From the Nov/Dec, 2025 issue of *Touchstone*

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Making the Best of Dystopia

St. Antony’s Guide to Resisting the Transhumanist Temptation
by C. R. Wiley

Let’s consider the art of prognos-tication: we’re all gamblers, you know; we’ve no choice. Tomorrow is coming whether we like it or not, and the lives we lead today are the bets we’re making on it.

Since we’re condemned to bet, how should we go about this peering into the future? I’m no Nostradamus, to which a friend told me, “Neither was he.” But G. K. Chesterton had some amusing observations on the practice, made at the beginning of his dystopia, The Napoleon of Notting Hill:

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, “Keep tomorrow dark,” and which is also named . . . “Cheat the Prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players wait until all the clever men are dead and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

Chesterton’s fun didn’t end there. He teased out the method clever men employ to predict the future:

All these clever men . . . [prophesy] with every variety of ingenuity what [will] happen soon, and all [do] it in the same way, by taking something they [see] “going strong” as the saying is, and carrying [it] as far as ever their imagination [can] stretch. This, they [say, is] the true and simple way of anticipating the future. . . . [J]ust as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know by an unalterable law of the inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant—just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches the sky.

I concede the point: the future will surprise us. But here’s the trouble with Chesterton’s jocular common sense. He published it in 1904—before two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, atomic weapons, Mao, the Sexual Revolution, and at least 100 million dead from war, genocide, starvation, and abortion—and that’s a conservative estimate. A bitter irony is that theological liberals believed the twentieth century would be “The Christian Century.” Would it have been a waste of time to suggest that things might take a turn for the worse?

Preparing for the worst, “prepping” (as it’s called), has its own downside. What do you do with a million-dollar bunker you’ve built in Montana if things don’t get worse, at least not right away? What if they even improve? Is there a way to prepare for any future you might find yourself in?

That’s what I hope this little meditation amounts to, a sort of middle way, a hedge against the worst without leaving you with a lifetime supply of Spam if things turn out all right.

Welcome to Dystopia

Check out any library and you’ll see that dystopias have multiplied since the Industrial Revolution. But a perusal of the literature reveals they’re often premised on technology making the world worse, not better—the telescreens of 1984, for instance, or simply television taken to the nth-level, as in Fahrenheit 451. Considering how many of us live in air-conditioned splendor, why are we so pessimistic? Perhaps the reason is that we already live in dystopia, and we’ve been here since the calamity in the Garden. (What could be worse than a story in which everyone dies in the end?) And we know what people are capable of, and how our marvels have been used to maim and kill millions of people. History, you could say, is the flavor of the month; dystopias come and go, but Dystopia remains.

Speaking of flavors, what’s the flavor of our time? I think it’s a thin reduction of classical liberalism (rapidly evaporating) with generous portions of Marx and Nietzsche poured in.

If that’s right, another metaphor might help when it comes to navigating the world of tomorrow. I think we’re facing a Scylla and Charybdis dilemma. You recall the mythical hazards of the Strait of Messina, the rocky shoals of Scylla to one side, and the whirlpool of Charybdis on the other. Most of my friends are worried about Charybdis to the Left, that swirling, bottomless wokeism that threatens to swallow Western civilization. But I’m not so sure. The success the Left enjoys is helped along by globalist moneychangers and Silicon Valley technophiles, both known for giving lip-service to equality but doing so behind the gates of Olympus. As you’ve probably guessed, my money isn’t on Charybdis. Instead, I’m putting it on Scylla and the forbidding heights of transhumanism.

Humans Are Now “Hackable” Animals

What in the world is transhumanism? Here’s a clue from the best-selling historian and futurist, Yuval Noah Harari: “Humans are now hackable animals.”

Let’s consider what’s implied by “hackable animals.” Hacking originally meant striking, as with an ax. It sounds like butchery, but Harari is using the term the way it is used in the world of computer programming. In that world, “hackers” use code like an ax to gain unauthorized access to machinery. It’s piracy. So, saying that “humans are now hackable animals” implies that we’re subject to piracy. But piracy by whom, and to what end? Harari is worried about bad actors who use artificial intelligence to influence and manipulate people.

