21 October 2025 – Nick Spencer

What are humans for?

Science, religion, and the future of humanity

Science’s ability to understand, manipulate, and “improve” the human is greater now than it has ever been, and the 21st century is opening up lots of areas – life extension, AI & human augmentation, genetic engineering – in which people (often tech billionaires) are planning to do just that. Doing so, however, opens up profound questions, going beyond the ordinary ethical challenges (is this the kind of thing we should do?) to encompass deep philosophical ones (is this the kind of thing we should be?). These are questions that science is, by definition, ill-equipped to answer. All too often, the knee-jerk religious response is to say that the answer is no – we shouldn’t do these things, we shouldn’t “Play God”. But, as Nick Spencer argues in this talk, maybe that is exactly what we should be doing. Maybe the real question is not whether we should play God, but what kind of God we should be imitating?

Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at the Christian think tank, Theos. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Magisteria: the entangled histories of science and religion (Oneworld, 2023), Playing God: science, religion and the future of humanity (SPCK, 2024), and The Landscapes of Science and Religion: what are we disagreeing about (OUP, 2025).