God's Mechanics by Guy Consolmagno

Author:Guy Consolmagno [Consolmagno Guy, S.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118041109
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

The copier repairmen are given thick manuals about how to fix their machines, but in practice, the manuals are often of little help. Machines don’t always break the way they expect back at the factory; there’s no documentation about what to do when a baloney sandwich gets caught in the paper feed! Instead, the repairmen use those manuals to try to deduce how the machines work, and then, from those deductions, they invent their own ways of fixing the kinds of problems they see in the field. These solutions are passed around in an oral tradition of stories recounted over endless cups of coffee at the local Denny’s as the repairmen hang out waiting for their beepers to go off.

And then it hit me: Isn’t this also the way that religion-practicing, rule-following techies deal with the rules of their religion? They agree with the overall general goals that they hear from their churches, but they don’t have a particularly high opinion of the “documentation” that describes how to reach those goals. And just like with the Xerox copier repairmen, there is among at least some techies an unspoken contempt of those who merely follow the documentation literally—and even more of the “suits” in management who insist on such behavior. Blindly following the edicts from on high implies that you don’t really understand the underlying technology.

So while they still have a strong devotion to following rules, the rules they follow aren’t always exactly what you find in the catechisms. Instead, they take those rules apart and try to deduce what the underlying principle is that their religion is trying to support. Then they create for themselves a new set of rules, a set that fits their own situations—and their own prejudices and predispositions as well, needless to say. Those self-created rules are the ones they follow religiously.

I find exactly the perfect illustration just a few days later, talking to Yaz, a scientist in his early forties who works near Palo Alto. For the most part, what he has to tell me is a good summary of what I have heard, again and again, from most of my older techie interviewees. Yaz is a devout, active Lutheran. In trying to describe his reasons for believing, he tells a now familiar tale: he relates strongly to the “Why is there something instead of nothing?” issue, but he is also motivated by the desire for something “out there.” The sense of using religion as a way of looking for meaning for his own life is much less strong now that he’s older; but he describes going through a period of atheism in his college years when science seemed to preclude the need for God, until eventually he learned enough about science to see its limitations and its inability to answer the “why” questions. Since then he has been associated with liberal, university-affiliated congregations.

He feels that all religions have some truth, but he rejects the idea that all religions are equal. On the other hand,

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