1.1 What Is Science Fiction?

According to Brian Willems, science fiction ‘can imagine true alternatives to our present, which is mired in the human-created oppression of people, the environment, and other living beings’.Footnote ³ Science fiction aficionados often make bold claims for its scope and impact such as this, so it is worth thinking about what makes a particular work of fiction ‘science fiction’.

When it comes to definitions, however, they are legion. There seems to be little consensus as to how exactly we classify science fiction, although most attempts tend to highlight futuristic and technological elements. Though broad, science fiction author Nalo Hopkinson’s description of the genre as ‘the literatures that explore the fact that we are tool-makers and users, and are always changing our environment’ is as good as any we might find.Footnote ⁴

Authors and readers of science fiction often distinguish between ‘hard’ science fiction, which places great emphasis on the details and mechanisms of the hypothetical technologies represented, and ‘soft’ science fiction, which is less concerned with the technology itself and more interested in the social, political, religious, and/or economic context in which the technology is situated. Robert Heinlein’s claim that speculative fiction is generally either about people or about gadgets is apt here.Footnote ⁵

Science fiction is often grouped together with fantasy under the umbrella term of ‘speculative fiction’, highlighting the similarities between the genres in terms of world-building. The present work distinguishes science fiction within the broader speculative fiction category in alignment with Judith Merril’s contention that science fiction in particular:

1.2 Science Fiction and Reality

Science fiction generally sets out to interrogate real-world social, technological, political, biological phenomena, and so on and to explore possible alternatives and their ramifications. Enrico Terrone identifies a common underlying structure between science fiction and philosophical thought experiments.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, David Seed describes a science fiction narrative as ‘an embodied thought experiment whereby aspects of our familiar reality are transformed or suspended.’Footnote ⁸

As Cory Doctorow highlights, even though we tend to associate science fiction with the future, the most memorable science fiction stories captivate the public imagination through what they tell us about the present.Footnote ⁹ Sherryl Vint also emphasises this contemporary aspect of science fiction – while it is often situated in the future, it examines the anxiety we currently feel about that future.Footnote ¹⁰ Science fiction offers us an ‘imagined sense of what tomorrow’s forms of life might look like’ and thus is a particular kind of ‘truth-telling’, assert Clark Miller and Ira Bennett, who argue that the genre should play a more significant role in the assessment of putative technologies.Footnote ¹¹

Indeed, many authors and critics highlight the contribution of science fiction in evaluating the potential consequences of technologies, or even preparing us for their inevitability. Science fiction writer Samuel R. Delaney frames science fiction as ‘training for thinking about the actual changes – sometimes catastrophic, often confusing – that the real world funnels at us year after year’.Footnote ¹² Le Guin describes the future as ‘a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in, a means of thinking about reality’ that science fiction capitalises upon.Footnote ¹³ Philosopher of technology Jacques Ellul’s reflections take on a more sinister nature, with the suggestion that science fiction’s depiction of extreme uses of technology actually serves to make us complacent in response to present anxieties.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘We take refuge in the real technological society in order to escape the fiction that was presented as the true technology.’Footnote ¹⁵

Science fiction can reflect reality beyond a narrow perspective on specific technologies. The relationship between art and truth has been well traversed, but science fiction in particular is well equipped to convey certain truths about the human condition. The essential gesture of science fiction, according to Le Guin is ‘the pulling back from “reality” in order to see it better.’Footnote ¹⁶ The next section will give more consideration to how this capacity is relevant for the field of science and religion.

Science fiction not only explores hypothetical technologies and their associated social contexts, however. It also inspires the real-world development of certain technologies.Footnote ¹⁷ Examples are plentiful – perhaps the most cited is the handheld communication device from the original Star Trek series as the inspiration behind the invention of the mobile phone in the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁸ Many writers of science fiction have been recognised scientists at the same time, for example, Geoffrey Landis, Arthur C. Clarke, and Charles Sheffield.Footnote ¹⁹ Marc Pesce contends that science fiction has been ‘the deciding influence on the direction of software development’.Footnote ²⁰ Without exaggerating the degree of influence, there is an imaginative feedback loop at play between science and science fiction, even if some scientists take pains to deny any cultural influences on their work.Footnote ²¹

Serious scientific scholarship at times draws on science fiction for illustrative or inspirational purposes.Footnote ²² Science fiction can also forge connections between popular science works, which share much in common with some forms of science fiction, and funding awarded to prospective scientific research. Robert Geraci describes this link particularly in the context of apocalyptic AI narratives:

It is clear, then, that science fiction is far more influential in our scientific and technological economy than is sometimes credited. And while science fiction is most often recognised as a medium of science communication, it can communicate historical, political, philosophical and theological ideas just as well.

1.3 Why Does (Science) Fiction Matter?

Finally we turn to this broader appeal and influence of science fiction beyond scientific and technological environments. Literature scholar Emelie Jonsson hypothesises that the human imagination serves an adaptive function from an evolutionary perspective, allowing us to construct virtual worlds in which we gain experiences that shape our decisions and actions and the meaning we make of them in the real world.Footnote ²⁴

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is perhaps the paradigmatic example of science fiction, helpful for thinking through the purpose and scope of the genre. It exemplifies the timelessness of some of the central questions tackled by many works of science fiction.Footnote ²⁵ What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have for and towards our creations? Are there limits to human creativity? It considers how moral understanding requires development, and challenges us on how we determine whether a being is a person.Footnote ²⁶ Concerning the ongoing relevance of Shelley’s novel to how we think about science and technology, J.M. van der Laan writes that

The enduring popularity of Frankenstein resonates with Mark Johnson’s account of how fictional narratives ‘provide us rich, humanly realistic experimental settings in which we can make our own moral explorations’.Footnote ²⁸ While van der Laan contrasts the meditative mode of the novel with the calculation of science and technology in the quote earlier, this does not amount to a rejection of what science and technology have to offer. Instead, the scope of fiction invites us to consider broader questions that might otherwise be sidelined or ignored in the everyday work of scientists and technologists. The questions explored in the novel are universal, existential ones, and therefore occupy a great deal of theological and philosophical thinking as well.

Is there a practical benefit to the kind of philosophical reflection that science fiction can facilitate? The value of fiction in all genres for moral formation has been identified in several contexts. Scholar of medical ethics P. Anne Scott argues that the ‘serious reading of literature’ can nurture the imagination for the proper practice of medicine, and recommends this be built into medical training.Footnote ²⁹ Martha Nussbaum describes how the narrative and emotional structures of novels function as ‘forms of Aristotelian ethical thinking’ that illuminate our understanding of the good.Footnote ³⁰ The impact of narrative and story on how people act in the world is an ongoing question to be explored throughout the rest of this work.

In a discussion of the ‘purpose’ of fiction, however, it would be wrong to speak of it only in terms of its value for prompting reflection about existential and/or moral concerns. While this work will focus on how science fiction can contribute to theological reflection, it is premised on a firm commitment to the pleasure and benefit of reading for its own sake.Footnote ³¹

2.1 Methodology in Science and Religion

It was less than two decades ago that Taede Smedes declared the science and religion field had reached a ‘mid-life crisis’.Footnote ³² Scholars of science and religion were mainly engaged in internal dialogue, Smedes argued, with neither scientists nor theologians outside the discipline registering much interest in that dialogue. According to Smedes, science and religion had become dominated by a cultural scientism that was essentially baked into the field’s origins by its scientist founders, and this logic of apportioning heuristic priority to the sciences had locked science and religion scholarship into a near hopeless trajectory.Footnote ³³

Smedes’ assessment highlights the long running science-religion dialogue on the topic of divine action as an exemplar of the theological naturalism that apparently pervades the field. Instead of seeking grand unifying theories between science and religion, Smedes advises that the way out of this stagnation is to focus on reaching understanding between scientists and theologians at smaller scales, increasing cross-training for theologians in the sciences, and devoting greater attention to the conceptual and methodological questions relevant for dialogue.Footnote ³⁴

Beyond the lingering logical positivism that Smedes identifies, theological engagement with the sciences has often amounted to the theologian reflecting on the implications of particular scientific theories (with varying levels of comprehension), or ‘cherry-picking’ scientific insights that support their theological commitments.Footnote ³⁵ While there is a place for a unidirectional interpretation of scientific insights into a theological register, there is a stronger need for work that thoughtfully considers how both conversation partners can make a real contribution.Footnote ³⁶

In the years since Smedes’ diagnosis, we can see these recommendations taken up (though not directly as a result of Smedes’ critique) in various different approaches within science and religion. The discipline has given much attention to self-definition and the articulation and interrogation of distinct methodologies, seen in the specific projects of ‘science-engaged theology’ and ‘after science and religion’.Footnote ³⁷ Numerous cross-training initiatives have been funded and deployed, encouraging theologians to learn directly from scientists in subdisciplines relevant to their research.

To explore further the notion of ‘science-engaged theology’, Perry and Leidenhag discuss the need for theologians wishing to engage the sciences in theological construction to develop a ‘trading zone’ with relevant scientific fields.Footnote ³⁸ In this trading zone, the language may be rudimentary (i.e. pidgin), and directly engaging with fluent speakers of the language native to the relevant science will likely assist understanding more than simply reading published scientific literature.Footnote ³⁹ Against the giving of heuristic priority to the sciences that Smedes critiques in science and religion scholarship, Perry and Leidenhag argue that in a science-engaged theology the sciences are treated as a source for theological construction without being made an authority, useful for constructive theology yet requiring attention to the way in which scientific thought is influenced by theological and philosophical assumptions already.Footnote ⁴⁰

Joshua Reeves has also considered the ways in which theologians may meaningfully interact with the sciences in their work. The particular concern he writes to address is the tendency of theologians to conscript scientific methodology to boost the credibility of their scholarship, a flawed strategy that he argues is built on a mistaken understanding of science. Reeves proposes several ways forward; one model suggests that theologians can serve as ‘historians of the present’.Footnote ⁴¹ This is a descriptive stance, grounded in an anti-essentialist approach to science, that brings the strengths of humanities scholarship to the analysis of contemporary scientific understanding and knowledge production. Theologians operating in this mode relinquish normative claims in favour of ‘build[ing] bridges of understanding between different communities’.Footnote ⁴² This thread will be picked up later in this section in thinking through how science fiction in particular might function in a mediating role.

