"And ye shall be like God"
What if resisting transhumanism looks less like rejecting technologies and more like loving our neighbor as ourselves?
By Joshua Rio-Ross
I never expected to watch an MMA fight, much less attend an MMA event. As a child, I loved all manner of violent sport. Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shaped my young imagination, and until age eleven, I was an avid WWE fan; beer-guzzling, bird-flipping “Stone Cold” Steve Austin was my favorite. But when I became a teenager, I decided to put my childish ways behind me.
But friendship often makes a mockery of coming of age. One of my unlikeliest friends watches and bets on MMA every Saturday. His date stood him up the night that MMA came to Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, so he asked me to take the spare ticket. I accepted the ticket and sported a gray shirt with blue print that said “VASECTOMY SURVIVOR: I kid you not.” I wanted to wear something that met the machismo of the moment, and the evidence suggested I was successful. I was privileged to scores of double-takes from guys wearing clothing branded “My balls was hot” (apparently a famous quote from one of the fighters). The two dozen or so women attending the event also did double-takes, but a special kind where they saw my shirt and then ricocheted a glare off of whatever man they were with before pointing back at me.
I no doubt started several arguments between couples that night. Would they have more children, or any children? Why were they together if not? What would they do with their time? And, if they’re not having any more children, would she be responsible for ensuring that didn’t happen? What would be lost if he did it instead?
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When I put the warrior-like, male-dominated world of violence behind me, I entered the pen-mighty, male-dominated world of divinity school, after which I finally moved on to the sedentary, male-dominated world of tech. I never quite shook the musk of divinity school, however, so my friends often send me lectures and news articles and books about God and AI.
I was recently asked to read and review Grayson Quay’s The Transhumanist Temptation: How Technology and Ideology Are Reshaping Humanity—And How to Resist. If you’ve heard the term transhumanism at all, it was probably applied to billionaire tech bros trying to live forever or to those same billionaires’ side quests—like machine-learning models that “read” human thought to recreate images, or contact lenses that let you access anything you want on your smartphone. In this sense, transhumanism is the use of technology to extend our humanity beyond its nature. Its examples often seem fringe or eccentric. Grayson Quay, on the other hand, finds transhumanism more pressing.
Transhumanism for Quay is an ideology characterized by the assertion of total human autonomy, aided by technological advancements, which he argues ultimately leads to “remaking” or “going beyond” our humanity in the name of self-definition. In his acknowledgments, he says, “If I convince some of you to view contemporary debates about politics, culture, morality, technology, and religion through the lens of transhumanism, I’ll have accomplished all I set out to do.” Recognizing that it’s “easy to dismiss self-described transhumanists as irrelevant,” Quay not only wants to reframe contemporary discourse in terms of transhumanism, but he also wants to reframe transhumanism itself not as a fringe movement but as the inevitable outworking of ancient ideological aberrations, thus imbuing his project with original and ultimate importance. To Quay, the transhumanist temptation is still the original temptation of Adam and Eve to “become as gods” on their own terms rather than on God’s terms. The only difference is that our temptation is empowered by technology and emboldened by contemporary societal corruption. When we give in, Quay says, we lose what we are and what we were made for.
The book is ambitious in scope. Its major sections cover “Bodies,” “Reality,” “Politics,” “Work,” and “God.” Its conclusion is even more ambitious, as it draws on science fiction to suggest how society might be reshaped to avoid transhumanism. Until the conclusion, though, almost every chapter skis a slippery slope: identify something that’s transhumanist, provide a genealogy with a critical lens, and extrapolate the extremes to which the problem will go. The most central topics are rightwing discourse pillars: abortion, transgenderism, assisted suicide, IVF methods, society’s virtualization, extreme individual expression, and secularization. Despite this ambitious scope and Quay’s focus on the family and sexual biology, Quay does not address vasectomies.
Theosis forces us to think of paradise chiefly as unity with God, and just so it forces us to think about who God is, what God’s life is like, and whether we want to participate in that life.
When you first tell a urology office that you want a vasectomy, they schedule a required consultation. Some of that conversation is logistics. You’ll go to this office thirty minutes before your appointment. You will have someone to drive you home. You may elect to use laughing gas. There will be local anesthetic. It’s a shot. Yes, it hurts, but briefly, like a quick hit to the crotch, and then the feeling goes away. When you’re done, you’ll ice it on and off for a week. You’ll need a semen analysis before having sex again.
