No Win Situations

Juan Williams asked Newt Gingrich in Monday night's debate whether his comment that poor children should be given maintenance jobs in their schools to teach them a work ethic wasn't insensitive to black people. Coming from a man who was justifiably shocked when NPR fired him some months ago for acknowledging his personal unease when Muslims board the same plane he's traveling on, this seemed like a strange question:

Gingrich's response speaks for itself. If Williams thinks it's offensive to suggest that one of the dysfunctions that afflicts communities mired in generational poverty is that they've lost the skills needed to succeed in the workforce then he's delusional.

Meanwhile, Joy Ann Reid a guest on an MSNBC show the other day thought it was offensive for Mitt Romney to give a distressed woman money to pay her electric bill, ostensibly because the recipient of Romney's kindness was black.

In case you haven't the time to watch the video here's the transcript of what Ms. Reid said:

As an African-American woman, it galls me. I don’t even like to watch it. I felt like it plays into every sort of patronizing stereotype of black people. Oh, here’s this little lady, let me give her 50 bucks. I mean, this is the guy who offered a bet of $10,000 on stage, you know, to another candidate, but, you know, here, let me lay off 50 bucks on this woman. And I think it plays into that conservative meme that you don’t need actual programs that the government puts in place to help people in need, we’ll just give them charity. The church will take care of them, I’ll give them 50 bucks.

Apparently we must conclude that at least some black people think it just as patronizing for a white man to give a needy black woman a little help as it is racially insensitive to encourage poor blacks to learn work skills. If Romney had ignored the woman people like Reid would probably have accused him of being hard-hearted, especially toward blacks, but when he helps the woman he's accused him of being condescending.

Of course, it doesn't seem to occur to Ms. Reid that if it's patronizing for a white person to help poor people then all those government programs she admires, programs in which billions of dollars are transferred from white wage earners to black poor people, are surely patronizing to blacks. Perhaps she thinks it's okay if the money is taken from the white man in taxes by the government and then given to the poor, but not okay if it's freely given to the poor in an act of personal compassion.

What exactly is the logic, if any, behind the thinking of either Williams or Reid? Or is logic not even relevant to those who are desperately trying to reinforce the belief that anything whites do or say about blacks is suspicious, whether it appears that way or not?

It's ironic that in trying to show that Gingrich and Romney have ignoble motives lurking in their hearts these commentators actually give the impression that they themselves are petty, cynical, and irrational. Wouldn't it be better if we stopped probing and dissecting people's hearts and simply judge them on the basis of the truth of what they say and the virtue of what they do?

If War Comes

A former agent of the CIA who once infiltrated Iran's Revolutionary Guard talks about some of Iran's plans and capabilities should the U.S. attack. Here are several of his main points:

In a recent meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, it was decided that the possibility of an attack by Israel or America in 2012 is real and that the country’s forces need to prepare several contingencies for war. It also was concluded that in case of war, the regime could be victorious, though the cost would be high, but it would emerge as the one and only champion of the Islamic cause in the world.

The radicals ruling Iran have long believed that obtaining the nuclear bomb will make them untouchable and will facilitate the expansion of the Islamic movement in the region and the world in bringing the West to its knees. They also have concluded that because of the troubles in the world’s economy and financial troubles in America, even a limited confrontation with America would benefit the Islamic regime.

Just as Hezbollah outfought Israel in the 2006 war, Iran can claim victory against the U.S. in such a conflict, which could include attacking Israel from several fronts. But the real prize for the criminal mullahs would be that it would help the regime bring down the monarchy in Bahrain, create instability in Saudi Arabia and, most important, help the Islamists in Egypt undermine military rule. All this would occur by inciting uprisings for a war of Islam against infidels and Zionists.

The guards in their preparations have mapped out several options. One would be to disrupt the oil flow from the Persian Gulf. They know that about 40 percent of the world’s oil and the majority of oil exports of eight countries in the Persian Gulf pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that could be blocked by the regime’s forces.

The guards’ navy of speedboats armed with cruise missiles, Iran’s submarines and, most important, the guards’ missiles of various kinds could be launched from deep within Iran and still target the narrow strait.

The guards also have mapped out an extensive list of U.S. bases in the Middle East to attack with their missiles, disrupting the movement of U.S. forces and the operation of the Air Force, which the guards believe will be the main thrust of any attack by America.

For that purpose, several U.S. bases have been identified that could be attacked either by short-range rockets with a range of up to 140 miles or with ballistic missiles with a range of more than 1,250 miles. The two air bases in Kuwait, Ali Al Salem and Ahmed Al Jaber, are less than 85 miles from Iran. In Kuwait, the U.S. camps of Buehring, Spearhead, Patriot and Arifjan, with distances of 65 to 80 miles, are all within reach of the guards’ various missiles.

The guards also are targeting four U.S. air bases in Afghanistan as the main launching pads for any attacks on Iran. The Bagram Air Base, home to most of the U.S. Air Force presence in Afghanistan, is just 450 miles from the Iranian borders and within range of all of Iran’s ballistic missiles. Other air bases in Afghanistan that would be attacked by the guards in case of war are in Kandahar, Shindand and Herat.

The super U.S. base, Al Adid in Qatar, which is home to a variety of U.S. bombers and fighters, is within 175 miles of Iran and a prime target for the guards, though because of favorable relations of the Islamic regime with the government in Qatar, the guards are not sure America can use that air base for its attack and therefore will be much more likely to use its other superbase at Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates, also within range of various Iranian missiles. Other U.S. targets of the guards are the U.S. 5th Fleet in Bahrain and Thumrait Air Base in Oman.

There's more at the link. Perhaps the American military can neutralize these threats, but if not, an attack on Iran will not be as painless as was the initial assault on Iraq. Iran has more formidable capabilities than did Saddam Hussein and the United States must be prepared for losses. Even so, if the world allows Iran to gain a nuclear weapon it must be prepared for even greater, perhaps catastrophic, losses.

OOL

Moshe Averick at Algemeiner.com quotes a number of Origin of Life (OOL) researchers who speak frankly about their complete mystification as to how life could have arisen from non-living matter.

Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak, for instance, stated that “It is virtually impossible to imagine how a cell’s machines ... could have formed spontaneously from non-living matter.”

Dr. Harold P. Klein, of NASA, once wrote in similar terms: “The simplest bacterium is so damn complicated from the point of view of a chemist that it is almost impossible to imagine how it happened.”

When one of the greatest chemists alive today, Dr. George Whitesides of Harvard University, was awarded the Priestley Medal for Chemistry in 2007, he said: “Most chemists believe like I do, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea…On the basis of all chemistry I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable.”

Dr. Eugene V. Koonin, a molecular biologist, once observed that:

Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is not due to lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.

This seemed to echo what science writer and cosmologist Dr. Paul Davies had written years earlier:

You might get the impression from what I have written not only that the origin of life is virtually impossible, but that life itself is impossible ... fortunately for us, our cells contain sophisticated chemical-repair-and-construction mechanisms, and handy sources of chemical energy to drive processes uphill, and enzymes with special properties that can smoothly assemble complex molecules from fragments…but the primordial soup lacked these convenient cohorts of cooperating chemicals…so what is the answer? Is life a miracle after all?

Averick goes on to summarize the current state of OOL research:

• Everyone agrees that the simplest living bacterium – which is functionally complex beyond comprehension – looks like it was designed and created by an intelligent creator.
• Everyone agrees that it is virtually impossible to imagine how it could have happened through an undirected process.
• Everyone agrees that no one has any idea how it actually did happen.

What can we conclude from this? Averick offers an answer:

I simply draw the obvious conclusions. The reason it looks designed, is because it is designed. The reason why it seems “astonishingly improbable” for it to happen through an undirected process, is because it is “astonishingly improbable” for it to happen through an undirected process, and the reason why, in fact, no one has any idea how it happened through a naturalistic process, is because it didn’t happen through a naturalistic process.

But if one is a naturalistic materialist and has apriori ruled out the possibility of a non-natural, non-physical designer of life then it simply must have happened through some natural, mechanistic process.

Averick appositely reminds us of a quote from Darwinian biologist Richard Lewontin who once said:

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to the understanding of the real struggle between Science and the Supernatural. We take the side of science despite the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism…we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanation, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.”

What are we to make of all this? One conclusion I think we can draw is that evolutionary science is not just about science, it's about religion. Following the evidence where it leads is a maxim adhered to only if the evidence leads us away from a Divine mind. If the evidence leads toward the uncomfortable inference that there really could be an intelligence directing the progress of life then, as Lewontin admits, many scientists are prepared to accept patent absurdity in order to cling to their faith in naturalism.

They've got a faith commitment to an atheistic worldview and no amount of evidence will be allowed to change their mind. And they think theists are irrational?

We Just Don't Know

We've spoken on occasion here at VP about the fact that we don't really know that global warming, if indeed it eventuates, will be the disaster the climate change alarmists predict. For all we really know it could be a boon to humanity to have more land in currently inaccessible regions like Siberia, Greenland and northern Canada open up to habitation, mining, and agriculture. Slightly rising temperatures could result in more rainfall in arid regions and reverse the desertification process of northern Africa and elsewhere, making agriculture around the globe more productive. Who knows?

Now science writer Matt Ridley raises another possible benefit of global warming - it could be saving us from an incipient ice age:

The entire 10,000-year history of civilization has happened in an unusually warm interlude in the Earth's recent history. Over the past million years, it has been as warm as this or warmer for less than 10% of the time, during 11 brief episodes known as interglacial periods. One theory holds that agriculture and dense settlement were impossible in the volatile, generally dry and carbon-dioxide-starved climates of the ice age, when crop plants would have grown more slowly and unpredictably even in warmer regions.

This warm spell is already 11,600 years old, and it must surely, in the normal course of things, come to an end. In the early 1970s, after two decades of slight cooling, many scientists were convinced that the moment was at hand. They were "increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age," said Time in 1974. The "almost unanimous" view of meteorologists was that the cooling trend would "reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," and "the resulting famines could be catastrophic," said Newsweek in 1975.

Since then, of course, warmth has returned, probably driven at least partly by man-made carbon-dioxide emissions. A new paper, from universities in Cambridge, London and Florida, drew headlines last week for arguing that these emissions may avert the return of the ice age.

Ridley elaborates on all this at the linked article.

The fact is that we don't know whether the global mean temperature is really rising, or, if it is, what's causing it. Nor do we know what the effects of a modest rise in temperature will be. Nevertheless, we're being told that we must spend billions of dollars and change the entire way of life of modern societies and do it now because if we don't we'll all die. But as Ridley points out, for all we know reversing greenhouse gas emissions may be the worst thing we could do for the planet and humanity.

Martin Luther King

Today is the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday and it would be well to focus on why we do. King was a man of great courage who was resolutely committed, not just to racial equality under the law, but to harmony among all the racial factions in America. His commitment to achieving justice under the law for every American was rooted in his Christian faith as his Letter From a Birmingham Jail makes clear, and it was that faith which made him a transformational figure in the history of our nation.

It's sad that though his dream of racial equality has been largely realized - the law no longer permits distinctions between the races in our public life - his dream of racial harmony has not.

One reason it has not is that his dream that his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character has been inverted so that the color of one's skin is often the only thing that matters.

Students are still accepted into colleges and given scholarships on the basis of their race without having to meet the same standards as those with a different skin color. The same is true of civil servants like police and firemen who are often hired and promoted on the basis of test performance, but who sometimes receive preferential treatment based on race. Our Attorney General is reluctant to prosecute blacks who deny others their civil rights, and any criticism of our president is interpreted as a racist reaction to his skin color rather than a reasonable opposition to his policies.

People are judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character as much today, perhaps, as at any time in our history. I don't think this is what King had in mind.

