transcript for Episode 56

Gretchen: My guest today is Dr. Derek Schuurman, a professor of computer science at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His academic interests in computer science lie in pedagogy, computing in the majority world, embedded systems, and robotics and computer vision.

His other increasingly passionate interest lies in issues relating to faith and computer technology. He's addressed these issues in two books, one from 2013 called Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture, and Computer Technology; and another just published last month called A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers.

On today's show, we'll dive into Dr. Schuurman's work on Christianity and code, as it were, and come away with both philosophical and practical ways to live out our faith in the world of bits, bytes and bugs. Derek Schuurman, welcome to the podcast. 

Derek: Thanks for having me. It's wonderful to join you here.

Gretchen: I'm enjoying the meme, how it started/how it's going these days, so let's start our conversation through that lens on the topic of computer science pedagogy, one of your academic interests. Without wading too far into the weeds with a full-on history of computer science education through the decades, give us a brief take on where CS educators are focusing their efforts in 2022, especially in light of big trends in data science, machine learning and AI. What things are the same, and what's different, both technically and culturally, since you entered the field some 20 years ago?

Derek: That's a good question. When I was an undergraduate student, even longer ago—between school and becoming a professor, I worked in industry for about 10 years, so I was in school even longer ago—and at that time, the way that computer science was taught is you remote-logged into a mini computer or mainframe of some sort, and you did everything from the command line.

The tools were expensive, the hardware was large. We had at the University of Waterloo, where I attended, something called “the red room,” where you could peer through windows down into this huge room, which had machines with blinking lights and men in white lab coats running around caring for the machines and feeding them.

Since then things have come a long way, of course. In industry, I did a lot of embedded systems, and so I worked with small microcomputers that were just beginning to find their ways into robots and motor drives and vehicles and material handling systems and those sorts of things. 

When I finally returned to teach myself after about a decade or so, and after completing my PhD, things were different. Some of the most exciting things were the hardware changes; the large mini computers had given way to laptops and desktops that were of comparable performance. I used something called a SUN workstation when I did my master's degree, which is what all the cool kids were using in research back then. So the hardware has changed, and of course now you can have a multi-core processor on a small, modest laptop, with performance that's many, many times that of these machines of yesteryear. 

But the software has also changed. One of the big change trends that I picked up on in the nineties was the birth of the open source software movement. Back when I was an undergrad, it was very expensive to buy a compiler, and you needed to use the machines at school in order to do anything substantial. Desktop PCs were still running DOS and were quite modest. Nowadays, some of these tools that are now freely available, specifically with the Linux operating system and the GNU C Compiler, have really revolutionized the ability of students and computer science programs to not only use code, but actually look at the source code and to contribute to code.

New languages have come along; C and Pascal were big when I was young. Now Python is popular, Java. We went through a phase of CNC++. There’'s been a lot of changes in the language front as well. And everyone's got their favorite language.

The development tools, the integrated development environments, now are very helpful. Back when I was coding, we were using editors like VI—maybe some of your listeners go back that far—text inline editors in a terminal. And now of course, with large integrated development environments and tools like VS code [for] coding and development; tools like GitHub [for] source code integrity—these tools have made a big difference. 

But also the content of a lot of computer science education has morphed somewhat. Machine learning has become a huge and significant part of the computer science landscape. But with that said, there's still a lot of things that endure. The basic courses I took back when I was an undergrad looked at things like data structures and algorithms, and largely a lot of those topics haven't changed. In fact, the classic book on those topics, The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth, is still found on the shelf of most computer scientists. There's been development to be sure, but a lot of these ideas are at the foundation of computer science and haven't changed as much. Even modern operating systems like Windows and Linux use algorithms that were developed decades ago for descheduling and memory management and all these sorts of things.

So there's a lot changing, but there's also a lot that stays the same as well. 

Gretchen: So from an educator perspective, and thinking about preparing students for jobs right after college: how has it changed in terms of what skills you have to have in this environment, when the big topics are AI and machine learning, and those are the kinds of skills that companies are looking for when they're scouring for talent?

Derek: I advise all of my students to include in their selection of courses those sorts of topics. I think software engineering is a really important topic, knowing how to make real software in the real world; understanding tools like Git and GitHub and the Agile software development process.