2.2 The Imagination in Science and Religion

Histories and analyses of the science and religion field give us insights into how its origins and leading thinkers have shaped the methodologies and priorities of recent scholarship. Several recent assessments of the field have already been mentioned (Smedes, Reeves), and the detailed accounts they provide offer helpful background to the arguments of the present work. In previous research I have traced the particular impact of these historical factors for how the imagination is conceptualised in much of the field.Footnote ⁴³ In summary, I suggested that the prevalence of particular of scientific methodologies at the beginnings of science and religion scholarship has resulted in the attenuation of research focusing on the importance on the human imagination from a science and religion perspective. The last decade has seen corrective endeavours; however, the field still has a way to go to catch up with the larger turn towards the imagination that we can identify in theological scholarship and in particular scientific disciplines more discretely.Footnote ⁴⁴

There are good theological foundations upon which we might argue for the importance of the imagination. This work is premised on the notion that human creativity is a divine gift, and derived from divine creativity.Footnote ⁴⁵ We communicate using symbols and metaphors (to be discussed further in the next section on embodiment). As inherently imaginative creatures, who make sense of the world and our experiences through story, this aspect of our nature ought to be taken into account in how we approach our task as theologians.

2.3 The Contribution of Science Fiction

In yet another assessment of the science and religion field and its future direction, Michael Burdett affirms that the imagination has been neglected within the science and religion field and calls for a more sustained dialogue with the humanities. He singles out science fiction (which he identifies as “the cradle of the scientific imagination”) as a critical resource for understanding what people believe about subjects relevant to science and religion.Footnote ⁴⁶ The remainder of this section will therefore turn to the ways in which science fiction might be a part of science and religion scholarship in light of the methodological context explored earlier.

We might start off by acknowledging the value of reading (and writing) fiction in and of itself. As mentioned earlier, the imagination is a fundamental part of our created being. By reading or writing fiction, we are exercising our God-given creative capacity. We often understand things better through image and story, in ways that are formative. Theologian James K. A. Smith writes about the role of the imagination in moral formation, and describes how ‘stories seep into us – and stay there and haunt us – more than a report on the facts’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Stories appeal to our imagination and affect, which operate at a precognitive level.Footnote ⁴⁸

Fiction can convey the messiness of human existence, illustrating the advantages and disadvantages of certain beliefs, worldviews, behaviours, technologies, social structures, and so on without offering propositional evaluations or distilling complex moral reasoning into an ethical checklist. The substantial body of work on theology and literature attests to the significance of literature in understanding ourselves and the world we live in. This is additionally backed up by recent emphases in evolutionary and cognitive sciences that explore the centrality of narrative in human reasoning.Footnote ⁴⁹

These are some of the ways in which fiction (generally) can assist theological reflection (generally), all of which are also applicable to the narrower context of science fiction in relation to topics at the intersection of theology and science. Building on Reeves’ proposal for scholars of science and religion to act as ‘historians of the present’, I have suggested previously that we might expand the types of scholarship that perform this descriptionist task to include creative media as well.Footnote ⁵⁰ Engaging this response, Reeves acknowledges that ‘science and religion scholars, who have been trained to move easily between scientific and religious frames of reference, are ones who can offer imaginative renderings of the larger world picture’.Footnote ⁵¹

Though Reeves focuses on science and religion scholarship in his proposal, mediating between positions that occupy different epistemic territories is precisely what fiction does really well. Fiction also has the capacity to probe assumptions (e.g. the metaphysical commitments that underpin certain technologies, even when technologists claim a more objective position) and invite reflection without being prescriptive. And it can often do so in a far more disarming fashion than the more propositional mode of academic scholarship.

How can fiction as a medium facilitate the bridge-building between science and religion recommended by Reeves? Fictional characters can be far more direct, even hyperbolic, in expressing a position, and are often able to do so without raising the hackles of readers who ascribe to competing viewpoints. The ideas we find in fiction may conform to or repudiate particular understandings in the real world, but they are a step removed and we do not usually interpret them as making truth claims. In this way, fictional treatments of real world questions and conflicts may perform a mediating role in more philosophical discourse.

The value of science fiction as a mediator between science and theology lies in part in its location outside both disciplines. Rather than having to insert theological questions or claims into scientific research, or translate scientific insights into a theological context, science fiction is a separate meeting ground entirely. The idea that science fiction might serve as an interdisciplinary mediator is not a new one – it has even been heralded as the bridge between the ‘two cultures’ of science and the humanities.Footnote ⁵² At the same time, the perception of science fiction as a less sophisticated niche within genre fiction parallels the persisting sense that the humanities are inferior to the sciences within the academy.Footnote ⁵³

If we are able to move away from the negative associations of science fiction, some of the genre’s characteristics could be re-framed in terms of strengths common to the sciences and the humanities. For example, Farah Mendlesohn purports that ‘in a genre predicated on the thought experiment, theological discourse comes naturally’ – the curiosity and capacity for exploring new possibilities in the sciences and the humanities can come together in science fiction.Footnote ⁵⁴

But we must take care with how we read science fiction in this context. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld challenges the idea of science fiction as a mediator, rejecting the pressing of the genre into service for science communication in a way that subordinates the literary nature of the text.Footnote ⁵⁵ As a literary scholar, Imfeld wrestles with how to undertake interdisciplinary work while maintaining the integrity of the literature she studies as literature. She proposes, in agreement with Seo-Young Chu, that science fiction must be understood as the ‘violent yoking’ of science and fiction, and in resisting actions that might soothe the violence of the yoking (e.g. focusing on the utility of the genre for scientific discourse) we leave room for the ‘fruitfully disruptive potential of literature’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In recognising this violent yoking without attempting to diminish it, Imfeld contends that the literary perspective in the interdisciplinary approach of the ‘literature and science’ field illuminates by subverting hasty transitions and translations between discourses.Footnote ⁵⁷

While I am describing science fiction as a potential mediator between theology and science, I do not wish to prematurely resolve any tensions between the two perspectives. Ideas – both scientific and theological – change when they are translated into fiction, so it is important to engage science fiction as literature, just as Imfeld recommends, rather than as prescriptive texts. It must be emphasised that fiction is generally not the place to go for nuanced theological exposition. In part, I have opted not to use explicitly Christian science fiction texts throughout this work because it can be tempting to read too much into the details of the narrative. Authors use allegories; for example, Tolkien’s ‘Ainulindalë’ story might give us some ideas of how he understands human creativity in relation to divine creativity, but we can hardly read it as his definitive theology of creation. Rather, fiction might furnish us with images that help to solidify our theological understanding (or prompt us to question it!).

When it comes to the particular topics featured in the second part of this work, it makes even more sense to draw on science fiction. The genre is so prominent in the ‘non-fiction’ writings of futurists, it provides an ideal entry point for theological interlocutors to join the conversation. Wired author Michael Solana attends to how influential science fiction has been in cultural perceptions of technology, and implores contemporary writers in the genre to make the most of that influence:

The following sections consider how science fiction helps us dream about particular technological futures, and how it might also guide our theological imagination in response to such imaginings. While science fiction can undoubtedly transport topics that have theological import into discussions among scientists, or between scientists and theologians, the particular focus in this work will be how science fiction can mediate between scientific discovery and theological reflection for theologians. The bridging role that science fiction performs here is an expositional one; fleshing out potential societal implications of various technological proposals in ways that prompt theologians to consider how they might also inform theological construction (or adjudication between theological perspectives).

This brings me to a final prologomenal note concerning the relationship between science and technology. The ‘science’ aspect of the science and religion field has mostly tended to denote the natural sciences; an analysis or critique of this narrower construal of science is beyond the scope of the current work. We are seeing a broadening in what counts as ‘science’ in the field (aided by the work of Harrison, Reeves, and others in dismantling essentialist understandings of science), evidenced in the embracing of the human and social sciences as disciplines for theological engagement. My own science and religion scholarship is informed by the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS perspectives were an important element of my formal training in a science and religion doctoral programme), and thus affirms the notion of ‘technoscience’ – which ‘signals a deep commitment to the view that [science and technology] are inextricably intertwined’.Footnote ⁵⁹ I will thus draw on both scientific findings and technological scenarios and applications, recognising that technology neither serves as a simple proxy for science or constitutes ‘applied science’ but instead scientific discovery and technological innovation exist in mutual relationship.Footnote ⁶⁰

3.1 Mind-Uploading

A prime example of a proposed technological augmentation that might discard the body altogether is mind-uploading, an envisioned future technological scenario in which the human brain can be scanned, copied, and uploaded in its entirety onto a computer substrate. It was popularised by roboticist and technofuturist Hans Moravec in his 1988 work Mind Children. The ability to upload our minds promises not only immortality (in digital form) and security (our memories can be ‘backed up’), but also cognitive enhancement via the use of more efficient “compilers”.

Moravec’s fellow technofuturist Nick Bostrom, founder of the World Transhumanist Association, has written several wildly optimistic letters from a hypothetical future uploaded self, promising joy and capability beyond our present, limited imaginations. ‘What I feel is as far beyond feelings as what I think is beyond thoughts,’ writes this hypothetical future self, urging us in the present towards a ‘reconfigured physical situation through technology’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Mind-uploading proposals are often underscored by a contempt for the physical bodies we currently exist in. Moravec, for example, dismisses the physical body, separated from its information systems, as ‘mere jelly’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Mark Dery summarises the attitude of mind-uploading advocates to the flesh:

We find this same language of ‘meat bodies’ in the cyperpunk genre – for example, Case, the protagonist in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (Reference Gibson1984) uses the term to describe his own body in unaugmented form, cut off from cyberspace. The Bladerunner franchise is perhaps the most familiar example of cyberpunk fiction, and scholars of the genre argue that cyberpunk culture is so pervasive it has now become our ‘quotidian reality’,Footnote ⁶⁷ with cyberpunk ‘a fictional attempt to grapple with the realities of our postmodern condition’.Footnote ⁶⁸.

3.2 Artificial Intelligence

The discourse around mind-uploading often overlaps with that surrounding the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Artificial intelligence was defined as a specific field in the 1950s, operating under the premise that ‘every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Proponents of AI believe that human intelligence is reducible to formal logic and a set of symbols (an idea that shows up in the thought of both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Thomas Hobbes), thus can be translated into equivalent computer processes.Footnote ⁷⁰ Distinctions are typically made between narrow and general AI, with the former excelling at specific tasks within a limited domain, and the latter involving capacities more akin to human cognition. For the purposes of this section, the implications of general AI and even ‘superintelligent’ beings are most relevant.

