Written by W. Robert Godfrey |
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Our responsibility is not to produce great success in our strength. Our responsibility is to be faithful and thereby to be instruments that God may use just as He will. Our great concern should not be our success or our will, but it should be God’s will and God’s success. And as Calvinists, our confidence will be that God will accomplish His purpose. 

The calling of Ligonier Ministries is to renew the churches through a growing knowledge of biblical Christianity, which is to say a knowledge of historic Calvinism. Ligonier is continuing the teaching ministry of R.C. Sproul, one of the best minds and one of the most balanced, faithful, and effective Reformed teachers of the last half-century. He inherited and continued a marvelous tradition: the militant stance for the fundamentals of the faith of J. Gresham Machen; the scholarship and Reformed orthodoxy of old Princeton Seminary; the evangelizing, Reformed revivalism of the First Great Awakening; the confessional and experiential Calvinism of the Westminster Confession of Faith; the teaching of John Calvin and the Reformation; and the legacy of Augustine and true catholicity. What a heritage is ours. How much we have inherited from those who have gone before. What a responsibility for us to preserve and advance what we have received.
We recognize that the great accomplishments of Christians in the past are now challenged in unique ways. After more than 1,500 years of Christianity’s providing the dominant worldview in the West, we now find ourselves living in a post-Christian world. Certainly in terms of Calvinism, our numbers, our influence, and our fervor seem much diminished. I was reminded of this in an essay by John Updike. Thinking about those beautiful Congregational churches on village greens in New England, he wrote: “Joy and aspiration have shaped these churches, but a certain melancholy may fill them. Puritanism faded into Unitarianism and thence to stoic agnosticism; these gallant old shells hold more memories than promises.”1 Has our movement come to hold more memories than promises? That is the great issue, it seems to me, before us today. My passion and my concern are that we be committed to the notion that Calvinism holds more promises than memories, as rich and glorious as those memories are.
The title of this essay, “The Whole Counsel of God,” comes from Acts 20:27, from the words of the Apostle Paul as he encouraged the Ephesian elders in their future service of the Lord. He said to them in part:
You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia, serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. And now, behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again. Therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified. (Acts 20:18–32)
Paul called on the Ephesian elders to preserve and build on the Christian truth that he had brought to them. He had given them “the whole counsel of God” and called on them to live courageously on the basis of that truth. Today we need a courageous Calvinism for the unique time in which we live. What is the character of that courageous Calvinism that we need? What is the truth of God that we must embrace, live, and teach?
Comprehensive Calvinism
The first element of courageous Calvinism that we need is a comprehensive Calvinism. You notice how Paul talked about the “whole counsel of God” (v. 27), that he did not hold back from them “anything that was profitable” (v. 20). Paul spoke very much in the spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ, who sent out His disciples in the Great Commission to go and teach “all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:20). Scripture and our Calvinistic heritage are clear that we are committed to all that the Lord has revealed in His Word. We seek no shrunken religion. We seek no minimalist doctrine. We seek the fullness of what the Lord has revealed to us. We stand with Jeremiah as the Lord spoke to him: “Thus says the LORD: Stand in the court of the LORD’s house, and speak to all the cities of Judah that come to worship in the house of the LORD all the words that I command you to speak to them; do not hold back a word” (Jer. 26:2). The task that is committed to us is to speak the whole counsel of God, all that God has revealed. Ligonier exists to help Christians study that Word in its totality and grow in that Word.
Our growth is founded on and rooted in our commitment to the Word and its inerrant authority. We embrace the Word in the spirit of John Calvin, who said, “A soul, therefore when deprived of the Word of God, is given up unarmed to the devil for destruction.”2 Our conviction is that the Word must be our sword and our defense. The Word in its complete truthfulness is what we need and that to which we are committed.
Calvin, commenting on Jeremiah 42:5–6, said:
If we desire to prove our fidelity to God, the only way of acting is, to regard his Word as binding, whether it be agreeable or otherwise, and never to murmur, as the ungodly do; for when God would have a yoke laid on them, they complain that his doctrine is too hard and burdensome. Away, then, with all those things which can render God’s Word unacceptable to us, if we desire to give sure proof of our fidelity.3
We accept the Word of God in its fullness. We are committed to it, both where it is pleasing to us and where it pinches us. Because of our sins and our ignorance, we must have the Word of God to correct us. And that means that we stand committed to a full biblical theology. J. Gresham Machen expressed this forcefully, reminding us that the “Christian life is the fruit of Christian doctrine, not its root, and Christian experience must be tested by the Bible, not the Bible by Christian experience.”4 We are committed to this notion that the Word judges us; we do not judge the Word. The Word directs us; we do not direct the Word.
R.C. Sproul continued and deepened this commitment with his leadership in defending the doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible during his ministry. Inerrancy became a touchstone of true biblical fidelity, helping to reveal those who tried to use traditional terms for biblical authority and reliability but used those terms in equivocal ways.
Because of our commitment to the Word, we are committed to the notion of the importance of theology. We are committed to the idea that theology is a reflection on the Word and an effort on the part of human beings to summarize that Word. We are convinced that theology is a useful, necessary discipline for appropriating the Scriptures for us. Evelyn Waugh, the British novelist, gave one of the best definitions of theology I know after his journey to Ethiopia for the coronation of the emperor Haile Selassie. After observing the extreme mystery of the rituals of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, he rejoiced in a theology that makes clear what God’s ways are. He wrote, “I saw theology as the science of the simplification by which nebulous and elusive ideas are formalized and made intelligible and exact.”5 The “science of simplification”—how seldom theology has been seen that way, but how true that is. Theology should make clear God’s will and God’s way as He has expressed them in His Word. And we here at Ligonier are committed to the full theology of the confessions to which we have subscribed, as they summarize biblical teaching for us.
Now, some have said that stressing the importance of theology makes Christianity too intellectualized. Some fear this means that only theologians have a role in the church. Perhaps in the tradition of our Reformed churches, there has been some danger of that. But it is not inherent in our tradition. We are not saying that theology is all there is to Christianity. But we are saying that theology must shape life. There must be life, but it must be shaped and directed by the Word of God.
Indeed, our Reformed heritage says that we do have more than theology. We also have piety; we have worship; we have loving service to the Lord. All these elements of Calvinism also flow out of the teachings of Scripture. We can see that clearly, for example, in the work of the Westminster Assembly. We need to remember that the Westminster Assembly not only gave us a confession of faith as a summary of doctrine, but it also gave us catechisms to teach the faith. It gave us a directory of worship to guide our meeting with God. It gave us a form of government to help in the organization of the church. And it gave us a Psalter to voice our praise to God. As we seek a comprehensive Calvinism, we must be sure that we have not shrunk it just to theology—however full our theology might be. We must be renewed in the fullness of a Reformed life flowing out of a Reformed theology. Our lives must follow a pattern of Bible study and prayer, of Word and sacrament, of self-denial and active love, and of Sabbath and of Psalm. We have seen a great decline in Reformed piety, in Reformed life, and I would suggest that decline is tied intimately to our loss of Sabbath and of Psalm. Too many of us have lost a day of rest, worship, study, and reflection and have lost the Psalms that put steel in our souls. We need to recapture that fullness of Calvinistic experience as well as Calvinistic theology.
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Written by C.R. Wiley |
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Some limits find their origins in human society—we can call them “positive law”, or perhaps, “social convention”, but whatever we call them, we can change them because we made them up. But there are other limits—limits that are simply in the nature of things. And those are the limits that we can’t change. While that may seem like common sense to the likes of you or me, many modern ideologues believe that the reason we think so is merely because we’ve been raised to think so.

Nearly everyone says that progress is a good thing. But one of its ironies is that it makes revolutions possible. A revolution is a turning, or perhaps better, an overturning. But for a turning to be progress, it has to get you closer to your goal. Without that, things just revolve in place: it’s the same old thing, over and over again. Things seem to change, but not really.
We’ve been going through a sexual revolution for a while now, and things have certainly changed—standards have been overturned—but is this progress? Or is this just the same old thing we’ve seen before? (History-a-plenty indicates that it is.)
Which brings me back to where I started: where are we supposed to be going anyway?
Scott Yenor is not squeamish about asking delicate questions. His latest book, The Recovery of Family Life: Exposing the Limits of Modern Ideologies raises questions about progress, among other things.
From the title you can see that Yenor’s book is about limits. Modern ideologies are dedicated to removing these. In particular, feminism, liberalism, and sexual liberation contend that the family, traditionally understood, has harmed women and sexual minorities by imposing oppressive limits on them. Feminism has worked to liberate women from the limitations of gender; liberalism has worked to liberate people from moral norms that have the force of law behind them, and sexual liberation has worked to cast off whatever those ideologies have left unchanged that might hinder the pursuit of sexual pleasure.
