Perhaps you have seen the term accelerationism used by some members of Team Reality. The idea, simplified, is that the system is lurching toward a leftist singularity, and that “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”. Assist events to get us to The End quickly and reduce our overall pain.
The idea is not unknown elsewhere. Even among Christians.
There is one form of active Christian accelerationism that is familiar. But there is another that I’m betting most of you haven’t heard before. I’ll spend only a moment on the first as a reminder.
Every Christian, defined here as one who believes Jesus is God, is obliged to believe that Jesus will return. Some day. The day is not known.
Some think they can hasten The Day by their activities.
The best known example are certain evangelical Christians who have developed the theory that the modern day country of Israel best fits scriptural passages about the End of the world. A prime example was (is?) Hal Lindsay, whose book, and later movie narrated by Orson Welles, The Late Great Planet Earth assured believers that after the modern state of Israel was founded there would only be “one generation” of men left.
Since it’s been 77 years since the founding of the modern state, and 77 years is surely at the outer limit of a “generation”, and the End has not yet come, the term “generation” has had to undergo substantial modification.
In any case, devout—really, too weak a word—support for that foreign country persists in the hope that prophecy can be juiced if only enough donations are sent.
But enough of that. Let’s turn from active accelerationism to passive accelerationism.
In two lectures, the great Peter Kreeft gave us an intriguing thought. That genetics may hasten the Second Coming.
Now wait. His is not some hot-take limited-information panicked shallow view. He has devoted serious thought to this.
In a lecture contrasting the science of Pascal with (what I could call) the scientism of Decartes, Kreeft said (about 30 minutes in):
[Through Descartes’ science] we might rid ourselves of an infinity of maladies both of body and mind and perhaps also of the enfeeblement brought on by old age, if one were to have a sufficient knowledge of their cause.
Well we know today that their cause is genetic and we have broken the genetic code and we are learning how to replace God’s and Nature’s encoding with our own. And if we do that by eliminating not just diseases but also death, we will have radically reinterpreted John Dunn’s pious poetic prophecy “Death thou shalt die” so as to put the conquest of death under our control, not Christ’s.
That would be playing God in almost exactly the same way as a mother who justifies aborting her own child when she plays God, and radically reinterprets Christ’s Eucharistic words. “This is my body,” she says. Those same words, but to take life rather than to give it.
…Frankenstein is one of the most popular stories ever written although it is far from a literary Masterpiece. Why is it so popular because we instinctively know that science fiction inevitably comes scientific fact.
Why should the technology of artificial immortality be an exception to that rule?
Descartes tells us to doubt everything but he writes in a letter to Burnham that it should not be doubted that human life could be prolonged if we knew the appropriate art…Why should there be any end at all? Why not complete man’s conquest of nature by conquering death itself?
…But once that apple is eaten it cannot be uneaten, and when death’s door is closed, the door to Heaven is closed, and if that happens Pascal will prove to have been much too naive and optimistic.
Let us pray that it does not happen.
And more explicitly, again comparing Descartes but this time with Bacon (at 24 min), he says:
Descartes hopes…to return to Eden or progress to Utopia through the unlimited potentialities of future technology.
He says this is advisable not only for the sake of an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth and all the goods one finds in it, but that we might rid ourselves of an infinity of maladies both of body and mind and perhaps also of the enfeeblement of old age, were one to have a sufficient knowledge of their cause and of all the remedies that nature has provided for us.
In a private letter Descartes confesses his most radical dream of the conquest of Nature’s trump card death itself. He writes, “It should not be doubted that human life could be indefinitely prolonged if we only knew the appropriate art.”
Here Descartes predicts exactly what [C.S.] Lewis warns against in the Abolition of Man. That this conquest of nature can become the conquest of human nature and the abolition of all diseases and perhaps death itself. Thus prophetically forecasting the dark dreams and devices of the so-called transhumanists in Silicon Valley, who are seriously working on the conquest of Nature’s trump card on artificial immortality by genetic engineering.
If this ever actually happens I think that would elicit the Second Coming and the end of the world.
Because of race of immortals living in this fallen world by their own fallen foolish prideful flesh would be like rotten eggs that never hatched. They would close the door to their own teleology, their own end.
This is obviously only the bones of an idea, and needs flesh. Maybe we can add some.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in part:
Before Christ’s second coming, the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers (Luke 18:8; Mt 24:12). The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of His Messiah come in the flesh (2 Thess 2:4-12; 1 Thess 5:2-3; 1 Jn 2:18-22) (CCC # 675).
Now everybody has problems. The roof needs replacing, money is low, what was the noise the car is making, this hangnail is inflamed, and on and on. These are all problems, and all different. There are at least as many problems are there are men. Clearly, no one man will ever offer to solve all of them, for everybody, at once.
But there is one problem every man shares. Death.
If a man offered to solve death, and could, well, the adulation he would receive would no doubt be substantial. And that is putting it lightly.
Who could refuse such a gift as the End of Death? Only religious fanatics who believe its sting was removed on the Cross. Only those who believe death is, as Kreeft said, the purview of Christ.
Those who refuse such a gift—perhaps it might be called Life Treatment, or, better, the Death Vaccination—would indeed face persecution. Doubt it? How soon you have forgotten the last four years! “Where is your Life Passport, bigot?” “Why aren’t you wearing the Life Mark? You’re fired.” Recall how you were told your vax didn’t work when you were within six feet of an unvaxxed person.
Kids would be removed from fanatical parents. Doubt it? How soon you have forgotten yesterday!
Yet is this science plausible? I am skeptical. Death is built into all of Nature. Everything dies. Overcoming it by technological means might be impossible. I do not say it is impossible. I’m guessing. At the least, the state science is in now makes it exceedingly unlikely to happen in the present moment. Yet things change.
What makes this passive accelerationism, and not active, is that nearly everybody is for this kind of “progress” in science. They support it, want to see it supported monetarily. We must needs have our toys. And of course many Christians take part in science. Only a scant handful warn against, or are nervous about, “advances” in medicine. But these critics are dismissed as Luddites, and cruel. After all, who can be against curing disease? In children. It seems inhuman.
An apt word here, as Kreeft hints.
Suppose Kreeft is right—you have to imagine you did not have breakfast now—and that the advent (a carefully chosen word) of scientific immortality would bring about the Second Coming. Would you, as a Christian, consider working in genetics?
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