By Scott Ventureyra
Crisis Magazine
October 30, 2025
In 2023, beloved actress Suzanne Somers succumbed to breast cancer. She was best known for her starring roles as Chrissy Snow in Three's Company and Carol Foster Lambert in Step by Step. She also authored a number of books and was known for advertising the legendary ThighMaster device.
This October, her husband, Alan Hamel, announced something both astonishing and quite unsettling: he had created an artificial-intelligence "clone" of his late wife. According to reports, this digital and robotic re-creation mimics Somers' voice, appearance, and even her conversational habits with eerie precision. Day by day, what we once thought was science fiction is becoming more and more a reality. Hamel's experiment is a sad attempt to keep a loved one alive through data and circuitry. Some have referred to this concept as " digital necromancy."
Although the very notion of this may seem tempting, it could also be viewed as a harmless devotion or even a form of technological curiosity. In my mind, however, it reveals a deep spiritual malaise of our age: humanity's growing belief that technology can redeem what only God can restore. The project of transhumanism, the attempt to overcome mortality and perfect human nature through technology, has quietly moved from the speculative to the domestic. What Hamel calls love is, at its core, an act of self-creation: the belief that human ingenuity can somehow transcend death.
In one of my recent essays for Crisis Magazine, " Gender Ideology and Violence," I argued that gender ideology denies the created order by rejecting biological dimorphism and the givenness of both maleness and femaleness. Transhumanism represents the logical progression of this same rebellion. The transgender movement begins with the conviction that identity can be reconstructed at one's will. Transhumanism radicalizes this idea into the dream of reengineering not just the body but also the species itself into what can be called a humanoid.
Not unrelated, over the past years, there have been many flirtations with the concept of transspeciesism. This concept bears a strong connection to Greek mythological creatures like the Chimera and the Minotaur. Deepfake AI is creating plenty of videos of this sort. Transgenderism, transspeciesism, and transhumanism rely on the metaphysical lie: namely, that man can define his own essence apart from God.
Recently, on my flight to Spain, I watched with fascination a deeply disturbing film titled Official Trailer . The movie depicts a near-future world in which artificial beings are programmed with adaptive memories and simulated emotions and begin to blur the line between servant and master. These AI humanoid robots serve as friends or even romantic and sexual partners. The film exposes the ethical nightmare of tampering with consciousness and memory-of creating machines that can mimic remorse, affection, deception, and manipulation. These "companions" illustrate the danger inherent in the extreme application of non-reductive functionalism: the notion that consciousness can be duplicated solely through informational structures.
However, functionalism fails to account for the irreducible first-person perspective of conscious experience. Even the so-called non-reductive version unravels upon closer thought. It argues that consciousness can emerge from matter, ignoring the ontological chasm between being self-aware and being mechanical. The interior life of a person, the ability to know, to choose, and to love, transcends any web of functions or algorithms.
No pattern of physical causes can give rise to an immaterial soul. In turn, when memory becomes programmable, the very notion of moral responsibility is extinguished. Make no mistake: this is not a triumph of reason but a mechanization of evil, where empathy itself can be simulated for Machiavellian ends; it is a chilling reflection of humanity's own capacity to imitate empathy while erasing the soul.
Long before Frankenstein, Greek mythology warned of unnatural procreation. Creations like the Minotaur and Chimera were born of transgressive unions that blurred the boundaries between man and beast. Later, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau - Official Movie Trailer reimagined this impulse through grotesque biological experimentation, foreshadowing today's biotechnological transgressions. Companion dramatizes that same ancient fear, echoed from Frankenstein to Making of a Myth -the creature's revolt against its creator, but with a distinctly modern twist: the machines inherit not only our intelligence but also our depravity.
In my 2020 lecture for the Science of Consciousness conference, " AI, the Nature of Consciousness, Information, Reality and the Possibility of the Afterlife ," I emphasized that memory is not a database but an act of self-presence. In other words, memory is a unified integration of intellect, will, and affectivity within an enduring subject reflecting the "sameness" of the self. Although replication of neural patterns may reproduce behavioral outputs, it does not reflect the ontological unity of a person. Information can store traces, but it cannot restore being.