But why all the fuss about limits? Is there something intrinsically bad about them? Can we truly live without them? True, some limits find their origins in human society—we can call them “positive law”, or perhaps, “social convention”, but whatever we call them, we can change them because we made them up. But there are other limits—limits that are simply in the nature of things. And those are the limits that we can’t change. While that may seem like common sense to the likes of you or me, many modern ideologues believe that the reason we think so is merely because we’ve been raised to think so. If they could just cleanse our minds with some sort of mind-swipe all things would be possible. (No limits!)
The Rolling Revolution
If there truly are limits, then the universe is tilted against modern ideologues. This doesn’t mean that they, like Sisyphus, won’t try to keep their revolutions rolling along.
Yenor calls this phenomenon, “The Rolling Revolution”. But unlike Sisyphus, the futility of their labors doesn’t affect them alone; they insist on making the rest of us push things along, too. Failure is never proof that their ideologies are defective or against Nature–it only means that efforts to root out resistance aren’t radical enough. (The origin of the name ‘radical” means ‘to the root’.)
Dr. Yenor’s book can be said to consist of three interrelated parts. First, he describes the ways in which feminism, liberalism, and the sexual revolution have rolled like a juggernaut over our institutions. (Although they are in many ways mutually reinforcing, nevertheless in some ways they are incompatible; for instance, sadomasochism by definition is not liberal—oppression is how sadomasochism works—sadomasochists like it that way.) Feeling-out the Natural limits of these ideologies constitutes the second part of the book (and it is the basis for the book’s subtitle). And finally, the last part of the book attempts to point a way forward, (and is the basis for the main title of the book—“The Recovery of Family Life”).
Just What is Ideology?
Defining your terms often helps your readers, and a definition of ‘ideology’ would have been helpful. (The subtitle is about the limits of modern ideologies, after all.) I don’t recall coming across one (and a glance at the index indicates that I didn’t miss anything). The closest thing to a definition that I did come across was this:
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It is now glaringly obvious that critics of the Left and Critical Race Theory have been right all along: Critical Race Theory and the broader Leftist agenda making use of it are not serious endeavors; they’re tools for seizing power, cynically applied. 

According to Critical Race Theory, “racism is ordinary, not aberrational—‘normal science,’ the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001, p. 7). Its advocates call this belief “systemic racism,” and Critical Race Theory is the “study” of this so-called systemic racism, if by “study” we mean “treasure hunt to find racism in everything.”
Consequently, according to Critical Race Theorists, virtually everything anyone can imagine is racist. The names of some birds and fish are racist, according to Critical Race Theory. Math is racist, especially if we care about getting the right answers, according to Critical Race Theory. A rock on University of Wisconsin, Madison, campus property is racist, according to Critical Race Theory. Schools, government institutions, businesses, classical music, Beethoven specifically, art, hiking, going outside, the pandemic, rock climbing, jogging, conservatism and all conservatives, the curriculum in any school and its books, black people who don’t agree with Critical Race Theory, logic, loyalty, punctuality, hard work, merit—these are all part of the “system” of racism that this neo-Marxian Theory “interrogates” for its hidden racism. Even being “less racist” or “not racist” and desegregating schools via Brown v. Board of Education is racist, according to Critical Race Theory. In fact, it was in those two phenomena that Critical Race Theory started.
In that it’s a neo-Marxist Theory that demands to be understood only in its own predefined terms, however, perhaps it is best to consider what Critical Race Theory is really all about by taking the advice of some of its philosophical forebears. In One-Dimensional Man (1964), the neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse explains, presaging the poststructuralist Jackie Derrida, that the motivating energy for a movement rooted in (Hegelian) “negative thinking” comes from what isn’t there more than what is. The absence haunts the movement and, ultimately, gives it its motivating energy and will. He, of course, meant the (absence of the) liberated Utopia—Communism, when it finally works—that “specter of Marx” that also animated Derrida, though less manically, in the 1990s. Thus, perhaps we can learn more about what “systemic racism” is about by taking some examples of what isn’t systemically racist, even though it plainly is (by their definition).
