Joel Woodruff, President of the C.S. Lewis Institute, discussed how Christians should engage technology with Tony Reinke, author and senior teacher for the Desiring God Christian ministry in an interview presented by the Institute the earlier in this year.
Woodruff asked Reinke about his interest in faith and technology. Reinke said that he came to true faith in Christ as a young adult. He had worked as a sports journalist. But his conversion experience gave him a great love for the church, and a calling “to be a journalist of Christian ethics.” This then led him into work in Christian ministry, and ultimately to working with the Desiring God ministry. About ten years ago he realized that considerable attention was needed to Christian ethics and social media. He said he conducted many interviews with ethicists in this period and endeavored to see the developing media in the light of Scripture. He also authored several books related to this, and ultimately a book addressing the big picture on this topic, God, Technology, and the Christian Life. He addresses not only social media, but also “mass media, and now AI [artificial intelligence], robotics, nuclear power” and other new areas of developing technology.
Technology and the Christian World View
Reinke defined technology as “applied technique.” It is “a way of engaging with God’s creation … using technique.” Technology has been with us from the first hammers used by humans to space travel. Both David and Goliath used technology in the Bible. David’s technology was far simpler but more strategic. Similarly, today some fields of technology, particularly digital technology, are developing rapidly, and others are “stalled.”
Woodruff asked if technology is dehumanizing the world. Reinke responded that AI does indeed “shape and form the way you think of what it is you think it means to be a human.” AI has many applications, including “personal productivity, national defense, in medicine, in law,” and in other areas. Much of the impetus behind AI is transhumanist. He quoted Elon Musk as saying, “we are brains in a vat.” What is truly important is supposed to be our consciousness, not our bodies, and what goes on in the body, whether it is flourishing or ill. The body may eventually be technologically dispensed with; consciousness remains as the real self. He noted that C.S. Lewis warned of “this transhumanist movement that he saw coming right after World War II.”
But Christians “know from the Bible, from birth to baptism to the Lord’s Table, to the resurrection from the dead we are more than just a conscious being, we have this body that God has given us, that frames what he expects from us, we’re gendered, we have different races, we have all these different aspects to our bodies that come into play that define who we fundamentally are.” While there are benefits to AI technology, we must remember the transhumanist philosophy lies behind it (which also includes the idea of transgenderism). AI will be dehumanizing if it leads to the conclusion that “consciousness is basically what we are.”
Perceived Dangers in Technology
Woodruff asked, “how does God view technology in our world today?” Reinke said that God gave us creativity to make things, and we are to “love him with them, to love others with them, and the glorify him for all the gifts he’s given us.” But he said that “for about the past one hundred years the default position of the church has been tech pessimism, it’s been Luddism.” He feels that the power of technology to cause mass slaughter in World War I helped precipitate the anti-technology sentiment. But instead, we should “see God’s glory in the innovations that we’re making.” He believes that the church has lost the priorities it needs to see God’s glory in technological innovations, and “they need to be recovered.” Above all is the priority of glorifying God in all of life (I Cor. 10:31). While transhumanism is a danger, we also need to give God glory for the benefits of technology. He pointed to the debate in the early American church over Benjamin Franklin’s proposal to harness the power of electricity (and by implication, other natural resources). But electricity itself was provided by God, along with our technological skill to use it. We should use the earth’s resources for God’s glory and the human good.
Additionally, much wonderful technology is developed by unbelievers, and we should glorify God in that as well. Reinke observed that cattle breeding, music making, and metal working all came from Cain’s descendants (Gen. 4;16-22), and they were not part of the chosen people in the Bible. God thus creates the innovators, whether they are Christians or not. He noted that Isa. 54:16 even says that God created weapons and the makers of weapons. But perseverance is required to develop technology. Reinke observed the 95% of Silicon Valley start-ups “will fail in the first five years,” while 97% of patents “never make a penny of profit,” although the current price of a patent is $10,000.
Woodruff asked, however, about the danger in technology to Christian faith. Reinke said that the danger is seeing technology as a way of salvation (as is now happening with transhumanism). The security of American life makes us prone to believe this. Insulated homes, hospitals and emergency rooms, modern medicine for diseases, the military to protect the country, etc. conduce to a feeling of complete security, which is untrue. We should instead glorify God for the security that we have, rather than finding ultimate security in technology. He observed that the account of the Tower of Babel does not say that God is against technology, but against a technological society that is godless.
Woodruff then asked how technology has impacted our spiritual lives. Reinke observed that the Bible has become increasingly available to people since the invention of the printing press, and today the Bible is online. But availability does not guarantee that the Bible is interpreted correctly. The question, Reinke said, is whether technology is making us better lovers of God and neighbor or is making us more self-centric. Spiritual formation is a long process, he said. Chatbots and other technology cannot necessarily provide a quick answer to spiritual problems. There will be “seasons of pain, seasons in which there’re aren’t a lot of answers.” We always have God’s revealed truth, but there are many other answers that we don’t have. Technological innovations and their results may be dramatic, but “God works in us by his own agricultural pace, by seasons, which is much slower.”
It is important to remember, Reinke said, that social media tends to put us around people who are like ourselves whereas one’s church provides a range of people who are very different in age, abilities, and views on life. The physical presence of people at church also gives a more authentic, “less filtered” presence than remote access.
Restricting Technology for Christian Life
Woodruff asked about restrictions that should be placed on technology. Reinke said that such rules for the family as “no smartphones at the dinner table,” or services such as Covenant Eyes to guard against pornography can be very helpful. Children should be taught “digital habits, good habits, in the home.” A wireless router is available that will cut Internet connections based on time spent online and content accessed. This makes it “easy to control what your child sees,” but “once you move to the smartphone, it becomes much more difficult.” Handing one’s ten-year-old a smartphone “can be really a bad decision,” he said. But guarding against pornography is not “the end of parenting,” but rather the crucial task is “giving your child a vision, a vocational vision and a moral vision of their lives that is so compelling, that they run towards that as the North Star of their life.” Children and young people must be moved beyond “the drama and allurements of what’s online.”
Woodruff asked what we should expect from technology in the future. Reinke responded that a number of early technological innovators expected that technology would eliminate the need for God. It was thought that even if God is real, “we would take the reins of evolution from him” and “do this on our own.” In fact, however, “technology actually makes us much more vulnerable than we thought we were.” He gave as examples identity theft which results from technology and annihilation from nuclear weapons. The doctrine of divine providence shows that technology has not made God more distant but has made us more “porous” to God’s action. Another dramatic example is the effect of technology on privacy. The move from rural and small-town life to urban life historically has provided anonymity, but the staggeringly advanced technology of facial recognition may make possible glasses in which the name and basic facts about strangers on the street is visible. Another possibility, disputed by some, is the development of “general use robots,” that would be household servants. The Chinese, however, claim that these will be deployed in about two years.
In conclusion, Reinke said that God has providentially given us the resources and ability to make new things, and to cause inventions to work. “We do not have to live lives of fear about what the future will look like, but we can rest in the one who gave us technology to know that he can govern it.”