About twenty years ago, a lecturer in philosophy stopped by my office in the Engineering Faculty. He was preparing to teach a class to a group of engineers, and he wanted my advice. The philosopher outlined his teaching plan, which began with the concept that “facts” about nature represent culturally conditioned mental constructs. I interjected, “Your students will dismiss that right off the bat. They are engineers. They believe that building a bridge requires real concrete and steel. They take for granted that, if you design it badly and it falls down, real people get hurt. And real lawyers sue you to take real money out of your bank account.” Disconcerted, he jumped to a different topic. As he left, I smiled to myself, “Good thing I’ll never have to deal with tenuous stuff like that in my technical work.”
I was wrong. Preferred pronouns are springing up in the email signature lines of many of my colleagues and students, a development that seriously undermines engineering’s grounding in tangible reality. Transgender ideology claims that gender identity is a construct, with no foundation in the physical world. An individual’s gender cannot be known, even in principle, until that individual defines and discloses it. To the degree that its characteristics differ from those of the individual’s natural body, the physical world participates in a matrix of oppression. This ideology militates against the intellectual foundations of my discipline. It also shows that engineering and Christianity may rise and fall together.
Much public controversy has swirled around the question of whether science and engineering are compatible with religion. A great deal of Christian evangelization answers “yes,” but this answer misses two important points. First, the question itself is becoming outmoded in the face of transgender ideology and other new beliefs. Richard Dawkins, who has spent decades disparaging Christian doctrines, now regularly finds himself lumped with Christians in the catch-all category “transphobes,” deemed worthy of censure and cancellation. Second, simply asserting compatibility undersells the Gospel message. Jesus came so that people might have life to the full (John 10:10). Immersion in authentic Christian living should enable believers to practice better science and engineering than a secular approach can sustain.
The Beatitudes point the way. For example, a policymaking scientist who is poor in spirit will dread the temptation of self-righteous, for-your-own-good paternalism, which appeared so prominently during the COVID era. An academic scientist who properly mourns will discard a favored theory to search for a better alternative when contradictory evidence arises, instead of ignoring or disparaging the evidence. A design engineer who is meek will cultivate the humility to seek assistance with a knotty project from colleagues who possess complementary expertise, instead of forging ahead alone with an inferior plan. Such conduct is possible for those of a secular persuasion as well. For the Christian, however, the Beatitudes offer an unmatchable rationale, teleology, and roadmap for the cultivation of such practices, especially in the face of difficulty and opposition.
The engineer who lives a full life formed by the Beatitudes will produce technical explanations with greater originality, data with more trustworthiness, designs with more practicality and beauty, and greater benefits to the common good than the engineer who does not. The many-faceted goals of engineering—solving problems, increasing efficiency and productivity, improving ease and comfort, reducing risk—all ultimately aim to serve one’s neighbor. Christianity specializes in that objective.
This might seem an unrealistic hope: Doesn’t secularization tend to accompany technological progress? Our age has become increasingly irreligious while also witnessing a vast social transformation by means of materials, medicines, devices, and measurement tools that were inconceivable a lifetime ago. The world’s oldest living person was born during the first decade of the twentieth century, a decade that saw the invention of airplanes, radios, air conditioners, and vacuum cleaners. American life expectancy at birth hovered near fifty years. Pollution was on hardly anyone’s radar. Today, hypersonic drones reach speeds near Mach 7. Computers perform two quintillion operations per second. Scanning probe microscopes manipulate individual atoms on surfaces. Antibiotics and other medical advances have boosted life expectancy to nearly eighty years. Advanced spacecraft divert dangerous asteroids 7 million miles away, and chlorofluorocarbon production has been curtailed to protect the ozone layer.