A glaring example of systemic racism-that-isn’t arises in the willful discrimination against meritorious Asian-Americans in American colleges and universities and other schools. This blatant exception to the rule of systemic racism not only exists but was defended against termination by nearly every Senate Democrat in a party-line vote in April when Ted Cruz attempted to add a provision in the “Stop Asian Hate” bill that would finally prohibit it. But, of course, Asian-Americans are a paradoxical minority. They’re white-adjacent, which is systemically racist.
There’s also the obvious case of the disproportionate impact (this being the proof that systemic racism is occurring) the riots, looting, arson, chaos, and subsequent “defund the police” initiatives had on black and Latino neighborhoods in our cities, costing many hundreds of black and other lives and billions in property damage and theft. “Whiteness is property,” we were told in apparent justification of all this mayhem, and the police are systemically racist. Somehow, though, encouraging these disastrous behaviors and policies doesn’t qualify as “systemic racism” despite the definition because they were protests for “justice,” which is supposed to be “uncomfortable.”
Another less obvious example of systemic racism-that-isn’t follows the eviction moratorium, which was just reinstated unconstitutionally by administrative decree. Brown and black landlords, who tend to run smaller operations and own fewer rental properties, are disproportionately affected and far more likely to lose their livelihoods and property as foreclosures loom. This policy, which benefits interests like BlackRock (with its deep ties to the administration and major international NGOs who also claim to care about “systemic racism” in everything else), is not “systemically racist,” however.
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My father appealed to his sons as young men growing up in his house, aiming toward what I see missing in the lives of so many young men—Godliness. Much more important than the color of his skin was the content of his character as a man who pointed us to Scripture.

Do black men matter? The obvious answer is, yes, black men matter. The question is, “In what way do black men matter most?” The answer is that all men, including black men, matter most notably in their children’s lives.
As the firstborn son of Clarence and Mary Walker of Utica, New York, I learned a few things very early on in life. The first thing my father taught me was hard work. My father would say, “No one but you are to blame for your failure. However, everyone will play a role in your success. So, never step on anyone as you climb the ladder toward your next goal.” My father’s constant instruction was that while I may not be smarter than the next man, I am fully responsible for the hard work I dedicate to the task. So, he instructed my brother and me to work harder than others to be successful. My father also told me, “Don’t ever plan to do something that you know will embarrass our family.” I knew that the last instruction covered everything from stealing to getting a girl pregnant before marriage and any other costly decision early in life.
When I was growing up, I assumed that everyone received the same advice from their father. Unbeknownst to me at the time was that single-parent households were on the rise. By 1980, approximately 1 in 10 white children and 5 in 10 black children were experiencing life without a father in the home.[1] The statistics on these numbers have dramatically increased. By 2018, the most recent statistics available, unwed mothers account for 4 out of 10 single-parent households. Black unwed mothers have grown to 7 out of 10 children born to a single-parent home. [2]
As I think about these epidemic numbers and compare them to the current focus on critical race theory to solve racial disparity, I must ask a question. Can you imagine the benefit that the black community would experience if proponents of critical race theory honestly addressed the systemic problem of fatherlessness? Like a man dying of thirst in the desert, many are running to the well of critical race theory as if it were drinking water. Sadly, CRT is a mirage, causing proponents to ignore the most fundamental problem of disparity in the black community—fatherlessness.
Studies are clear regarding the innumerable problems that are the result of absentee fathers. If something is not done quickly, the current devastation within black communities will only grow more prominent in the coming years. As one who benefited from a father in the home, my father taught me many things that I see missing in this current generation of fatherless males. Allow me to give you the benefit of the two lessons I mentioned at the opening.
You are Not a Victim
My father once said, “Son, racism only has the power you give it.” My father was not ignoring that racism existed. Born in rural Arkansas and armed with a 6th-grade education, my dad had first-hand knowledge of the racism of the Jim Crow south. However, he never allowed racism or a lack of formal education to stop him from accomplishing a goal. Furthermore, as a family whose faith is central in our lives, we serve God, who is more powerful than any racist. Our culture today is missing key fatherly instruction that refuses to see victimhood as a badge of honor followed by the masculine example of sticktoitiveness.
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Unlike the Force in Star Wars, which one “masters” over time through meditation and other self-calming practices, the Spirit of Christ sovereignly confronts us. It is not we who make use of him; it is he who makes use of us. For, apart from God’s Spirit, we are utterly lost in a plethora of destructive patterns which lead, ultimately, to death.

I’ve got a confession: I often view the Holy Spirit as nothing but a useful tool.
