Derb – You write: “… if I survey my own small stock of understanding about human nature, I can’t see that any of it is owed to the efforts of theologians or philosophers. Historians? Novelists? Poets? Yeah, I’ll concede ground there.”

Taken to an extreme (I doubt you actually hold) this view strikes me as a very unconservative one. To what and to whom you consciously and personally feel a debt of gratitude to seems somewhat irrelevant. You are a product of thousands of years of civilizational progress (or development if “progress” is too loaded). The traditions you inherited, the customs you hold dear, the values you believe to be worthwhile and a thousand other things you take for granted were all developed by theologians, philosophers, novelists, poets, businessmen, soldieres and, of course, scientists over the generations.

Indeed, many of those scientists — Galileo, Newton et al — were deeply religious men who would not have done what they did were it not for theology and philosophy.

The conservative enterprise, it seems to me, is inextricably bound to the idea that we are standing on the shoulders of giants and that the civilization we cherish wasn’t created ex nihilo. Our social and personal habits are the product of a grand experiment which has, to be sure, made many mistakes and which still leaves room for much improvement but it still something to be defended and cherish. And as Hayek has written, it is unlikely any one of us can comprehend how much knowledge and intelligence is buried within the most simple props of our civilization.

Indeed, the scientific enterprise fluorished in our civilization (and stalled in others) for a reason. As Charles Murray likes to say, “a computer chip and the software it runs are monuments to Aristotelian logic.” It seems odd that you would seek to skim the cream of science off the top without paying heed to the contributions which made science itself possible. Again, I doubt that was your intent, but that’s how some might read it.