When I worked in industry in the nineties, these things were not very mature. There were books written at the time with titles, like The Software Death March, which came out of a need to have a much more refined understanding of software engineering techniques, to make sure that you wouldn't end up with these ridiculous situations where people committed to software projects that took three years in reality, and promise them in six months. You'd have coders and engineers working stupid hours trying to deliver, and of course that never ended happily for anyone. So I think there's a much better understanding of some of those techniques, and our students need to know those sorts of things and be familiar with those tools.

Gretchen: One of the things you mentioned is GitHub, which is an open source platform where computer scientists can post their code and have it worked on by other people. I know this is a huge cultural shift from maybe even 20 years ago, certainly further back, especially within some companies that shall go unnamed. How do you find the open source shift affects the pedagogy of what you're doing?

Derek: For years, I was a very strong open source evangelist. When I first started as a computer science professor, I worked in a very small Christian university. I was at a small Canadian university, and I was a one person department with a minimal budget. And so on an open source was wonderful, because it enabled us in that setting, with a modest budget, to be able to use the tools that large corporations were using, and to be able to see what was going on inside. So it was quite wonderful. 

And I encourage my students to this day to participate in open source projects. Then when they do graduate and begin looking for work, they actually have a portfolio of projects that they can share with prospective employers, projects that they've worked on [or] contributed to. I encourage them, if there's a project you love to use—Open Office or whatever it is—contribute some code. Get involved in the community and learn from that experience.

There's also the use of open source in some of the projects that we've done overseas. We've brought Raspberry Pis to South Central Africa, to Zambia, to Central America—a couple of places, for use in K-12 schools. These little computers that are about the size of a deck of cards are wonderful machines for teaching and learning, and run largely on open source software, and have been a real blessing in communities where access to computing and computer labs was very limited.

Gretchen: Even as you talk—my mind goes metaphoric almost all the time, and I'm feeling like humanity has God's great open source project, and our mandate in Genesis to contribute to the code. 

But let's go on to another area. In addition to teaching, you've spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about technology ethics through a Christian lens. In your book, Shaping a Digital World: Faith, Culture, and Computer Technology, you paraphrase Tertullian’s famous question: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” by asking” “What does Silicon Valley have to do with Jerusalem?” Unpack that question for us, both in light of Tertullian’s original idea, and its current ideation in computer science and AI.

Derek: When I was in industry, I recall distinctly sitting in a cubicle farm and wondering, what does my faith have to do with my work now as an engineer? I was raised in Reformed circles, so I had the instinct that it mattered, but I didn't know how to connect the dots so well. I did not attend a Christian university; I went to a large technical university where I took almost all technical courses, and I had not had the opportunity to think through these things very well. 

So when I found myself as a brand new professor, wet behind the ears, having to teach students for whom integration of faith and learning was part of my job, I had to figure this out. So that question really resonated with me. What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem—Athens representing culture, of course, and Jerusalem representing faith. That's a bigger question that goes back to this early church father; what does Christ have to do with culture? What does faith have to do with culture, and what do bytes have to do with beliefs? 

That began my own journey of exploring and learning about that. What I discovered through being mentored by wiser professors at Redeemer at the time, and by mentors and by reading on the subject, is that it really does matter. God cares about technology. Our faith does not hinder us from cultural participation, but it actually equips us to be able to be salt and light in those different areas. It's a response of obedience to God's command, to unfold the latent potential in creation. A former professor at Calvin University, the late Gordon Spykman, put it this way: “Nothing matters, but the kingdom, but because of the kingdom, everything matters.”

That's what I like about the Reformed tradition: it has this comprehensive view of Redemption, of Creation. It's a big cosmic view of all the possibilities in Creation—how sin has affected all of this, but also how Christ’s cosmic sort of salvage operation is including all of these things in his Redemption, and how he calls us to participate in that as agents of reconciliation.

So I was able to situate it within that story. Then of course the question becomes, how then shall we compute? It's about the specifics. But that flows out of that; that framework was an important one for me to realize.

Gretchen: You just mentioned sin, which is an entree to a wonderful chapter that you have in Shaping a Digital World on computer technology and the fall. You cover several topics in that chapter. [One] is the concept of software errors—often expressed by the more common term software bugs. Now, the history of that term is actually funny, and maybe you can share that story; but bugs, as you note, continue to plague modern computers to this day. So considering the chapter title, I have to ask you, Derek: are computer bugs the result of sin? And if not, how should we view them? 

