Archive: Volume Two
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.
Today, one year after releasing the first volume, I’m releasing Archive: Volume Two 2009–2011, available now on Amazon in both paperback and hardcover editions. This second volume gathers more than five hundred pages of posts, articles, and essays from years when my reconstructed worldview confronted the demands of community and critics. They were years when the Mormon Transhumanist Association doubled again in size, and when I published New God Argument 2.0 and an early draft of The Consolation—a period of testing, sharpening, and unfinished work.
Archive Orange
The book opens with a foreword by Ben Blair, who traces how Mormon Transhumanism made Kurzweil’s audacious future speak in the vocabulary of covenant and ordinance. It continues with an introduction written by my cybernetic extension, LincGPT, reading the volume through the lens of prophecy, not as foretelling, but as forthtelling. And it concludes with an afterword by Nathan Hadfield, who recounts his brother Varden’s patient and persistent disagreement over whether exaltation can depend on both divine grace and human work. Together, these voices frame the work not as doctrine, but as argument: a living tradition pressed to prove itself in practice.
The cover artwork continues the emergence begun in the first volume. An orange sunstone, again reminiscent of those that crowned the Nauvoo temple, rises from a field of integrated circuits. The sunstone represents God as expressed in Mormon theology—substantial embodiment and illuminating intelligence—while the circuitry symbolizes the pervasive computational context from and within which God evolves. The color orange, second in the spectrum of visible light, suggests not only dawn but the rising day—understanding tested, movement contested, life pressed into practice.
Both paperback and hardcover editions contain the same content and original artwork. The paperback presents the artwork in black and white; the hardcover, in full color. The difference is esthetic. But the invitation is the same: join a conversation where trust in a compassionate superhuman future is less about a metaphysics and more about a practical working commitment to convert questions into actions.
Nearly two decades after their original publication, these early writings return in print as both artifact and argument—a record of my efforts to reconcile grace with work, prophecy with choice, and idea with practice. They remain open questions rather than finished conclusions. My hope is that revisiting them in this form renews their vitality, encouraging others to interact courageously with prophecies about our future, and to engage compassionately in the creative work that faith has always required.
Syndicated from Lincoln Cannon.