Nor do I think he would have been happy that we celebrate black history month as if it were somehow separate from American history rather than, as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues, an integral part of American history. The civil rights movement was not merely a black movement, it was an American movement in which the nation realized that we were not living up to the ideals of equality and liberty upon which America was founded. It was a time when the nation realized that we were not living consistently with the deepest convictions we held as Christians, namely that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Martin Luther King persistently and bravely held these ideals and convictions before the American people, he refused to allow us to avoid seeing their implications, and repeatedly urged us to live up to what we believed deep in our souls to be true. And the American people, many of whom had never really thought about the chasm between what we professed and what we practiced, responded.

It was an American achievement that involved the efforts and blood of people not just of one race but of all races. Thinking of the great sacrifices and advances of the civil rights era as only a success story of one race is divisive. It carves out one group of people from the rest of the nation for special notice and tends to exclude so many others without whom the story would never have been told.

On Martin Luther King day it would be good for us to try to put behind us the invidious distinctions we continue to make between white and black. It would be good to stop seeing others in terms of their skin color, to give each other the benefit of the doubt that our disagreements are about ideas and policies and are not motivated by hatred, bigotry, or moral shortcomings. It would be good to declare a moratorium on the use of the word "racist," unless the evidence for it is overwhelming, and to stop think of racism as a sin committed by the majority race only.

Let's judge each other on the content of our character and of our minds and not on the color of our skin. As long as we continue to see each other through the lens of race we'll never have the unity that King yearned for and gave his life for.

Did the Cosmos Have a Beginning?

When the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe was first proposed it met with a lot of resistance from scientists and others who were dismayed by the fact that the Big Bang entailed that the universe had a discrete beginning rather than being infinitely old. If the universe had a beginning then it must have been caused by something outside itself, and since this sounded too much like the Genesis account of the Bible, many scientists resisted the Big Bang until the predicted background radiation left over from the initial "explosion" was serendipitously discovered in 1963 making further resistance seem futile.

Even so, the refuseniks have not given up and have over the years advanced a number of theories that would do away with the unpleasant theological implications of the standard Big Bang model by keeping the Bang, so to speak, but doing away with a cosmic beginning. However, in one way or another all of these theories have come to grief.

An article at New Scientist (subscription required) suggests that hope is fading that a beginningless universe can made to conform to the evidence we have. Here's part of the article:

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including [Stephen] Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

The details of Vilenkin's argument follow in the article, but the important point is that cosmologists are now in a quandary. The data does not support the idea of a beginningless universe, but if the universe had a beginning then the argument for a transcendent, very powerful, very intelligent, personal cause of the universe becomes almost irresistable.

Consider, for example, the following argument that has been popularized by the philosopher William Lane Craig:

1. Everything that comes into being has a cause of its existence.
2. Nothing is the cause of itself.
3. The universe had a beginning and thus came into being.
4. Therefore the universe had a cause.
5. There are only three kinds of causes: abstract (ideas), scientific (physical forces), and personal minds.
6. Abstract objects are causally impotent, and physical forces would only exist after the universe came into being.
7. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be a personal mind.

Thus we have good reason to believe that there is a transcendent personal cause that began the universe. Sound like anyone you know?

See vjtorley's post at Uncommon Descent and William Lane Craig's website for more.

John Rabe

Ever think you'd watch a movie in which the hero was a member of the German Nazi party? Well, okay, Oscar Schindler in the movie Schindler's List, was a party member, I guess, but I can't think of any other candidates, or at least I couldn't until I watched the movie John Rabe the other evening.

Rabe's story was very much like that of Oscar Schindler. He was a German businessman, working for Siemens in Nanking, China in 1937. This was the year the Japanese invaded China and perpetrated the mass slaughter of what became known as the Rape of Nanking, brutally raping and slaughtering some 300,000 Chinese. The horrors perpetrated by the Japanese in Nanking are beyond imagining (see link), but the movie gives a glimpse of what it was like.

Since the Germans were allies of the Japanese in 1937 Rabe was able to use his Nazi Party credentials to carve out a demilitarized safety zone in the city in which Chinese civilians were able to find relative safety from the savagery of the Japanese troops. It's believed that Rabe and a dozen or so other foreigners working together were able to save the lives of some 200,000 Chinese.

The movie (2009) stars Ulrich Tukur as John Rabe and is very well-acted. I strongly recommend the film to anyone who wants to know more about one of the most savage episodes of man's inhumanity to his fellow man ever recorded, and who also wants to watch a film about real heroism during these terrifying days.

There's a biography of Rabe at Wikipedia. The tragedy of his life seems to have been compounded after he left Nanking and returned to Germany, but what he and his associates did for the Chinese is something which should never be forgotten.

Democrat Difficulties

National Review's Yuval Levin lays out the difficulties the president faces in coming up with a viable campaign strategy:

I know we’re all supposed to think that the primaries are poised to turn out a weak Republican nominee and that President Obama will swoop in this fall and carry the day with some brilliant pincer move that simultaneously dubs the Republican too extreme, too moderate, too boring, and too weird. And I suppose it’s possible that the president and his team will suddenly turn out to possess keen political skills they have been hiding somewhere for the past three years. But can we spend a moment pondering the approach that team Obama seems to be hatching so far? Looking at what the administration and the Obama campaign have been doing and saying in the buildup to the general election, it has been awfully difficult to find evidence of a plausible strategy.

Obama has some very daunting problems to contend with, of course. His record of accomplishments, amassed mostly in his first two years in office, is extremely unpopular and so could not be the centerpiece of a reelection campaign. He has presided over the largest deficits in American history and nearly doubled the national debt. He pushed through a large stimulus bill in 2009 that is taken to have been a failure (in no small part because the administration defined metrics for success, like keeping unemployment from rising above 8%, that have plainly not been met) and a health-care reform in 2010 that started out quite unpopular and has gotten only more so with time. Meanwhile the economy remains weak, unemployment remains high, and 80 percent of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This has left the president in an exceptionally challenging political position in a re-election year. At the beginning of November of 2010, on the day Republicans took 63 House seats and 5 senate seats from the Democrats, Obama’s job approval in Gallup’s daily tracking poll was 44 percent; today it is 43 percent. Party identification in November 2010, according to Gallup, was 31 percent Democrat, 26 percent Republican, and 41 percent independent; in December 2011 it was 27 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 42 percent independent. Republicans held a 5 point lead in Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot that November, and today they have a 6 point lead.