Yet despite these extraordinary achievements, engineers must confront hard questions about their social role. In the first place, engineering can be held partly responsible for weapons of mass destruction, the surveillance state, and environmental degradation. More immediately, there is a crisis of trust. Technical leaders have lost considerable public respect and in some quarters are openly reviled as never before. Why? Top-tier technical journals have formally endorsed political candidates, and they helped to suppress legitimate hypotheses about the origin of the COVID virus. The UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) misleadingly advanced worst-case pandemic scenarios to the government as normative. Ceaseless admonitions by policymakers in the U.S. to “follow the science” implied that technical evidence leads to policy decisions in straight lines. Few technical experts spoke up to challenge this absurd canard.
Another emergent crisis, as I have hinted, is philosophical. Engineers who add preferred pronouns to their signature lines lend support, often unwittingly, to an ideology that scorns bedrock assumptions of the technological enterprise. Engineering practice acknowledges that culture and particular experiences validly shape technical goals and approaches. However, engineering also assumes that nature possesses an objective reality that is intelligible through methods of observation, principles of logic, and instinctive ways of learning shared in common by all humanity. This reality must be discerned, not defined according to personal choice. Moreover, apprehension of this reality is available in principle to all people; no aspects remain ontologically restricted to particular individuals or groups. To the extent that such assumptions are abandoned, the scientific foundation of engineering evanesces.
Accordingly, the weakening of these assumptions has led to successful competition from other worldviews. In New Zealand, for example, indigenous Maori beliefs about nature have been slated to be taught in school classrooms with equal standing alongside “Western science.” In recent decades, leading thinkers in the West have embraced various forms of de facto gnosticism driven by emotivism and based on racial, gender, and environmental concerns. The underlying anthropology views the self through a psychological lens as self-defining, with constraints of social convention and the natural world acting mainly to oppress.
One shudders to think where these currents may lead. Fifteen years from now, it’s conceivable that a student may say the following to a professor of chemistry or physics: “Newton’s laws of motion? The guy who cooked them up ran England’s Royal Mint, which financed a huge colonial empire that enslaved millions. Worse, he invented calculus, which oppresses underprivileged students even now because it’s so hard to learn. Calculus should be purged from courses, or at least identified as a tool of oppression every time it’s used.”
We must hope that this scenario proves overwrought. Its very conceivability refutes the notion that engineering and science operate serenely in some objective sanctuary free of anthropological squabbles. The processes of design and discovery unfold according to metaphysical assumptions (often implicit), as well as social, financial, and career incentives. These factors influence which questions are asked, the plans for addressing them, and how the outcomes are interpreted and assessed. Current trends do not conduce to sustaining the technological progress humankind has enjoyed in recent decades.
For example, technical education in the U.S. is deteriorating, especially at earlier educational levels. Statistics compiled by the National Science Board show that mathematics achievement by fourth and eighth graders exhibited no measurable improvement between 2007 and 2019. More recently, the National Center for Education Statistics reported a dramatic decrease in mathematical aptitude for thirteen-year-olds between 2020 and 2023. This decline, combined with falling birthrates, will diminish the technically competent workforce. A Defense Department report in 2021 warned that the U.S. is “fast approaching another Sputnik moment” for this reason. Much human suffering will ensue.
Meanwhile, engineering has a communication problem. Despite the omnipresence of engineering—chemical, mechanical, electrical, biomedical, agricultural, civil, petroleum, nuclear, aeronautical, materials, computer, environmental, and industrial—much of the public has only a hazy idea of what engineers do. Engineering differs from “technology,” which overlaps with it but also includes practices based entirely on crafts, artisanship, and empirical know-how. Modern engineering relies heavily on formal analytical and mathematical methods, and it rests on a foundation of science. And yet it must be distinguished from science. The physicist and aerospace engineer Theodore von Karman, who developed swept-wing aircraft, suggested that “Scientists study the world as it is; engineers create the world that has never been.” The maxim is helpful, although of course it is too neat a division. One might say, more precisely, that engineering differs from science (including applied science) by habitually incorporating three distinguishing modes of thought: constraints, systems and design. Even in these modes, the communication problem emerges again. “Systems” is a fuzzy concept, and the public often associates “design” with art.
