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The chapter on the atomic weapons program is the shortest and the weakest of the second part. Neither of those projects can be understood purely in terms of being useful to the improvement of the human condition, rather they are also "technologies of transcendence," promising to leave the disdained limitations of the body behind and to open a new, brighter chapter in the history of humanity. The second half of Noble's account examines the religion of technology in four major projects of contemporary techno-science: nuclear weapons, space exploration, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering.
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The incremental advance of technology became enduring evidence of the progress towards perfection. And the spirit of engineering easily mixed with the militant Protestantism into a specific American credence of salvation through technology.
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With the colonialization of America the construction of paradise on earth became a decidedly more practical matter. Utterly disinterested in the practical application of his knowledge, he believed that uncovering the hidden logic of the universe was to understand and identify with the mind of the creator, who by that time was increasingly considered as the divine watchmaker. Newton saw himself as a messiah and prophet. Not only knowledge of the forms of nature, but knowledge of the divine design of nature was the goal, as scientists raised their eyes from Adam to his Father, from the image of God to His mind. Their scientific and religious ambitions were one and the same. Their members, exclusively men, viewed themselves as the vanguard to a restoration of the divine knowledge of man.įrancis Bacon and other founders of modern science devoted themselves to finding new ways of getting closer to nature and deciphering the divine message of its making. Throughout the Middle Ages a variety of brotherhoods embodied this spirit. This new idea inspired a move away from seeking transcendence through the withdrawal from the world towards seeking it in extending man's dominion over nature, thus returning to the condition of paradise where Adam's knowledge was absolute. Through the study and employment of technology, man's initial god-likeness could be, at least partially, restored. The knowledge (re)gained through mechanical arts, so Erigena argued, was an aspect of mankind's original endowment which had been obscured after the fall from paradise. Mechanical arts, a term used throughout the Middle Ages, comprised both science and technology. There, in a radical departure from tradition, the philosopher John Scotus Erigena introduced the idea that the mechanical arts are "man's links with the Divine, their cultivation a means of salvation" (p. Noble begins his account in the ninth century at the court of Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne. Noble traces the varying forms in which religious convictions have stimulated science and technology over the last thousand years and examines how they still shape their current development. It is the achievement of this provocative thesis to foreground that religion and technology are not so much opposing historical projects but rather that they are deeply intertwined. He argues that, at its core, technology embodies a tenet of religious millenarianism promising the transcendence of mortal life. Noble addresses the question why Western Judeo-Christian culture has developed such an extraordinary obsession with technology. In the present book, Noble concludes his move from the material to the cultural forces shaping technology by examining the religious transcendentalism that motivates the techno-scientific project. In A World Without Women (1992), he focussed on the gender aspect of engineering arguing that its male-dominance continues the Christian, clerical culture from which it emerged. 1984, in Forces of Production, he investigated the social history of industrial automation. In America By Design (1977), Noble examined the convergence of science, technology, and corporate capitalism, offering a Marxist reading of the appropriation and exploitation of knowledge by the managerial class. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention closes more than 20 years of research of coming to terms with the power and the ambivalent character of technology in the modern (American) society. > homepageĬopyright: Canadian Journal of Communication The Religion of Technology, Review Review: The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention.īy D.