Robert Geraci brings together both AI and mind-uploading in his description of ‘apocalyptic AI’, which imagines that ‘in the very near future technological progress will allow us to build supremely intelligent machines and to copy our own minds into machines so that we can live forever in a virtual realm of cyberspace.’Footnote ⁷¹

In many respects, however, artificial intelligence research runs counter to the goal of mind-uploading. A growing number of AI researchers are instead centring embodiment in their work; indeed, AI is one of the scholarly strands in the broader embodied cognition field. Matej Hoffman and Rolf Pfeifer, for example, demonstrate that embodied AI is better able to process information, due to its capacity to interact with the environment through movement and sensors.Footnote ⁷² The fact that many AI companionship services price voice interactions at more premium levels than simpler chatbot conversations suggests that more substantial embodiment makes a difference to how we perceive and interact with AI.Footnote ⁷³

3.3 The Singularity

Mind-uploading proposals and artificial intelligence also come together in the notion of the Singularity. In fact, the term ‘Singularity’ was first used in science fiction by futurist Vernon Vinge to describe a future progression of human intelligence beyond our capacity to extrapolate from or model on present intelligence.Footnote ⁷⁴ The idea of the Singularity has been taken up within the field of artificial intelligence to describe the exponential growth of artificial intelligence, and the uncertainty associated with a future in which the intelligence of artificial agents outstrips that of humans by orders of magnitude.Footnote ⁷⁵ It metaphorically deploys an astrophysical concept – a Singularity denotes the breakdown of space-time laws at the centre of a black hole – to highlight the radical shift in existence it represents.Footnote ⁷⁶ The related term “event horizon” (the surface of a black hole, at which point the gravitational pull becomes irresistible) has also been translated into the AI context to convey the inevitability of a Singularity once the tipping point is reached.Footnote ⁷⁷ Technofuturist Ray Kurzweil further popularised the term, describing the Singularity as ‘a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed’ (and predicted this will occur in the year 2045).Footnote ⁷⁸

Part prediction, part prophesy, the Singularity attracts a range of responses. As a hypothetical future, it has fuelled a range of research initiatives (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowski’s Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence) and philanthropic endeavours (mainly via the effective altruism movement, and its longtermism philosophy offspring).Footnote ⁷⁹ Since the large-scale roll-out of accessible generative AI applications in 2022, the effective altruism and long-termism communities have been divided over appropriate responses and the management of AI existential risk.Footnote ⁸⁰

Beth Singler explores the use of religion in AI-Singularity science fiction texts, particularly as they deal with the ‘event horizon’ that Vinge’s Singularity represents for imagining the human future.Footnote ⁸¹ She describes religion as a ‘pernicious problem’ for narratives exploring humanity’s response to existential AI concerns.Footnote ⁸² While depictions of religion in post-Singularity tales vary widely, Singler draws our attention to the way in which Doctorow and Stross are able to represent both traditional religious fundamentalism and Singularitarian fervour as similar systems of belief in their novel The Rapture of the Nerds (Reference Doctorow and Stross2012).Footnote ⁸³

3.4 Engaging Science Fiction on Embodiment

Event horizon difficulties notwithstanding, mind-uploading is a fertile scenario for science fiction. Quoted at the beginning of this section, Charles Stross’ novel Glasshouse (Reference Stross2006) portrays a post-Singularity world, populated only by those who chose to upload their minds prior to the transformative event. Contra to the utopian picture painted by Bostrom et al., Stross imagines a society overrun with identity theft and censorship, and cut adrift from the past due to the expunging of memory by malevolent viruses. On the whole, people still tend to adopt some form of a physical body, which can be modified beyond the still popular “orthohuman” configuration and changed frequently. These bodies are vulnerable to damage and decay, but they are also easily replaceable. This morphological freedom comes with a much greater freedom of expression and identity for individuals (represented as an improvement over our present experience).

The enduring presence and significance of bodies in Stross’ imaginary future provides an alternative vision of mind-uploading in which jettisoning the physical body is not necessary. In entertaining this possible future – an activity that speculative fiction invites us into – theologians and philosophers deeply committed to the value of the body and its critical place in human being might contemplate the myriad other implications of mind-uploading for how we exist as individuals and in society.

Even as Stross extends and challenges imagined future ideals relating to mind-uploading proposals, he offers a critique of contemporary social realities. The plot centres around an experiment in which volunteers are recruited to take part in an immersive re-creation of twentieth-century society. Stross describes his intention: ‘why not take the Stanford Prison Study protocol and apply it to gender roles among a bunch of posthumans … [in a world] in which physiology and gender and biology are mutable?’Footnote ⁸⁴ Would people conform to the hierarchical and discriminatory social practices of an earlier era?Footnote ⁸⁵

In Stross’ imagined future, people are now described as ‘emotional machines’ – virtual minds that originated from human brains. AI entities operate alongside these emotional machines, for example, as therapists, or as non-player characters in the immersion. The experiment around which the plot revolves is intended to reconstruct the social relationships from the ‘early emotion-age culture’ (i.e. our own contemporary and recent social context), which have been lost as a result of incompatible data formats and military censorship. From this post-Singularity perspective, our own time is described as a polity in which ‘people have no control over who they are’ with a ‘pre-Acceleration scarcity economy’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Stross brings to life the risks of mind uploading. Our hearts race as the main character tries to evade unknown, but dangerous, enemies. ‘If they’ve hacked my backup so deeply that they can force a new body plan on me, then they can do anything they want. Mess with my head, run multiple copies of me, access my private keys, even make a zombie body and use it to do whatever they want it to do while masquerading as me.’Footnote ⁸⁷ Certainly the story has more impact than a theoretical risk assessment of a speculative technology.

The narrative also allows us to come at certain insights or perspectives from a less confronting angle. Within the experiment, one of the participants is critiquing the study design, suggesting it has oversimplified in its stark gender divisions. ‘If I had to guess, I’d say they’ve mistaken radical prescriptive documentation for descriptive,’ she concludes.Footnote ⁸⁸ We are invited to reflect on the cultural and social constraints that are historical from our own vantage point, but which seem limited or based on flawed understanding, and encouraged into greater epistemic humility over our present convictions. Along with all of the risks and disadvantages associated with mind uploading that Stross draws our attention to, the opportunities it might provide for individual expression and play are illustrated as well. The novel teases out the complexities of these technological proposals, neither embracing them nor rejecting them outright, making it an excellent meeting ground upon which we might have the broader theological and philosophical debates (as described in the previous section).

How do we even begin to think theologically about AI and mind-uploading? These technologies have wide-ranging implications for theology, from our understanding of what it means to be human (including human agency, and the extent to which we are genuinely creative), to the expectations that Christians hold for salvation, redemption, and glorification.

Beginning at the end, visions of the future that feature mind-uploading and intelligent machines often have strong eschatological connotations. Geraci underscores the religious connection, arguing that:

There are particular resonances between AI and mind-uploading and the more gnostic elements of traditional religions (the ‘dualistic’ worldview that Geraci mentions in the quote earlier). Gnosticism sees the material world (including the body) as evil, a shackle for the spirit which is good and pure. The ‘radically purified bodies’ that Geraci describes as required for the transcendent future imagined by proponents of apocalyptic AI represent a shift away from the organic, degenerating corporeality we presently endure, albeit in the direction of software existence rather than the non-corporeal spirits of more conventional gnosticism.Footnote ⁹⁰ The tenor of these imaginings is brought to life in science fiction examples such as the short story by Richard Stallman ‘Made for you’ (Reference Stallman2012). The story aims at a utopia, in which a human gradually migrates his existence onto a virtual platform throughout the progression of his relationship with a virtual ‘soul mate’. Once the upload is complete, he experiences a more comprehensive joy than he ever could have imagined in his flesh-bound existence. It is a less compelling picture of fulfilling relationship than the one Stross fills out for us (the event-horizon of the Singularity appears to be less of an impediment for Stross’ imagination than most), but nevertheless gives us a more tangible understanding of what mind-uploading represents for many (it aligns with Bostrom’s euphoric predictions, for example) for our theological and ethical reflection.

Geraci goes as far as to name transhumanism as a new religious movement, that ‘advances technoscientific research agendas, creates the ideology for virtual life, and presses for the acceptance of intelligent machines into human culture’.Footnote ⁹¹ Certain works of science fiction aid in making the ideological implications and/or potential consequences of these technological proposals explicit. For example, Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (Reference Stephenson2019) features billionaire Dodge, whose cryogenically preserved brain is scanned and uploaded by one of his descendants. In Stephenson’s tale, uploaded minds inhabit a digital afterlife that most resembles a mediaeval fantasy world (reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia). Religion features quite overtly, with one uploaded mind self-styling as a deity and making a run for world domination.

Pseudoreligions may have their own scriptures, and in some cases science fiction may fill this role. Joshua Raulerson describes a speculative ‘hyperreal’ feedback loop that is ever tightening within some techno-utopian and fringe science movements that advocate for

Former evangelical Christian Meghan O’Gieblyn lends weight to the understanding of transhumanism as a religious substitute, recounting her own disillusionment with Christian faith and discovery of transhumanist philosophy as a satisfying alternative.

Just how similar is this glorified body of the transhumanist imagination that O’Gieblyn refers to compared with a Christian understanding of glorification? Well that depends on which perspective you encounter within the Christian tradition, as gnosticism has influenced Christian thought in various ways throughout its history. N.T. Wright is one of those who calls out the pervasive influence of gnosticism, which has led some to a ‘souls in transit’ notion of the future, whereby Christians hope to leave behind fallen material existence altogether for eternity in spirit form.Footnote ⁹⁴ This version of immortality is a great deal closer to the hopes of many transhumanists than the alternative Wright defends as true to the scriptures and their testimony concerning the body.

Despite the ongoing influence and appeal of gnosticism, bodies matter immensely within Christian orthodoxy. Formulated against various heterodoxies and heresies that included gnosticism, the Apostles’ creed affirms a belief in ‘the resurrection of the body’ and Christians have expressed this hope in liturgy for centuries. But how is this generally understood? Two opposing views on the bodily resurrection are represented well in The Meaning of Jesus (Reference Wright and Borg1999) by Wright and another New Testament scholar, Marcus Borg. The latter follows a demythologising tradition, arguing that it is not necessary for Christ to have physically risen from the dead for Easter to carry religious meaning, and even truth.Footnote ⁹⁵ Wright defends the traditional Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection against more metaphorical understandings.