If engineering is little understood, and if it indeed faces a set of crises, what difference might Christianity make? At least four answers come to mind. First, Christianity insists that nature is fundamentally good, not oppressive. And yet it does not view the Earth as a god-like being, which humans must not affect or alter. Second, Christianity provides engineering with a rightly ordered rationale: To serve others. Benedict XVI and many others have pointed out that technological advances may be judged good or bad according to how they express love of neighbor. Third, the incarnational teleology of Christianity provides engineering with a supremely noble goal: to build for a new creation, which will become fully realized at the end of time. Engineering understood in this way becomes an enterprise for transforming and redeeming nature. Fourth, engineering practice can offer a distinctive window into the spiritual realm for the purpose of prayerful redemption of the individual.
If engineering would benefit from taking Christianity more seriously, it should be obvious to Christians that any evangelization of the West must take engineering seriously as well. High technology pervades our civilization, and many an issue of our age has a technological component: Global environmental changes, for instance, involve large-scale technology manufacture and use, and require large-scale mitigations, which inevitably entail engineering. This century will witness the increasing importance of advanced semiconductor manufacturing, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, the commercialization of space, the ubiquity of security cameras, biometric identification, the manufacture of vaccines, and more.
Evangelization has responded to its social context ever since St. Paul’s earliest preaching. After the Roman empire legalized Christianity, so that martyrdom diminished, the Church needed a new model for all-in commitment to the gospel. Accordingly, the desert fathers arose to show that martyrdom could be spiritual rather than bodily. The Benedictine order adapted and institutionalized that insight in Western monasticism, which pursued a communal form of prayer and work. When urban life in the West revived during the thirteenth century, the Franciscans and Dominicans arose to meet evolving spiritual needs through preaching and evangelical poverty. As the West grew increasingly secular and sophisticated in the sixteenth century, the Jesuits transmitted the gospel message through education and missionary work. At present, much of the West has rejected its spiritual heritage in favor of aggressive materialism or de facto gnosticism. The culture is technocratic, which means that Christian evangelization must develop the habitual capacity to proclaim in a technological idiom.
It is striking, then, that whereas the relationship between Christianity and science has occupied many fine minds since at least Albert the Great, far less thought has gone into Christianity’s relationship with engineering. This is partly due to the relative novelty of engineering: Certain examples of modern engineering date back quite far, but most engineering has appeared only in the past two centuries. Green shoots are appearing—Pope Francis’s Laudato Si is the first papal encyclical that refers to engineers explicitly—but much remains to be done. Where, then, should a theology of engineering begin?
There is, admittedly, a respectable theological case that engineering arose only as a result of original sin. Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the Confessor believed that Adam and Eve were created atechnos, that is, with no need to craft anything because they lived in perfect harmony with God and nature. The fashioning of loincloths after the Fall signaled the first stirrings of engineering; Cain, the first murderer, went a step further by founding cities.
But Maximus himself sounds a more upbeat note by pointing out that technē—which encompasses engineering—flows from God’s gift of the human intellect. When guided by acquired and infused virtues, engineering not only protects and comforts humans living in nature-turned-hostile (Gen. 3:16-19), but also transforms creation in unprecedented ways to mirror truth, goodness, and beauty as God always intended. Moreover, Scripture brims with references to God as purposeful designer: Proverbs 16:4 and Psalm 139:13- 14 are obvious examples. And as any engineer would expect, creation is designed to spawn systems: planetary systems, weather systems, nervous systems, circulatory systems, and many more. Even the constraints (“weaknesses” in 2 Cor. 12:9) imposed by nature can serve to perfect the use of human power for creation’s stewardship.