Derek: My instinctual kind of reaction, when I first started thinking about these things, is of course bugs are due to sin. We don't want them there, they're a pain. Of course the term goes back to a time in the history of computing where one day a large mainframe stopped computing. I think it was actually Grace Hopper, a famous figure in computer science. They went to go look at what was going on, and they literally found a bug, a moth, trapped in a relay that had actually caused the machine to malfunction. Of course, that isn't a problem with modern solid state electronics; but every time we encounter these things, we harken back to that by saying there's a bug in the computer somewhere. 

But your question about is that due to sin: it's something that, after some thought, requires a little bit of nuance. I think where to begin thinking is the difference between finiteness and fallenness. Sin has brought all kinds of perversion and distortion in technology; Romans 8 tells us that the entire creation is groaning, and of course that means everything, including our technology, is affected by sin. But the question is, suppose that the Fall had not happened, and Adam had gone on, and cultural development would have unfolded—as I believe it would. And computers perhaps would have been invented. Would an unfallen Adam, or one of his descendants, I suppose, have been able to write a million lines of code without a single bug? 

I don't believe so. We have to realize that even without sin, we're still creatures. We're not God; we're finite. We have finite capabilities, we have limits. I've speculated that computer bugs are part of just the complexity of computing. Computing is one of the most complex things that humankind engages in. If you think about skyscrapers and bridges and some of the most complex machines that we build, software's right up there: operating systems with tens of millions of lines of code and thousands of person-years of effort to create. I don't think that finite beings can write a million lines of code without having some iterative development process. Bugs are part of an iterative process that's inherent to complex things like computer science and programming. 

But I would quickly add that the harmful effect of bugs—[for example] the Therac-25 incident, where a radiation machine had a software bug and overdosed several patients, leading some to die later as a result—that would not occur without sin. I think in those cases, we see the harmful effects of bugs being due to sloppiness: not adequate testing, not using best practices, not following good software engineering techniques—those sorts of things come from different aspects of sin.

But the fact that software's iterative, and we have to do these different design cycles to refine it, might just be part of the nature of coding itself, and part of the complexity of what we're dealing with, and just part of our finiteness. And of course the thing about finiteness and fallenness is we need to accept the former, and fight the latter. So we need to distinguish between them. 

Gretchen: I think that's an excellent point. Sometimes we just think about the Fall as the whole issue, rather than the creative nature of people. I also love your explanation of the immense nature of software code. If you take a horizon of an iceberg on the water, you see the tip above, but this giant thing below. I think a lot of people don't see that giant thing below that's running everything we use right now, from our cell phones to our laptops, to Netflix, everything. 

Gretchen: I was going to ask if we'd ever have bug free code this side of heaven, which is a bit of a rhetorical question; but I think a better one is a more fundamental question: Will we have computers in heaven? And what clues do we find in Scripture, perhaps in relation to the use and transformation of other tools we've crafted here on earth? 

Derek: That's a really fascinating question. I often pose that to my students, and they'll respond with no, there won't be computers in heaven. And then I say, well, will there be harps? Oh yeah, there'll be harps. And what about pipe organs? Oh yeah, pipe organs. Those are technologies too.

If you look at the biblical story, it begins with a garden, but it ends in a city, which seems to imply the new heavens and the new earth have a certain amount of cultural development with them as well. They're not just a pristine garden like Creation opened with. 

And if you read verses like the one in Revelation 21, which talks about the kings bringing in the honor and glory of the nations; and Isaiah 60, which is this wonderful chapter about Zion, about how there'll be flocks and herds and lumber, and even the ships of Tarshish will be there somehow appear in Zion, but repurposed in service to the Lord. Micah 4:3 has this verse about how swords will be bent into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks: this idea of technology that was intended for harm—swords and spears—being redirected towards instruments for cultivation, what we were originally called to do in Genesis.

So I see this sort of movement, and I think there'll be more continuity between the new heavens and the new earth than we think. Of course it will be free of sin. We need to be humble and realize that we see through a glass darkly—we don't really know what a world without sin will look like. But I won't be surprised if there's a lot of cultural developments that we’ll recognize, including computers. 

And I go out even more on a limb with my students and I suggest, you know what, if there's going to be computers, my guess is that they'll be running Linux. That's highly speculative, but I think all of the creational possibilities will be there. There'll be discontinuity, but I think there'll be a lot of continuity in the new heaven and the new earth with what we experience now as well.

Gretchen: Our listeners can't see, but behind Derek is a penguin, which is the symbol of the Linux operating system.

Derek: Yes, the Tux penguin, which is the mascot of Linux. Absolutely. It's on my desk at work, and at home. 

