Homo Deus

Homo Deus, the “human god,” is Yuval Noah Harari’s name for the species he expects Homo sapiens to make of itself through biotechnology and artificial intelligence. In the book of that title, published in Hebrew in 2015 and in English in 2016, Harari argues that humanity, having brought famine, plague, and war under control, will turn to grander projects, its “next targets” being “immortality, happiness and divinity.” The coinage holds an instructive tension. Deus means “god,” while homo descends from an ancient word for “earthling,” kin to humus, the soil, an echo across unrelated languages of the Hebrew ‘adam, drawn from ‘adamah, the ground.

Harari’s argument turns on humanism, which he treats as a religion that “worships humanity, and expects humanity to play the part that God played.” The upgrades humanism now pursues, he contends, would undo the very self it venerates, for the upgraded “will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents.” Many believers hear in the title only the presumption of Babel. Latter-day Saints have less reason to recoil, since the Restoration teaches openly that men and women may become as God is. The pressing questions concern the route to such divinity and the character of the god who emerges on the other end.

As Gods, Knowing Good and Evil

The first offer of divinity in scripture comes from the serpent in Eden: “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The Hebrew kē’lōhîm, “like God” or “as gods,” repeats the very word that names God earlier in the same verse, so that the promise offers a share in God’s own knowledge. Restoration scripture treats Eve’s choice with unusual sympathy, as a necessary step toward that knowledge. The Book of Moses, however, separates the gift from its sponsor, identifying the voice behind the serpent as one who “knew not the mind of God” and “sought to destroy the world.”

Ezekiel gives this seized form of godhood a human face in the prince of Tyre, the merchant city of the sea. The prince has said, “I am a God, I sit in the seat of God,” and, being “wiser than Daniel,” he has gathered “gold and silver” into his treasures by his understanding. The lament that follows places him in “Eden the garden of God,” recapitulating the first garden’s story. The Lord answers that the prince remains “a man, and not God,” and asks whether he will “yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God?” (Ezekiel 28:2-9). Meanwhile the “multitude of thy merchandise” has filled his city with violence.

Ye Are Gods

To the members of his council God declares, “Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes” (Psalm 82:6-7). The Hebrew ‘ĕlōhîm ‘attem confers the title outright, and readers have long recognized here the ancient divine council. The same speech, however, grants the title while withdrawing immortality from gods who have judged unjustly. Accused of blasphemy, the Savior answered from this psalm that God “called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:34-35). The title, on this reading, comes through the word received.

In the vocabulary of fellowship, the second epistle of Peter offers believers “exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Peter’s word, koinōnoi, means sharers or partners, the term Luke uses of James and John, who “were partners with Simon” in his fishing. The divine nature, so described, is held in common with God and with others. Early Christian writers built on such texts a doctrine of deification, or theosis, and Irenaeus in the second century confessed a Lord “who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”

Gods Who Continue

At the funeral of King Follett in April 1844, Joseph Smith taught that “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man,” and told the Saints, “you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves,” advancing “from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead.” In 1840 Lorenzo Snow had distilled the same doctrine into a couplet: “As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man may be.” In this teaching divinity is learned by small degrees and attained through the resurrection, so that the earthling raised to godhood remains embodied, as God Himself is.

Restoration scripture defines that divinity by its relations. Of those sealed in the new and everlasting covenant, a revelation declares, “Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue” (D&C 132:20). Their godhood rests on bonds with spouse and posterity that persist, which the same passage calls the “continuation of the lives.” The god of Harari’s forecast, by way of contrast, is a power upgrade that discards the humanist self. Restoration exaltation is relational, embodied, and covenantal, and the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation accordingly calls disciples to become “compassionate creators as exemplified and invited by Jesus.”

Dataism and the Superfluous

Harari names an emerging creed dataism, which “declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.” He also warns of a “useless class” that “will not merely be unemployed⁠—it will be unemployable,” and his book’s summary observes that “the way humans have treated animals is a good indicator for how upgraded humans will treat the rest of us.” Jan Bentz has called the vision a utopian myth that offers freedom from toil, pain, and death but leaves no room for sacrificial love. Ezekiel’s Tyre traveled the same road, from wisdom to riches to the seat of God.

In the psalm of the divine council, God “standeth in the congregation of the mighty,” and his charge to the gods is concrete: “Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy” (Psalm 82:3). Having judged unjustly, the beings called “children of the most High” are told they will “die like men.” The psalm holds out the title of god and measures it by care for those whom power would render superfluous. Builders of artificial intelligence and human enhancement who aspire to that council, as Mormon transhumanists believe humanity may, inherit its charge. A Homo Deus worthy of the name would raise the poor and fatherless with the earthlings who first wield such power.

See also: Neohuman, Noosphere, Posthuman, Reconciliation, Solarpunk