Search
Close this search box.

Tag: Science

Integrating Technology and Religion in a Post-Secular World

This blog discusses how the post-secular can be a fitting stage for the promising dialogue between religion, science and technology.

Last Friday I “zoomed into” a stimulating academic dialogue entitled “Theology, Technology and the Post-Secular.” In it, a world-class team of scholars explored how the intersection of theology, science, and technology has evolved in the last 50 years and where it is going in the future. In this blog, I’ll provide a short overview of the conversation while also offering reflections on how the discussion enriches our dialogue in the AI theology community.

If the post-secular is our reality, it is time we learn how to build bridges there.

An Overview of the Field

The talk started with Dr. Tirosh-Samuelson asking Dr. Burdett to provide a short overview of the burgeoning field of religion and science. In the United States, the establishing of the Zygon journal of religion and science inaugurated the dialogue in 1966. In essence, the challenge was to find a place where these two can interact. Science tends to bracket the question of metaphysics (why things are the way they are) while religion lives in that space. This can often lead to misunderstanding and members of each side talking past each other.

Rejecting the notion of incompatibility, Dr. Burdett prefers to define the relationship as complex. For example, on the one hand, theology paved the way for scientific inquiry by first positing a belief in an orderly world. On the other hand, Christian Geocentrism clashed directly with Galileo’s accurate Heliocentric view. Therefore, the theologian believes in forging integrative models where conflict is not glossed over but carefully sorted out through respectful dialogue.

According to Dr. Burdett, the field is currently undergoing a shift from natural to human sciences. While the conversation started in topics like the implications Big Bang and Evolution, the focus now is on Neuroscience, questions of personhood and cognitive science of religion. The field has zoomed in from the macro view of cosmology to the micro view of anthropology.

Furthermore, the field is shying away from theoretical discussions opting instead to work on concrete questions. This new focus highlights where science and religion meet in the social-political stage. For example, how does religion and science interact when someone is considering in vitro fertilization? How do religion and science meet in people’s decision to take the vaccine? How does one comprehend the motivation of climate change deniers? These are just a few questions fueling research in this nascent field.

Image by Michael Schwarzenberger from Pixabay

A Theologian in a Tech-saturated World

In the next segment, Dr. Gaymon Bennett asked Dr. Burdett to speak about the role of the theologian in a technology-saturated world. How can a theologian tell a compelling story in the public square to those who do not align with his religious beliefs? Do religious perspectives still have a place in a secular world?

In his answer, Dr. Burdett pointed to Vatican II’s formula of Ressourcement and Agiornamiento. The first word has to do with a return to the sources, namely, the traditions and writings of the faith. It means examining carefully what we received through tradition and practices from past generations. The second points to updating that knowledge to the current context. How can these sources speak fresh insight into new evolving questions? The dual movement of reaching for the past while engaging with the present becomes a vital framework on how to do public theology in our times.

To illustrate the point, Dr. Burdett shared a personal anecdote about his journey to scholarship. Growing up in Northern California in the 1990s, he asked “what are the main driving forces shaping culture?” To him, it was clear that the rise of PCs, the Internet, and smartphones would categorically transform society. What would theology have to say about that? He wanted to know it from a technical perspective so he could see it from the inside. This is what moved him to focus his studies on the intersection of theology and technology after a stint in the industry.

Photo by Natalya Letunova on Unsplash

Grappling with the Post-Secular

Closer to the end, the conversation shifted towards grappling with the term “post-secular.” For decades, western society divided the world between the secular and the religious, with little intersection between the two. Science and technology have in effect been the major driving forces of secularism. Yet, we now find Silicon Valley, arguably the global center of this marriage, teeming with religious aspirations.

Even so, Dr. Burdett suggested that we still live in a God-haunted world. The removal of religion from public life left a jarring vacuum yet to be replaced. Along with religion was also any notion of the supernatural, all sacrificed in the altar of Modernity. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold expresses this sentiment well in the following verses from Dover Beach: 

  The Sea of Faith
  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
  But now I only hear
  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
  Retreating, to the breath
  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
  And naked shingles of the world.

This vacuum generated a thirst for new avenues of meaning. This in turn dethroned science as the sole arbiter of truth as it proved inadequate to fill humanity’s soul. The post-secular dashes the illusion that science and technology are sufficient to explain the world and therefore cannot be elevated above other views. Instead, it is a space where religious, mystical, and secular (scientific and technological) views are on the same footing again. The task, therefore, is to bring all these disparate perspectives into respectful dialogue while recognizing their common goals.

Reflections and Implications

Here I offer a few reflections. The first one relates to an important clarification. Throughout the dialogue, the unspoken assumption was that the relationship between religion and science was equivalent to that of religion and technology. However, it is worth noting that while science and technology are deeply intertwined today, that was not always the case. Hence, I would love to see an interdisciplinary branch that focuses on questions of religion and technology independent of science.

It was also illuminating to see scholars name a phenomenon we have been experiencing for a while now. While I have not heard of the term before, its reality resonates well. Nowhere else is this more true than in the cyber global space of social media. Given the pervasive nature of these platforms, this reality is also spilling over to other spheres of human connection. University, churches, companies, and non-profits are also becoming post-secular spaces. This is a fascinating, harrowing, and alarming development all at once.

Finally, I would add that it is not just about connecting with ultimate meaning but also about a return to nature. Whether it is the climate crisis or the blatant confession of how disconnected we are from creation, the post-secular is about digging down to our roots.

Maybe the sea of faith is not just calling us to ultimate meaning but also to encounter the oceans again.

