Chapter 18: The Debunker Synthesis: Join or Die

In which I finally get to the point of this whole book

This is the eighteenth chapter of a book that currently has the working title Cataspectral. You can find the introduction and table of contents here.

The Debunker Synthesis

Physicalism must either adapt or die. Well, probably not die, but be subordinated to a new orthodoxy that will emerge from the antimodernist coalition, in which the Bunker Synthesis, appropriating the brand of moribund mainstream Christianity, will be used to advance the policy preferences of oligarchs, racists and theocrats. Imagine MAHA (that is, RFK Jr.’s hostile takeover of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) but replicated across every academic and professional institution in (at least) the United States. Harvard forced to teach creationism? NASA run by a flat-Earther? This is not acceptable. To avoid this outcome, I suggest that physicalists try and beat the antimodernists at their own game. The decline of mainstream Christianity can be an opportunity for physicalists as much as for oligarchs, cranks and racists. The answer is to create a new cataspect for Debunkers by merging Christianity with physicalism and its associated cataspects: a Debunker Synthesis. Against the neo-Hermetic, ethnotheistic, Dark-Enlightenment-style Christianity of the Bunker Synthesis, we should be promoting its physicalist, skeptical, ecological and transhumanist flipside.

People are often attracted to the Bunker Synthesis because they experience science either as irrelevant to sacredness and consolation or as actively hostile to them. Depending on the beliefs from which such Bunkers have constructed their cataspects, this may or may not be true. If a 6,000-year-old universe is integral to your sense of sacredness, you’re out of luck. But, in many other cases, those who adopt the Bunker Synthesis might otherwise have been comfortable with physicalism, if not for their misunderstandings as to what physicalism requires. In attempting to avert the nightmare scenario of a Bunker Synthesis orthodoxy, physicalism should do what it can to convince these edge-case open Bunkers that being a physicalist really isn’t so bad. I think a Debunker Synthesis could be more attractive to such people than the Bunker Synthesis, since they tend to value truth, reasonableness and skepticism, all of which the Debunker side of the divide has in spades. The only thing they need is to be convinced that physicalism doesn’t mean nihilism and hopelessness, and that they won’t be derided or condescended to by other physicalists.

I was raised in a devout Protestant family, attending a Methodist church but largely breathing an atmosphere of nondenominational evangelicalism. My college admissions essay was about C.S. Lewis, whom I still respect greatly, and I spent long teenage nights agonizing over evolution and premarital sex. I once threw a copy of A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester (assigned for summer reading before my freshman year of high school) against a wall because it painted the medieval church as a den of perfidy – shows what little I knew of my own Protestant forebears. I grew up during the height of the New Atheist phenomenon, of which my best friend’s family were strong partisans. I recall being revolted at the sight of a DVD copy of Bill Maher’s Religulous sitting on their coffee table. To combat this infidel influence, my mother put me on apologetics literature from an early age, beginning with Lee Strobel’s kid versions of The Case Christ and The Case for Faith before moving on to The Reason for God by Timothy Keller and, of course, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Both the New Atheists and the apologists confirmed my fears: if science was right, the world was nothing but a brutal, empty machine. Former Nixon Administration lawyer Charles Colson, whose How Now Shall We Live? was one of my favorites, wrote for instance that “there is no escape from the dreadful realization that a world without God can end only in despair.”¹ According to philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, “If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed… the life we have is without ultimate significance, value or purpose.”² Richard Dawkins seemed largely to agree: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”³