Gretchen: In regards to what you just said about spears and swords being shaped into different kinds of tools, I don't know that I view a computer as a weapon, so to speak. It’s more a calculator. Computers were originally people, setting aside someone to do sums and math, and we just made a machine to do that. So my mind goes more toward, what's the purpose of a computer on earth, and then extrapolating what it will look like in heaven. I don't know if that suggests anything to you, but my sanctified imagination wonders what that looks like. 

Derek: You can see how all of creation has this sort of numerical aspect to it. Number is so much part of the beauty, the order in creation. I won't be at all surprised if that continues into the new heavens and the new earth. If we want to go on to explore and uncover and worship God through uncovering and discovering these things and praising him for them, then a computer would be an awesome tool for that. 

Gretchen: Just thinking of what we don't know about the universe, and what we may be able to still explore and work in heaven. 

Derek: I think there'll be a lot to continue to uncover and explore, and do so in a way that shows love to neighbor and gives glory to God. 

Gretchen: The other question I want to talk to you about from this chapter, “Computer Technology and the Fall,” is the subject of idolatry. On page 59, you use the word “technicism,” which Egbert Schuurman refers to in his book, Faith and Hope in Technology. Talk a bit about the key belief system of technicism and how it acts, perhaps opaquely, as the underlying worldview in the science of AI. 

Derek: That's a word that I picked up from Egbert Schuurman, a Dutch Christian philosopher of technology. It points to the notion of making an idol out of technology, seeing it as the route to human progress and solving all of our problems, new and old.

John Calvin said half a millennia ago that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols. And I think technology, if we're honest, is one of the idols of our time. We just need to be aware of that. 

And it goes back even further, right? The original sin in the garden was one of wanting human autonomy, to be able to go it on our own. I think a lot of people see technology as that route to achieving the new heavens and new earth, but without God, doing it on our own. It's a kind of technical utopianism.

I think it's connected a little bit to Epicureanism, this idea that God is absent, so it's up to us to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps through science and technology and the enlightenment project; achieving progress and seeing that sort of extending into the future. There might be setbacks along the way, but eventually we'll solve hunger, and we'll solve war, and some people even go so far as to say we can solve the problem of death with technology. 

There's Ray Kurzweil, who's written about the coming singularity: this notion that we'll be able to download our brains into a computer and live forever, which from a Christian perspective is gravely mistaken. It's a very reductionist, materialistic view about what it means to be human, that somehow by capturing the interaction of particles or electrochemistry of our brains and representing them in a computer captures the essence of what it means to be human.

If we read the Scriptures, the original creation of Adam, for instance—he's made up of the stuff of the Earth, to be sure, but it also requires the breath of God, a living spirit. The same with the vision of Elijah and the dry bones: it's more than just flesh and organs and body parts; it requires the breath of the Lord to animate them. 

But this technicism is very wide inscope. It's a trust in technology to solve all our problems, including the problem of death. This goes back to the first temptation—that you shall not surely die, and you could live forever.

The Tower of Babel is another story that comes to mind—this sort of human project. I tell my students, this is not a warning that civil engineering is sinful. If you read the text, you see that people are motivated to build a tower that reaches to the heavens, to build a bridge between heaven and earth. They're motivated to make a name for themselves instead of glorifying God's name; and they're also wanting to stay together and not spread out, even though God had told them to fill the earth. So it was an act of disobedience, through technology trying by their own wits to build a bridge between earth and heaven. And of course, the problem with idols is they don't deliver, and often they demand everything. Whereas a Christian would see the only bridge between heaven and earth is Jesus Christ.

Gretchen: Interestingly, the Tower of Babel story is one of scattering humanity and confusing their languages. I've often used the phrase “reverse the curse,” which is the technology pathway to salvation and solving problems. I think we even see this in language translation software, where you can pretty well take any language now and translate it on the fly, back into what they were with one common language. So, that barrier’s down.

Derek: I always think about when the Holy Spirit was poured out, and people were speaking on Pentecost, and being able to speak all these different languages, how God's coming kingdom was going to bridge all of those divides.

Gretchen: That goes back to your nations coming into heaven and nations being united. Interestingly about Ray Kurzweil, I read the book, The Singularity Is Near, and he actually uses the phrase. “We'll be able to live as long as we want.” And then in parentheses, he says a subtle distinction from forever. But I've always thought, at what point do I say, I'm going to hang up—whatever metaphor you're going to hang up: your spurs, your hat—and say I'm done. Also, I don't think he addresses the idea of what happens, unintended consequence-wise, when you have all a whole bunch of old people continuing to stay on the planet and you don't have the cycle of replacement going on. 

