The Big Bang and the Big Bomb: Examining the Role of Science and Technology in Apocalyptic Belief Systems

Well over a decade ago, on a Sunday morning for entertainment, I was watching the great charismatic preacher Oral Roberts. Just by luck I happened upon his sermon in which proclaimed to have recognized the beast from Revelations. In his lament against the beast and Satan he produced a sign of it proof, conformation that the beast was among us and we were fast approaching the end days and the battle of the apocalypse that would herald in the new millennium. His proof was both comical and shocking. From his wallet he produced a credit card bill from Sears or J.C. Penny, and pointed with excitement at the string of numbers at the bottom of the receipt used by the a computer to read the data. There among a string of numbers, irrelevant to the normal person, were three six’s in a row, “666” the number of the beast. He had figured it out; computers were a tool of the devil and a manifestation of the beast amongst us. He told those listening to him that they could easily verify what he had discerned by simply checking their own receipts and bills when they got home. This event occurred in the relatively early days of computers, long before the worry of the Y2K bug and the potential for systematic catastrophe due to computer malfunction and the resulting confusion. It was disconcerting to hear him speak about computers being a tool of the devil. Was he talking about the same computer that one of my first lessons in computer science class taught me was “garbage in equals garbage out”? Was he talking about the same computer that allowed for the development of the enormous capabilities of scientific calculation and technological advancement? Although it made little sense to me at the time, it was clear from his rhetoric that yes, he was. In a way this portrayal of technology as a tool of the devil or a manifestation of the beast can make sense. Using Peter Berger’s definition of the role of religion as a the “ultimate shield against the terror of anomie” this interpretation presented by Roberts may be an attempt to shield the practitioners of his religious tradition from the anxiety inducing sense of normlessness created by modern scientific progress. In the discourse presented by Roberts science and technology are a personification evil and incorporated within his tradition in the position most amicable for that of enemy, namely the Book of Revelations. The framework presented by Berger does have limitations when examining why this transformation of a secular enterprise into a religious enemy appears so successfully within the Christian Fundamentalist and Evangelical movements. Does the removal of anomie created by