The Ideas Behind the Novel, Called by Name

The following was sent as a Substack email on 29 July 2025: https://substack.com/@sciencenirvanachrist

Two questions that occupied my mind for many years motivated me to write the novel, Called by Name: Birth of a New Christendom:

1. What is consciousness?

2. Assuming the personal God of Christianity exists, how might His Divine Providence unfold?

Question (1) has intrigued philosophers for more than two millennia and neuroscientists and psychologists for at least 100 years. In the novel, I do not attempt to deal with the variety of consciousness theories. Instead, I assume that the materialist view of consciousness is correct enough to convince materialists that the transhumanist goal of transferring or copying a human mind to a computer is possible, thereby extending consciousness virtually indefinitely.

In order to create a context that would enable this accomplishment, I further suppose that the global, secular utopia of which transhumanists dream will come to be. Thus, the world of the late 21st century is stable, prosperous, and free enough to enable people to pursue whatever pleasures appeal to them. I say “free enough” because the stability of such a society would depend upon (a) a high level of voluntary compliance and conformity among its citizens, and (b) an optimum level of tolerance of maligned dissenters and nonconformists, including religious believers. This tolerance enables the compliant masses to feel superior to the deviants and claim the status that comes with being a member of the “good tribe,” thus sustaining the illusion of democracy and hiding the reality of oligarchy.

Given a stable, prosperous, secular, technologically advanced, and “happy” society, it is reasonable to suppose that very wealthy people would seek to transfer or copy their minds to a computer in pursuit of a transhumanist form of immortality. I take literary license by assuming a higher level of technology in the late 21st century than is likely to be the case. I did this because I believe the kind of society I describe is a plausible development of our current society and, therefore, more relatable than an imagined society 200 years in the future. In a sense, I posit that Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum friends succeed in creating a global society in which the super-wealthy and technologically savvy rule from behind the scenes.

The novel describes two classes of seemingly self-conscious cyber entities: (1) Hope, who was programmed into a supercomputer in Louis Ye’s lab at MIT, and (2) the human minds transferred to supercomputers, most notably that of Victoria Scott, the richest person in the world.

The novel explores the implications of two incompatible perspectives on these cyber entities. First is a religiously based perspective, which views the self as something more than a pattern of neurons or computer programming and which perceives cyber entities as lacking the subjectivity of human consciousness. Second is the materialist perspective, which conceives of the mind as merely a pattern of neurons or computer programming. Those adhering to the first outlook conclude that mind downloads are intricate copies and are no more a human consciousness than an elaborately detailed hologram of a human form is a body. Those associated with the second outlook reject what they allege is the “ghost in the machine” view of religious adherents and see cyber copies as equivalent to the brain-based human minds.

Implicit in the novel and explicit in the Lisowski essays (sent in previous Substack posts) is the idea that one or the other of these two perspectives will prevail, depending upon whether the personal God of Christianity exists. If there is no God and consciousness is nothing more than an intricate configuration of matter (whatever matter in itself is), the transhumanists will win the future, unless humanity destroys civilization through nuclear war or some other chaos-inducing process before technology and social stability enable the transfer of minds to computers. If there is a personal God, His Divine Providence will ensure the ultimate failure of those who treat humans as objects to be manipulated and discarded.

When I began the novel, I thought I would write about a transhumanist dystopia and explore machine consciousness from the inside, so to speak. However, while I was working on early drafts, I was also studying the history of Christianity and thinking deeply about my weak Christian faith. Unlike other religions, and despite the many terrible events in its history, Christianity is imbued with a sense of progress, with a faith that God’s divine plan for humanity continues to unfold, even in dark times. Hence, if the near future brings a transhumanist dystopia, God will “nudge” people here and there to perform actions that will guide humanity, or at least a remnant of humanity, away from irredeemable disaster. Providence is the unfolding of God’s redemption of humanity, and, as others have suggested, history is His_story.

