Engineering is my Religion

Think of it this way. What does a religion have? Laws, tenets, prophets, creation, destruction, and usually theories of life and death. What do science and engineering lack that other religions have?

In my opinion, nothing.

We have Newton's Laws, the Theory of Relativity, thermodynamics, aerodynamics, chemistry, physics, quantum mechanics, and too many more to list here. We have theories on how man was created. We have Darwin's Theory, the "Big Bang" theory, the inevitable heat death of the universe (a quiet apocolypse) evolution, and DNA.

Our theories on life and death can be summed up with 3 things - Conservation of Mass, Conservation of Energy, and e=mc^2.

Think of it this way.. you die. You get buried. The energy trapped in your cells enriches the soil. Flowers bloom in the soil. Bees collect pollen from those flowers, and make it into honey. A bear swats down the beehive and eats that honey. Now your energy is part of that bear, part of what keeps it alive.

We have prophets - Aristotle, Socrates, Einstein, Euclid, Kepler, Darwin, Curie, Goddard, and hundreds and hundreds more. Men and women who have explained "unseen forces" like gravity, and electromagnetism, who have theorized on time and space and the universe.

We have books of knowledge - in the form of text books. We have services in the form of seminars and lectures.

I am not less spiritual than you.
I do not lack morality.
My worship is learning and knowledge.
Cease your preaching. Your senseless debates. I am not less of a person because I don't follow an old religion. I follow a new religion - science. I'm tired of being judged because I was brought up differently than you.

The next time I get asked, "So, what religion are you?", rather than sweating out an answer like "I'm agnostic" or "I'm an atheist", I think I'll just answer

"I'm an engineer"

and leave it at that.

<--"Mathmatics is the language with which God wrote the Universe." - Galileo-->

You use that word a lot...I do not think it means what you think it means.

AlexZander: An intriguing writeup, but let's make something clear (and yes, in the context of your writeup this is more or less semantics): you mean "science".

Engineering is about what we do when we combine our technical and scientific knowledge with the desire to create and build things for ourselves. It's about making stuff, both real and virtual.

As such, it's hard, not just because it drags in all of the seeking-of-universal-truths that make the science difficult in the first place, but because it is also about the design and compromise you have to do to make those truths usable in real life. Engineering is the essence of the human condition: doing the best we can with what we know, cobbling together imperfect objects in an imperfect world.

In a way, though, engineering also represents a kind of apotheosis, an unlocking and harnessing of the mysteries of the universe. Of course, it is a part of the human condition that for every door we open in the contemplation of the structure and laws of the universe, we find three more closed doors in the next room. But it's equally a part that we keep opening new ones. You're not ever meant to get all of it—some truths are not for you—but you are allowed to chip away at the big block and keep any pieces that fall off.

And these pieces you may assemble into wondrous things: dams, bridges, scanning-tunneling microscopes, fast fourier transforms, convex hull algorithms, wave-division multiplexers. Each of these achievements stands as a little monument to the gift of knowledge you have received, an embodiment of it. Creating them is, perhaps, one of the reasons why we are here.

Yet each one also stands equally as a reminder of our boundedness to Earth, our separation from the divine: nothing works pefectly, the design is never right, there's too much heat loss from resistance, etc. Things fall apart. And as they do, so you will do also, eventually. You are an engineering achievement fragile and wonderful in this world as they are: our achievements are us incarnate, and in miniature. And in an age where our engineering powers begin to approach the province of what we used to think of as the divine, where we can literally mine the genetic code that produced us and reproduce it in another, that separation is all the more poingant.

So as to the node title, bravo. Continue to study, continue to seek, continue to believe. The truth is out there. Build a better mousetrap. Build a giant wall visible from space. Build a ship with interstellar drive.

Just don't try to build a tower big enough to ascend into the kingdom of heaven, 'cause you can't make 'em that high.