The Agnostic Engineer

Introduction and Contents

Welcome to The Agnostic Engineer, my personal web journal.

If you've been here before, here's a quick link to my latest entry.

Ideally, I'd be adding new entries to this regularly, every few days. But I'm an ocassional journalist, at best, and I don't really intend this to be a daily blog. More a series of ocassional short essays and commentary on themes relating to the mission of Silverthorn Institute. I'll start here with an explanation of the philosophy behind what I write, and then add a running index for individual pieces as I find time / inspiration to write them.

Let's start with that word, agnostic. Webster's defines an agnostic as one who holds that the existence of God is ultimately unknowable. That was T. H. Huxley's meaning when he coined the term in 1870. These days it's often used less formally to indicate simply that one has no committed position on a particular issue. I use it to mean something in between. To me agnostic conveys a mental outlook that accepts the uncertainty of knowledge, and the ever-present possibility that what we believe to be so may turn out to be wrong. Hence, it means keeping an open mind, and being receptive to evidence and logic. Above all, it means a willingness to give priority to what is, based on the most honest assessment one can manage, even when it's not what one might prefer to believe.

That ties in with the "engineer" part of the title, because engineering is about designing things that will work in the real world. You have to pay attention to how the world actually functions, and never mind how you or anybody else would like to imagine that it functions. Faith and ideology have no part in good engineering. But good engineering needn't be limited to bridges and airplanes and silicon chips. To the extent that we can figure out the rules for how things work, it can apply to government policies, business organizations, and social institutions. Note, however, that engineering only speaks to how to do something; deciding what should be done falls in the realm of values and choices. The values that most interest this particular engineer are preserving the diversity of life on earth and building a sustainable future.

The Agnostic Engineer, then, is first about striving to understand how the world works, uncolored as much as possible by ideological preconceptions of how it should work. From that base, it is about figuring out what is possible for humanity in the future, and how to build toward a sustainable future. Which is, in a nutshell, exactly what the Silverthorn Institute as a whole is also about. The Agnostic Engineer is something like the central consciousness of the Silverthorn Institute; the other articles and links on this site are source material and the results of investigations that have led me to the conclusions I write about in this column.

With that, here is a running table of links to individual articles in this series: