Why Is Silicon Valley Fascinated with Heretical Christianity? Theologian Responds to Peter Thiel

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Ross Douthat

   You would prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitating.

2. 00:04

   Peter Thiel

   Yeah, well—

3. 00:05

   Ross Douthat

   This is a long hesitation. This is a long hesitation.

4. 00:08

   Peter Thiel

   There's so many questions.

5. 00:09

   Ross Douthat

   Should the human race survive?

6. 00:11

   Michael Horton

   The fact that these are our two choices actually shows what human beings are capable of by their own free will.

7. 00:19

   Ross Douthat

   At some point—

8. 00:20

   Peter Thiel

   No, no, no.

9. 00:21

   Ross Douthat

   At some point, God is gonna step in.

10. 00:23

    Peter Thiel

    I am not—I am not—I am not that Calvinist.

11. 00:27

    Ross Douthat

    And that's not Calvinism, though. That's just Christianity.

12. 00:29

    Michael Horton

    That is—I'm so glad Ross as a Roman Catholic. When it comes to God being behind history, or it comes to substitutionary atonement, or it comes to original sin, they're just these doctrines that Christians have historically believed.

13. 00:45

    Ross Douthat

    And you can have a heretical form of Christianity, right, that says something else.

14. 00:50

    Peter Thiel

    I think the word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament.

15. 00:53

    Michael Horton

    God didn't create us to overcome nature. He created us with a particular nature to care for nature, to be part of nature, to serve nature, to steward nature.

16. 01:04

    Peter Thiel

    One world or none, Antichrist or Armageddon, on one level are the same question.

17. 01:09

    Michael Horton

    It's interesting that the eschatology that is being represented here is very close to end times scenario that I grew up with. Frankly, connecting the coming Antichrist with a one-world government and the United Nations sort of being the target of that.

18. 01:38

    Michael Horton

    Earlier this year, we had New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on the program, and we had a great conversation with him, but we wanted to take a look at a conversation he had with Peter Thiel on his podcast, Interesting Times. Oddly enough, the things that Peter Thiel thinks about are the Bible, orthodoxy, the Antichrist, and as we'll see, even Calvinism. Let's see what he has to say.

19. 02:04

    Ross Douthat

    The world of AI is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative, whatever word you want to call it, view of the technology than you're expressing here, right? And you were mentioned earlier, the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn't anymore. It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a kind of mechanism for transhumanism, for transcendence of our mortal flesh, and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about? You—I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right? You're hesitating.

20. 02:56

    Peter Thiel

    Well, I—

21. 02:57

    Peter Thiel

    Yes? I don't know. I would—I would, um—

22. 03:02

    Ross Douthat

    This is a long hesitation.

23. 03:03

    Peter Thiel

    There's s[o many—

24. 03:04

    Peter Thiel

    There's so many questions implicit in this.

25. 03:07

    Ross Douthat

    Should the human race survive?

26. 03:10

    Peter Thiel

    Yes.

27. 03:11

    Ross Douthat

    Okay.

28. 03:11

    Peter Thiel

    But I also would like us to radically solve these problems.

29. 03:21

    Ross Douthat

    Right.

30. 03:21

    Peter Thiel

    And so, you know, it's always, I don't know. Yeah, transhumanism is this, you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. We want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way, the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this is these things don't go far enough. Like, that transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul.

31. 03:59

    Michael Horton

    Well, actually, Christianity, uh, it's not that it's more radical, uh, in this transformation than transhumanism. It's actually more beautiful because what happens is the same body that dies and decays will be raised. It's not that we ever transcend our bodies. We have transhumanists wanting to transcend our bodies and Christians wanting to transform our souls. Our bodies will be transformed. We are body-soul unities, and transhumanism really comes close to the ancient Gnostic heresy in denying that.

32. 4:40

    Peter Thiel

    You need to transform your whole self.

33. 04:43

    Ross Douthat

    Right, but the other—wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. I generally agree with what I think is your belief that religion should be a friend to science and ideas of scientific progress. I think any idea of divine providence has to encompass the fact that we have progressed and achieved and, and done things that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. But it still also seems like, yeah, the, the promise of Christianity in the end is you get, you get the perfected body and the perfected soul through God's grace. And the person who tries to do it on their own with a bunch of machines is likely to end up as a dystopian character.

