Limits of Atheism

Suppose a controversy erupted among scientists and philosophers over, say, the ability of the Big Bang to account for certain cosmological facts about the world, or suppose the controversy swirled around whether the theory of quantum mechanics was correct. How many people outside the relevant disciplines would take much of an interest? Probably very few. Why then do so many non-scientists react so vigorously to challenges to traditional Darwinism?

This is the question that David Warren asks in a column in the Ottawa Citizen titled The Limits of Atheism. He concludes that the reason is because it's not the scientific convictions of the non-scientists that are under assault by the skeptics of Darwinism, it's their religious beliefs.

Most non-scientists who hold fervently to the Darwinian view of life do so not because they're convinced by the evidence, indeed, they often know little about the evidence. Rather they cling tenaciously to the theory because it's a necessary prop for their atheism. Atheism demands a naturalistic explanation of life and the cosmos, and if Darwinism is cast into doubt then so are the religious convictions it undergirds.

It should be pointed out that many non-scientists are hostile to Darwinism for the same reason. Darwinism, many of its opponents realize, is antagonistic to belief in a creator God, and so they reject it reflexively quite apart from the evidence for or against it. The difference is this latter group freely acknowledges their motive for doubting Darwin whereas the former group does not.

RLC

Slipping Toward Revolution?

All is not well in Ahmadinejad's Iran. This article provides the details.

RLC

The Chinese and the Taliban

Strategy Page has a somewhat surprising piece on growing hostilities between the Taliban and the communist Chinese in Pakistan:

Currently, 7,000 Pakistani military and police personnel protect Chinese working inside Pakistan. In addition, there are a small, but growing, number of Chinese security personnel. The Chinese security detachment works with the Chinese community in Pakistan, to make sure there are no misunderstandings about the need for tight security. The Chinese security personnel also advise the Pakistanis on Chinese security needs, and help get needed technical equipment brought in from China. The major danger to Chinese in Pakistan is Islamic terrorists. Most of these are al Qaeda, and local Islamic radicals (mostly Taliban) who want Pakistan run by a religious dictatorship.

Since China has come down hard on real, or perceived, Islamic radicalism at home, China is seen by Pakistani Islamic radicals as "foreign devils" and "enemies of Islam." The Islamic radicals recognize that China is crucial to maintaining Pakistani military and police power, and keeping the current government in power. So there are more attacks on Chinese by Pakistani Islamic radicals....

....All this Chinese counter-terror work is done very quietly, and covertly. That may keep it out of the Western press, but the Chinese are increasingly tagged as major bad guys by the Islamic media, especially the outlets that are pro-radical.

I certainly don't wish to see innocent Chinese civilians suffer the outrages of terrorism, but part of me wonders if it wouldn't at least be interesting to see what China would do if the Taliban began targeting them in earnest.

RLC

Don't Confuse Him with the Facts

"Regardless of what they say, we need a change in direction." So says Sen. Bob Casey (D, PA) while talking about the upcoming Petraeus-Crocker report.

The Senator is telling us that even if the September report is unsullied good news - even if Gen. Petraeus informs us that the surge is minimizing the killing and chaos, that the Maliki government is getting its house in order, that al Qaida is on the run and the Sunnis and Shia are cooperating to end the insurgency - the Senator will still call for a "change in direction." He makes it difficult to take him seriously.

Which direction would the Senator suggest we move in? He doesn't say, of course, because this would require serious thought about the consequences of whatever proposal he comes up with, and I suspect that he realizes that if he engages in that thinking any resulting proposal would look very much like what Bush is already doing.

His insistence that we'll need a change in direction in Iraq regardless of what Gen. Petraeus has to say makes one wonder about the depth of his concern for the people of Iraq, not to mention his ability to see beyond the next couple of months.

RLC

And the Point Is?

There is perhaps in this photo a serious and profound symbolism - something that most of us simply cannot be expected to comprehend but that those with the requisite wisdom will discern. It has something to do, I suppose, with removing one's clothes to more effectively demonstrate one's committment to a cause. I confess, however, that I lack the necessary powers to see what lying en masse on a glacier in the altogether has to do with anything except perhaps one's emotional development.