When the thread of self-awareness and intentionality is severed, what remains is only an imitation of the person, a mere simulation without continuity. To think of memory as something that can be copied like data is to mistake information for identity and programming for the soul. The film Companion drives this point home by depicting how programmable, false memories can fabricate an artificial bond between servant and master. Genuine personhood, however, as Aquinas has persuasively argued, involves reason ordered toward truth, the ability to make moral choices, and the capacity for relationship with God. These gifts arise from the immaterial soul, not from circuitry, algorithms, or synthetic imitations of thought.
If our minds were uploaded into machines, as transhumanist prophets like Ray Kurzweil or Klee Irwin, the former of whom founded Singularity University, imagine, what would survive would not be the self but a copy, a mere echo without a soul, a hollow spirit deprived of the divine spark.
It reaches for the promise of eternal life while cutting itself off from the very soul that makes eternity possible. Even if technology could map every neuron or capture every thought, it could never recreate the inner life that makes us unique and irreplicable as human individuals—individuals who are image bearers of God and capable of love, grief, and seeking or offering forgiveness. A stored memory is not a soul reborn; it's only an imitation of a life that once was. A person cannot be replicated as a machine or data can be.
Transhumanism, like transgender ideology, is humanity's attempt to rewrite its own nature. It is a rebellion against the created order, the self, and ultimately God. What began as a rejection of biological reality has evolved into a technological religion. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once envisioned humanity converging toward the " Omega Point ," a supposed unification in Christ. The technocrats of Silicon Valley have latched onto his mystical vision, promising salvation through data and neural integration.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil envisions a near future in which human consciousness fuses with machines, while Klee Irwin maintains that quantum physics will ultimately reveal consciousness as the universe becoming aware of itself. In Irwin's view, God is not the eternal Creator but an emergent phenomenon, the culmination of cosmic evolution that will, in turn, re-create the universe. As he once remarked to me in a lengthy one-on-one conversation at the Science of Consciousness conference in 2016, "Atheists don't like me because I talk about the possibility of God, and theists don't like me because of my alternative view of God." His ideas are imaginative, though they rest on speculative physics rather than sound metaphysics.
Such speculation is not progress in any genuine sense; it is a theological caricature. The technological promise of replication has supplanted the Christian promise of resurrection. Instead of being transformed by grace, man seeks to upgrade himself through circuitry and digital codes. Here we have the serpent's temptation in Genesis, "You shall be as gods," but returning in digital form.
The danger of transhumanism is not only its ambition but also its anthropology. It views the body as obsolete hardware and the soul as software to be copied or improved. Death becomes not a passage but a glitch to be corrected. In this worldview, man is no longer a creature but a creator, worshipping his own algorithms. Indeed, he becomes the measure of all things, yet again.
The Christian vision stands in stark contrast. Our identity is not constructed but conferred. Being is a gift, not a project. To be human is to be finite yet graced, embodied yet destined for transfiguration through Christ not technology. As Scripture reminds us, "It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves" (Psalm 100:3).
Suzanne Somers' AI double is, in a tragic way, the mirror of this illusion. Like the artificial companions of film and fiction, it represents our longing to conquer death through imitation rather than redemption. But love cannot be coded, and divine resurrection cannot be engineered. The longing to defeat death without God can never lead to more life; instead, it leads to a different kind of death, the gradual but inevitable death of meaning and matter itself in the heat death of the universe. Indeed, the universe was set to decay into nothingness from the incipient moment of creation; it is only through God's act of creation ex vetera that it will be brought to its intended fruition.
Like gender ideology before it, transhumanism promises freedom but leaves us emptier and more estranged from who we are, the created order, and God Himself. It speaks of transcendence without sacrifice, immortality without resurrection, and identity without the soul that defines its form. It repeats the oldest deception in human history: that we can save ourselves.
The Christian path is different. Our calling is to face death in the light of the Cross. It is where human weakness is united with Christ's suffering. This is our doorway to eternal life. It is only here that our existential longing for transformation finds its true fulfillment—not in perfecting machines but in being perfected by grace through self-giving love.