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The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention

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I suppose most people like me have wondered why technology has advanced so rapidly in western societies but so little in, say, India or in Africa. I first noticed this through the work of Joseph Needham. I went to an excellent lecture of his with the unforgettable title "The Pre-Natal History of the Steam Engine". The Chinese had many of the precursors to the steam engine but didn't put them together. I've seen this rise of western technology attributed to Christianity in western cultures but never in a very convincing way. David Noble has convinced me. In the first part of the book he shows the explicit influence of two passages in the Bible, one from Genesis and one from Daniel. It is an academic style of writing. You've got to want to read it but its worth it. I wanted to know much more in depth about the role of the monasteries in developing technology. I found myself looking up the origin of Benedictine liqueur (from an apothecary in a monastery). When it comes to the present day the book is weak. He dwells on the religious views of current or recent scientists. Since most of the American population is theist and attends church its not surprising that scientists also espouse religious values. To make a great point out of this is redundant. After reading this book I wanted to go further but was disappointed to have my appetite so whetted but not yet satisfied. Chris.

This is a good book and a bit of a fun read though in its nature-- in what it tries to be-- it alienates itself from whatever group is intended to be its core audience. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile and well-written; though I gather than some, from its reviews, have had some problems with its difficulty and subject matter.

This is meant, I think, to be a popular book rather than an academic text. The author has his story-line and sticks too it fairly well: as with any 'popular' book, if you dig from one discipline into its minutia, you're going to find flaws and biases. Books can be great still. Because it is a popular book dealing with more or less of an arcane area, it does have a tendency to ramble between lots of stuff that most people generally haven't heard of: if you sit back and let the whole picture come into focus, I have found, in the end, you're still left with a worthwhile read.

To the reviewer who said that this book only focused on the development of technology and its interplay with religion in the West: it could be argued that only in the West could the author's thesis be proved: religious devotion was a cause of technolgical development and not vice-versa (i.e. religion/religious groups reacted to technology in the form of change in doctrine, practice, etc.: like the development of the different 'modern' branches of Judaism in the nineteenth century OR changes in Islam toward fundamentalist, anti-Western belief caused partially by technology... I can't think of any better non-Western examples...)

This is a worthwhile read; I'm pretty sure that its worth the fifteen dollars or whatever it costs. Buy it if you're in the mood for a challenging, good read on this sort of subject matter....

This book was recommended to me by a friend, who is a clinical psychologist. As soon as I began reading it, I felt very strongly that I would not be able to accurately evaluate it without input from people knowlegeable in science and technology and, perhaps more ominously, I did not want to continue reading it without access to this perspective.

I asked my book group to read and discuss this work. The group consists of three research chemists, one chemical/technological lawyer, two teachers, and one artist. The resulting discussion revealed flaws in Noble's narrative which I believe non-scientifically oriented readers should be aware of.

All readers in my group agreed that the book was hard to follow unless one came to it bringing some background information to the chapter topics. One of our group had worked in the Human Genome Project and knew some of the people discussed by the author, while another had some knowledge of the evolution of early Christianity. Both readers felt the author's bias in these areas.

On the whole, my group of readers felt that Noble wrote this book with a thesis to prove and was willing to extract, delete, and filter information out of context to support it. A propos of that, the scientifically-oriented members of the group were critical of Noble's lack of "scientific method" in approaching the topic he had chosen. They felt he ignored achievements of science motivated by humanitarian concerns and which achieved the desired results in favor of inflammatory scare tactics tending to overwhem and thus convince the non-scientific reader of the invidious presence of ignorance, compromise, and corruption.

As to the author's emphasis on religious beliefs as justification for scientific/technological pursuits, the scientific members of my reading group disputed Noble's characterization of scientists' motivation as essentially fundamentalist religious in nature. The practicing scientists concurred that their commitment to research came more from a stance of profound curiosity on the nature of things than the usurpation of God's creative work that Noble asserts as scientific motivation. This is not to say that these scientists did not have a sense of awe and extreme respect for what they might encounter in their research. Their statements were, for me, an antidote for the scary, cavalier attitude that Noble proffers in his book as being typical of today's scientific community. There are, albeit perhaps a minority, scientific/technogical people (or those in other fields) who do not pose a threat to the natural creative order of things.

Other criticisms were an annoying excess of shallow name and publication reference dropping, which I must sadly dismiss as typical of scholarship in the 1980s and 90s.

In conclusion, the feeling was that Noble could have done a much better job with his ideas than he did in this book.

