The Sacramental Technologist, Part II: From Nature to Empowered Nature

How can we perceive the work of God through human technology?

In the first part of this post, I laid a foundation for a kind of sacramental vision. Now we need to apply that to Nature, and to the Empowered Nature of human technology.

Nature

If you’ve never read G.K. Chesterton’s little book on St. Francis of Assisi, I really recommend it. Francis delighted in God through God’s creation. His famous song is the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon:

Praised be you my Lord with all your creatures,
Especially Sir Brother Sun,
Who is the day, through whom you give light.
And he is most beautiful and radiant with great splendour.
Of you Most High, he bears the likeness.

Chesterton notes how St. Francis was able to see this glory of God through creation. The Roman pagan world before him had worshiped the creation. Nature-worshiping, Chesterton says, produced “things that are against nature.”[1] Romans came to associate nature with every kind of sexual variety and magic. The pagan world first needed to be purged of that view of nature. But the medieval of St. Francis’s day had been cleansed of those pagan associations, and “they were like children” again, looking fresh on God’s world with wonder, where God could be all, in all.[2]

The result was that “water itself had been washed.”[3] The natural mountains and streams were free to be supernatural again – made by a creator, bearing his stamp. Chesterton said when Francis looks at them, “they are all like things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come and name them.”[4] Francis was able to take up this childlike joy of Adam afresh in a supernaturally charged world.

Technology: Empowered Nature

But we are human, so we must go beyond the given natural world that would exist without us.

Let me preface this by saying that experiencing God in nature is more important than experiencing God through technology. It should be our baseline. It cleanses us, it relieves us of the inhuman burden of lives lived at the speed of electricity.

Nevertheless. Man the Maker, homo faber, is also made in the image of God, and human productivity is also a sacrament of the divine. In this too we must find the traces of deity, receive it with thanksgiving, and offer it back to God like priests of his earth.

I think the difficulty is that, with technology, the thing we are offering is the work of our own hands and minds.

There are a lot of wonderful resources you can find on human creativity being an outflow of God’s creative nature. Many of those, though, are really about artistic creativity (songs and painting), rather than technological creativity (buildings, accounting systems, coding).

We can sort of sense God in the right-brained, artsy affairs of inspiration and aesthetics, but it’s more difficult to sense God through human logic, order, planning: the left-brain domains. The bones of technology seem so non-sacramental—metals, engineering, formulas—that we end up putting technology outside spiritual experience, or a mere tool to influence people for our cause, or perhaps we simply label it the enemy of deep faith. In other words, we see no sacrament in Man the Maker.

In the arts, inspiration feels like it comes like a miracle from the outside, into my head. In the planning of technology, massive advances are made through working out equations, lines of code, and manufacturing steel. These things only happen when I am in full control of my cognitive powers. It’s the work of my hands. It’s the power of my mind.

But at the risk of being a little philosophical, I think that’s because we rarely think about where our mind comes from.

Human technology, from the wheel to the automobile, to the self-driving automobile, is a wonderful re-ordering of creation to new uses. It requires disciplined study and patience. The result is maybe the scariest and most amazing thing humans are capable of: power. The sacramentality of power is to see there is a capability (what the medieval monks called potency or potentiality) of matter to become technology, which is placed there by God, and worked out through a rational gift in humans – also placed there by God. Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; it is the glory of kings to search a matter out.”

When I perceive divine wisdom and power through the human manipulation of matter, I am seeing God as the source of human consciousness and logic itself. The human mind is made in the pattern of the divine mind. So the human technologist works sacramentally when he or she is cooperating with God’s power in the act of creating, making a tool with incredible power to modify God’s environment.

The sacramental technologist thinks about the power of technology and about all its powerful effects on creation: education, community, culture, worship. When I make a bridge, it begs the question: what is worth connecting, at what cost? When I build Large Language Models of chatbots, it forces me into the questions of how this is good, whether I should unleash it on people without precautions, even as I wonder at the logical capacity of God that is activated from potentiality into powerful effect in these algorithms.

To recap. The beginning of a sacramental worldview is to see the sacrament of redemption in the body of Christ, the church. That leads us to a healthy sacramentality of nature, seeing the work of God bursting through creation. But if we really want to embrace God’s whole world, we need a sacramentality of technology and human making, full of wonder and carefulness.

[1] G.K. Chesterton, “St. Francis of Assisi,” in St. Thomas Aquinas & St. Francis of Assisi (Thirsk: House of Stratus, 2008), 119.

[2] Chesterton, “St. Francis,” 121.

[3] Chesterton, “St. Francis,” 123.

[4] Chesterton, “St. Francis,” 123.