The Case for a 'Divine Engineering' Movement

2025-08-08

TLDR: Travis and Gary are exploring building a "movement" around "Divine Engineering"—creating technology that embodies God's nature through discoverable patterns and commons-oriented infrastructure, giving Christian technologists a shared framework to build in a way that pleases God.

Preface

Over the past few months, Travis Oliphant and Gary Sheng have been deepening their friendship, discovering remarkable alignment in their approaches to technology, faith, and community building. Through extended conversations, it has become clear that Travis, as both a man of faith and a brilliant engineer and ecosystem builder, has been applying what can be aptly named “divine engineering” principles throughout most of his career.

Travis's foundational contributions to the open source ecosystem—creating NumPy and SciPy, contributing to PyTorch, co-founding Anaconda, and pioneering community-building approaches through PyData conferences—all reflect what we now recognize as divine engineering in practice. His philosophy that "love and faith are the best fuels for open source development”, his commitment to collaborative rather than controlling leadership, and his understanding that "Christ enables us through non-coercive power” have been the invisible foundation of his most successful work.

This document outlines what we are calling the divine engineering “movement”: our joint effort to make these principles legible, to improve and refine them through systematic study, to create a collaborative framework that other technologists can leverage to do God's work more effectively, and support ours and others divine engineering efforts.

“Divine engineering” is not a new invention—it's the articulation and systematization of patterns that God-driven technologists like Travis have been living out for decades.

Our vision is to enable a new generation of technologists to see their craft as ministry and their code as service to the common good.

The Problem

When business becomes a game of stacking coins without moral guardrails, technologists are pushed to build "sinfrastructure"—systems that guide people to a life of sin. From social media platforms designed for endless scrolling and comparison, to gambling apps that turn phones into portable casinos, to content platforms that proliferate pornography—much of today's most successful technology serves as bullet train infrastructure to spiritual destruction. Meanwhile, open source maintainers create massive public value but struggle to sustain their work, and faith communities lack resilient technological infrastructure for formation, discipleship, and collaboration.

The Opportunity

Christ modeled non-coercive power—invitation over manipulation, love over control. We can design technology the same way. Proven open source methods, paired with explicit alignment to human flourishing, can build "discipleship infrastructure": commons‑oriented systems that make it easier for technologists to walk with God and serve others.

The Solution

We are building a movement around Divine Engineering—the practice of creating technology, communities, and economic systems that embody God's nature through discoverable patterns, ultimately producing infrastructure that democratizes human flourishing.

Democratizing human flourishing means systematically increasing accessibility to the conditions that enable holistic well-being for everyone—physical, mental, relational, spiritual, and financial health. It requires innovation and systems change that make the facilitators of well-being accessible to all people, not just the privileged few.

What Are Divine Patterns?

Divine patterns are repeatable, testable ways of living and working that reliably produce results that reflect God’s nature when applied by individuals and collectives in technology and community contexts.

• What they are: documented, reusable practices that capture wisdom discovered across Scripture, lived practice, and cross‑tradition experience
• Who they apply to: individuals and collectives (teams, congregations, networks)
• How they’re used: documented as small, actionable templates (Context → Problem → Pattern → Practices → Anti‑patterns → Evidence)
• Why they matter: they make virtue practical and teachable, allowing teams to build in ways that are consistently life‑giving
• Examples: consent‑first data flows, portable identity, reversible choices, transparent budgets, shared stewardship of commons

What Is Divine Infrastructure?

Divine infrastructure is the open, interoperable code, standards, data models, and services that support discipleship, formation, and community collaboration. It is designed to be forkable, portable, privacy‑respecting, and non‑extractive—serving the commons first.

• What it includes: open‑source services, SDKs, schemas, and reference implementations
• How it relates to patterns: patterns describe why and how; infrastructure is the concrete what
• Examples: identity and permissions, consent and data portability services, content commons, small‑group tools

We believe that creating and maintaining divine infrastructure is one of the most practical ways technologists can honor God with their craft, and it is central to the Divine Engineering philosophy.