34. 05:27

    Peter Thiel

    Well, it's—let's articulate this.

35. 5:35

    Ross Douthat

    And you can have a heretical form of Christianity, right, that says something else.

36. 5:40

    Peter Thiel

    I don't know. I think the word nature does not occur once in the Old Testament. And so it is about transcending nature. It is about overcoming things. And the closest thing you can say to nature is that people are fallen.

37. 05:54

    Michael Horton

    See, this is a problem that we've addressed before on this program, that too often we start with human nature being fallen and not with human nature as good, essentially, from the hand of the Creator. When (Michael Horton)Peter Thiel) says that the Old Testament, the word nature doesn't appear in the Old Testament, the idea of God nature-ing—creating particular beings with particular natures—is assumed throughout the scriptures, right back to the creation narrative itself. You know, we're bounded, we're finite. There's a utopian worldview here in the tech world that assumes we can become infinite. Like God. We can become not creatures, but in a sense, creators and overcome nature. God didn't create us to overcome nature. He created us with a particular nature to care for nature, to be part of nature, to serve nature, to steward nature. And this pitting of humanity against nature—is very much of the transsexual, transgender, transhumanist outlook, it seems. And all of it, again, going back to—with familiar echoes of ancient Gnosticism.

38. 07:33

    Peter Thiel

    That's the natural thing in a Christian sense, is that you're messed up. And that's true. But, you know, there's some ways that, you know, with God's help, you are supposed to transcend that and overcome that. And, but then if you just—present company excepted. Most of the people working to build the hypothetical machine god don't think that they're cooperating with Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord of Hosts. They think that they're building immortality on their own, right?

39. 08:08

    Ross Douthat

    We're jumping around a lot of things. So again, the critique I was saying is they're not ambitious enough. From a Christian point of view, these people are not ambitious enough. Now, then we get into this question, well, are they—

40. 08:21

    Ross Douthat

    But they're not morally and spiritually ambitious enough.

41. 08:25

    Peter Thiel

    And are they even still physically ambitious enough? Are they even still really transhumanists? And this is where, okay, maybe it's about uploading, which, okay, well, that's not quite—I'd rather have my body. I don't want just a computer program that simulates me. So that uploading seemed like a step down from cryonics.

42. 08:44

    Ross Douthat

    There's also a very macroscopic question that you're interested in, uh, that, you know, we'll pull on the religion thread a little bit here. You have been giving talks recently, uh, about the concept of the Antichrist, which is a Christian concept, an apocalyptic concept. What does that mean to you? What is the Antichrist?

43. 09:07

    Peter Thiel

    How much time do we have?

44. 09:08

    Ross Douthat

    We've got as much time as you have to talk about the Antichrist.

45. 09:13

    Peter Thiel

    All right. Well, I have a—I could talk about it for a long time. But, you know, I think the default political solution people have for all these existential risks is one-world governance. You know, what do you do about nuclear weapons? We have a United Nations with real teeth, and it's—it's—they're controlled by an international political order. It's, you know, what do we do about AI? And we need global compute governance. We need, you know, a one-world government to control all the computers, log every single keystroke to make sure people don't program, you know, a dangerous AI. And so the atheist philosophical framing is One World or None. That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late '40s. Starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously you need a one-world government to stop it. One World or None. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is Antichrist or Armageddon. You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we're sleepwalking towards Armageddon.

46. 10:29

    Michael Horton

    It's interesting that the eschatology that is being represented here is very close to kind of end times scenario that I grew up with, frankly, connecting the coming Antichrist with a one-world government and the United Nations sort of being the target of that. That was a very popular thing not just in the John Birch Society, but in much of the evangelical dispensationalism I was raised in—it would be a one-world government. Think of Left Behind, if you've ever seen that movie, at a summer camp. That seems to be (Michael Horton)Peter Thiel)'s baseline assumption of the end times. He seems to follow that idea that the Antichrist is a figure who is for an internationalist kind of order. And it's interesting how this plays out politically in our current climate.

