When I was deciding what to study at university, it was the desire to create things that led me in the direction of engineering. Other disciplines offered opportunities for rational exploration, but engineers go beyond logical deduction to create practical solutions to problems, improving people’s quality of life.
As a child, I had always been fascinated with making things – my bedroom was full of models, including my flagship, which was a fully working model fire engine with a multi-section ladder that could be raised, extended and rotated to any position by means of a system of cranks and pulleys. What I only realised much later was the extent to which creativity reflects the work of our Creator God.
The very opening words of the Bible are “In the beginning, God created...”, and at the end of the first chapter, “God saw all that He had made, and it was very good”. (Genesis 1:1, 31)
God creates, God makes… Engineers create, engineers make.
In the Bible’s worldview, creative engineers follow in the footsteps of our Creator God, whose creations are good. Humans, we’re told, were designed in His image, which is why people are precious and valuable. It follows that this is why we recognise intrinsically the value of life, and we naturally recognise it as something good when people are valued unconditionally, simply because they exist; for the same reason, our consciences tell us that harming people is wrong, while improving people’s quality of life is good.
Beauty derives from God’s good creativity too, as the Bible tells us that God made trees that are pleasing to the eye – not just the ones that are productive, with good fruit, but those that are nice to look at, to enjoy.
As a radio engineer now, working for Nokia on 5G mobile communication systems, it fascinates me to see what God has built into the universe, waiting for us first to discover, and then to figure out how to use for the good of the people He has created to populate His world. He built radio waves into the universe from the beginning – invisible, lying undiscovered for millennia; now, we have not only discovered them but are learning how to use them to communicate, to locate, and to sense.
To give another example, we have just had solar panels installed on our house – a relatively recent innovation, yet one that relies on the elements like silicon and phosphorus that God designed with the right band gaps to enable us to generate electricity from light.
Who can say how many more opportunities for creativity lie waiting for us to discover and exploit in the years ahead! As Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth century astronomer said, scientists are “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” – or perhaps the engineer’s version of that would be “discovering God’s creations after Him”.
When we take a radio wave and modulate some data onto it so the data can be transmitted and received and decoded, we rely on that radio wave behaving consistently. We rely on Maxwell’s equations to predict how it will propagate. We rely on being able to design electronic circuits that behave consistently, and hence predictably. We rely on computers producing deterministic answers to calculations.
All these things are only possible because there are stable, reliable laws built into the universe that define the way it operates – laws that reflect the consistent, faithful nature of our unchanging God, who, in the words of the Bible, promised that “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.” (Gen 8:22)
We can extrapolate from that to say that Maxwell’s equations, the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the charge on an electron will not change. These are constants that we rely on every day in order to be able to create with predictable results. Constancy is part of God’s creation being “good”.
But the Bible goes on to paint a picture of the human race rebelling against its Creator, deliberately going against His instruction manual for His creation, and the result is a world that’s good but spoilt, as the relationship that God intended us to have with Him is broken. By the third chapter of the Bible, we get a picture of a world where every beautiful aspect is in some way marred:
- The joy of childbirth marred by pain
- The beauty of marriage marred by selfishness and rivalry
- The productivity of agriculture marred by weeds
- The satisfaction of creative work marred by frustrating toil
- Life itself marred by death
This worldview resonates exactly with the kind of world we see around us in practice:
- In the countryside, beauty marred by litter and environmental destruction.
- At work, collaboration marred by office politics and rivalry, with people trampling on each other to get to the top.
- In relationships, happy times with friends, until they let us down.
- Achievements and successes in which we take delight, until we let ourselves down.
- In engineering, amazing technical advances, marred by being used for evil, not just for good: o Mobile phones that can be used to keep in touch, to befriend, and to work together, can also be used to download pornography or to organise crime.o Nuclear power that can be used to provide clean energy can also be used for mass killing and destruction.o Artificial intelligence, that can solve intractable optimisations quickly, is feared will develop the ability to destroy us all.
There is, of course, only one person who has ever lived who has used God’s creation only for good, and never for evil – the wonderful person of Jesus Christ. The One through whom all things were made entered His own creation, uniquely having the power to override the laws He built into the universe, and to undo the marring of creation – to heal people, to raise people from death, to restore the broken relationship between the human race and its Creator.
And yet, the Bible tells us He too became marred – marred beyond human likeness – because He didn’t just come and do good to people at no cost to Himself – He came and suffered with us and for us, as He paid the price for our rebellion against our Creator, to rescue us from the jaws of justice. And to cap it all, He conquered the greatest marring of creation – death itself.
As we exercise the gifts our Creator has bestowed on us as engineers, what a privilege it is to bring to light new wonders of His creation, to learn how to use what He has built into it to display His glory, and, even in small ways, to lessen the marring of creation caused by the Fall.
The more we experience the wonders built into this creation, the more we may glimpse the infinitely greater wonders of the new creation to come, where nothing will be marred or used for evil, with no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away.
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