Descartes Luciferian Legacy

Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates for enhancing the human condition through advanced technologies, aiming to overcome limitations such as disease and mortality. This views technology as if it were able to be our “savior”, to save us from the two consequences of sin: sickness and death, which came upon the human race as a result of the fall of man. In truth, Jesus Christ alone can cure the human condition. He alone is able to save us from sin, the root cause of all the disorder of the world. He heals us from sin by His supreme holiness, His Church, and His Sacraments which help us to attain true sanctity.

Transhumanism has no regard for holiness, which is the only true cure for the sad condition of the human race. Rather, it sees technology as the “savior” from the fall. It explores the integration of humans with technology to create a new phase of human evolution. Transhumanists see human beings as “merging” with digital or robotic technology, having robotic intelligence implanted into their bodies. Imagine becoming a built-in “smartphone” with Siri for a perpetual counsellor! Transhumanism is a nightmare looming upon the horizon. Catholics must be aware and prepared to reject its false philosophy.

To combat this deceptive illusion, which is a false hope of salvation, Catholics must consciously preserve their trust in Jesus Christ as the Savior, with a willingness to suffer and endure sickness and pain when it is willed by God, and also to humbly submit to the degree of God to pass through death. In so doing we are able to merit a participation in the sufferings, passion, death, and redemption of Christ. That is the only way to heaven. Death is only a doorway which God asks us to pass through as a part of humility and reparation for the original sin.

The false philosophy of transhumanism seeks to eliminate death. It imagines salvation is something occurring in this world, in this life. Catholic doctrine shows that the perfect healing of the human race comes after the attainment of this perfect submission and obedience, including undergoing death. For Catholics, it is not in this world but in the next life that the full fruits of glory—freedom from all disease and mortality—will be revealed.

Contrary to the Gospel, transhumanists are still attempting to achieve the false promise of a self-attained glorified state in this world with no need for God. They continue to believe that we could become immortal if they simply develop enough technologies to combat every known cause of death in the body or outside of it, and protect ourselves against every possible accident. Yet they do not know what they are trying to achieve. They will only be miserable if they can manage to succeed by medicine and robotics to live even a thousand years upon this earth in a fallen and sinful condition without Christ. It is not wonderful to have a thousand years to accumulate sins and to have to struggle against the devil, which our warfare in this world entails.

We should not imitate those who follow after this false hope of immortality in this fallen world. Foolish people throughout human history have been seeking the miraculous fountain of youth. They looked for it in some miraculous spring of water, rather than in the font of holy baptism. Catholics should seek after grace and spiritual virtue. We should be willing to suffer purely and perfectly all the things that God wills, just as the saints and martyrs have done. The glorified state will be awarded to us in the heavenly life if we are faithful. There we will finally be confirmed in grace, free from sin, temptation, sickness and death forever!

This is not to say that we cannot make use of remedies or technologies on earth, if we see that they are able to be spiritually profitable in some way. But the progress of technology should never be regarded as a goal or as a means to salvation of the human race. There are many saints who discerned wisely by the Spirit of God when it was suitable to heal people, and when God was asking them to suffer, and even when it was their time to die. In that case, they did not pray for healing or try to achieve it against the will of God by technological or medical means. The spiritual good for the soul is what should be sought first of all.  It is important for Catholics in today’s world to limit technology to a tool which is used only inasmuch as is beneficial to the Church.

This article is an attempt to explore the connections between the philosophy of Descartes and the rise of this full manifestation of human-digital mind in today’s modern world. Nearly 400 years after Descartes, the philosophical seeds of evolution and the mathematical mind which he sowed are reaping a harvest of AI and transhumanism . . .

Descartes’ Temptation Against Faith

When Descartes came up with his famous statement “I think, therefore I am”, he imagined that he was paving the way towards a whole new way of thinking and reasoning in which knowledge could be somehow completely “sure”. In Descartes’ new system, everything in nature had a natural explanation. Gradual processes in nature offered a more “reasonable” way to account for the origins of man and the universe than belief in the supernatural Creation of God.

