Peter Thiel Says Christianity Promises More Than Transhumanism: an Eternal Body and a Transformed Soul
Peter Thiel Says Christianity Promises More Than Transhumanism: an Eternal Body and a Transformed Soul
On September 24 in Berlin, Peter Thiel received the Axel Springer Award and spoke with CEO Mathias Döpfner for over an hour. Near the end of the conversation, Döpfner asked him about the most optimistic scenario for human lifespan. Thiel named 150 years as a benchmark with no clear natural ceiling, rejected mind uploading as a path to immortality, and chose dementia as the problem he would tackle first.
Döpfner, the head of the Axel Springer media group (Bild, Die Welt, Politico, and Business Insider), asked Thiel to name the boldest scenario and suggested the phrase "eternal life" himself.
"150 years. It's not clear why it couldn't be more. It's not clear there are any natural limits at all," Thiel replied.
Thiel tempers this immediately with a concrete example: in 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, promising to defeat it within five years. Fifty-five years have passed, progress has been made, but victory remains distant.
Earlier in the conversation, Döpfner asked Thiel directly whether his interest in longevity is a good investment or a personal fear of death and aging. Thiel confirmed that the fear of death and aging does play a role, adding that it is strange how rarely people talk about it openly. The early modern period thought differently: Thomas Hobbes wrote that life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, and that science was supposed to extend it, possibly indefinitely; Francis Bacon believed science would lighten the human condition; Condorcet and Benjamin Franklin believed that one day it would be possible to cure disease itself, and death itself. Society abandoned this ambition in what Thiel calls a "shocking" way: "People don't even think we can cure Alzheimer's. Why not at least try?"
Thiel's hope that no limit exists rests on a specific argument: he views biological processes as irreversible, but informational processes as reversible in principle. If biology can be described in the language of information, he believes, it should theoretically be possible to run these processes in both directions, the way a computer can be rolled back to an earlier state.
Döpfner pressed further: does this mean the path to immortality is uploading the brain into a computer? Thiel answered without hesitation:
"I would not find it acceptable to be uploaded into a computer program that simulates me. I don't think that would be me," he said, calling his view "physical, perhaps Christian-informed": personhood, in his understanding, is inseparably bound to the physical body.
This spring, Vatican theologians published a document against transhumanism that called the very attempt to technologically defeat aging "naive and arrogant presumption." Thiel has criticized technological hubris for years, and one might expect religion to constrain his transhumanism. Instead, he inverts the argument:
"It is not that transhumanism is too strange or too radical from a genuinely Christian point of view. It is that it does not go far enough," Thiel said, noting that the full Christian promise goes beyond a long life: an eternal body and a transformed soul.
To the objection that infinite life would kill all ambition and become boring, Thiel responds just as directly: "The answer to all of that is: better than the alternative. I don't think I would be bored."
Thiel calls his biotech investments "surprisingly difficult," but if he had to choose one area, "I would seriously go after dementia: finding a way to slow or reverse the decline of brain function in people."