But the term is used in another way, ostensibly less nefarious. Sometimes “hacking” is used to describe tinkering with machinery to improve or repurpose it by enhancing or even circumventing its original design. When it comes to “hacking humans,” this is what transhumanists are up to.

Let’s dig a little. There’s a syllogism hiding in “Humans are hackable animals.” “Humans are animals” is the major premise. Few people would deny it, but most people would add a minor premise, something like, “People are not just animals.” Christians would add, “People are also images of God.” The conclusion that follows is that people already have a God-given purpose.

This puts a severe limit on what you can do with them—cracking open their heads and poking around, as you might with the head of a cockroach, is a no-no. But what if we replace the minor premise with another? What if we say there is no essential difference between humans and other animals? And what if we go on to say an animal is just a kind of machine, and that there aren’t any essential differences between the things we make and the things we don’t make, between machines and animals?

Machines bring metal and wires to mind. But machines don’t have to be made of metal and wires. What if we said animals are a kind of “wetware” instead of hardware? Marvin Minsky (co-founder of MIT’s artificial intelligence program), did just that, referring to living bodies as “marvelous meat-machines.” (Let’s be grateful for the qualifying adjective.)

The trouble with this becomes clear when we think of human bodies this way. If we’re essentially machines, everything changes character—for example, instead of software mimicking the mind, the mind is reconceived as a form of software; and instead of robots mimicking human beings, we’re merely—you get the picture. All of this is hiding in the term, “hackable.”

The influence of this change is as far-reaching as the future of humanity. Gone is what makes us human. And questions such as, “What did God intend?” or even, “Is it natural?” are begged away. The intrinsic limit on what you can do with a human body is also gone. If there is to be a limit, we’ll have to decide what it is. (And who gets to do that?)

So, how do you hack a human being?

Hacking wetware isn’t new; it’s the stuff of comic books. Or take the eugenics movement, which was an attempt to level-up humanity through selective breeding. You could call it “Transhumanism 1.0.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt let us in on a little secret: “The Nazis did not think that the Germans were the master race, to whom the world belonged, but that they should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and that this race was only on the point of being born.”

But today transhumanism isn’t content with the upper limit that carbon-based life places on the project. (The Nazis were not ambitious enough.) Now the goal is to upgrade ourselves using silicon, among other things. And while artificial intelligence (AI) is a separate project, it is indispensable to transhumanism. Transhumanists want to physically link our brains to AI to make our intelligence become practically god-like. (More on this in a minute.)

Kurzweil’s Notions

These days Ray Kurzweil is transhumanism’s best-known evangelist. Rather than summarize what he says and run the risk of misrepresenting him, I’ll just quote him at length and let him speak for himself. I think you’ll see that he’s clear and unambiguous.

Where to begin with Mr. Kurzweil? How about at the end of his book, The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, where he considers the question, “Who Can I Be?” (Take note: he uses the term “Singularity” for a hoped-for advent when artificial intelligence upgrades itself indefinitely—something humans currently have to do for it.)

Our questions of identity are tightly interconnected with issues of consciousness, free will, and determinism. In light of these ideas, I could say that this particular person—Ray Kurzweil—is both the result of incredibly precise conditions and the product of my own choices. As a self-modifying information pattern, I have certainly shaped myself through decisions throughout my life about whom to interact with, what to read, and where to go.

Yet despite my share of responsibility for who I am, my self-actualization is limited by many factors outside my control. My biological brain evolved from a very different kind of prehistoric life and predisposes me to habits that I would rather not have. I cannot learn fast enough or remember well enough to know all the things I would like to know. I can’t reprogram it to free me from fears, traumas, and doubts that I know are preventing me from achieving what I would like to achieve. And my brain sits in a body that is gradually aging—although I work hard to slow this process—and is biologically programmed to eventually destroy the information pattern that is Ray Kurzweil.

The promise of the Singularity is to free us from all those limitations. . . . Imagine how much more we’ll be able to shape ourselves when we can program our brains directly.

And so merging with superintelligent AI will be a worthy achievement, but it is a means to a higher end. Once our brains are backed up on a more advanced digital substrate, our self-modification powers can be fully realized. Our behaviors can align with our values, and our lives will not be marred and cut short by the failings of our biology. Finally, humans can be truly responsible for who we are.