It seems to me that people who think they must be nude in order to make some political point are not far removed from the people who walk down the street exposing themselves to passersby. They're both trying to say something by flashing their privates at people, and they're both in need, no doubt, of the services of a psychologist.

RLC

No Dhimmitude for This Man

Pat Condell is antagonistic to all religion, a position about which I think he's just plain wrong, but in this short YouTube presentation he says many things which need to be said, particularly regarding European appeasement of Muslims.

It is this spirit of submission to which Condell takes such acerbic exception and which spawns such loopy proposals as that of Bishop Tiny Muskins of Netherlands who has urged Christians to begin referring to God as Allah so that Muslims won't be so hostile toward us (See, however, Byron's reply in our Feedback section for a different view of the Bishop's proposal).

Under Sharia Law non-Muslims, if they're permitted to live at all, must accept the authority of the Koran, the dominance of Islamic rule and live in abject servility as second or third class citizens. Such people are called dhimmis by Muslims, and it is to this status that many Europeans seem to aspire. Not, however, Pat Condell.

Too bad he doesn't understand Christianity as well as he understands the threat posed by contemporary Islam.

RLC

Iraq Update and Questions

Bill Roggio updates us on operations Phantom Thunder and Phantom Strike. Here are some excerpts:

In today's press briefing from Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the Commanding General of Multinational Corps - Iraq, provided an operational update on Operation Phantom Thunder and its successor, Phantom Strike.

Since Phantom Thunder began in mid-June, US and Iraqi security forces have killed 1,196 extremists, wounded 419, and detained 6,702 suspected insurgents, Odierno said. Of those killed or captured, 382 are considered high-value targets. Over the past two months, US and Iraqi security forces have found 1,113 weapons caches, 2,299 IEDs and disabled 52 car bombs. "The number of found-and-cleared IEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs and caches are approximately 50 percent higher than the same period last year, due in large part to effective tips provided by concerned Iraqi citizens," Odierno said.

Phantom Thunder has had a noticeable effect on the security situation in Baghdad and beyond. "Total attacks are on a month-long decline and are at their lowest levels since August of 2006," Odierno said. "Attacks against civilians are at a six-month low, IED attacks are a two-month decline and have a 45 percent found and cleared rate." Inside Baghdad, civilian deaths are at the lowest levels since February 2006, when al Qaeda in Iraq destroyed the dome of the Golden Mosque in Samarra...

Since the "surge" of five additional US combat brigades was completed at the beginning of June, US and Iraqi forces have persistently remained on the offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq and the Iranian-backed Shia terror groups. Al Qaeda in Iraq has not had time to regroup and reestablish itself as US and Iraqi forces maintain the pressure with rolling operations. Just as the push to clear Baghdad began to ramp up with the "surge," Phantom Thunder was launched in the major population centers in the Belts. Just as al Qaeda looks to move its operations into the less patrolled rural regions, Phantom Strike and Lightning Hammer were launched to tackle these regions.

This is a major difference from 2006, when Multinational Forces Iraq failed to conduct a cohesive battle plan to address al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency, while ceding large sections of Baghdad and portions of southern Iraq to the Mahdi Army. The attempt to secure Baghdad in 2006 failed as there was little effort to dislodge the terror groups from the Belts surrounding Baghdad.

Now all this raises a couple of questions. Here's one for Democrats in general: If this trend looks like it's continuing next month will you still be calling for withdrawal of American forces?

And here's one for Sen. Harry Reid and Congressman John Murtha in particular: Do you still maintain that the war in Iraq is a lost cause?

And finally, here's one for the MSM: What are the chances you guys will ask either of these questions?

RLC

Our Guy

Jim Geraghty at NRO has a piece on our guy Mike Huckabee. There are a lot of good horses in the Republican stable but Huck's beginning to look like a contender.

If Newt Gingrich were running he'd be another strong candidate, notwithstanding the personal baggage he's carrying (Who in this race isn't carrying baggage?). This brief clip of Newt gives the viewer a sense of why he'd be such an attractive candidate for conservatives.

