Religious Studies In Software Engineering

A software engineer with a degree in religious studies argues that the field’s tools explain a lot about tech. With no agreed definition of religion, he works from Paul Tillich’s “ultimate concern”, and he weighs insiders’ knowledge against outsiders’ distance rather than picking one.

Media shifts move authority, from print loosening the Church’s hold on scripture to digital tools reshaping who speaks for a technology. Open source follows the sect-church-sect cycle: rebel projects harden into institutions and spawn new rebels. Peter Naur’s “programming as theory building” gives the software version of a living tradition: a program dies when the people who understand it disperse.

He reads Big Tech as a secular religion, singularity talk as prophecy, and AI utopianism as a heaven narrative, and stays sceptical of predictions of imminent superintelligence. His own position is stated plainly: he is inside the church too.