I read The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention by David F. Noble for a college course called Philosophy of Technology. I read this book in the context of the required reading of other philosophers such as: Bill Joy, Raymond Kurzweil, Douglas Kellner, Don Ihde, Jacques Ellul, Hans Jonas, Martin Heideggar, Albert Borgmann, and Arnold Pacey.

Noble's writing style reminded me of reading an encyclopedia or a "collective biography" - it focused on the lives of several individuals with a connection among them. He provided the name of an influential person, their time period, a brief description of what they did, and maybe a quotation or two.

Though fascinating, I think this book can be intimidating if you lack some background knowledge on the European philosophers that Noble mentions in the book. To fully appreciate the metaphors that Noble highlights, I think you also need a good understanding of the four books of the Bible - Genesis and three books of prophesy: Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelations - otherwise his arguments won't seem very significant. I am a Christian, so was impressed with the extent of Noble's knowledge of specific scriptures in the Bible, but it didn't seem like Noble himself is a Christian, as he refers to "Christian mythology" (p. 103) and "so-called born again fundamentalists" (p.109). He has obviously read up on major Christian leaders - I was surprised to find William Tyndale (p.43), Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell mentioned (p.109) in the book. Usually when Christianity, especially Creationism, is brought up, Charles Darwin is usually brought up as well, but not so in this book, evolution did not make an appearance. I was surprised too that Galileo, Isaac Newton, and Thomas Edison, were discussed, but there was no mention of Albert Einstein - I think Einstein was a pretty important guy to leave out. Other well-known historical figures that appeared in the book include: Christopher Columbus, Mozart, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, Neil Armstrong, Adolf Hitler, and Karl Marx.

I feel like Noble presented history in a rather "cut and paste" fashion, which I think detracts from some of his credibility and can be sited as a weakness in his methodology. He used a lot of ellipses in his quotations, which I myself use sometimes, but the result seemed choppy and a bit suspicious. I realize that he was trying to move quickly through about 1,000 years of history, pointing out key individuals along the way, and to include full quotations would have probably been unrealistic. Still, I was uncomfortable with the excessive hodgepodge and serious risk of statements being taken out of context - for example, I looked up footnote #14 from page 110 and discovered that the quote was compiled from statements the speaker made on three separate pages.

So, while I did find the historical details and comparisons to Christianity interesting, this book read a lot like a timeline, and I'm not sure I agree with where it is projected as going.

This is a good book and a bit of a fun read though in its nature-- in what it tries to be-- it alienates itself from whatever group is intended to be its core audience. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile and well-written; though I gather than some, from its reviews, have had some problems with its difficulty and subject matter.

This is meant, I think, to be a popular book rather than an academic text. The author has his story-line and sticks too it fairly well: as with any 'popular' book, if you dig from one discipline into its minutia, you're going to find flaws and biases. Books can be great still. Because it is a popular book dealing with more or less of an arcane area, it does have a tendency to ramble between lots of stuff that most people generally haven't heard of: if you sit back and let the whole picture come into focus, I have found, in the end, you're still left with a worthwhile read.

To the reviewer who said that this book only focused on the development of technology and its interplay with religion in the West: it could be argued that only in the West could the author's thesis be proved: religious devotion was a cause of technolgical development and not vice-versa (i.e. religion/religious groups reacted to technology in the form of change in doctrine, practice, etc.: like the development of the different 'modern' branches of Judaism in the nineteenth century OR changes in Islam toward fundamentalist, anti-Western belief caused partially by technology... I can't think of any better non-Western examples...)

This is a worthwhile read; I'm pretty sure that its worth the fifteen dollars or whatever it costs. Buy it if you're in the mood for a challenging, good read on this sort of subject matter....

This book would more accurately be titled "Christianity and Technology," as Noble treats his subject exclusively from a Western perspective. He provides a good overview of religious motivations for scientific and technological progress from medieval times to the American space program and Human Genome Project. Especially inspiring to these researchers and inventors have been apocalyptic expectations and the impulse to recreate the original relationship between God and humans in Eden. However, the book suffers in the last chapters as Noble examines modern research in genetics, artificial intelligence, space flight, and nuclear weaponry, and the author's thesis that religion is inciting dangerous developments in these fields is a weak one.

This book traces the origin of the Internet and the attitudes of its developers to Protestant theology and its antecedents in Christianity. Instead of goodness entering the world through God's omnipotence, Protestants believe that they are required to build God's kingdom in this world. The drive in northern Europe for technological enhancements to life derives from this.

