Science as Soteriology

More insight from Ellul

I’m catching up with myself. Reorienting to the essential. And in my isolation and unhappiness with my times and circumstances I continue reading old books that I neglected and find treasure that is a cognitive road map.

Science is no longer confined in distant, unknown laboratories.

It is present among us. This happens to be considerably reinforced by the political impetus toward the public and the young. Children must not only be taught at once to use technical instruments (the computer) but also given a love of scientific research. The future depends on their being qualified in techno-science. Parents and children must be convinced of the preeminence of science. This is presented as a matter of destiny. Young people must be fashioned for tomorrow’s society, which will inevitably be scientific and technical. It is simply not considered that precisely in making young people first and foremost into scientists, we are transforming a possibility or a trend into an inevitability.

But we must look at another vital aspect of this new ideology.

More than ever, through the social transformation that it entails, science is becoming not merely the discovering of nature but the response to everything that disquiets or troubles us. There is thus developing an ideology of science that I would call a soteriology. The present-day ideology of science is an ideology of salvation. That is, science is our only recourse, and any negative aspects are strenuously contested. Science alone holds the future to our society. No matter what problem may arise the inevitable answer will always be: Science will take care of it. This is obvious in medicine. With the incredible discoveries in all areas during the last twenty years, the average person now thinks that medicine will have an answer to everything that attacks us. The media not only tell us of new remedies but offer explanations, no doubt greatly simplified, of the scientific research that led to them.

Half of our medical knowledge is out of date every five years. Ten to twelve percent of techno-scientific publications are out of date each year. It is estimated that human knowledge doubles every five years, and in 1985 as much scientific information was published as between 1550 and 1950.