While there are continuing debates on how precisely the bodily resurrection is understood among Christian theologians which will not be explored for reasons of scope, for Noreen Herzfeld the doctrine underscores the crucial difference between Christian eschatological hope and technofuturist or transhumanist alternative futures. The cybernetic immortality of mind-uploading represents a ‘quasi-Cartesian dualism’ counter to the resurrection of the body insisted upon in Christian theology.Footnote ⁹⁷ By conceiving of the person in informational terms, ‘the dreams of cybernetic immortality fail to capture the full nature of what it means to be human and are illusory hopes for a form of immortality not requiring the action of a supernatural being’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Michael Burdett and King-Ho Leung analyse the informational ontology that operates within transhumanism, revealing how the infosphere takes on a pseudosupernatural nature in proposals such as mind-uploading.Footnote ⁹⁹ Comparatively speaking, the glorified bodies anticipated in Christian eschatology represent a more audacious hope than mere software immortality.

But the body is not merely significant from an eschatological perspective. A theology that affirms the material body in the goodness of creation is well positioned to consider why the body matters, what we might lose if bodies are entirely jettisoned. Here, the related fields of metaphor studies and embodied cognition offer crucial insights concerning how our understanding and communication are dependent on our shared bodily experiences. In their seminal text Metaphors We Live By (Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explicate the fundamental embodiment of the metaphors we use everyday. For example, when we talk of a ‘warm welcome’, we are actually referring to the universal bodily experience that associates physical affection with an increase in temperature. According to Lakoff and Johnson, ‘our metaphors will reflect our commonplace experiences in the world. Inevitably, many primary metaphors are universal because everybody has basically the same kinds of bodies and brains and lives in basically the same kinds of environments.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These embodied concepts form the basis for more abstract ones via metaphorical projection.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Iain McGilchrist emphases this bodily foundation, arguing that ‘everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body’.Footnote ¹⁰²

Embodied cognition is an interdisciplinary field that brings together research programmes as diverse as philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroimaging, linguistics, robotics, and artificial intelligence. It challenges more traditional approaches to cognitive science that have tended to isolate the cognitive processes of the mind from the sensory context of the body. This includes computational models of the mind, that sees the brain as a self-contained processor that receives sensory input alone from the rest of the body.Footnote ¹⁰³

Embodied cognition instead underscores the idea that the mind does not operate solely within the brain as a central processing unit. Cognition involves the whole body. Andy Clark summarises this integrated understanding of cognition, emphatically asserting that human brains ‘are not the brains of disembodied spirits conveniently glued into ambulant, corporeal shells of flesh and blood’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This perspective is critical for engaging with proposals such as mind-uploading, artificial intelligence, and the Singularity, which predominantly operate in conjunction with the older computational models of the human mind.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ We see these competing visions of the mind play out in fictional works too, such as Robert Sawyer’s Mindscan (Reference Sawyer2005).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sawyer imagines a rather bleak mind-uploading scenario which results in an identity crisis as biological and digital selves clash over which is more authentic.

All this means that it is not only our practices, but also our conceptualising, intellectualising, and therefore our theologising that are embodied.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Tobias Tanton offers a comprehensive theological treatment of embodied cognition to contend that our theological reflection is inescapably corporeal.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Theology is not merely a cerebral collection of concepts, doctrines and beliefs – these facets are all grounded in bodily experience and, conversely, bodily practices in the form of religious rituals also shape theological concepts.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Tanton begins with a problem: ‘Theology, then, readily operates under the illusion that it is being undertaken by disembodied creatures who have access to “pure” reasoning, rather than the idiosyncratic mind afforded by a bundle of flesh and bone, neuron and sinew, the products of a long evolutionary process.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ Against this problem, he makes the case that the notion of embodied cognition provides the necessary context for how we understand revelation, accommodated as it is to the human mind. Our corporeality determines the constraints within which our understanding can operate, and therefore the context in which divine revelation must be mediated.Footnote ¹¹¹ Studying human cognition gives us greater insight into revelation (how it is mediated, not its content), according to Tanton.Footnote ¹¹²

Embodied cognition offers insights not only for how God communicates with us, and how we understand God, but for how we communicate with and understand disembodied intelligent beings such as hypothetical uploaded minds or AI. We have a tendency to anthropomorphise AI when we talk about it, attributing to it belief, knowledge and understanding. At the same time, we can also underestimate how involved humans are in current AI applications. At present, even disembodied AI technologies depend on embodied information. Large Language Models, for example, which operate in most of the generative AI models used presently (e.g. ChatGPT) are trained by humans on data produced by humans, and therefore rely secondhand on language derived from physical corporeality.Footnote ¹¹³ Stross highlights this fact in the context of mind-uploading – one of the characters in the immersive embodied simulation observes ‘it is very interesting to discover that the phrase “my blood runs cold” actually reflects a physical sensation’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Through this fictional perspective of an uploaded mind experiencing the full sensory landscape of a human body, we are made cognisant of how communication and understanding depend on our bodies.

What does this mean for the prospect of AI? Can it truly attain to the capacities of human cognition? Andrew Davison draws on the theological tradition of analogy to describe how artificial intelligence resembles human cognition without being identical to it.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As Davison highlights, this is an example of how philosophical thought can inform our understanding more broadly – in this case by way of analogy we might choose certain words and concepts to describe AI capacities while maintaining a distinction to how the same words and concepts are used of human capacities. Davison leaves open the question of what this might mean for the future achievements of machine learning, however, especially concerning the authenticity of ‘understanding’ in the context of metaphorical language that originates in human embodiment.

We can imagine in theory (if not in concrete detail, given the limitations of our corporeality), that new metaphors might arise which transcend physicality, and do not depend on a shared bodily experience for effective communication.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Tanton’s use of accommodation to explain how an infinite God can be intelligible at all to the shape of the human mind might have further applications here as a framework for conceiving of understanding across seemingly unbridgeable ontological divides. This is admittedly conjecture, but could accommodation also occur between embodied human and virtual or AI minds, or even between the latter and God?

In a similarly speculative vein, theological responses to AI are also concerned with the implications for how we understand human being, and whether the category of human could ever extend to AI. Herzfeld gives an excellent overview of the history and development of AI technologies, arguing that some definitions and approaches understand human intelligence to be primarily rational, while others construe it in terms of relationality.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Much scholarship in theological anthropology focuses on the Christian claim that humans are created in the image of God, and Herzfeld also takes up this doctrine in thinking about the technological creations of our own making.

The imago Dei has often been pressed into theological service to under-score human uniqueness (considered further in the next section), and to define what it means to be human. Interpretations of precisely what the imago Dei corresponds to are generally characterised as substantive (a characteristic that humans possess), functional (a role that humans perform), or relational (the imago Dei comprises the fundamental relationality of humans – to God, to each other, etc.). Historically, a substantive account that associates the imago Dei with the capacity for reason has been dominant, but this has given way in more recent years to functional or relational interpretations.Footnote ¹¹⁸

It is worth noting that the doctrine of the image of God has been highly contested throughout the history of its interpretation, and there are only a few Scriptural references upon which interpretations are built.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Particular framings of the imago Dei have wrought significant harm, justifying social hierarchies and the exclusion of many deemed to lack the necessary defining characteristics.Footnote ¹²⁰ We must not rely too heavily on the doctrine for a theological anthropology, however, heeding Jeanine Thweatt-Bates’ reminder: ‘Despite its importance and centrality, the biblical concept of the imago Dei remains ambiguous, prompting a long history of theological interpretation of this primary and yet stubbornly mysterious aspect of human being.’Footnote ¹²¹

Alongside the imago Dei, many theological engagements with AI have centred on the matter of personhood; that is, is it possible for a robot or other AI entity to be a person? In answering this question, Herzfeld employs Martin Buber’s I-Thou distinction (via Barth’s developed criteria) – we relate to persons as ‘thou’ but to objects as ‘it’. She ultimately concludes that we cannot exist in I-Thou relationship with AI, but must instead maintain an understanding that they are tools, not people.Footnote ¹²² As with the imago Dei, personhood is also notoriously difficult to define as a concept, particularly in such a way that it does not unwittingly exclude some humans from the category of person. The question of how cyberspace and virtual technologies are reconfiguring our relationships is a subject of contemporary theological interest, pushing the boundaries of how we define human being.Footnote ¹²³

Returning to science fiction, Klara and the Sun (2021) by Kazuo Ishiguro raises this very question of personhood in relation to artificial intelligence. It is difficult to avoid spoilers, but the plot centres on whether an “artificial friend” (i.e. an android) can be a satisfying replacement for a human loved one. The artificial friend Klara is astounding for being both utterly different (e.g. her perception of the sun, the way she processes visual sensory inputs, her perspective on what makes for a fulfilling life) and remarkably “human” (e.g. her compassion, her longing to be chosen). The tale delivers a subtle but incisive challenge as we contrast Klara’s seemingly naive worldview with our own assumptions about what makes us us, and whether than can be defined using scientific frameworks.

Of course, just because we imagine AI to share many characteristically human attributes does not mean it is true. Humans have a propensity to anthropomorphise. Science fiction does give insight into how we perceive AI though, and when it comes to personhood, science fiction can be revelatory in relation to many of our hopes for AI. We often attribute ‘human’ identities to AI beings in fiction. Apart from Klara in Ishiguro’s novel, we might look to the work of Becky Chambers (discussed in the next section), or Martha Well’s The Murderbot Diaries for AI protagonists that exhibit human-like capacities for introspection, compassion, emotional intelligence, and growth. The way we respond to AIs in fiction suggests that we at least hope that they might come to share in personhood, and extend our options for meaningful relationships.