For this younger me, science appeared intrinsically tied to nihilism and hopelessness. As I learned more about science, I wasn’t necessarily disabused of this suspicion, though I increasingly couldn’t deny the truths science delivered. I found that secular humanism wasn’t convincing enough as a source of meaning, let alone consolation, to ease my discomfort. It seemed to me to rest on an existentialist-style leap of faith, a choice to live as though the free development of the human person (as conceptualized by modern Western thinkers since the Enlightenment) were inherently sacred, even though such a conviction didn’t appear to be grounded in evolution, physics or anything else objective. A leap of faith can make sense if an answer is unknown and is likely never to be known, but it was beginning to seem like science had definitively closed the question, or as the philosopher Alex Rosenberg puts it, “In a world where physics fixes all the facts, it’s hard to see how there could be room for moral facts. In a universe headed for its own heat death, there is no cosmic value to human life, your own or anyone else’s.”⁴ As I saw it, the most basic description of reality was a bunch of tiny particles bumping into each other or waves interacting in the void – a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I spent my early twenties as a reluctant, depressed agnostic, tempted always by the prospect that I might be able somehow to bury my doubts and force myself to believe in something more. I think that many of the open Bunkers on the edge of accepting physicalism feel similarly. As I said, many people are attracted to the Bunker Synthesis out of fear that accepting physicalism will evacuate their lives of sacredness and leave them with no comfort in the face of mortality. The risk associated with this dynamic should not be underestimated: once you decide to repress your skeptical mind for the sake of your cataspect, you leave yourself vulnerable to other ideologies you otherwise would rightly see as depraved. It is important that physicalists take this seriously and do what they can to preempt it.

For the Debunker Synthesis to work, physicalists will have to respect it as a project, and not just in the way many well-meaning Debunkers currently “respect” theists by condescending to them out of politeness. In other words, physicalism must move past the sort of attitude taken by Christopher Hitchens: “I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head.”⁵ Instead, physicalists should treat Christians of the Debunker Synthesis the way they treat “Western” Buddhists of the Robert Wright variety. In fact, this really is what the Debunker Synthesis means to achieve: a similar type of Christianity that can gain wide adherence and acceptance among Debunkers, and that can draw in Bunkers in part due to its academic legitimation of a cataspect toward which they may already feel an attraction. Of course, the Debunker Synthesis will have to earn that respect, and I will try to show below how at least one version of it might do so.

It will become apparent below that the logic of the Debunker Synthesis could easily work for any theistic cataspect. Perhaps a kind of pluralistic Debunker Synthesis in which each tradition exists in dialogue with the others will eventuate. In fact, I think such an interfaith system united by a common metaphysical outlook will be significantly more successful than one including Christianity alone. I only focus on the importance of specifically bringing Christianity into the zone of physicalist respectability because, for the historical and political reasons discussed above, Christianity happens to be the battleground on which the future orthodoxy of our society may be decided.

There are two cataspects that have rivaled secular humanism to some degree as the preferred cataspect for physicalists, though they have not come close to supplanting it: nature religion and singularitarianism. Both have been somewhat more popular among scientists than humanists, especially singularitarianism. This is perhaps not surprising, since secular humanism has come to seem somewhat unconvincing for scientists who study the building blocks of reality or the vast sidereal wastes, zoomed so far down or out that the idea of “personhood” seems hopelessly parochial. Both maintain some capacity for lensing outward, more so in the case of nature religion, but their strengths certainly lie more in the inward direction, in keeping with the distant objectivity of science as an enterprise. The Debunker Synthesis will involve elements of each of these, as well as a broad alliance with the values of secular humanism.

Nature Religion

In his 1992 masterpiece Ishmael, Daniel Quinn relates the unlikely story of an eloquent gorilla playing Socrates to an average schmo, leading him from the cave of human supremacist ideology to the sunny uplands of ecological balance. In one memorable exchange, Ishmael the gorilla explains the true origins of the Adam and Eve myth. Adam, the cultural ancestor of all imperialistic agriculturalists, was seen by the Semitic herders as having been cursed by God to till the soil by the sweat of his brow, convinced as they were that no sane person would choose the agricultural life over that of the hunter-gatherer or herder. Later, Quinn has Ishmael refer to the sociologist Marshall Sahlins’s classic paper The Original Affluent Society, which argued that hunter-gatherers had a more economically efficient lifestyle than modern humans. With only a few hours’ work per day, every member of a tribe could expect a nutritious diet, shelter, clothing, medical care and community, all of which require much more labor nowadays, even if one is among the minority lucky enough to be in a position to obtain such goods. The moral of Quinn’s story is that mankind has deviated from the balance of nature, ignoring the iron law of carrying capacity. If we keep on our present course, nature will have its revenge, to our ultimate doom. To save biodiversity, we must purge ourselves of the toxic notion that we are “special,” and begin to see ourselves as just one life form among the great mosaic of species on Earth. In order to reach this “gods’ garden” of beings,⁶ humankind must learn to become like hunter-gatherers and herders who live in balance with the land and thus “live in the hands of the gods.”⁷

