Mark Steyn has made a career out of being an alarmist? What?

An alarmist in the sense of trying to wake people up to reality.He certainly stands out in sharp contrast to the PC crowd that is running things in this country.Or should I say “ruining”things in this country?

“Why the sarcasm?”

Because what he wrote came across as snide and anti-intellectual, two things that irritate me.

“he’s doing a hit piece on scientists doing theology”

I didn’t get that at all. It seemed more like him pointing a finger at “science”, in general, and doing the Nelson Muntz “ha ha” from “The Simpsons”. As if he were saying, “You guys can’t even figure out why we exist, and you expect me to take your word on {insert contentious scientific theory}?!?”

He seems to assert that because “science” doesn’t explain everything, right now that its somehow deficient as a source of knowledge.

There’s also this: “despite all of the claims that it has all the answers…”

I don’t know any sane scientist who would claim that the current body of scientific knowledge contains “all the answers”.

“I don’t know any sane scientist who would claim that the current body of scientific knowledge contains ‘all the answers’.”

Again, it sounds like you are setting up straw men for your argument. Veith never said anything like this. His point was about scientists who say that science is capable of giving us ‘all the answers’, or similar humanistic philosophic claims.

I’m a PhD-level scientist, and I’ve encountered quite a few colleagues who think we already have all the answers, but just haven’t ‘discovered’ them yet. Now, whether or not they are sane remains to be seen. But they do make the claim.

Science by its very nature is (as you term it) a deficient source of knowledge, because it defines anything other than the natural as improper for or impossible to study or understand (error of naturalism). That doesn’t mean that science is a non-useful source of knowledge (and Veith never claims or intimates that), or that science doesn’t do a very, very good job at what it claims it does (error of mysticism). The problem (and irony) that Veith is trying to point out is those in the field of science who refuse to acknowledge their limitations and become (as Reg S points out) arrogant in their viewpoint that nothing else matters or has any value, all the whilst they can’t even give a cogent explanation of the origin of physical matter, much less answer any of the ‘why’ questions about that matter.

Will science ever get to good explanations of some of these hard questions of the ‘how’ or the ‘what’? I think so. Will science ever get to a good explanation of ‘why’ or the ‘who’? Never.

I’ll go with Doc’s charitable explanation of Veith’s arguments. He writes:

I hadn’t realized that science, despite all of the claims that it has all the answers, remains stuck at a very basic conundrum:

Here he seems to be saying that if one believes science has the capacity to eventually explain the full material nature of creation (i.e. “has all the answers”) then the fact that science “remains stuck at a very basic conundrum” is somehow problematic. I’m not sure I see the problem.

“We don’t know why X is the case, it certainly conflicts with our current models” doesn’t imply “We won’t ever figure out why X is the case, or develop models that incorporate X.”

Veith also writes:

So it isn’t just that science can’t explain the fine-tuning that makes life on earth possible. Nor is it that science can’t explain why anything exists. According to its own theories, nothing CAN exist.

You’re telling me you don’t detect an implicit, “Boy is ‘science’ dumb!” at the end of that paragraph? ‘Science’ is so screwed up that its own models predict nothing should exist! How can we trust ‘science’ at all?!?

I agree, Mark. Merriam-Webster defines alarmism as “the often unwarranted exciting of fears or warning of danger.” I think “alarmist” is mostly used to mean one who gives an unwarranted warning of danger.

When I was a philosophy major at a secular state university, I learned quickly that the most fundamental philosophical question is: Why is there something, rather than nothing. As a Christian I used this question to prompt the hoped-for-vexing question to my fellow classmates: Are we here by accident, or is there cosmic meaning to our lives. Had I been studied in presuppositionalism at that time, I would had used that argumentation. Nevertheless…

Thanks for posting that article, Tim.