Virtual World - Week Two

Philosophy and New Technology

Link between the technological revolution and postmodernism

The virtual world - ‘in which we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.28)

Is it possible to separate media from message? (Pattison, p 34)

Waters, From Human to Post-human

Human relationship to reality and nature traditionally one of power.

A paradigm shift from providence to progress.

‘Progress was clearly the most prized legacy of the Enlightenment...’ (Waters, p 12)

Pattison, Thinking about God in an Age of Technology

Assesses modern theology (‘the view from the deck’) in the light of the technological (‘engine room’) revolution (pp 59-63)

Pattison refers to Bultmann on the problems of modernity and New Testament world-view (Pattison, p 33)

Some post-modern thinkers want to rebel against the modernist technological culture.  They question the place of scientific subject/object knowledge.  Interestingly in doing so they - Derrida, for example - often find themselves in league with religious sensibility and faith.

So, is post-modern thinking - liberating or hinderance for Christian apologetics?

Jean-Jacques Rosseau, the Romatics 

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

All critique the modernist paradigm - ‘view from nowhere’.  subject/object.  Naive (see Kevin Vanhoozer on Gadamer for example)

Schroeder (German radical hermeneutician) makes an interesting proposal about the importance of embodiment for epistemology.  What does this have to say to virtual human existing?

Foucault (French post-structuralist).  ‘knowledge and truth... are caught up in power struggles’ (Danaher, p 24).  Foucault’s view of truth intrinsically linked to power games.  What does this say to Christ’s claim to be truth, and the way that God’s truth is ultimately manifested in the weakness of the crucifixion?

Postmodernism about fragmentation and flux there is no stability or centre (Kramer).  We can only have an indirect relationship with reality through language and media. 

Does the philosophical analysis of our indirect grasp of reality resonate with virtual technology?

Yes, but did it not before.  Does not virtual technology merely exaggerate the distance between the ‘I’ and the ‘real’, because it gives individuals greater power to control or manipulate what is potentially real, at least indirectly.