2 weeks ago, in the class for which I began this blog, we watched “How Should We Then Live?” by Francis Schaffer. That was all fine and somewhat humorous at times. Yesterday I was cross-referencing the term “Deus Ex Machina” (the new title of my blog—it means “god from the machine”) and all its various interpretations when I came across Cooper's Law. Simply put it says that “all machines are amplifiers.” Today I had an epiphany.
You see, I picked “Deus Ex Machina” as the new title to suggest the literary usage (sudden inexplicable resolution to an impossibility) as well the idea of blogging to explore Christianity (think about it: God from the machine/computer). Anyway, Cooper's Law is also a literary device (particularly in sci-fi) that says that any piece of predominant technology (especially advanced-tech) in literature serves as an amplification to human persona and, quite possibly, as a deus ex machina.
So, what about Francis? Well, at one point he says that the pagan gods of the Romans, like the Greeks before them, were simply amplified humanity: "Their gods depended upon the society that had made them and when this society collapsed the gods tumbled with it.”
Do you see where I'm going with this? Two notable thinkers from completely different spectrums (Schaffer a Christian historian and Cooper, well he either invented the cell phone or wrote some books) coming up with similar devices. Schaffer + Cooper = Techno-deity. I might be completely misinterpreting these two by comparing them. Either way, it made me think.
What do you think? Has our modernistic techno-saturated science-worshipping knowledge-junky culture developed its own pantheon? I know what G.K. Chesterton thought:
"When men stop believing in God they don't then believe in nothing, they believe in anything!"
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