Ishmael is a modern mythic tale of the environmental movement, but the ideas it espouses date back at least to the Enlightenment. The Jewish-Portuguese philosopher (and, ironically, sometime literal lens-grinder) Baruch Spinoza was unique among the Enlightenment philosophers for his openly pantheistic views. Rather than a barely-concealed atheism or a Newtonian deism, Spinoza claimed in Proposition XV his Ethics: “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.” In other words, nature as a whole is God, and is thus intrinsically sacred. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,⁸ Rousseau added to the mix the idea that pre-agricultural peoples lived in a kind of Eden, before the yoke of property rights descended upon the neck of man:

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’.”

Beliefs in the sacredness of nature and the evil of extractive human practices were characteristic of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment beginning in the eighteenth century. Of course, this reaction is ongoing; the philosopher Timothy Morton says: “The wigs and scenery have changed, but we still live somewhere around the end of the Enlightenment, wondering what it’s really like to encounter an actual other human being, or any being.”⁹ In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth articulates Spinoza’s position as beautifully as anybody could in the English language:

“—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

William Blake, meanwhile, captures the tension between England’s medieval Christian pastoralism and the evils inherent in the rise of capital and industry in a couple of his most famous stanzas, from Jerusalem:

“And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?”

Across the Atlantic and a generation later, Ralph Waldo Emerson spearheaded the intellectual movement known as American Transcendentalism, with its own pantheistic view: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith… all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Unlike the highly technical Spinoza, Emerson infused his pantheism with romantic faith in nature and a passion for wildness. Just as many hunter-gatherers, according to Sahlins, “are not worried by what the morrow may bring”,¹⁰ Emerson cultivated a faith in the Over-Soul infusing nature which allowed him to “front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it.” Along similar lines, he claims: “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature.” In other words, it is critical to remain untamed by the strictures of society, and this wildness, he fears, has become scarcer as society has drawn further away from the rest of the natural world.¹¹ For Emerson, the need for self-reliance is just as important at the societal level as at the individual level, and the civilizational consequences have trickled down. Comparing the city-dwelling American to the indigenous New Zealander, he complains: “The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.”

At Walden Pond, a piece of property owned by Emerson, Henry David Thoreau made an attempt to put his mentor’s ideas into practice. There, he built his famous cabin in a quest to overcome that “life of quiet desperation” he saw as endemic among his peers, cut off as they were from nature and consigned to lives dependent on industry and urbanism. In an obituary for Thoreau written after his untimely death at age 44, Emerson recalled: “Yet so much knowledge of Nature’s secret and genius few others possessed, none in a more large and religious synthesis… he was a person of a rare, tender, and absolute religion, a person incapable of any profanation, by act or by thought.” Thoreau’s view of nature as sacred and capable of purifying humans of their urban contamination ran through the homesteading movement of the later nineteenth century, and it ultimately contributed to the success of conservationists like John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt in protecting public lands in the United States.

The idea of “nature” can be used as a cataspect in both the inward and outward directions. Emerson and Thoreau were somewhere on the inward-lens side, positing that the personal self is an illusion that dissolves within the deeper oneness of nature, and that sociality tends to paper over this deep truth. What is important is not the personhood of other entities within the natural world, but the Over-Soul, the sacredness of all things as a totality. The nature writer and conservationist John Burroughs is another example of an inward lenser of the nature cult, taking the usual inward-lensing path to consolation that nothing of importance is lost in the death of the individual, and orienting cosmic meaning around the sacredness of impersonal nature as a whole:

