A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

Historico-theological Debates

One prominent instance of analyzing what historical traditions have to say about technology centers around the question of whether Christianity made a distinctive contribution to the rise of modern technology. The relation between Christianity and technology was initially broached in scholarly form by the social scientist Max Weber (1864–1920), who focused on the contribution of Protestant Christianity to the development of capitalist industrialization. By attributing to Christianity some responsibility for the rise of techno-capitalist civilization, Weber popularized a criticism previously advanced by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), that bourgeois culture was simply Christian morality write large.

Prior to the initial stirrings of distinctly modern attitudes, most religious philosophies were at least minimally wary of what is now called technology. The argument was fundamentally quite simple: that the pursuit and practice of technics distracts from higher things. This idea can be found in the Jewish–Christian scriptures as well as in Daoist and Buddhist teachings. In the first case, one may cite the stories of a conflict between the shepherd, Abel, and the builder of cities, Cain (Genesis 4), and of the attempt by humans to aggrandize themselves through the technical construction of a tower that would undermine dependence on the divine (Genesis 11: 4–9). In the second, a story from China relates that the sage Chuang Tzu (fourth century ...