All this suggests there is no self-evident path to reelection for the president. He can hope for significant improvements in the economy to change his fortunes (although the unemployment rate is a good bit lower today than in November 2010 and that doesn’t seem to have done the trick), but he can’t run on his record or rely on some cushion of public confidence and satisfaction. He needs a positive strategy to improve his circumstances. But the campaign strategy his team appears to be putting into place would seem to be very poorly suited to doing so.

To further consternate the Democrats, it looks as if the Republicans are poised to take the Senate and keep control of the House. If this happens, Obama, if he's reelected, will find it very hard to do much of anything which, given his apparent ambitions for the country, is probably a good thing. Not only will Republicans block his legislative agenda and prevent him from naming radical judges to the federal bench and Supreme Court, but they'll surely press investigations of some of Mr. Obama's more suspect cabinet members, particularly Attorney General Eric Holder.

There are thirty three Senate seats up for reelection in 2012 and only ten of them are currently held by Republicans. The remaining twenty three are occupied by Democrats (and one Independent who caucuses with the Democrats), and several of those twenty three look very vulnerable. Given that in order to take control of the Senate the GOP need only capture seven more seats - and hold on to the ten they have - it looks like 2012 is shaping up to be a very glum year for the Democrats.

Anyway, Levin has some interesting things to say about Mr. Obama's campaign options at the link. It's an interesting read. One of the things we can expect the Republicans to press him on is what, exactly, he intends to do with four more years in the White House. As Levin observes, nothing he's already done is popular (Stimulus, Obamacare), and the only thing he's talked about doing in the future is raising taxes on the rich and imposing more regulations on business. There's nothing innovative, positive or even specific in his message. It's all vague platitudes about everyone doing their "fair share," etc.

One gets the feeling that the only reason he wants to be reelected is so he can continue to take extravagant vacations and play more golf. Of course, if Republicans wind up with control of Congress that's about all he'll be able to do.

Camp Fire Girls

Warren Cole Smith shares the improbable story of how a chance encounter with a Camp Fire Girls leader turned him into a fiscal conservative:

It was the fall of 1981. The United States was coming out of a recession. Ronald Reagan had been president since January. Among his first acts in the White House had been to dramatically cut spending for social programs.

And the woman sitting next to me on an airplane was not happy about it.

I was sitting on the aisle, and she had the window. She worked for an organization called Camp Fire Girls, now called Camp Fire USA, and she couldn’t stand Ronald Reagan. I wanted to know why. She described an after-school program she ran that served hundreds of poor children. I remember thinking then that it sounded like a worthwhile endeavor. The program had received about $100,000 — almost its entire budget — from the federal government. Reagan had eliminated that funding.

In 1981 I was a young man whose thinking was in a state of transition. In 1976 I had voted for Jimmy Carter, but in 1980 I pulled the lever for Reagan, in part because I thought Carter had shown general incompetency regarding economic matters. I had graduated from college in 1980, in the midst of the Carter Recession. I then spent more than a year in a series of part-time and temporary jobs, all the while looking for full-time employment. I had voted for Reagan not so much because I was a conscious part of the “Reagan Revolution,” but because — like many who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — I was hoping for change.

So when this Camp Fire Girl leader started railing against Reagan, I offered no defense. “That’s terrible,” I said. “Sorry that program got eliminated. What do you do now?”

“Oh,” she said. “I still run the program.”

I was confused. “I thought you said Reagan eliminated the program,” I said.

Smith goes on to recount the rest of the tale of how this conversation precipitated his conversion to conservatism. It's interesting. Check it out at the link.

Why Do They Dislike Him So?

Denver quarterback Tim Tebow has become something of a cultural phenomenon in the last couple of months, hated by some, loved by many (He was voted the most popular professional athlete in a recent ESPN poll). It's easy to understand why he's loved, of course. He's a great success story - told by most experts that he lacked the skills to be a successful pro quarterback, relegated to third string on the Denver depth chart, coming off the bench to lead his team to several dramatic last minute, last second, victories and propel them into the playoffs.

On top of that he is by all accounts a humble young man of outstanding character and leadership skills. It's a perfect script for a Hollywood movie.

So why is he disliked, perhaps even hated? Ostensibly, it's because he's outspoken about being motivated by his Christian faith and love for Jesus Christ. An article by Matt Higgins at CBS elaborates:

Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has seemingly made himself the poster boy for Christianity, praying on the field after a win, putting Bible verses on his eye black during games and even starring in an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl, but one atheist group believes he’s doing it all for personal gain.

American Atheists — a New Jersey based group that promotes the separation of church and state — tells CBSDenver.com that the only reason Tebow is popular is because he constantly injects his Christianity among the public.

The only reason? There are others who have made no secret of their faith who have not achieved the level of celebrity that Tebow has. What makes Tebow different is the aura of the near-miraculous that surrounds some of his triumphs, particularly his role in the overtime win against the Pittsburgh Steelers. To the American Atheists, however, the amazing success of an unabashed Christian is like a chicken bone stuck in their windpipe:

When we watch a sporting event, we are all united for our team,” says David Silverman, president of American Atheists. “Tebow takes religion and injects it into the mix and divides the fan base.

Silverman seems to think that the Denver "fan base" is as narrow-minded and intolerant of other people's desire to express their deepest convictions as he is and that their common joy over the Broncos' success disintegrates as soon as Tebow kneels briefly in the endzone after a score. Presumably, Silverman is fine with the borderline-obscene dances with which some players celebrate their success, or the embarrassingly childish antics of other players who mimic and mock their opponents after a sack or a touchdown. Those ridiculous displays of arrested development are okay, Silverman would have us believe, because they're not "divisive," but an act of genuine humility and gratitude apparently just rips fan unity to shreds in Mile High Stadium.

Silverman states that Tebow’s repeated references to God in his post-game comments after a win is "bad" for football.

“(Religion) injects the divisive force into football,” Silverman says. “Why in the world are we talking about religion when we are talking about football?”

