W. Kent Fuchs bridges spirituality and technology.
To many people, technology and re­ligion are very different animals. Technology, after all, grows out of science and hard evidence; religion is based on faith. Yet in W. Kent Fuchs, dean of Cornell University's college of engineering, the two are intertwined. In the mid-1980s, before completing his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, Fuchs (pronounced "fox") earned a master's degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL. While a professor at Illinois, he moonlighted as a minister. This unusual second job taught him that community-building and communication are just as important in the development of new technologies as they are to the health of religious congregations.
Fuchs says that he is able to bridge the worlds of technology and religion effectively in part because he believes they have common goals: improving society and transcending human frailty. Religion helped give birth to the information age through the printing and dissemination of sacred scriptures and other texts. Now, says Fuchs, information technology is repaying the favor, improving people's understanding of world religions. Fuchs points out that advances in computing and digital communications have made religious texts available to larger audiences and have helped create new tools for analyzing languages in the Bible. Religious websites and chat rooms are exploding in popularity and are increasingly being used by churches for recruiting.
Fuchs believes, though, that scientists should try to align the technologies they develop with their faith. That's especially important for biomedical fields like cloning that touch on issues of creation or immortality. Similar quandaries, albeit more speculative ones, arise in the information sciences. Take the idea, popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, of downloading the contents of a person's brain onto a com­puter to preserve thoughts and memories for eternity. Fuchs is skeptical about the prospects for that sort of digital afterlife. "I don't believe we can emulate [personal immortality] with technology," he says.