Losing His Soul

Did you notice that Mr. Kurzweil described himself as “a self-modifying information pattern?” In his own estimation, he’s some sort of software. While it is likely the technical challenge of “backing up our brains to a more advanced digital substrate” will prove insurmountable, it’s the upgrade Mr. Kurzweil longs for.

Mr. Kurzweil believes he will be able to upgrade not only his mental software but his body as well. Nanobots will repair his aging internal organs, genetic engineering will radically extend his lifespan, and sundry robotic attachments will eventually replace his limbs, vital organs, and even his brain.

Technologists tend to oversell their breakthroughs, and the soporific of the newly possible dulls their thinking to unintended consequences. But when it comes to physically linking people to AI, does Mr. Kurzweil truly believe power will flow in only one direction? Would AI merely amplify his intelligence, or could it take possession of him, and in some sense use him?

He also seems blind to the likely implications of the adoption curve. If his dream is feasible to some degree, won’t early adopters always be ahead? At least Nietzsche was a realist, his Übermensch wasn’t Everyman. He believed most people would be left behind. He called them the “Last Men,” dullards who’d prefer safety and pleasant sedation to the hazards of overcoming limits. Yuval Harari agrees—most people will be useless in an AI-driven, transhuman future.

And if this isn’t enough, some transhumanists think soulless meat-machines can even beat death with ever more sophisticated upgrades. Harari again:

Humans don’t die . . . because God decreed it, or because mortality is an essential part of some cosmic plan. Humans always die due to some technical glitch. . . . Every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death.

As you can see, transhumanism has acquired an eschatological edge. Indeed, it now competes with Christian eschatology. Harari, Kurzweil, and others like them function as prophets of a new age, an age in which you either submit to the machine or face the doom of the Neanderthals.

I’ve followed the tortured logic of transhumanism to the center of a dark labyrinth. Yet, in my mind’s eye I see a wizened, wiry, smiling hermit from the third century; he’s holding a luminous golden thread, and he is saying, “Follow me.”

St. Antony & Your Best Life Now

Of all people, why did Antony of the Desert come to mind when I read Ray Kurzweil? I suppose it was because I couldn’t imagine anyone less like Ray Kurzweil, and yet, curiously, anyone more like him. (I’ll get to why in a moment.) But let’s begin at the beginning. Who was he?

I’m not an authority on Antony (251–356), and I’m guessing when you think of devotees of the Desert Fathers you don’t think of Presbyterians. But even Presbyterians can’t deny the significance of Augustine and Athanasius. And both of those Church Fathers admired Antony and tried to emulate him.

I recalled Augustine writing in Confessions of his astonishment when he heard of Antony, and I’d read Athanasius’s On the Incarnation and knew he’d also written a Life of Antony. So I picked up the latter volume, and I fell in love with the guy, too.

How should I introduce him to you? I’ll let Athanasius do it; this is from his Life:

Antony was of the Egyptian race, his parents of good birth and good means—Christians, too, so that he was brought up Christian wise. . . . After his parents’ death he was left alone with one very young sister. He was eighteen or twenty years old. . . . Less than six months after the death of his parents he was going out to church, as usual; and collecting his thoughts, he pondered as he went how the Apostles, leaving all things, followed the Saviour, and the people in the Acts who sold their possessions and brought the price and laid it at the feet of the Apostles for distribution among the needy. . . . With these thoughts in mind, he entered the church; and it so fell that the Gospel was being read then, and he heard the Lord saying to the rich man, “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and come follow me and thou shalt have treasure in heaven” [Matt. 19:21]. Then, as though it was from God that his thoughts . . . had come and this reading had been for his sake, as soon as he went out of the church he gave to the villagers the property he had from his parents (it was 300 acres of land, fertile and very beautiful). . . . And all else he had in personal property he sold . . . which he gave to the poor, keeping a little because of his sister.

Simple hearing; simple obedience. It took him to the desert, where he lived a long life—mostly alone. And there, in the desert, he fasted and prayed.

Antony’s life illustrated the cost of discipleship by saying in effect, “Discipleship can cost you even this: wealth, sensual pleasure (including sex, which in our day is confused with life itself), fame, and the comforts of companionship.” Antony reminds us that the body should serve the soul, and both body and soul should serve the Lord.

