Feb 25 2010
Miraculous Technology and the Supernatural
How does the saying go? . . . A technology sufficiently advanced (above some current baseline) is indistinguishable from magic. Or something.
Get a load of this near magic: ‘Perfect’ Liquid Hot Enough to Be Quark Soup
Recent analyses from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference “atom smasher” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, establish that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light have created matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius — the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory, about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. [bold added]
Holy smokes!
Perhaps one of the things that would make a technology sufficiently advanced as to appear magical is a lack of an explanatory mechanism for the observation/event. Lacking an explanation, something just doesn’t seem natural. It’s super – natural. It’s above current understanding.
From early in the Bible to late you will find associated with the supernatural things that confound.
“Who among the gods is like you, O LORD ? Who is like you— majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders? (Exodus 15:11).
Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. (Acts 2:43)
So what does it take to transform a miraculous/supernatural event into a something religious? A crucial social element. A responsible agent from another world or with other-worldy powers. And perhaps this agent must be perceived to be related to you and/or have a vested interest in you. Maybe the agent has to be responsible for your being and/or well-being.
So what’s the difference between a scientist and a priest? The scientist revels in tests and explanations, attributing his deeds to things fully natural. The priest doesn’t. The priest speaks of a special agent — a god — from a special realm and into gaps in the known injects the work of this god. The scientist doesn’t.
