Technology

I've often heard it said that the technology boom beginning with the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and speeding up exponentially from the mid-nineteenth to today is a result of the pouring out of the Spirit of God since the Restoration.

Corollary to this is the assertion that the Dark Ages in Europe were thus because of the Great Apostasy--once Christendom turned from God, he took away their ability to invent stuff.

I see a couple of problems with this assertion. First, the Dark Ages weren't. There were some remarkable thinkers working then whose influence on western thought continues today, people like Augustine, Aquinas, and Chaucer. So while technology (and specifically industrial technology) wasn't booming, there was no lack of really good thinking.

Second, Even if the Dark Ages had been dark in Europe, some really amazing intellectual (both scientific and artistic) work was being done in, for example, the Arab world. Much of the knowledge we have of classical Greek philosophy (Plato, for example) comes via Arab scholars' preservation of their texts. Modern mathematics, too, owes a great debt to pioneering Arab scholars of the period.

So, does this mean that God poured out his spirit on the "infidels"? Or just that he withheld it from European Christians?

A more interesting question to me is how science and technology--and the presumption of rationality that these are based on--have shaped our ideas about knowledge and history. That is, we call the Middle Ages either Middle or Dark precisely because of their presumed lack of rational thought and scientific process.

In the Church, we seem to have bought in wholesale to the idea that technology is a blessing from God, and that its advances are evidence of his providential approval and meant to further his work. Is this a dangerous equation? How does it affect our thinking about other cultures? About our own?