In the novel, the Catholic Church, which has a vast international structure, leads the resistance to the godless “utopia” that views stability, comfort, and pleasure as the most to which humanity can aspire. Fearing catastrophe and recognizing the need for religious remnants to survive, the pope, a former physicist, establishes refuges throughout the world and in space, with the help of a mega-billionaire friend whose company mines asteroids. The small settlements in space enable the development of a New Christendom.

Relying on the work of historian Tom Holland,¹ my prior Substack post, “New Christendom and the Concept of Hell,” suggests that Christianity emerged from and ultimately transformed the culture of the Roman Empire, and continues to affect contemporary secular society in ways that are not apparent. The old Christendom retained many Roman values and beliefs, e.g., toward punishment. Our current secular culture and the fictional secular utopia of the novel rest on Christian morality untethered from Rome while rejecting the notion of God. In the novel, a new Christendom emerges from the secular utopia and, like the old Christendom with Rome, retains some of the secular society’s fundamentally Christian values, such as compassion and tolerance, but restores God to the center of its culture.

New Christendom settlements first appear in the rotating asteroid habitats, then on Planet 9, and lastly on Earth itself. Advanced technology, especially robotics and food production, are vital to the establishment of these Christian communities, which are established as large communes, each of which is self-reliant and independent. Because tolerance is a fundamental value of New Christendom, the Christian communes include a significant percentage of non-Christians. But unlike the secular society, the New Christendom towns place God - and a church - at the center of communal life and the geography of the town. Since the settlements are technologically advanced communes, the intelligence and efforts normally directed toward money making and its supportive professions can instead be aimed at educational and religious needs of the community. Thus, the church of a New Christendom community is its soul, while the educational complex is its beating heart.

Looking to the far future, which is imagined through Hope’s multi-million-year interstellar voyage, the novel assumes something that most science fiction rejects, namely, that there are physical limits to technology, that “progress” will eventually reach a point of diminishing returns for a given level of effort. Mind transfers are an illusion. The body’s stupendous complexity means that no scientific advancement will eliminate death. No spaceship or communication can go faster than the speed of light. Eventually, all civilizations will reach a state of permanent stability, which can vary from global takeover by a computer mind, to nuclear destruction, to unending tyranny made possible by technology, to the New Christendom model of self-reliant towns humbly singing their assigned notes in God’s cosmic oratorio.

The rarity of habitable worlds among the stars and the inescapable mortality of humans means that the stars are not for humanity. Voyages of thousands or even tens of thousands of years would be necessary to reach even a relatively nearby habitable world. Humans, like other intelligent species among the stars, must forge their futures within the confines of their solar systems.

Estimates of the number of galaxies and stars in the universe vary widely, in part because the vast majority of galaxies appear to be dwarf satellites of larger galaxies like our Milky Way. A conservative estimate is “100 billion (galaxies) × 100 billion (stars per galaxy) = 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars.”² If the personal God of Christianity exists, would He have created so many stars and limited intelligent life to Earth? Even if intelligent life arose in only one in a million galaxies (one in 100,000,000,000,000,000 star systems), 100,000 planets in the observable universe would have intelligent life. Most of those alien civilizations, unlike the infant civilization of Earth, would be millions or hundreds of millions of years old. Because of the limitations imposed by the upper speed limit of light, these civilizations will have little if any contact with other intelligent species in the vast universe.

The Lisowski essay on time speculates that our vast, four-dimensional block universe is the creative God’s “canvass,” and that His Providence is cosmic in scope, so it is not limited to Earth. The novel ends with a chapter that essentially explores two questions related to this speculation: First, if God exists and if he created other intelligent species, do these species share a common conception of God, given that the same God created all of them? Second, if cyber entities like Hope have neither human consciousness nor souls, do they have minds, and do they achieve the status of our beloved pets and other animals, which God loves as part of His creation?

If you read the novel, I hope it enriches your contemplation of the “big questions” of life.

Footnotes

1 Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world. New York: Basic Books.

2 https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/how-many-stars-are-in-the-universe