ABSTRACT
This chapter takes its cue from how we understand creaturely providence alongside divine providence and focuses specifically on human agency associated with the production and deployment of technology. Its guiding question is: How do we understand and how ought we understand God’s purposes being realised in history, society, and nature alongside what is clearly becoming more apparent today in the way human technological agency is impacting history, society, and nature? Simply put, how does an understanding of divine providence relate to the increasing public belief that technology drives history and drives it for the better? The chapter will first provide a brief genealogy of how technology has become implicated in how we understand the shape, direction, or purpose of history, society, and nature. Part of that genealogy will involve explaining how the doctrine of providence gets transformed and secularised into the ‘myth of progress’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continues to operate today. The chapter then turns briefly to how one ought to understand normatively this technological agency in light of divine providence. Should the impact of technology on society, history, and nature been seen as a moment within what has been called Heilsgeschichte? The chapter argues that it really should not, even if it changes our perception of particular categories or doctrines in Christianity. Instead of elevating technology to such a sacred place (as many religious and non-religious transhumanists do), it would be better to understand how God might work through creaturely technological forces as a subset of secular history within which God draws all into salvation history.
