Episode 45: The Fabric of Faith: Christianity's Imprint on Technological Progress and Human Flourishing

Discover the profound relationship between Christian theology and the transformation of the cosmos and society, as articulated by the insightful Vishal Mangalwadi.

We examine the biblical view of a pristine creation marred by human transgression, with its present state of death and decay a stark deviation from its intended perfection. This episode will take you on a journey through the rich tapestry of belief that not only shapes a Christian's response to suffering and labour but also drives the relentless pursuit of technological innovation aimed at bettering the human condition.

From the genesis of hospitals out of compassion to the rise of machinery for easing toil, we explore the intrinsic value of human life that undergirds these advancements.

Vishal Mangalwadi unravels the complex weave of culture, technology, and science—a narrative that reveals a distinct Christian influence on the course of human progress.

We reflect on how the physical senses are not constraints but conduits to knowledge, essential for our interaction with the world around us.

The episode traverses through history, examining the cultural contexts that spurred technological ingenuity, from water mills in medieval Europe to the architectural wonders of ancient Rome.

Amidst the conversation, we ponder the cultural trade-offs of progress, recognizing the losses and gains in our relentless march toward the future. Tune in for a thought-provoking exploration that connects the dots between faith, innovation, and the human experience.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. And we are in the middle of this exploration of the foundation principles of a Christian doctrine of creation that enables civilization and science to flourish. And we ended last time on point three, how the heavens and the earth are good, very good, and we noted that death and decay are not natural to the creation, they're not part of its original design, and we must always think of that, of death and decay, as enemies that must be defeated. And Christ has done that with his death and resurrection. And Genesis 3 shows us that we live under a curse caused by human sin. The curse is delivered by the Lord Jesus, the eternal Son, when he comes to walk in the garden to meet with Adam and Eve, and he pronounces the curse. But the reason he does that is human sin and tied into that is the sin of Satan, who join this, this primal sin that happens when the primal sin happens in Eden. I don't think there's really evidence that there was sin before that, although there are all kinds of theories and ideas that people have about sort of a cosmic rebellion that happened before that. But there's not, there's no evidence of that in the Bible.

Speaker 1: 2:17

The place, or the Bible uniformly points to, got this events of Genesis, chapter 3, as the explanation for sin and death and decay. And so Satan and initiates this rebellion which humanity joins in with and and therefore this because particularly human beings are, were this pivotal point of creation, the, the whole creation is, is about human beings. The pinnacle of creation is the creation of Adam and then Eve, and so because human beings are in that position that the entire creation, the cosmos, the heavens and earth, look to humanity to realize the purpose and destiny of creation, so that when, when Adam and Eve fall into sin with with Satan, follow Satan in doing that or join with him in doing that, it disrupts the whole cosmos and brings this twisting and corruption so that the whole creation is bound to decay, not willingly, and it lot, it groans to be free of this current order of death and decay and pain and sorrow and futility. Futility is such a key word in this. The idea that there's this effort going on in the whole creation is working but cannot bring about its real purpose. This frustration that's another word that's used, frustration, and the book of Ecclesiastes says everything's vanity vain. This frustration, purpose cannot, we cannot fulfill the purpose of of the universe, the creation, because of this futility, this bondage to decay and a curse of frustration that's upon us. So the curse is not natural to the creation and to make this distinction, it's one of the most powerful truths in Jesus to see that what's wrong with the world and that frustration, that inability to do what we really want to do or what the whole creation wants to do, that is not natural to the cosmos. It's a corruption which cat which will be removed in Christ, fully from the entire cosmos at the end of all things, when Jesus returns. But even now we can experience something of freedom from that in our church life together. So it.

Speaker 1: 5:14

But the key is there's a difference between the original goodness of creation and the challenges of a cursed and corrupted world. And we, we should not passively accept pain, sorrow, disease and death, but rather we work together to alleviate all these things and to fight against them as enemies. And that's usually important. It's why hospitals and medical care are so deeply Christian and and hospitals all over the world are named after Christians and the whole concept of hospitals comes out of Christian culture. That, because there's this sense of it's not just oh well, that's the. That's either the fate, or that's karma, or that's just the will of Allah, or whatever, and that you just have to accept it. No, like Jesus when he came among us as the incarnate God, the fact that he healed, he's setting an expectation, a trajectory, a possibility of human life that can be free of disease, free of hunger, free of demons. It's an incredible statement, an impossible statement he makes in his incarnate ministry, to say these things I, I'm against and I will get rid of them eventually. He's showing he has the power to get rid of them and the intention to do so.

