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D. F. Noble. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 273 pp.
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. 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. In Forces of Production (1984), he investigated the social history of industrial automation. In A World without Women (1992), he focused on the gender aspect of engineering arguing that its male dominance continues the Christian, clerical culture from which it emerged. 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.
Noble addresses the question: "Why has Western Judeo-Christian culture developed such an extraordinary obsession with technology?" He argues that, at its core, technology embodies a tenet of religious millenarianism promising the transcendence of mortal life. 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. 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.
Noble begins his account in the ninth century at the court of Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne. 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. 17). Mechanical arts, a term used throughout the Middle Ages, comprised both science and technology. 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. Through the study and employment of technology, man's initial god-likeness could be, at least partially, restored. This new idea inspired a move away from seeking transcendence through withdrawal from the world toward seeking an...