Eugenia Torrance

Several theologians have pointed to resonances between the Greek Patristic doctrine of deification or theosis and recent transhumanist narratives: both discourses indicate death as the final enemy of humankind and invest heavily in a hoped-for transcendence of life as we know it. These resonances will be investigated further by comparing the approach to human nature found in Maximus the Confessor and in the prominent transhumanists Nick Bostrom and John Harris. In addition to sharing with transhumanists a disavowal of death and a trajectory towards transcendence, Maximus also shares a view of human nature that is more dynamic and open-ended than is commonly attributed to his Late Antique context. On the other hand, Maximus also insists on the persistence of this dynamic nature in its integrity even into the eschaton. He does so for a number of reasons that should give Christians pause about any rhetoric that calls for an abandonment of human nature: that theosis depends precisely on sharing a human nature with Christ; that our vocation as mediators in creation depends on our physical bodies as the locus of shared existence with the material world; and that corruption has a providential use in binding us together with our neighbors and in cultivating virtue as we strain for the incorruptible and supernatural gift of theosis.

Starting with Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton's theology has often been caricatured as putting forward a “God of the gaps” argument for God's existence and continued involvement in the world. Peter Harrison has pointed out that this characterization of Newton's theology is “not entirely clear.” A closer look at Newton's letters and the drafts to the Opticks reveals that, rather than arguing God's providential ordering and care over the world, he takes these for granted and is reluctant to specify instances of this order and care based on his physical research. He certainly believes in gaps in mechanical causes but is more eager to fill those gaps with nonmechanical natural causes than with God. Further, his system does not exhibit the two most prevalent weaknesses attributed to “God of the gaps” theologies: (1) that by describing God as intervening in natural causes his skill as a designer is maligned and (2) that by describing the physical details of God's involvement in the world one puts too much weight on theories likely to be replaced as science advances. Newton avoids the former weakness because it is only God's masterfulness as designer that he ties in any way to his theories of the physical world. He avoids the latter because he never points to God as the direct cause of any specific physical processes. Newton hoped that his system would cause his readers to marvel not only at God's providence but also at humankind's inability to sufficiently understand it.