I just came across this fascinating article by a Christian engineer, Jace Yarbrough, about “why we don’t have more engineers.” The shortage of good engineers has been the subject of intense effort for decades, yet the supply has stubbornly refused to increase. In addition to two factors that are already widely appreciated—engineering is intrinsically difficult so few can do it, and it is relatively impervious to artificial grade inflation; and engineering schools are often unnecessarily unwelcoming toward many students who could become engineers—Yarbrough offers a third. Few people want to be engineers, he suggests, because engineering means exploiting God’s creation for humanity’s selfish ends.
That many Christians have internalized this deeply unbiblical, implicitly Gnostic negative view of technological progress is not news. What is shocking about this article, however, is that this person has internalized it, and has done so in a particular way.
To begin with, Yarbrough is not just an engineer, but actually seems to be very happy to be an engineer. It requires a really stunning dualism to write an article that basically amounts to “I rape the earth for a living and God hates that, but hey, it’s a fallen world and all – people have got to eat, so you do what you have to do. So, yeah, I’m proud to do work that God hates.”
At this point I would normally launch into Theology of Work 101 – economic work existed before the fall and is part of God’s good plan, wealth creation is a spiritual act that God intends for the blessing of human beings, flourishing of shalom, etc. etc. The only problem with that is that Yarbrough has already written on that subject. With great eloquence and erudition. Recently. Twice. Now that’s dualism.
Yarbrough even makes the standard point that the biblical narrative begins in a garden and ends in a city; apparently the implications of that observation have not been fully assimilated. Does Yarbrough think cities just grow up out of the ground? Or that any kind of human civilization resembling a city can be built without transformatively using (or “destroying,” if you like) some natural resources? Does God love the heavenly city but hate the work that builds it?
Another alarming aspect of the article is that Yarbrough openly mocks Al Gore and in various other ways self-identifies as an opponent of squishy-left views on economics, environmentalism, etc. This confirms an impression that has been growing in my mind – that we need to stop thinking about bad economic thinking as a product of the left. It isn’t, or not distinctively so. There’s almost as much quasi-Gnosticism on the right as on the left these days.
Let’s be clear: God loves engineering. When he made the human race, he declared one and only one explicit purpose for human life: to have a transformative impact on the environment. (Well, okay, and to reproduce.)
Genesis 1-2 tells us the following:
- God made the world with a small garden in the middle of a huge, desolate wilderness. The description of the wilderness emphasizes that it is a wilderness because the impact of human work is absent.
- God made human beings to work (and reproduce).
- God’s marching orders to humanity are to go fill the world and subdue it to God’s will.
What does the “cultural mandate” amount to in this context? I think you could express it this way: “You see this beautiful little garden you’re in? Okay, now, you see all that huge desolate wasteland of wilderness out there? Go make all of that like this.”
The purpose of human life is to have an impact on the environment. God loves engineering.
Greg Forster is the author of five books and numerous print articles covering theology, economics, political philosophy and education policy. He has a doctorate from Yale University, is a program director at the Kern Family Foundation and also a senior fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice.
November 29th, 2011 | 10:45 am
Good thoughts. Combined with the the knowledge that the cultural mandate also suffers the effects of the fall, and therefore all our efforts are not always “very good” or even properly motivated, you get a robust theology of technology with all the necessary caveats. And I’m pretty sure Greg Forster has the caveats in mind, as well.
November 29th, 2011 | 10:49 am
Yes, naturally there will be many caveats as a result of the fall – but you can’t begin with the caveats. Gnosticism could almost be defined as “beginning with the caveats.” Thanks for making this explicit, though – I should have done so in my original post.
November 29th, 2011 | 11:22 am
Does he love lawyers too? I have a dog in this fight so please answer carefully.
November 29th, 2011 | 11:41 am
The premise is bunk.
There are lots of Christian engineers. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, Christians are a much higher proportion in engineering than they are in the arts (any of them) or the pure sciences, which have the benefit of not, you know, raping the earth.
The real problem is that (a) engineering and science are hard, (b) engineering and science are not “sexy” like they (kind of) were in the immediate post-Sputnik era, and (c) people want to make money.
(a) doesn’t seem especially controversial.
(b) means that, um, “sexy” people tend not to go into engineering and science. Seriously. Engineering and scientific societies complain that they are portrayed as unattractive weirdos in the media, but visit any engineering department. The stereotype is not unfounded. Even if it were, when’s the last time you saw engineers or brainiacs portrayed as admirable or “cool” people on a TV show? I rest my case.
(c) may seem ridiculous, but hear me out. It’s no secret that engineering, while providing a comfortable living, is nowhere as rewarding as, say, bossing engineers around, managing their retirement accounts, or stitching them up when they burn, cut, or shock themselves. Add to this that engineers are outsourced at a higher rate than managers, bankers, and doctors, and you have to ask yourself why anyone would be fool enough to become an engineer unless she or he loves it.
