Transhumanismo is a scam, but it is possible for an integral look, says priest

The Spanish priest Ricardo Mejía Fernández has just published Transhumanismo integral (Ediciones Encuento, Madrid 2025) A reflection that seeks to reformulate this current of biotechnological thinking and action, such as “a technological expansion of traditional humanism.”

Transhumanism “is a cultural and intellectual movement that affirms the possibility and need to improve the human condition, based on the use of reason applied under an ethical framework based on human rights and the ideals of enlightenment and humanism,” according to Definition of the Transhumanist Association.

In the prologue, the archbishop of Burgos (Spain), Mons. Mario Iceta, emphasizes that Mejía approaches the reality of the most generalized transhumanist proposal from “a deideologized look at the real”, as the child of Hans Christian Andersen’s story in which he says without complexes that the king is naked.

Prelate summarizes the foundation of the thesis raised by Mejía by stating that “technique is a human way of loving, and love is the human way of using technique.”

As a philosopher of science and technology, Father Mejía has reaped in his short life (he will turn 38 on April 15) a wide international recognition, which highlights his choice in 2021 as an academic of the International Society for Science and Religion based at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

Asked by ACI Press, he does not hesitate to define the majority transhumanist proposal as a “dangerous scam” and, at the same time, remember that “a technical intervention, by the simple fact of not being natural, is not enough for us to disqualify it as immoral.”

Therefore, it advocates an approach according to the ecclesiastical teaching, the “critical technophilia” to address the issue, since “the technique is already in the creation plan.” Thus, his proposal of an integral transhumanism seeks to collaborate with the “abysmal desire” that lives in the depths of the human being and is related to his specific religiosity.

ACI PRESS: Is there a bad transhumanism and another good?

P. Ricardo Mejía Fernández: Transhumanism in its majority (transitive and even substitutive form), to the extent that it seeks to improve the person only from the biotechnology altering their specific limits, is of any point contrary to an ethic of the person.

My proposal is a forceful criticism of transhumanism that is known until today, which lacks an anthropological, metaphysical and ethical foundation minimally acceptable.

However, even these transhumanists want The desire to see God.

His mistake is how they propose that this abysmal desire of man will be filled: not with a reality according to this abyss, but with those provisional devices, techniques and interventions of technosciences.

Giving this answer is to scarce man because they conceive of the person simply as a complex material mechanism, to whom a strange mental capacity of this mechanism is joined.

The place occupied by religion will now be occupied by technosciences. Can this transhumanism and its posthumanist extreme be critically reviewed, recognizing its real elements? It is what I have done in my work.

ACI PRESS: You use the concept of “integral transhumanism”. What is the “integral improvement” that it proposes in various fields: biological, social or spiritual?

P. Mejía: Transhumanisms run so far without recognizing their partiality, with a clear danger towards the person: making it dependent on an alleged exclusively augmentating salvation of our aspects more similar to a hardware, which will grant you sooner rather than later the new anthropotecnias.

They also alien the human being in future promises that are still to be manifested 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 the advances of new technologies, aided, strengthened and widened, without prejudice to the human community or the ecosystem, in everything that does not endanger its essence, its dignity and its centrality.

This is not a “goodism”, because the integral improvement has to depend on the integral moral good, that is, the improvement, among those found in technosciences, must depend on an integral ethical personalism.

It is very questionable, and therefore inspired me in the integral humanism of J. Maritain without incurring his virtualism, a good of the individual totally outside the good of his community and the planet.

ACI PRESS: Is transhumanism without eugenics possible, discarding the weak or denaturation of the human being?

P. Mejía: Eugenics understood as the elimination of unwanted human life is an aberration, as Pope Francis points out against the “culture of discard”, but not the technical stream of personal life without undermining it, nor suppress it. The latter is not convicted of the Magisterium of the Church.

To this I call it, inspired by a first stage silenced in the English scientist Francis Galton, a viticulture of both care and the improvement of the person in relation to the community and with the environment. It cannot be improved without caring.

