Some held that free will was an illusion granted to us by a merciful God who realized how dull…

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According to the viewpoint of the Machine Age, in order to understand something it has to be taken apart conceptually or physically. Then how does one come to understand its parts? The answer to this question is obvious: by taking the parts apart. But this answer obviously leads to another question: Is…

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to say we are experiencing a change of age is to assert that both our methods of trying to understand the world and our actual understanding of it are undergoing…

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From these two beliefs-that the universe was a machine created by God to do His work, and that He had created man in His image-itobviously followed that man ought to be creating machines to do his work. The…

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Another important consequence of the commitment to causal thinking derives from the acceptance of a cause as sufficient for its effect. Because of this a cause was taken to explain its effect completely. Nothing else was required to explain it, not even the environment. Therefore, Machine-Age thinking was, to a large extent, environment-free; it…

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as the rate of change increases, the complexity of the problems that face us also increases. The more complex these problems are, the more time it takes to solve them.

Perhaps even more revealing of the environment-free orientation of Machine-Age science is the nature of the place in which its inquiry was usually conducted, the laboratory. A laboratory is a place so constructed as to facilitate exclusion of the environment. It is a place in which the effect of one…

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either we do not respond at all or we do not respond quickly enough or effectively enough to the changes occurring around us. He called our paralysis in the face of change-demanding change Future Shock. One of the objectives of this book is to overcome such paralysis.

The doctrine of determinism gave rise to yet another critical question to which philosophers of the Machine Age devoted much of their time. How can we explain free will,…

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