Alive

Alive names a condition so ordinary that it rarely gets defined, and so contested at its edges that biology still has no settled definition to offer. It implies both mortality (a condition preceding death) and immortality (a condition of being alive permanently, either after death or after being transfigured). In a very literal sense, being alive is the central purpose of all God’s creative and salvific efforts.

Scripture uses the word more freely than science does. God is “the living God.” Christ says, “I am he that liveth, and was dead” (Revelation 1:18). A father says of his returned son, “he was dead, and is alive again” (Luke 15:24), though the boy never stopped breathing.

Within the sweeping cosmology of Restoration theology, the concept of life dilates even further. The earth is no mere rock, but a conscious entity that speaks, breathes, and mourns its wicked inhabitants (Moses 7:48). We learn that intelligence itself is coeternal with God⁠—neither created nor made (D&C 93:29)⁠—and that spirit is simply matter in a finer, purer state (D&C 131:7-8). In this breathtaking vision of the universe, aliveness is not a crude binary of "living" and "dead." To the contrary. It is a rather vast spectrum cascading across varying degrees of consciousness and light.

Alive in Christ

Hedcut illustration of In the tradition of scripture’s teachings, life in Christ is often described as relational and moral—an enabling capacity for response, growth, and change rather than a purely mechanical sign. — We can be made alive in Christ when we bind ourselves to him through covenant, thereby granting ourselves greater access to his mercy and grace.

Nephi offers a striking paradox when he writes that “we are made alive in Christ because of our faith” (2 Nephi 25:25)⁠—delivering this message to an audience that is still in the land of the living. The aliveness in question here is relational and moral: the capacity to love, to grow, to be transformed. Its opposite is not a flat electroencephalogram but a stalled condition, a person closed against change.

Ezekiel’s vision poses the question directly: “Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37:3). The answer arrives as sinew, flesh, breath, and a restored people. Scripture does not seek to soften the sting of death by calling it a harmless transition; it looks to the day when it's finally undone.

Blurring the Boundaries

Biologists disagree about whether viruses qualify as living organisms. Prions replicate without genes. Synthetic biology assembles minimal genomes from ordered chemicals. Cryopreservation patients are legally dead while their structure may remain informationally intact, which is why some distinguish clinical death from information-theoretic death. Meanwhile, complex software systems pursue dynamic goals across shifting contexts without ever needing to metabolize a single calorie.

Intelligence, understood broadly as the capacity to achieve goals across tasks of varying complexity, cuts across the living and the dead. Scripture’s readiness to call an earth alive and a breathing man dead fits this messy terrain better than any tidy taxonomy does.

The work that devolves upon the Living

Hedcut illustration of Ethical life hinges on classification: traditions that distinguish life carefully often treat that boundary as a call to compassion, and widening whose needs are counted as morally urgent becomes a recurring moral task. — For the Mormon Transhumanist, the theological hope of resurrection takes shape in the very practical work of extending human lifespans and recovering lost ancestral records.

How we classify life carries immense moral weight. To decide who⁠—or what⁠—counts as alive is to decide who is owed our compassion, and the history of narrowing that circle is, invariably, a history of cruelty. The great work of our era is to relentlessly enlarge that circle: extending our reach toward the dying, the cryogenically preserved, the unborn, the ancestral dead, and eventually, the digital minds humanity will one day bring into being.

For Mormon Transhumanists, the concept of resurrection is far more than a passive theological hope⁠—it is a refusal to let death have the final say on human existence. More importantly, they view the quest to overcome death as a divine mandate. Efforts to recover ancestors from records, extend healthy lifespan, and reverse aging all follow from it.

The measure of aliveness, then, is what the living do for the ones death has taken.