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.

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.

I propose there might be one more factor discouraging high school seniors from choosing a STEM degree: their humanity.

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.

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.

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.”