Don't astronauts eat freeze-dried rations on their journeys into space? Then what in the world - er, universe - was Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. doing with a chalice, a vial of wine, and a few fresh wafers before he disembarked from his lunar module? Celebrating Holy Communion, of course.
Not to be outdone, Aldrin's colleagues on subsequent Apollo missions left Bibles and Christian flags on the Moon's surface. These astronauts' spiritual convictions are simply the continuation of a 1,000-year-old Western tradition, historian David Noble claims in his book The Religion of Technology. In fact, he argues that the advance of nearly all the useful arts was inspired by religious expectations.
The author traces this spirit back to the monasteries of medieval Europe, where technology first became identified as a means for humanity to regain the divine perfection it had lost in a mythic Fall. He then moves through the Middle Ages and into modernity, citing luminaries who he believes grounded their scientific work in an apocalyptic vision of a new humanity freed from mortal limitations.
The book is full of fascinating profiles of the architects of modern science. Robert Boyle, for example, who pledged his life to religious devotion when caught in a severe storm that he identified with the end of the world, thereafter saw the scientist as "the priest of nature."
Unfortunately, Noble tries to make every moment fit into the sacred canopy that he has stretched tightly across Western culture. The reader could be forgiven for concluding that the conflicts that rock religion and modern science are merely figments of the contemporary imagination. David Hume's devastating empirical critique of religion, however, was not simply a blip on our cultural landscape.
Noble's analysis often lacks the more nuanced approach that James Gilbert brings to his recent book Redeeming Culture, where the boundaries of religion and science are polemicized and contested, though in a synergistic way.
Nevertheless, Noble effectively gives lie to the myth that religion and modernization exist in a zero-sum game. Religion does not belong to the primitive past any more than science and technology march to the beat of the future. They have evolved together and will continue to spin forth into cultural paradox.
STREET CRED
Full-Service Traveler M Is for Modem ...
On Priests of Nature
