Transhumanism is a materialist religion that seeks to find transcendence and immortality through technology and the fashioning of a “post-human species.”
If transhumanists have a leader, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom is the guy. Apparently, he believes that we all may be living in a computer simulation out of the Matrix. From, “Is the Universe a Simulation?” by Berkeley professor Edward Frenkel, in the New York Times:
According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used.
This may strike you as very unlikely. But the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom has argued that we are more likely to be in such a simulation than not. If such simulations are possible in theory, he reasons, then eventually humans will create them — presumably many of them. If this is so, in time there will be many more simulated worlds than nonsimulated ones. Statistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.
Well, if we do indeed live in a computer simulation, then someone designed it. Do you realize what that means? Nick Bostrom believes in intelligent design! My Discovery Institute colleagues will be so pleased.
P.S. Ironically, Nicholas Kristof laments in his NYT column, just a page or two away from Frenkel’s piece, that professors don’t have more societal influence. This is a good example why.