Creation: Why Christians Built Machines

This is a stronger claim than it sounds. It says that the engineer who patiently arranges materials until something new becomes possible is not, in that work, doing something morally separate from prayer. It says that the physician who isolates a useful molecule from a useless one is participating in an order she did not invent and could not invent. It says that the agronomist who finds the variety of wheat that grows where the older varieties failed is, at least implicitly, in conversation with Genesis 1. The Christian tradition has held all of this together for four centuries, and it is the argument that the strand this site calls Build and Heal exists to make.

What the claim is, and is not

It is not the claim that technology is good. The tradition is too honest for that.

It is the claim that the act of intelligent making is part of what human beings are for. To make is one of the things being-in-the-image-of-God means, in the version of Christian anthropology that treats the divine act of creation as a real ongoing reality in which finite agents are invited to participate. The cathedral builder, the violin maker, the surgeon, the early printer, the engineer of pumps and dams and electrical grids, the writer of code that works — all of them, in this account, are doing something that bears a recognizable relation to the divine work of fashioning what had not existed before.

The claim is also not that all making is equally good or that more making is always better. The same tradition that treats invention as participation in creation treats the misdirection of invention as a sin against creation. The Christian who reads Genesis 1 has also read Genesis 11. The tower at Babel was a feat of cooperative engineering, and what was wrong with it was not the engineering.

The early modern charter

Francis Bacon wrote the charter at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He read the Fall as having damaged both human innocence and human dominion, and he read the recovery as a divided labor: religion answers the loss of innocence, while the arts and sciences can partially repair the loss of dominion. This is a strong theological claim. It locates organized empirical science inside the Christian story of redemption — not at its center, but as a real part of it. The recovery is not the gospel, and Bacon never said it was. But the recovery is not foreign to the gospel either.

Robert Boyle made the charter inhabitable. The Christian Virtuoso is the figure he wanted to introduce into the world: a Christian whose experimental work is itself a form of worship, whose instruments are a discipline of attention, whose results are shared because knowledge is for the relief of suffering, and whose ordinary life — funding medicines for the poor, supporting Bible translation, treating servants as souls — is the unbroken continuation of the work he does in the laboratory. Boyle is the proof of concept. He shows that the Baconian charter can be lived, not just written.

The seventeenth century is unfashionable to admire and unfashionable to defend. Modern critique has spent two hundred years arguing that the Baconian and Boylean project secularized faster than it admitted, that it produced the dominion problem we now have, and that the harmony of natural philosophy and Christian devotion was a happy accident of cultural conditions that quickly ended. There is something to all of this. There is also something to the response: the project was theologically thicker than the slogans suggest, and the alternative was not a more contemplative Christianity but a more impoverished one.

The twentieth-century theology of the engineer

The strongest twentieth-century articulation of the doctrine is Friedrich Dessauer’s. Dessauer was a working engineer — he built X-ray machines for medical use as a young man — and he wrote Philosophie der Technik from inside that practice. His claim is that the inventor encounters, in the act of solving a technical problem, an order he did not put there. The arrangement of materials that works is not arbitrary. It is the realization of a possibility already inscribed into the structure of nature, and the inventor’s experience of getting it right is the experience of meeting a reality that precedes him.

This is what Dessauer meant by his most famous line: the discovery of natural law is a meeting with God. He did not mean that engineers should be pious about their patents. He meant that the laboratory is, in its own way, a place of theological encounter, and that the engineering vocation is therefore not a worldly compromise the Church reluctantly accepts but a real participation in the unfolding of creation.

The argument has consequences. If invention is partly a discovery of what was always possible, then the engineer is responsible to that possibility in a way that resembles the responsibilities of any other vocation that answers to something beyond itself. She is responsible to the truth of what works, to the dignity of the users her work will serve, to the network of unknown brothers and sisters who built what she builds on, and to the Creator whose intelligibility her instruments register. Dessauer thought of this network of mutual obligation as having an almost Franciscan character: a pact of service among people who would never meet.

The dominant Christian conversation of the twentieth century did not develop this argument with the seriousness Dessauer hoped for. The figures who became famous — Guardini, Ellul, Heidegger, Bernanos — were doing other necessary work, but the constructive theology of the engineering vocation was left thinner than it should have been. One of the openings the present site exists to mark is the room for this constructive work to be done again, with the resources of contemporary Catholic, Reformed, and Orthodox moral theology.

The contemporary opening

Pope Francis, in the AI corpus, has held open the affirmative side of the Catholic tradition more carefully than the public conversation usually credits. Science and technology, he insists, are “wonderful products of a God-given human creativity.” The Rome Call and Antiqua et nova are not anti-technological documents. They are documents that insist technology must remain ordered to the person, the common good, and the truth — exactly the conditions under which it can be honestly described as participation in creation rather than as substitute for it.

Paul Scherz is doing the contemporary virtue-ethical work that could turn the Dessauer charter into a usable ethics for working scientists and engineers. The virtues that experimental science has classically required — truthfulness, patience, candor, generosity, attentiveness to reality — are not optional ornaments on the practice. They are the practice’s interior form. The pressures of the commodified research economy on those virtues are themselves a theological problem because they are corroding the very disposition that lets the laboratory be a place of encounter.

What it means now

To take this strand seriously today is to reject two easy positions.

The first is the secular position that engineering is a value-neutral instrumental practice whose ethical content arrives only in the question of “use.” Dessauer’s whole point is that this is not true; the practice itself has an interior form that either is or is not answerable to the order it studies.

The second is the religious position that takes the Christian seriousness of the Humanize and Limit and Expose False Salvation strands as warrant for treating engineering with bare suspicion. The early modern Christians who built modern science did not think that. The twentieth-century Christians who developed the strongest theology of invention did not think that. The contemporary work of figures like Scherz does not think that.

The argument is harder than either position. Inventing is, when it is done well, one of the things the human creature is for. Inventing is, when it is done poorly, one of the most dangerous things the human creature does. Holding both at the same time is the discipline this site exists to support.

See also: Fall: When Tools Become Systems · Redemption and Eschatology: Healing, Resurrection, and False Salvation