The man who co-edited the National Science Foundation’s 2002 landmark report Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, which set the federal research agenda for nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science, is the same man who, twenty years earlier, had called on his sociological colleagues to become “religious engineers” and deliberately construct new scientistic cults to displace Christianity. William Sims Bainbridge, Director of the Information and Intelligence Systems Division at the NSF, had spent five years embedded in the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a satanic cult that split from Scientology. He accepted a teaching role in its pantheon of Satan, Lucifer, Jehovah, and Christ, and published his ethnographic findings as Satan’s Power in 1978. Martin Erdmann’s The Spiritualization of Technology: The Quest for Human Perfection, published in German in 2015 and in updated English translation in 2024, documents the Bainbridge dossier and situates it within an intellectual lineage reaching from Hesiod to the Extropy Institute.
Erdmann holds a Master of Divinity from Columbia International University, a Master of Theology from the University of Basel and the University of Aberdeen, and a doctorate in Modern Church History from Brunel University London awarded in 1999. From January 2004 to December 2008 he served as resident ethicist and consultant to the surgeons of the cardiology unit at University Hospital Basel and to the medical personnel of the CLINAM Foundation, the European Foundation for Clinical Nanomedicine, now the International Society of Nanomedicine. The research he conducted over those five years became the basis of the Habilitation thesis in Systematic Theology that Károli Gáspár University of Budapest accepted in 2017; the book is that thesis. He has directed the Verax Institute for Christian apologetics since 2003. Patrick Hunziker, Deputy Head of Intensive Care Unit Cardiology at University Hospital Basel and now President of the International Society of Nanomedicine, contributed the foreword.
Erdmann presented a paper at the University of South Carolina’s nanomedicine conference arguing that the convergence project is a modern version of alchemy. The audience of seventy to eighty medical professors and doctors erupted in applause when he finished. The alchemical reading is not an outside interpretation imposed on the field. Working practitioners recognize what the project is. His stated purpose in publishing the book in both German and English, Erdmann writes, was to expose the open secret to a larger international audience.
The 2002 NSF and Department of Commerce report, 405 pages, moved the technological transformation of the human species from speculation into federal research policy. Mihail Roco, Director of NSF’s Nanotechnology Division, and Bainbridge, co-editing the volume, sympathetically credited Ray Kurzweil’s projections of machine consciousness, mind transfer, and reversible death. They proposed a “global brain” linking human nervous systems into a single transcendent collective intelligence. They projected a human body made “more durable, healthier, stronger, and easier to heal,” resistant to biological threats and the aging process. The executive summary declared the NBIC convergence would lead humanity to a “golden age” and recommended the US government make enhancement research a national priority. The scope of what was being proposed, bearing the imprimatur of the federal science establishment, is what gives the document its historical weight. Dissenting voices within the field, including Jeremy Rifkin, Bill Joy, and Phil Kuekes, did not alter the direction of the agenda.
This book belongs in the lineage of works that read modern technological utopianism as religious inheritance, continuous with Hermetic, Gnostic, Neoplatonic, and alchemical sources. It stands alongside Frances Yates on the Hermetic tradition, Eric Voegelin on Gnosticism and modernity, and C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. The summary unpacks the specific documentary record Erdmann assembles: Marsilio Ficino’s 1463 translation of the Corpus Hermeticum for Cosimo de’ Medici, prioritized over the completion of his Plato translation, which launched the Renaissance Hermetic revival that reaches to Francis Bacon; Walter Wilmshurst’s 1927 declaration in The Meaning of Masonry that “the evolution of man into superman” is the actual purpose of the Craft, stated sixty years before Max More formalized the Extropian Principles; and the seven Extropian Principles themselves, accompanied by an anonymous 1995 Extropy Journal manifesto demanding “Down with the laws of gravity” and declaring “We will become our own gods.” The Director of Information and Intelligence Systems at the National Science Foundation is on public record proposing a Church of God Galactic. His own published writings establish the fact. What has been seen in his dossier cannot be unseen.
I interviewed Dr. Erdmann in April 2026 and reviewed his earlier work The Greed for Gold and Glory, a 487-page documentary account of mercantilism from Venice to the present-day City of London. Both pieces are in the archive. He writes five days a week on Substack under Musings of the Court Jester. His scholarship is among the most consequential independent work being produced in this field, and I am a supporter of his work.
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