Spanish priest’s new book takes critical look at transhumanism

Madrid, Spain, Apr 3, 2025 / 10:30 am (CNA).

In his new book “Integral Transhumanism,” Spanish priest Ricardo Mejía Fernández examines the transhumanist movement as “a technological extension of traditional humanism.”

According to the definition of the Transhumanist Association, transhumanism “is a cultural and intellectual movement that affirms the possibility and necessity of improving the human condition, based on the use of reason applied within an ethical framework sustained by human rights and the ideals of the Enlightenment and humanism.” 

In the book’s prologue, the archbishop of Burgos, Mario Iceta, emphasizes that Mejía approaches the general transhumanist proposal from “a de-ideologized view of reality,” like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story who unabashedly declares that the emperor has no clothes.

The prelate summarizes the basis of Mejía’s thesis by stating that “technology is a human way of loving, and love is the human way of using technology.”

As a philosopher of science and technology, the 37-year-old Mejía has been gaining international standing, including his election in 2021 as a member of the International Society for Science and Religion at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

In an interview with ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner, Mejía did not hesitate to define the majority transhumanist proposal as a “dangerous scam.” At the same time, he was quick to point out that “a technical intervention, simply because it is not natural, is not enough for us to disqualify it as immoral.”

Mejía advocates an approach consistent with the Church’s teachings, a “critical technophilia,” to address the issue, since “technology is already present in the plan of creation.”

ACI Prensa: Is there a bad transhumanism and a good transhumanism?

Father Ricardo Mejía Fernández: Transhumanism in its majority form (transitive and even substitutional), to the extent that it seeks to improve the person solely through biotechnology by altering their specific limits, is completely contrary to an ethics of the person.

My proposal is a forceful critique of transhumanism as it is known today, which lacks a minimally acceptable anthropological, metaphysical, and ethical foundation.

However, even these transhumanists seek to fulfill an infinite desire for fulfillment, what centuries ago was called, as was so often commented on by St. Thomas Aquinas, the “desiderium naturale videndi Deum” (“the natural desire to see God”).

Their error lies in how they propose that this innermost human desire will be fulfilled: not with a reality commensurate with this utterly deep desire but with the provisional devices, techniques, and interventions of the technosciences.

To provide this answer is to defraud humankind because they conceive of the person simply as a complex material mechanism, to which a singular mental capacity is added, the fruit of this mechanism.

The place once occupied by religion will now be taken by the technosciences. Can this transhumanism and its posthumanist extreme be critically reviewed, recognizing its elements of truth? This is what I have done in my work.

You use the concept of “integral transhumanism.“ What does the “integral improvement“ that it proposes consist of in various fields, biologically, socially, or spiritually?

The various transhumanisms have so far been developing their thought without acknowledging their partiality, with a clear danger to the human person: making him dependent on a presumed salvation exclusively through the augmentation of our most hardware-like aspects, which new anthropo-technologies will grant them sooner rather than later.

They also alienate human beings with the future promises that are yet to be revealed thanks to these disciplines. Fortunately, transhumanism is not a closed and monolithic movement, which allows me to reformulate it.

The term “integral transhumanism“ means, on the one hand, a technological expansion of traditional humanism as well as the recognition that the person can be also and not only through advances in new technologies assisted, strengthened, and expanded, without detriment to the human community or the ecosystem, in all that does not endanger its essence, dignity, and centrality.

This is not a “do-goodism,“ since integral improvement must depend on integral moral goodness — that is, improvement, among those found in the technosciences, must depend on integral ethical personalism.

It’s highly questionable, and that’s why I’m inspired by Jacques Maritain’s integral humanism without incurring in his virtualism, a good of the individual completely separate from the good of his community and the planet.

Is transhumanism possible without eugenics, discarding the weak, or the denaturalization of the human being?

Eugenics understood as the elimination of unwanted human life is an aberration, which Pope Francis criticizes as the “throwaway culture,“ but not so the technical strengthening of personal life without undermining or suppressing it. The latter is not condemned by the magisterium of the Church.

Inspired by a silenced early stage of the English scientist Francis Galton, I call this [by analogy] a viticulture of both care and the improvement of the person in relation to the community and the environment. One cannot improve without caring.

