In my admittedly short career, I've had the great blessing to work exclusively in the tech industry. Likely as a result of my proximity to technology and technologists and my love for philosophy, I've thought a lot about "The Problem of Technology." Which I'll discuss more later. But here's the ultimate thesis: the techno-skepticism so common in Catholic circles is not only dead-wrong, it's a flat out rejection of Christ's command to go forth preaching the gospel to the four corners of the world. 

As the Head of Product at Exodus 90, very often, I hear from well meaning Exodus men who ask why Exodus has an app. "The disciplines of Exodus 90 are about setting technology aside," they remark, "why then do you center the Exodus experience in an app?" In a quick email or conversation, I usually explain that formation in the proper usage of technology is one of the things we're trying to offer.

As it so happens, almost everyone we serve is required to use a smartphone or laptop for 8 or 10 hours a day for work. And with so many of our essential services going digital as well (banking, paying bills, setting appointments, and more), the number of hours that a normal, well-meaning person will have to spend on technology (in order to remain normal and well-meaning) will only increase. And this doesn't even account for purely discretionary tech use as a form of entertainment.

If we believe that God is not to be found in tech, then we've been damned  to countless hours of hellish frustration apart from his grace as we simply try to administer our normal lives. Is the only virtuous option to reject tech entirely? The article you are reading is a proof to the contrary. Such a rejection of technology is not only not required for an authentic expression of the Christian life, I would argue that the disposition toward technology so common in our circles implies not only a misunderstanding of God's creative power, it's an outward break from the virtue of hope that is demanded along with faith and love as the cornerstone of the life which is Christian. The short answer to the question "why does Exodus have an app" is that technology is going nowhere and so men need formation in how to use it in a way that pleases God. The long answer begins now. 

If you haven't studied the philosophy of technology, you should be forgiven if you haven't asked that question, "What is technology anyway?" As it turns out, it's not a very straightforward answer.

The Ancient Greeks (from whom we get the word technē) thought of technology as art, craft, or skill. Plato and his predecessors, therefore, thought of technē as a form of knowledge and even used the term interchangeably with other Greek words that we commonly translate as knowledge, like epistēmē. Aristotle, did not use the terms interchangeably, however. In general, technē for Aristotle meant something like the knowledge of production--building or making things, while epistēmē meant a higher form of knowledge of necessary and unchanging things (geometry being a great example).

It's important to understand that Aristotle believed that all things are endowed by their nature with an end, a purpose, a fundamental reason why, and that this end is good. The human hand for example serves the rest of the body in countless ways and fundamentally serves the good of the body. But what if the hand or one of its fingers is broken. The hand is no longer serving its ultimate purpose. The hand, he would say, has lost its virtue and it is no longer a good hand. But here's where technē comes in. The doctor has cultivated a form of knowledge that allows him to heal the hand (with braces, splints, salves, and ointments) and return it to it's proper function, restore its virtue, and make it a good hand again. The doctor is a technician and his produced remedies are technology. 

For Aristotle, technology is fundamentally about the restoration of nature to its own, natural ends. Or, in perhaps a slightly less dramatic way, technology imitates nature. Technology, then, fundamentally is at the service of the good. It's important to note here that this wasn't idealogical. He wasn't making a moral statement about technology (like "technology is only good if it imitates or restore nature"). He was simply grounding his theoretical understanding about the nature of technology in his direct experience of it in the world around him. We'll come back to this point later. 

Perhaps the pinnacle of Ancient Greek technology was the Antikythera Mechanism, a complex system of gears and dials that enabled you to input some date, and it would calculate the position of the planets, stars, and even the phases of the moon that one would observe in the night sky on that date.

If the example of the doctor restoring the virtue and function of the human hand to it's natural ends is the best example of nature-restoration technology, the Antikythera Mechanism is the best example of the nature-imitation technology. The technicians who created this device (by hand mind you!) understood the mathematical courses of the celestial bodies and coded up those motions in complex gearing.

The gears, of course, don't have knowledge of the celestial motions or the celestial bodies. The creators of the Antikythera Mechanism are the ones with that knowledge. They tricked the gears into role playing according to an abstraction of the rules that govern the celestial motions. The Greeks thought that this mechanism was actually imitating nature. I would argue, however, that the Antikythera Mechanism is not actually directly imitating the celestial bodies. The gears are imitating the knowledge of the motion of the celestial bodies that exists in the human mind. The Antikythera Mechanism is re-presenting human thought about the celestial bodies according to the best Ptolemaic astronomical theory and direct observation of the night sky.