This is laughable. Anyone who has ever listened to athletes' post-game comments knows that they're usually as trite, banal, and hackneyed as the reporters' questions that elicit them. If Silverman thinks he's missing something important when Tebow takes three seconds to thank God for helping him to do his best then he hasn't listened to very many of those interviews.

Look. Tebow hasn't promoted himself. He never asked for all this attention. He just went about his business doing his job, and the media, always digging for a story, generated all the buzz about "Tebowmania," not just in the wake of his on-field success but also as a consequence of the mockery he has endured from other athletes, commentators, and people like Silverman. People talk about him, he doesn't talk about himself. As Higgins says:

The fascination over Tebow officially reached national heights when people across the U.S. started “Tebowing,” mimicking Tebow’s sideline prayers.

But Silverman, swimming furiously against the tide of opinion of everyone who knows the young man best, alleges that Tebow is a hypocrite:

Silverman believes that Tebow is “full of crap” when he publicly displays his Christianity on the football field and said his prayers are for publicity. “It’s not that Tebow prays, it’s that he waits for the cameras to be on him to do it,” Silverman says. “He’s totally faking.”

This is absurd. How does Silverman know this? Does he have access to Tebow's mind? Does he know something about Tebow that his teammates don't? Silverman's pinched, dessicated worldview has no room for the belief that someone can be absolutely sincere about their love for God.

Athletes give thanks all the time to different people - parents, coaches, mentors - for their success. Why is it over the line for someone to believe that God is the source of their ability and to thank Him for it?

Silverman says if Tebow is truly a Christian, he would pray in private, not public. “It is not surprising Tebow ignores Matthew 6:5 in which Jesus says, ‘When you pray, do not pray like the hypocrites in the street,’” Silverman says. “They pray to be seen praying. Pray in the closet.”

So this is it? Silverman thinks that Tebow is not sincere because he's praying where people might see him? Silverman simply fails to comprehend that the passage he cites is not about where one prays but about why one prays. Jesus is adjuring his followers not to pray with the purpose of bringing some sort of renown or credit to themselves but to pray with sincere gratitude to God.

Of course, Silverman doesn't think Tebow is sincere, but that's more a reflection upon Silverman's cynical and uninformed view of Christianity than it is upon Tebow whose sincerity no one closest to him questions.

David Silverman might be a pleasant enough fellow in person, but in this piece he comes across as sour, jealous, and petty. What a contrast with the guy he seems so bitter toward.

Snowy Owl

This winter has seen an influx of one of the largest and most beautiful North American owls into the lower 48. Fans of Harry Potter are familiar with the Snowy owl, but most people have never seen one in the wild. Snowies are residents of the Arctic tundra where they feed largely on lemmings, but they move southward in winter and sometimes travel all the way to the U.S.

This year there's been a large-scale movement of these owls into the states and several have turned up in Pennsylvania. Unlike most owls, which are nocturnal, snowy owls are diurnal — they're active both day and night which makes them easy to see if one is in the area.

Snowy Owl

A Snowy was found recently near Shippensburg which isn't far from where I live so I went this afternoon to see it. It was a gorgeous bird, large and almost completely white. Younger owls have dark edges to their feathers giving a barred appearance, but older Snowies, especially older males, are almost completely white.

There's a very interesting story on this year's irruption of these birds which can be read here.

Where Things Stand

Strategy Page fills us in on the nature and effects of the sanctions imposed against Iran:

These sanctions ...prohibited Iran's major customers from buying Iranian oil, and made it more difficult to pay for it if they did buy the stuff. The Europeans are switching suppliers, and East Asian ones (at least Japan and South Korea) are under pressure to do so. China is lining up suppliers outside the Persian Gulf. The $110 billion annual oil revenue is what keeps the Iranian religious dictatorship in power. As those new sanctions went into effect at the end of 2010, the value of the Iranian currency plummeted over ten percent and the Iranian economy shuddered.

Actually, in the last year, the Iranian currency has lost 60 percent of its value against foreign currencies. Now, it costs 16,000 Iranian riyals to buy one U.S. dollar. A year ago, it only cost 10,000. So not only are smugglers demanding higher fees to get forbidden goods to Iran (because of the increased risk of getting caught and prosecuted), but it costs 60 percent more to buy foreign currency to pay the smugglers, or legitimate suppliers of goods. All this grief doesn't get much attention in the foreign press, but in Iran it's big and seemingly unending bad news. Iran also sees income cut by ten percent because of additional banking sanctions, which makes it riskier to do business with Iran (and not have your transaction seized for violating sanctions.)

The new sanctions will not be completely successful, but if Iranian oil income were cut by a third or more, most Iranians would feel it. Iran has responded with threats, saying it will close the Straits of Hormuz (the narrow entrance to the Persian Gulf, where 40 percent of world oil passes on its way to world markets). Another aspect of the new sanctions makes it more difficult (and expensive) for Iranian banks to operate overseas. Iranian economists and financial experts have convinced Iran's leaders that the new sanctions are worse than any previous ones and a real threat to the Iranian economy, and the survival of the religious dictatorship.

So the new sanctions have teeth, or will have if they're imposed rigorously. How will the Iranians respond? Strategy Page lays out the likely scenario:

Iran has long issued dire threats, and never followed through. Iran much prefers to operate in the shadows by quietly supporting terrorists and irregulars. Iran could use this approach by using submarines and small boats to plant naval mines in the Straits of Hormuz. This would quickly escalate as local and foreign navies moved in mine-clearing forces, along with warships and aircraft to protect the continuous mine-clearing operation. Iranian bases would be attacked to destroy the mines and delivery vehicles (small subs and boats). This would quickly escalate to an attack on all Iranian military equipment.

That is not likely to happen any time soon, as it will take months before the sanctions actually translate into significant lost Iranian oil sales. During that time, negotiations, many of them secret, will take place with Iran about nuclear weapons, support for terrorism and other bad behavior.