Likewise, a technical intervention, simply because it is not natural, is not enough for us to disqualify it as immoral: Is it immoral to wear glasses, an artificial addition to the body to correct vision? Or a pacemaker? Obviously not.

The majority of transhumanists my integral transhumanism opposes understand technology from an unbridled instrumental perspective: If it is technically possible, it is technically feasible to modify not only certain aspects of humankind but the very essence of humankind.

I believe it is metaphysically impossible to modify this essence, although today multiple genetic edits can be made that radically modify our bodies. This does raise concerns in bioethics and other fields, without thus abandoning a hopeful view of its treatment from a comprehensive ethical perspective.

This is emphasized by Archbishop Mario Iceta of Burgos in his extraordinary prologue to my work.

If a hopeful perspective on the transhumanist proposal is possible, what positive elements do you see?

No matter how much we insist on an uneducated humanism regarding the technosciences applied to humankind, these will likely continue to grow. Biotechnology is a specialty increasingly present in universities and is studied by a growing number of our young students, many of them Catholic.

How can we attempt to articulate an ethical discourse about the person, ignoring that today and in the future, our bodies and minds will increasingly be subject to intervention with these technosciences?

Integral transhumanism, far from a technophobia that ultimately grants these technosciences a free pass by failing to address their problems head-on or ignoring them, seeks to incorporate them into a critical approach that responds to ethical demands.

The position most compatible with the Church’s magisterium would be a critical technophilia that can incorporate those interventions of science and technology that allow for and strengthen a more developed human life in growing measures, even expanding it in aspects that our species has not yet reached through evolution, without this implying the suppression of the human person, particularly in an embryonic or dependent stage, or subordinating it to technological determinism.

What should we fear from the most widespread transhumanist proposal, which seems to be an amendment to the mystery of creation?

The majority of transhumanism is, as I’ve pointed out, a dangerous scam. I say it’s dangerous because it doesn’t rely solely on a vague promise but rather proposes that, until the definitive transhuman or posthuman arrives, technological interventions can and should be carried out on human beings, transcending genetic and personal barriers.

According to them, nothing can be more normative, or hold a higher place, than techno-scientific experimentation itself. Thus, we are promised the possibility of being more than human in an uncertain future, and in the meantime, we are invited to do anything with our bodies in an unrestrained experimentalism.

In my work, I assert that this transhumanism deforms humankind (human beings conduct experiments based on deliberation that concerns morality, even if they don’t know it) and deforms technology, since the only way to exercise this ability is by opposing it to humankind itself.

I call this a “Molochan“ deformation, in reference to the demon Moloch, who demanded that the purest human life [babies] be sacrificed to him so that he could offer greater prerogatives in the future.

But technology is already present in the plan of creation, precisely at the moment when God asks Adam and Eve, according to the beautiful story of Genesis, to care for and serve in the Garden of Eden without damaging it or its caretakers. Caring is key to the creation of technical humanity, since technology is meant to be an ally for the integral good of humankind in relation to our fellow human beings and the Earth.

Is there a relationship between the drive for this transhumanism and the secularization of the West?

This is what I argue in a chapter of my book. The majority of transhumanism is a consequence of secularization, although for some members of this movement, it presents itself with clear overtones of secularist religion.

In my opinion, it is an ultra-secularist proposal in the realm of technoscience, born directly from the most unbridled exclusionary humanism of modernity: a humanism that excludes God, neighbor, and care for our common home.

In my work, I criticize the worst of the modernisms from which this movement springs, as well as the understanding of humanism only as that which defends the despotic man. That’s why I so much like the neologism “transhumanism,“ such that I understand the prefix “trans“ not as abandoning our essence (this is metaphysically impossible), but rather as overcoming this modernist and exclusivist bias of a mistaken understanding of the self-deifying individual who can do whatever he pleases, no matter the cost.

I think, as a philosopher of science and technology, as a priest, that we must boldly critique the ultra-secularism that many transhumanists draw upon to try to improve humanity by turning their backs on God, in that neo-Gnosticism and neo-Pelagianism they unwittingly champion.

Integral transhumanism, on the other hand, cannot obstruct the innermost desire of [Homo] Sapiens, his specific religiosity, with techno-scientific fixes that are always revisable and perfectible. Improving humanity is a broader and grander undertaking.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.