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

The major transhumanists to whom my integral transhumanism opposes understand the technique from an unfortunate instrumental reason: if it is technically possible it is technically feasible to modify, not only certain aspects of man, but the same essence of man.

I think it is an impossible metaphysical to modify this essence, although today multiple genetic editions can be made that radically modify our body; Which does generate concern in bioethics and other areas, without giving up a hopeful look with respect to its treatment from an integral ethical approach.

This is highlighted by Mons. Mario Iceta, archbishop of Burgos, in his extraordinary prologue to my work.

ACI PRESS: If possible a hopeful look on the transhumanist proposal, what are the positive elements you appreciate?

P. Mejía: As much as we insist on an illiterate humanism with respect to the technosciences applied to man, you are most likely to continue growing. And it is that biotechnologies are an increasingly present specialty in universities and that study a greater number of our young students; Many of them Catholics.

How to pretend to articulate an ethical discourse about the person ignoring that today and in the future you can intervene more and more in our body and in our mind with these technology? Integral transhumanism, far from a technophobia that in the end of citizenship letter to these technosciences by not addressing their problem in front or by obviating it, seeks to incorporate them into a critical approach that responds to ethical demands.

The most compatible position with the ecclesiastical teaching would be that of a critical technophilia in which those interventions of science and technology that allow and strengthen a human life developed in increasing measures can be incorporated, and even expanded in aspects to which our species does not arrive evolutionively, without this implying to suppress the human person, particularly in an embryonic or dependence stage, nor Technological

ACI PRESS: What should we fear of the most widespread transhumanist proposal, which looks like an amendment to the mystery of creation?

P. Mejía: The majority transhumanism is, as I have pointed out, a dangerous scam. I say that it is dangerous because it does not depend only on a vague promise, but that it proposes that, while the transhuman or the definitive posthuman, it can and should be intervened technologically in the human being transferring the genetic and personal barriers.

According to them, nothing can be more normative, or be above, than the same technoscientific experimentation. Thus we are promised to be more than humans in an uncertain future and, while, we are invited to do anything with our body in an experimentalism without limits.

In my work I affirm that this transhumanism deforms man (man does experiments based on a deliberation that concerns morality, although he does not know) and deforms the technique since the only way to exercise this capacity is contrasting it to man himself.

I call this a deformation, the “Molokiana”, in reference to the demon Molok, who asked that the purest human life be immolated to offer better prerogatives in the future.

But the technique is already in the creation plan just at the moment when God asks Adam and Eva, according to the beautiful narration of Genesis, take care and serve the Eden garden without damaging him, or damaging his caregivers. Taking care is key in the creation of the technical man because the technique is called to be an ally for the integral good of man in relation to his peers and earth.

ACI PRESS: Is there a relationship between the impulse of that transhumanism and the secularization of the West?

P. Mejía: The same is what I defend in a chapter of my book. The majority transhumanism is a consequence of secularization, although in some members of this movement it is presented with clear visas of secular religion.

It is about my understanding of an ultrasecularist proposal in the plane of technosciences, which is born directly from the most unleashed exclusive humanism of modernity: a humanism that excludes God, our neighbor and the care of the common house.

In my critical work the worst of the modernisms of which this movement springs, as well as understanding humanism only as the one who defends the despotic man. That is why I really like the “transhumanism” neologism, so that the “trans” prefix I understand, not as leaving our essence behind (this is impossible metaphysically), but overcoming this modernist and exclusive bias of a wrong understanding of the self -devinizing individual and that can do what it places it costs what it costs.

I think, as a philosopher of science and technology, as a priest, that a bold criticism of ultrasecularism of which many transhumanists drink to intend to improve the man turning his back on God, in that neo -gnosticism and neopelagonism that they fly without knowing it well.

Integral transhumanism, on the contrary, cannot plug the abysmal desire of sapiens, its specific religiosity, with the technoscientific remitists that are always reviewable and perfectible. Improving man is a broader and larger company.