I am not a monk; I’m a Protestant, after all. I own productive property, and I am persuaded that it can even be a school of virtue. And I am married, with three grown children, and six grandchildren (and counting). And I hope to pass my possessions on to them someday. And I love beer, cigars, bourbon, and my steak medium rare. But I also love Antony. (And I am presumptuous enough to think he might have liked me.)

Returning to the question I started with—why did I think of him? Antony is the antithesis of transhumanism, and yet, paradoxically, he embodied transcendence. We can learn things from him, both how to resist transhumanism and how to live our best lives now. The first lesson has to do with the nature of reality. Antony believed in real presences.

Discerning Spirits

When the term “real presence” comes up, debates about the sacraments come to mind. But what I’m referring to is spirits themselves. Let’s lay our doctrinal rapiers aside for a moment and consider the thoroughly modern Yuval Noah Harari and his casual dismissal of spiritual realities that were taken for granted by most of humanity until just recently. Earlier I quoted him as saying, “Humans are now hackable animals.”That was lifted out of context. Here’s the full quotation:

Humans are now hackable animals. You know the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit or free-will, and nobody knows what’s happening inside me, so whatever I choose, whether in the election or the supermarket, this is my free-will—that’s over.

Materialists, for the most part, consider consciousness to be epiphenomenal, meaning it is a byproduct of chemistry and other physical phenomena. But this turns things on their head. God’s Spirit is behind matter, and matter is a byproduct of his thought.

Plato wasn’t the only one who said, “What is seen is temporal, but what is unseen is eternal”; the Apostle Paul said it, too (2 Cor. 4:18). Antony believed it; he believed God’s Spirit is real, and that his own spirit was real, and he believed evil spirits are real, too—and famously he wrestled them.

Speaking of wrestling with spirits, Athanasius said this in his Life of Antony:

[W]e have enemies, terrible and unscrupulous, the wicked demons, and against them is our warfare, as the Apostle said, “. . . not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness dwelling in high places” [Eph. 6:12]. Great is the number of them in the air around us.

You might wonder, where have all those wicked spirits gone? Perhaps you don’t think they’ve gone anywhere, but many modern people don’t think they’re real (or ever were), let alone an ongoing problem.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another possibility is that there’s been a change in tactics. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis’s imagined correspondence between a senior demon (Screwtape) and his acolyte (Wormwood), Screwtape in letter #7 says this to his charge:

My Dear Wormwood,

I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course, this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics. At least not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. . . . If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight.

As with so many other things, Lewis proved prophetic. We have arrived. We now live in the land of Materialist Magicians such as Ray Kurzweil.

Scales Falling from Our Eyes

In order to see why Antony is helpful for such a time as this, we should clear away a couple of ways he is misread.

First, he didn’t go into the desert because he was some sort of back-to-nature hippie. He’d never read Rousseau, or Thoreau, or Wordsworth. All he had were the Scriptures, and they told him the wilderness was where you were tried and tempted. The Israelites were tried there for 40 years, and Jesus was led there to be tempted for 40 days. And that’s what Antony expected when he went there.

We’re not afraid of the wilderness today. (At least when safely sheltered in our automobiles and the mobile phone service is working.) Instead, we believe the wilderness is fragile and needs protection from us. If there are devils anywhere, they’re in our cities and our institutions. Antony’s aside, “the demons with whom we wrestle in the hills,” just doesn’t compute.

Then there’s the canard that Antony—and the Desert Fathers generally—were Gnostics. To a certain cast of mind, any form of self-denial smacks of Gnosticism. That’s mistaken. Antony didn’t deny himself because he hated his body. He denied himself because he loved the Scriptures.