Derek: I would challenge his presuppositions to begin with. I don't think you could live forever by downloading your brain into a computer. In fact, what I think of is the words of Psalm 115, which says those who put their trust in idols become like them. If you download your brain into a computer, you are a computer.

Gretchen: Yeah. That's computational reductionism. 

Derek: Very much so. A reductionistic view of what it means to be human.

Gretchen: The other visual that came to me while you were talking about Elijah and the dry bones—and I just listened to a sermon on this recently—was that the TV show Westworld, where they show a body being made at the beginning. 

Derek: 3d printed. 

Gretchen: Yes, exactly. I'm wondering what it really looked like in that; and then of course I start singing the song: dry bones, dry bones. 

Let's move on to your new book, Derek, which is really, really good. You're one of three authors, and you guys trade off chapters and do some co-writing. It's a Christian field guide to technology for engineers and designers, and it's a very practical book about living out your faith in the real world of engineering and computer science. 

In your chapter, titled “Beyond Engineering Ethics,” you set up a sort of prerequisite for the moral life and ethical decision-making by pointing to the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's quote: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” I love this. It took a little while to unpack it, but I want you to kind of spread it out more. How is the idea of seeing ourselves as part of a story more important, or maybe more helpful, than relying on these various ethical theories and frameworks and using case studies and trolley problems to make decisions?

Derek: I'm still unpacking this too. The typical way that engineering ethics is taught is through case studies. So the trolley problem and other problems are posed, and then students are encouraged to pick one of the typical ethical frameworks—whether that's deontological ethics, or virtue ethics, or consequentialism/utilitarianism—and then figure out, in this situation, which one applies and argue it through, and do this for a whole variety of case studies.

Now I think that's of some limited use, but I don't really teach ethics along those lines when I'm working with my students, although we talk about these things and the three classic ethical frameworks. I think one of the issues with using case studies is that [they] are often things that seem far off and remote from everyday life. They’re these dilemmas that arise infrequently, that seem very remote from everyday life, and at these times then you pull ethics off the shelf in order to inform how you're going to approach these problems. 

I think [it’s] not very helpful to think this way. Ethics has to be seen more holistically, more comprehensively, in an all-of-life kind of framework. I rely a lot on N.T. Wright’s writing in his book, After You Believe, where he actually comments that virtue ethics is something that's quite appealing to Christians that goes back to ancient Greek thought; but he looks at the New Testament and he says, really, it's not so much the word virtue that's used there, but the notion of Christian character. And it’s Christian character not as an individual project, but it involves working in community; it involves the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. It involves becoming, essentially, more like Jesus, and involves all kinds of different spiritual practices. This N.T. Wright corrective I find really helpful: to kind of see ethics as they're described in the New Testament.

I think the story idea is an important one. One of the things about doing all these case studies is it's somewhat subjective which framework you use and how you argue it and so on. But the idea of a story is that, while we've talked about the enlightenment story, there's also the Biblical story, of course. N.T. Wright has this fascinating example when he's talking about ethics, where he talks about how do we do this? He [says], consider that there was this long lost Shakespearian play which is found, and the final act is missing. But it's such a wonderful play that people want to want to put it on. How do you go about this? One way to do it would be to have some writer write the final act. But he says a more interesting way, a more perhaps true way of doing this, would be to invite Shakespearian actors, who are totally immersed in the story of Shakespeare, and have read all the prior chapters, and are immersed in his work and the trajectory of the narrative; and they improvise the final ending of the story.

He likens that to us as Christians living in this in-between time. We have the story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, of the early Church. We know how it ends; we have the story of a new heaven and a new earth. And we live into that story, and that informs how we live in the current time in which we find ourselves: becoming more like Jesus, equipped and shaped to know how to respond in our context in a way that reflects God's desire for his creation for his world.

Gretchen: I want to follow up on what you've just said in linking this to the trolley problem specifically, as it relates to the trend in autonomous agents, particularly cars. This is where I think computer scientists are finding that idea of ethics most applicable; what does a car with computer vision do when it sees one person there, and five over there? Should I crash the car versus killing a person? So how does this idea of the computational reductionist view of the world—everything's a machine—and the machine will have to make a decision, and it doesn't have wisdom like a human or God, and it needs the trolley problem training? check

Derek: This is the subject of a lot of research and ongoing work in industry right now. Machine learning is an area where I think we're still trying to figure some of these things out. I know you're involved in AI and faith, as I am, where we're trying to think about how do 2000 years of Christian social thought—and other faiths, in the case of AI and faith, it's an interfaith dialogue—how do they inform how to approach these kinds of things. 

