Technopoly

I've been toting around Neil Postman's Technopoly for the past few weeks, and reading it here and there when I have nothing else to do. It's quite interesting. I've gotten to the third chapter- he's in the middle of an overview of our journey from a tool-using culture to a technopoly. Technopoly is a word which Postman coined, meaning a society in which technology reigns; in which tools control us instead of vice-versa. One of the most intriguing ideas he's written on so far is the concept of theology as the Queen of the Sciences, and how that way of thinking has changed so much and at the same time as the great technological advances of the past centuries. It seems that as man became more dependent on his inventions he became less aware of his dependence on his Creator. Here's an actual quote from chapter two:

Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo put in place the dynamite that would blow up the theology and metaphysics of the medieval world. Newton lit the fuse. In the ensuing explosion, Aristotle's animism was destroyed, along with almost everything else in his Physics. Scripture lost much of its authority. Theology, once the Queen of the Sciences, was now reduced to the status of Court Jester. (page 34)

What's actually happened is that Biblical theology has been replaced as Queen by television's theology; where we once controlled our use of tools with our theology, now our theology is controlled by our tools, which also control us. I don't mean subliminal messaging, although billboards, commercials, and magazines are quite good at that sort of thing; I mean that we do not think Biblically any more. Theology provides a paradigm for thought about all of life, and instead of learning our theology from the Bible, we've been learning it from television. Instead of learning from the Master, we've been learning from the tools.

Just as Jesus is and must be the King (of everything), Biblical theology is and must be the Queen of the Sciences. If not, we lose our understanding of the fundamental way the world works, and we're just blind men leading other blind men. And we all know what happens when the blind lead the blind.