The Technological Atonement for Transhuman Gods
Curing nature's original sin with secular progress
“He shall burn all the fat on the altar as he burned the fat of the fellowship offering. In this way the priest will make atonement for the leader’s sin, and he will be forgiven” (Leviticus 4:26).
In the Abrahamic religions, atonement is making amends for wrongdoing. These reparations are supposed to unify the wronged and the atoning parties so they’re “at one.”
A sacrifice or some other act of contrition harmonizes the sinner with God, and the lack of harmony is due to our falling away from God’s perfect state. The Hebrew scriptures elaborate on these sacrifices, as though there was a technology of atonement so that the sacrifices could be proper or ineffective depending on how well the fat is burned on the altar.
In the twenty-first century, that religious conception of atonement strikes educated secularists as archaic. But we should distinguish between the existential problem that theistic religions were supposed to solve and the half-baked solutions they offered. There are no gods and theology is quackery, so there’s no atonement as the Bible or the Quran describes it.
But there is a gulf between the mind and the world. The enlightened individual’s alienation from social foolishness and nature’s neutrality towards the preferences of living things is still at the core of our species’ existential condition. The story of Adam and Eve captures this irony when it depicts the dawning of self-consciousness as a tragedy. Any adult may sometimes feel pangs of nostalgia for childhood innocence, just as our species may wish we could be as oblivious as animals.
What we discover when we model our environment and ourselves with all the powers of our cerebral cortex and the institutions of science and art is that the homes we take for granted — our personalities and societies — are infinitesimal islands adrift on an alien sea. Nature is wild whereas we strive to be civilized. Civility is the opposite of naturalness, which implies that our physical underpinning is self-transcending, a feat that’s played out, too, in the collapse of the quantum wavefunction that forms material objects, and in the black hole’s devouring of spacetime, and life’s emergence from nonlife.
The universe, then, isn’t a flawless continuity. There are breaches in the cosmic plenum, as we would expect from a monstrous, mindless, amoral creator. Within the sea of quadrillions of solar systems, life emerges and evolves to the point of appreciating its anomalousness and lack of oneness with nature’s constructs that are enslaved by their physicality.
To be sure, our bodies are physical, and our minds are somehow hosted by our neural substrates. But this is just to say, again, that physical elements and forces can undo themselves. In our case, this happens in mental and linguistic representations that recognize the abysses between life and death, and between nature’s wild trials and people’s intelligently designed civilizations.
Thus, as arbitrary as theology may be, theistic religions are well-motivated. The existential problem of being all too aware in a domain of mostly impersonal events is real. We might seek secular atonement with nature. Evidently, this is done by a different, much more rigorous technology, one that works and isn’t just hand-waving magic.
To see what this means, we must perform the gestalt switch of understanding how the “original sin” isn’t ours but nature’s, as it were. Instead of sacrificing animals or people to please a tyrannical deity that we fashion in the image of our corrupt political rulers, we must appreciate how nature falls away from itself just by being inherently monstrous and unspeakable. Certainly, natural forms are often beautiful, and nature’s a sublime creator that far surpasses our species. Yet metaphysically, as determined ultimately by the social intuitions of some clever mammals, the emergence of physicality from quantum ghostliness is an appalling affront.
How, then, shall nature be forced to redeem itself for being godless? We redeem nature with the transhuman end of technoscience. A Type III civilization on the Kardashev scale, for example, would unite with nature by re-engineering physicality at the molecular level, replacing wildness with artificiality at every turn in a galactic social order that bestows an intelligent purpose on nature.
Again, it’s not life that needs to submit to nature or nature’s divine creator. That religious conception of atonement now is only quaint. Instead, the technological applications of scientific knowledge that harness nature’s physicality and potentially enslave or transform whole worlds unify nature with our ideals. We envision how nature should have been, and science and technology have the power to make it so.
Reality-based atonement is just the terraforming of wild places. Perhaps no such terraforming will ever be complete, and nature’s monstrous wildness will always outstrip people’s ambitions, making even transhuman gods hubristic. Still, whereas the theistic mythos is fanciful, the science-fictional speculation of godlike terraforming only elaborates on the progress that’s already before us in the Anthropocene.
Again, this progress is hardly stable, and we may well fail to fulfill our potential and atone with nature, sacrificing wildness on the altar of ingenuity. But chances are that somewhere in the universe, perhaps in some distant age, an intelligent species will evolve and achieve Type III independence, exploiting a galaxy’s resources.
Even we who are mostly confined to our planet have an inkling of how that transhuman godhood would play out. But the point is that this secular atonement ought to give our species its existential direction. Rather than preoccupying ourselves with antiquated theological fantasies, we ought to ponder the implications of scientific and philosophical progress to mitigate the alienating knowledge of our lifeless maker.