But that’s a meeting that could have been an email. At some point, the urologist cuts to the chase: The procedure is successful 99% of the time. Yes, it’s technically reversible, but they don’t market it as such because that procedure is more complicated, more expensive, and successful 80% of the time. You need to know you want to do this. You need to understand that you might change your mind one day. Your spouse might change her mind. You might get divorced, or your spouse might die, and your next spouse might want a child. Do you understand the risks? Do you accept them?
In attempting to define theological and philosophical underpinnings for The Transhumanist Temptation, Quay initially comes up with the term anti-transhumanism, by which he means that humans are a particular type of being made to flourish in a particular way, and they should not try to change into something else with a different telos. Later, he more humbly refers to this stance as wisdom, locating it in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the Bible, Aquinas, and, most crucially, Catholic natural law. Quay sees two diverging paths within world history. First is the transhumanist path, which succumbs to the satanic temptation to “become as gods” by our own devices and ultimately leads to humanity’s destruction. Alternatively, there is the path of flourishing, which acts in accordance with who and what we were created to be, ultimately leading to theosis—becoming one with God on God’s terms.
I was surprised and refreshed to see theosis featured in Quay’s introduction. Theosis is seldom featured in contemporary soteriologies and eschatologies, let alone books concerned with topics like AI. Even though it’s a loadbearing concept that substantiates much of the Christian hope, we mostly let “saved by grace through faith” (sometimes “unto good works”) be the means unto heavenly ends, where details are scant. Theosis forces us to think of paradise chiefly as unity with God, and just so it forces us to think about who God is, what God’s life is like, and whether we want to participate in that life. When deployed theologically, it foregrounds the character of God over some abstract heavenly state or Babel-like utopian polity. As God says to Abraham, “I AM your exceedingly great reward.”
Theosis does not function this way in The Transhumanist Temptation. It is introduced as our human telos but functions only as the destination achieved from following natural law. It is not, however, a destination that also guides. When the destination is not the guide, the means are at risk of losing the character of the ends. If theosis is just where we’re heading but not also a life we participate in now, then we’re at risk of building ethical systems that supposedly lead to God but that are unaccountable to God’s character. This happens in Quay’s book, which begins with a theological framing but is soon directed by other whims and powers. It emerges as a politics book motivated by theological and ethical concerns, not a theology book with political concerns. Quay uses transhumanism as a frame for applying natural law to his political talking points—and not a natural law with clear epistemological grounding in theosis. As such, the book’s moral judgments and political reformations often hinge on what Quay himself considers natural. For him, biology and genetics are determinative for what to do with one’s body, the physical is preferred to the virtual, and the spiritual mind has primacy over scientific matter. Barely addressed, however, are who God is, how God is revealed, or how theosis in the end affects my discernment right now.
If we privilege ethical frameworks that seek to preserve idealized humanities, we risk threatening people with damnation without equipping them to discern a flourishing life.
I have this conviction that most of us who grow up in America form our identities in terms of our potential. From our beginnings, we are projected into the future: “She’s always kicking; she’s going to be a swimmer.” “He’s so cute; he’s going to be a heartbreaker.” “They love to argue; they’ll make a good lawyer someday.” This thinking gets into us. Every accomplishment, however humble, casts a lifetime’s worth of implication. At any given moment, who you are is amplified by the inverse scale of your years. And then one day people stop assessing you for who you could be and just assess you for who you are. It’s like an amputation.
What hadn’t occurred to me until my consultation with the urologist was that people trade this projection for progeny. Sure, you can still project yourself onto the future even if the people around you don’t, but, as many other philosophers have taught us, that projection is ultimately onto death. And when people are confronted with death and dying, they put their hope in legacy.
I’m a child of divorced parents. The last vestiges of their marriage are me and the hyphen in the name Rio-Ross. Rio is the stage name of a grandfather who is not my blood grandfather. My wife and I are the only Rio-Rosses. One of the losses of not having children—a grief I had to sit with and accept—was that in my daily projection of myself and my wife onto the future, our name would not continue, nor would there be a bloodline that would transcend our deaths. I would lose the chance to trick myself into thinking that I could transcend the mortal limits of my human body through my children and my children’s children.
Stanley Hauerwas, famed theologian, cultural critic, and grouch, said, “I’m still mad as hell at Christians for making the Christian life so damn uninteresting.” He went on to argue that the project of Christian ethics is not and cannot be America. If Christianity becomes entrenched in American politics and political categories, then Christians will find their imaginations bound by those same categories, the Church fissured with the same lines that score the rest of our lives. We will bring nothing new, restorative, or hopeful to society’s political problems because our Christian life together offers nothing distinctive that could renew our ethical imagination.
