Machines for Making Gods: Mormonism, Transhumanism, and Worlds Without End

An engrossing account of the way religion and the technological imagination come together in the world's largest and longest-running religious transhumanist organization.

At the surface level, the Mormon faith and transhumanist aspirations may seem to be so different that it is hard to imagine how these two concerns could even exist alongside one another, let alone serve together as the joint impetus for a social movement. Machines for Making Gods investigates the tensions between science and religion, religious speculation, and the social powers of the imagination to illustrate how new branches of this early nineteenth-century faith are bringing some young Mormons back into the fold.

The Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA) believes that God intended humanity to achieve Mormonism's promise of theosis through imminent technological advances. Drawing from a nineteenth-century Mormon tradition of religious speculation to reimagine Mormon eschatological hopes as near-future technological possibilities, they envision such current and possible advances as cryonic preservation, computer simulation, and quantum archeology as paving the way for the resurrection of the dead, the creation of worlds without end, and promise of undergoing theosis--of becoming a god. Addressing the role of speculation in the anthropology of religion, Machines for Making Gods undoes debates about secular transhumanism's relation to religion by highlighting the differences an explicitly religious transhumanism makes.

Intervening in the exploding anthropological literature regarding transhumanism, Jon Bialecki charts the conflicts and resonances between secular transhumanism and Mormonism. Bialecki also examines how religious speculation has opened up imaginative horizons to give birth to new forms of Mormonism, including a particular progressive branch of the faith, and even formations like queer polygamy. The book also reveals how the MTA have used their religious speculation regarding God and technology to forestall some of the social pressure that comes with apostasy in much of the Mormon Intermountain West.

Both a qualitative and social ethnographic portrait of Mormon Transhumanism and Mormon Transhumanists, Machines for Making Gods illustrates how the scientific imagination can be better understood when viewed through anthropological accounts of myth.