# Faith

Explore how faith intersects with transhumanist thought—discover the Mormon Transhumanist perspective on trust, hope, and humanity’s divine potential.

Scripture describes faith as a steady assurance that moves people to act, and Restoration teaching adds that it is a form of power, the principle by which God works. Mormon transhumanists therefore treat faith in human and technological possibility as a call to act and to test, and they distrust belief that refuses to be tried.

Faith is trust or confidence in a person or a promise. The Hebrew *'emunah*, often rendered "faithfulness," means firmness or steadiness and comes from the root *'aman*, "to be firm," from which *amen* also derives. One of its earliest uses describes a body before it describes a belief. When Moses held up his hands while Israel fought Amalek, Aaron and Hur supported them, "and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun" (Exodus 17:12). The word translated "steady" is *'emunah*, and Hebrew readers could hardly have missed that faith, in their language, looks like hands held firm under strain. The Greek *pistis* likewise means trust, and also faithfulness, the quality that makes someone worth trusting. Critics of religion often define faith as belief without evidence, and some believers accept the definition as a virtue. The scriptures describe something closer to an assurance that acts, and Restoration texts go further.

## Substance and Evidence

The New Testament's definition of faith uses words drawn from property and proof, and Restoration scripture ties faith to trial and witness.

It has long been recognized that the eleventh chapter of Hebrews supplies the classic definition: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). Less often noticed is the character of its two key terms. *Hypostasis*, "substance," means what stands underneath and gives something reality, and some scholars, citing ancient property records, read it as a title deed to what is hoped for. *Elenchos*, "evidence," means proof or the conviction that proof produces. Faith in this definition holds a claim on a future it cannot yet see. The Book of Mormon keeps the same balance. Alma teaches that "faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things; therefore if ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true" (Alma 32:21), so that faith falls short of knowledge while aiming at what is real. Moroni adds the order of events: "ye receive no witness until after the trial of your faith" (Ether 12:6). Moroni places the witness after the trial, so that faith requires acting before the evidence is complete.

## The Principle of Action and Power

Early Latter-day Saint teaching describes faith as the principle behind every deliberate action, human and divine.

The Lectures on Faith, delivered to elders in Kirtland, Ohio, in the winter of 1834–35 and published with the Doctrine and Covenants until 1921, begin from Hebrews and draw a wider conclusion. Faith is "the principle of action in all intelligent beings," and the lectures illustrate the point with ordinary labor, asking whether anyone would have sown without believing that he would reap. They then add that faith "is not only the principle of action, but of power also, in all intelligent beings whether in heaven or on earth," citing the verse that "through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God" (Hebrews 11:3). On this reading God creates by faith, and the lectures say that one who works by faith works "by words instead of exerting his physical powers." Christ extends the same power to his disciples: "If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is expedient in me" (Moroni 7:33). The sower in the lectures and the God who frames worlds stand in one pattern, each acting on an outcome not yet visible.

## Experiment upon the Word

Alma frames faith as an experiment whose results can be observed, and that frame sets the test for faith in technology.

Alma invites his hearers to "awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words" (Alma 32:27), and he describes the signs by which a planted seed shows itself to be good: it swells, enlarges the soul, and enlightens the understanding. Mormon transhumanists read the passage as a model for their own trust in human potential. Research on aging, long engineering projects, and every attempt to build what does not yet exist act on outcomes not yet seen, much as the sower does. The same frame exposes a risk. Recent manifestos of technological optimism are written as creeds, and investors have poured fortunes into promises that were never tested, as when a blood-testing company raised hundreds of millions of dollars for devices that did not work as claimed and its founder was convicted of fraud. Belief of that kind asks for a witness without the trial. The test for faith in any technology is whether it acts on its promise while submitting that promise to experiment and evidence, as Alma's seed is judged by its growth, or asks people to believe in place of seeing results.