Is technology (always) the answer?

Countless are the contemporary challenges that we look to technology to solve, while many privileges enjoyed today stem from technological advances of our forebears.

But could society's relentless pursuit of technological progress be founded on a misconception of what it means to be human? Can the Bible temper our felt need for technological 'solutions'—and guide us to greater wisdom in negotiating humanity’s relationship to technology?

These are leading questions for Dr Jonathan Lett, currently at Wycliffe on a research sabbatical from his role as Director of the Faith, Science, and Technology Initiative at LeTourneau University, Texas.

Lett is no anti-technologist! He’s quick to recognise how technology is inseparable from being human. It accompanies our waking and sleeping, our work and worship, our recreation and rest, our being born and dying. It’s there from the very start: in the hospital’s delivery ward; the car seat that brings us safely home...

But he thinks that this lifelong intimacy with technology across every sphere of life is precisely what allows it to escape our close examination. Much of his teaching and research is devoted to helping the church step back and—through a Christian lens—examine the assumptions driving our development and application of technology.

While at Wycliffe, he is working on a book that examines the goodness of creaturely limits, called Limited for Good: Being Human in a Technological World. One of his main theses is that we look to technology to eliminate struggle, extend freedom, enhance choice. These are widely assumed to be desirable outcomes, and technology their desired enabler.

The problem with this view, Lett argues, is that it teaches us to despise our dependency and vulnerability and regard our constraints as obstacles to be overcome. It characterises human aspiration as freedom FROM constraint—a negative freedom. But Christian teaching speaks of freedom primarily in the positive sense. True human freedom is freedom FOR communion with God.

Lett proposes that we revisit Genesis 1-3, where the Bible celebrates God’s creation of a world ordered by constraints and limits. It is precisely these intentional parameters that God calls ‘Good’—being gifted as the means by which humans will enjoy communion with God, each other and the world. This end is impossible without those means. We must see human finitude not as curse but as God’s gift—necessary to fulfil our goal as bearers of the divine image.

The Fall is the rejection of being a dependent, vulnerable creature. It is a wanting to be 'like God', i.e.: independent, autonomous, self-grounded, self-willing. This is our picture of human freedom today, but it’s contrary to the biblical one which reaffirms human finitude not as an impediment to be surmounted but as a precondition of our thriving.

Our technological desire to abolish limits is at odds with the Christian story, says Lett. The drive to make life as efficient and limit-free and choice-rich as possible is a powerful one. To fight it is to swim upstream.

Lett sees his book as having relevance for Christian witness in the public sphere. He feels the apologetic challenge for Christians is to articulate a picture of human freedom in contrast to the one our culture assumes. We need to frame compelling reason for upholding limits and respecting human dependence.

This is not to say that Lett thinks all limits are good; they aren't. But neither are they all obstacles to our flourishing.

According to Lett, it takes wisdom to know the difference.