Information technology (IT) is a general term used to cover most aspects of computer-related technology. Intimately connected with information and information theory, IT deals with the representation, storage, manipulation, and transmission of information in digital form. The religious significance of information technology must be considered in the light of a general theological view of the nature and purpose of human life. Wherever any medium comes to permeate and shape almost all aspects of social and individual existence, questions can be asked about the direction in which such changes lead, and whether they are favorable or inimical to the purpose of human life as conceived theologically.

At the center of the debate lies the broader question of the way in which human beings represent, model, and shape the world. As computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum (1923–) once put it, ". . . the computer is a powerful new metaphor for helping us to understand many aspects of the world, but . . . it enslaves the mind that has no other metaphors and few other resources to call on" (p.277).

IT began as a tool that human beings could use as they saw fit. In less than half a century it came to occupy an indispensable place in the world. No single human being altogether controlled that rise, and no single human being understands all its implications. The question is rapidly becoming whether human beings will control information technology or information technology will control human beings. Is the demand that people render the processes of human life in forms that are susceptible to digitization forcing them to alter the way they live their lives without giving them a chance to decide whether those changed lives are the ones they wish to lead? That question forces people to examine, perhaps as they have never examined before, the things they think valuable about human life.

Digitization adds a new dimension to the philosophical issues associated with representation. Their sensory system limits what humans can experience, and their intellectual systems attempt to compensate with imagination for those limitations. By universalizing concepts and generalizing theories from experience of particulars, humans have achieved an understanding of the universe of extraordinary power, but that power is not without its costs and its drawbacks. Universal concepts overwrite the particularities of specific instances, just as Plato believed they should, but they lose sight of detail when number and quantity, statistics and probability, replace specificity. Once the world is digitized, this process takes another step toward unreality: A computer stores data in a medium that is incapable of retaining all the detail and presents people with clear-cut images, data, and their constructs that bear a more remote connection to the "real world" than their usual appropriation in human intellectual systems.

Conceptual clarity, of course, has its power and its uses. By concentrating first on idealized simplified situations, processes that are unimaginably complex in reality can begin to be grasped. Computer-generated models of the workings of a living cell—its DNA-replication and division, its immune-system response to attack by viruses, and so forth—illuminate and clarify. But the reality is far less clear-cut, like the digital signals that are represented as beautifully symmetric square waves.

The more pervasive IT becomes, the more it will tend to influence, shape, and direct human lives. In itself it is no more a force for good or evil than other tools, but the range of its influence makes it unlike most other technological changes. The way colored glass affects everything seen through it affords an analogy: As people come to conceptualize the world more and more in terms borrowed from IT, does a time arise when IT comes to shape their view of the world rather than transmit and interpret the world for them to view? At a very basic level, IT does not answer questions about what people should do with it. It is open and indifferent to that use. But it is easy to overlook the way it constrains what people can see, what they aspire to see, and how they see it.

Uses and impact

Security and surveillance. Information transmitted down wires or by radio waves is inherently more vulnerable to interception than information retained in a vault, and so security measures have been developed to match the increased threat. Chief among these are advanced methods of data encryption using encoding systems that are virtually impossible to break, even by the most advanced computer systems.

The ability to render data safe by encryption also has the potential to prevent those responsible for surveillance from decoding messages between subversives, terrorist groups, criminals, pedophiles, and others deemed socially undesirable. There have therefore been attempts to restrict access to high-performance encryption systems, to forbid the transmission of heavily encrypted signals over the Internet, and to prohibit the export of encryption software likely to enable data to be made impregnable to snooping.

Weaponry and conflict. Many of the pressures that have produced advances in the understanding and command of guidance and control systems have arisen from military applications. Warfare has been transformed by advanced technology. "Smart" bombs that seek specific targets, "jamming" devices that interfere with the ability of an enemy to communicate on the battlefield, software viruses that disrupt control systems, eavesdropping on email and digital telephone calls, and electronically disseminated misinformation are all part of the stuff of modern warfare and state security. But smart bombs are not as smart as people are led to believe, and the technology has proved less reliable than military and political leaders insinuate.