Here is something Paul said that Antony put into practice: “I appeal to you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable worship” (Rom. 12:1). There’s also this:

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Cor. 9:24–27)

Antony didn’t punish his body because it was a prison; he disciplined it because it had a future. John Behr, in his excellent introduction to the works of Athanasius, said that Antony’s self-discipline was aimed at reclaiming the body, not fleeing from it:

The movement that Athanasius portrays in On the Incarnation, of the Word coming into our world by taking a body as his own, as his own instrument, in order to ensure victory over death for those who are in his body, is continued in the Life of Antony, in terms of the appropriation of Christ’s victory, making it one’s “own,” in the intense struggle with the devil that such appropriation entails. In this Life there is no “flight from the body,” but rather a concrete engagement in the body and for the body. Not only that, but the whole premise of Antony’s efforts is based upon the dynamic of the incarnation. Thus, at the very beginning . . . his struggle is placed in the context of the victory already won by Christ:

“. . . Working with Antony was the Lord, who bore flesh for us, and gave to the body the victory over the devil, so that each of those who truly struggle can say, It is not I, but the grace of God which is in me” [cf. 1 Cor. 15:10].

But if Antony wasn’t fleeing from danger or his body, what was he up to? As I said earlier, I think he was after his best life now.

You might have assumed I was speaking tongue-in-cheek, and I was, a little. But it’s also a serious consideration. Antony was a free man, free in ways many of us are not.

I believe that each of the things Antony is known for—going into the desert, discerning spirits, and disciplining his body—are worth emulating as we enter a transhumanist dystopia, but it is the last of these that meets the challenge most directly because it demonstrates that we already are transhumanists; we are the original transhumanists.

Christians are promised eternal life, full knowledge, and even a form of godhood—whether we call it theosis or glorification. We can believe what we’re promised, or we can take matters into our own hands and die. It’s a recapitulation of the episode in the Garden. There are two trees—the Tree of Knowledge where the tempter is coiled, and the Tree of Life, where God in Christ offers himself to us. The tempter is ingenious: offering us what is already ours at the cost of it. If he were not so diabolical, we might admire his audacity.

Antony Made His Body Subject to the Lord

Our bodies have a future. In 1 Corinthians 15 they’re described as a seed (vv. 37, 42–44), and in 2 Corinthians 5:1–5 they’re described as clothing. In both places we’re told that someday they will transcend the limits of biology.

In the meantime, our bodies already belong to the Lord. This is the reason for Christianity’s stress on sexual purity. Implicit in sex is a way of knowing that the world has forgotten. Sometimes it is called “participation”— koinonia in Greek. When we are engaged in impure sexual acts, impurity is communicated to us. The modern notion that our bodies are merely machines made of meat and that the contagions we need to worry about are merely physical in character is simply wrong. Physical bodies can be infected by spiritual diseases as well.

The body is not for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Cor. 6:13b–20)

The digital world is increasingly taking possession of the physical one, turning it into an “internet of things”—a term used for the ambitious project of subjecting the real world to the digital one. For transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil, this is something to celebrate. But for Christians, our bodies come with a “no vacancy” sign in the window. We are not our own; we have been bought with a price.

The materialist magicians that Lewis saw coming are now here, and their incantations are designed to take possession of us. Can we serve both God and Google (or any other huckster for transhumanism)?

Apotheosis or Theosis?

This will be the great either/or of our time. (By the way, perhaps it is indicative of which side the technologists are on that the AI that comes with my word processor recognizes “apotheosis” but not “theosis.”) Fundamentally, there’s nothing new here; it is the original temptation. But let’s admit there has been a significant upgrade when it comes to the false hope of bootstrapping transcendence. Will we rise to the challenge and stick to the original hope? Will we be content to wait for the Lord’s appearance and the vision that transforms us, or will we bow to the silicon gods we’ve made, and plug into them, and be incorporated by them?

There are always hidden costs and fine print when it comes to every new iteration of the original temptation. If I had been there when Eve heard the tempter’s words, I hope I would have had the presence of mind to whisper in her ear, “Ask what’s in it for him.” Surely, the serpent wasn’t speaking from the goodness of his heart. We now know he had a hidden agenda.

The transhumanist temptation is no different. What is Google up to? This isn’t a tinfoil-hat question. (Speaking of those, I might decide to start wearing one.) I think the best way to answer it is by asking another question loudly and repeatedly: “What’s in it for Google?”

Let’s not make the mistake of going along with yet another tower-to-the-sky building project, another attempt to immanentize the eschaton. Let’s show a little patience and wait for the apocalypse. It’s a safer bet.

C. R. Wiley is a pastor and writer living in the Pacific Northwest. He has written for many publications, his favorite being Touchstone. His most recent book, In the House of Tom Bombadil, is available from Canon Press. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

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