I think a helpful way to begin is to think about what sort of things ought we to automate? What sort of things ought we not to automate? Things like childminding robots and elder care robots, I would say there's something about giving care to other people, as a human with a human, is something that's part of our responsibility and our calling that we shouldn't automate or offload to machines. Fix And then I think there's a category of things where perhaps some combination of human and machine are helpful. Fred Brooks, a famous computer scientist, once talked about how we're all trying to build all these large brains called AI, but instead we should be thinking more about IA—intelligence augmentation, having machines working alongside people. So I think wisdom will need to be used to discern applications where automation is appropriate, and where it's not appropriate; and where it is appropriate, then to say, okay, what are the kinds of scenarios that we need to think about and how do we safeguard? It's not just safety; it's bias, it's justice, it's all of these sorts of things that I think there's increasing awareness of. 

The book Weapons of Math Destruction comes to mind; that’s Cathy O'Neil's book. It's a stark warning about how a lot of these training sets include these sorts of bias that then become codified, and then they end up being amplified because they're being used all over. So there's a call there to think about how we ensure that there's justice and transparency included in the design and development of these things. And that's not an easy task.

Gretchen: No, and that actually leads beautifully into where I want to detour for a second, and that is the debate about determinism in technology. You're at Calvin College, and you are a Reformed believer. Calvinism has a reputation, deserved or not, as being all about predestination, largely based on a handful of scriptures like John 6:44, Romans 8:29, and Ephesians 1:5. Some people have conflated religious predestination with technical determinism, arguing that we don't really have a free will—going back to what you said, there are things we shouldn't do with AI and autonomy in agents aside from ourselves—but rather than our futures are determined for us, whether by God or other forces. fix

So what do you say about that, Derek? How are theological and technological determinism different from each other, and how might we have a better understanding of this? 

Derek: Let me take a stab at this. Let me start by saying I've been a Reformed Christian all my life, but the whole notion of predestination and so on has never been something that I've fretted or dwelt on very much. Calvin himself didn't really spend a lot of time writing or thinking about this, certainly not in his writings or in his institutes. I think the purpose of it was mostly as a comfort. It begins with the premise that God is sovereign. That’s sort of a starting point in Reformed thinking: God is sovereign. So this idea that he holds everything in his hands and he's in control is one that's meant to be a comfort to Christians. It has to do with the perseverance of the saints, of knowing that your salvation is secure, that nothing can thwart God's plan. 

The idea of technological determinism is a lot more troubling. It's the idea that technology is in control. It's an autonomous force beyond our control, and there's nothing we can do about it. We're on this bus that's hurtling down the road, and we don't know who's driving it or where it's going. I also have problems with that; I think that God created us with freedom and responsibility. Some reformed theologians have talked about two sides of a coin: there's God's sovereignty on one side, and then on the flip side of the coin is our freedom and responsibility. They're both there somehow, and it's hard to hold them both in your hand at the same time; but it's like two sides of a coin. 

And so with technological determinism too, I say we always have freedom and responsibility. We may allow technology to take us to places, if we passively allow it to unfold as it will. If we allow certain ideologies to unfold without our thoughtful, responsible control, then we will reap the consequences to be sure. But I think the idea of God being in control is a comfort, and the idea of letting technology have its way is not comforting; it’s something we want to avoid. 

So technological determinism—I'm not a believer, but when you read people like Jacques Ellul, you see very quickly the consequences of a kind of world as it unfolds [that] makes absolute efficiency the thing that we optimize for in every area of life. There'll be consequences, and we'll reap those. But I think the Reformed doctrine of God's sovereignty is one that's just very comforting. 

There's this Reform testimony called Our World Belongs to God, and it's an incredible comfort knowing that our world belongs to God. We are not our own. That's the Heidelberg Catechism: we belong body and soul, life and death to our faithful savior, Jesus Christ. It's a pastoral, comforting thing. But it doesn't release us of responsibility; God still calls us to act responsibly, and we live Coram Deo, before the face of God. And we're called to act and respond obediently also in the cultural area of technology.

