosmic evolutionary epic.

 

To get control, I guess, of the evolutionary epic. But there it is. To diminish all constraints of our being – intellectual, psychological, physical, and moral.

DR. CRAIG: I wonder how he knows that that is the purpose of life. He has no argument for that. He just asserts it. It seems to me on his view there is no objective purpose in life. Ultimately this attempt that he mentions, as I say, will succumb to the second law of thermodynamics. It will all end in meaningless death.

KEVIN HARRIS: That tends to be a constraint.

DR. CRAIG: [laughter] Just a little bit.

KEVIN HARRIS: Even if life was extended a million years, eventually, poof.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, yeah. We are talking here about infinity, right? Wholly apart from that, there is nothing here that gives us a ground for infinite goodness which he admits is necessary. Not just the prolongation of life.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we conclude today, he mentions you in one of his articles. He says,

Craig seems unaware that science and technology will probably give us the immortality he seeks—assuming his followers don’t take us back into the dark ages. They are trying their best though by making sure that children don’t learn modern biology. Wait until he realizes what the computer scientists are up to. And when science defeats death that will be the end of religion. For religion is based primarily on a fear of death. Craig would have been right at home in the Dark Ages. He is a true enemy of the Enlightenment; he is a true enemy of the future.[4]

 

DR. CRAIG: Well, apart from the ad hominems in that paragraph, I do not think that science and technology will probably give us the immortality that we seek. Why? Because science itself shows that that is impossible. There is nothing that finite agents within an expanding universe can do to ultimately stave off the heat death of the universe and the increase in its entropy.[5] I certainly think that we ought to learn modern biology. I encourage people to master neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory so that they understand it and can make an intelligent decision as to whether they agree with it. I do realize what computer scientists are up to. I am familiar to some degree with efforts in artificial intelligence, and also at how hopeless those efforts probably are to duplicate anything like human intelligence since our minds, or brains, don’t operate according to the way computers do. Finally, I don’t see any evidence that religion is based primarily on a fear of death. He doesn’t give any evidence of this. I would like to see some sort of evidence for that. But even if that is, that would still be a textbook example of the genetic fallacy. That is to say, trying to invalidate religion by explaining how it came about. That does absolutely nothing to suggest that the truth claims of religion are in fact false. So this is not a very impressive closing paragraph to his blogs. I am an opponent of the Enlightenment insofar as the Enlightenment was the endorsement of scientific naturalism and human autonomy over against God. I am not an enemy of the future obviously. I think the future lies in God’s hands. That provides the only hope for a future. It is the atheistic view which has no supernatural reality beyond the universe that ultimately leads to universal destruction and therefore despair. I think that the charges that he has leveled are quite groundless. But more important than that, when you read the blog in its entirety, I think that the religious answer to the question of the meaning of life comes out looking very compelling because it can deliver what transhumanism cannot – namely, eternal life forever and a connection with an infinite qualitative good.[6]

Previous Podcast   Next Podcast