Work and society. Information technology significantly alters the parameters governing the way human beings cooperate to achieve their goals. The manufacture of physical objects requires people to be physically present at the site of their construction, in however widespread a way the components are manufactured. Before electronic mail and data communication through the Internet, office work similarly required people to be collected together in their workplaces. Where added value arises largely from the manipulation of data strings—through programming, database design and construction, composing and editing text, and so forth—this physical juxtaposition is unnecessary. People can relate across digital channels through video conferencing in ways that significantly reduce the need and opportunity for physical meetings.

It is not yet clear what the consequences of this shift in work patterns will be, and they are not unique in human history. Just as the industrial revolution drew populations to the cities and the invention of the telephone and radio communication had a major impact on the relationship between society and work, so decentralized but cooperative data-working will effect further changes in that relationship. The threat of loneliness will increase alongside the opportunities for freer work patterns and wider circles of friends, and many have found their experiences of "virtual communities" deeply unsatisfying and unfulfilling.

Viruses, hacking, and censorship

The destruction of the modern Eden of computergenerated communication by deliberately made viruses is a story of almost biblical proportions. The fact that computers must be accessible to a public domain to receive email or access Internet websites makes them vulnerable to attack from malicious software that attaches itself to email and downloadable packages. Executable files and attachments, once opened, infect the host machine, and commonly export themselves to other machines by spawning copies of themselves in bogus messages sent to all or some of the entries in the local address book. The cost to commerce, worldwide, of damage caused by viruses is already measured in billions of dollars, and the cost of antivirus software that struggles to keep up with ways to immunize systems against attack by viruses that become more sophisticated every day has added to that cost.

Hacking, as the process of gaining unauthorized access to another computer is known, is also a major problem. Just as authors of software viruses regard every new defensive shield as a new challenge, so all the sophisticated mechanisms that are employed to prevent unauthorized access to a computer represent a similar challenge. Hackers' conventions set up competitions where the winners are those who can most successfully penetrate the defenses devised by other competitors, and there have been many instances where commercial, national defense, and other secure systems have been penetrated. Some hackers are motivated by no more than the intellectual challenge; some are malicious; some are politically motivated; some are disgruntled employees; some are just socially disenfranchised and angry.

The location of the physical machine hosting a website is not easy to discover. As a result, it is difficult to police the Internet in order to impose any kind of censorship. But it is not clear whose responsibility or entitlement it is to act either as censor or police force. National governments and international organizations are frequently thwarted in their attempts to track subversive, criminal, or other groups by the lack of boundaries on the Internet.

The most obvious cases where some believe censorship should be imposed are sites posting, advertising, and selling sexual material. Others include terrorist organizations, industrial saboteurs, and all sorts of political activists. But here as everywhere the boundaries between public security and private freedom are hard to define.

On the other hand, the difficulty of policing the Internet affords a means to support and help oppressed minorities in countries where they are persecuted. It enhances freedom of speech and expression. It joins together those who find themselves in minorities. It affords the means for all kinds of propaganda wars to be waged. It allows books and art and music to be made available to the poor and to those who live where some material is prohibited or circumscribed. All of these opportunities can, of course, be used for good and ill, and whether the good outweighs the ill remains to be seen.

Reality and virtual reality

Sciences and religions strive to increase knowledge and awareness of what they take variously to be "reality." They have argued extensively and bitterly about the boundaries of "reality," even though their conceptions of reality have grown and changed through the centuries.

The term virtual reality is generally taken to denote that new realm of experience fabricated with the aid of IT from the connections between people throughout the world and the capabilities of software to generate new kinds of communication and even new fictional environments in which they can interact. There is nothing in principle to prevent people living on opposite sides of the globe from donning some sort of virtual-reality headset and sharing the exploration of an entirely unreal virtual habitat.

Virtual habitats are not, of course, new. Every fictional book ever written has created virtual habitats for the human imagination, and so, more recently, have films. It is the interactive capacity of virtual realities that is new and poses sharp questions about what people take to be the nature and purpose of human existence.

Individuals and societies

A person's sense of self has typically been associated with a certain geographical locality, a workplace, and a group of friends largely drawn from his or her own nation. People and their cultures are intimately intertwined, even if every culture consists of a myriad of subcultures with their own mores and customs. Selves are distributed through these cultures, and people know themselves as reflected and invested in them.

Because information technology offers people the opportunity to associate with anyone in the world with access to the Internet in a way that far surpasses in immediacy and intimacy anything possible through the telephone or "snail-mail"—through email, video conferencing, websites, chat rooms, and so forth—it is now possible to withdraw from the community defined by a locality, a geographically defined subculture, or a nation-state, and to find (or lose) oneself in the greater culture that exists through the interactions of persons on the Internet.

It is often suggested that computer technology has made human beings less sociable or neighborly. Now that people can choose like-minded conversational partners from anywhere in the world, they are supposedly less minded to socialize with their neighbors. It is not obvious that this is true. Computer technology is as ambiguous as was the television, the telephone, or the motorcar.

Computer communities do, however, break national boundaries without the need for expensive travel, and it is certainly arguable that greater international fraternization will reduce rather than increase the long-term threat of war. What is not clear is the extent to which having the world as one's neighbor will make one less able to negotiate tolerantly with those physical neighbors who surround one every day, or whether exposure only to those who agree will make one less tolerant of those who do not.

Although it is not true that the Internet has spawned "virtual" communities as an entirely new phenomenon—they have always existed through newsletters, journals, conferences, and the like—it has certainly made their activities more widespread and the frequency of their interactions much greater.

Whatever interest people have, there is almost certainly an Internet community that shares that interest. Through online discussions, websites, mass-circulation email, and so forth, such groups establish both their mutual interest and, usually, considerable interpersonal rapport that spills over into wider aspects of life. Participants will commonly share their joys and sorrows, support one another, and exercise general pastoral care for the group. This phenomenon has led some to suggest that the World Wide Web may facilitate the generation of a new kind of religious community in which mutual care and even worship arise within a virtual world rather than geographically close localities or through meeting eclectically in physical buildings.

Embodiment and realism challenged

Science and religion agree that human beings are embodied: finite, physical existence in a physical world, the fact that life has a beginning and an end. These things occasion no disagreement, even if the nature of the beginning and the end do. Human evolutionary history has been dictated by this physicality, and the need to reproduce, feed, and survive as individuals and species has been deeply influential in making all creatures what they are. Virtual selves challenge this history by providing an intelligible alternative in which people might one day come to exist not as physically embodied selves but as remote functional intellectual agents that would stand evolution on its head by adapting the world to fit human imaginations rather than adapting human bodies to fit the world.

Most people recoil from this suggestion because they do not want to lose their physical embodiment. The pleasures of physical contact, whatever they may be, seem so central to what it is to be human that people want to stop in its tracks any process that would render them less than fully physical and embodied.

This instinctive reaction raises clear questions about what people really and genuinely and deeply value as human beings. Science, in its popularly conceived objectivity, cannot answer those questions because it is indifferent to them. For science, human beings and all living and nonliving things simply are what they are; there is no justifiable scientific view of what anything "ought to be." As soon as one asks how things "ought to be," one is in philosophical or religious or ethical territory; science strikes rock, and its spade is turned.

Philosophy and psychology enable people to see that there is no such thing as a raw perception neither filtered nor colored nor shaped by certain sorts of conceptual apparatuses. The world and what is designated reality are complex mixtures of sensory stimulation and intellectual construction. Software and hardware change the way human beings see the world, first as a matter of programming necessity, and later because the image of the world they have has been distorted by the information-theoretic format. One is also tempted to believe that the sheer quantity of information available on the Internet somehow replaces the filtered, processed knowledge imparted through more traditional means of dissemination.

IT models and reality

A theology of creation identifies the physical embodiment of persons as playing a major part in the achievement of the creator's purpose. Physical embodiment entails certain limitations imposed by sensory parameters and necessitates certain kinds of community and cooperation. The nature of the world comes to be construed in accordance with certain kinds of gregarious cooperative endeavor.

IT has the power to change the relationship between human's perceptual and conceptual systems and the world. Digital clarity, arising from the cleansing of data of its inconvenient messiness, encourages one to reconfigure the world; virtual communities encourage one to reconfigure the parameters of friendship and love; software models first imitate and then control financial, political, and military worlds. The beginning of the twenty-first century is an age when the residual images of a predigital worldview remain strong; one can still see that there is a difference. A theology of creation suggests that this analogical unclarity is deliberate and purposive; a digital worldview may prove more incompatible with that creative story than currently supposed. The digital reconfiguration of epistemology may yet prove to be the most profound shift in human cognition in the history of the world, and the changes impression of reality that it will afford will present any theology of creation with a deep new challenge.

See also EMBODIMENT; INFORMATION; INFORMATION THEORY

JOHN C. PUDDEFOOT