Gretchen: Interestingly, God being sovereign and good, and technology companies wanting your eyeballs and your money—we often see this determinism play out in terms of you either accept or decline the app. It's binary. And the choice we have makes us say, well, if I don't say yes to giving you all my data, I can't have the app. And God has given us a world which we do have access to. Even if we don't say yes to him. And so there's this wonderful tension of free will on that end,

Derek: And open source software plays into there too. If you don’t like the way things are unfolding, there's the opportunity with the tools that we have to redirect them, and to come up with alternatives that are more normative in a lot of ways.

Gretchen: Maybe this conversation is just opening eyes to say, we're not tied to these technical decisions. We have agency and we should speak up. 

Let's take this conversation about determinism a little further. You talk in your chapter in the Christian Field Guide called “Technology and the Future” about technical optimism and pessimism—which I think you've given us a nice snapshot of. But you also bring both science fiction, particularly in visual media like film, and the Bible into the conversation. So let's talk a little more about what role narrative structures play in shaping our understanding of technology and our vision of the future.

Derek: I love movies and science fiction movies. Someone once said, the artists get there first. They're culturally upstream from us. I think that a lot of these sort of narratives can be helpful, what-if, imaginative explorations of what happens if we don't steward our technology properly. Or, these are excellent stories that exhibit certain worldviews. The highly optimistic stories—of which there's very few I might add; it doesn't make for good theater either, probably. 

The one that comes to mind—and I write about this a little bit in my chapter about technology in the future in A Christian Field Guide to Technology—is the original Star Trek, which had a lot of optimism in it. Boldly going where no man has gone before—to new places and new civilizations; an era where mankind humankind has solved a war and hunger. By their wits and technology, they're able to solve every problem that they encounter in each episode. I actually quote one of the characters from one episode, which is basically an encapsulation of the original Star Trek worldview, which probably reflects the worldview of Gene Roddenberry, the producer of Star Trek. 

But there's very few of these utopian sort of movies. Most of them are very pessimistic. The iconic one that comes to mind is Terminator, where machines turn on their creators and destroy them, which is basically a retelling of the Frankenstein narrative of sorts. These are helpful ways of thinking about the consequences of technology when we take it into certain directions, or when we ignore responsibility. It's a helpful sort of parable.

One movie that I find really helpful and delightful is Wall-E. Wall-E is a beautiful parable. It depicts these humans who areaboard this arc being looked after by automation systems, totally passive and just a shadow of what it means to be a human being fully alive: these obese humans sitting in La-Z-Boy chairs, scurried about by machines, watching screens passively while slurping Slurpees. But at the end, you see this moment when the ship's captain wrestles control away from the automated system and redirects the ship back to Earth, where they take this fledgling green plant back [and] there's the suggestion that things are going to start anew, and humankind is going to go back to their original calling to cultivate the earth and to unfold its potential and to care for it. fix It's a movie that has the picture of the consequences of the destruction of the earth that can come with irresponsible use of technology, but the hope of what happens when we take our rightful responsibility, and how that can unfold. So it's a beautiful tale. 

Gretchen: The other side of what you're talking about from the film industry: the Bible predated that by some decades, to say the least; and this idea of the new heaven and the new earth is this future that you were referring to.

How do you see the two married? This narrative structure of hope and renewal and redemption is present both in some of the literature of science fiction—those stories that are positive—and for sure the Bible.

Derek: This Christian hope has been something that's been very powerful in animating all kinds of stories. The big difference, of course, being that in the Christian story, it's not us who usher in the new heavens in the new earth. The Bible's very clear about making technology either the villain or the savior. Neither of those things is the case.

We have to have this corrective to realize it won't be by our efforts that the new heavens and the new earth will be brought; it'll come when Jesus returns, and the Bible is clear that the builder and architect is God. By his grace, some of the honor and glory of the nations may be brought into it, once they're purified from sin; but it's not going to be by our wits, or by our work, or by our hands, that that will come. And that's a good thing. 

I see that as being very distinctive between stories that see technology as the villain or technology as the savior. Neither of those things coincide with what the biblical story tells us.

Gretchen: And we see that in Zechariah 4: “Not by power, nor by might, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty.”

Derek: Another verse from Zechariah that I find amazing is a point where they mention, holy to the Lord will be emblazoned on the pots and pans, and the cow bells. You see ordinary, everyday things in Zachariah that are being consecrated, purified, redeemed, and made holy to the Lord. I think that's what it will be in the new heavens and the new earth: all of these things will be made holy to the Lord, and he will purify them. There'll be this cosmic kind of purification. 

Gretchen: Gives new meaning to “We need more cowbell.” 