Quay falls into this trap. I find this evident in the rightwing pillars that constellate most of his topics and the tone that he uses to address them. He indulges in dismissive mockery and rightwing podcaster vernacular like “woke” and “social justice warriors,” sometimes parenthetically caricaturing his opponents (e.g., “having a trans kid is a status symbol, after all”). His descriptions of the ideas he critiques are reductive (e.g., he says feminism is “largely reduced to birth control and abortion” and that the “LGBT movement” is “swallowed up entirely by transgenderism”), and in the little constructive philosophical work that he does, his anticipation of counterarguments is unimaginative. These tone shifts and shortcuts compromise the book’s credibility, limiting its audience primarily to those already steeped in the political right’s discourse.
Quay also falls into this trap in the solutions that he reaches for. I can sympathize with Quay’s concern that the tidal onslaught of new technologies confronts us with ethical decisions and ramifications that we barely have time to think through. Whether to protect sacred values or just to keep our feet under us, I understand the flinch and the instinct to cling to something as an anchor. But what’s unsettling is Quay’s commitment to leveraging political power for that anchor. His imagination seems conditioned by the discourses of our time, and thus his solutions are either limited to ones we already know (authoritarianism) or to the bizarre techno-advancement you’d expect him to reject (space colonization). Quay seems to miss that our politics are no less a technology that fashions how we live our lives, how we articulate our humanity, than the phones or pills in our hands. One painful lesson we learn from the twentieth century is that we deal an obscene amount of damage to ourselves and our neighbor in exactly the measure that we try to control our humanity, even in an effort to defend what we think we were made to be. If we privilege ethical frameworks that seek to preserve idealized humanities, we risk threatening people with damnation without equipping them to discern a flourishing life. Worse, we risk licensing authoritarian regimes, which peddle fealty as flourishing.
Maybe the most convincing argument against Quay’s solutions is that Quay himself doesn’t seem to believe in them. The Transhumanist Temptation ends not with a bang but a whimper, with the claim that likely nothing will save society from giving in to its devices. The two paths—the one toward destruction and the other toward flourishing—will diverge until Christ comes to make things new. By the end of the book, I didn’t even know if Quay believes we’ll have the discernment we need for our times, nor do I know if there’s redemption from the transhumanism he’s convinced we’re damned to partake of. If there’s no hope, why write the book at all?
If Hauerwas is right, then our liturgies and our communities and our practices should deliver us from the well-trod and ultimately hopeless political snares that fill our airwaves. Our life together should reconfigure how we think about our world, how we discern our times, and how we meet our neighbor—whether they have hope or not.
I’m also one of those people who believes that marriage is a sacrament, that when we made our vows and said to each other, ‘Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,’ it was true. And since it was true, then acting on behalf of my wife’s body is acting on behalf of my own.
We wanted a child. My wife talks to children like they’re adults. They don’t feel stupid when she explains things, and they trust her because she takes them seriously. Babies consistently make eye contact with her, and they like messing with her long hair, and they usually don’t cry when she holds them. I know that all this preternatural, quasi-mystical stuff is battle tested when you actually have children, often getting shredded in the daily grind that parents are in equal parts proud to say is hell and proud to say is the most important thing you’ll ever do in your life (or even the only important thing you’ll ever do in your life). But I also know that being good with children often gives you the courage to have them. My wife had that courage.
What she doesn’t have is health. She has multiple chronic conditions, one of which is treated with a medicine that is technically chemo. When you pick it up from the pharmacy in Tennessee, they ask you whether you are or could be pregnant because the drug is abortifacient, meaning that my wife could not carry a pregnancy to term; we would be waiting on a miscarriage. In Tennessee, a doctor is legally permitted to terminate a pregnancy only when they know there’s “serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” or “inevitable abortion.” In practice, this often results in women being treated too late for life-threatening conditions at the onset of late or complicated miscarriages. Given my wife’s health already, this risk was too great. And even in a world where my wife could ditch the chemo, we would almost certainly have serious miscarriage-inducing complications during pregnancy.
Two years ago, my wife’s conditions were worsening, and the chief culprit was her birth control, which mitigated the effect of some other medications. If she could stop taking hormone-based birth control, her medicine would be more effective, and her body overall would be more regulated. There was, of course, a litany of birth control alternatives. You can list most of them yourself. Almost all of them are for women. The safest was for me.