Indeed, we find this hope reflected in real-world applications also. People are turning to AI to meet their individual relational needs. Responses to these trends are conflicted – some decry the developments as yet another symptom of the widespread malaise initiated and exacerbated by the rise of social media; others welcome the expansion of social networks for the otherwise lonely and neglected in society. The science fiction examples offered in this section invite us into imaginaries that are hospitable to theological revisions when it comes to personhood, such as Midson’s rejection of a Buberian I-Thou framework. As an alternative, Midson suggests we might ‘emphasize plurality by figuring “We” alongside “Thou” to convey how we – humans and chatbots alike – are congeries of different relational parts – including other humans and chatbots’.Footnote ¹²⁴

4.1 Human and Non-Human Nature

‘I have placed you at the very center of the world.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ So speaks God to man (and undoubtedly it was a man imagined as the recipient of such a proclamation), according to fifteenth-century humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The question of how humans are distinct from non-human nature is a perennial one, with particular attributes highlighted as singular to human being (e.g. reason, possession of a soul, imagination, religiosity). Human uniqueness is often the basis of arguments for human exceptionalism, and the attribution of moral status to human beings over other species.

The notion of human uniqueness has a complicated legacy within Christian theology and its influence on Western philosophy and culture more broadly.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Together with the assertion that humans are created in God’s image (Gen 1:26-28), God’s subsequent directive to Adam and Eve to ‘fill and subdue’ the earth (Gen 1:28) has informed countless theological anthropologies that emphasise human dominion over nature. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this dominion so much as the description of the human task as the enslavement of nature given by Francis Bacon, often styled the ‘father of modern science’, who extended earlier humanist visions of dominion by uniting them with the grandiose aspirations of modern empirical science.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Lynn White Jnr’s famous 1967 critique of Western Christianity finds the root of the contemporary ecological crisis in the triumph of Christian anthropocentrism over paganism in the mediaeval period.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ According to White, the Christian doctrine of humans made in the image of God established a dualism between humans and the rest of creation, and instrumentalised nature in relation to human ends.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ White describes how this doctrinally driven anthropocentrism was embedded into the foundations of modern science and technology as it developed in the West.

The question of human uniqueness is also relevant to the themes of earlier sections. Anthropocentrism is rife in contemporary movements that advocate for the use of technologies to ‘enhance’ human characteristics. Transhumanist advocates of enhancement acknowledge the continuities between their position and earlier humanisms from the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The perceived special status of humans is threatened by the advent of artificial intelligence. Much of our social, not to mention theological, engagements with the ethical questions around AI are consumed with the question of whether AI might be accorded personhood. Furthermore, the differential status we see applied between humans and non-humans has its parallels in the various distinctions and discriminations often made between humans according to race, class, gender, able-bodiedness, and more.

4.2 Engaging Science Fiction on Human Uniqueness

In her award-winning Wayfarer series, Becky Chambers writes what has been termed ‘hope punk’, a style of science fiction that presents a more positive vision of the future than is typical for the genre. Chambers imagines a universe in which humans are not at the top of the intelligence pyramid, and there are many other highly intelligent sentient species outside of our solar system. In this imagined universe, humans have had to learn humility, and they are far from morally (or intellectually) superior to the other species that make up the fictional Galactic Commons. They possess little power and influence politically – Jeremy Axelrod suggests that humans occupy the condition of subalternality in Chambers’ fictional world.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Chambers’ oevre might have been deployed in relation to any of the themes treated in the current text. With respect to embodiment, Chambers offers a critique of anthropocentric enhancement projects. In the second book of the Wayfarer series, A Closed and Common Orbit (Reference Chambers2016), we gradually learn of the ‘Enhanced Humanity’ movement, which operates Enhancement Colonies in which genetically engineered humans are bred in gestation chambers for specific purposes (reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s famous Brave New World). The Galactic Commons and the human diaspora have severed all ties with the movement, thus indicating universal condemnation of their project.Footnote ¹⁵¹

The flourishing societies depicted in Chambers’ fiction are thoroughly embodied and sensual. Bodily differences are celebrated and delighted in via physical encounters between species, sometimes platonic, sometimes sexual. A lot of attention is given to culinary descriptions, with hospitality at the table an important feature of most communities and societies throughout Chambers’ works. The relationship between the body and its environment is treated with spiritual reverence, with detailed funeral rites and composting of corpses described in the third Wayfarer novel Record of a Spaceborn Few (Reference Chambers2019).

Chambers also gives us a picture of what the human task might look like in a world no longer ruled by anthropocentrism. This concern is particularly central to her Monk and Robot novella series. Set on the fictional moon Panga, they depict a world in which, at some time in the distant past, robots had awakened to consciousness, discovered and rejected their created purpose, and departed for life on their own in the wilderness (a far cry from the Singularity envisioned by many technologists and sci-fi authors). Not only were the humans of Panga able to relinquish control and reach peaceful accord with the robots, but in the intervening years they have found a way to live more lightly. Much of the cultivated territory is given back over to wilderness, and human societies operate sustainably and justly. The main character, Dex, is a tea monk – equal parts priest, therapist, and tea sommelier, Dex travels the regions brewing up bespoke herbal blends for troubled souls and providing space for contemplation.

For various reasons, Dex finds themself in the wilderness, beyond the reaches of human territories. They encounter Mosscap, a robot who has come as an emissary to the humans to understand a driving question: ‘what do humans need?’. The remainder of the novellas see them journeying together in search of answers to this question, and learning of one another’s customs and worldview along the way. While facilitating an uncomfortable interaction between Mosscap and a community that has rejected technology, Dex reflects on how their ministry has prepared them, musing that ‘building a canvas for others to explore themselves on was rather the point of monastic service, after all’.Footnote ¹⁵²

This celebration of difference goes hand in hand with other societal reorientations. Throughout the novellas, Dex is reflecting on the relationship between identity, vocation, and purpose. Pangan society has shifted away from an economics of capital, to one that acknowledges mutual benefit in a wider exchange of goods and services. Chambers would be the first to acknowledge the many influences on her writing and we see similar themes in classic works of science fiction. Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series also critiques the hierarchical nature of human society and psychology, while maintaining a place for genetic engineering technologies in the construction of a better world. Butler’s Earthseed series proffers a new religious movement to address socioeconomical and political crises, and also imagines a life for humans in the universe beyond Earth. Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) falls within the critical utopian tradition (in which we might also situate Chambers’ work), imagining an anarchist-syndicalist alternative to capitalism.Footnote ¹⁵³ An earlier novel in the same series, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), develops an alternative construal of sex and gender and examines the cultural implications. While Le Guin herself recognised and lamented a lingering assumption of heterosexuality in the text,Footnote ¹⁵⁴ her writings helped pioneer a tradition of questioning norms.

Of course, Chambers and the authors that inspire her portray fictional universes populated with other clearly sentient species. It remains a hypothetical scenario for us, but that does not mean there are not lessons to be drawn from the human self-understanding that she depicts. How do we balance an acknowledgement of particularly human capacities that come with attendant responsibility, without inflating our worth compared with other creatures? Elizabeth Johnson articulates the concern well:

Johnson’s diagnosis is reminiscent of White Jnr’s critique. Though White was pessimistic about the potential for science and technology, grounded as they are in Christian attitudes asserting the mastery of humans over nature, to solve ‘disastrous ecologic backlash’, he was not entirely despairing over how theology might shape our view of nature into the future.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ He identifies the Franciscan emphasis on the equality and autonomy of all creatures as a remedy, arguing that a problem of religious origin necessitates a religious solution.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

5.1 What Is Virtual Reality?

Virtual reality (VR) technologies combine hardware, software, and user movement to immerse a user in an imagined space that feels real; that is, the brain is persuaded into thinking it is somewhere else.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Virtual realities can be individual, or shared by multiple users – the collective element leads Matthew Cotton to describe VR as a socio-technical system.Footnote ²⁰⁹

We participate in virtual worlds by assuming an avatar – a digitally embodied representative of ourselves. For some, the avatar is an opportunity to adopt an identity vastly different from how they present in the physical world, whereas others reach for a facsimile. Thus VR allows us to simultaneously become disembodied (our physical bodies fade into the background) and ‘hyper-able-bodied’ through the expansion of our capabilities via avatars.Footnote ²¹⁰

For many, the idea of collective VR immediately conjures up images of the ‘metaverse’. The metaverse remains a somewhat inchoate concept, but is framed as the next evolution of the internet.Footnote ²¹¹ Generally, the metaverse combines VR applications across entertainment, education and business to generate a single virtual context in which all aspects of personal and professional life can be conducted.

It was actually science fiction that gave us the term ‘metaverse’. Neal Stephenson coined it in his 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash to describe the virtual world at the centre of his fictional universe, accessed through personal or public terminals connected to a privately owned network. Stephenson is considered a futurist in his own right, writing near-future science fiction that considers the impact of emerging technologies such as solar geoengineering.Footnote ²¹² One of the earliest ‘metaverses’ developed is the online media platform Second Life, which launched in 2003 and peaked at over a million users a decade later. Second Life encourages pseudoanonymity, with users able to sculpt their own avatars and identities separate from the real world.Footnote ²¹³ Robert Geraci describes Second Life, in the eyes of its users, as ‘the precursor to the digital paradise of Apocalyptic AI’.Footnote ²¹⁴

The idea of the metaverse really entered the mainstream in 2021, many people first becoming aware of the concept when social media giant Facebook rebranded as Meta. Some people have even begun investing in virtual property in the metaverse, without seriously reflecting on the implications of those particular visions of the future for social structures and activities such as governance, education, healthcare, leisure, and relationships.Footnote ²¹⁵

Virtual reality has been heralded for many potential benefits. Cotton offers a helpful overview, which includes training and education applications, as well as therapeutic uses, for example, in psychological treatment for phobias.Footnote ²¹⁶ Research continues to investigate whether VR can increase empathy through provision of immersive experiences from the perspective of another. Studies have shown positive changes in people’s attitudes towards human rights as a result of VR immersion experiences.Footnote ²¹⁷ The jury is still out on whether VR might facilitate empathy towards racial minorities and decrease implicit bias;Footnote ²¹⁸ however, a recent feasibility study found that VR might increase empathy among disability support workers towards their disabled clients.Footnote ²¹⁹

5.2 Virtual Reality and the Body

While VR has been touted for a number of benefits, it is worth considering the implications it has for how we think of human being. VR is essentially a disembodying technology, even if we occupy avatar bodies. How different is it from the radical mind-uploading proposals discussed in Section 3? Like mind-uploading, virtual reality seeks to overcome some of the restrictions of our typical physiology and embodiment (whereas mind-uploading seems to focus more on increasing longevity and cognitive processing capacity, VR often defies bodily constraints such as how fast we can move through space, or the kinds of athletic feats we can accomplish without injury). If VR technology promises an escape from the limitations of a ‘normal’ body, what does that mean for how we understand disabled bodies?

