IN SO FAR as religion has any USP — unique selling point, in marketing jargon — it’s the promise of everlasting life. Marxism assures us of justice on earth. Communism guarantees material equality. Liberalism gives us freedom, and nationalism a way of belonging. Religion gestures towards each of those goods, but it surely is its commitment to everlasting life that actually differentiates it. As the nice Australian poet, Les Murray, once wrote: “Whatever the nice religions offer, It is afterlife their people want.”
“Eternal life” is an unhelpful phrase — vague to the purpose of misleading. The religious promise to beat, circumvent, or by some means cheat death is available in reasonably different flavours. “Eternal life” might be material or immaterial, universal or selective, joyous or bleak. Moreover, not all religions have formal beliefs about eternity, still less ones which can be codified.
Nevertheless, even with all these caveats in place, it’s beyond serious doubt that ideas and guarantees about the opportunity of conquering death are a characteristic of religions, and never shared by other human ideologies or practices. For higher or worse, the religious own “everlasting life”.
Or they did until recently — because the traditional, arguably innate, human hope for everlasting life has, over recent a long time, caught the eye of scientists and billionaires alike. Immortality, whether biological, genetic, cryonic, cybernetic, or digital, is now subject to serious scientific research, and serious money.
As you read this, there are roughly 500 people all over the world who’ve paid good money to have their bodies pumped filled with liquid nitrogen and stored the other way up in a large refrigerator for an unspecified time period. A number of have elected to be decapitated first, storing their head alone, “neuropreservation” being a less expensive option than full-body immersion. Some have even paid for his or her pets to hitch them — mainly dogs, but, every now and then, cats, and in addition, apparently, five hamsters, two rabbits, and a chinchilla.
The concept that “deceased” organs might be revivified is well attested. A reasonably ghoulish 2019 paper in Nature reported how researchers, working with the severed heads of 32 pigs that had been killed for meat in a slaughterhouse, managed to “revive the disembodied brains . . . [up to] 4 hours after the animals were slaughtered”.
Scientists are keen to downplay the implications of this for humans, and their caution is well advised. The science of “neuropreservation” is primitive. Researchers have seen no signs of the revival of co-ordinated electrical patterns or “consciousness” in animal brains, and human brains are prone to be considerably tougher to recuperate.
HOWEVER primitive, speculative, and downright gothic cryonics could also be, though, it set the hares of “scientific immortality” running. Perhaps science could enable us to defeat death, if not by cryonics, then by another approach?
There are loads of pseudo-scientific approaches available. Life extensionism is the try to dramatically increase longevity by a “scientifically tested” regime of vitamin and mineral supplements, calorie restriction, hormone alternative, and programmatic exercise. Parabiosis, against this, is the practice of preserving youth through young-blood transfusion. Neither works.
But their appeal is indicative of a mental reframing of this whole issue. The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), in its eleventh edition, has now included ageing (versus age-related conditions) in its compendium, treating it as a disease “associated [with] decline in intrinsic capability”.
Understood in this manner, ageing is just not some form of mysterious build-up of negative energy or lack of vitalist life force: it’s, for want of a greater phrase, a matter of wear and tear and tear, accompanied by the rising costs of alternative. There’s only to date you’ll be able to drive your automobile, nonetheless rigorously you take care of it, before it becomes more economical to purchase a latest one.
Where that analogy breaks down is that no automobile of any age produces perfect, shiny latest baby cars. Humans do. The genetic material each of us inherits at birth is freed from any age-related degeneration that may need affected our parents on the time of conception. Old bodies can generate young cells.
This opens up a more realistic approach to holding back age and death than that offered by young-blood transfusion or life within the deep freeze. In 2012, the Nobel committee awarded the prize in medicine to Shinya Yamanaka, a Japanese biologist who had worked out methods to “reprogramme” mature cells in order that they turn into young — or, more precisely, “pluripotent”.
Another option is present in telomeres, the repeated DNA sequences found at the top of a chromosome. They act a bit like aglets — the plastic or metal tubes on the tip of a shoelace — stopping the ends of the chromosome from fraying and decaying, thereby protecting its information-carrying portions. Their protective function is just not cost-free, nonetheless, and, every time a cell divides, the telomeres are shortened. After a certain point, after they have turn into too short, the cell is unable to divide and dies.
This will not be an inevitable process, nonetheless. Telomerase, an enzyme that’s expressed naturally in stem cells but not in most mature, adult cells, restores damaged telomeres, thereby prolonging the health and age of cells. Boosting the extent of telomerase within the body might help protect telomeres and thereby slow cell senescence.
THERE are other genetic possibilities. Professor Cynthia Kenyon has worked out that it is feasible to double the lifespan of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans by disabling a single gene, and has identified that studies have shown that humans who live to 100 usually tend to have mutations in daf-2, the relevant gene.
Whether or not these options bear fruit, science had other options up its sleeve, comparable to “improving” humans by splicing them with technology. Brain-computer interfaces, by which brain signals control external devices without using conventional neuromuscular pathways, have been the topic of intense research over the past 20 years, and have met with some success.
