Albert R. Antosca

This dissertation explores the perennial link between religion and technology in Western culture. Specifically, I focus on a subset of transhumanism, known as Singularitarianism, as a modern representation of the historically close relationship between technology and religion in the West. To provide a genealogy of Singularitarianism, and the transhumanist movement out of which it emerged, I trace the history of Western techno-religious culture from Latin Christendom, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all the way to modern transhumanism. Modern transhumanism is the result of this philosophical framework combined with rapidly accelerating technology, resulting in the belief that humans should control their own material and spiritual evolution through technology. Today, the rapid advance of advanced technology is seen as capable of realizing the promises traditionally satisfied through traditional theistic religion in the West. In exploring these dynamics, I make the argument that religion adapts to technology at an ontological level. For the purposes of gaining insight to the fundamental question concerning what it means to be human in an age of technology, Singularitarianism serves as an example of how our technology facilitates ultimate concern by addressing the challenges of meaning in an age of accelerating change, and reveals where religion is going in the future. This represents, in the language of Charles Taylor, a kind of re-enchantment of the West.

This dissertation explores the perennial link between religion and technology in Western culture. Specifically, I focus on a subset of transhumanism, known as Singularitarianism, as a modern representation of the historically close relationship between technology and religion in the West. To provide a genealogy of Singularitarianism, and the transhumanist movement out of which it emerged, I trace the history of Western techno-religious culture from Latin Christendom, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all the way to modern transhumanism. Modern transhumanism is the result of this philosophical framework combined with rapidly accelerating technology, resulting in the belief that humans should control their own material and spiritual evolution through technology. Today, the rapid advance of advanced technology is seen as capable of realizing the promises traditionally satisfied through traditional theistic religion in the West. In exploring these dynamics, I make the argument that religion adapts to technology at an ontological level. For the purposes of gaining insight to the fundamental question concerning what it means to be human in an age of technology, Singularitarianism serves as an example of how our technology facilitates ultimate concern by addressing the challenges of meaning in an age of accelerating change, and reveals where religion is going in the future. This represents, in the language of Charles Taylor, a kind of re-enchantment of the West.

This article provides a framework for understanding the dynamics between the disenchanting effects of a uniquely modern existential meaning crisis and a countervailing reenchantment facilitated by the techno-cultural movement of transhumanism. This movement constructs a post-secular techno-theology grounded in a transhumanist ontology that corresponds to a shift away from anthropocentric meaning systems. To shed light on this dynamic, I take a phenomenological approach to the human-technology relationship, highlighting the role of technology in ontology formation and religious imagination. I refer to examples of transhumanist religious movements to illustrate a new posthumanist ontological grounding of meaning corresponding to a contemporary meaning-crisis that scholars are calling ‘neuroexistentialism.’ I then use the language of Charles Taylor and his work on secularization to frame these ontological developments. Ultimately, this article argues that transhumanist religious expression represents a zeitgeist of post-secular re-enchantment.