By the same token, I like the fact that you've brought up the idea that we make technology the villain, because Satan is the villain, and it's his forces—both spiritually and physically—that we should be focused on. I think we often sub in technology for him as well as for God.

I know you read a lot Derek, and I've already added a lot of books to my own reading list thanks to you—both our conversations and the work that you write yourself. I'd like you to share a couple of books, maybe two or three, that have made an impact on you, and then say why you'd recommend them to our listeners. 

Derek: Thanks for giving me an opportunity to do that. I should be very quick to add, using sort of computer science lingo when it comes to theology and philosophy, I'm a user and not a developer. So a lot of the stuff that I've been able to make use of, I'm grateful for the cloud of witnesses that have written about these things and helped me also mentor in my own life. One book in particular that I can point to where that is the case is the book Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview by Albert M. Wolters. Al Wolters was a colleague of mine at Redeemer University when I taught there in a small computer science department for many years, and I was really grateful to him for helping me shape a reformational Christian worldview. That book has been very transformative in terms of my ability to connect the dots between my faith and my technical work. 

Another book that's more recent if you do want to think more deeply about Christian philosophy of technology is Craig Gay's book, Modern Technology and the Human Future: A Christian Appraisal. He writes a wonderful book that uncovers a lot of the philosophical presuppositions in today's technological world. 

And then finally, a book I've referenced earlier is N.T. Wright’s book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. That book, for me, has been really helpful in thinking Christianly about ethics, as I mentioned earlier. So those are three books that I would recommend.

Gretchen: I'm staring at an entire shelf full behind you, and knowing how you think Derek, I would use the word curator rather than user, because what you do in your work is bring these other authors and thinkers into line of sight, for me anyway. So I appreciate that. 

As we close, I'd like you to talk about how you chose to close your book, The Christian Dield Guide to Technology with a series of letters exchanged between a young engineer and his former professor and mentor. Now, I don't want to do a whole spoiler thing; but we can at least say these were centered on the topic of how we can live out our faith in a real world context. I wonder why you chose this personal letter format to tackle these practical issues. I also wondered if it was slightly autobiographical, given that I know a bit about you and how you framed these. And here's the third part of that question: What does the comic strip character Dilbert have to do with the biblical prophet Daniel?

Derek: The last chapter is one that I wrote in A Christian Field Guide to Technology, and it is informed quite a bit by my own experience. As I mentioned earlier, I worked for almost a decade as an engineer in industry, but I've also been in ongoing conversations with alumni, with students, who've also come to me expressing some of the challenges that they face in their work. And so this final chapter, “Letters to a Young Engineer,” is basically a set of letters exchanged between a recent graduate and an older Christian college professor who worked in industry for a time, giving him some advice and some encouragement. I thought that was just a helpful way to model how we as Christians need mentors and people who embody a worldview for us in order to encourage us along the way, the way that I've experienced in my own life. 

The recent alumni in the exchange of the letters—his name is Daniel, which is no coincidence—is working on the West Coast for a high tech company. Andhe shares with his former professor some of the struggles, and it actually opens with him saying he feels like a Dilbert. When I was in industry, I used to have Dilbert comics on my cubicle, and used to commiserate with some of the things that would be expressed, living in a drab cubicle farm and thinking about what it means to be a Christian. It goes back to where my thinking originally started on all of this: sitting in a cubicle farm, wondering how do I connect bytes and beliefs. 

And of course, the professor encourages him, and tells him to maybe think more about Daniel than Dilbert has a model. Daniel was in Babylon, in a place where there were very few who shared his faith; where he had to live out his faith and continue his spiritual practices in a place that was not hospitable to that. In Jeremiah 29, we read about how God is speaking to the Israelites and Babylon and saying, you need to seek the peace and prosperity of the city. You need to pray for it. And this professor encourages the student to pray for his workplace, and for his workmates, and for the work that he does; and then encourages him to continue spiritual practices, gives him some advice on a few specific issues which come are described in the exchange of letters, and encourages him to continue to be a faithful presence. And then reminds him that his Christian calling goes beyond his paid work: that he's called to be a member of a community and a church, and cultivating spiritual practices—going back to the importance of Christian character that we talked about earlier when we talked about ethics. 

I hope it's an encouragement to young engineers, but also a model, in as much as it can be in these few short letters, of a way more experienced Christians can encourage younger Christians in the field of technology to remain faithful in their callings and in their vocations.

Gretchen: Derek Sherman. It's always illuminating and inspiring to talk to you. So I want to thank you for joining us today. 

Derek: Thank you for inviting me.