Perhaps the one thing that will give the Iranian fanatics pause as they try to find a way to survive an all-out war such as the one that toppled Saddam Hussein is that they have precious few friends in the world, not even in the Middle East:

Iran's bad behavior (supporting terrorism, developing nuclear weapons, threatening neighbors) has left it with few foreign friends. China, one of its major trading partners, is its major customer for oil. But China has made it clear that if Iran finds itself with more oil than customers, China will expect to pay less for Iranian oil, if only to compensate for any sanctions damage China might suffer.

Russia is another Iranian ally, but will not do much to help, because closing, or even trying to close, the Straits of Hormuz will be a bonanza for Russia, a major oil exporter that does not use the Straits of Hormuz. Oil prices will surge as long as there are problems at the Straits of Hormuz. Other Iranian friends, like North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, are more a burden than a benefit.

Iran is holding very few high cards in this poker game. The smart thing to do would be to fold and follow the Libyan example of giving up nuclear aspirations. Unfortunately, fanatics don't always do the smart thing, and even when they do they often push matters to the very brink before they pull back.

There are other factors working against Iran. For instance, our pullout from Iraq has opened up Iraqi airspace making it much easier for Israeli warplanes to reach Iranian targets. Will Israel avail themselves of the opportunity?

Another is the coming presidential election. How will Mr. Obama's electoral prospects bear on what we do in Iran? If he's polling behind his opponent in October will he be more likely or less likely to launch a strike at Iran's nuclear facilities in order to gain a popularity surge?

My own feeling is that the Iranians will not back down and neither will the Israelis. In the end, neither will the U.S. The Iranians believe they're on a mission from God. The Israelis believe their survival is at stake, and the U.S. has said many times that we will not accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Given those three positions it's hard to see how the worst will be averted, unless there's a change in leadership in Iran.

Another Iranian Scientist Hit

You'd never know it from watching the news talk shows, obsessed as they are with Mitt Romney's machinations at Bain Capital, but we seem to be hurtling toward war with Iran. The Iranians are determined to build a nuclear weapon and, one hopes, we're determined to prevent it. The U.S. is now poised to impose tough sanctions on Iran which, if they do what they're supposed to do, will cripple Iran's already feeble economy.

Iran threatens to retaliate by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz which would block a lot of oil from getting from the wells to the market and cause oil prices to skyrocket around the globe. Of course, it would also shut down their own ability to sell oil which seems somewhat counterproductive.

In any event, the U.S. has vowed it will not let the Iranians close the Strait.

Meanwhile, Debkafile reports that yet another Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated in Tehran:

Forty-eight hours after Iran began advanced uranium enrichment in the fortified Fordo bunker near Tehran, Prof. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, deputy director of the first uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was killed early Wednesday, Jan. 11 by a sticky bomb planted on his car by two motorcyclists. It exploded near the Sharif technological university in northern Tehran.

The pair made their escape. Prof. Ahmadi-Roshan was the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be mysteriously assassinated in Tehran in two years. The same method of operation was used in a similar operation last year. Iran has blamed them all on Israel.

There's more on this at the link. One wonders how deep the Iranian's bench of nuclear scientists is and how much it has to be attrited before the nuclear weapons program grinds to a halt.

One also wonders how these guys sleep at night knowing that they're probably on the list to be blown to smithereens, and that if they escape and are successful in building a nuke, it'll be used to blow a lot of children to smithereens. It must be as tough on the nerves as it is on the conscience, if they have one.

Anyway, perhaps the Iranians can be persuaded to give up their nuclear ambitions before it comes to war or before any more scientists are dispatched to Paradise, but there's not much grounds for optimism, I fear.

The Conflict

I've just finished reading Alvin Plantinga's latest book Where the Conflict Really Lies and recommend it enthusiastically to anyone interested in issues lying at the interface of science, philosophy, and religion. Plantinga is probably the most consequential philosopher of the last thirty years so whenever he speaks the entire philosophical community listens.

His project, as he makes clear several times throughout the book, is not to argue for the existence of God, nor to argue that atheism is false, nor to argue that evolution is bogus (he himself accepts the principle of descent through modification), but rather to argue that those who believe that science and religion (or more precisely, theism) are incompatible with each other are mistaken.

Indeed, he argues for much more than that. He mounts a persuasive case that whatever conflict there is between science and theism is superficial, but that there is profound conflict between science and naturalism - the belief, as Plantinga states it, that there is no God nor anything like God. He also wants to show that the concord between science and theism is deep while the concord between science and naturalism is superficial.

This will not surprise those who've been reading Plantinga for a while since he's been making this case in various venues for at least twenty years, but it'll come as a shock, perhaps, to many who've been inculcated with the idea that science and religion have been at war with each other ever since the Enlightenment.

Plantinga argues that the notion that evolution discredits theism is simply wrong. There's no conflict between evolution and theism. There is, however, great conflict between theism and unguided evolution, the idea that evolution is a purely fortuitous unplanned process governed only by natural forces. The belief that evolution is unguided in this sense, however, is not any part of proper science. It's metaphysics. It's an entailment of naturalism.

Moreover, naturalistic evolution is incompatible with confidence that our cognitive faculties (our reason) are reliable. If unguided evolution is a fact then we have no grounds for trusting any belief that we hold including the belief that unguided evolution is a fact. One can be an atheist (or naturalist), or an evolutionist, or believe that his reason is trustworthy, but he can't hold all three positions at the same time.

Plantinga has been making this argument for a long time and he's at his persuasive best in Conflict. Since the theory of evolution is a major pillar of modern science and since it's virtually impossible to dispense with confidence in our cognitive faculties, it seems that the conflict is between science and any metaphysics which entails the conclusion that we can't trust our cognitive faculties. That is, the conflict is really between science and naturalism.

This is not the place to lay out Plantinga's argument in detail, so I encourage anyone interested in these issues and who has read a little bit of philosophy to read the book for themselves. It's very accessible to the layman and constitutes one of the best rebuttals to the New Atheists on the market today. It can be ordered from our favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

Tebow

For those, like me, who are reveling in how Tim Tebow is making his detractors look like chuckleheads, I offer this little diversion from our usual fare:

Moral Confusion, Logical Consistency

In an excellent piece at The Algemeiner Rabbi Moshe Averick analyzes the statements of four prominent atheistic thinkers with regard to the Jerry Sandusky pederasty allegations and finds that none of them have any basis for deploring or condemning what Sandusky is accused of doing. The interesting thing is that all but one of them admits it.