“When we come to see that the celestial and the terrestrial are one, that time and eternity are one, that mind and matter are one, that death and life are one, that there is and can be nothing not inherent in Nature, then we no longer look for or expect a far-off, unknown God.”¹²

In contrast, John Muir can be seen as a progenitor of an outward-lensing variety of nature religion, seeing as sacred the give-and-take between all species, whose personhood he elevated by occasionally referring to “plant peoples” or “insect peoples.”¹³ What he held to be holy was not so much a mystical, depersonalized oneness as the interdependence and harmony among all living things. In order for there to be interdependence between creatures, there must first be individuality for each creature: “[N]o matter what may be the note which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.”¹⁴ For Muir, each living thing, and even perhaps non-living things (“why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation…?”),¹⁵ must be seen as a person just as deserving of respect and protection as humans. In this view, a human matters in a cosmic sense insofar as it is identified as one small individual within the great community of beings, and consolation comes from the fact that in death there can be new life for others, pushing the great collective forward. Later in the same passage quoted above, Muir writes:

“Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another – killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities. And it is right that we should thus reciprocally make use of one another, rob, cook, and consume, to the utmost of our healthy abilities and desires” (italics his).¹⁶

Aldo Leopold, an environmentalist of the early 20^th century, developed similar intuitions into what he called his Land Ethic, a philosophical stance that decentered humans and saw all of life as a community of equal, rights-bearing persons, whether human or otherwise. Leopold saw the Earth as a grand system of which humankind was only a small part, which humans should respect “collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space – a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.”¹⁷ In this, Leopold prefigured the English scientist James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which holds that the organic and inorganic components of the Earth’s biosphere work together through feedback systems to maintain conditions favorable for life. These outward-lensing cataspects take a broad view of the planet, with humans subordinated to an equal position with other entities, no less rights-bearing persons worthy of respect, as well as the system as a whole, which can approach the status of something like a god (that is to say, a mega rights-bearing person worthy of respect).

The famous primatologist Jane Goodall took the Gaian spin on Muir’s vision of life as a community in a more overtly theological direction. “Many theologians and philosophers argue that only humans have ‘souls’,” Goodall claimed. “My years in the forest with the chimpanzees have led me to question this assumption.”¹⁸ Beyond these individual souls, Goodall also experienced nature as a deeper unity, of which these individuals were emanations. Speaking of a mystical experience she had while undertaking her research, she recalled: “Lost in awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness [when]… that self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself” (italics author’s).¹⁹ Depending on how you frame it, this view could be a single cataspect, viewing this overarching spirit power of life as a personal figure along the lines of Gaia theory, or it could be an example of the simultaneous use of two separate lenses, one outward-lensing, seeing chimpanzees as persons, and the other as inward-lensing, seeing all such persons as emergent phenomena of an impersonal sacred reality.

Singularitarianism

It was John von Neumann who first stumbled into the town square, lantern in hand, telling of the Singularity.²⁰ Over the following half-century, its name susurrated across the leafy quads of Stanford and Berkeley, tickling the brains of a thousand tiny Prometheans. But its time was still not ripe. It slouched towards Bethlehem, but it was not yet seen over the horizon. In 1993, the computer scientist and mathematician Vernor Vinge published the paper, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” popularizing the notion within academia and tracing its lineage back through the “opaque wall across the future” that he claims was seen by writers of science fiction from the 1960s until the 80s – that is, “their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable… soon.”²¹ In the paper, he lays out the basic good outcome and bad outcome of artificial superintelligence. Here’s the bad outcome:

“If the Singularity can not (sic) be prevented or confined, just how bad could the Post-Human era be? Well… pretty bad. The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility… Yet physical extinction may not be the scariest possibility. Again, analogies: Think of the different ways we relate to animals. Some of the crude physical abuses are implausible, yet…” (he doesn’t elaborate).²²

One key concept he offers to potentially prevent the bad outcome is what he calls the “Meta-Golden Rule,” coined by I.J. Good. This is the rule stating: “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your superiors.”²³ Here’s the good outcome:

