Undervalued & Undersold

#1 An Anthropology that can withstand Transhumanism

An introduction to the series

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ mourns the decline in church attendance. As a pastor and a Christian, I relate - it is, after all, my desire to see all people everywhere acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord.

But Larkin was no pastor, and his ‘beliefs’ were elusive, even to himself. He is not lamenting the unbended knees that deny God the glory he is due. His concern lies this side of the veil - not what is owed to God but what is lost to the world. What humanity, culture… people lose when churches lie empty. The perverse ordering of his concerns notwithstanding, this is not irrelevant to the Christian cause - whilst it is not central, whilst the joys of salvation are primarily being close to the Father, united with the Son, and dwelling always with the Spirit… there are myriad joys that simply come with a rightly ordered worldview. More than this, there are Truths, deep Truths that act as a spinal column for our most treasured sensibilities. These are all too often undervalued by Christians, and thus undersold when we speak to others of the hope we have. It is not rare to dig into the most treasured principles of the world and find that their foundation rests on some doctrine of Creation or Resurrection which yet remains suspended by the law of Wiley Coyote… the world has not yet looked down.

This is the first in a series of short posts on undervalued and undersold ‘Christian commodities’ - uncounted blessings Christians should thank God for, and non-Christians will surely desire - here is ‘heavy land’ for searching feet to take hold of.

#1 An Anthropology that can withstand Transhumanism

I recently revisited George Eliot’s marvellous Middlemarch and was struck by how often the author falls back on the term ‘image’. We’re used to the idiom, but it is a borrowed idea, and Eliot’s fluctuating use of it draws attention to the instability of human dignity without a Christian worldview.

In Middlemarch, Dorothea is at one point “the image of sorrow”, then later “the image of serene dignity”. Rosamund is “the image of placid indifference” then is “the image of sickened misery”. What stable dignity do we have if we image different things according to our mood or our behaviour? And from what stable does it come!? A man commits a terrible crime - he is a monster, he opens the door for you and he’s a sweetheart. A toddler is alternately an angel and a terror. What ungrounded torment it must be to walk through life as it were such a hall of mirrors - where what I am fluctuates with as much caprice as what I do.

For Eliot, and indeed by instinct, for most of us, the human simply is whatever it is doing. Dorothea must be the image of sorrow when she sorrows, and the image of dignity when she is dignified. But the Christian says you are the image of God when you play football, when you tuck your children in bed, when you have an affair, and when you vomit on the bathroom floor.

This Truth places the value in the person, not in their activity. As we’ll see later in this series, this gives greater credence, not less, to calling evil ‘evil’. If the recently deceased Ian Huntley were a monster when he committed his heinous crimes, then he was operating within his telos and one may as well call a shark evil. You may still despise him - there are plenty who hate sharks - but you are prevented from placing a moral value on his behaviour.

But the mistake I want to focus on (and for which the Christian worldview holds the cure) is the photo-negative of that: if people, adopting monstrous behaviours become monsters… then what of machines adopting human behaviours?

This is an important thing to get right - already we are seeing Large Language Models issued as prescriptions to the ‘lonely old’. We are seeing relatives of dying men and women being marketed AI versions of their loved ones. We are seeing, in other words, humans reduced to data, and then replaced. Because this has happened in two moves, we are left fighting the second, but we’re already hamstrung: if humans can be reduced, then humans can be made. A Christian anthropology is necessary to see us through this season of anxious invention.

A Christian anthropology will allow us to give dignity to every human, and refuse it to their pretenders. It will tell us why it is wrong to prescribe either chatbots or lethal doses of muscle relaxants as a ‘cure’ for loneliness.

Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
God-like erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shon,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure—
Severe, but in true filial freedom placed…

Visible even to Milton’s Satan, human dignity and worth is derived, thank God, from their Creator, not their deeds.

Humanity is blessed and worthy by divine and creative decree. Divine inasmuch as the Supreme Authority has made a pronouncement, and creative as the maker has titled and described his work. To deprive a person of dignity is to deny God’s authorial authority, and beyond that his worth in se - one cannot describe one’s lover’s reflection as repugnant then turn to her and call her beautiful.

Every human being carries the imago dei, the very image of God - that gives us the right to challenge evil, gives us the hope to pursue redemption, it gives us the resolve to give care, the obligation to administer justice, and the eyes to see beauty amidst the most graphic and stomach churning degradation.