This thought dawned on me as my wife and I sat down to watch through the Star Wars Saga (wife’s first time, my second).
The Force
Anyone who knows anything about Star Wars has likely encountered talk of the “Force.” Throughout the Saga, the Force is given several names: It, Life Current, Sight, Life Wind, and Luminous Mist[1]. According to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Force is “an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.” As with most energy fields, the Force is something which can be controlled – even manipulated. In the final analysis, the Force is simply a metaphysical tool to be used for good or ill.
What does Star Wars have to do with the Holy Spirit?
Well, as I watched Star Wars I realized that I often try to “master” the Holy Spirit like a Jedi tries to “master” the Force. In other words, I treat the Holy Spirit as nothing more than a magical instrument given to me for my own self-fulfillment and self-realization. This is why, in prayer, I can find myself asking God to do things that, in the end, would only serve my own purposes – not His.
Maybe you’ve experienced a similar feeling. Maybe you’ve been tempted to see the Holy Spirit as your Holy Vending Machine. And maybe that’s left you feeling like God never answers your prayers (at least, in the way you think he needs to). Well, if you’re like me, you’re ready to stop treating God’s Spirit like the Force and start treating him like the third Person of the Trinity.
This is where Romans 8 comes in. Claimed by many as “my favorite chapter in the Bible,” I’ve found it strange that many seem to miss Paul’s emphasis on life in the Spirit. And that’s okay. It’s why we read the Bible over and over again. God’s always got something new to show us, which is why I want to spend the rest of our time pondering what Paul has to teach us about God and his Spirit’s saving work in our lives. But first…
The Force of Sin
In the early chapters of Genesis, two damning powers entered the world: sin and death. Genesis 4:7 personifies sin as an animal “crouching at the door.” Likewise, Paul, in Romans 6:16, says that fallen humanity has become an “obedient slave” to sin and is thereby subjected to death. John the Revelator sees this sin-leading-to-death as ending, ultimately, in a “lake that burns with fire and sulfur” (Rev 21:8). Thus, from Genesis to Revelation, sin is seen as a powerful, death-dealing force, and it one which has infected us all (Rom 5:12). This leads us to the first few sentences of Romans 8, wherein all of the bad news of our sin comes to a crashing halt.
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For believers, over time, our belief systems and thought patterns are conformed more and more to God’s Word. Triggers will lose their power to tempt us towards sin and self as God’s Word becomes more real to us.

“What are you thinking?” We ask this of each other often, don’t we? When our minds are troubled, and our thoughts seem filled with unholy and disturbing ideas or images, we need outside help. Christ does not leave us to fend for ourselves but rescues us out of our distress to produce peace in our thought lives.
God’s Word makes a startling statement about a believer’s thought life. 1 Corinthians 2:16 tells us that, through our union with Jesus, we now have the mind of Christ. This gives us the ability to distinguish good from evil and truth from lies. Believers can think as Christ thinks. Throughout this lifetime, we will battle to keep our thoughts set on him and the truths of Scripture, but, no matter what you have been through, it is possible to have your mind renewed so that you experience thought patterns that line up with the gospel and an increasingly Christ-centered emotional life.
Women who have pursued pornography, sexual fantasy, sinful sexual experiences, and other expressions of sexual sin increase their likelihood of experiencing troubled thought lives. Sadly, women who have been sinned against with sexual trauma can have troubled thought lives, through no fault of their own. Some say that an image or memory can pop into their minds in an instant, even though they have not looked at porn or been involved sexually with someone for years. Others’ patterns of thought are entangled with troubling emotions that seem deeply engrained in their responses; prayer, Bible reading, and listening to Christian music push away these thoughts for a time, but they still return. Distressing, scary, shame-provoking memories about themselves, their bodies, men, women, relationships, and more flood their minds like an incoming wave or an unexpected hurricane that threatens to undo them.
The Bible teaches that all things are the servants of God (Psalm 119:91) and that all things are in subjection to and under the authority of Jesus (Ephesians 1:22–23). Yet many of us struggle to come anywhere close to clean and holy thought lives that serve Jesus. Present and past experiences have formed pathways in our minds that produce dark thoughts—and usually result in sinful behaviors too. Maybe we have absorbed sexual images through pornography, movies that normalize and celebrate sin, or books that feed sensual ideas and fantasies. Maybe the memories that currently trouble you aren’t primarily sexual in focus, but they are connected to messy relational dynamics in which you were ensnared, like codependency and emotional enmeshment. Perhaps fear triggers a moving sidewalk in your thoughts that carries you from distraction to distress to destructive patterns of thinking.
