by Currie Jean

Created on: February 09, 2009

You are a veteran from the Iraq war. You lost a leg, from the knee down, in an IED altercation. Some robotics engineers at your local University are working on a very special project: advanced prosthetics which would allow amputees to walk without canes or crutches, and maybe even run and jump. The best part? In exchange for participating in their study, they're willing to donate an advanced prototype for your continuous use.

Do you take them up on their offer?

Or do you politely respond, "Thanks, but no thanks. After a month of prayer, my leg should grow back nicely. I only need god. Keep your technology"?

No sane person would say that. Why? Because it's ludicrous. Why? Because, no matter how religious most of us may be, or how convincingly we say we believe in the loving power of god, we know that prayer does not regrow limbs.

Once upon a time, when medicine was new and largely erroneous (drilling holes in skulls, the four humors, etcetera), humans had barely any help at all for a severed limb. If you lost a leg, you were left to hobble around on crutches with a stump - that was, if you were lucky, and not bedridden. A hundred years ago or more, praying was just about all one could hope to do to change such a sad situation - so people did.

While the habit has become tradition, it appears less and less reasonable. As science discovers more about the world, and technology produces more fruits of that knowledge, people don't have quite as much time to waste on prayer as they once had. They're too busy helping one another.

To say that technology promotes atheism is to say that technology counteracts belief in god. If 'god' is considered to be an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing being, the fact that he does not help the sick, while human-gleaned medicine does, is making those of us with the fruits of accumulated naturalistic knowledge far less likely to believe in a god.

The need to believe in such a god increases with desperation and powerlessness, and decreases with access luxuries like healthy food, clean water, warm, dry shelter, education, and advanced medicine. Don't believe it? Just look to earth's quality of life standards: the best countries to live in (determined by low infant mortality rates, caused in turn by useful technology) tend to also be the least theistic.

Contrary to the beliefs of some anti-technology religious sects, this does not mean that technology is evil. Rather, it means that belief in the supernatural is useless compared to what humanity

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