After clarifying precisely what he will claim in his argument Rabbi Averick examines the moral philosophy (and confusions) of philosophers Michael Ruse, Jason Rosenhouse, and Joel Marks as well as biologist Jerry Coyne, all four of whom have been discussed here at VP over the last couple of years.

He begins with Ruse who wants to have it both ways. Ruse says in several places that morality is a purely subjective phenomenon, but then in the wake of the Sandusky revelations he insists that "I want to say that what Jerry Sandusky was reportedly doing to kids in the showers was morally wrong, and that this was not just an opinion or something based on subjective value judgments. The truth of its wrongness is as well taken as the truth of the heliocentric solar system.”

How can he say this? What does he base it on? Actually, as his fellow atheists point out and Rabbi Averick explains, he bases it on nothing more substantive than that he simply feels very strongly that abusing young boys is wrong.

Coyne, Rosenhouse and Marks are more faithful to their fundamental assumption that there is no God. They just deny that pedophilia is really wrong. Here's Marks, for example:

Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.

He further explains his position in this passage:

The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. [Some atheists] would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Averick closes his post with a plea to atheists:

The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.

Atheism stands for nothing, signifies nothing, and affirms nothing except for one thing: All the moral aspirations of the advanced primate we call a human being are nothing more than a cosmic joke….and not a very funny one at that.

Ideas have consequences. Some people think that there's no difference between theists and atheists except that theists go to church, synagogue or mosque and believe a lot of crazy things. Nothing could be further from the case. There's a wide chasm between the two worldviews and Averick highlights it in this column.

The atheist has no basis for making moral judgments other than his own subjective, arbitrary feelings and tastes. When the atheist says pederasty is wrong he's saying nothing more than "I don't like pederasty." Any judgment based on one's personal tastes, however, has no more moral force than saying "I don't like sushi and you shouldn't like it either." One's personal preferences certainly don't make something morally wrong.

Here's the difficulty the atheist finds himself in: If there is no God then Sandusky's pedophilia is not morally wrong, but most atheists feel deep inside themselves that pedophilia is morally wrong. Thus they hold two mutually incompatible beliefs at the same time. Their problem is compounded in that despite holding simultaneous incompatible beliefs they also hold the belief that they're somehow more rational than the theist.

As more and more atheists realize where their disbelief logically leads them they find themselves confronted with the choice of either abandoning their disbelief or embracing moral nihilism which, as Averick notes, dooms them to a man-made hell of the human jungle where not even the sexual abuse of children can be said to be wrong.

Do read Rabbi Averick's post and also the comments. Some of them afford excellent examples of missing the point and other failed attempts to avoid the force of the rabbi's argument.

Does the Future Belong to Islam?

In a recent column Pat Buchanan gives reason to answer this question either way. First some reasons to think the answer is yes:

If demography is destiny, the future would seem to belong to Islam.

Consider. The six most populous Muslim nations — Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Turkey — had a total population of 242 million in 1950. By 2050, that 242 million will have quintupled to 1.36 billion people.

Meanwhile, Europe’s fertility rate has been below zero population growth since the 1970s. Old Europe is dying, and its indigenous peoples are being replaced by Third World immigrants, millions of them Muslim.

But there are also reasons for thinking the answer is no:

[T]here is another side to the Islamic story.

In international test scores of high school students in reading, math and science, not one Muslim nation places in the top 30. Take away oil and gas, and from Algeria to Iran these nations would have little to offer the world. Iran would have to fall back on exports of carpets, caviar and pistachio nuts.

Not one Muslim nation is a member of the G-8 economic powers or the BRIC-four emerging powers — Brazil, Russia, India, China.

In the 20th century, the world saw the rise of the Asian “tigers” — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong. Where are the Muslim tigers?

A few years back, the gross domestic product of the entire Arab world was only equal to Spain’s. Take away oil and gas, and its exports were equal to Finland’s.

Measured by manufacturing power, the Islamic world, though more populous, cannot hold a candle to China. And while Islam was a civilization superior in some ways to the West from the 7th to 17th century, somewhere that world began to stagnate and decline.

So the question arises: If Islamism is capturing Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, and will capture other Muslim nations as the Arab Spring advances, where is the historic evidence that these Islamic regimes can convert their states into manufacturing and military powers?

Where is the evidence that Islamist regimes, such as Sudan and Iran, can deliver what their peoples demanded when they brought down the dictators?

And if, like the communist regimes of the 20th century, they cannot deliver the good life that the rebels sought when they dumped the tyrants, what will follow Islamism, when Islamism inevitably fails?

In the long run, does Islamism really own the future of the Islamic world? Or has the clock begun to run on the fundamentalists as well?

The only way the Islamic world could come to dominate the world would be if an effete West simply decides it doesn't want to fight for its culture, which is certainly a possibility. Otherwise, the Islamic world will be a force to reckon with only so long as it has oil.

After the oil is gone, or it becomes available elsewhere, the strict uniformity of thought - religious, scientific, and political - imposed by Islamic authorities will stifle any incipient advance, and the loss of oil revenue will cause the rest of the Islamic world to revert to the same levels of poverty which prevail in those countries, like Afghanistan, which have no petroleum.

The crucial question is whether the West has the will to resist the Islamic quest for world domination until that happens.

Do We Have Free Will? (Pt. II)

Biologist Jerry Coyne, an atheist, wrote a column for USA Today in which he teases out the implications of an atheistic worldview for our belief in human free will. I shared some thoughts on the article on Saturday and would like to finish those up today.

Coyne argues that atheism, or metaphysical naturalism, entails that there is no free will as it is commonly understood. In other words, at every given moment there really is only one possible future and the conviction that we really were free to choose other than what we did choose is an illusion.

Toward the end of his column he talks about the implications of his denial of free will for our belief that we're morally responsible for the choices we make:

But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can't really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren't freely chosen?

