Burdett - Eschatology and the Technological Future

This is a book about the technological future. It is about how technology in the last two centuries has stimulated our speculations, imaginations and hopes for the future. Of course, it might be added that this preoccupation with the future is not unique to the technological future. Concerns about economic stability and the erosion of confidence in our models of economic growth have equally contributed to increased speculation about the future as have the present ecological and energy crises. Alvin Toffler coined the term future shock And the general consensus is that the ecological and energy crises can be aided with increasing green technologies. Where other forces may compel us to obsess about the future, technology is very much a key component to all imagining of that future today.

Of course, more will be said about our public fixation with the technological future, particularly in the next two chapters. This book, however, is also about how the future gets constructed. What exactly is the future from a more philosophical point of view? How does the future relate to the present and to the past? Does appealing to ontology help? Is the future just a product of the past and present? Is it driven from behind, or is it something which beckons from ahead? These issues are the topic of the final three chapters.

This text also addresses these questions from the Christian tradition. The latter half asks how Christians, in particular, have thought about the technological future and how they construct the future. Christian scholars have, in the past century, increasingly reflected upon the force of technology on individual lives, the church, and history and the future more generally. While I would suggest that not enough attention has been devoted to

Whereas these are the general themes of the present work, I also offer a constructive argument. In the first instance, I aim to assess how and to what extent technological futurism, and in particular transhumanism as an extreme version of technological futurism, can be incorporated into the Christian tradition. In so doing, I aim to highlight the relative deficiencies and harmony transhumanism has with the Christian understanding of the future. In the second instance, I argue that Christian eschatology can provide a more robust account of the future than that offered by technological futurism. I argue that Christian eschatology, when it emphasises the themes of possibility and promise, canat the leastprovide a needed corrective to technological futurisms and specifically transhumanist understandings of the future, orat mostprovide a counterreligious narrative which allows for radical hope in the way technological futurisms alone cannot. Christian eschatology does not restrict itself to what is only actual to create its future. Rather, it is open to a God of possibility and promise who is not limited to interpolation and history, but can bring the radically new in the Kingdom of God. The Christian response to technological futurism is that the future is Gods future and must be set within the interpersonal nature of a promissory triune God who brings new possibilities to the world.

But why is this book needed specifically? First, as intimated above, society today is concerned about the future and, in particular, there is concern about how technology is ramping up the stakes of our continued existence. As we will come to see in the next few chapters, technology has been the locus of salvation for many when reflecting on the future whilst, for others, it has been the gravest enemy. Generally speaking, this book is required because technologically driven ideologies verging on the religious are becoming ubiquitous today.