AI Future: Technology And The Direction of Cosmic History

One of the biggest casualties of Western subject-based knowledge is the separation between Science and Humanities. Because of this rift, Science became abstracted from human affairs and Humanities disconnected from the natural world. This did not happen by accident but came as a result from the combination of specialization and human limitation. As each field expanded, it became humanly impossible to learn about it in conjunction with others. Yet, what specialization added by uncovering complexity it hurt by promoting fragmentation. If academia is to serve society again, then it must find ways to train holistic scholars who are both competent in their fields while also able to relate their field of knowledge to other areas. 

A recent attempt to integrate the two is an effort called Big History. This teaching philosophy, idealized by historian David Christian and recently funded by the Gates Foundation, seeks to connect Humanities with Science by looking at history in its totality. That is, from the beginning of the cosmos to the emergence of human history. The field of History would most often limit itself to human civilization having little interest in what preceded it. That was left to natural sciences with little connection between the two.  

While I applaud such integrative effort, I must point out that David Christian is not he first one to attempt such holistic view. Religious texts have been doing that for centuries. The Hebrew Bible, for example, wades into natural history territory in its first chapters of Genesis. Other religious texts of the time also contained creation stories that meant to explain the perennial question of how it all began. Certainly, scientific discoveries of the recent centuries have complicated these narratives. Yet, the main point here is to locate an attempt such as Big History in the persisting human need for a holistic story. We long for an integrated view of the world separating into different subjects will not help us get there. 

Where Did We Come From?

For centuries we looked at Cosmic History through a religious lens. Cultures developed their own view of the origins of the world. This was not only a way to understand beginnings but also its meaning and implications for how to live together in society, functioning as a regulating standard for all members of that society. 

In the West, this perspective began to be challenged by the the theory of evolution and with the rise of modern natural sciences. While this approach uncovered new findings, it abstracted the question of meaning from the quest for knowledge. The scientific endeavor became obsessed with tracing the origins of existing natural processes with little regard for questions of “why?” and “what for?”. 

Such predicament forced us to operate with hybrid brains. For questions of how, we turn to science (often associated with the left side of the brain), for questions of meaning we turn to religion, art and philosophy (often associated with the right side). As long as no attempt to relate the two were made, life could go on.

 In religion, and more specifically in Western Christianity, the dominant religious response was rejecting evolution and its implications. This response did not entail in a wholesale rejection of science, but removing it from the areas that contradicted traditional religious views. This solution was made possible by a separation between the natural and the supernatural. The natural, the realm of humanity, could still be run by the pre-suppositions of science and technology. Yet, in the realm of the supernatural, where ultimate meaning lies for believers, religious worldview ran unchallenged. 

In science, the reigning philosophy is naturalism. That is, we can only understand and trace back the processes that gave way to the world we live in. This “objective” quest has no room for questions of meaning. The universe simply is and the only knowledge that matters is the one that can be quantified or verified by scientific experimentation. In essence, the naturalist view does not dispute the natural and supernatural divide. It is simply not interested in the latter. 

Clearly these responses have run into tremendous difficulties in a multi-cultural world. Its main loss, however, was the original unified view of reality that pre-modern creation stories provided. 

A New Path For Cosmic History

In The New Cosmic History, Theologian John Haught forges a path aiming to transcends the natural vs supernatural divide by looking at cosmic history as a way to engage and also challenge both science and religion. Informed by scientific discovery that describe an evolving universe and holding tight to the religious yearning for justice, the theologian proposes an anticipatory view of Cosmic history. It incorporates the development of life through billions of year but it gives it a future goal. Haught sees the emergence of religion in the axial age (800-300 BC) as a precursor of what is to come. By doing so, John Haugth flips the natural-supernatural divide into a time continuum. God is not out there in a supernatural realm but in the future. Religion, birthed as hope in the human consciousness, points to a reality that evolution will eventually leads us to. 

Haught calls this view of Cosmic history, anticipatory. It moves the locus of meaning away from quantifiable natural processes and from supernatural conceptions and places it in time dimension. The yearning for rightness present in all religious is not simply a hope but the very direction of Cosmic History. In a sense, religion is the universe whispering to us: “everything will be ok at the end.”

While heavily influenced by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s natural theology, this perspective also shows echoes of Molmann’s hope theology and Pannenberg revelation as history view. Yet, it adds to these thinkers by presenting it within the context of a science-informed Cosmic History. By doing so, it emphasizes that the development of religion was indeed a revolutionary step in the history of the cosmos, not only of humanity. It is so, not because of what it is but to the future that it points to. In a Christian perspective, Haught’s view reinforces that idea that truth is eschatological – an unfolding that will only be fully understood at the end when God renews the earth.  

Implications for Technology

For the purpose of this blog, I want to correlate Haught’s anticipatory view of Cosmic History to an understanding of technology. First, it is important to note that discussions of technology tend to fall in into discipline-based mode of knowledge of natural sciences most often done with little correlation to human experience. The fragmented foundation in which current technology was developed yields a byproduct misaligned with human flourishing. Hence re-visiting this foundation and replacing with a holistic view of reality can go along way to repair this disconnection.

Second, Haught’s dispelling of the natural/supernatural divide also helps address another divide in the topic of technology. That is, the natural/artificial divide. The same dualistic thinking that encouraged the natural/supernatural divide is also behind our tendency to divide the natural from the artificial. Usually, the connotation is that natural is pristine and superior to the artificial which is often seen as a poor approximation of nature. An alternative view would place technology in a continuum with nature as opposed to another category of its own. This would not only help humanity back to nature but also allow technology find its purpose in flourishing. 

These two insights opens the path for a new way of re-imagining our relationship with technology and in shaping its future. Can technology be part of the renewal of the earth prophesied by religion? If so, then we have a lot of work to do for certainly what we see today is underwhelming, only an evolutionary stage in the way of becoming something beautiful and true.