Speaker 1: 7:00

Again, we've sometimes referred to Mangalwadi's book about Christian culture and the Bible and so on. He points out how cultures that have not been shaped by Jesus Christ put up with, for example, hundreds of women and children carrying brutally heavy water buckets backwards and forwards every single day, because that's just how it is, that's the nature of things, kind of things. That's fate, that's karma, that's so on. But to church, fat people, to people following in the way and the mind and the heart of Jesus Christ, there's a desire to change that, to find ways to invent and innovate, to take away the pain and toil of menial labour. There's no point to menial labour in and of itself. If it can be alleviated, if we can think up a way to make life easier and better, then we will. That's the Christian mentality. There's no reason, there's no intrinsic reason for pain and suffering and toil and sweat and blood to be accepted. They are intruders, they are unnatural, they will not be here forever and so therefore we push them back now as much as we can. So let me give you a quotation from Manglewaddy's book. Here we go. Only one culture has promoted technology for general welfare and for liberating and empowering the weak Slaves, women, children, handicapped, the poor.

Speaker 1: 9:06

Professor Lynn White Jr thoroughly documented that humanising technology came out of biblical theology. Quote from Professor Lynn White Jr's book called Medieval Religion and Technology. He says this the labour-saving power machines of the later medieval middle ages were produced by the implicit theological assumption of the infinite worth of even the most degraded human personality, by an instinctive repugnance towards subjecting any man to a monotonous drudgery which seems less than human in that it requires the exercise neither of intelligence nor of choice. Now, let me, let me put. That's the end of the quote from Professor Lynn White, and I'm in the middle of the Manglewaddy quote, but I just want to notice that labour-saving devices are a product of the later middle ages, because there's this Christian belief that human beings were not made to do that, to do monotonous drudgery that has no room for intelligence or choice or or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Let's make things to change that, and in his book that Professor Lynn White says the chief glory of the later middle ages was not its cathedrals or its epics or its scholasticism. The chief glory of the later middle ages was building for the first time in history, and that was building a complex civilisation which rested not on the backs of sweating slaves but primarily on non-human power. That's an incredible quotation that's left me thinking many times. Like Christian culture rejected slavery, and then it only slavery only came back into the European Christian civilization at all due to the rejection of Christianity in the 18th century. When they get into the rationalism in the late 70s century and into the 18th century, that's when you get this horrible re-appropriation of something that's so anti-Christian. Yes, of course slavery's been indigenous in pagan cultures, and especially Islamic culture down through the ages, but it was alien to Christian culture and rather than it was this drive to not only get rid of slavery as a practice but to get rid of anything that's like, to get rid of a slavish way of living. Let's produce technology or find ways to make so that nobody has to do drudgery. Let's find ways to make human life less frustrating, less full of vanity. And all of that comes out of this deep understanding of what is the creation really for. What is natural, which is goodness, what is unnatural? Well, unnatural is pain and sorrow, sweat, blood and tears.

Speaker 1: 13:07

Let me carry on with Mangalwadi's quote. The development of the water mill illustrates that culture is as important for the development of technology as ingenuity is. In 1935, mark Block published his finding that the water mill had been invented at least a century before Christ. Later, its usefulness for grinding grain was known. In Afghanistan, on the border of geographical India, almost everyone needed to grind grain. Yet the use of the water mill never spread in Hindu, buddhist or later Islamic cultures. Christian monks in Europe were the first to begin the widespread use of the water mill for grinding and developing power machinery. Technological innovations took place in Christian monasteries, whereas science grew in Christian universities. Wow, what a great quotation from Mangalwadi. And nearly there's so many things in his book like that. But I love that quotation, particularly because of the end portion, that technology grew out of the monasteries, christian monasteries, whereas science grew in Christian universities.

