Ross Douthat speculates on religious responses to transformative technology
In a world that remains stable and wealthy and scientifically proficient, someone or someones may figure out how to achieve substantial life extension, artificial wombs, genetic selection for unusual strength or speed or appearance, the breeding of human-animal hybrids, and other scenarios that have belonged for years to the realm of “just around the corner” science fiction.
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Human social institutions would change dramatically, to put it mildly, if babies could be grown in vats and people lived to be 125. Our political and economic debates would be scrambled if the rich suddenly began availing themselves of technologies and treatments that seemed to call a shared human nature into question.
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There is a possible future where it becomes clear that the real bottleneck—the real source of temporary technological decadence—wasn’t technological proficiency so much as a dearth of societal ambition and centralized incentives and unsqueamishness about moral considerations. In this scenario, it would be Chinese scientists, subsidized and encouraged by an ambitious government and unencumbered by residual Christian qualms about certain forms of experimentation, who take the great leap from today’s CRISPR work to tomorrow’s more-than-human supermen—and suddenly the world would enter a scenario out of the original Star Trek timeline and its predicted Eugenics Wars, with a coterie of Khan Noonien Singhs in power in Beijing and the rest of the world trying to decide whether to adapt, surrender, or resist.
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Indeed, you wouldn’t necessarily need the huge AI or biotech leap: even a refinement of existing virtual reality, one that draws more people more fully into the violence and pornography of unreal playgrounds, would seem to demand a religious response, even a dramatic one. Perhaps not quite a jihad… but at the very least an effort to tame and humanize the new technologies of simulation that escapes current culture war categories sufficiently to usher in a different—at long last—religious era than the one the baby boomers made.
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Two things that certain modern prejudices assume can’t be joined together: scientific progress and religious revival. It isn’t just that some technological advance could, as suggested above, act in creative tension with religion by provoking a moral crusade or jihad in response. It’s also that scientific and religious experiments proceed from a similar desire for knowing, a similar belief that the universe is patterned and intelligible and that its secrets might somehow be unlocked. Which is why in periods of real intellectual ferment and development, there is often a general surge of experimentation that extends across multiple ways of seeking knowledge, from the scientific and experimental, to the theological and mystical, to the gray zones and disputed territories in between. Thus, the assumption, common to rationalists today, that religion represents a form of unreason that science has to vanquish on its way to new ages of discovery, is as mistaken as the religious reflex that regards the scientific mind-set as an inevitable threat to the pious simplicities of faith.
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Much as the relationship between science and religion can be adversarial, there can also be a mysterious alchemy between the two forms of human exploration.
The Decadent Society, Chapter 10: Renaissance