God, Technology, and the Christian Life (eBook)

1

What Is Technology?

People don’t slow down much when driving across Nebraska. But tap the brakes the next time you’re crossing the Cornhusker state, glance off into a cornfield, and you might see my name in all caps. REINKE is synonymous with agricultural technology. The name swings on metal logos attached to giant farm sprinklers across the Midwest because my grandfather and his five brothers claimed three dozen patents among them for ideas ranging from the aspirational to the multimillion-dollar useful.1 The ideas that paid off seeded a corporation of center-pivot irrigation systems for farms and aluminum truck beds for semis.

My grandfather’s technological ambition was undampened by a lack of schooling past eighth grade. A carpenter, electrician, and farmer, he was awarded a bronze star in World War II for helping to reengineer an antiaircraft aiming computer.2 Back home, he aspired to modernize rural homesteads, turning hundred-year-old houses built prior to running water into electrified homes powered by batteries recharged by aluminum windmills. In his personal machine shop, he invented and manufactured copper heat exchangers to cool irrigation engines with groundwater.

When electrical costs soared in 1978, my grandfather designed and built an aluminum windmill using a centripetal flywheel to automatically pitch the blades based on wind speed, making it possible to generate electricity with either high wind or very little.3 He was fascinated by aluminum. For fun, he crafted the first aluminum violin I have ever seen (and thankfully the last one I have ever heard).4 By the time my grandfather retired, I was in high school, and he cleaned out his workshop by giving me a pile of abandoned aluminum projects. It took me weeks to pneumatically chisel thousands of aluminum rivets off iron structures, but it paid off. By the end of that summer, the pile of broken rivets and the sheets of scrap metal registered into an aluminum pile that I recycled for one thousand dollars. It helped pay for college. But more memorably, it put me in close proximity to the remnants of my grandfather’s ambitious dreams.

Innovation is in the Reinke blood. But technology is deeply connected to each of us. The story of humanity is the story of technology. The prophet Daniel marked off successive kingdoms by dominant metals: gold, silver, bronze, iron, iron-clay.5 We mark off human history by the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the nuclear age, and the computer age. Today, we live in the age of technology. This long-running drama of innovation includes each of us. No family tree is uninventive.

This Reinke lives inside an accelerating tech age that the world has never seen. I don’t think my grandfather ever touched a PC, but someday I may be biologically linked to a superprocessor. My father, himself very inventive, was mesmerized by the moon landing. But in my lifetime, I expect to see commercial flights to the moon. Right now, I could spit saliva in a tube, mail it, and get a full mapping of my heredity and genetic susceptibilities. My great grandkids may live on Mars. I have witnessed incredible changes in my first forty years on this planet and, Lord willing, I brace for more outrageous changes to come in the forty years ahead—or century ahead, if the prophets of life expectancy are right.

I don’t innovate in a farm shop like my grandfather; I write in the outskirts of a major city, surrounded by technology. As I type, my robot vacuum bumps my feet, stops, turns, bumps, stops, turns, and bumps again, self-correcting like a blind turtle as it cleans the carpet in my office. Specialized automated robots, like my vacuum droid, can do one thing well, but nothing else. Remote-controlled bomb-detonating robots sync with other semiautonomous service robots. Prototype dog-like robots and human-like robots are in the works at major science labs. And at the far ends of the robotics industry are inhuman sex robots and weaponized killing robots. And the first-ever, fully autonomous robots are likely to appear in the next several years. We call them driverless cars.

We are entering a new technological revolution that’s impossible to predict. It’s a good time for Christians to think about God’s relationship to technology as we ask questions about the origin of our gadgets. What technologies are helpful or destructive? And how can we walk by faith in the age ahead? First, we must tackle a fundamental question: What is technology?

What Is Technology?

Technology is applied science and amplified power. It’s art, method, know-how, formulas, and expertise. The word technology is built on the root techne- or technique. We amplify our native powers through new techniques. Noah and the animals could never outswim a global flood, so God designed a ship. The people of Babel couldn’t live in the sky, so they engineered a tower. Today, elevators in downtown Dubai carry people into the stratosphere. Jacob and his sons dug wells by hand and shovel, but Union Pacific blasted trails through the mountains with dynamite. Today, dinosaur-sized augers grind out underground tunnels for millions of telecom cables. And the smartphone extends the popping electrical explosions in our brains, through our thumbs, to our phones to become little digital ones and zeroes that we broadcast in messages to influence the world.

Tech intensifies our dexterity, augments our influence, and empowers our previously feeble intentions. And no innovation more potently amplifies us like the computer chip. By weight these little chips are the most powerful things in the continuous universe. Excluding cosmic explosions and nuclear bombs that exhaust their power in a hyperblink, “of all the sustainable things in the universe, from a planet to a star, from a daisy to an automobile, from a brain to an eye, the thing that is able to conduct the highest density of power—the most energy flowing through a gram of matter each second—lies at the core of your laptop.” Yes, the tiny microprocessor “conducts more energy per second per gram through its tiny corridors than animals, volcanoes, or the sun.” The computer chip is “the most energetically active thing in the known universe.”6

As I write, Apple has just unveiled M1, “the most powerful chip” the company has ever made, “packed with an astounding 16 billion transistors.”7 With this much power in every iPhone and MacBook, we can do a lot with our tools—a lot of damage or a lot of good. So how will we wield this power?

Learned techniques are ancient too. When the Good Samaritan found a bleeding Jew on the street, he jumped into action, binding the wounds and applying topical treatments before loading the man’s weight like cargo on his animal and transporting him to an inn where he paid with money he made in the market so the innkeeper would continue the work of applying healing measures.8 The story shows us love in action through technique. We don’t love “by smiling in abstract beneficence on our neighbors,” wrote agrarian Wendell Berry. No, our love “must come to acts, which must come from skills. Real charity calls for the study of agriculture soil husbandry, engineering, architecture, mining, manufacturing, transportation, the making of monuments and pictures, songs and stories. It calls not just for skills but for the study and criticism of skills, because in all of them a choice must be made: they can be used either charitably or uncharitably.”9 We love one another through art, skill, and technology.

The story of humanity tells the tale of how we have learned to love each other more by improving our skills. Back in the fifth century, Augustine pondered all the ways that we use our talents to serve society. He praised the intellect of fallen sinners, the intact “natural genius of man,” that creates remarkable necessary inventions (and unnecessary ones too). When making a list of innovations that caught his attention, Augustine began with textiles, architecture, agriculture, and navigation. Then he celebrated sculptors, painters, composers, and theater producers. Then he turned his attention to nature, and all the ways humans capture, kill, or train wild animals. Then he thought of all the medical drugs that preserve and restore human health, without forgetting the weapons used to defend one’s country in war. Next, he praised the “endless variety of condiments and sauces which culinary art has discovered to minister to the pleasures of the palate.” (Translation: give thanks for Chick-fil-A Sauce.) Next, he commended all the means we have created for speaking and writing and communicating, from rhetoric and poems to novels and lyrics. And then he praised musicians with instruments and songs. Mathematicians next. Then astronomers. For Augustine, you can pick any branch of science, follow its course, and be captivated by human ingenuity. Over every imaginative invention of man we celebrate “the Creator of this noble human nature” who is “the true and supreme God whose providence rules all that he has created.”10

Everything mentioned here by Augustine (down to sauces), includes applied science, or technology. In 1829 Jacob Bigelow published a book with that relatively new term in the title: Elements of Technology, a book to celebrate advances in human...