Tech journal

As I’m reading The Next Story, I find myself with questions when I read passages like these:

God made us creative beings in his image and assigned to us a task that would require us to plumb the depths of that creativity. He knew that to fulfill our created purpose we would need to be innovative, developing new tools and means of utilizing the resources and abilities that he had given to us. In other words, obedience to God requires that we create technology…

In a fallen world, technology enables human survival. It is all that stands between us and abject misery…

Technology is a good, God-given gift. Created in God’s image, we have a mandate and a desire to create technology. Technology is the creative activity of using tools to shape God’s creation for practical purposes…

The basic gist is that God blessed the creation of technology before the fall. The fall messed things up because God cursed our connection to the creation we were supposed to “subdue,” so much so that weapons systems and herbicides were “required” to keep us from abject misery. So after the fall, too, technology is presented as a “good, God-given gift.”

I have a hard time with the notion that technology was “required for obedience” before the fall. We had no need for it then. There was unity and wholeness in the creation, unity between God and humankind, and unity between humankind and the creation we were called to steward. Technology was not needed to “shape God’s creation”; there was no division that needed to be mediated through instruments. The only picture we’re given of a prelapsarian job description was Adam naming the animals — a creative act that was essentially artistic, not technological.

There is also an assumption here that God’s original assigning of responsibility to humans was of the same type as the CEO handing off a responsibility to department head: “Go and get the job done.” But it was our decision to “go,” rather than to work in continual communion and cooperation with God, that constituted the fall. God didn’t give humanity a job and send them on their way; he defined their position and worked with them according to the free choice of all involved. It was the serpent that suggested the idea of independent action, and Eve took the bait. The idea that technology was necessary for us to do our God-given job before the fall doesn’t really work.

The persistent assertion that technology is a “good, God-given gift” even after the fall doesn’t make sense either because the separation we now seek to mediate through the use of technology was inflicted on us by God himself, according to the story. Suggesting that God then gave us the gift of a means to thwart it is akin to a child saying to his mother, “Because you put me in a time-out in my room, I had to make a sheet-rope and climb out the window. Thank you for the good and perfect gift of my sheets and my unlocked window.”

I am not sure what all the implications are, but for starters I don’t think we can assume that technology is part of God’s perfect plan for humanity. Creativity is. But the various ways we devise to manipulate our environments often carry so many unintended consequences, and put us truly at odds with our indisputably God-given responsibility to care for the creation (oil spills, herbicides, nuclear destruction), not just because we are sinful but because the scale on which our technologies allow us to operate is too large for us. We are not able to anticipate or account for the damage we can do. To say that God gave us this gift to use independently of him is to accuse him of gross negligence. It would be like giving a 4-year-old the keys to the car. It seems more rational to see technology as one of the results of the fall, and though it can have some beneficial effects, it was not Plan A either before or after Eve ate the apple.

I’m thinking of early episodes with technology in the Bible and wondering what picture emerges. There is Babel, against which God’s judgment is unequivocal. There is Noah’s ark, in which Noah’s activity was anything but independent. God gave him the most exact measurements and detailed instructions about what materials to use. It was entirely God’s project, not Noah’s clever invention. There is Jericho, where God presumably knows more about the laws of physics than his people, and once again gives them careful instructions. I’m sure there are plenty of other incidents, but these are what come to mind at the moment. None of it suggests that technology is required to obey God, and none of it implies that human invention independent of God is his perfect plan.

These are just my initial reactions as I read. For all I know the book will sort out some of what now seems puzzling or contradictory. But it’s helpful to me to be able to pin down some of my thoughts and questions in words so I can keep track of them as I continue reading.