More on The Conflict

Mark Shea holds forth on matters of science and religion in jovially bellicose manner, as is his wont. His mockery of the ignorant things people say would be stronger if he'd caught, say, Richard Dawkins, or someone of that stature, saying something equally dumb (like, I dunno, advancing an argument that assumes God has a material substrate and can thus be meaningfully discussed in terms of complexity and bandwidth); picking on the things people say in newspaper comments sections is like beating up babies. It's only a step up from engaging in dialogue with youtube comments.

Mr. Shea's main contribution in these matters is the short, snippy labels he comes up with. "People who worship, rather than use, the intellect" - that sums up so very, very much. The following comments are also very true:

Man is an inveterate philosopher. He cannot resist the impulse to make grand pronouncements about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything on the feeblest provocation. The trouble is, he usually doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He incessantly goes off half-cocked. Both the secularists and the fundamentalists who hold forth with sweeping confidence in comboxes are typical specimens of postmodernity’s odd tendency to assume that our technological civilization somehow confers indiscriminately on all its citizens an automatic Ph.D on whatever they feel like pontificating about in a bar or a combox... We live in a time like no other: where more knowledge has been piled up than ever before (about both Science *and* about biblical revelation) and more and more partisans of each use it for little besides hurling fragments of it at one another like chimps flinging dung at one another at the zoo.

I think we've all been guilty of that at some time or another.

Although I'm curious about whether assuming an unearned PhD in whatever you want to talk about is really anything new. Granted, the modern age is especially bad, but I think that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" has been true forever, and the tendency of people in bars, taxi drivers, village cynics, &c. to hold forth on everything under the sun as if they know all about it is about as old as the hills.