As a brief aside, it's worth noting that the same engineering tradition at Rhodes and Alexandria that created the Antikythera Mechanism also created countless other baffling innovations. In the 1st century A.D., Hero of Alexandria invented the steam engine:

But like I mentioned above about Aristotle, this conception of technology as imitation or restoration of nature wasn't a moral ideology. It was more like a commonsense theoretical grounding for what it is to begin with. As such, since nature doesn't harness the power of steam to power anything, the enormous potential of such a device just never occurred to Hero. He made them and sold them to wealthy patrons who set them up in their dining rooms as party tricks. Likewise, as it turns out, it's theoretically possible to use the gearing of devices quite similar to the Antikythera Mechanism to encrypt and decrypt information like we do in modern password systems. But nature doesn't seem to encrypt and decrypt information using elliptic curves, so why would the Greeks? It's not so fanciful to imagine the the industrial revolution could have been sparked by Hero at the time of Christ. It's not altogether unreasonable to imagine that the Ancients, not the Moderns, could have been the first human beings to make a leap for the moon. 

The fundamental breakthroughs that enabled the modern, digital revolution are twofold: 

While the historical details of who and when are fascinating, I'm going to gloss over a lot of that to get to the ultimate point I'm trying to make: rejection of technology is fundamentally a corruption of God-given ability. 

Binary logic is wildly cool. Logic, as such, exists in the human mind. Like the celestial motions of the heavenly bodies (which existed first in nature and then by abstraction in the human mind and were re-presented by the gears), logic as such doesn't physically exist. Logic is an abstraction. So what are we talking about? 

So here's a question. What if we translated these particular statements and conclusions into a more abstract and symbolic representation? What if we called true statements `1` and called false statements `0`. If we did this, we can more easily analyze a `Truth Table` for all combinations of input statements on an operation. For example, for the three operations we looked at above, the truth tables look like this:

Operation | Input -> Output

NOT

Okay, so at this point, all we've done if used a symbolic and abstract language to describe the behavior of the relationship of true and false statements. Nothing more. We haven't done any "logic." We've just encoded the rules of logic into the relationships of `1` and `0` based on some operation.

So here's the fundamental insight at the heart of the digital revolution: what if we built something that had some property that we could call `0` and another property that we could call `1` that could role play the rules of logic back to us that we just described? It turns out that we can. And that's where transistors come in.

In a circuit, current is trying to flow from the positive terminal of a power source to the negative terminal (ground). The electrons actually go in the opposite direction, but that's okay--it doesn't actually matter. All we're doing is applying a symbolic language to properties that behave the same way our truth table did above. In an NPN transistor (see the diagram above), current can only flow from the Collector to the Emitter if there is also a current flowing from the Base to the Emitter. This is just based on the physical properties of the materials in the transistor. There's no logic here. Just physics. The electrons are just doing what they do based on the properties of the semiconductors in a physical system.

We can build a little truth table for an NPN transistor, calling the Collector and the Base the inputs and the Emitter the output.

C, B -> E

Doesn't this truth table look familiar? The lightbulb in the picture which is connected to the Emitter above will only turn on if we connect the transistor's Collector AND Base and to the positive terminal of the battery. If you take either the Collector wire or the Base wire and connected it to the battery's negative terminal, the lightbulb will turn off. We have here the most basic AND circuit (***). Remember, there's no logic here! The electrons are just doing what the electrons do. We are calling the potential of the electrons to flow `1` and the lack of potential for electrons to flow `0`. There's aren't any 0s or 1s. The 0s and 1s are in our minds. They are a symbolic abstraction applied to how electrons flow. And then we built a little system where the potential of electrons to flow behaves the way we wanted them to flow to recreate the truth table for the AND operation.

As it turns out, by hooking up transistors in various configurations you can reproduce any truth table you might want. You can build an OR circuit that turns the light on if one or the other input is tied high. You can build a NOT gate that turns on the light if the input is tied to ground. You can even build more exotic circuits like XOR that will turn the input on if one or the other input is high, but not both. And just because it's super interesting, I'll mention the NAND (NOT AND) gate. The output is high if and only if both inputs are low. I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader, but it turns out that ANY logical operation can be constructed exclusively with NAND gates. For example, if C is A NAND B, and D is C NAND B, then D NAND C is A AND B (^^^).

One last comment on digital logic is worth dwelling upon. We all know that we count using 10 counting digits. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. We only have ten numbers, but of course we can count higher than nine. We reuse the numbers again by appending them to one another in sequence. And so after 9, we get 10--using the symbols 1 and 0 to mean the number which is one greater than 9. Probably because we have 10 fingers, this way of counting is very natural to humans. But we can use the same trick to use more or less than 10 counting digits. For example, if we only restricted ourself to counting with 0 and 1, then we would use the number 10 to represent the value of 1 greater than 1 (which is 2). And we could keep counting this way: 0, 1, 10 (2), 11 (3), 100 (4), 101 (5), 110 (6), 111 (7). If your wondering why I'm talking about this, consider how we might add two binary numbers together. Say, 1 + 1. Of course, I just told you the result would be 10, but might we be able to construct a circuit that could role play this addition back to us? We can. Let's make a truth table.