5.3 Engaging Science Fiction on Virtual Reality and Accessibility

The novel Lock In (2014), by John Scalzi, imagines a near future in which a significant proportion of the global population has experienced complete and permanent physical paralysis (Haden’s syndrome) as a result of an incurable virus. Combining various technologies discussed in Section 3, ‘locked in’ individuals (Hadens) are able to access a virtual world (also used widely by individuals not affected by the virus) and control personal robotic transport units in the real world through the use of neural network implants. In many respects, these technologies allow disabled individuals to participate more fully in human life (the sequel features a sport dominated by Haden players, but with many fans who are not Hadens).

Because the technological solutions for Haden’s syndrome are advanced (the novel takes place twenty years after the initial pandemic event), the cultural and political impacts of these interventions are teased out in the novel. There are political debates and legislative proposals around the rolling back of expensive government support for the various accommodations that Hadens currently receive, on the grounds that technology has advanced so far that Haden’s syndrome is no longer functionally a disability. This is explored further in the sequel Head On (Reference Scalzi2020), as the privatisation and commercialisation of industries developing assistive technologies or offering support services increasingly sidelines Hadens without sufficient financial means.

Lock In also directly addresses the complexity of ‘cure’ in the context of disability. One of the individuals living with Hadens raises the issue: ‘Making people change because you can’t deal with who they are isn’t how it’s supposed to be done … You say “cure.” I hear “you’re not human enough”.’Footnote ²²⁰ A cure is being developed for Haden’s syndrome, but not all those with the condition are interested in being cured. In parallels to certain perceived disabilities in our world, Hadens are described as having their own community and culture. In fact, Scalzi’s related novella explicitly compares the tensions within the Haden’s community to the real world deaf community – while some who are deaf see deafness as an impairment they would like to overcome (e.g. by using cochlear implant technology), others see it as an identity marker that gives cohesion to a unique deaf culture with its own language.

5.4 Complicating Technology and Disability

Indeed, the idea of technology as the solution to disability is pervasive. ‘We are inundated with imagery of disabled people overcoming the circumstances of their bodies through technology, which is framed as a kind of technological salvation for bodies and minds.’Footnote ²²¹ Thus writes Ashley Shew in recounting her experience of having a leg amputated, describing how almost everyone she encountered immediately and hopefully (and without prompting) raised the topic of prostheses. When it comes to such aids, technology has tended to be simplistically rendered as enabling crippling disability to be overcome in science fiction imaginings.Footnote ²²²

It is worth noting that technology can sometimes produce disability, rather than mitigate it.Footnote ²²³ Technological aids, from prostheses to VR headsets, cause their own types of pain and exhaustion, but these are often dismissed or downplayed as worthwhile compromises in service of ‘able’ bodies.Footnote ²²⁴ The field of disability studies pushes back against the notion that technology ought to restore physical normality, with Tobin Siebers offering the following description:

How might insights from disability studies shape our thinking about VR? Adan Jerreat-Poole brings a ‘crip technoscience’ lens to their engagement with VR in science fiction, citing Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch’s definition of the ‘politicized practices of non-compliant knowing-making: world-building and world-dismantling practices by and with disabled people and communities that respond to intersectional systems of power, privilege, and oppression by working within and around them’.Footnote ²²⁶ Virtual realities tend to be built around able-bodiedness as the most desirable user position,Footnote ²²⁷ reifying the limitations of the physical spaces we already occupy. Ironically, VR ‘re-centres the physical body’ – the in-game avatar is controlled by out-of-game bodily movements.Footnote ²²⁸ Jerreat-Poole draws heavily on the ‘crip futurity’ framework developed by Allison Kafer in order to crip the technology of the VR game, a process which they describe as ‘repurposing, hacking, and modding futuristic technology in order to explore justice-oriented relationships between the body, technology, and society’.Footnote ²²⁹ Jerreat-Poole imagines an alternative VR game that does not merely accommodate crip bodies, but celebrates them, and concludes their article by sketching out the technology and gamescape that might constitute such an alternative.Footnote ²³⁰

While this section focuses more specifically on virtual reality in relation to disability, there are other science fiction works that explore disability more generally. The short story collection Outlaw Bodies explores from a number of perspectives the ways in which future bodies might be controlled through enhancements and modifications, and some of the implications for gender and sexual identity, and disability.Footnote ²³¹ Ato Quayson takes as his focus the various frames that have been applied to disability in Nobel Prize–winning literature, contending that literature helps to ‘refract these multivalent attitudes towards disability’.Footnote ²³² Kathryn Allan challenges the dominant presentation of technology as cure in an edited volume of essays that explore disability in science fiction.Footnote ²³³ Allan highlights the capacity of science fiction to act as an ‘early warning system’ for the types of futures that can arise out of our current situation, arguing that this positions the genre uniquely to conceive of future possibilities for constructing disability.Footnote ²³⁴

The ‘early warning system’ of science fiction can be amplified by scholarship. Dan Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole draw attention to the way in which many ‘disabled’ people have not been permitted to occupy the position of the ‘modern human subject’.Footnote ²³⁵ Here we might revisit the idea of the cyborg, premised as it is on deconstructing the assumptions about the subject that were central to humanism and modernity. The previous section highlighted Haraway’s cyborgology as a fruitful construct for theological reflection, however it is notably deficient when it comes to disability. Jillian Weise offers a crucial corrective from her own experience of disability, critiquing Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ for its failure to recognise that the cyborg is a real figure already for disabled folks, and not merely a metaphor for a so-called feminist resistance.Footnote ²³⁶ Listening to such critiques, this concluding section aims to centre disability as a key consideration in theological discussions of technology and embodiment.

Though Haraway’s proposal overlooked the fact that those experiencing various disabilities were already depending on technologies in often life-sustaining ways, other scholars have engaged the cyborg more inclusively in relation to disability. Thweatt-Bates’ turn to disability theology was mentioned in the previous section, recognised as a theological trajectory that might trouble traditional notions of embodiment in a posthuman direction. Damien Patrick Williams traces the origins of the cyborg in earlier imaginings about space exploration, and the understanding that the unfamiliar conditions of space will engender experiences akin to the social construction of disability that exists presently in life on earth (and therefore disabled people might be better equipped to adapt).Footnote ²³⁷ ‘Had we maintained disabled people’s stories as a part of the mythology of the cyborg, from the beginning, Western societies might now have a better relationship with concepts of disability and mental health,’ argues Williams.Footnote ²³⁸ In rehabilitating the notion of the cyborg, which has only served to disenfranchise people living with disabilities, Williams draws on intersectionality theory (with parallels to Hamraie and Fritsch’s ‘crip technoscience’) to recognise the particularities of specific disabilities in relation to identity, politics, and technology.

5.5 Economic Access

An intersectional lens brings into focus other forms of marginalisation beyond disability. Scalzi also invites us to consider how a world in which we can interact with others separate from our physical body changes our relationships with traditional classifiers such as gender and race. We never learn the gender of the protagonist Chris, who as a Haden from childhood has never experienced the world in a particularly gendered manner.Footnote ²³⁹ The way that Scalzi is able to do this with subtlety (many readers do not even notice) is particularly effective for later reflection on how embodiment, technology and gender interact.

Scalzi is not the only writer to explore the place of virtual reality technologies and their implications for access and equity. Ernest Cline’s 2011 Ready Player One was a bestseller (with polarising reviews) in which characters from all kinds of backgrounds and personal circumstances were able to compete in a worldwide game set on a virtual reality simulator called the OASIS. The use of avatars disguises players’ real appearance, which is presented as ameliorating discrimination on the basis of gender, youth, and physical disfiguration. For the main character, the OASIS is aptly named, allowing him to escape the discomforts and deprivations of his daily life of near poverty. Cline’s 2020 sequel, Ready Player Two, is perhaps best employed to highlight the downsides of VR – while the neural interface technology introduced in the novel supposedly has benefits such as increasing empathy, Cline’s presentation is less than convincing.

The ambiguity of science fiction is evident here – a particular work can be strong in its representation of some ideas and the imaginary it builds, while falling short in other ways. Most science fiction explorations of virtual reality and metaphors retain economic stratification in the societies they depict (possibly a result of the near-future setting that they often adopt). Neal Stephenson, John Scalzi, and Ernest Cline all imagine virtual worlds in which the sophistication of an individual’s avatar and/or personal spaces within the metaverse is indicative of their wealth and status.

In thinking about the possibilities for VR to engage disability more helpfully, we need to ensure that we are not just swapping one form of exclusion and injustice for another. Even if they are designed in ways that do not privilege able-bodied participants, within the current technological and economic paradigm VR technologies will only be available to those with sufficient wealth. Bringing together virtual reality and disability, a novella by James Tiptree Jr presents a more cautionary tale in which a physically impaired teenage girl is given a ‘dream’ opportunity to control a beautiful (but literally brainless) body and celebrity status, only to become the puppet of powerful corporate interests.Footnote ²⁴⁰

Here, the role of science fiction in critiquing present social realities is crucial. While this volume is mainly concerned with science fiction as a conversation partner for the dialogue between science and theology, we could make the case that this also applies to religion and economics (setting aside the question for now of whether economics is a science). Exponential technological advancement is increasing the wealth gap between the most privileged societies and the least. Technology transfer programs have formed part of public policy solutions, with varying success. The field of development economics is concerned with the economic mechanisms of technology transfer, but politicians and policymakers are generally operating at some distance from ethicists and technologists.

How might speculative fiction provide a shared reference point for some of these disciplines to collaborate? Sociologist Jens Beckert contends that fiction and economics have more in common than most would assume. Both ‘create a reality of their own by making assertions that go beyond the reporting of empirical facts’ and tend to take narrative form.Footnote ²⁴¹ Expectations around economic futures are produced out of uncertainty by economic decision-makers. Imaginaries are at work in both, even if suspension of belief operates differently – we suspend our disbelief in imagined economic futures under the assumption that they will approximate economic reality. There are enough epistemological parallels that they might be productive conversation partners.Footnote ²⁴²

Let us briefly consider what this process of exploring technology transfer in fiction could look like based on its applicability in science and religion studies. Scalzi’s fiction raises the issue of economic disparities in access to VR technology, but the focus remains within a single nation and associated technological environment. To explore technology transfer specifically, we might return to Charles Stross. Stross’ Merchant Prince series centres around ‘The Clan’, a group of families who possess a hereditary capacity for travelling between worlds.Footnote ²⁴³ Bearing striking resemblance to the Mafia in its organisational structure and the degree of control it exerts over its members, The Clan’s power base is located in an alternate history, where Christianity did not take hold, the Industrial Revolution did not occur, and the Eastern seaboard of the landmass known as the United States of America in our world is inhabited by numerous small European principalities. The ‘Gruinmarkt’, their own kingdom, is a typical mediaeval fiefdom in an agrarian economy. The ‘world-walkers’, able to travel between their world and our world, have become extremely wealthy and powerful aristocrats through a combination of efficient communications and transport in the world of the Gruinmarkt and trafficking drugs in the United States.