In Science and Creation, Stanley Jaki advances a compelling historical argument that Christianized civilization in the West was uniquely able to incubate modern science. Perhaps less recognized is that modern engineering co-incubated as a fraternal twin. Science and engineering both required widespread faith in a transcendent creator god who is personal and rational. That faith led pivotal thinkers to trust in the comprehensibility of nature, believe in historical progress, and grasp the significance of quantitative methods. However, this thinking did not exhaust the Incarnation’s implications. The Church Fathers recognized that the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension link the spiritual and physical realms in a profoundly new way. An essential consequence is that redeemed people should seek to build for God’s kingdom on Earth in anticipation of the end of time, when the fullness of transformed creation will be revealed. Engineers thrill to building things, whether bridges, reactor systems, integrated circuits, or software systems. To a faith-filled engineer, it is an exceptionally appealing notion that designing and fabricating systems, artfully optimized in the face of constraints, helps to build, literally, for a new creation.
For Maximus, the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:9, 17) represents the universe, which offers knowledge of good when contemplated through a spiritual lens and knowledge of evil when viewed through an earthly lens. God’s glory shines transparently only through the spiritual lens, which became badly clouded after Adam’s fall. But transparency improves as a result of acquired and infused virtues.
Throughout the patristic age, between Origen and Augustine, nature was conceived metaphorically as a book whose proper reading revealed spiritual truths in a manner analogous to Scripture. Subsequent developments traced a complicated path and added layers of meaning to the metaphor. As the patristic age closed, Maximus expounded the metaphor at length in his Ambigua. In an exegesis of the Transfiguration, Maximus writes that in the Book of Nature, “The Word . . . is rendered legible when He is read by us. For through the reverent combination of multiple impressions gathered from nature, He leads us to a unitary idea of the truth.” More boldly, Maximus claims, “Whoever wishes blamelessly to walk the straight road to God stands in need of both the inherent spiritual knowledge of Scripture and the natural contemplation of beings according to the spirit.” Furthermore, “the two laws—the natural and the written—are of equal value and dignity. Both of them reciprocally teach the same things, and neither is superior or inferior to the other.”
Medieval writers adopted different theological foci and developed the Book-of-Nature theme accordingly. Hugh of St. Victor believed that, before the Fall, the Book of Nature sufficed for disclosing divine wisdom. The Fall obscured our vision. To restore the loss, Bonaventure described a three-stage progression by which people may gradually ascend and better perceive their maker in the Book—beginning with “vestige,” moving through “image,” and culminating in “likeness” for those most conformed to God. However, both Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas gave priority to the Book of Scripture for revealing divine revelation fully and without error.
The metaphor continued to evolve thereafter but lost its luster due to the slow rise of interpretations suggesting that nature could supplant Scripture as a vehicle of divine revelation. Yet in recent years, the metaphor has regained prominence in orthodox Christian thought. Encyclical letters by the last three popes mention the Book of Nature. Several writings and discourses of Benedict XVI ponder the theme, giving it perhaps the most extended and significant theological treatment of the past century. In a characteristically integrative approach, Benedict’s thought links the Book of Nature to contemplation, faith, natural law, and liturgy—centering all of them on Christ.
Benedict pointed out in a 2006 address that the Book employs mathematical language, and that the correspondence between the mathematical structures deduced by human intelligence and the objective structures in creation suggests a single original intelligence. He portrayed engineering (termed “technology”) as the systematic application of mathematical instruments to harness nature for our service. His 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate admonished against using this service for selfish purposes and enjoined using it for greater freedom to worship and contemplate the Creator. Thus, “in technology . . . man recognizes himself and forges his own humanity.” Clearly Benedict’s thought perceives both intrinsic and instrumental purposes for engineering.
The Book of Nature metaphor may be adapted and elaborated fruitfully for a technological era. Engineers and scientists who encounter spiritual realities by reading the Book of Nature may help us to understand how the supernatural can be represented in the natural—as it is in icons—and how natural and supernatural meet in the Eucharist. Conversely, traditional theology provides important safeguards against interpreting the Book of Nature with unwarranted tendencies toward deism or pantheism.