Why "Divine" Rather Than Just "Good"?

Most "tech for good" movements get stuck in endless debates about what constitutes "good" because they lack objective moral foundations. Without shared values, teams spend more time arguing about ethics than building solutions.

Divine Engineering provides clarity. Biblical truth offers an objective framework that defines goodness in practice: love that wills the good of another, truth that corresponds to reality, justice that protects the vulnerable, and stewardship that acknowledges accountability to God.

Debates on what is “divine” will occur between God-fearing engineers. But that biblical foundation makes it easier to find consensus on whether, say, technology facilitating gender-transforming surgeries are moral to write code for. Moral debates are much easier to settle when operating from a shared framework of seeking God's guidance, rather than assuming that any of the many competing moral philosophies that dominate secular tech spaces are equally valid.

This theological clarity becomes a competitive advantage—while other movements debate foundational philosophy, we can focus our disagreements on application and implementation because our moral foundation is much more settled.

Who This Movement Is For

• Builders who want their technical craft to serve a higher purpose
• Faith communities seeking trustworthy, portable, non-extractive tools
• Funders who care about durable public goods and people formation

Core Principles → Practices

1. Pattern‑Based Development → Pattern libraries, repeatable templates, testable hypotheses
2. Reflect God’s Nature → Decision heuristics for love/truth/beauty/justice; ethics reviews before launch
3. Non‑Coercive Power → Human‑in‑the‑loop defaults, no dark patterns, reversible choices, meaningful consent
4. Commons‑Centered → Open standards, forkable code/content, portable identity/data
5. Sustainable Mission → Public goods funding, patronage/fellowships, stewardship licensing, transparent budgets

Why Now?

• Open source proved collaboration works; sustainability and governance must catch up
• AI is reshaping civilization; alignment to human flourishing is urgent, not optional
• Builders seek meaning beyond profit; faith communities need credible digital infrastructure

What Success Might Look Like

We acknowledge these are aspirational indicators rather than precise metrics. Movement success will ultimately be measured by fruit that reflects God's nature, which may look different than we anticipate.

Potential signs of a flourishing Divine Engineering movement:

• Leadership Development: More team leaders successfully creating and sustaining divine engineering teams
• Sustainable Organizations: Companies building divine infrastructure while generating revenue, contributing to open source, and giving back to the movement
• Institutional Adoption: Faith institutions leveraging divine infrastructure relevant to their mission of making disciples of nations
• Cross-Denominational Collaboration: God-driven technologists from different traditions working together on shared infrastructure
• Pattern Documentation: Growing library of tested divine patterns with evidence of their effectiveness

These are examples of what it might feel like for the movement to develop in a truly divine way—though we remain open to God leading in directions we haven't yet imagined.

Movement Structure

The Divine Engineering movement centers around several key components:

Co-Initiators

• Travis
• Gary

Core Infrastructure

• Movement “Bible”: A collaborative, living document that people can buy physical copies of; Gary and Travis speak about it and distribute copies at conferences (you can imagine conference organizers buying hundreds as the speaking “fee”)
• Divine Engineering Podcast: Interviews with leaders who have created successful divine engineering ecosystems
• Divine Patterns Wiki: Comprehensive case studies, pattern library, and examples of existing divine infrastructure (PyTorch, SciPy, etc.) with analysis of why they qualify as divine infrastructure
• What else?

Community & Practice

• Apprenticeships that develop both technical skill and character formation?
• Community of God-driven technologists spanning different denominations?

Reference Implementations To Prioritize?

• Platforms for collaborative creation and stewardship of knowledge?
• Technology that supports discipleship and community formation?

Note: The actual movement structure needs to be refined through conversation with Travis before finalizing any of these components.

Overall, Divine Engineering exists to answer "how" to build technology, technology businesses, and technology ecosystems for God’s glory.

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"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord." - Colossians 3:23