| Immortality on Earth? Transhumanism through | ||||||||||
| Islamic Lenses | ||||||||||
| بِسْمِِ اللِِ الرَّحْمٰنِِ الرَّحِيْمِِ | ||||||||||
| Introduction | ||||||||||
| In 1965, an American scientist by the name of Gordon Moore made a relatively specific prediction about the number of transistors within a dense integrated circuit that would go on to become an accurate projection of technological change as a whole. Moore predicted that the number of transistors within such circuits would double approximately every year. | ||||||||||
| This prediction of exponential growth turned out to be descriptive of much more than mere transistor populations within circuits. Scientific discovery, and consequent developments in technology, are now widely accepted as growing exponentially, | ||||||||||
| exhibiting | acceleration. | |||||||||
| This growth has brought with it a pushing of boundaries at an unprecedented speed. Writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke (d. 2008) famously commented that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” | ||||||||||
| Indeed, we appear to be on the verge of witnessing nanotechnological interventions that would have mere decades ago been the stuff of science fiction. Transhumanism is a term coined by British biologist Julian Huxley (d. 1975), | ||||||||||
| brother of renowned novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley (d. 1963), that now refers to the process of improving the quality and length of human life by way of biotechnological interventions, including but not limited to, nanotechnology, | ||||||||||
| cybernetics, pharmacological and gene therapies | . While transhumanists herald this as | |||||||||
| the beginning of perhaps the greatest chapter in human history, those opposed to | ||||||||||
| transhumanism are warning that all that proverbially glitters is not necessarily gold. | ||||||||||
| Some scholars, both Islamic and non-Islamic, have suggested that the propagation of transhumanism presents one of the greatest challenges to humanity brought about by modernity. To use human discovery to alter humankind, at as fundamental a level as proposed by transhumanism, provokes numerous profound questions related to theology, philosophy, biology, psychology, and of course, ethics. What is interesting, and might be seen as setting the tone for this discussion, is one of the key points taken from the story of Adam in the Quran. He is misled by the devil, in part by the promise | ||||||||||
that eating from the forbidden tree will grant him immortality (Quran 7:20); immortality is very much a part of the transhumanist agenda. This paper attempts to grapple with some of the most significant issues raised by transhumanism that will need to be addressed by Muslims. The main question is: what are the challenges inherent in attempting to reconcile Islam with transhumanism?
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