A book that offers an interesting insight on Noble's ideas is 'Collective Intelligence' by Pierre Levy. This book examines the social impact of Internet technology and proposes a set of ideals that should be used to guide a society using it. Levy tries to show how his set of ideals would obtain the most benefits from society from this technology. An interesting part of the book occurs when Levy compares the mode of live in an Internet society with that derived from Catholic ideals. He recounts mediaeval Catholic philosophy on the means by which God's insight creates the world. God can exist by his contemplation of his own existence since he is the essence of all things and out of his contemplation springs angels which can contemplate their own existence but need other things to exist. There are 10 ranks of angels each created either by God's or the next higher angel rank's contemplation of themselves. The contemplation of the lowest rank of angels creates our world.

The nub of this is that the world is top down. The ideal is at the pyramid of existence and goodness derives its meaning from the top. Levy contrasts this with the new conception of the Internet as shown by Noble. The lowest rank which is our world can create a new world above it. In this case, it is the lowest level of connectivity of the Internet. This new world is good in so far as it enables the inhabitants of our world to flourish. The lowest levels in cyberspace can create higher levels of existence with no limits on the number of levels which corresponds to the ranks of angels. Goodness flows up these levels from the real world in direct contrast to Catholic theology.

These two books support each other. Levy offers this Internet world as an ideal and contrasts it with the Catholic ideal. Noble examines it as an historical process and notes its derivation from Protestantism.

These are two very interesting books well worthy of attention.

As some other reviewers have said, Noble crosses a vast expanse of history in this slim volume, and it seems that the intimidating density of information presented would have been less so if the historical sections had been more expansive and less list-like; overall the effect is rather rushed, even truncated--1000 years is a long time, and to cover it in about 300 pages is nigh on quixotic.

This book is certainly interesting, and the portions on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the detailed history of Freemasonry, are especially strong, and his connection of the efforts of AI researchers to the ancient ideal of parthenogenesis is a lovely observation. But the final chapter and the conclusion are disappointing: they both collapse into the standard party line among postmodern critics that all but demonizes scientific inquiry and bemoans the ideology of dominance over nature while never proving why nature's subordination to man is in fact a bad thing. The conclusion is as such vague in the manner typical of such critiques--technoscience is of course the big bad wolf in the forest, but the contributions that technoscience has made to the lives of not only Westerners but many throughout the world are conspicuously ignored. His thesis suggests that if scientific motives were divorced from religious ideals then science would take a more practical, and less lofty, direction, but this seems to unfairly assume a level of uniformity among members of the scientific community that very well may not exist.

I enjoyed this book and would read it again; however, it becomes frustrating to read treatise after treatise on technoscience that does little more in the end than rehash the typical postmodernist critique of scientific inquiry as little more than another one of the hegemonic patriarchal West's grand narratives.

Amazing how I could use the title "Religion of Technology" and counter Noble's thesis. Key to understanding this book is to grasp the milieu in which Noble writes: he wishes to utilize historical critical methods in deconstructing the evolution of technology. Fascinating idea, and his ideas are intriguing; but he is misguided. The key problem lies in the Cartesian dichotomy of spirit vs. body.

Noble argues that the spirt-man, through Christianity, emboldened western culture to utilize technology for salvation. One glaring defect in this argument is his inability to explain how Christianity departed from Augustine's view of man's sinfulness to Joachim's view that mankind could obtain perfection through his own efforts (technology). Unable to explain this, Noble's premise splutters on, lacking the foundation to prove his thesis that the spirit-man is behind technology. In reality, the body-man is the catalyst of technology.

The body-man is best portrayed as Goethe in the 19th century. Herald of romanticism, Goethe wrote with ease and genius -- a true creative artist who seemed to instinctively acheive greatness. The cry of romanticists was "get back to nature." Ironically, these body-people whose love of instinctiveness and the natural (Nature) fell into the trap of defining successful living as fulfilling 'bodily' desires. The delicious irony is that right around this era of romantacism western society underwent its captilistic industrial revolution. Fastforward to the neo-romantic movement of the 1960s. Here we have free love, drugs, etc. true body-orientation. Interesting how the decade of greed (80s) came around from these same '68ers'. Further, these 68ers created the capital to usher in an intense period of technological growth (contrast this to the earlier generation supporting NASA, and how bored we are with what NASA does now compared to Sony Playstation 2).

Approaching the excessively long-winded, I will conclude with this: the body, not the spirit, is behind technology's latest thrust (19th-21st century). Unfortunately, Mr. Noble could not step out of the 'modern' condition to grasp the greater reality behind technology. We've believed the myth of the jock (body) vs. nerd (spirit), thinking this is reality. Harmonizing body with spirit, something which hasn't been done since Descartes, will provide the proper understanding of technology. I'm still waiting for a great book on technology.

God's words finally revealed for those who are called