Speaker 1: 14:49

I'd love to do a lot more on this, but I'll just say this for now Technology is not the same as science. Technology does not grow out of scientific understanding but out of craftsmanship and artisan skill. That's a huge thing to understand. You can have incredible technological development quite independent of scientific theories you can think of, for example, think about ancient Roman technology with viaducts and road construction and so on. It's a technological advancements but not necessarily tied to scientific theory. So that's an important idea the way technology developed through Christian monasteries. And then, of course, if we hadn't had the disaster of the enlightenment that completely distracted the growth of technology and science, if we hadn't had that, it'd be so fascinating to see what, how European culture could have hugely accelerated in technology and science. But yes, the great technological developments of the Industrial Revolution, for example, were not primarily driven by new scientific thinking but by innovations in technical skill and technology.

Speaker 1: 16:31

Hugely important points there that it's got a lot to do with human ingenuity and a motivation. It's to do with the motivations to use craftsmanship and artisans skills in a particular direction. I'll have to leave that now because although, yeah, I mean, I'll, let me say this the ability to see the underlying goodness of the creation and see the problems as enemies to be destroyed is foundational to the union between science and technology. That's produced extraordinary fruit. But it is worth noting that technology is not a straightforward blessing because it's often portrayed as this kind of technology is an is a unmitigated upward ascent of goodness, and there's you sometimes a bit less now than 10, 20 years ago, but there would be technology based magazines and websites and things and programs on television. If you ever remember something called Tomorrow's World, that dates me, I guess I think that was in the 70s and 80s and things, and it's tremendously entertaining watching these episodes of what what they tomorrow's world was about. Here's technology that's going to lead us into tomorrow's world and when you watch episodes of it now it's fascinating. Some things are much, much bigger than they realized they were going to be, other things laughably not. But the idea of technology is this like solution to all problems and an unmitigated, unmitigated good. That's complicated because technology gives with one hand but it takes away with the other.

Speaker 1: 18:45

Machines that enabled the industrial revolution were also used and abused, and abused to turn social structures upside down and cause terrible working conditions. So we were thinking the great you might say a great piece of technology is are the industry, are the other factory, the factory system with these machines capable of producing huge amounts of clothing very rapidly? Okay, so it looked at it just in its ability to produce lots of clothing in a massive building, conglomerating huge amounts of work potential into a single building driven by water, and then late, and then steam power and so on. You might say, oh, that's good. No, not totally. There is a good to it, but the bad to it is, in order to do that and pull together so much labor and industry into a single building, lots of people have to be displaced, re housed in proximity to the factory. And then, and then the manner of life where men, women and children are expected to work inside those factory systems. It's incredibly destructive of the family, of social order, and incredibly terrible working conditions to work in proximity to these machines and people terrible injuries, death, long working hours, all those things In another way, the invention of faster forms of transport has brought both blessings and trouble, not only in terms of the spread of disease, the spread of terror, the delivery of weapons.

Speaker 1: 20:52

The spread of ideas also that's again, the technology enables the rapid spread of ideas, but that again is a double-edged thing, because some ideas are terrible and cause war and cause tremendous disruption in people's lives and people. Adopting ideas without that spread of ideas, wow, the misery of adopting bad ideas. But so yeah, faster forms of transport, faster forms of delivery of information, faster forms of delivering weapons of war, but also those that's bad, the spread of disease, terror, weapons and some ideas, but also the rapidity of delivery of medicine. Commerce there's a lot of good things about the rapid delivery of commerce. Mission communication there's loads of good things about it. But it's not. Everything has a good and bad side with technology.

Speaker 1: 22:01

Here's a great point I think Mangalwadi makes this point that the triumph of the passenger jet meant that transatlantic travel could be done in less than a day. But it also brought an end to the golden age of passenger liners and travel by boat. You might say, well, hey, good, good riddance to it. Well, not necessarily. There's a whole culture around the travel being by boats and it lends itself to a kind of appreciation of the world and the protection and flourishing of separate cultures that is hugely undermined by a global village mentality. There's a lot to say about that. But see all technologies and then we know like our phones and computers are always this kind of, sometimes we hate them, sometimes we don't want them, but we need, you know, we're sort of enmeshed with them. So all these technologies may be real improvements. But we must be aware that a new technology does not only expand opportunities, it also brings to an end options that are seen as redundant.