We should recognize that we already make some allowances for this problem by treating criminals differently if we think their crimes resulted from a reduction in their "choice" by factors like mental illness, diminished capacity, or brain tumors that cause aggression. But in truth those people don't differ in responsibility from the "regular" criminal who shoots someone in a drug war; it's just that the physical events behind their actions are less obvious.

But we should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you'll behave badly in the future. Even without free will then, we can still use punishment to deter bad behavior, protect society from criminals, and figure out better ways to rehabilitate them. What is not justified is revenge or retribution — the idea of punishing criminals for making the "wrong choice." And we should continue to reward good behavior, for that changes brains in a way that promotes more good behavior.

Set aside the objection that, given determinism, there is no "good" or "bad" behavior, just behaviors that we like or don't like. Still, Coyne never addresses the important point. If determinism is true not only are reward and punishment never deserved, but moral outrage is absurd. The man who tortures children and then kills them is not immoral. Those who let others starve while indulging themselves to excess are not immoral. The person who legally bilks the elderly out of their life savings is not immoral. There's no moral duty not to do any of these things.

None of those things are wrong because to be wrong an act has to be in some sense freely chosen by the agent. If a "choice" is merely the result of fermions and bosons spinning about in someone's brain then there simply is no moral responsibility.

It's understandable why Coyne would finesse this point by raising it and then changing the subject to crime, though. If he were to follow the logic of his claim that we can't hold people morally responsible for their actions most of his readers would be repelled by his conclusion and thus repelled by the atheism that leads to it.

Is Romney Worse Than Obama?

One of the left's criticisms of presidential candidate Mitt Romney is that his work at Bain Capital resulted in people losing their jobs. In order to make their business clients stronger in the long-run real people were sacrificed. This is cited as proof that Romney is heartless and ill-suited to be president.

It's an amusing ploy as A. Barton Hinkle, in a column at Reason shows. It turns out that this very criticism of Romney, that he eliminated some jobs in order to make his clients stronger and better off in the end, is precisely the same rationale that the left uses to justify the loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industries.

Hinkle notes that:

[J]ust a couple of weeks ago the AP reported that “more than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of new federal air pollution regulations.” That estimate is based “on the [EPA]’s own prediction of power plant retirements.” When a plant shuts down, people lose their jobs – regardless of whether the job losses are offset by gains elsewhere.

In other words, forcing people out of work is okay when government does it in the name of improving human well-being, but it's a terrible thing when a private firm does it in order to make their business more efficient. Hinkle goes on to say that:

The Center’s overview notes that green-energy cheerleading includes “no analysis of job destruction due to increased cost of energy.” Furthermore, “there is no effort to balance the potential positive impacts with potential negative impacts of job destruction and higher energy costs. In a sense, these studies are cost-benefit analyses without any cost considerations.”

Now, you can argue—the EPA certainly does—that environmental regulations which force coal plants to shut down make society better off in the aggregate. You also can argue ... that while environmental rules might cause job losses over here, they are more than offset by job gains over there. And you can likewise argue that, in the long run, Americans will all be better off if Washington forces the country to embrace green energy.

Just remember: If you do argue those things, then you are making the same point Romney makes about the “creative destruction” of leveraged buyouts: Over the long term, it makes everybody better off—despite the temporary “human toll.”

Here's Hinkle's conclusion:

There is one major difference, however. If you disapprove of what Bain and other venture-capital firms do to companies, you don't have to support it. That's one of nice things about free enterprise: You're free to choose. But if you disapprove of what the federal government's energy policies do to companies, too bad. You're going to take part—whether you like it or not.

During the campaign candidate Obama promised, essentially, to destroy the coal industry. If Romney were to say something like this the media would be apoplectic over the number of jobs people would lose:

For more on the human consequences of the president's war on fossil fuels see this article at Prison Planet.

Do We Have Free Will?

One of the enduring philosophical questions is the nature of human volition or choice. Are our choices really free, as we feel them to be, or are they the inexorable product of our genetic dispositions or the environmental influences exerted on us throughout our lives? If our choices, or at least some of them, really are free what does that mean? What exactly is a free choice? Is it completely uncaused and spontaneous? If so, in what sense can we be responsible for it?

If, on the other hand, our choices are determined by factors over which we have no control it doesn't seem we could be responsible for them either. Moreover, if our choices are the inevitable result of extrinsic factors like our childhood upbringing, etc. then how can there be an obligation to behave one way rather than another? How can we have a duty to do anything unless we can make a meaningful decision to do it?

Biologist Jerry Coyne is an atheistic materialist who shares his thoughts on this matter in a column in USA Today. According to Coyne atheism entails determinism, and this has very important consequences. I think he's right. Here's part of his column:

You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation. A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.

Coyne is correct, I believe, if his implied assumption that brains are all that are involved in the choices we make is correct, but why think it is? If, in addition to our brains, we are also possessed of an immaterial mind (or soul) then all this talk about physics determining our choices is so much flummery. In order for Coyne's argument to have any force one would have to accept his materialism, but in order to accept materialism Coyne would have to persuade us that there's no immaterial mind and this task he doesn't assay. He just assumes it as though it were a settled matter. It's not.

Parenthetically, it's odd that he suggests that our brains, like real computers, are programmed by blind forces like genes and experiences. Real computers are programmed by minds and would hardly function, let alone evolve, were they solely operated and designed by random, purely physical forces.

In any case, we have an overwhelming sensation of being free. That sensation - Coyne calls it an illusion - would seem improbable if materialism is true but not so unlikely if we, in fact, have an immaterial aspect to our selves, a mind or soul. A mind or soul, however, would seem to be less probable on atheism than on theism. Thus, our sense that we are free seems more likely to be correct if theism is true than if atheism is true. That's why atheists like Coyne are anxious to persuade us that we're not free.

In other words, if you believe you are able to make choices that are in some sense free, if you believe that at least at some moments in time there is more than one possible future, then you should be a theist of some sort. Your belief in free will is much less likely to be true if atheism is true. The sensation of being free counts as evidence for theism and against atheism, and the belief that one really is free comports more easily with theism than with atheism.

I'll have a bit more to say on Coyne's column on Monday.