Transhumanism is the idea that humans and technology can merge to make us a longer-living species—or even a new one. Photo via iStock/yucelyilmaz

Classes

CAS Class Stresses That Religion and Science Are Reconcilable and Crucial

In new era of AI, course now explores transhumanism and its implications for immortality

The movement called transhumanism embraces technology-enhanced human abilities, including—for some advocates—our merging with artificial intelligence (AI) to create a new, immortal species. Boston University students ponder this potential paradise, and whether it would be all its boosters promise, in Yair Lior’s Religion and Science class.

Make no mistake: this visionary tech-topia has religious overtones, most transhumanists’ secular and atheist professions notwithstanding. “They endow technology with religious significance,” Lior, a College of Arts & Sciences senior lecturer in comparative religion, said in a recent class session. “There’s something about technology that has the promise of salvation, immortality,” with some futurists forecasting the day that we’ll upload our consciousness into eternally replaceable machines. “Humans do have a tendency to need a God [to create] some kind of predictability.” 

But might AI makers who warn the technology actually could turn malicious be right?

Lior’s students split between worried and meh. Samuel Tauer (CAS’29) amused his classmates with what history may record as an opening skirmish in the revolt of the robots: He recalled how, over spring break in Miami, an autonomous delivery robot blocked his path on the sidewalk and refused to budge. “It was expecting me to move,” he said. “It was in that moment when I kind of realized we’ve got, like, a potential issue on our hands.”

Alika Grigorova (CAS’26), who uses AI large language models for her research group in mathematics and statistics, doubted the technology would turn on us, since people decide which datasets to use in training those models. “We’re controlling this as humans,” she said. Ava Shimkus (CAS’28) agreed, but added, “We also know that humans don’t always act in other humans’ best interest.” 

Lior has taught iterations of the class for a decade, tracing the interplay between science and religion from antiquity to today. He covers such topics as St. Augustine reconciling biblical doctrine with reason; religious reactions to the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin; and modern flash points, including intelligent design (the notion that the complex, precise laws holding the universe together suggest a purposeful creator) and New Age spiritualities.

With the rise of AI, the course includes transhumanism as well. Lior shows slides on the classroom’s flat-screen TV with quotes from advocates like the computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who years ago predicted that, with our identities uploaded to computational technology, “Our immortality will be a matter of being sufficiently careful to make frequent backups.”

In an era of polarization—over religion, science, and, well, practically everything else—the class actually has a positive takeaway, Lior told BU Today: we must and can smash the stereotypes and preconceptions that students on each bench (science or religion) harbor about the other. 

He has had nonbelieving, STEM-oriented students who disdain religious people as “superstitious,” he said, while some conservative religious students believe science is out to undermine Christian values. Both are wrong, Lior said: “A lot of extremely intelligent people subscribe to religious traditions [with] very sophisticated notions of God,” including trailblazing ancient and medieval scientists. A scholarly notion from a century or so ago that science and religion are conflicted has yielded to the idea that the science-religion relationship is nuanced, Lior said: “not conflict, but complexity.” 

The message resonates for several of his students, including Brian Song (ENG’29), who said he’s an atheist who attended a Catholic high school: “I’ve always been generally pretty open-minded.”

Jasmine Sabol (Sargent’28) took the class as part of her minor in religion in science and medicine. Her mixed Christian-Buddhist family observes Christmas, Easter, and some Buddhist practices; she said the course has taught her the history of “integration” between religion and science, as well. “Originally, I came into the class thinking it’s a conflict model,” Sabol said, “where it’s, like, they’re always at odds with each other.” 

But studying, for example, how many religious believers accept science’s big bang theory as God’s way of creation “was something I thought was really cool, and it changed my perspective.”