God and the Engineer: An Integration Paper

Cedarville University exists to equip Christian students for lifelong leadership and service marked by excellence and grounded in biblical truth. So states the mission statement of this great institution. The challenge for her faculty is to flesh out this mission in individual courses, laboratories, and interactions with students across the campus. This is the mandate of “biblical integration”. The challenge for Christian professors is to see the whole realm of knowledge holistically and to teach their students to do the same. Greg Bahnsen describes well the task of integration when he says, “...God’s word demands unreserved allegiance to God and His truth in all our thought and scholarly endeavors.” The believing professor then has no choice but to get down to business in the task of integrating. She must show that God is not silent when it comes to her discipline. She must help her students to put the pieces together. The human mind as created by God longs to see unity and coherence in the observed world. James Orr says that such a mind “is not content with fragmentary knowledge, but tends constantly to rise from facts to laws, from laws to higher laws, from these to the highest generalizations possible.” To help students to do this and to see God and His glory as the highest generalization is biblical integration as I understand it. This paper addresses specifically the task of doing biblical integration within the context of the engineering programs within Christ-centered universities. In Section II I briefly defend the idea of Christ-centered higher education. I elaborate on some reasons why parents should desire Christ-centered higher education for their children as opposed to the education that they might receive in a secular university. This discussion then leads naturally into a discussion of the epistemological and philosophical underpinnings of engineering within the framework of biblical Christianity in Section III. In Section IV I take up the biblical view of vocation or calling and deal specifically with engineering as a legitimate calling for Christian men and women. In Section V I address the need for a sense of moderation concerning our conception of what engineering and technology can do for mankind in a fallen world. Finally, in Section VI I describe how we may make specific applications in the engineering classroom