 

Descartes embraced evolutionary philosophy, rejected the supernatural, and turned man’s mind into a sort of reasoning machine in which thinking can be reduced to mathematical certainties like 2+2=4. This led to the philosophy of rationalism, which holds that there is no knowledge that transcends man’s reason. Thus, although perhaps Descartes did not realize this, according to rationalism there really is no such thing as supernatural Faith. Supernatural Faith involves using the intellect to assent to truths higher than the human mind. Supernatural Faith is beyond the limits of rationalism.

Descartes was originally a Catholic, but it is not difficult to see how the devil attacked his soul: against the supernatural virtue of Faith. It seems, unfortunately, that he succumbed. He had been influenced by a movement of skepticism, which was a philosophy becoming prevalent at that time. The skeptics doubted that any truth can be known with certainty. It should be obvious to any good Catholic that this entire movement of skepticism was in itself a temptation against Faith.

Supernatural Faith is the theological virtue by which one assents with one’s intellect to the truths which God has revealed, which come from Him as their source, and which are given to us and only known to us through Divine Revelation. These truths are the mysteries of the Creed and all the articles of Faith taught by Jesus Christ and by the Catholic Church. These truths contain mysteries, which exceed the capacity of man’s mind. Nevertheless, they are not contrary to reason; they are simply higher than reason.

The assent to Faith is a supernatural act. It is something like jumping off a diving board. There is an element of risk involved in deciding to believe God, simply because He is trustworthy. But this is what Faith is. It is not possible for a human being to possess supernatural Faith without grace. This is why it is said that Faith is a “gift”, because God alone can give the grace for someone to make that act which is above the natural human capacity. The person does not do it alone, but by cooperating with the grace of God. Why some do not do this is a mystery. It is not that God does not offer the gift of Faith to everyone; only some do not choose to accept it. Built in to the mystery of Faith is the mystery of human free will. Each man is free to choose whether he will cooperate with the grace of God or not.

When faced with the temptation of doubt, what should Descartes have done? He probably should have made many acts of supernatural Faith and asked God to get him through that time of doubt. If he had submitted his mind to the truth of revelation and resisted the temptations, the Lord would have surely strengthened him and revealed to him ever greater spiritual illuminations. Instead, he chose to try to find a way out that did not involve having to exercise any supernatural Faith but was located in his mind alone.

There is nothing truly “reasonable” about believing in naturalism to explain the origin of things in nature. This idea only appears more “reasonable” on the surface, because it does not require one to trust in God, or accept His Word or the Church’s teachings. It does not require opening the soul to anything invisible or spiritual. Naturalism invites us to believe that knowledge of the origins of man and the universe lies within reach of the unaided human intellect, without requiring grace or any supernatural assistance. For Descartes, that seemed to offer intellectual security. Yet, in fact, it accomplished the opposite. It led him and the rest of the world after him to a realm where truly nothing is infallibly certain. Scientific study is far from certain. As we know, scientists are changing their minds about their theories about how the universe works every day.

The only things of which we can be absolutely sure are the dogmas of the Faith infallibly defined by the Church and contained in the Apostles’ Creed. True Faith is the opposite of doubt and skepticism, and it resists it and opposes it. Just as St John says “perfect charity casts out fear” (1 John 4:18), so likewise it could be said that “perfect Faith casts out doubt”. Descartes, thinking he would find security, found nothing but finite and fallible human knowledge, perpetually striving after that assurance which nothing but believing God can ever give.

Theology Proceeds from Faith

Once the human intellect makes the decision to assent to the higher truths of Faith, it may proceed from there to contemplate that truth further and to carefully draw conclusions from it. This is how the theologians discovered Divine truths from contemplating Divine Revelation. It begins by believing in the revealed Truth as the given premise for reasoning, and from there it will go on through a logical process to discover what other details and depths those mysteries contain. It is a certain “unveiling” or “unpacking” of that supernaturally revealed truth.

This is how true theology occurs in the spiritual lives of saints, such as St Thomas Aquinas and other brilliant doctors of the Church, who were men of real Faith and prayer. They prayed and reflected and reasoned upon truth and drew conclusions to learn more about God. Next, they submitted those conclusions to the judgment of the Church for them to be ratified in time by God’s Holy Spirit working in the Church. That is theology.

