Religion is not the antithesis of technology – in many ways, it is the prelude to it
David F. Noble seeks out to illustrate a counter-intuitive fact. The greatest scientific minds of the past, and present, have religious beliefs, it is not that their religious beliefs are coincidental, but that they form the very basis for their pursuit of science and technology in the first place – not in a metaphorical but in a literal sense. From Boyle, to Descartes, to Boole, to Newton, to Francis Collins – religion has been at the heart of the deepest scientific questions mankind has ever asked..
In The Religion of Technology, Noble tries to tell us why. In the U.S, the connection between religion and technology has something to do with the expectation of the return of Jesus Christ.
Technology as deliverance
The distinctive feature of the modern age concerning our relationship to technology, is that we are no longer content with the comfort and survival they bring to our lives, but that we seek deliverance from it.
Noble believes that such a development is a consequence of a myth we have consciously or unconsciously constructed. But Noble makes a distinction between two classes of religious scientists, those who believe that the science is a way of discovering clues about the mind of God, and those who believe that it is our duty, as human beings, to enact the divine plan here on earth.
Many religious scholars have warned about attachment to technology. To them, technology is merely a tool to make the lives of human beings more comfortable, but nonetheless, it exists for man in his fallen state. A second group of religious thinkers, more engaged with the useful arts, are of the opinion that technology is mankind’s salvation. Noble’s thesis throughout the book, is that we are, whether we like or not, enacting the beliefs of the second group of people. And with such an enactment comes dangerous consequences.
Fallen technological man
“Quite apart from those supernatural arts of living in virtue and of reaching immortal beatitude which nothing but the grace of God which is in Christ can communicate to the sons of promise and heirs of the kingdom, “there have been discovered and perfected, by the natural genius of man, innumerable arts and skills which minister not only to the necessities of life but also to human enjoyment.” – Augustine, The City of God
Augustine recognized the “astonishing achievements” that had taken place in cloth-making, navigation, architecture, agriculture, ceramics, medicine, weaponry and fortification, animal husbandry, and food preparation; in mathematics, astronomy,and philosophy; as well as in language, writing, music, theater, painting, and sculpture. But he emphasized again that “in saying this, of course, I am thinking only of the nature of the human mind as a glory of this mortal life, not of faith and the way of truth that leads to eternal life.… And, remember, all these favors taken together are but the fragmentary solace allowed us in a life condemned to misery.”
Here, Noble contrasts the views of Augustine with more recent techno-religious enthusiasts, who are working towards a paradise on earth. Jacques Ellul made a similar point to Augustine, when he said that technology existed for mankind it is fallen state, and had no other significance. In this view, technology had nothing to do with transcendence – it signified the denial of transcendence.
Transcendence, the recovery of lost perfection, could be gained only by the grace of God alone. Moreover, those so blessed, said Augustine, would partake in a “universal knowledge” far beyond the ken of mere mortals. “Think how great, how beautiful, how certain, how unerring, how easily acquired this knowledge then will be. And what a body, too, we shall have, a body utterly subject to our spirit and one so kept alive by spirit that there will be no need of any other food.” In the early Middle Ages, for reasons that remain obscure, the relationship between technology and transcendence began to change.
In the Book of Revelation (the last book of the Bible), there is a prophecy that foretells a thousand-year reign on earth of the returned Messiah, Christ, with an elite corps of the saintly elect. It is here that the fate of the Fall is reversed and the curse is lifted. The redeemed mankind if permitted to return to paradise, eat from the tree of life, and regain Adam’s original perfection, immortality, and godliness.
In the early centuries of the Christian era, there were myriad millenarian voices heralding the imminent advent of the Kingdom of God, which drew their inspiration from biblical prophecy and mystical vision. But these voices were soon marginalized by the clerical caste, which embodied the power and authority of the Great Church. In the view of this emergent elite, the millennium had already begun with the establishment of the Church and they were the earthly saints. In their eyes, belief in a millennium yet to come was subversive, because it suggested that the Kingdom of God had not yet arrived but belonged to a future time beyond the Church.
Despite official condemnation, belief in a future millennium continued to flourish, mostly as an expression of popular desperation and dissent. The medieval ecclesiastical elite neither offered nor harbored hope of an earthly paradise beyond the Church. In the high Middle Ages, however, in the wake of religious revival, a rigorist Church-reform movement, the Crusades, and renewed external threats to Christendom, millenarianism regained a degree of elite respectability, especially among the new religious orders, which made use of apocalyptic mythology to validate their identity and destiny, and thereby magnify their significance.