Binary Addition
If we're adding together two 1-digit binary numbers together, we know that the last digit of the number will only be 1 if one or the other inputs is one, but not both (because 0+0 = 00, 1+1 = 10, but 0+1=01 & 1+0=01). So the smallest digit is given by XOR gate we mentioned above. But the bigger digit is also a logical operation. We only get a 1 is the higher digit place if BOTH of the lower digits is a 1 (because 0+0 = 00, 1+1 = 10, but 0+1=01 & 1+0=01):

Inputs: Function -> Output | summary 

And just like that, the logical circuits we discussed above (which were created by setting up transistors in various configurations) can be themselves be hooked together in various configurations to do math. ELECTRONS DON'T KNOW MATH. Electrons just flow according to the laws of physics. But we know what math is and came up with a symbolic language using 0s and 1s as representatives for more complex ideas and built circuits that can role play our thinking about the relationships between those representatives back to us. 

So why this digression? What digital circuits do is exactly analogous to what the gears of the Antikythera Mechanism are doing. The gears follow the laws of motion and the elections follow the laws of charges and we have created physical machines that can role play back to us some abstraction of a thing according to the rules of our abstractions. The circuits aren't logical. The gears aren't logical. They're deterministic. But we've created physical systems that can play back to us the logical, abstract way that we think about things. 

Digital logic just tricks electrons to repeat and enact logical operations by sending them flowing this way or that way. But there is no logic. There is no math. There is no `0`. There is no `1`. The zeros and ones, the trues and falses are in the human mind. When I see the output of from the the Antikythera Mechanism or the digital logic circuit, the machine is presenting to my mind again (re-presenting) some abstraction or some thought that already existed in the mind of the creator of the machine. By virtue of this feature, I would submit that--at fundament--all technology is a form of communication. Either: from my past self, encoding some logical operation in a circuit, to my present self. Or: from the creator of one machine to some other operator of that machine. Technology re-presents prior human thoughts and makes them present in the mind of the present operator. And if the machine is good enough, the re-presentation is automatic. The technology plants the re-presentation in the operators mind for consideration. 

And just to drive the point home. If we think back again to the doctor who restores function to a broken human hand. What the doctor is really doing is restoring the function of the human hand by communicating with nature (via splints and casts) how it ought to be. And when that communication is received and re-presented physically in the hand, then the healing is affected. Aristotle taught that the goodness or purpose of the hand was already present in the broken hand and not actualized, but what the doctor really did was take his abstract thought and understanding about the goodness of the functioning of a hand, make it present in his mind, and then construct a technology to communicate those thoughts about the goodness of the hand into the hand itself. Technology is the communication of abstract thought for the purpose of that thought's re-presentation. 

If technology is the communication and representation via abstraction of human thoughts, it means that technology itself is only valuable if the thoughts being communicated and represented are valuable. Technology is a conduit, it's a medium. It's just a bunch of gears or electrons acting in accord with their natures. And, by the way, Aristotle's point about nature is that it's good. The gears and electrons acting in accord with their natures is good. And by good, I don't just mean "nice" or "neat". I mean good in a cosmic sense: "And God saw that it was good" (Genesis 1:10). 

The Problem of Technology is that we, the creators and operators of these machines, are the ones doing the communicating. Uniquely, of all creation, God felt something different after he created human beings: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). Of course, the Fall prevents us from acting in accord with this Very Goodness quite often, but not exclusively. Grace exists. Virtue is real. Through his Cross and Resurrection, Christ has set us free from sin and death. We can (and sometimes do!) act in accordance with the Very Goodness of our natures. But not always. Sometimes the communication and representation we enact through technology is bad.

Sometimes, when I'm scrolling Twitter or browsing the Internet, the photons coming out of the light emitting diode array (the screen) I'm looking at re-present the form of a scantily-clad lady and she populates my imagination. That representation was communicated to me by the creator of the image, the creator of the machines running the website, and the creator of an advertisement who wanted to seize my attention in order, in this example, to take a second look at the ad and buy something. The re-presentations made by modern computer systems can be so true to life that they activate the same neurochemistry in my brain that would fire if I was actually beholding that woman in real life.

The Problem of Technology is that the re-presentations that we are capable of communicating are so thorough, so accurate, so real that the creators of these systems can genuinely harm the operator who happens to be using them. They can sow the seeds of lust, sloth, envy, greed, wrath, gluttony, and pride. But it's important to remember where the sin is actually committed. It's not in the technology itself. The technology is just electrons and photons acting according to their natures and they are good. The bad comes from the integrity of the creators of the systems and the thoughts that they are compelling through re-presentation via technology in the minds of the operators.

