A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Great Pyramid of Giza and questioning whether humanity may have taken a wrong turn as it followed the trajectory of technological innovation. For instance, there’s still not a convincing argument on how the pyramids were built yet though our technology today boggles our minds, still much seems awkward and inefficient when compared to the spectacularly enormous and precise construction of the Great Pyramid built over 4500 years ago. Our cars are hugely oversized for transporting our order-of-magnitude smaller bodies around. Our airplanes are staggeringly inefficient and cumbersome compared to the flight of a bird. Even the lightbulb with its heated filament giving us electric light for the first time in 1879 seems very inefficient compared to the light produced by the sun.
The direction we have taken seems to have sprung from the time that Darwin’s theory was published in 1859 and the establishment of methodological naturalism soon thereafter. Methodological naturalism was indoctrinated by science as the recognized way to explain and investigate phenomena in our natural world. The principle itself requires scientists to assume that all features of our natural world must be derived from, or the result of, material causes, with the complete exclusion of anything metaphysical or theological as a means of explanation. I wrote about this in both “Methodological Naturalism” and “Reconciling.” In so doing, we’ve done two things: we’ve taken a very material—call it mechanical—approach to technology and made what we can see the only thing that is viable or believable.
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