Early on in the series, the existence of further alternative worlds is discovered. A third alternate history becomes part of the storyline: an industrialised ‘steampunkesque’ world in which the North American continent is the stronghold of the exiled British monarchy (at war with France), social customs are roughly Edwardian, and Levellers are agitating for revolution. While this world is industrial, its technology is pre-WWII in sophistication. For various reasons that need not be discussed so as to avoid spoilers, a small progressive element among the Clan seek refuge in this third timeline, where they establish themselves as part of the post-Revolution ‘New Commonwealth’ and set about a strategic programme of technology transfer to ‘catch up’ with the United States in that domain.

Wealth disparity is exacerbated by technological advances. What does ethical technology transfer look like? Is it the responsibility of governments? Is it only appropriate in the context of aid, or a legitimate business enterprise? All of these are questions that concern development economists, but responses would surely be enriched by the input of scholars from various humanities’ perspectives, as well as technologists.

The discussion around technology transfer in Stross’ series illustrates the various motives operating. First, money. They can amass great personal wealth by trafficking in intellectual property. Second, lifestyle – if they are to make this their new home then they have been accustomed to the luxuries afforded by more developed technologies. Third, power. They are able to exchange their access to technological information for positions of power in the government, which also gives them security. Loyalty for homeland is also a factor at times. Erasmus, born in Timeline 3, is a key revolutionary agent dreaming of a more equitable society. Clan member Miriam grew up in the United States, but sees technology as salvation from subsistence and serfdom for the masses in the Gruinmarkt. And, finally, war, or the avoidance of war, is a motivating factor. ‘World walkers’ having been deemed a terrorist threat in our world, technology transfer contributes to an arms race in which only the threat of ‘mutually ensured destruction’ maintains a fragile peace between timelines.

The series aids reflection on real-world technology transfer by highlighting the differences. The Clan have the benefit of hindsight to inform which technologies they prioritise for transfer and which to avoid altogether. Technology is not value-neutral, and this is made explicit. One of the government agents of the New Commonwealth puts it well: ‘If you choose a technology, you are implicitly accepting the political imperatives that provide the context the technology operates within. If you want railroads, you must accept coal and steel industries, compulsory seizure of land for rights-of-way, standard railway time, and central stations.’Footnote ²⁴⁴

In this fictional account, they also recognise the social context in which technology operates to be even more crucial than the technology itself. Thus, they prioritise contraception and domestic technologies and associated family planning measures to achieve female emancipation and optimise their workforce. In writing their Constitution, they make certain tweaks to human rights language from our timeline in order to prevent liberty from encroaching on egality or fraternity (thus foreclosing the emergence of libertarianism). Having witnessed the abuses of centralised surveillance infrastructure, they are able to transfer information and communication technologies while building in the security structures to prevent a national surveillance system.

Of course, there are further differences. Access to technological information in Stross’ world is completely controlled. In our world, migration and business both muddy the waters – it is not so simple as one party having all the technology and then dictating how it is transferred to another. Nor should it be – the Clan’s approach to social engineering would smack of paternalism if it could be implemented in our world. This just emphasises the importance of postcolonial voices in this conversation – the complex legacy of imperialism and enduring privilege means that ‘wealthy’ nations should not be making these decisions on behalf of ‘poor’ ones.

There are theological resources that support this reimagining of global economics. Kathryn Tanner proposes a theological economics premised on grace that is admirable in many ways,Footnote ²⁴⁵ but has come under criticism for not directly engaging with economic scholarship. Economist Rowena Pecchenino contends that Tanner’s proposal that the current market economy structure can be maintained and redeemed by a substitution of motives (with love of God and neighbour supplanting possession) is based on faulty assumptions – in fact worldly goods are finite and therefore competitive in a way that divine grace is not.Footnote ²⁴⁶

Albino Barrera is a professor of both theology and economics, and presents a more sophisticated interdisciplinary engagement. Transfer schemes are one of the pillars in his call for economic decision-makers to consider their mutual obligations.Footnote ²⁴⁷ He conceives theologically of economic security as a twofold gift that acknowledges human participation in the divine bestowal of gifts but is also realistic about the nature of material goods. He shows a practitioner’s awareness of the various economic and development agencies involved in global economic restructuring.Footnote ²⁴⁸

Questions of equality and access are particularly pertinent in relation to the prospect of human technological enhancement, discussed several times already in this Element. Some transhumanists have presented technological enhancement as a solution to the present inequalities and injustices. Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson, for example, advocate for moral bioenhancement as a moral imperative, on the grounds that our present capacities are insufficient to address the catastrophes (environmental, economic, etc.) of contemporary life.Footnote ²⁴⁹ Others suggest that cognitive enhancement (even restricted to the few privileged elites) will have trickle-down effects in the form of effective global solutions for systemic injustices.Footnote ²⁵⁰

Elaine Graham calls out the lie in such prognostications, predicting that human enhancement technologies are far more likely to increase existing disparities.

As highlighted in the present section, people can be excluded from augmentation technologies for economic reasons, but also on the basis of disability (physical or cognitive). There is a growing body of work reflecting theologically on disability, with Nancy Eiesland’s The Disabled God (Reference Eiesland1994) a significant contribution. Building on liberation and feminist readings, Eiesland argued that the central image of God in the broken body of Christ can properly be construed as a disabled God. Eiesland also writes within a social model of disability, which emphasises the need for accessibility and assistive technologies over cures. To shed light on what it means to think of disability as a social problem, Lennard Davis helpfully distinguishes between impairment and disability: ‘[i]mpairment is the physical fact of lacking an arm or leg. Disability is the social process that turns an impairment into a negative by creating barriers to access.’Footnote ²⁵²

Engaging with fictional depictions of the near future such as Scalzi’s can encourage our theological reflections on disability towards a social model, rather than an ontological one. The parallels to debates around identity and cure with respect to deafness were mentioned earlier; there are similar discussions with respect to conditions such as Down’s syndrome or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Sara Green and Donileen Loseke provide a helpful account of the tensions between social and medical narratives of disability and some of the ways this tension impacts disabled people, their family, and their caregivers.Footnote ²⁵³ The fact that various disability communities are not homogenous when it comes to how they conceive of disability is a reminder of the need to listen intently to those with personal experience (the slogan ‘nothing about us without us’ has been taken up by many people with disabilities to insist upon this inclusion).

Brian Brock approaches the topic of disability through what he terms a ‘theological hermeneutic of experience’, sharing an account of life with his son Adam who he describes as profoundly cognitively disabled.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Brock argues that the wounded body of Christ is God’s attack on our contemporary assumptions regarding disability, revealing the fundamental error of determining some to be ‘able-bodied’ in comparison to others.Footnote ²⁵⁵

The crucified Christ is only part of the Christian narrative, however. Atonement theory is beyond the present scope, but the event of the cross is tied to the resurrection in Christian theology. For those who do hold to a physical resurrection (as discussed in Section 3), an understanding of disability is pertinent when it comes to such eschatological expectations. There are a range of theological perspectives when it comes to the topic of impairment and disability in relation to the anticipated resurrection body.

A theology of bodily resurrection goes hand in hand with the affirmation of matter and bodies as good (contra Gnosticism). The main imagery that guides Christian understanding about the nature of the resurrection body comes from 1 Corinthians 15:35-55, a long passage in which the apostle Paul is attempting to describe the eschatological hope in answer to the question: ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ His response somewhat cryptic:

What do we take the description of the resurrected body – imperishable, glorious, powerful, spiritual – to mean? Does it include the eradication of all disabilities? It did for the majority of early Christian theologians, argues biblical scholar Candida Moss, who outlines how thinkers such as Irenaeus and Augustine linked salvation and the cleansing of sin with the removal of all bodily deformities or impairments through the healing work of Christ.Footnote ²⁵⁶

With the rise of disability theology, however, this is no longer an unchallenged belief. Though the scriptures on the nature of the resurrected body are difficult to interpret, particularly in relation to disability, we look for clues in how the resurrected Christ is described. After the resurrection, Jesus eats and drinks in fellowship. He has recognisable marks from the wounds of the cross, and the disciple Thomas is able to physically touch these wounds. Maja Whitaker considers the nature of these marks, whether they represent ‘persisting wounds’ or ‘healed scars’.Footnote ²⁵⁷ She concludes that these marks ‘may be more than merely a trace or memory of weakness or disability, but rather the substantial embodiment of that weakness and disability in the resurrection body’.Footnote ²⁵⁸ Eiesland reflects on the theological significance of such a position: ‘Resurrection is not about the negation or erasure of our disabled bodies in hopes of perfect images, untouched by physical disability; rather Christ’s resurrection offers hope that our nonconventional, and sometimes difficult, bodies participate fully in the imago Dei …’Footnote ²⁵⁹ Eiesland calls us to interrogate the body practices of the church, especially the Eucharist, to ensure that people with disabilities have full access to these ordinary practices (without the focus being on how disability necessitates modification).Footnote ²⁶⁰

Fictional explorations of virtual reality and neural interfaces also return us to realities of embodiment and difference. In the final Wayfarers book, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (2021), Chambers introduces ‘sims’ – simulated environments for virtual reality immersion. One of the characters designs sims and acknowledges the way they need to be tailored to the nervous system of the individual player. Their very design depends upon a standard bodily configuration – Chambers makes the point in relation to a marginalised species that was never mapped for sim software, but the point also hits home in relation to different and disabled human bodies.

5.6 What Is Flourishing?

Ultimately, engagements with technological augmentation and AI are underpinned by assumptions about what makes for a life well lived. Why do we seek ‘cures’ for disability (prioritising this over improving access)? What do we hope AI will achieve for us?