November 29th, 2011 | 12:08 pm
Speaking as an engineer myself, we don’t have more engineers because many smart students realize they can make far more money, with far less studying, by choosing to be bankers, lawyers, or doctors instead.
Those who do choose engineering because they like to build and design things, often find their efforts hampered by the corporate bureaucracy and marketing departments of their companies. It is a fallen world, after all…
November 29th, 2011 | 12:15 pm
Barry: I always answer carefully when speaking to lawyers!
1) Lawyers are people, therefore God loves lawyers. :)
2) The proper purpose of the legal profession is to interpret the law, and thus serve others by helping maintain the social structures necessary to a just civil order. God desires the doing of justice in the civil order, therefore God blesses the practice of law.
[All due caveats about the impact of the fall are hereby incorporated by reference.]
November 29th, 2011 | 12:24 pm
Greg, I just figured without the caveats, you’d get a certain amount of “noise” reaction to things that you probably left unstated, but did agree with. I do agree you have to start with the positive case.
bourgeois oppressor — Amen on your c! As the wife of an engineer, it isn’t the money pot people think. When my husband graduated ~25 years ago, starting salaries for engineers were pretty good compared to many other fields. That hasn’t kept up — experienced engineers are falling behind other professions that started out comparably.
November 29th, 2011 | 1:14 pm
Of course God loves lawyers! He loves sinners doesn’t He?
November 29th, 2011 | 2:34 pm
“Few people want to be engineers, he suggests, because engineering means exploiting God’s creation for humanity’s selfish ends.”
Well, not to be the toenail in the yogurt, but let me modify this a bit. It is true that engineering to many represents a certain ATTITUDE toward creation. This attitude is fine when you are saying, for example, “I can put these pieces of metal in this configuration and make this bridge twice as strong. And, if I can do that, why shouldn’t I?”
But that “engineering” attitude becomes exploitative when it spills over into other areas. Such as: “We have a big city here with a large population. We can engineer these cattle/hogs/chickens/corn seeds/etc., to produce three times more beef/pork/chicken/corn/etc., and only use a quarter of the space, to feed this population. And if I can do that, why shouldn’t I?”
Or, to put it this way: We do not always appreciate the pull money has on us. But, just because we can make more money by engineering creation in some way, is not in itself a prima facie reason for doing so.
I think perhaps several decades of this type of “engineering” mentality are what people react against. It is not the engineering itself per se, but rather the misplacing of the mentality into areas it doesn’t belong, solely to make more money–precisely by “exploiting God’s creation for humanity’s selfish ends.”
November 29th, 2011 | 2:45 pm
I strongly object to the suggestion that buiding bridges that are twice as strong is in some way morally or spiritually arbitrary, an act of mere will or power (“if I can do that, why shouldn’t I?”). To make a bridge more structurally sound is a profoundly moral act – just ask some people whose loved ones died in the big bridge collapse in Minneapolis a few years ago.
I take it that what you’re trying to do here is insert the necessary “caveats” (see above). But your own approach shows how neceseary it is to begin with the affirmation of the basic moral and spiritual goodness of the activity (whether engineering or anything else that serves authentic human good) and only after that is fully and robustly established move on to the caveats.
Contrary to your characterization, the original article that I linked to is definitely objecting to “engineering itself per se.”
November 29th, 2011 | 3:27 pm
I think you may misunderstand Yarbrough’s article. His concern seems to be not engineering per se but engineering as our society currently teaches and practices it.
As I recall, Gnosticism sees the material Creation as bad (so we need to escape it) or as meaningless to those who possess the right knowledge (in which case we might as well indulge fleshly desires fully). In saying, “…we are trained to apply knowledge indiscriminately—no wisdom required. Questions like ‘What’s the physical world for and how ought I approach it?’ are never even alluded to in our curriculum,” Yarbrough appears to be anti-Gnostic, suggesting that the material Creation has both a meaning and a right use. Do not the Apostle Paul (Romans 1) and St. Athanasius (On the Incarnation) both teach that the material Creation is, in fact, the means by which the invisible God reveals Himself (in particular by the physical body of our Lord)?
The Biblical narrative ends in a city, yet the Lord stops the builders at Babel. Why? Lest men accomplish everything that they plan to do. Why is this so bad? Because it leads men into the slavery of fulfilling their own wills, becoming whatever they choose to be, rather than into the freedom of realizing their nature as creatures made to grow into the image of God.