And then, after all, there’s mind-uploading, also sometimes referred to as “whole brain emulation”, based on the concept the brain might be deconstructed into the form of digital information that computers process. Fantastical and far-distant as this sounds, scientists point to the child steps to date taken on the road. The Blue Brain Project has, since 2005, been working to construct “the world’s first biologically detailed digital reconstructions and simulations of the mouse brain”.
Such successes have made some people inordinately obsessed with the probabilities allegedly on offer here, envisaging that some combination of brain-scanning, artificial intelligence, digital uploading, and human augmentation might someday “save” and “resurrect” or “reincarnate” humans, thereby securing for us the immortality we crave.
The religious language is just not inappropriate. Indeed, it’s an intricate a part of this “transhumanism”. Ray Kurzweil, the St Paul of this movement, has proposed bringing his dead father back to life, albeit it as an avatar, and has popularised the concept of the “singularity”: a form of tipping point at which artificial intelligence surpasses that of humans and sends us plunging right into a post-human future. Not without reason has it been described as a form of secular eschatological moment.
THE quest for scientific immortality clearly doesn’t want for enthusiasm. It needs it, because the sensible problems facing these attempts are almost incalculable and make the resurrection of Christ look like a mere conjuring trick with bones by comparison.
Take transhumanism. The Blue Brain Project has now managed to map fully one cubic millimetre of mouse brain. They found it contained greater than 100,000 neurons with greater than a billion connections between them, and that it required two petabytes of knowledge to store. The average human brain is about 1400 cubic centimetres, and accommodates roughly 100 million neurons (of about 1000 differing kinds), and doubtless about 100 trillion synapses (contact points between neurons).
Even if one were to unravel such stupendous technical challenges, more theoretical ones would remain. The concept that mind might be reduced to information is questionable to say the least. The concept that it’s ever static enough to scan is equally doubtful, as is the assumption that the mind can exist without the body. And, even were your uploaded mind to be subsequently downloaded right into a reconstructed body, it will not be you, a lot as a duplicate of you, not only endlessly replicable but, once reincarnated in its latest robotic form, set off on a special experiential path.
In short, such speculations would simply be fancy — scientific pie within the sky, so to talk — were it not for the incontrovertible fact that a variety of extremely wealthy persons are very considering the entire affair in the intervening time, and are pouring considerable sums of cash into it. The life-extension industry, which is already large, might be value greater than half a trillion dollars by the mid-2020s. And it is just not simply confined to humans. Loyal is a biotech start-up dedicated to extending the lifespan of dogs.
The religious dimension inside all that is complex. A 2021 Theos-Faraday study found that the more individuals participated in religious practices (attending religious services, praying, and reading holy texts), the less likely they were to want some form of scientific immortality. In the United States, Pew Forum found that white Evangelical Protestants were among the many least prone to want life extension (only 28 per cent wanted it), whereas black Protestants (47 per cent) and Hispanic Catholics (46 per cent) were more divided.
On the one hand, it mustn’t be surprising to learn that religious attitudes to scientific attempts to cheat death are generally colder than the non-religious. After all, why pin your hopes on an imitation when you may have the true thing to sit up for?
On the opposite hand, we should always not be surprised that there’s a range of non secular (on this case, Christian) opinions on the problem, from Christian transhumanists, who find salvation (or not less than hope) in technology, to those (a minority in our own time, but not previously) who reject any try to cheat death through human ingenuity as a type of blasphemy. Christian believers don’t appear to talk with one voice in relation to the subject of scientific immortality.
THERE are various reasons for this polyphony of Christian voices about scientific attempts to cheat death. Some are bad — confusion, ignorance, indifference — but one is nice. It is, in effect, that the Christian tradition itself doesn’t speak with one voice here. There is a polyphony — or, higher still, a real, creative tension — at the guts of the Christian vision of life, death, and immortality.
This will look like a contentious claim; so it will be significant to be clear about what’s and is just not being said here. This is just not the (familiar) point that Christians themselves have held different views on this matter. Popular Christianity, for instance, has often slipped right into a form of implicit dualism by which the soul or spirit plays just about the identical part because the uploaded mind of transhumanism.
However much individual believers or heterodox theologies have slipped into such dualistic beliefs, it doesn’t change the orthodox position that, from the earliest days, Christians believed within the bodily resurrection from the dead on the idea of Christ’s own bodily resurrection from the dead. Eternal life, in Christian orthodoxy, was never spiritual within the disembodied, ghostly sense of the word.
Moreover, there was never an issue that this final bodily resurrection can be anything aside from an act of God. Christians were charged to live as aliens on the earth, or as if time were short, but there was no sense that their efforts would by some means effect the approaching of the Kingdom, as in the event that they could twist God’s arm into delivering on his guarantees.
In short, nonetheless much there was confusion and tension inside Christian minds, and debates on life, death, and immortality, this is just not what we’re referring to. There is not any polyphony here: orthodox Christian belief is that everlasting life is (1) bodily and (2) a present of God.