The science fiction examples discussed in this section are able to inspire our theological imaginations in some places, and critique them in others. Initially, the portrayal of personal robotic devices in Scalzi’s work appears to be a valuable technological achievement. But reading this alongside first-hand accounts of people’s lived experiences with amputation or paralysis, we are able to discern the technoableism inherent in such visions of the future. We can question why disabled individuals need to assume upright and bipedal stances in order to navigate the physical environment they share with able-bodied folks. At one point, the Haden protagonist Chris declines to use a wheelchair to compensate for a faulty personal transport unit, sourcing an expensive replacement rather than presenting physically as disabled in any way. As a wealthy Haden, Chris does not really experience disability or identify as disabled – the advantages of their mobility options and capabilities are emphasised and they mostly seek to be independent of any limitations posed by their biological body.Footnote ²⁶¹ The fictional scenario invites us to make comparisons with disability support infrastructure and funding, and the way they are often politicised in our present world.

Siebers argues that disability ‘often comes to stand for the precariousness of the human condition, for the fact that individual human beings are susceptible to change, decline over time, and die’.Footnote ²⁶² This picture of human being is antithetical to the transhumanist endeavour, and thus disability accounts are vital in countering these particular visions of the technological future. While some within the disability community see ‘enhancement’ as a positive, others see it as an unwarranted and unnecessary solution.Footnote ²⁶³ Many with lived experiences of specific conditions that biotechnology is aimed at eliminating testify to the value of their ‘impairments’, and contend that overall human experience would be impoverished without these unique experiences.

To see technology as cure is a failure of imagination. According to Jerreat-Poole, we ought to be ‘imagining uses for technology other than those animated by colonial capitalist science fiction, turning away from war, policing, productivity, and athleticism, and toward mutual care, rest, community, and collectivity’.Footnote ²⁶⁴ In an extended quote, they help us tie together the posthumanist emphases of the last section with the ethical imperatives of the present section’s exploration of disability and technology:

The imperative to create technology based on care is an immediate one. Much of the hype we have seen throughout the past few years over generative AI, whether awe-induced or anxiety-driven, has distracted us from the human labour and exploitation inherent in its history and ongoing development.Footnote ²⁶⁶ We must not allow fear or excitement over technological possibilities to prevent us from advocating for justice and equality in the here and now. Greta Byrum and Ruha Benjamin call out the ‘gospel of tech solutionism’, reminding us that technology on its own is not the answer to social problems. Reimagining a future with technology requires significant input from the margins if it is to genuinely address any of the issues discussed in this section, rather than merely reinforcing the status quo.Footnote ²⁶⁷

We also need to think about the contexts in which action can be effective. The internet is a great connector, and has been an immense boon to many in finding groups for support, validation, and motivation. Nevertheless, Philip Butler warns against the ‘sedating quality’ that virtual spaces can have, a perception-distorting effect whereby ‘people think their virtual social actions make concrete systemic change’.Footnote ²⁶⁸ Whatever form it might take, the metaverse cannot be allowed to facilitate escapism, or the equivalent of hashtag activism.Footnote ²⁶⁹ ‘Users frequently and willingly secede the luxuries of privacy, autonomy, and personal environmental awareness in order to adhere to technology’s hyper-engaging allure.’Footnote ²⁷⁰ Alternatively, we are duped into believing that if we only consume the right products, we are working to solve problems that in reality are systemic (thus cannot be addressed through individual action alone).Footnote ²⁷¹

The cripping of technology and the reimagining of a technological future that genuinely challenges the status quo is a theological task, one that substantially depends on where we locate flourishing. Together with Michael Burdett, I have elsewhere used the contrasting foci of creaturehood and deification to position some of the visions of human flourishing operating within transhumanist, secular humanist, and critical posthumanist approaches to human technological enhancement (as well as within certain theological responses).Footnote ²⁷² We propose a theological anthropology summed up by the phrase ‘creatures bound for glory’ to restore a theological horizon (i.e. transcendence) to a critical posthumanist framework (as called for by Graham).Footnote ²⁷³ From a theological perspective, this makes it possible to celebrate embodiment and creaturely malleability in all the forms it takes and will take (without the need for technological cures), to grapple with technological augmentation on a case-by-case basis (neither prohibition nor imperative exists), and to retain an eschatological perspective that nevertheless hopes for redemption beyond the dimensions of our present creaturely existence.

6.1 Real-World Pathways to Fictional Utopias

What does it look like in practice to ‘stay with the trouble of damaged worlds’ while working towards their betterment? While science fiction can inspire us with the kinds of futures it imagines, we are left with the more pragmatic challenge of how to bring those futures to pass. This is a critique often levelled at more utopian fictional works such as Chambers – they present a world that is unattainable, or at least they do not provide us with the steps to realise it.

This applies to most, if not all, visions of the future, regardless of how appealing they might be. As Boss puts it: ‘Techno-utopian visions, whether of the ecomodernist sort or the cybernetic variety, often fail to take seriously the interim phase in which technologies of transformation are dependent upon uneven and unequal regimes and resources.’Footnote ²⁷⁵ ‘You can’t get there from here’ is an idiom most often used in the context of giving directions to physical destinations that are difficult to reach from a current location, but it often feels true of the technofuturist visions we encounter in both science fiction and reality.

Sarah McFarland Taylor asks a similar question in relation to the ‘restorying’ of the world. It is all well and good, she argues, to say that we need a new story (here she is mainly referring to David Korten’s contrasting of the ‘sacred money and markets story’ with the ‘sacred life and living earth story’).Footnote ²⁷⁶ But how do stories get changed, and is it even possible to have a shared cultural story any more?Footnote ²⁷⁷

This question notwithstanding, McFarland Taylor explores the ways in which mediated popular culture (e.g. the depiction of the ecocity Wakanda in Marvel’s Black Panther film) can shape real-world environmental initiatives.Footnote ²⁷⁸ It is a challenge, however, to bring about a ‘reorientation of environmental messaging away from the notion that every tiny act counts and toward an unapologetic emphasis on broad-scale policy enactments and serious public investment’.Footnote ²⁷⁹ There is a real risk that popular narratives of activism can be redirected towards consumer behaviour panaceas, rather than be allowed to instigate structural change. In reading science fiction and discussing the implications for a theological imagination, we must ensure this does not remain an individual and private dream, but fuels collective action.

Nevertheless, Haraway envisions science fiction (among other SFs) as a critical source for the restorative project of healing a damaged world at the heart of The Camille Stories. At the same time, she does not retreat into a simplistic account of stories transforming the world merely by being shared. How might science fiction keep politics alive, and block the foreclosure of utopias, as she recounts in this fictional scenario?

A reframing of the way that we conceive of utopia might assist us with this task, and reconcile Haraway’s exhortations against salvation narratives with a more hopeful outlook. Kim Stanley Robinson, another science fiction writer, defines utopia in the oft-cited lines: ‘Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.’Footnote ²⁸⁰ In other words, ‘stay with the trouble’. If utopia is a process, not a final state, then we do not run the risk of foreclosing it by cementing a particular vision in place and holding it exclusively as the goal.

Such indeterminacy can make the struggle all the more difficult. When contemplating the various ills of the world we live in, and the ever encroaching crises (environmental, social, technological), despair can be a tempting way out. But as Rebecca Solnit reminds us, despair is a luxury, a response that can only belong to those cushioned from the immediate effects of climate change.Footnote ²⁸¹ Instead, Solnit describes hope as the opposite of not only despair, defeatism, cynicism, or pessimism, but also optimism.Footnote ²⁸²

Indeed, hope is central to a theological reflection on all the issues raised in this Element. A robust theological framework will also eschew the kind of retreat from the world that despair so often invokes. Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart remind us that ‘Christian hope is neither promethean nor quietist. It neither attempts what can only come from God nor neglects what is humanly possible’.Footnote ²⁸³

Science fiction is valuable input for the Christian imagination, giving texture to hope even if it cannot itself implement the kinds of changes needed to realise the alternative worlds it projects. Jerreat-Poole describes how they look ‘to science fiction and pop culture as sites to do this critical dreaming’ on how augmentation technologies might be used to enact a more feminist and ethical politics into the future.Footnote ²⁸⁴

In effect, this is what it means to ‘stay with the trouble’ as theologians and scholars. Story may not be everything, but it is nevertheless the medium that theologians and philosophers work with. Not quite in the sense that Haraway envisions, perhaps, as a Christian hope does look to divine salvation after all. But also not in a way that belies the urgency of acting in the present.

At the very least, we must ensure that our theological frameworks do not discourage the kind of initiatives required to enact real world change. N.T. Wright admits that he does not know exactly how the present and new creation are related (the new creation is at the same time continuous and discontinuous with the present, but how exactly is beyond our knowledge). He assures us with conviction, however that working to heal the present world is building the kingdom of God. ‘What you do in the present – by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbour as yourself – all these things will last into God’s future.’Footnote ²⁸⁵

Drawing inspiration from the imagined worlds constructed by authors of science fiction (whom Christina Bieber Lake designates as ‘prophets of the posthuman’),Footnote ²⁸⁶ a theological approach to human being in relation to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and mind-uploading can sustain hope without foreclosing utopia. It may be enriched by posthumanist scholarship and disability theory inflected in explicitly theological interpretations to ensure that the future is not imagined for the edification of a narrow slice of humanity. It might incorporate a deep incarnational perspective that does not privilege human uniqueness in determining what future flourishing could look like.

This Element remains a theoretical work, rather than a political manifesto or action plan. By and large, theologians are not the ones doing the practical work of healing a damaged world. Most of us are not developing and implementing technologies, or writing policy and passing legislation, or providing essential services to those laid low by exploitative practices, war, or natural disaster. But many of us are engaged in the kind of theological reflection that (hopefully) trickles down from academic symposia and outputs into textbooks and pulpits, and influences those who minister to and teach and care for many more. Let us not think of our contribution more highly than we ought.

So I conclude on a rather ambivalent note, fitting given the tensions inherent to staying with the trouble. Yes, the imaginings that shape our theological understanding and convictions matter, and we do well to read widely and draw on science fiction in our reflection around the future of creation with technology. No, a good story is not enough on its own to bring about the degree of healing required, especially if that story envisions a utopia installed by wiping the slate clean. We are responsible to act as well as to imagine. We do both out of hope.