Religion and Technology

The ongoing battle between 'Religion' and 'Science' is often treated as a conflict of ideologies, a debate over ideas. But perhaps most damaging to the former has been in the application of the latter, in technological innovation. In the Medieval Era, Theology predominated culturally, in large part due to the general adherence to Ptolemaic cosmology that validated the hierarchical scheme of God, God's representatives on earth, and those ruled by the latter. Two inventions shattered this arrangement. First, the telescope revealed that the earth is not located 'below' the Heavens, which meant that neither God, nor his surrogates, is 'above' the rest of humanity. Hence, the slow, still incomplete, erosion of Monarchism over subsequent centuries. Second, the Gutenberg press facilitated the generalization of scriptures and other religious documents, that had hitherto been in the exclusive possession of theological leaders. Hence, as an immediate consequence, the Protestant revolt from Roman Catholicism, and subsequently, theinfinite recursive generation of heterodoxies that have far distanced contemporary spirituality from its Medieval roots. A more underappreciated third invention in this category is the microscope. The latter has been as much a tool of discovery as the telescope, revealing previously undreamt-of realms of existence, including the origins of many ailments, thereby leading to the almost complete usurpation of Prayer as a treatment of them. Furthermore, by showing how vital operations can be functional at such a minute level, it pioneered the demonstration that complex mental operations can occur in the small space within one's head, rendering the hypothesis of a non-physical Soul no longer necessary, with the memory capacities of today's tiny microchip perhaps the most triumphant expression of that trend. Finally, the more formal notion that a person can be built up out of smaller forms of life substantiates the Evolutionary paradigm of an ascent of biological ascent, that challenges the scriptural account of a Fall. Medieval Theology was the attempt to ground Abrahamic monotheism on ancient, primarily Greek, thought. The rise of technology is further evidence of the instability of that structure.