The Heresies Of Today’s Technology
The Heresies Of Today’s Technology
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2026/05/the-heresies-of-todays-technology/
Publish Date: 2026-05-01 06:05:00
Source Domain: www.patheos.com
The Roman Catholic church has been scrutinizing the implications of AI and other technology in a way that Protestants too can find useful. The Vatican’s International Theological Commission (ITC) has released a study document on the anthropology–that is, the doctrine of man–that is being promulgated by the new technology.
From Quo Vadis, Humanitas? (my emphasis):
Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that operates on the belief that human beings can and should use the resources of science and technology to overcome the physical and biological limitations of the human condition, in particular ageing and even death, thus shaping their own evolution and maximising their own potential to the point of redesigning human beings to make them fitted to ‘go beyond’. With its programmatic emphasis on increasing individual human capabilities, it develops a distinctly anthropocentric perspective, subscribing to an ideological and naively uncritical view of scientific and technological progress.
Transhumanism imagines a future in which human beings will perfect the current biological form that defines human nature, in order to achieve the goal of individual immortality, supported by technology. In the utopian scope of its quest for immanent immortality, transhumanism can be interpreted as the existential expression of a presumption that is both naive and arrogant.
I would note that this anthropological heresy goes far beyond issues of technology, of course. Though tech billionaires are investing vast sums of money on research to cure death, we also see the assumptions of transhumanism that we should “go beyond” our biological bodies in the transgender movement. Also in genetic engineering, whereby we design our own children, and in the reproductive technologies that conceives babies apart from sexual relationships. The study goes on:
Posthumanism, understood in the strict sense, criticises traditional humanism, questioning the specificity of…
