God Starts with Your Imagination of the Future
Lincoln Cannon is an American philosopher and technologist who co-founded the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2006, serving as its president from 2006 to 2016. He is a leading advocate of technological evolution and postsecular religion, combining software engineering expertise with degrees in philosophy and business. ¶ Cannon is also a founder and board member of the Christian Transhumanist Association. He formulated the New God Argument, a logical argument for faith in God that has become popular among religious transhumanists. His academic work includes “Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism” published in Religion and Human Enhancement: Death, Values, and Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and “Transfigurism: A Future of Religion as Exemplified by Religious Transhumanists” published in The Transhumanism Handbook (Springer Verlag, 2019). ¶ Mormon transhumanism, as articulated by Cannon, holds that humanity should learn how to be compassionate creators. This idea is central to the Mormon theological tradition, which provides a religious framework consistent with naturalism and supportive of human transformation. Cannon’s work bridges religious faith with scientific advancement, advocating for the ethical use of technology to extend human abilities in ways consistent with a religious worldview.
When we imagine better minds and bodies, better relationships, and a better world, we imagine God. When we trust in and work toward such, we have the most important kind of faith. It’s the kind that becomes God. Then we’ll know that God exists, whether or not we know that now.
When we imagine the limits of creation, we imagine the creation of more creators in worlds without end. When we imagine the limits of compassion, we imagine sharing power among all of those creators and all of their creations. This is superhumanity. And this is God.
Imagine the Future
If we become God, at the limits of compassion and creation, we will create new worlds for new Gods. To that end, we couldn’t simply copy ourselves. That would be neither creative nor compassionate. We would need to cultivate the possibility of genuine compassion and creation.
Genuine compassion and creation are only possible, only conceptually coherent, within a possibility space that includes genuine risk. The limits of compassion and creation, the Gods, are only possible within a possibility space that manages the limits of risk. God is courage.
As compassionate creators, as courageous Gods, we would work to create more compassionate creators, more courageous Gods. We would cultivate their possibility. We would create worlds that cultivate compassion, creativity, and courage. We would emulate our evolutionary history.
And in so doing, we would realize that we’re almost certainly not the first to emulate our evolutionary history. We would realize that we’re almost certainly not the first compassionate creators. Superhumanity almost certainly wouldn’t be the first Gods.
Trust in and work toward better minds and bodies, better relationships, and a better world. Courageously cultivate compassion and creation at their limits. If this is our potential, it’s probably also our origin. Whoever believes in God might with surety hope for a better world.
Syndicated from Lincoln Cannon.