I have been caught up in many conversations over the summer, at science-religion conferences and meetings with theologians, where the future of human evolution has come up. Almost invariably in these conversations, someone expresses the opinion – as though everyone there takes it for granted – that humans are the end point, the goal, or the pinnacle of evolution. A related viewpoint that I’ve heard said is that we humans have managed to extricate ourselves from the evolutionary struggle: our technological prowess has enabled us to raise ourselves above the survival of the fittest; we are, quite simply, the fittest. And another related viewpoint is that we humans were somehow the inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process. The final related viewpoint (the most explicitly theological) says that God directed evolution so that humans would be the end result. All of this is related to a much-debated idea in theology, of ‘human uniqueness’.
Tag Archives: Human Being
Transhumanism and Theology
New College (Edinburgh’s School of Divinity) recently hosted a conference organised with the Albertus Institute on the topic of ‘What makes a person’. As a philosopher/theologian working in the field of science and religion, I was invited to offer a contribution centred on some of the theological issues raised by Transhumanism. Continue reading