Exploring Connections Between Engineering And Human Spirituality

The wealth of knowledge and wisdom within a diverse university community provides a rich and fertile setting for students to explore connections between their chosen discipline and their own spirituality. Multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate students and faculty explore, and wrestle with, the connections between science/engineering and spirituality as they endeavor to become whole persons. Engineering, science, and theology students team up to investigate and assess evidence of purpose from findings in science and engineering. They apply reverse engineering techniques to natural systems in an effort to assess the potential for design recovery. Psychology students help to provide a better understanding of the human condition and the role of perceived affordances in establishing purpose. Anecdotal and survey evidence suggests that undergraduate students find such interdisciplinary studies to be interesting, motivating and beneficial for solidifying personal meaning and purpose. What better place than in higher education to address such monumental and multi-faceted questions? These are the issues that students want to discuss, since the answers they uncover play a significant role in shaping and motivating their future careers and lives. The fields of science and engineering have a huge role to play in this discussion, but they need other disciplines to join them at the table. Engineering students in particular are well equipped to address such big questions, but they benefit greatly from dialogue with students and faculty in other areas. If the goal of higher education is to produce well-rounded and responsible professionals, then institutions should seriously consider addressing the issue of human spirituality as it relates to each student’s field of study. This article presents one such perspective for the field of engineering. The need for whole person graduates in science and engineering During the summer of 2009, Sam Schurman, former Chancellor of the University of Minnesota Morris and currently Interim Dean of the Faculty at the University of North Carolina Asheville, delivered a powerful lecture entitled, “Seeing the Light: Reflections on Honors at Faith-based Colleges from a ‘Sympathetic Outsider’” at the Council on Christian Colleges and Universities Honors Workshop. During this lecture, he made a radical suggestion: that we “reopen the doors of higher learning to the human spirit.” He reiterates this point in his latest book, Seeing the Light: Religious Colleges in TwentyFirst-Century America 1 where he argues that there is much to be learned by the secular academy from such institutions. Many in higher education are echoing this sentiment. In a recent article, Alexander Astin, Founding Director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, argues that spirituality deserves a central place in higher education. In describing what he means by “spirituality,” he writes that, “...spirituality has to do with the values that we hold most dear, our sense of who we are and where we come from, our beliefs about why we are here – the meaning and purpose that we see in our work and our life – and our sense of connectedness to each other and to the world around us.” Based on this definition of spirituality, it is hard to imagine anyone who would not be interested in this pursuit, or who would not benefit from discussions of how their chosen discipline interfaces with spirituality. In a new book entitled Educating Engineers: Designing for the Future of the Field 2 , the authors call for a broadening of engineering education by asserting “...that an approach that integrates knowledge, skill, and purpose [emphasis mine] through a consistent focus on preparation for professional practice is better aligned with the demands of more complex, interactive, and environmentally and socially responsible forms of practice.” Human spirituality is intimately related to a sense of purpose, which governs human concerns and motivations. Proper motivations are critically important for the responsible practice of engineering, as well as the successful completion of an engineering degree, and even the choice to pursue the difficult field of engineering as a career. This article begins to explore the connections between the field of engineering and human spirituality in an effort to encourage students to seriously consider careers in engineering, and better prepare engineers for a fulfilling life of meaningful and responsible service in this challenging field. Suggestions for making the college experience more “spirit-friendly” are offered in a new book entitled Encouraging Authenticity and Spirituality in Higher Education. In this book, Chickering et al. note that, American undergraduate education is largely focused on the transmission of theories, empirically derived facts, and the disciplinary frameworks and methods used to create and interpret empirically derived information. Unfortunately, examining the ways in which students can use the information and analytic processes about which they are learning to create meaningful individual lives and positive social structures has largely been excluded. Such characteristics as wisdom, compassion, and integrity, and such concepts as justice, ethics, values, morality, virtue and character are ones that most undergraduates fail to consider because the curriculum does not encourage them to do so. 3 In science and engineering, students are taught to be objective and analytical, and rightly so. But if their education consists solely of this approach, then is it possible that something of critical importance is being left out? Courses in ethics typically provide students with positive understandings of moral duty and professional obligation, but does this go far enough in making connections with spirituality? Recent studies are recognizing the importance of encouraging students to make connections between scientific knowledge and other ways of knowing such as direct experience, self-evident truths, and wisdom. For example, Michael Reiss at the University of London, in a recent article entitled “The Relationship between Evolutionary Biology and Religion,” writes that effective teaching in this area can help students appreciate the procedures and limitations of science, “and the ways in which scientific knowledge differs from other forms of knowledge.” 4 Other ways of knowing are also being discussed by educators such as P. J. Palmer, who writes, The mode of knowing that dominates higher education I call objectivism. It has three traits with which we are all familiar. The first of these traits is that the academy will be objective... Secondly, objectivism is analytic...Third, this mode of knowing is experimental...Very quickly this seemingly bloodless epistemology becomes an ethic. It is an ethic of competitive individualism, in the midst of a world fragmented and made exploitable by that very mode of knowing. The mode of knowing itself breeds intellectual habits, indeed spiritual instincts, that destroy community. We make objects of each other and the world to be manipulated for our own private ends. 5 Chickering et al. make it clear that their “problem is not with scientific methods and research or with rational inquiries concerning human nature. Instead the problem is that we tend to assume that objective methods require us to eliminate questions of purpose, value, and meaning, and to assume that we humans are only machines, or collections of molecules or interacting subatomic particles.” 6 What kind of identity do students develop under such a system? It is widely recognized that students should not be indoctrinated into a particular world view. Rather, they should receive the pertinent knowledge that will allow them to form their own view of things, and integrate the meaning and purpose of their lives into this view. Although higher education strives for this ideal, is it possible that current curricula are guilty of the following stinging accusation? A great irony is that while spiritual indoctrination, in particular, has been banned from our classroom, indoctrination and imposition continue unimpeded. Students aren’t indoctrinated into religious liturgy but instead into dualism, scientism, and most especially consumerism. We have been indoctrinated into a severely limited, materialistically based world view. Rather than learning to nurture and preserve spirit, we learn to manipulate the world: to earn, store, and protect wealth. Rather than learning to be sensitive – understand and attend to the needs of others – we learn to want, rationalize, and do for ourselves. With the rise of a kind of “economic individualism” as our basic sense of identity has come the centralization of wealth and power, the loss of the “commons”, and the ravishing of the planet. The fact is, within our schools and culture, identity is being imposed: not spiritual identity but material identity. 7 Due to this worldview with its embedded philosophy of science, which permeates the classroom experience, students are shaped into efficient scientists and engineers who tend to focus on making discoveries and producing effective products in the absence of spiritual considerations. This is due largely to the current “academic” worldview under which they labor. While this worldview of efficiency is not necessarily bad, and is certainly the means to an often progressive end, it can lead to a dysfunctional society. This perpetuates a fragmented form of community in which members fight over resources in what Palmer calls “competitive individualism,” rather than working together, using all of the talents offered, to reach a more complete and harmonious solution. So what kind of graduates are needed to solve today’s societal problems? Chickering et al. suggest that our colleges and universities are well poised to ‘educate a citizenry able to function at the levels of cognitive and affective complexity the problems requi