catapult magazine

Why is engineering under the science section?

If engineering was a science, our cars would look the same, an Intel processor would be just like a PowerPC, and everyone would naturally know if a door needed to be pushed or pulled. If engineering was a science, an engineer would take a mathematical model, collect experimental data, divide this by that and multiply by some other stuff, and out pops a car, computer, or door. Science involves abstraction. Engineering involves synthesis. The problem with confusing these two is that engineering becomes a science where something can be designed in a vacuum with no consideration for its broader impact. When engineering becomes a science people forget the process of design. Obviously, there is not an equation for a car; many design decisions are based on assumptions, feelings, or the contents of one’s rear. Sure science can be used as a tool, it’s great at providing clarity (5 > 4 is always true when using integers), but where do discernment, insight, and wisdom come from and how are they incorporated into the design process? Engineering is an activity that people participate in to solve practical problems in people’s lives. An image bearer is on both sides of the engineering process. Engineers and people affected by engineering need to understand the important distinction between science and engineering. People need to understand that wisdom and discernment are needed fill the gaps between a scientific explanation and a real life situation to make a design decision.

I agree, VanderCrowd. (Your first initial doesn’t happen to be D., does it? :o) )

While modern engineering relies heavily on the natural sciences, reducing it to being just another one of the sciences is wrong. You said it well when you said "Science involves abstraction. Engineering involves synthesis. "

Science is about looking at one part of reality and “figuring it out.” For example, a physicist doesn’t care what color a moving object is or what it is worth on the stock market or legal issues concerning the object. (Well, she probably is concerned about those things in the back of her mind, but those are not the things she is studying.) Instead, she is concerned with the ball’s motion, mass, etc. She’s abstracting the physical properties that she is concerned with in order to find out more about that particular aspect.

Engineering, on the other hand, has to concern itself with all parts of reality. An engineer can’t only worry about the motion of an object. He has to worry about economic factors, environmental factors, legal factors, aesthetic factors, and many more. An engineer has to take what he knows about all the sciences and use that knowledge to design something that takes into account all parts of reality. That is what is meant by saying engineering involves synthesis.

But, while I wouldn’t call engineering a “Science,” I wouldn’t call it an “Art” (at least, it doesn’t fit in with any of the other things they have under the Art category) or a “Social Issue,” either. It really doesn’t fit in any of the categories. So, that may be the reason it is in the “Science” category.

Sometimes I think that the distinction between art and science is one of the most unhelpful distinctions I can think of. Science is often incredibly intuitive (the guy who discovered that the benzene molecule is arranged in a ring had a dream that gave him the breakthrough), and art is often very ordered and logical (consider the design of a painting with symmetry and the division of threes or consider the five act structure of drama).

No real scientist that I have read would discount the art of their field, and no real artist would discount science.

My first initial is not D, but the original Vander Krowd did father many of my ideas. Also, thanks for expanding on “abstraction” and “synthesis”.

Well, I definitely wouldn’t call engineering a science. The point that I want to make is that the process of engineering design includes more than science and is not under the umbrella of science. I would like to challenge engineers to use more than science to formulate problem statements, define product specifications, and evaluate design alternatives. Maybe the arts, our feelings, or the Word of God should have more influence in the design process. There has to be a source of wisdom contributing to the development of technology.

THis is, admittedly, a bit of a stretch, and I am certainly not a biblical scholar, so maybe someone could help me with this, but it seems to me that God consistently seems to advocate synthesis, that is, bringing the seperate parts of your life, the seperate parts of his would, the seperate parts of your behavior, etc, into unity with each other. Humans seem to like to seperate and divide things. Maybe it is all leftover from the tower of Babel or something, but it seems to me that if God gives us ten commandments, we turn them into several hundred at first, then several thousand. God comes back to earth and says that since we can’t handle 10, he’s give us two — Love God above all and our neighbor as ourselves. We take that and (with good reasons) turn it into a library’s worth of laws. We do the same thing with science and art and everything else — break things down into little bits.

Now part of that is practical, since we can’t wrap our minds around everything at once, but it seems to me that if we acknowledge taht God is the God of the whole world, Christians ought to be all about dismantelling distinctions between things and working toward unity overall.

Then again, I didn’t get much sleep the last couple of nights, so maybe it is just me.

You can add to your list of “opposites”, law and freedom, Christ’s reconciliation of the Jews and Gentiles, a point Hegel makes in his early theological work. BBC, you are in good company. Hegel’s system is founded on the idea that the movement of God is the reconciliation of opposites. Hegel’s whole view of history as an ever-moving reconciliation reflects this.

While we’re talking philosohy, the Greeks actually already had a more “synthesized” view of arts and sciences; this was reflected in their word, “techne”, which might include the work of poets or mathemeticians. It was scientific modernization which led to the seemingly irreconcilable split between arts and sciences. I’m very very interested in this relationship and am excited about the direction our age is moving in now. It seems to me that the sensations which have fallen within the realm of “art” in modern times are starting to be seen as more foundational to human existence in our own day and age. Freud was trying to get science to see its own limitations (all that falls within human consciousness) and was working on a system that would uncover the secret world of the unconscious, but he was rejected by science. Now, though, he is becoming increasingly popular in the arts because he was trying to make the scientific method open to the artistic method and to philosophy because he offers a new way of doing science which has become necessary in a post-modern age.

But I’m sure all great scientists have known the necessity of artistic process through all ages in order to have achieved what they have.

ps. sorry for the longish post. this is an important topic for Christians to be discussing.

Amen, Grant.

So, is there any Christian institution of higher learning that has given up the practicality of organizing itself by departments and science buildings vs. humanities buildings in favor of something more unifying? (I know Dordt groups there offices in pods including different department members, but my understanding is that it is still divided humanities vs. sciences)

A very interesting article that I think would be appreciated by engineers and non-engineers alike that talks about the role of aesthetics in engineering design: http://fie.engrng.pitt.edu/fie95/3a5/3a51/3a51.htm

The paper asks the question: “What are the characteristics of good engineering design aesthetics?”

It answers this by saying, "I want to argue that aesthetically good engineering design is that which embodies technological allusivity…. Technological allusivity in engineering design is achieved when the design successfully suggests a (delightfully) harmonious interaction, at the human-technical interface, whereby the product dissolves into an extension of the user.

Consider the key words in this definition. ‘The design successfully suggests,’ refers, of course, to the idea that allusivity is the core of aesthetic meaning. By referring to the ‘human-technical interface,’ technological allusivity is connected with ergonomics and user-friendliness. The phrase, ‘dissolves into an extension of the user,’ is a metaphor for the process by which the product becomes so familiar to us that it is as unobtrusive and as natural as our bodies and minds."

I think that gives an idea of how engineering isn’t and shouldn’t only be focused only on function. Obviously, the function of a technological object is important, but proper functioning alone does not make a technological object “good.”

Engineering — it is a basic method for those who are intellectually gifted to make themselves a lot of Money.

Eddie, I don’t know where you are getting this stuff. I’m not an engineer, but if I were comments like this would offend me. Your post was a gross oversimplification that had little to contribute to a (albeit dead) thread. Please, drop the sarcasm. There is a place for it, but I don’t think you’ve found that yet.

How providential that Eddie resurrected this thread! I am an engineer and have been looking for the article by Charles Adams listed above by ByTor.