But the flip side is also true. In so far as the re-presentations are fundamentally the abstractions of human thought, human creators, those re-presentations can also aspire to the Very Goodness that God proclaimed of human nature. Aristotle taught that the fundamental, essential difference between a human being and the rest of the natural order is the ability to reason. And the word he uses for reason can be used interchangeably with another word: lōgos. Human beings have the ability to speak, to reason, to communicate, and engender thoughts in our minds and bring them forth into the world through writing and talking and building. Communication from the human outward to other humans or to nature itself is the very thing which God in his infinite goodness has given us as our nature. And it turns out, this is the feature that makes us like unto God. In Genesis 1 which we have been quoting, God speaks the world into existence. He thinks, reasons, speaks and the world springs forth. So too, insofar as we have been the capacity to speak and reason, we have the ability to create as well. The likeness of the human being to God is what made the human being Very Good. He saw in the human being his own reflection! Because he made us in his image and likeness. 

We should not arrive at the conclusion that technology is communication and therefore dependent on the integrity of the human creator and leave it at that. We should not say that it's at best arbitrary and leave it there. We don't say the same of a human being! We say that he should strive after virtue and become who he was made to be in the image and likeness of Almighty God. We say that though the capacity of evil is in him, he should conform himself to God and rely on his grace to express the Very Goodness of his nature. And the same is true of our technical creations. If there is sin in them, that sin belongs to their creators. And we should strive to live lives without sin. The Problem of Technology turns out to simply be another way of stating the Problem of Evil.

The Problem of Evil asks why an omnipotent and good God would allow evil to exist in his creation. The short answer (and I will admit that it can be deeply dissatisfying to deep thinkers) is that God is good and where he is absent through human thought and deed, there is evil. The necessity of the willful engendering of goodness turns out to result in the possibility of evil, but also in the possibility of love and therefore life and grace. For God to be ultimately good and not a tyrant, he cannot impose his presence in creation, but must be brought there through an act of love.

Jesus gave us the Great Commission. To go forth proclaiming the good news of the God who is love and baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The flip side of the Problem of Technology is that the re-presentations that we are capable of communicating are so thorough, so accurate, so real that the creators of these systems can genuinely bless the systems' operators. The age of the Apostles was a missionary time, there were men and women all over the earth so desperate to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. In the age of exploration, missionaries went forth in response to the Great Commission preaching the gospel to native peoples at the four corners of the Earth. The 21st century is also an Apostolic Age. Those who are desperate for the good news now inhabit the four corners of Cyberspace. The missionary potential to bless men and women all over the world through good and holy technology is not only possible: I would argue it is the responsibility of Christians living today.

I have no respect for a Christian or Catholic version of techno-skepticism. I believe that the blanket rejection of technology and its fruits is to reject Christ's call to preach the gospel to all men of Good Will. As you can probably piece together from the above ideas, I believe that to reject technology is to reject the fundamental teaching of Christianity that human nature was created by God and is Very Good. Rather, I hope for a world where the gospel is incarnated all around the world leveraging all we have at our disposal to share the good news. That we would re-present the thoughts and ideas of Christianity to all so that they might live them out in their lives. This is the ultimate hope of Christianity: that God the Father would finish the work he started and reconcile all things and all beings to himself in the final and full coming of his kingdom.

We have a role to play in the cosmic unfolding of the Second Coming. Jesus would not have laid down the principals to care for the sick, visit the prisoner, feed the hungry, cloth the naked if it didn't matter. He would not have sent us out to proclaim the good news if it didn't matter. In his mysterious wisdom, Jesus entrusted the missionary and evangelical character of faith in him to us. He did not use his omnipotence to visit all the nations. He visited one nation in one time in history and has left the rest up to us through the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. If we fail in the missionary objective Christ gave us, his kingdom will be lacking.

---

Notes:

(***) I didn't want to disrupt the flow of the argument, but one NPN transistor isn't enough to make a true AND gate because if you wire up the base to power and the collector to ground, you've actually created a short circuit that will burn out in enough current can flow. This is more about respecting the physical properties of electrons, however, and less about the point about recreating abstract, mental logic physically. A true transistor AND gate is two NPN transistors. The Emitter of the first is connected to the Collector of the second. The Collector of the first is supplied with power and the Emitter of the second is your output. Then the two Bases are your inputs (and the best practice is to have your input go through a current limiting resistor).

(^^^) Because the NAND gate is a universal gate, I thought you might like to see how it's built with transistors. It leverages one NPN transistor (which we've talked a lot about) and one PNP transistor which is kind of the opposite. Current will flow from the Emitter to the Collector when the Base is more negative than the Emitter. Technically, I should be pulling the Base of the PNP up to positive so that it defaults high when not connected, but hopefully you get the idea. For the lightbulb to turn on, you need to connect both inputs to ground. And if either input or both is connected to power, the lightbulb turns off.