Engineering and the Ultimate is the product of the Engineering and Metaphysics Conference held at Oral Roberts University in 2012. It seeks to open up new pathways for engineering to escape the intellectually stifling philosophy of pragmatism. They point out in the book that the classical and medieval engineers saw their work as pointing to a grander reality that they saw in nature. Their designs sought to reflect the beautiful design in nature. And they weren't ashamed to admit it. The book is of a definite Christian orientation (both Catholic and Protestant). Overall, it is friendly to Intelligent Design, however, one author, Alexander Sich, makes a scientific case against Intelligent Design [ID]. He instead argues that ID is a useful philosophy but should be treated as a scientific model. Many of his arguments have been refuted in the past. I refer the reader to Evolution News and Views for more information.
I only have one problem with the book. It has no bibliographic information for itself! In order to find it, I had to look through the bibliographic info of one of the author's papers. So, here it is in full: Bartlett, Jonathan, Dominic Halsmer, and Mark R. Hall. Engineering and the Ultimate: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Order and Design in Nature and Craft. Broken Arrow, OK: Blyth Institute Press, 2014.
Other than that one minor issue, I personally found the book to be quite enlightening. Having little personal experience with engineering, I found it to be a good introduction to the interaction between engineering and philosophy. I highly recommend it, and I hope that the Blyth Institute Press continue to publish more solid scientific work!
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