Human technology, when rightly considered, does not lead us away from God but presses us inexorably toward Him, awakening gratitude, reverence, and awe at the multi-layered wisdom embedded in creation. Something as ordinary as textiles—wool twisted into thread, flax processed into linen, cotton spun and woven—quietly reveals that man does not create in the absolute sense, but merely discovers and develops what God has already hidden within the fabric of physical reality. Scripture proclaim and nature affirms a world, not as chaotic, but as ordered, intelligible, and fruitful. The earth yields materials that respond predictably to human labor because they were designed to do so. Wool felts and spins, flax yields linen, and cotton clings and twists, because God decreed that fibers interlock under tension. Man’s role is to exercise dominion—to cultivate, name, steward, and develop what God has made. As Samuel FB Morris, inventor of the telegraph exclaimed, “What hath God wrought!”
This insight extends far beyond looms and spindles. Every technological achievement presupposes a universe governed by consistent laws and minds capable of understanding them. Well, the college professor and student asked for proof of God‘s existence, the iPhone in their pockets, the clothes on their backs, and the logic, reason and language that enables them to communicate, all testify to an Intelligent Creator of an intelligent cosmos. These are not neutral facts. As Cornelius Van Til famously observed, the unbeliever can count, but cannot account for why he can count. Materialism, pantheism, and atheism borrow the tools of reason, logic, induction, and morality, but cannot justify them. A universe reduced to matter in motion has no reason to produce truth, no obligation to honor logic. But the unbeliever lives as though the world is meaningful, rational, and trustworthy, because it is. The Christian claim is not merely that some evidence points to God, but that without God, there can be no evidence, no proof, no knowledge whatsoever. This is the impossibility of the contrary: remove the God of Scripture, and the very act of asking for proof collapses.
At the heart of this coherence lies the triune nature of God Himself. Reality holds together because its ultimate source is neither an abstract unity nor a chaotic plurality, but one God in three persons, eternally reconciling unity and diversity. Both Van Til and R. J. Rushdoony argued that all non-Trinitarian systems fail at precisely this point. If ultimacy is pure oneness, distinctions dissolve into illusion; if ultimacy is pure manyness, coherence disappears. Only the Creator’s inscripturated self-revelation, as One in being and Three in persons, resolves the question. This is not a philosophical add-on but the necessary precondition for logic, language, science, and society. Unity and diversity are not at odds because they are already harmonized in God’s essence.
Neither is this triune structure imposed retroactively by New Testament authors or later Christian philosophers, but woven throughout Old Testament revelation. The God of Israel creates by His Word while His Spirit hovers over the waters (Genesis 1:2–3). God speaks within Himself, saying, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26), without appealing to angels or rival deities. The Angel of the LORD appears as both distinct from God and yet fully identified as God, speaking with divine authority and receiving worship (Exodus 3; Judges 13). “The Lord said to my Lord sit at my right hand…” (Psalm 110:1) Isaiah records the Lord saying, “The Lord GOD has sent Me, and His Spirit” (Isaiah 48:16), while Isaiah 63 speaks of the LORD, the Angel of His Presence, and His Holy Spirit acting together in redemption. The Shema—“The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4)—does not deny internal plurality but excludes rival gods, using a word for unity (echad) that allows for compound oneness. Israel’s monotheism was never a barren unitarianism; it was always rich, relational, and internally complex.
This theological reality explains the everyday metaphysics of creation itself. A bolt of cotton is rightly called cotton, and a single strand pulled from it is also rightly called cotton. The many fibers do not destroy the unity of the fabric, nor does the unity erase the reality of the fibers. Materialism cannot explain why both the whole and the parts are equally real; nominalism reduces unity to language, while reductionism dissolves wholes into fragments. But in a world created by the triune God, this structure is expected. Universals and particulars coexist because unity and diversity coexist eternally in God. Textiles become a parable of reality: many threads, one fabric; many members, one body (1 Corinthians 12:12); many persons, one humanity; one God, three persons.
When this vision is grasped, technology itself becomes doxological. The great scientists who founded modern disciplines understood this intuitively. Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, and James Clerk Maxwell did not see their work as replacing God but as uncovering His handiwork. Kepler famously described science as “thinking God’s thoughts after Him,” echoing Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God.” Their faith was not an obstacle to inquiry but its foundation. They expected order because they believed in an ordering God; they trusted reason because they believed human were created to know truth, and to discover, explore, develop, utilize, and responsibly steward what God has created.
In the end, textiles, technology, and theology all converge on the same confession; producing wonder, humility, and praise, joining the psalmist in saying, “O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all” (Psalm 104:24).
Article posted with permission from Bill Evans
