Shortfalls of Technologism

Thoughts

What do technologists fail to understand about the world?
There’s been a cloud of ideas circulating around my head for the past couple of months on the worldview of people associated with science and technology. I think this started after listening to an interview with Richard Dawkins, where he made a very specific claim: that he is interested in specifically science and technology that, for example, gives us the method for humans to fly to the moon and back. This is a very interesting claim that is very helpful in understanding the worldview of the technologist. They are interested in a very specific thing: the method to achieve a certain goal. It is only the method they are solving for, i.e., how do we do an already specified goal. This has been an immensely fascinating revelation and not at all what I expected.

From the perspective of someone more theologically minded here is a different claim: "The underlying theology behind a stated goal, which captivates the human spirit in such a way that allows for the final equation to be solved, is more important than the technology needed to achieve the stated goal."

Let’s use the Apollo mission as a concrete example.
I will ask a series of questions in pairs, related to Apollo, designed to highlight what I am trying to get at here:

- What type of rocket was needed to go to the Moon?
- Why did we go to the Moon in the first place?

- How did we get the money to build the rocket?
- Why did the space race evolve, and thus fund new institutions like NASA and the Soviet Space Program?

- How do we beat the Russians and get to the Moon?
- What is the nature of the underlying ideologies that captivated the West and the Soviet Union, that created a cold divide between the two powers, and allowed for the space race to evolve as a hierarchical test of technological prowess?

The science and technology needed to achieve a goal, which I refer to as the method, can only exist when the stated goal has the proper underlying theology. This is how we landed in the situation we’re in. This is why tech companies spend billions of dollars to get people to stay on a YouTube ad for three seconds longer. This is why people spend decades creating useless things like meme coins, gambling casinos, sex robots, and in-app microtransactions. The end goal of most companies today (simply making money) is a shallow goal for immature little Fools. Scientists and technologists have lost sight of properly oriented theology which their entire world has stood on since the academic field was first created.