God is an Engineer

In writing Neurifact, I made the main character an engineer. For the most part, engineers are stereotyped as very structured, opinionated, and unemotional introverts, so how can one create an exciting and entertaining story about such a person? Aren’t you stepping way out on limb in featuring such a character in a fictional thriller-story?

Well, let me venture even further out on that limb with the statement that our omnipotent and omniscient God is, in fact, an engineer. In creating the universe, God designed matter and energy to form the universe and added life to one speck in that universe in a well-engineered environment called earth. It is not clear on what day God created well-ordered technology in his universe and earth, but the mathematics, physics and biology underlying his handiwork is no doubt divine. And by creating humanity with just an infinitesimally small slice of his image, God gave man the intellect, curiosity, and motivation to slowly and sequentially explore, unpack, harness and apply technology to better the human existence over time.

So let’s take an engineering analytical perspective to examine God’s wonderful engineering accomplishments. First, as to the origin of the universe, we’ll let the astrophysicists, Christian apologists, and atheists inconsequentially argue that topic ad infinitum. But for engineering purposes, we’ll assume a set of given initial conditions at the Eden exit point. Man departed Eden initially as a failed and failing being along with the knowledge of good and evil, but God left him with His image and dominion over the other earthly creatures, while forcing him to labor for survival with the “sweat of his brow.†Simultaneously, God allowed a Christ-defeatable Satan to co-exist to confront man with sinful distractions that included misapplying evolving technology for evil purposes. The Christ-defeatability of Satan is left as a straightforward Gospel exercise for the reader.

Without going into deep detail, we know man was able to overcome his need for shelter, food and survival and band together into pro-creating cultural communities, one of which was chosen by God. As time allowed, certain men with an early engineering bent, were able to investigate the mathematics, physics, and biology of earthly processes and exploit their accumulated knowledge of different technologies to smelt metals, craft tools, cultivate crops, domesticate animals, harness natural energies, build structures and machines, and over time perform life-sustaining services more efficiently. As history’s engineers achieved successes, they couldn’t help but marvel at how God had implanted technology within His creation and opened paths for them to discover and exploit these technologies. But Satan lurked behind these God-led technology exploitations and subverted a set of these engineers to adapt selected technologies for evil, most often to support their killing, conquering, and destroying.

Over the course of many centuries, this steady progress of technology discoveries and engineered systems advanced at a steady pace, and I believe God was generally pleased with His servant engineer’s successes. I believe that part of God’s engineering strategy after Christ altered the pathway for mankind at a hinge point of history, was to bless the engineers of Christian nations and grant them accelerated access to his technology as evidenced by the expansion of western Christian countries to establish new Christian countries. God led engineers in these countries to unleash the industrial revolution, where engineering successes skyrocketed. But an observant Satan followed these emerging engineering advances and continued to subvert a portion of them for evil.  

With Babbage’s machine, Maxwell’s equations, and Shockley’s transistor, amongst many other engineered systems, we entered the digital information age where engineering breakthroughs seem to be occurring on an almost daily basis. But evil continues to thrive and progress as well, and as technologies converge and compress, we now have a situation where every person can hold the breadth of good and evil in the palm of their hand. And Satan is seizing on these engineered handheld devices to convince weaker and more gullible persons to allow these devices to do their thinking and reasoning by presenting tailored and seductive messages to them, the younger the better. Who knows where it will all lead as humanity careens along life’s pathway with good and evil lining both sides of the path pulling individuals in either direction. But we take comfort in knowing that God has well engineered the end state when His good will triumph. In the meantime, in heaven, where many engineers are part of the saved throng surrounding the glorious throne of God and worshipping and praising Him, you’ll likely find all the engineers huddled closely near the foot of the throne, patiently waiting for God to deliver his highly anticipated “How I Did It All†engineering lecture series.