Speaker 1: 23:30

So I posted two cards yesterday and, comparatively speaking, it was hugely expensive to do that, to buy two cards and to buy a book of stamps. Once that would have been relatively cheap to do. Now, well, it cost me nearly £15 to buy two cards and the book of stamps. Now the book of stamps was the really expensive item there but it was for eight stamps. So eight stamps plus two cards was nearly £15. And once that would have been a very cheap thing to do. But now, because handwriting and communication through mail is not done, you know, once was a huge amount of letters because that was the primary means of distance communication. But because new technology has replaced that and email, zoom calls, text, phone calls, all the kind of multiple ways that has huge, so soon it will be almost impractical to send letters and cards and that option will perhaps be completely gone at a time. But so all of this, look I've got.

Speaker 1: 24:51

In a way this is a distraction, the point being is that the, the creation itself is good and that the Christian culture has this pushing to alleviate problems. And I guess our little distraction there is to say it's not easy to alleviate all the problems in the world. It's not easy to solve all our sorrow and death and decay and pain and disease and things, because sometimes we know, in our push to solve a problem we create new ones. But nevertheless, this, the Christian civilization, has within it, this impetus to drive out thing from creation, these things that are we know to be inherently unnatural, whereas other worldviews believe them to be natural. And what can you do? That's the will of the gods, that's fate, that's karma. But that is an entirely pagan way of thinking. And Christ has given us this incentive, direction in his own ministry to say no to these things and to attempt to, even now, even now, before the regeneration of all things, push back against them. And then, before we just end this and I'll end, I want to finish with this before in our next episode we push into the fourth and final principle.

Speaker 1: 26:29

This appreciation of the goodness of creation is especially important about the human body, the goodness of the human body. The Bible says that the human body is the glory of humanity and we are made in the image of God, and that includes our bodies. And bodies are not evil at all, they are very good and hugely honored throughout the Bible, all the way through the Bible and the living God, eternally by the incarnation and resurrection. The living God, the eternal Son, has a human body and right now, right now, this cosmic Christ, who runs the entire universe, runs the entire universe in and through a human body, and that there's no greater affirmation of the human body, or even of the capacity of a human body, that a human body sits on the throne in the highest heaven and rules the entire heavens and the earth with and through a human body. And so why this is important is in Greek thought, especially pagan thought, the pre-Christian Greek pagan thought, this idea was that the mind, the mind is what is good, and the mind can access supreme truth and ultimate reality, but the body cannot. The body is unworthy, and the more that you get engrossed in your bodily senses, the less truth you can access, kind of thing. But what the Bible teaches and the Christian doctrine of creation is that our yes, we can think the thoughts of Christ, the Creator, after Him.

Speaker 1: 28:28

But our bodies are necessary for this engagement with the creation. Our bodies are designed to interact with and perceive the universe in a fruitful and faithful way, and just that logic of the entire creation is in our bodies and our bodies are designed to interact with it and see the universe and understand it. It's hugely important that we understand that our knowing of the universe comes through our bodies. It's not as if only our minds do science. Our bodies are. What do science? Our bodies do experiments and perceive that. Our eyes see, our ears hear, our mouths taste, we smell, we hear, we touch all of these things. Our bodies are designed to engage with and investigate, to probe and understand the universe. And so we have.

Speaker 1: 29:41

It's not that our bodies are the barrier that gets in the way of understanding the universe, but our bodies are the vehicle, the only possibility of the way, the way we understand the universe, the way we come to discover it, is through our bodies. And we become frustrated and disorientated and doubtful if, when our bodies deceive us and I say, oh, my eyes deceive me or I misheard that, like what the ancient Greeks said, our, because our bodies can sometimes be mishear or missee. Therefore you can't trust them, but rather know, the Christian says no, we know that that happens and that is a frustration to us. We want to overcome that. We want to design glasses to see better and have all equipment to improve the way we see Microscopes, telescopes, better ways to hear better, like we want to improve and get rid of problems in that perception. It's not as if we want to say no, I don't accept curses and limitations and deceptions.

Speaker 1: 31:01

Our bodies are designed to really see, to perceive properly, and so we don't go oh, but because they sometimes fail, therefore bodies as a whole are a failure. We go no because they sometimes fail. Let's try that. They mostly succeed and therefore we see the failure as the unnatural thing and the success as the natural thing, and that's a Christian way of viewing our bodies. It's our physicality that is most important for science, civilization, art, everything. Our physicality is most important, not just an abstract intellectual logic that is disembodied. Rather, it is the embodied physical logos of our bodily life that enables us to do science and build civilization.