Bacon thus sought to close the gap between technologyand philosophy, noting scornfully that among philosophers “it is esteemed a kind of dishonor unto learning to descend to inquiry ormeditationupon matters mechanical.” Toward this end, he insisted that philosophers must overcome their elite disdain for the useful arts, and learn to deal with “things themselves,” “mean and even filthy things,” in order better to appreciate their value and appropriate their fruits.
In his defense of the worthiness of the useful arts, Bacon forcefully reasserted the tradition begun long before by Erigena, Hugh of St. Victor, and Roger Bacon, and sustained, most recently, by Paracelsus, Bruno, and the Rosicrucians.
“It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor thequietof resolution, nor the raising of the spirit nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honor or fame, nor enablement of business, that are the true ends of knowledge,” Bacon insisted in Valerius Terminus, “but it is a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation.” “We are agreed, my sons, that you are men,” Bacon wrote in his “Refutation of Philosophies.” “That means, as I think, that you are not animals on their hind legs, but mortal gods.”
Bacon’s bold biblically inspired vision reflected the exaggerated anthropocentric assumptions of his seventeenth-century Protestant faith, the conviction that “human ascendancy was central to the Divine plan.”
“Man, if we look to final causes, may be regarded as the centre of the world insomuch that if man were taken away from the world, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or purpose,” Bacon wrote. In the same scriptural spirit, he counseled humility in the pursuit of knowledge and power, lest mankind repeat the sin of Adam, but he defended his grandiose enterprise by insisting that “it was not that pure and unspotted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to things agreeable to their natures which caused the Fall, but an ambitious and authoritative desire of moral knowledge, to judge of good and evil, which makes men revolt from God.”Like Roger Bacon before him, Francis Bacon maintained that the biblical accounts of Noah, Moses, and Solomon, as well as the history of the useful arts, offered sufficient evidence for the belief that the restoration of mankind’s original powers was part of the divine plan.
Boyle learned Hebrew and other ancient languages to read God’s words in their original expression. Likewise, as a natural scientist he delved directly into God’s work—in the original, as it were—in an equally devout effort to come closer to his Creator. “It is the glory and prerogative of man,” Boyle wrote, “that God was pleased to make him, not after the world’s image, but his own.” Thus, he urged, mankind must “look upon ourselves as belonging unto God.” Boyle believed that this privileged relationship to God was especially embodied in the scientist, “born the priest of nature,” whose “inquiry mediates between God and Creation.” And he was convinced that, because of their great learning and devotion, the scientific virtuosi would ultimately, in the millennium, “have a far greater knowledge of God’s wonderful universe than Adam himself could have had.”
Newton
Though Boyle no doubt identified himself, and was certainly viewed by his many acolytes, as the very model of the saintly virtuoso, the new transcendent ideal was more fully realized in the Godlike persona of Isaac Newton. Austere, ascetic, and aloof, Newton spent his entire life seeking some intimate understanding of his Creator. Like Boyle, Newton studied ancient languages better to understand the true meaning of Scripture. A fervent millenarian, he devoted a lifetime to the interpretation of prophecy, producing four separate commentaries on Daniel and Revelation.
In Joachimite fashion, he believed that he “could prove, point by point, that everything foretold in the prophetic books had actually taken place, that the correspondence between prophecy and recorded history had been perfect.” In a treatise on “The End of the World, Day of Judgement, and World to Come,” he speculated about what the millennium and the Kingdom of Heaven would be like, while he privately calculated the time of the second coming. Born on Christmas Day, he believed himself a messiah and a prophet (a status still accorded him by Seventh-Day Adventists) and wrote that the “Sons of the Resurrection” would have bodies like that of Christ, “with more than a touch of self-assurance that he would be among [them].”
Whereas Boyle began his career emphasizing the usefulness of experimental natural philosophy only to argue later that “patient study was likely to enable man to gain a far larger share of his patrimony than aiming at immediate usefulness,” Newton from the start “displayed sovereign indifference to the practical usages of science”; throughout his life his scientific efforts to discern the operating laws of nature were “directed almost exclusively to the knowledge of God.”Newton’s religious beliefs encouraged him “to search for divine efficacy in every aspect of the material order.” For Newton, then, to uncover the hidden logic of the universe was to understand, and in that sense identify with, the mind of its Creator.
To the deeply religious mind of modern science, beginning with Boyle and Newton (and also Galileo), the twin conceptions of “the divine transcendence of the creator-maker and the transcendence of man as knower reinforced each other.” Henceforth nature was to be understood by the way it was made, which required of the scientist a God-like posture and perspective.But divine knowledge of creation was not all. Some aimed even higher, seeking not merely to know creation as it was made but also to make it themselves, actually to participate in creation and hence know it firsthand.
In the sixteenth century, inventors and mechanics had increasingly invoked the image of God as craftsman and architect in order, by analogy,