A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers

Ethan J. Brue, Derek C. Schuurman, Steven H. VanderLeest

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781514001004
• eBook ISBN: 9781514001011
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Christian Theology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Our technology shapes the way we live, interact, work, play, and even worship. Technology and its power are both old and new—as is the wisdom we need to envision, design, build, and use it well. For Christians passionate about developing technology, it's not always clear how their faith and work intersect. How can designing and using technology actually be a way of loving God and our neighbors?Veteran engineers and teachers Ethan Brue, Derek Schuurman, and Steve VanderLeest provide a field guide for fellow explorers working with technology. Using numerous case studies, historical examples, and personal stories, they explore issues such as:

• biblical themes and passages that relate to technology
• the ethics and norms involved in technology design
• how engineering and technology tap into human dreams for a better world

Along the way they acknowledge the challenges arising from technology but also point to the wonderful possibilities it offers us and its ability to contribute to the common good.For Christians studying and working in engineering, computer science, technical design, architecture, and related fields, this book is packed with wisdom and practical guidance. By sharing what they have learned, the authors encourage readers to ask harder questions, aspire to more noble purposes, and live a life consistent with their faith as they engage with technology.

Chapter One

Dreams Take Flight

Not only cathedrals, but every great engineering work is an expression of motivation and of purpose which cannot be divorced from religious implications. . . . The age of cathedral building is long past. . . . But every manmade structure, no matter how mundane, has a little bit of cathedral in it.1

SAMUEL FLORMAN

Before heading off into the technological landscape, we begin our field guide with an examination of the underlying yearning to design technology. What drives our dreams and longing to invent? This chapter was written collaboratively by all three authors, reflecting insights from their own journeys to become engineers. The purpose of this chapter is to connect our hopes and dreams exhibited in technology to our ultimate hope in our sovereign God who is making all things new in Christ.

Two dreams. Same goal. Same technology. Different endings. Samuel Langley dreamed of a flying machine. So did Orville and Wilbur Wright. In fact, so did many others, stretching back to the artist-inventor Leonardo da Vinci in the thirteenth century. Of all the dreamers, inventors, and innovators through the ages, the story that ultimately gets tied to the invention of human flight tells us as much about our own hopes and dreams as it does about the transcendent imagination fueling the technology itself.

In the mythology of flight, the Wright brothers most often play the protagonists. However, in the late 1800s, if you were betting on the future of heavier-than-air powered flight, Samuel Langley would have had the best odds for being the inventor of the early aeroplane. He had the right education as a scientist, political capital, connections, and finances to make it happen. As a distinguished astronomer and head of the prestigious Smithsonian Institution, he had at his disposal seventy thousand dollars (nearly two million in today’s dollars), of which the majority was taxpayer funded, to design, build, and test the first mechanically powered airplane. By contrast, with less than a thousand dollars of their own money, the Wright brothers were self-educated, self-funded, and self-motivated owners of a bicycle shop. This backdrop brings to mind our favorite storylines in which an unlikely underdog overcomes insurmountable odds to achieve success.

In the fall of 1903, Langley’s scientifically engineered contraption, packing an impressive fifty-plus horsepower, made its long-awaited, well-publicized flight multiple times across the Potomac in Washington, DC, complete with a sizable entourage of reporters, scientists, and interested citizens. While the stage was impressive and the flight commendable, it was the dramatic landings that stole the show. The final and most spectacular landing occurred in December of 1903, morphing aeroplane into submarine and memorably landing a brave but fully chilled and drenched pilot, sputtering profanities, back on the riverbank. What crashed in the Potomac was more than just the flying mechanism. Equally damaged that day was the public’s faith in institutional science, political power, and wealth. Meanwhile, a little over a week later, two bicycle mechanics who spent a mere four years of vacation time “playing with” technology were able to coax a mere twelve horsepower engine to lead them into history, witnessed by a handful of curious locals with surprisingly little drama.

Maybe we find the story of the airplane so intriguing because it embodies the rags-to-riches mythology that we want to be true. However, a closer reading of the Wright story reveals something deeper than the retelling of the American dream. The story reinforces the notion that in culture making, the visionary artist often eclipses the scientist. This may explain why today we remember Kitty Hawk as the site of the first flight and why the Wright brothers achieved a chapter in history while Langley only secured a footnote.

What drove the brothers Wright to dream about flying? Momentous technological change often grows from a deep yearning or belief. The Wright brothers’ imagination was sparked at an early age after Milton Wright gave a toy flying device to his young sons, Orville and Wilbur, in 1878. It was perhaps an odd gift coming from a man of the cloth, as Milton was a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. Little did their father know that his gift might inspire the boys to dream of creating the first powered aircraft that could be reliably controlled by a human pilot. Not all beliefs are articulated in doctrinal statements, some take shape in wood and metal.

The boys grew up in Dayton, Ohio, pursuing diverse interests in sports, music, nature, and mechanical devices. As teenagers, their curiosity drove them to build their own printing press and to later start a bicycle shop. Reading news stories about early attempts to fly reinvigorated their childhood dreams, and they began researching and experimenting to create their own airplane. Possibly taking their cues from their bicycle world, they reconceptualized the “problem of flight” not as getting into the air, but as giving us control when we got there. Like the experience of learning to ride a bike, our earliest failures occur when trying to turn, slow down, or stop. Driven by this quest to solve the flight control problem, they built models and prototype gliders to test and refine their design. They meticulously examined each failure and improved the design before ever attempting powered flight—all the while refining their skill at riding the airplane. They identified the Outer Banks of North Carolina as an ideal location for their final field experiments because of its frequently windy conditions. They set up camp in Kitty Hawk, being drawn back to this wilderness landscape not simply for its aerodynamic advantages, but also for the contest of wit and skill played out against an unpredictable foe of wind and weather.

