I want to focus on a different aspect of Ken MacLeod's 'Rapture of the Nerds' comment, because I actually think it cuts both ways. Yes, it's possible to draw parallels between the Christian idea of The Rapture — and, even more generally, between religious ideas of transcendence generally — and the notion that, once human technology passes a certain threshold, roughly that described by Vinge and other singularity enthusiasts, human beings will potentially enjoy the kind of powers and pleasures traditionally assigned to gods or beings in heaven: Limitless lifespans, if not immortality, superhuman powers, virtually limitless wealth, fleshly pleasures on demand, etc.

These do sound like the sorts of things that religions have promised their followers throughout human history. That leads some who invoke MacLeod's comment to contend that because singularity enthusiasts hope for the same kinds of things that religious believers have hoped for, singularity enthusiasts are merely adherents to a new sort of religion, the religion of science.

But as Isaac Asimov has noted, the religion of science is distinguished by one chief characteristic: 'that it works.' I express no opinion on whether science will actually deliver on these hopes. But I note that people once looked to supernatural sources for such now-mundane things as cures for baldness or impotence, only to find those desires satisfied, instead, by modern pharmacology. Yet that hardly makes those who place their faith in pharmacology members of a religion — or, if it does, it makes them members of a religion that is distinguishable from those dependent on the supernatural.