47. 11:30

    Peter Thiel

    One world or none, Antichrist or Armageddon, on one level are the same question. And this was a plot hole in all these Antichrist books people wrote. How does the Antichrist take over the world? He gives these demonic hypnotic speeches and people just fall for it. And so it's this plot hole, daemonium ex machina.

48. 11:50

    Ross Douthat

    It's totally implausible.

49. 11:51

    Peter Thiel

    It's a very implausible plot hole.

50. 11:53

    Peter Thiel

    Ross Douthat) — Right.

51. 11:53

    Peter Thiel

    But I think we have an answer to this plot hole. The way the Antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It's the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century where, you know, the Antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that. In our world, the thing that has political resonance is the opposite. We need to stop science. We need to just say stop to this. And this is where, yeah, I don't know, in the 17th century, I can imagine a Dr. Strangelove. Edward Teller-type person taking over the world. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.

52. 12:45

    Ross Douthat

    In a sense, we're already living under a moderate rule of the Antichrist in that telling. Do you think God is in control of history?

53. 12:54

    Peter Thiel

    I think there's always room for human freedom and human choice. These things are not absolutely predetermined one way or another.

54. 13:05

    Ross Douthat

    Right. But God wouldn't leave us forever under the rule of a mild, moderate, stagnationist Antichrist, right? That can't be how the story ends, right?

55. 13:18

    Peter Thiel

    Attributing too much causation to God is always a problem. You know, I don't know, there are different Bible verses I can give you, but I'll give you John 15:25, where Christ says, “they hated me without cause.” And so it's all these people that are persecuting Christ have no reason, no cause for why they're persecuting Christ. And if we interpret this as an ultimate causation verse, they want to say, I'm persecuting you because God caused me to do this. God is causing everything. And the Christian view is anti-Calvinist. God is not behind history. God is not causing everything. If you say God's causing everything—but God is behind Jesus Christ entering history because God was not going to leave us in a stagnationist, decadent Roman Empire. At some point—

56. 14:11

    Peter Thiel

    No, no—

57. 14:10

    Peter Thiel

    At some point God is going to step in.

58. 14:11

    Peter Thiel

    I am not, I am not that Calvinist.

59. 14:16

    Ross Douthat

    That's not Calvinism though, that's just Christianity.

60. 14:18

    Michael Horton

    That is—I'm so glad Ross—who is Roman Catholic—when it comes to God being behind history, or it comes to substitutionary atonement, or it comes to original sin, they're just these doctrines that Christians have historically believed. It's called Calvinism now, dismissed as Calvinism, like it's some weird branch of something, an aberrant sort of theology. Ross is exactly right. This is just Christianity. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. God wouldn't leave the world to destruction. Humans don't have that kind of sovereignty, that kind of power to destroy themselves. God loves the world too much to let us do that.

61. 15:05

    Ross Douthat

    God will not leave us eternally, you know, staring into screens and being lectured by Greta Thunberg, right? He will not abandon us to that fate.

62. 15:15

    Peter Thiel

    For better and for worse, I think there's a great deal of scope for human action, for human freedom. If I thought these things were deterministic, you might as well, you know, maybe just accept it. The lions are coming. You should just have some yoga and prayerful meditation and wait while the lions eat you up. And I don't think that's what you're supposed to do. It's—

63. 15:39

    Ross Douthat

    I agree with that. And I think on that note, I'm just, I'm just trying to be hopeful and suggesting that, you know, in trying to resist the Antichrist using your human freedom, you should have hope that you'll succeed, right?

64. 15:53

    Peter Thiel

    We can agree on that.

65. 15:54

    Ross Douthat

    Good. Peter Thiel, thank you for joining me.

66. 15:57

    Michael Horton

    I do find Peter Thiel's juxtaposition of Antichrist and Armageddon really fascinating, and that the fear of one can lead to the other. But it's interesting to me too that human beings are responsible for both. Only God is responsible for redemption. Human beings—our hearts are so corrupt, our hearts are so twisted that we can create totalitarian antichrists on one hand, and on the other hand, simultaneously create Armageddon. These are—that the fact that these are our two choices actually shows what human beings are capable of by their own free will. But the cross—the cross of Christ represents what is possible when God rolls up His sleeves.