ABSTRACT

Although it is easier to consider technology by reference to technical artefacts, the author examines technology more broadly. He argues that it is preferable to understand technology as devices within a technologised culture rather than a set of unrelated artefacts or tools. Understood as devices, as Albert Borgmann recommends, technology raises quite fundamental questions for culture and theology. Following a suggestion from Peter Hodgson, we may understand technology in three spheres of human life: self-relatedness, wholeness and world-relatedness. The phrase postnatural condition is the author's attempt to present together these three distinctive aspects of present life that affect how we should think theologically about technology. First, technology in a postnatural condition has implications for how we think about the human, its self-understanding, powers, limits and responsibilities. Second, the theme of wholeness in the postnatural condition invites consideration of the wider natural relations of the human. Finally, the postnatural condition seeks to do justice to human technological activity.