When Descartes was faced with the temptation against Faith, he did not pass the test. He did not make the act of Faith to believe in God’s Word by trusting that God is true and cannot lie. He chose instead to reject the supernatural dimension and to limit knowledge to only what he could safely assent to without making a supernatural act of Faith. This is why his philosophy resulted in pure materialism. Once one rejects the supernatural, one has nothing left except for the material world to consider as a source of revelation.

Clearly this is the foundation for the modern framework of complete atheism, whose underlying principle and pre-determined committed bias is to exclude the supernatural as a cause for anything. It leads clearly to materialism.

Descartes wanted a mathematical certainty in knowing everything, as if all truth could be lowered to the level of a calculator answer. In other words, he did not want to experience the risk of Faith. He wanted absolutely no risk. He wanted no supernatural truth greater than his mind—in other words, no mysteries. This faithless philosophy automatically excludes the truth of the Holy Trinity, because God Himself is a mystery. Perhaps Descartes did not realize that this is what he was doing. He might have thought he was still a Catholic. But by taking this path, he was turning away from God in fundamental orientation, although nominally he may have remained a “Catholic”.

Probably Descartes might have become a brilliant theologian if he had chosen to be like the saints who rely upon God’s Divine Revelation as their source for true knowledge and illumination. Instead, he became the opposite of a theologian, a sort of anti-theologian, and became the cause of deception for many people in centuries to come. We can recall the words of Christ, Who said, “Woe to the world because of scandals. For it must needs be that scandals come: but nevertheless woe to that man by whom the scandal cometh.” (Mt. 18:7.) Descartes, through his lack of Faith, promoted the materialist and evolutionary philosophy which has become a scandal to the world and placed a stumbling block before many of God’s children.

The Pride of Rationalism

Rationalism is simply naturalism of the mind. In some ways, it is no different than evolution, which says that all the things in the biological world had to come to be through the power of nature and natural causes alone. Rationalism simply does this in the realm of thought. It says all the thoughts and supposed “truths” in the world have developed from man’s mind alone. Rationalism is related to naturalism, because rationalism, being the naturalism of the mind, sees its own thoughts as the source and summit of knowledge. This knowledge is, of course, evolutionary, and thus “consciousness” is seen as constantly developing, just like biological evolution.

Perhaps the readers could take a moment and just imagine what kind of pride it is to think that your own thoughts could be the source and summit of all knowledge! It’s really rather unbelievable. However, it goes further than that. For Descartes, “thinking” is not only the origins of this new reality of supposedly “certain” knowledge, but thinking is even seen as literally determining existence in Descartes’ mind. In other words, he is making himself like a god, out of whose mind comes all existence, of himself and everything else.

It ought to be apparent how much this smacks of a counterfeit of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, Who is Begotten of the Father. Christ is the very image of the Father, eternally Begotten by His Intellect and Will from all eternity. The Father knows Him in His Intellect, and He wills Him in His Love. In begetting His Son eternally, you could say that God sort of “thinks and then Christ IS”. The Father “thinks” of the Son, and the Son IS, and He is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity. This has been going on from all eternity with no beginning, nor ever will have any end. Out of their mutual Love, contemplating One Another as Divine Persons, proceeds the Third Divine Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

God’s thinking literally does create existence, because not only does the Father know the Son in the Holy Spirit from all eternity, but He also created the whole world out of this knowing and loving, in which the Word and the Spirit were present and working as well. Yet God’s knowledge is not just mere knowing; it is also loving and unitive within the community of the Most Holy Trinity. Even when God created man, it was as an outpouring of His generosity, and with the intention to unite man with Himself in love.

All this is a very poor description of the Trinity, but it shows how on some level, the Knowledge in the Mind of the Father begetting the Son from all Eternity is what Descartes is apparently trying to imitate within himself. It mirrors the truth about God, but in a perverse way, because you remember that at the same time Descartes was renouncing the supernatural. It also leads to a bad spirit, a spirit of darkness, which is what characterized the so-called “enlightenment”, in which Divine Truth was being discarded in favor of the exaltation of human knowledge and reason.

