Fifteen years ago when Leanne and I were first married we moved into an old farm house on a thirty-acre property. We worked for some folks who owned the land and lived a few acres from us in a newer home. When we first arrived the land was unfamiliar and mysterious. There were lots of trees (many of them blasted box elders!) and two spring-fed ponds and a small river marking the north-east boundary of the land.

I remember being a bit spooked the first time venturing around the property at night. Born and bred in the suburbs, where there is nothing mysterious about the trees that grow in medians between four-lane roads, I felt vulnerable looking through the shadowy branches of a thicket at the edge of the property, trying to catch a glimpse of the lights of our little home. This place was more wild than a cul-de-sac. Granted, it wasn’t Sleepy Hollow, but it was easier to imagine creepy things on that property than in the front yard of my childhood home that had a streetlight shining down on the concrete steps that bordered our twenty square feet of sod.

Within a week or two I learned to drive the old International tractor that we used to mow lawns. It had lights and made noise and could pull a small trailer loaded with the chainsawed logs of felled trees. From that time on those thirty acres of land were cozy, quaint, nostalgic; but, no longer mysterious.

I have been reading David Landes’ classic history of the Industrial Revolution, The Unbound Prometheus. Landes agrees with and quotes Lynn White regarding a shift that took place in the Middle Ages. The “‘saint replaced animistic sprite as the most frequent and intimate object of popular religious concern, our race’s earthly monopoly on ‘spirit’ was confirmed, and smashed animism and provided the cornerstone for the naturalistic (but not necessarily irreligious) view of the world which is essential to a highly developed technology.’”

This week I’ll be hosting a screening of Plug & Pray followed by a faculty panel at Point Loma Nazarene University where I work. The characters in the film, many of the world’s most brilliant roboticists, make it clear that they are now attempting to replace the saint as they create a new technological life.

What is odd to me is that, after removing dryads from trees and nymphs from rivers and now allegedly cathedral saints from society, the roboticists cannot help using the language of spiritual mystery when talking of their work. It is as if, having denied ghosts and rejected the soul, the modern-day naturalist feels it necessary to forge a spirit out of circuits. Why? How come the naturalist, having dismissed the mysterious, cannot resist attempting to construct the spiritual? The saint has no spirit but the machine will become the new saint. The very irony of it ought to be enough to compel many naturalists out of the lab and into the chapel.