2.5 KiB
What's God got to do with it, anyways?
Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that there is a great distress around technology and its byproducts these days. Social media. Vaccines. Petroleum Products. Climate change. Software-As-A-Service. Right-To-Repair. Microplastics. Heavy metals.
Every engineering decision carries truly a moral weight.
To say otherwise is the heresy of secularism - that there are things outside the purview of Christ's kingdom. Even the smallest decision of whether or not to comment a line of code leaves its mark, however small, on the fabric of the world.
Technologists of our age are faced with this in an amplified way, since we have tapped into sources of vast power - both metaphorical and real. A misplaced decimal point has the power to keep an airplane aloft, or crash and burn.
The effects are even deeper though - the decision to route a highway one way or another can foster or divide a community. The envisioning of cars as we have them rather than they were a hundred years ago has had effects that we cannot even fathom. The world around us is increasingly shaped by our technologies.
It isn't merely that how we think affects how we form the world around us - the world around us also forms our minds and hearts; these same minds and hearts that Christ loves.
The kingdom is at hand.
Brothers and sisters, we are not here to kill time until the fullness of it comes. We are here to be the hands of Christ - to continue the work of the Divine Carpenter. What more awesome, noble, worthwhile task could an engineer endeavor to?
Opposing this is a spirit of liberalism - a self-centered, egotistical spirit concerned with what is most profitable, most enjoyable. Concerned with "reconciling" Christianity with the constructs of our world, rather than converting our constructs to the fullness of truth, beauty, and goodness.
A spirit of transhumanism opposes this as well - that we will remake the world anew in our own image and likeness, and cast aside the shackles of old curmudgeony 'morality'. This will still inevitably run into the hard limitations of the laws of physics, but even if it didn't, would result in a world as fun as a game with no rules played in a frictionless vacuum - the ultimate paradox of choice evaporating all meaning.
We must envision technological development through the mind of Christ - we must learn from the great deposit of wisdom that we have been given and continue to be given through the Holy Spirit if we are to move towards the Heavenly Jerusalem.