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Science as Salvation
Midgley's 1992 unmasking of the quasi-religious fantasies embedded in popular science — including the AI community's prediction of technological transcendence.
Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (1992) is Midgley's most sustained analysis of how scientific rhetoric has absorbed the structure of religious promise — complete with eschatology, soteriology, and the narrative of redemption through specialized knowledge. The book traces how, as traditional religion receded from educated Western culture, the salvific impulse did not disappear but migrated into scientific discourse, producing a class of claims that use the vocabulary of science to make promises only religion had previously made: transcendence of embodiment, immortality, the fulfillment of all human longing, the elimination of suffering. Midgley was not hostile to either science or religion. She was hostile to the fraudulent hybrid — the impostor that uses scientific authority to make religious promises, and religious fervor to defend scientific claims.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book emerged from Midgley's engagement with the AI research community of the 1980s and the physicists developing grand unified theories. She noticed that the language surrounding these projects had an unmistakable theological quality —