Becoming an Anti-theologian

One difference between God and the devil is that the devil has only intelligence and no love. Thus the devil’s “intelligence” is just enlightenment, and not “illumination”. True illumination comes from God and is loving. The devil also has no unity or community, and therefore he is isolated and schizophrenic in his pride and hatred of God. It is an intelligence without charity and without community. It is good to pay attention to this, because this is exactly what Artificial Intelligence is like. We can recognize in Artificial Intelligence a similarity to the devil’s “loveless intelligence”, because it also is a product of knowing without loving, and without having being, or without anyone to truly communicate with. People who talk to artificial intelligence talk to nobody but themselves in a human echo-chamber. It leads people into a world of isolation and loss of true human relationships.

Now, it can be argued that Descartes follows the pattern of demonic intelligence, inasmuch as he cut himself off from the trust in the Divine and union with God and decided to just be alone and figure things out for himself, in his mind alone. It seems he thought he could know things much better in this complete isolation and giving into doubt.

There could be no better way than this to lead to the same mental schizophrenia of the devil and to quickly turn into a self-created anti-holy-trinity of “me, myself, and I”. Descartes concluded that because he is thinking, this thought is the source of certainty of existing. It seems as if he was isolated with himself, trying like God to “beget” himself by his thought, only in a wrong way. This whole thing is really rather arrogant. God is the only one Who is Eternally existing and Uncreated and Who can really “think” and make things come to be. Descartes is only a creature who received his existence from God. If Descartes had been humble, and had had Faith, he should have said, “God made me; therefore I am. He made me like Himself; therefore I am able to think.”

Yet even to profess this, requires Faith first of all. Descartes, avoiding Faith, takes himself for the starting point, rather than God. This is ultimately pride. Rather than turning to God and glorifying Him and thanking Him for his existence, he makes himself and his thought somehow as the origin of everything and the starting point for the new world system of thought that he intended to invent. Rather than a loving Communion of Persons as God is in Himself, Descartes becomes an isolated human rationalist searching for the source of existence in rational intelligence alone. Of course we should be able to see how this leads to the artificial concepts of intelligence and being that we have today! The truth is: God is the One who exists and from Whom everything else proceeds, not ourselves!

This reversal of humility of switching ourselves with God is also related to the reversal of every other principle which was from that point on backwards in philosophy. Hence, every other false and backwards principle came from this false beginning (for example, the idea that “the present is the key to the past”, instead of the other way around, “the past is the key to the present”, etc.). Everything is switched around now. Human pride leads to a complete subversion of everything.

Descartes himself declared that it was “ambitious” of him to try to invent a system of thought that would change the whole world. Ambition is a vice, what St Thomas lists as a daughter of pride. Perhaps this ambition, intellectual pride, the rejection of Faith, and vainglory were the cause of his downfall.

Descartes could have perhaps become a great saint and a luminary of the Church. He might have been a great theologian, or even a mystic. But instead he searched for his answers in the occult, frequenting the occult group, the Rosicrucians. He became something of an anti-mystic receiving “enlightenment” from a demonic spirit, which appeared to him in three dreams, pretending to be the “spirit of truth”.

Perhaps if he had not followed these things, he would have been glorious and exalted for his virtue of Faith, because this would have been the source of his triumph. He would have used his intellect for the good of the Church and for the expounding perhaps of scientific mysteries concerning the Faith. He might have even become a Doctor of the Church! Sadly, he chose to follow the lies of satan, through curiosity, the desire of occult knowledge, and the love for glory and honor and fame, to “make a name for himself” as the devil had promised him.

To press into the realm of a faithless rationalism, as Descartes did, is essentially anti-theology. If theology is reasoning from known truths of Revelation to derive other truths, then anti-theology is going to be the reasoning from the rejection of Divine Revelation to arrive at further discoveries of the same ongoing lies and false narrative. Certainly, there will be ongoing and cumulative “discoveries” made in following an evil path as well as a good path. Reasoning from a false premise will arrive at more false conclusions.

Today this anti-theology and false reasoning has dominated academia for over 400 years, winning great esteem for its apparent—though largely non-existent—connection with advances in technology and scientific research. By now, largely because of the influence of the philosophy of Descartes, most people have transferred their faith from the infallible Word of God to trusting primarily in fallible human science.