The polyphony, or creative tension, comes once we take a look at what this implies for our attitude to life and death while on earth. It would, for instance, be easy to take the short step from acknowledging the beliefs just outlined to reaching the conclusion that believers should simply acquiesce within the face of death. Don’t hassle raging against the dying of the sunshine. There’s no point.
Were this the one voice, the response to scientific attempts to cheat death through biological, genetic, or digital means can be straightforward. They are at best pointless, at worst fallacious, blasphemous attempts to attain what only God can.
But it is just not the one voice, as there’s one other that threads through the Bible, which insists that death is just not simply to be accepted without demur. On the contrary, the New Testament, particularly, is evident. Death is the enemy: a dehumanising, alien and invasive force, a foe to be fought reasonably than an ally to be embraced.
Herein lies the stress. On the one hand, death is the enemy, an attitude that inspires resistance. On the opposite hand, victory over death is just not in our gift, and death might be defeated only by the grace of God — an attitude that naturally breeds resignation (and hence, at best, suspicion of, and, at worst, hostility to, the reason behind scientific immortality).
What, then, is Christianity to make of this scientific quest for immortality? Does the programme of technological life-extension and immortality merit support (born of our resistance to death) or criticism (born of our resignation to it)? Navigating this query is removed from straightforward, but could also be helped by two relevant but sometimes ignored elements inside the idea of “resurrection”: community and transformation.
MODERN Western societies naturally approach the concept of everlasting life in an individualistic way, as if what we’re really talking about is the enduring existence of a single organism. Christians are hardly proof against this. However, the New Testament claims that the resurrection of Christ is the “first fruit” of a general resurrection, the offering in the beginning of the harvest by which all is gathered in. By this understanding, everlasting life is nothing if it is just not communal.
Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones in chapter 37 imagined an almost medically vivid resurrection of the Israelite dead: “I’m going to open your graves and produce you up from them; I’ll bring you back to the land of Israel.” The book of Daniel proclaimed: “Multitudes who sleep within the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” The prophet Isaiah declared that “your dead will live . . . their bodies will rise — let those that dwell within the dust get up and shout for joy”. Resurrection is a collective recreation of a people, not the continuing survival of a person. It is just not simply the continuation of normal life by other means.
This connects with a second point: transformation. The problem with earthly humans is just not simply that they’re mortal, but that they’re sinful. Christian “immortality” is just not and can’t be divorced from the concept of transformation. Eternal life is just not only embodied and a present of God, but it surely is relational, in a way that humans may very well be — or, reasonably, in the best way that we should be, but so rarely are.
Eternal life is just not a lot a spot, still less a reward, but a state of mutual love and gift — a state that we taste on this life, but only fleetingly. As George Eliot remarks at one point in Middlemarch, “we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied within the completeness of the beloved object.”
Resurrection involves not simply the defeat of death, but in addition the defeat of sin, which is so often paired with it. Eternal life, resurrection life, is life in community — community that continues to be unfractured by sin — which suggests it’s necessarily transformed life. It is just not simply the continuation of a specific organism, and even a bunch of them, but its/their re-creation. It could also be helpfully understood qualitatively reasonably than quantitatively: an infinite extension of the standard of affection and beauty we experience, sometimes, on earth reasonably than an infinite extension of the amount of time now we have here.
In the ultimate chapter of Julian Barnes’s novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, the narrator wakes up in heaven. He has a beautiful time there. The food is great, the wine excellent, the sex sensational. He plays golf to his heart’s content, and gets impossibly good at it. Millennia tick by. Eventually, things begin to pall a bit, and he discovers that, regardless of heaven affording every pleasure you’ll be able to consider, 100 per cent of people that find yourself there determine, in the long run, “to die off”.
People like him often go first. “People who want an eternity of sex, beer, drugs, fast cars . . . they’ll’t consider their good luck at first, after which, after just a few hundred years, they’ll’t consider their bad luck . . . they’re stuck with being themselves. Millennia after millennia of being themselves.”
The narrator tries to seek out an answer by becoming the form of person “who never gets bored with eternity”, but he’s informed that folks have tried it and it never works. “You can’t turn into another person without stopping being who you might be [and] no one can bear that.” Eventually, he acquiesces. “It seems to me”, he reflects at the top, “that Heaven’s a excellent idea, it’s an ideal idea you might say, but not for us. Not given the best way we’re.”
The story is remarkably acute and relevant as a “religious” perspective on the scientific quest to cheat death. Human life is a posh, multi-layered thing, directly biological and cognitive, communal and spiritual. Science may hold out some hope of with the ability to transcend a few of those layers — the biological and, perhaps, even the cognitive — but (the religious perspective insists) humans are greater than biological organisms or pondering machines. Being capable of transcend and transform some layers or dimensions of our humanity, without touching others, may find yourself the worst possible option for us.
This is an edited extract from Playing God: Science, religion and the long run of humanity by Nick Spencer and Hannah Waite, published by SPCK at £19.99 (Church Times Bookshop special price £15.99); 978-0-281-09003-7 (Books, 22 March).