Engineering is also a useful analogy for the Church, the Body of Christ, in all its variety and complexity. The days of individual geniuses doing solitary technical work—Galileo, Einstein—are long gone. “Big science,” as in the human genome project or experimental high-energy physics, requires enormous organizations comprising thousands of people. Discovery-oriented technical work in academic laboratories involves teams of graduate students, postdoctoral associates, faculty, and others. In government and corporate laboratories and in production facilities, teams of mixed disciplinary background are often the norm. Reading the Book of Nature with technical proficiency is often a collective enterprise.
Evangelization also, of course, requires prayer and action. Maximus and other patristic writers insist that proper reading of the Book requires extensive discipline to cultivate virtues that order the soul and conform it to God. The conformed soul transforms the senses so that they may perceive the spiritual through the natural, as happened with the burning bush of Moses and the Transfiguration. Engineers are well positioned to understand all this, since their work requires the discipline of extensive study and practice over many years.
What action might spring from this sort of prayer? Not necessarily the foundation of new organizations. Christian societies, such as Engineering Ministries International and the Christian Engineering Society, already exist, though they deserve to be more widely known among the nontechnical faithful. Meanwhile, the existing array of Christian missionary and educational organizations is vast and deep. If some of those organizations add technological components that accord with their existing charisms, the cause of evangelization will advance considerably.
As C. P. Snow argued in The Two Cultures, “science” (tacitly including engineering) and the humanities have diverged into separate domains with poor intercommunication. Snow advanced this concept in 1959, and it generated controversy, which continues today. However that debate resolves, most engineers don’t regularly use words like “epistemology,” “logoi,” or “eschatology.” Any understanding of philosophy or theology is usually rudimentary. The technical proficiency of humanists is likewise typically weak. We need to think about how to bridge this gap.
As I argued above, over time the secular West will increasingly struggle to sustain its technologically based well-being, partly due to ideological factors and partly due to broader social and cultural dysfunctions. The opportunities for evangelization by engineers will be numerous and far-reaching in education at all levels—elementary, secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate. Education has long been a major venue for evangelization, but giving it a specifically technological orientation will help to bring the incarnational dimensions of Christianity into high relief.
The historian Richard Rex has proposed in these pages that the City of God has undergone three great crises. The first crisis involved the theological question “What is God?” and emerged with the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon. The second crisis involved the ecclesiological question “What is the Church?” and occurred in conjunction with the Council of Trent. We live in the midst of the third crisis, which involves the anthropological question “What is man?” The stakes are high.
Yet there is hope for the future. Many engineers seem congenitally unable to relinquish their grounding in objective reality concerning both material objects and human anthropology. For example, when answering a recent academic survey to gauge attitudes toward transgender ideology among engineering undergraduates, one student wrote, “There are two genders, male and female. If an engineer creates a bolt and a nut but then whimsically labels them, then he’s not that great of an engineer.” In this environment, the coupled incarnational and metaphysical dimensions of Christianity become assets, rather than the liabilities they sometimes were thought to be when atheistic materialism was the challenge. Christianity not only takes the created world very seriously, but also possesses an exquisitely developed metaphysics, which overmatches the inchoate, weakly articulated metaphysics of transgenderism. Moreover, most engineers resonate better with logical argumentation than with emotive diatribes.
The theology of Vatican II may be helpful here. After all, few clergy are engineers; the evangelization of our technological age must be an apostolate mainly of the laity. Fleshing out the theological and practical implications of the Book of Nature will require a ressourcement that draws on the insights of Augustine, Maximus, Bonaventure, and many others. Expressing the fundamental affirmations of Christian faith in an accurate yet technologically savvy vocabulary will be a challenging exercise in aggiornamento.
The evangelization task sketched here may seem daunting, given the social realities of our time. It is always worth remembering John Paul II’s exhortation: “Be not afraid!” The Resurrection impels Christians to build for a new creation, which undoubtedly includes specific devices, technologies, and softwares that never existed in nature. Yet the engineering process of discovering, designing, and manufacturing with the eyes of faith transforms people. Thus God works through people to redeem his creation, and his faithful people are redeemed in the process. Evil throws up constraints. But in the elegance of this design for our salvation, one can readily discern the hand of the supreme systems engineer.
