Human Flourishing in a Technological World: A Theological Perspective. Edited by JensZimmermann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. 356. £82.98.

Where is the locus of mystery in the world? In a disenchanted world, humans find the mysterious and meaningful primarily in ourselves. We may never have been the strongest or fastest creatures on earth. Our dominance over craft succumbed to machines during the Industrial Revolution, but we were confident in our place as the most intelligent of creatures on the face of the earth. Recent advances in artificial intelligence challenge this long held dominance and sense of the human place in the world. Is this story of technological eclipse of the human true? At best, it's incomplete. As contributors to Human Flourishing in a Technological World argue, the technological challenge to human flourishing stretches back to the mechanistic philosophical anthropology that long predates modern computers. Though AI does raise genuinely new questions, it also, perhaps even primarily, raises old questions of human identity and goods with new urgency. Human Flourishing in a Technological World is a collection of essays arising from a three-year research project of the same name. Most contributors proceed from ‘a theological perspective’, as promised by the subtitle, in dialogue with a variety of other disciplines. The theological perspective is set against a technologically redefined anthropology represented by transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom. The volume is broken into three sections: historical/philosophical, practical, and ‘demystifying’. Given its breath, I will limit myself to commenting on select chapters within each section. The first section offers various analyses of what is lost or denied within a technological paradigm. Ashley John Moyse articulates and criticises what he takes to be the anti-humanism implicit in the technological way of life, which makes us ‘into inhuman humans’ (p. 69). Whether explicitly in transhumanist discourse or implicitly in youth culture, technological discourse is aimed at overcoming rather than enhancing humanity. Moyse traces this to ‘a Baconian spirt’ of overcoming human nature through the will as enabled by technology. In a theological register, this techno-mastery over nature is Pelagian or Promethean. The move away from the human is equally a move away from God. Hope in a redeemed humanity through Christ is replaced by techno-libertarian hope in unlimited capacity to dominate and manipulate nature. Following Donald MacKinnon, Moyse argues that Christ's humble entry into humanity is the means of overcoming the hubris of the Baconian spirit. Jens Zimmermann critiques the technological paradigm though Husserl's distinction between the lifeworld and the objective world. Zimmermann lays much of the blame for technologised anthropology on Descartes's dualism. The Cartesian soul is discarded, but his mechanical conception of the human body is not only retained but expanded. This Cartesian mechanism is a precursor to Richard Dawkins's conception of life as merely information and to Kurzweil's understanding of the brain as a pattern recognition machine. Zimmermann counters reductive, mechanistic understandings of the human person with the human person as imago Dei. In Zimmermann's reading, Christian anthropology, properly understood, affirms a creative, embodied personhood. Personhood in the image of God is not constrained by nature but opens itself to freedom in communion with other persons. Unlike the reductive, mechanical conception of person, the Christian conception of person rests on a fundamental mystery of the person. Viewed from the lifeworld of the Christian person, the transhumanist vision is one of abdicated freedom and algorithmic sameness. John Behr finds the same vexing questions raised by AI as far back as Homer's Odyssey. The goddess Calypso offers Odysseus the chance to escape his humanity in all its contingency. He is offered a god-like life with Calypso, or a human life of joy, pain, and above all contingency with Penelope. Odysseus chooses to remain human. For Homer, only in an uncertain life can one grow in virtue and be properly human. Few are given as stark a choice as Odysseus but smaller choices along similar lines have become common. Behr argues that in the medicalisation and consumerisation of our bodies, humans attempt a life with Calypso that denies the body, rendering it ‘plastic’ rather than flesh. Christianity offers an alternative post-humanity of the incarnation and resurrection. Though the effecting example of Blandina, a second-century slave and martyr described by St Irenaeus, Behr argues that the Christian move beyond the human is through the vulnerability of the human, not despite it. The second section moves from theological and philosophical anthropology to practical implications of the various positions at play. Through her consideration of the de-extinction of species, Celia Deane-Drummond brings the long history of human social development into dialogue with Aristotle and Aquinas's distinction between making through art or technology and acting through practical wisdom. Contrary to many interpretations of Aristotle, making is not value neutral. As humans develop tools, for example tools allowing for stable agriculture, the works of human art change our humanity and what constitutes flourishing. The capacity for reflective philosophical, theological, and scientific writing arises in part out of technological progress. Here Deane-Drummond deploys a further Thomistic distinction—practical reason considers the means of acquiring goods versus wisdom, which considers the goods themselves. The debate around the moral use of technology is fraught because the relationship between the practical and theoretical reason is fraught. Deane-Drummond argues that the practical reason/ wisdom distinction maps onto the nature/grace distinction. Technology as a mode of natural achievement and practical wisdom ought to be evaluated by its openness to grace. Technology can be ‘a way of cooperating with the divine’ (p. 173). The difficulty is determining which technology is open to such cooperation. The third section is unlike the previous two in both style and content. It consists of a lecture by the celebrated computer scientist, Jaron Lanier, and the subsequent exchange between Lanier and project participants. Lanier's paper subverts recent technological narratives by attempting to de-mystify technology and re-mystify human beings. Those familiar with Lanier's work will be unsurprised by the line of argument—for decades he has been a humanist technologist. His is a reverential humanism such that Lanier is loath to define the human person. He happy to describe disanalogies between humans and computers. Lanier's argument is mixed with his own personal history with the luminaries of modern computing, most notably Marvin Minsky. In Lanier's version of this history, technology has been developed and deployed in ways that either enhance or obscure human agency. Human beings are not merely pattern matching machines destined to be surpassed, in short order, by our silicon functional equivalents. Technological development is not destiny but a series of human choices. We may choose to develop technology to serve human beings or undermine ourselves, but, crucially, it is a collective human choice. The volume's expansive focus on human flourishing and technology is both a virtue and a vice. Negatively, the foci, methodology, and style of the fifteen contributions are distractingly varied despite their generally theological orientation. So too the quality of the contributions is uneven. Positively, the collection highlights the discipline and context-spanning implications of technological advance, particularly the recent advances in AI. In a rapidly changing field, an expansive vision helps avoid neglecting what might turn out to be vital.