Abstract

This dissertation explores the perennial link between religion and technology in Western culture. Specifically, I focus on a subset of transhumanism, known as Singularitarianism, as a modern representation of the historically close relationship between technology and religion in the West. To provide a genealogy of Singularitarianism, and the transhumanist movement out of which it emerged, I trace the history of Western techno-religious culture from Latin Christendom, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all the way to modern transhumanism. Modern transhumanism is the result of this philosophical framework combined with rapidly accelerating technology, resulting in the belief that humans should control their own material and spiritual evolution through technology. Today, the rapid advance of advanced technology is seen as capable of realizing the promises traditionally satisfied through traditional theistic religion in the West. In exploring these dynamics, I make the argument that religion adapts to technology at an ontological level. For the purposes of gaining insight to the fundamental question concerning what it means to be human in an age of technology, Singularitarianism serves as an example of how our technology facilitates ultimate concern by addressing the challenges of meaning in an age of accelerating change, and reveals where religion is going in the future. This represents, in the language of Charles Taylor, a kind of re-enchantment of the West.