The Creation is not so much neutral raw material merely awaiting the imposition of our wills (that is, in fact, a secular view). Rather it has a nature, namely to reveal the Son of God, Who made it. It helps us to that end if we use it according to its nature (and, conversely, if we grow in the knowledge of God, we will better understand the nature of the Creation). Modern engineering and science, however, are primarily about predicting the behavior of the Creation and thus manipulating it to the ends we choose (i.e., fulfilling our wills). It should trouble and grieve us that our capacity to manipulate the Creation has run far ahead of our wisdom in knowing what manipulations are profitable for us and for it (the most obvious example of this being our medical technologies that allow us safely to commit mass murder of the unborn).
Engineering, per se, may well be “very good,” but engineering as we practice it may be doing us tremendous harm. As I read it, Mr. Yarbrough is helpfully suggesting that there is a difference between the two.
November 29th, 2011 | 3:35 pm
What are you seeing in the article that draws this distinction? Here are a few direct quotes from the article:
I propose there might be one more factor discouraging high school seniors from choosing a STEM degree: their humanity.
“But the goal of engineering,” as recently expressed by one of my (uncharacteristically thoughtful) engineering buddies, “is the exploitation of nature. That’s why we approach a problem with the assumption that nature will be working against us.” At the risk of sounding like a tree-hugging Avatar fanatic, there is something inhumane about that.
I would argue that as humans, we further intuit a particular responsibility to look after her [nature]. Majoring in a STEM subject requires denying that intuition.
Certainly he could have written an article such as the one you describe. But that is not the article he in fact wrote.
November 29th, 2011 | 3:40 pm
Second the comments of Bourgeois Oppressor, Kevin and pentamom on the $ front. A young man who’s reasonably bright can make a lot more money, without working significantly harder, in investment banking or law or medicine, sometimes even in accounting. And I say that as a lawyer, the son and nephew of engineers, and the friend of several patent attorneys who got engineering degrees before figuring out the foregoing.
November 29th, 2011 | 4:14 pm
Greg,
As Jace’s colleague, I think that Craig and Reid are right and you are wrong. True, Jace’s underlying argument is implied rather than stated, but as George MacDonald once said, why write “This is a horse” under a picture of a horse?
You noticed Jace’s repeated references to the natural order, to nourishing creation, and so on. You noticed that he is, in fact, an engineer himself, and a happy one. You even noticed that he’s written two posts on work recently, making similar points to the ones you made in this post.
But–astoundingly in my view–you failed to draw the logical conclusion from all those things, instead deciding that Jace must be intellectually schizophrenic.
There’s a far more obvious conclusion that doesn’t involve questioning Jace’s intelligence.
Jace wasn’t criticizing science (I have yet to meet a Luddite engineer); he was criticizing science as the 21st-century engineer has been taught it. As C.S. Lewis documented in “The Abolition of Man,” the Western view of science has undergone a pronounced shift over time–from discovering nature to conquering nature. While the Enlightenment played a part, Lewis was right to note the unprecedented dominance–and the futility–of the “conquer nature” school in his own time. And Jace is right to note the effects of that dominance half a century later, and to argue implicitly for a rediscovery of science properly understood.
Fortunately, at least some of your readers grasped this.
November 29th, 2011 | 9:29 pm
But even if that is what he meant, it hardly helps matters. On that reading, his argument boils down to the assertion that in our time, the profession of engineering has been significantly *more* morally disordered than the other professions that potential engineers are choosing to go into instead – academia, finance, law, etc. Forgive me, but the suggestion is asinine. I think Lewis very badly overstated the extent to which science is disordered in modernity. But even Lewis didn’t suggest that science was so much *more* disordered than other professions that it would have difficulty attracting young people compared with such paradigmatic exemplars of virtue as Wall Street.
December 2nd, 2011 | 3:00 am
[...] recently responded to my last post (“Why No One Wants to be an Engineer”) with this forceful rebuttal. In a nutshell, he argues that “God loves engineering. When he made the human race, he declared [...]
December 2nd, 2011 | 9:14 am
“On that reading, his argument boils down to the assertion that in our time, the profession of engineering has been significantly *more* morally disordered than the other professions that potential engineers are choosing to go into instead – academia, finance, law, etc. Forgive me, but the suggestion is asinine.”
I’m not so sure. One might well avoid all such professions and (1) fall into an unchosen profession–a profession that simply pays bills–or (2) decide that the most worthy use of time is to protest by setting up tents outside businesses and making a fuss.
For better or for worse, not everybody lines up all potential professions and weighs their material and spiritual pros and cons.
December 5th, 2011 | 5:10 pm
[...] his gracious reply to what was, I admit, a provocatively worded critique of his post on engineering in modernity, Jace Yarbrough asks me for my thoughts on this question: [...]
December 6th, 2011 | 11:35 pm
[...] Engineering is Glorious!, a post on the First Thoughts blog about a Christian engineer who equates engineering with raping [...]
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