Giving thanks for the calling of engineers

This is a transcript of a Thought for the Day given by David Wilkinson on Boxing Day, 2025. The episode of the Today show on which it appeared was edited by Sir James Dyson.

If, in the beauty of rural Northumberland, you see an electricity pylon messing up the view, I confess I know the person responsible – my Dad! As a planning engineer with the electricity board, he didn’t have a strong aesthetic sense, but he was a hands-on problem solver with a passion to serve others and create new ways to improve life through resilient and efficient power supplies.

When he became a Christian, his faith had the same focus. In the words of the New Testament letter of James, he took seriously being a ‘doer of the word, not a hearer only’. Indeed, if he had been present in the biblical account when Jesus was surrounded by a crowd in a house in Capernaum, he wouldn’t have complained from afar, but he would have been one of those who demolished the roof to get their paralysed friend to see Jesus.

As an engineer he joined more distinguished names whose faith encouraged them to get their hands dirty in exploring the world and making it a better place. These included pioneers of electricity and magnetism, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, through to ‘Hidden Figures’ such as the NASA mathematician of spaceflight Katherine Johnson. They saw the laws and materials of the physical world, and the ability to ask and pursue questions, as gifts from God.

Today is the birthday in 1791 of Charles Babbage, sometimes called the ‘father of the computer’. He was an extraordinary inventor, engineer and theologian. In his book On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, he saw God creating and sustaining the laws of physics by which the universe develops, and that these faithful and universal laws can be used to solve problems and design machines. To be made in the image of a creative God was to have the capacity to create.

Some religious people have occasionally exalted the spiritual at the expense of the physical, seeing the priest as more important than the engineer. But the Christian tradition for me has always affirmed the value of the physical. It is about a God who becomes human flesh in Jesus.

Having landed on the surface of the Moon, Buzz Aldrin took the bread and wine of Holy Communion and read from John’s gospel the words of Jesus: ‘without me you can do nothing’. He was giving thanks for the brilliance of the Apollo engineers who had got him safely there, and to the God who had made a world in which such exploration was possible.

Today, I too give thanks for engineers and their holy calling.