Christian Transhumanism

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A Christian History of Transhumanism

Patristics & Early Church

Justin Martyr & resurrection of the body

Saint Irenaeus described a Transcendent Humanism

Saint Macrina the Younger used science to prove resurrection of the body

Gregory of Nyssa God designed human anatomy to make us the technological species

1320s Dante's Divine Comedy

"Words cannot tell of that transhuman change..."

1620s Sir Francis Bacon

The Royal Society

Thomas Jefferson

“Bacon, Locke and Newton. I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.” — Thomas Jefferson

American Postmillennialism

Stone-Campbell Movement

Benjamin Franklin?

1800s The Russian Cosmists, religious imperative to use science to defeat death, and colonize space

1930s Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Quotes on Transhumanism

Quotes on Omega Point

connections to Singularity

connections to Internet

References by Current Popes

association with Julian Huxley

1940s WD Lighthall

"Paul's Transhumanism"

1929 The World, the Flesh & the Devil

1949 TS Elliot; The Cocktail Party (1949)

1957 Julian Huxley

"The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature. "I believe in transhumanism": once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny." — Julian Huxley

1968 John Warwick Montgomery; Cryonics and Orthodoxy

1988 Extropianism

1994 Frank Tipler publishes The Physics of Immortality (1994) describing the Omega Point Theory

1998 World Transhumanist Association

2003 The Simulation Argument by Nick Bostrom

2010s

History of the Christian Transhumanist Association

Other Influences on the modern Christian Transhumanist movement

Transcendent Humanism of Irenaeus and the early Christians

Eastern Orthodoxy

Wolfhart Pannenberg

Physical Eschatology — "heaven on earth"

Steven Kotler, Peter Diamandis, Aubrey de Grey

A Christian History of Transhumanism