>I see Bill's stated version of intervention to correspond to the artist.
That is indeed what I had in mind. I believe God _is_ an artist, and
certainly some features of the world around us may exist only for God's
artistic pleasure. We can study them and learn about how they are
constructed, but if we put on blinders and refuse to look at the
possibility that God does things simply out of His good, artistic pleasure,
then we are missing the real reason for the existence of these features.
Loren's example was
>Consider two extreme versions of design-for-self-assembly. 1) An engineer
>designs component pieces to self-assemble into the same final (complex)
>form or forms every time. Each time the process starts, the pathway taken
>might be considerably different, but it always finishes with identical
>products. 2) An artist designs component pieces to self-assemble into
>beautiful, complex forms which are radically different from each other
>each time, depending sensitively on which "pathway" is taken.
I'm not totally comfortable with the implied dichotomy between engineer and
artist. There can be and is considerable artistry in many engineering
projects. Perhaps only other engineers can appreciate some of it, but it's
there :-).
Bill Hamilton | Vehicle Systems Research
GM R&D Center | Warren, MI 48090-9055
810 986 1474 (voice) | 810 986 3003 (FAX)
hamilton@gmr.com (office) | whamilto@mich.com (home)