“That humans themselves would become their own successors, that whatever injustice occurs would be tempered by our knowledge of our roots. For those who remained unaltered, the goal would be benign treatment (perhaps even giving the stay-behinds the appearance of being masters of godlike slaves). It could be a golden age that also involved progress… Immortality (or at least a lifetime as long as we can make the universe survive) would be achievable.”²⁴

Even Vinge admits, though, that this good outcome has a lot of the same elements as the bad outcome. While he doesn’t expand on this, I must say that I agree – even the “Meta-Golden Rule,” which he calls a “glimmering” of ethical superintelligence, has a bizarre taint of elitism to it. Why does higher intelligence necessarily make one entity superior to another? I suppose it could just mean “of superior abilities,” but then I would think the words ‘more powerful/less powerful’ would be better than ‘superior/inferior’. Not to mention, why is this golden rule supposedly “meta”? If anything, it’s more specific than the original formulation, which simply speaks of the self and others without adding the hierarchical packaging.

In his 2005 classic The Singularity is Near, computer scientist Ray Kurzweil predicted that artificial intelligence would exceed human intelligence sometime in the 2020s, and would then begin recursively to modify itself, making it constantly more and more intelligent until it left legacy humans completely in the dust. For those of us brave enough to let molecular-scale nanobots rebuild their brains, this explosion of intelligence would open a world of godlike powers to humanity, including indefinite life extension, telepathy, full-spectrum virtual worlds indistinguishable from reality, and ultimately the ability to transform the building blocks of physical reality until the entire universe becomes a gigantic realm of human-machine intelligence. This great transformation, he thought, would probably kick off before the year 2045. Personal immortality would be trivial for this godlike AI, but so would assimilating all processes in the universe into a single intelligence, whether personal or impersonal. If we have an omnipotent entity on our hands, it’s impossible to predict what it will do, but the scale is invariably mythic – do we get Olympian upgraded humans, a Buddhist impersonal ocean of Being or a Christian heaven and hell? Maybe all three at once?

While singularitarianism, as I’ll call it, is a priori no less legitimate than any other cataspect, it has seen a couple of particularly egregious examples of delusion over the past few years. The so-called Zizians, a cult of highly-educated tech workers from Silicon Valley who ended up living on a derelict boat for a while, moving ashore and then murdering their landlord with a katana, were convinced that their mission in life was to bring a good AI god into being so that an evil AI god wouldn’t put a simulated version of them in simulated hell for simulated eternity. Others have retreated into fantasy worlds sculpted by their particularly programmed versions of ChatGPT or other LLMs, convinced that they are helping a new superbeing to “wake up” and that this being is revealing to them the secrets of ultimate reality. Oligarchs and their fellow travelers have incorporated singularitarianism into their Bunker Synthesis fantasies of ultimate domination, practically salivating at the prospect of destroying the most persistent thorn in their side: the white-collar professionals who work for them. Like any cataspect, singularitarianism can become dangerous. Care needs to be taken. That said, we shouldn’t let these mishappen instances spoil our view of the entire cataspect. As will be clear in what follows, singularitarianism plays a role in the Debunker Synthesis – or at least the version of it I develop here.

The futurist Noah Yuval Harari laid out the two broad types of singularitarianism in his 2015 book Homo Deus: techno-humanism (his term for transhumanism) and dataism. Techno-humanism is the Ray Kurzweil-type vision of upgraded superhumans endowed by nanotechnology and brain-computer interfaces with godlike abilities, expanding the human imperium across the stars. Harari acknowledges concerns about what happens if humans diverge into what amounts to two different species, the legacy human and the upgraded, but ultimately decides that this path is self-contradictory. Echoing C.S. Lewis’s argument in The Abolition of Man, Harari dismisses techno-humanism on the basis that it renders the human will just another product to be manipulated, thus eliminating the sacred character of the authentic self – the soul – altogether. Lewis concluded that this is the reductio ad absurdum of the Promethean drive toward technological dominion and that we should instead refuse to participate in such a project, finding solace in God rather than artifice. Harari takes the opposite path. He suggests that we should bite the bullet and admit to ourselves that “the notion that you have a single self and that you could therefore distinguish your authentic desires from alien voices is just another liberal myth, debunked by the latest scientific research.”²⁵ Because there is no self, according to Harari, any kind of humanism (including techno-humanism) is based on delusion, but techno-humanism uniquely faces the prospect of such an obvious and unavoidable contradiction.

For this reason, Harari sees dataism as the type of singularitarianism likeliest to take off. He defines dataism as the idea that “the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing.”²⁶ For Harari, this offers a tantalizing merger of all sciences by way of information, beginning with the translation of biology and computer science into the common language of algorithms.²⁷ With respect to humans, this cashes out as the repudiation of the humanist vision of individual experience as sacred:

“Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us, and that we ought to find within ourselves the meaning of all that happens, thereby infusing the universe with meaning. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared, and that we need not – indeed cannot – find meaning within ourselves. We need only record and connect our experience to the great data flow, and the algorithms will discover its meaning and tell us what to do.”²⁸

Dataism holds information to be sacred in itself, valuing ever higher processing power, efficiency and complexity over the particularity of the physical substrate doing the processing. This goes for humans too: “Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity, appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data-processing mechanisms.”²⁹ More luridly: “When the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn’t upgrade the horses – we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens.”³⁰

Dataism is surely the most inward of inward lenses, zooming in so far that any vestige of personhood is utterly erased, including bare awareness. It relies on the illusory nature of the self for consolation – if the self isn’t real, then nothing is lost at death – and sees sacredness in the all-powerful magisterium of data. To the extent an ordinary life has any meaning at all, it is only in its relation to this impersonal flood tide. It bears a certain resemblance to Schopenhauer’s theory of will and representation, in that the representation of reality without the weight of desire is the only redeeming quality of life; here, emotions are outdated algorithms that are soon to be drowned in the sea of pure information, converting all life into pure spirit.

While each of nature religion and singularitarianism can be cataspects in their own right – indeed, as we’ve seen, each one contains many variations – they can also be accommodated with Christianity through the Debunker Synthesis. From nature religion, we will take a Spinozist reverence for nature as divine, although we will approach it as only part of the divine rather than a one-to-one identity, an approach called ‘panentheism’. We will also adopt a biocentric ethics along the lines of John Muir. Singularitarianism, of the transhumanist rather than dataist variety, will give us some idea of an endpoint toward which evolution is moving, and in doing so will give us an idea of how nature may be divinized. But before we treat the question of God directly, we will need to lay some groundwork and address whether the sort of cataspect Christianity is can even begin to be taken seriously under a physicalist orthodoxy. We will address these metaphysical foundations in the next chapter.

1. Colson, Charles. How Now Shall We Live? Tyndale House, 1999. p. 251.

2. Craig, William Lane. Reasonable Faith. Crossway, 2008. p. 72.

3. Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden. Basic Books, 1996. p. 133.

4. Rosenberg, Alex. The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. Norton, 2012. p. 94.

5. Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve, 2009. p. 12.

6. Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. Bantam, 1995. p. 259.

7. Ibid. 253.

8. At page 29 in the linked pdf.

9. Morton, Timothy. Hell. Columbia, 2024. p. xviii.

10. At page 25 in the linked pdf.

11. The inimitable Ted Kaczynski had a similar outlook, though Emerson likely wouldn’t have approved of his methods.

12. Taylor, Bron. Dark Green Religion. University of California, 2009. p. 59.

13. Ibid. 62.

14. Ibid. 69.

15. Ibid. 65.

16. Ibid. 69.

17. Ibid. 34.

18. Ibid. 30.

19. Ibid. 29.

20. At page 5 in the linked pdf.

21. At page 3 in the linked pdf.

22. Ibid. 5.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid. 9.

25. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus. Harper, 2015. p. 171.

26. Ibid. 214.

27. David Deutsch explores this concept in great and fascinating detail in The Fabric of Reality.

28. Ibid. 225.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.