Figure 1.1. Photo of the first powered, controlled, sustained airplane flight in history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, December 1903

Longing represented by dreams and imagination is an important factor in technology design. Today, most new technology originates in big companies, so we might mistakenly connect innovation to the economic motivations of corporate businesses and miss the role of play. One of the most striking features of the Wright brothers’ story, though, is that their motivation arose not from some practical need but from a delight in tinkering and exploring. Their story demonstrates the power of play, imagination, and human creativity—driving them from the inauspicious printing press and bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, to flight tests in the boondocks of Kitty Hawk. Kitty Hawk was more akin to a rustic vacation camp than a science project, and the memoirs of their experiences on the Atlantic coast read more like poetry than a lab report. Orville and Wilbur were gymnasts, football fans, pond hockey players, bike riders, skate sharpeners, book lovers, naturalists, art connoisseurs, and musicians, as well as inventors. These diverse interests shaped their imaginations, and their curiosity drove them to design the world’s first successful heavier-than-air engine-powered and pilot-controlled aircraft.

More important than the creation of the Wright Flyer itself, may be the creation of the Wright history. Langley and his institution of scientific predecessors may have, through their myriad of failures, done more for the ultimate future of aircraft design than the Wright brothers. Nevertheless, it is the Wright brothers that we more often choose to remember. Stepping back from the story, the reason may be bound up in our dreams. We also dream of the activity of creating: the adventure, the joy, the delight of exploration, free from the demands of our modern industrial machine. While only a few in the world are granted access to the well-educated and well-funded world of Langley, most of us can identify with the world of the Wright brothers. Their dreams of creating were as strong as their dreams of flying.

What drives humans to create technology? Some have suggested that invention is the result of Darwinian selection and that creating tools to survive is simply an evolutionary skill that developed over time, corroborating the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention. While some creative abilities that our ancestors employed to survive still endure, such as harnessing fire for energy, other creative endeavors are now directed toward crafting the arguably less essential jet skis and big screen televisions. Others have suggested that invention is a type of technological determinism, assuming that technological progress is inevitable, implying that engineers are compelled by some impersonal force. Still others have suggested that invention is driven primarily by consumerism and materialism, which creates the demand for what invention supplies.

Is invention only driven by the instinct for survival or the instinct of greed? Neither survival nor greed led us to the first flight at Kitty Hawk or the first majestic cathedral. They were driven by delight in creating something new and beautiful and noble. Technology always serves a purpose or seeks to achieve a goal by solving problems. The best technology delights us with intuitive melding of form and function, and in some ways this aesthetic makes it a product of not only science but also of art. Although calculation and logic are fundamental to modern technology, the development of technology is a creative activity. We do not calculate a new technology, we design it. In the end, our best technology is derived not from our base instincts but from our noblest dreams.

Yearning for something better stokes our imaginations to explore new possibilities and to envision a different reality. Imagination is our conscious dreaming. Our ability to create technology allows us to ponder new and better ways to achieve our goals, and even to conceive of new goals that build on new tools. We can better our lives, improve our community, advance our society, and care for our world with the devices we dream up and build.

Science fiction has long inspired the imaginations of modern technology developers. Written in 1865, Jules Verne’s classic tale From the Earth to the Moon imagined a voyage to the moon a century before the first moon landing. Another classic Verne story, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, describes an electrically powered submarine a decade before the first one was constructed. Prolific science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke described artificial satellites for communication more than a decade before the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Today satellite technology is so common that we usually drop the qualifying adjective “artificial.” Martin Cooper, an AT&T engineer widely recognized as the father of the cell phone, mused that Dick Tracy comics depicting futuristic wrist-watch radios may have inspired his vision for mobile phones. The Star Trek television series may have also inspired various technologies, ranging from spaceship propulsion to medical imaging. In one of the halls of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum one can view a model of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek near a model of the lunar landing module, placing the dream of space travel next to the reality of it. Indeed, imagination often precedes invention.

DREAMING OF SPACE

Figure 1.2. Apollo 17 launch

One of my indelible childhood memories is the sight of a television image of the launch of Apollo 17 and the subsequent fuzzy black and white video of men walking on the moon.2 It was late 1972 when I watched footage of Walter Cronkite’s report on the Apollo program’s final mission to the moon. My father let me stay up late one evening to watch the spectacular images of people visiting another world. I didn’t know it at the time, but these missions to the moon were the culmination of centuries of human dreaming about flight, outer space, and celestial bodies. What I did know was that it sparked my own imagination. It was one of the experiences that led me to dream about my own vocation: first imagining myself as an astronaut, but eventually focusing more on technology and deciding to become an engineer.

The entire Apollo program was the culmination of a dream. In 1961, US President John F. Kennedy laid out an ambitious, mind-boggling goal:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Ea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Dreams Take Flight
• 2 A Survey of Technology and the Biblical Story
• 3 Field Responsibility
• 4 Faithful Design Guides
• 5 Beyond Engineering Ethics
• 6 Modern Towers of Babel
• 7 Moving Forward by Looking Back
• 8 Technology and the Future
• 9 Must We Leave Our Neural Nets to Follow Him?
• 10 Letters to a Young Engineer
• Questions for Reflection or Discussion
• Notes
• Image Credits
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright