The Difference Between Discernment and judgement continued..


The engineers perspective continued


This is one of those topics that seems kind of dry on paper when your thinking about how to go about talking about it. But I think it's really a "fun" topic. But then again I'm not only a son of the military industrial complex but a History Channel junkie as well (And I love military history a specially studying military history, weapons tech etc.). I love all the scheming behind a concept and looking "to get the most bang for the buck" that comes with this discipline.


But cutting to the chase...

What is the Engineers Perspective? It really the same perspective that a lot of us have if we are a "smart shopper". Namely the ability to buy or in this case construct something based on a number of important specifications, requirements or needs. My family for the last 20+ really has been into using the magazine "Consumer Reports" when it came to making some of those important big ticket item purchases especially for buying cars, but also some of the other houshold appliances. That magazine is the epitome of this sort of reasoning. Products are evaluated on a number of important dimensions based on cost, performance, reliability, overall cost to maintain, as well as comfort, safety ratings as well as various features. And each one given a rating on each area as well as an overall value rating on which product is the overall "best deal".

People who design and invent things also have to think this way as well. I think that may even the most true for people who work for the goverment, especially designing for the Department of Defense. When the navy, airforce, army, orders a new tank, fighter, bomber etc. they have a list of mandatory specifications that must be met.

Let take a bomber for example... Based on my recollections some of our famous bombers had minimum requirements as far as such things as their operative range (the total miles they can fly on a tank of gas), total bomb load, armor and defensive systems, type of radar, max speed, cost to produce and so on.

So anyway like the parable of the blindman and the elephant I achowledge that Truth can be a complex multi sided thing. And likewise, a discerning engineer, needs to carefully think out designing his project to optimize the best combination and ammount of needs and requirements. And I would also state one of the Orthodox maxims that we are created in "the Image of God". The things we do finitely tend to be shadows of God's infinite nature. (While there is sin that corrupts aspects of human nature, God has nevertheless given us some revelation about His own nature in the way he has created us).

Anyway bringing this back to the topic at hand. If we are really going to think about what the nature is regarding the nature of judgement, discernment, truth etc. We really needed to a few basic things and that will be the subject of my next post....