I’m confident Grayson Quay would say vasectomies are another means of asserting bodily autonomy. The same argument holds for any birth control. They use medical technology to stop a function that the body would otherwise naturally perform. In the name of controlling my own body and my own identity, I’m using that technology to transcend my God-given humanity and telos.
But the consultation not only confronted me with the end of my bloodline but also the permeability of my body—and not just because of the scalpel. Up until that point, my wife’s illness had affected my life in important and dramatic ways, but the physical burden was in every important way hers to bear. The vasectomy was the first time her illness would have lasting implications for my body. And I felt that. My body felt an aversion to that, even an injustice to that. I felt the nearness of this other, her claim on me. It threatened my illusion of impassibility and my illusion of the insulated self.
Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who believes in the resurrection of the body. I am one of those people who believes in sacrament. I believe that when I taste bread and wine and hear “This is my body and blood,” Jesus’s resurrection means that both of those things are true. I’m also one of those people who believes that marriage is a sacrament, that when we made our vows and said to each other, “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh,” it was true. And since it was true, then acting on behalf of my wife’s body is acting on behalf of my own.
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While reading The Transhumanist Temptation, I kept coming back to a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Creation and Fall: “Technology is the power with which the earth grips man and subdues him.” When I returned to Creation and Fall to contextualize the quote, I found that Bonhoeffer is speaking as a matter of fact, not as a matter of necessity. He is not saying that technology must function as this subduing power, but that it does so as a consequence of humankind not fulfilling their role in relationship to God, neighbor, and the earth.
The quote comes from Bonhoeffer’s “The Image of God on Earth” chapter, wherein he characterizes the Imago Dei as human freedom in this world, and he characterizes human freedom not as some substance or property that we bear, but as a relationship that we have with God and, in turn, with each other. This centering of freedom stands in stark contrast to Quay, for whom human freedom is treated as a problem to overcome. For Quay, our societal love of freedom is symptomatic of our self-idolatry, and this freedom can and should be compromised in the name of shaping a more flourishing society.
For Bonhoeffer, all Christian God-talk must run through Christ. Likewise, who we are is first and foremost interpreted through who Christ is and who he is for us. Bonhoeffer’s phrase for this is that we, from our vantage point in time, can only know the beginning (Adam, Eve, and what they mean for who we are in the world) from the middle (Christ, and what he means for who we are in the world). The Transhumanist Temptation uses our origin story to ground both our temptation toward transhumanism and our ethical reasoning about technology. According to Quay, we must resist self-definition and the compromise of our humanity in favor of that which is natural to us and keeps us on the road to human flourishing. Bonhoeffer, writing in a time when contemporary ideals of “natural” human flourishing had taken on diabolical and authoritarian force, would reject Quay’s entire ethical framework before ever getting to a specific ethical question. According to Bonhoeffer, we don’t know who we are “originally” or “naturally” without the mediation of Christ. We don’t begin deciding what we should do by asking what is most natural to us; we begin by looking for how to love our neighbor in Christ.
While ethics is primarily concerned with what we ought to do, one nagging and persistent sidecar question is how we practice ethics in time. Our lives are fraught with decisions and indecisions. It’s easy to read someone like Kant—who largely thinks of ethics in terms of proofs and thinks of immoral actions as practical contradictions—and to walk away thinking you might not be smart enough to make an ethical decision. And something Quay absolutely has right is that our culture is changing at such a breakneck speed that we’re faced with completely new decisions about how to live our lives with unprecedented frequency. We’re left wondering not only if we’re clever enough to think of the right thing to do, but also if we’ll think quickly enough.
This, among other things, is a driver behind the idea of virtue, and it’s a driver behind Bonhoeffer’s ethics of watchful discernment. Virtue ethics demands that we gradually become, with practice and discipline, the sort of people who do the right thing in the moment that calls for it. This anticipates that there are countless moments in our lives when we either can’t or won’t or don’t have time to think of the ethical thing to do. This also anticipates theosis by demanding that becoming one with God actually means becoming like God, not simply in external obedience to ethical mandates, but by internal character. Bonhoeffer’s framework offers similar exigency to virtue ethics; his character formation is driven by a prayerful watchfulness for how to love our neighbor—by the active (re)formation of desire. This inherently comes with risk. These in-the-moment ethical frameworks mean we might still get things wrong. Faith, here, is an enabler of action. “Sin boldly,” Luther would say, “and repent all the more boldly.”
However we construe discernment, we have to account for the fact that, with or without technology, most of the human experience is not knowing what the hell is going on.
