Paradoxes are a dime a dozen in America, but few can seem quite so puzzling as the nation's twin obsession with gadgetry and God. With science and religion still duking it out in our courts and schools, this mutual love appears more than passing strange. But as the York University historian David Noble argues in his new book, religion and technology have long been bosom buddies in the West -- and not just because technology establishes its own dogma and priestcraft, or inspires the kind of enthusiasm and awe formerly reserved for the hordes of heaven. According to Noble, the two enterprises have been feeding off each other for a millennium, with the result that the technology of the contemporary world "remains suffused with religious belief."

For Noble, the belief in question is Christianity, particularly in its perfectionist strains. Perfectionists held that with hard work and God's grace, mortals -- ie, men -- could achieve spiritual perfection in this life. Restored to an original unsullied state of godlike power and intelligence, the perfectionist would taste salvation -- the life of Adam sans Eve. By the high Middle Ages, Noble argues, this transcendentalist dream fed into a growing obsession with the coming millennium, a craze sparked by the mystical Cistercian Joachim of Fiore. In many Christian minds, the thousand-year earthly reign of Christ described in Revelation lent a new and evolutionary thrust to history itself. At roughly the same time, medieval intellectuals like Erigena and Roger Bacon were also getting heavily into tech, as monasteries began incorporating the once lowly "mechanical arts" into their otherworldly labor. Technology became eschatology, the utopian foundations of the New Jerusalem.

In the first third of his book, Noble traces this curious medieval equation through Renaissance hermeticism, Puritan science, Freemasonic France, and nineteenth-century American millennialism. Though his argument for the sacralization of technology is convincing, Noble's attempt to delinate some singular "Christian" psychology lurking within Western techno-mania remains rather disappointing. Noble does not deal with the fact that, in both letter and spirit, perfectionism cuts against the grain of Christian orthodoxy, which in its Augustinian mode was wont to emphasize the irredeemable worthlessness of our earthly trials. In fact, the dream of self-divinization that Noble articulates does not characterize the Church so much as the underground pockets of alchemy and gnosis that make up the so-called "hermetic tradition". Noble does touch upon the hermetic element in the religion of technology; in particular, he breaks new ground is outlining the pivotal role that French Freemasons played in the birth of the modern engineer. But in neglecting to crack open the occult paradigms of Ficino or the Masons or Giordano Bruno, he brushes over the implication that the subliminal archetypes that drive Western technology are as much magical as religious, heretical as heavenbound.

But such arcana is not Noble's aim. He wants to dispel a myth that continues to bind us: the myth that modern technology is a purely secular phenomenon. And when he reaches the twentieth century, Noble hits his stride as he starts flushing out the divine pretensions and otherwordly hungers lurking in the fields of atomic weaponry, space exploration, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering. Much of this stuff is a revelation. With all the Bibles and communion wafers that astronauts have left on the moon, and with all the Mormons and born-agains running NASA at home, the agency might as well become its own denomination -- indeed, only public pressure kept NASA from building a Chapel of the Astronuats in the early 1970s. Far less amusing is Noble's analysis of the apocalyptic fatalism of many nuclear weapons scientists and the messianic glee of genetic engineers, their "divine mandates" and elite access to the "language of God."

As you might expect from the author of Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment and the Message of Resistance, Noble is not exactly a fan of the religion of technology. He concludes his book by warning that instead of serving people's basic needs, "the technological pursuit of salvation has become a threat to our survival." No doubt about it, although the reasonableness of Noble's take on new technologies is somewhat undercut by the knowledge that as a professor he eschews email and forces his students to write papers by hand.

More damning is the fact that the mad pursuit of utopia is hardly restricted to those nursing transcendental fantasies. Our century has seen loads of techno-savvy socialist utopians commit brazen horrors in the name of immanence, atheism, and the satisfaction of people's "basic needs." It is right and timely to expose the otherworldly fantasies we have invested in technology, but one wishes that Noble had spent less time stringing together his rosary of citations and a bit more on the fecund possibililites that religious language holds as it attempts to frame technology. Reading the foolish and pernicious things these god-fearing scientists think and say, I was struck less with the inherent odiousness of godtalk than with the crudeness and literalism of their faith. As Noble's own work implies, religious impulses ain't going away, and a more constructive book would have transcended mere exposure and opened up the possibility of maturing those impulses towards more humane and ecological ends.