Nicolò Cobianchi, M.A.

PhD Project

The Technological Eschaton: How Transhumanism Appropriated Christianity's Promise of Immortality

This PhD project investigates how transhumanism and techno-optimist discourse have appropriated the role once reserved for traditional religions, and for Christianity in particular: the promise to defeat death. For years, transhumanist thinkers such as Ray Kurzweil, Max More and Nick Bostrom have prophesied the imminent advent of a posthuman age, in which humans merge with the machine, transcend their bodies of flesh and engineer their own evolution. Tech leaders such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel echo these promises of limitless abundance in the public sphere.

The fear of death has always been the central concern around which religions have taken shape. The dissertation argues that transhumanism is the most recent answer to this fear, and the latest step in the dismantling of European metaphysics and in the gnostic immanentisation of the Christian eschaton (Voegelin). Into the void left by God stepped technology, which had become the dominant mode of revealing (Heidegger) and, with it, an ontology, an ideology and a language. Technology thus inherited the salvific, or destructive, role that had belonged to the divine.

Transhumanism becomes the technological religion of our age not only by answering the fear of death and reproducing Christian eschatological patterns, but also by moralising technological development, creating forms of ritual centred on biological optimisation, and casting tech leaders as infallible prophets and self-appointed restrainers of technological chaos.