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Transcendence, for the Christian, is more than a life of eternal consciousness. It is a visceral, bodily eternity, where men and women live in a glorified earth with glorified bodies (Rev. 21). Whereas transhumanism dreams of a disembodied, mechanical immortality for humanity, we Christians—trusting in the sure promises and work of our Lord Jesus Christ—look forward to a glorious, heavenly city, where we shall live and rejoice eternally in the presence of our God.

Since the beginning of history, people have used technology to overcome various challenges. Bifocals, cars, artificial knees, smartphones: the history of humanity is littered with technologies designed to address the many limitations we face in our everyday lives. The last few decades have given us many new, amazing technologies, ranging from personal computers to improved prosthetics for the disabled. Because of these remarkable advancements, a growing number of thinkers are beginning to wonder how new technologies can help us not only overcome but even transcend our physical limitations. “Transhumanists,” Ian Curran states, “believe that developments in science and technology will soon make possible the radical transcendence of human biological, cognitive, and emotional limitations and the evolution of a posthuman race, even the attainment of immortality.”[1]
Whether or not future technologies will live up to the dreams of these transhumanists, the fact that we are increasingly looking to technology to solve humanity’s troubles—and perhaps even deliver us from mortality—warrants a thoughtful examination of the transhumanist movement, its underlying assumptions, and the possible consequences of new medical and cybernetic technologies emerging in the coming decades.
Over the last few centuries, many Western thinkers have preached an optimistic view of scientific progress. The French Enlightenment philosopher Nicholas de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, expressed such confidence in humanity’s capacity for “unlimited progress” that he wondered if “the duration of the average interval between birth and wearing out” would one day have “no time limit whatsoever.” [2] Within the last few decades, the emergence of computers, along with major advances in the fields of human biology and medicine, have opened new horizons upon which optimists could cast their visions for the future of humanity. These advances afforded new possibilities not only for the alleviation of human suffering, but also the enhancement of humanity.[3] For example, recent innovations in prosthetics have stimulated conversation about the prospect of one day replacing functional human limbs with enhanced bionic prostheses.[4]
Furthermore, as computers have become increasingly complex,[5] it has become conceivable, even imminent, that computers could soon exceed the human brain in terms of speed and capacity.[6] For transhumanists, the “singularity”(the term used to describe this proposed historic inevitability) will make it possible for humans to escape from their mortal bodies. As tech innovator, philanthropist, and leading proponent of transhumanism Ray Kurzweil notes:
“[T]here won’t be mortality by the end of the twenty-first century…Up until now, our mortality was tied to the longevity of our hardware. When the hardware crashed, that was it. For many of our forebears, the hardware gradually deteriorated before it disintegrated…As we cross the divide to instantiate ourselves into our computational technology, our identity will be based on our evolving mind file. We will be software, not hardware.”[7]
According to Kurzweil and others, de Condorcet’s dream of immortality will be fulfilled once humans cease to be confined to bodily limitations and opt for a “post-biological” existence.
Transhumanists also propose that post-biological existence will offer more than immortality. As people get rid of biological limitations and integrate themselves with advanced technologies, they will also gain a whole set of abilities, pleasures, and experiences that transcend those of bodily existence. Kurzweil, with obvious zeal, writes, “[T]he road we’re going down is a road paved with gold. It’s full of benefits that we’re never going to resist—continued growth in economic prosperity, better health, more intense communication, more effective education, more engaging entertainment, better sex.”[8] Even spiritual experiences, Kurzweil proclaims, will be capable of enhancement in this “posthuman” age. As scientists discover “the neurological correlates of the variety of spiritual experiences”, Kurzweil is certain that these experiences, too, will be heightened as human beings achieve ever-increasing technological complexity.[9]
Despite the far-reaching scope of transhumanism’s vision for human evolution, however, some transhumanists are also genuinely concerned about the potentially negative consequences of these technologies. The most recent draft of “The Transhumanist Declaration” acknowledges “that humanity faces serious risks, especially from the misuse of new technologies” and calls for research in order “to carefully deliberate how best to reduce risks and expedite beneficial applications.”[10] Still, it is worth noting some of the potential ethical objections to the transhumanists vision for the future.
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