The vasectomy process isn’t glamorous. I remember the waiting room was airing forty-year-old episodes of Supermarket Sweep. I’ve reconstructed this story in my mind so that I was reflecting on capitalism and inflation and the cyclical nature of style while I waited, but in reality I was probably pale and mindless because an old man waiting on his annual testicular cancer follow-up thought that I needed encouragement. He said he hardly felt his vasectomy thirty years ago. I thanked him for the information, decided this wasn’t the place for shaking hands, and went back for the snip.
I decided that a vasectomy is the sort of you-only-do-it-once event where I had the privilege of having nothing to prove. I therefore opted to pay an additional $150 to legally get high on laughing gas. I’ve never consumed a drug stronger than Lagavulin and am generally averse to anything that will compromise my sense of self-control. But, again, on this day I had nothing to prove and even less to protect. I had fully accepted my human frailty.
Once a patient has decided to go through with the procedure, my urologist tries to introduce as much levity to the process as possible. He has a three-song playlist that he plays every time he performs a vasectomy: “The Final Countdown,” “Pimp Juice,” and “Thunderstruck.” By the time “Pimp Juice” comes on, the anesthetic has taken full effect, as has the self-serve laughing gas.
I mostly remember one part of the procedure: feeling bumptious enough to start making requests before the playlist was complete. I requested “Let’s Move to Vietnam” by Ezra Bell. It’s an angry banger about an affair. The possible suggestion of my song choice struck me as my procedure was wrapping up, so I felt obligated to explain to my urologist and his nurse, “This song makes it sound like my wife had an affair. She didn’t have an affair. She’s a wonderful woman.” They reassured me they had no doubt that was the case and that the procedure was a success. I shuffled back to meet my wife in the lobby with my new t-shirt.
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Theosis can’t just be where we’re heading; we need to participate in it now. That participation needs to form our discernment. And however we construe discernment, we have to account for the fact that, with or without technology, most of the human experience is not knowing what the hell is going on. We have limited time, limited language, limited reason, and ever-more-limited attention. Bonhoeffer isn’t the only ethical thinker to offer a framework more conducive to in-the-moment discernment. The Christian tradition is rich with them, including the Catholic tradition that Quay participates in. St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Bonaventure, and Hans urs von Balthasar each envision theosis not just as a destination but as a means and guide. The old maxim that God is the one in whom we “live and move and have our very being” meant that God’s life is something we practice now, even if in fits and starts. How we practice and the metaphysical articulations of that practice are distinct for each thinker, but the chief virtue (in both the sense of moral character and power) for all three is love.
Love here is considered a theological virtue rather than a natural one. It undergirds ethical discernment, mediates created beings to one another, and brings about cosmic unity in and through humankind. It renews the intellect via wisdom, which directs the mind by and toward God-formed desire. Love is God’s life at work in us, but it’s also the beauty we perceive that opens faith in us. Essential in these frameworks is the nearness of the other, our neighbor, someone to love. Who we are and who we are to be are only perceptible as God reveals Christ in our neighbor. Bonhoeffer’s language is useful here: “In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being free means ‘being free for the other,’ because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.”
Love, made possible by encountering our neighbor, frees us not only from pathological self-definition but from ensnaring ourselves in our own political devices, falling prey to a political will to power that pathologically defines who we and our neighbor are supposed to be. And that freedom is for God’s life in the minutia of our daily decisions and interactions. It appears when you talk to a child like they’re an adult or comfort a stranger in the waiting room. It appears under the knife. Whatever our humanity is, it magnifies in our nearness. We find it when we give ourselves over, when we empty ourselves out.
Featured photo: Misterton (Notts) All Saint’s Church Window, “Symbols of the Stigmata” by John Piper, made by Patrick Reyntiens (Wikimedia Commons)
T-shirt photo courtesy of Joshua Rio-Ross
Book cover from the publisher’s website
St. Joseph University Parish, “Love of God, Love of Neighbor” (Wikimedia Commons)
Church of St. Francis in Krakow, Poland, “God the Father – Arise,” by Stanisław Wyspiański (Wikimedia Commons)
Joshua Rio Ross is a data and AI consultant in Nashville, Tennessee. He has a master’s in philosophical theology from Yale Divinity School and a master’s in mathematics from the University of Missouri. He is married, has two pups, and did quite well in fantasy sports this year.
The Transhumanist Temptation by Grayson Quay was published by Crisis Publications on July 15, 2025. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here.
