The Worship of Science
In the early 19th Century Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. 50 years later Jules Verne wrote numerous
best-sellers predicting travel under the sea, in the air -- even space travel. Also helicopters, television and
the internet.
What happened? How did Shelley's prophecy of scientific and technological doom give way to Verne's
paean to science & technology?
For one thing, after the scientific revolution gave rise to the industrial and technological revolutions, there
was tremendous transformation in every sphere of human life as the industrial revolution progressed.
In 1818 the Dickensian miseries of the earlier Industrial Revolution still loomed large. Injustice, illness,
child labour, poverty and mortality. In 1818 Shelley hadn't yet seen how, after 1850, developments in
steamships, railroads, internal combustion and electrical power generation began bringing about great
improvements in peoples’ standards of living, life expectancy -- and tremendous optimism concerning
science and technology.
By 1865, Verne could see how steel, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the telegraph, the
telephone and railroads were transforming human life and Western society as a whole.
But there was something else. Something deeper than mere optimism about science & technology.
Something without which there could have been no scientific and industrial revolutions. No optimism
about science & technology in the first place. Beneath peoples’ ways of living and being, the ways of
knowing were becoming increasingly transformed from faith-based to evidence-based.
How did evidence-based knowing displace god-given truths? Was the logic of faith defeated?
Chronology of the “Great Turn”
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16th Century: Copernican heresy
17th Century: Galileo & the start of modern science.
18th Century: Newtonian's mechanics & scientific revolution pave ways for industrial revolution
Early 19th Century: Shelley’s Frankenstein first published in 1818.
Later 19th Century: Darwin’s Origin of Species first appears in 1859.
Later 19th Century: Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon published in 1865.
Late 19th Century: After 1880 there is burgeoning consensus that evolutionary theory is true. That
evolutionary theory isn’t just a theory. That people were never created in god's image by any divine
intervention from the hand of god
Faith-based knowing was not so much defeated as undermined and displaced. Discuss.
Shelley would have had us returning to the natural. Was Verne not precisely who Shelley was warning us
against? Like Victor at his blasphemous worst? Seeking to replace the redemptive majesty and order of
Shelley's nature with greed and brash ambitions to conquer nature regardless of all consequence?
But how can we heed Shelley – and dismiss Verne? Even if not brashly optimistic like Verne, even if we
don't wish to worship science and technology -- how can we avoid science and technology replacing god in
our thinking, in our knowing, in our relationship with truth?