“There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion:  ‘The religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach.’  It is false; it is the opposite of the fact.  The religions of the earth do not differ greatly in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach.”

-- G.K. Chesterton, Othodoxy

When Rome burned under Nero, the cry was "The Christians must have set the fires."  This time it is our Rome that is burning.  But this time the cry is, "The Christians are trying to drown us."

As in the days of Babylon on the plain of Shinar, men have begun to murmur among themselves, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.”

One version of the dream envisions adjusting people to their particular lots in life in order to “enhance” their performance and satisfaction.  We could have soldiers who don’t need to sleep, file clerks who never get bored, laborers who never go on strike, miners who prefer the heat and dark, abortionists who don’t have bad dreams.

In another, more egalitarian version, everyone is re-engineered the same way (except perhaps the engineers), so that life is more to our liking.  Everyone could live forever, even if this meant putting an end to children, a point Europe has almost reached anyway.  No one need ever become depressed, even if he had something he ought to be depressed about.  No one need ever suffer pangs of conscience, no matter what he had done.  No one need ever go mad from not knowing the meaning of his life, for our minds could be readjusted so we thought we knew already, or just didn’t need to know.

I don’t think the Church is ready to answer the prophets of Shinar, whom I imagine arguing something like this:

“You say freedom lies not in denying but in following our nature -- in humanizing ourselves, becoming more what God had in mind, fulfilling our inbuilt potentialities, our “immanent intelligibility.”  Very well, we concede -- so it does!  But what you call a human being is just a sophisticated mechanism; what you call its nature is its operating system; what you call its subjectivity or consciousness is its executive  function; what you call its immanent intelligibility is the objectives built into its program; and what you call desires are their internal representations.  Fulfilling our immanent intelligibility can therefore mean nothing more than becoming more successful in attaining what our programming leads us most strongly and persistently to desire.

“What then is this longest, strongest desire?  Preeminently, the increase of our power, or the power of our descendants, with whom we are programmed to identify.  If so, then to act on this desire simply is to act freely, simply is to follow nature, simply is to humanize ourselves.   Suppose the greatest step we could take to increase the power of our descendants were to make them something different than we are -- to free them from human limitations.

“You might say that by taking such a step, we would not humanize ourselves but only abolish humanity.  Say rather that in this case, the highest expression of our freedom is also its terminal expression -- that abolishing humanity is the most humanizing act we can perform.  What parent would not sacrifice himself for his children?

“You say that even if we expressed our own freedom by reinventing humanity, we would destroy the freedom of our descendants -- we would be turning them into artifacts, treating them as things.  Perhaps you imagine them complaining that they didn’t ask to be transhuman!  But I notice that you don’t level the same accusation against the Creator, for after all, we didn’t ask to be human.  Well, our descendants haven’t asked to be human either.  Why should we force them to be?

“You say that created nature isn’t a limitation on our freedom, but the divine gift that makes freedom possible.  So be it!  Then we will be as gods to them -- dying gods, burdened with our sins -- and their reinvented nature will be the gift from us that makes their freedom possible.   There are no two ways about it.  If our freedom is following our nature, then their freedom is following theirs.  To go with their new nature, they will simply have a new freedom.  And wouldn’t it be a lot more fun?”

Dialogue with transhumanists -- and make no mistake, there will have to  be dialogue with transhumanists -- will require considerably more philosophical equipment than we presently possess, and will require it at several different levels.

At the level of discursive reason, the metaphysics lesson must be prolonged.  The differences between substances and mechanisms, between natures and programs, between the immanent intelligibility of our nature and what we strongly want, these things and others must be made more clear, clear to people who are not philosophers, or the dialogue will go nowhere.  The whole ontology of modernity must be called into question, a stupendously formidable task.

At the level of simple insight, the power of the mind by which it sees what it understands, the matters we are discoursing about must be brought closer to the eye, made accessible to intuition.  One thing that needs to be seen before it can be understood is the sheer horror of the transhumanist ambition.  The danger is not that proponents of this ideology could achieve what they desire, but that they might ruin humanity by trying.

An even more important thing to be seen, or at least to be glimpsed, is divine transcendence.  If we think that just because secular people are afraid of God, they must not long to see Him, we are mistaken.  Under every disguise – and transhumanism is such a disguise -- that desire remains real and powerful, and must be offered the hope of satisfaction.

Statistics can so easily be manipulated to give misleading impressions that a famous little book is titled How to Lie With Statistics.  The author wrote it in 1954.  My economics professor assigned it in 1971.  It’s still in print.

Such cautions and warnings are all to the good.  It’s as easy to sucker people with statistics today as it ever was.  But many people, having learned that they can be fooled, refuse to accept any statistics whatsoever.  They assume that all statistics are lies.  Students diligently write down the numbers their teachers feed them, just in case they’re on the exam.  But many go on believing what they want to believe.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad if what they wanted to believe were guided by common sense.  But college in our day tends to be a destroyer of common sense, so all too often it’s coupled with epistemological relativism.  If what’s true for you may be false for me, why then, a lie for you may be honest for me.

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways, while to succeed is possible only in one way.  – Aristotle.

According to moral realists, like me, the sentence, “Murder is wrong,” means that murder, in fact, is wrong.  Such sentences are capable of being either true or false; this one happens to be true.   It describes the actual moral quality of murder, a property which belongs to the act irrespective of what any of us think, feel, or say about the matter.  If I say “Murder is right,” murder is still wrong.

In everyday speech we tend to use the term “relativism” as a catch-all for a variety of views which are actually somewhat different.  What they have in common is that they reject moral realism.  But they go off the rails for different reasons.

The three most common kinds of moral anti-realism are relativism in the strict sense of the term, subjectivism, and non-cognitivism.  To the relativist in the strict sense, the sentence “Murder is wrong” means that murder is wrong in relation to the speaker.  Such sentences may be true for one person or group, he thinks, but false for another.  Maybe murder isn’t wrong for, say, assassins.

To the subjectivist, the sentence “Murder is wrong” may seem to tell us something about murder, but in fact it only tells us something about the speaker.  One well known variety of subjectivism holds that what it tells us about the speaker is his feelings about murder – perhaps something like, “I dislike it, and I want you to dislike it too.”  If the subjectivist says that such sentences are capable of being true or false – and he may not -- at best he means that they might be either correct or incorrect descriptions of the speaker’s emotions.  “It’s all about you.”

To the non-cognitivist, although the utterance “Murder is wrong” has the grammatical form of a sentence, it does not actually express a proposition at all.  Consequently it is no more capable of being true or false than an utterance like “Whoops,” “blimey,” or “I’ll be dog-goned.”