#-989 Can Frankenstein Be Saved?
March 25, 2018Thank you for considering my question! I find it very fun and engaging to listen to your podcast and it always is edifying to my Christian faith! God bless you and your organization may many more souls be blessed and edified through the ministry.
Onto the weird question!
Suppose a being like Frankenstein’s Monster existed—an artificially created being produced by human technology but possessing rationality, self-consciousness, and moral awareness. If such a being were not a biological descendant of Adam and therefore not part of the fallen human race in the traditional sense, could it nevertheless be redeemed through faith in Jesus Christ? Or is participation in Adamic humanity a necessary condition for salvation? I’m asking because advances in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology raise the possibility that humans may one day create rational agents. Would Christian soteriology allow for their inclusion in redemption?
Clarence
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
Actually, there’s a version of your question that is much less weird, Clarence, and deserves to be taken seriously: namely, suppose that there are extraterrestrial, intelligent persons such as you describe. Could they be redeemed through faith in Jesus Christ? That is a much more realistic scenario than your Frankenstein monster.
I’m inclined to say that in virtue of his incarnation, by means of which the second person of the Trinity assumed a human nature, his redemptive death is efficacious only for those who similarly share a human nature. That is the whole point of the incarnation. So if there are extraterrestrial agents like Klingons, then, assuming that they also have violated God’s moral law, God would in his grace provide a means of salvation specifically geared to them. (A very interesting question here is whether one of the Trinitarian persons would have assumed a Klingon nature, just as God the Son took on a human nature.) So the efficacy of Christ’s redemptive death is limited to human beings. This would also imply that it would not be efficacious for Frankenstein’s monster, given that he is not a human being. Ditto for AI bots.
- William Lane Craig