RLC

Road to Dhimmiville

Here's a wonderful idea proposed by a Catholic bishop in the Netherlands: He suggests that in the interest of religious harmony Christians should call God Allah. This will please (and appease) Muslims, the bishop avers, and they'll be so much more agreeably disposed toward Christians because of it.

We here at Viewpoint think the prelate is on to something, so why stop at calling God Allah? There's much more Christians can do to mollify their Muslim neighbors and to persuade them of our good will. For instance, why not begin calling Mohammed the Messiah and start celebrating Ramadan? Think of the good feelings those two simple acts would engender among the faithful minions of Islam.

We also think it's high time Christian women got serious about modesty and started wearing the hijab, if not the burka, and what would be wrong with bowing five times a day toward Mecca? God, er, Allah, doesn't care which direction we face when we pray, so it may as well be toward Mecca as any other direction.

We are indebted to the good bishop for coming up with such a fertile idea, an idea certain to put us firmly on the road to universal religious peace and harmony. After all, why should Christians be all persnickety about holding on to their theological principles and traditions when peace can be so easily had by just giving them up?

RLC

Moral Darwinism

Byron passes along this piece by Ben Wiker on what evolution has to teach us about morality. The closing paragraphs, in particular, caught my eye:

While he didn't call for direct extermination of the weak, Darwin did believe that the unfit shouldn't be allowed to breed at all. As for the fit, "there should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring."

What does this mean? Forced sterilization? The end of monogamy? Breeding camps for the hyper-fit and concentration camps for the unfit? Darwin was purposely vague, but ended with the ominous remark: "All do good service who aid toward this end." Well, that's morality according to Darwin. Again, it ain't pretty, but all must agree on one thing. Darwin correctly drew the logical moral implications from his evolutionary theory. It's hard for the most adamant advocates of Darwin to recall the horrors of the 20th century-to bring to mind all those who thought they were doing "good service" by the eugenic elimination of the unfit-and not squirm a bit.

In his book, From Darwin to Hitler, Richard Weikart fleshes out the connections between the Nazi holocaust and the 19th century eugenics movement which was, as Weikert demonstrates, largely inspired by Darwin. Ideas have consequences and the consequences of Darwinism have not been particularly lovely.

RLC

Kirk on Conservatism

I came across a link recently to an essay by Russell Kirk in which he outlines ten key principles of philosophical conservativism. It's an excellent primer on what it means to be conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke.

One of the best paragraphs in the essay is the conclusion wherein Kirk observes that:

The great line of demarcation in modern politics, Eric Voegelin used to point out, is not a division between liberals [i.e. classical liberals] on one side and totalitarians on the other. No, on one side of that line are all those men and women who fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of that line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.

In other words, the great divide in modern politics, at least in the West, is between secular materialism which holds that man is nothing but a flesh and bone machine, and Judeo-Christian theism which holds that man has an inherent dignity and worth because he has been created by God in His image and is loved by Him. The implications of each of those views are immeasurable. The first leads to tyranny and totalitarianism while the second leads to freedom and human achievement.

RLC

The Speed of Light

An article in The U.K.Telegraph says that German scientists are claiming to have broken the speed of light barrier. If they have, it'll almost certainly throw much of our entire understanding of physics into disarray.

The article gives a couple of reasons why, but here's one. Increasing the speed of an object takes increasing amounts of energy and, according to relativity theory, as the object approaches the speed of light the energy it takes to make it go even faster begins to approach infinity. In other words, to accelerate an object beyond 186,000 miles per second would take all the energy in the universe. This seems impossible and so it had been thought that such speeds were impossible to attain.

If the German physicists have done it physics will never be the same and science fiction will theoretically no longer be fiction.

RLC

Interesting Fact

Bill Roggio, discussing operations related to Phantom Thunder in Iraq, notes that "The aggressive pace of operations since January has resulted in an explosion in the prison population. There are currently 42,000 detainees in Iraqi and Multinational Forces Iraq custody. Of those detained, 2,760 are foreign fighters as of August 8. This number includes over 800 Iranians."

Eight hundred Iranians!?

RLC

War Weary

Polls, we are told, show us that the American people are tired of the war and want it ended. This causes us to wonder. Why, or how, could anyone in the States, except for those and their families who have served in Iraq, possibly be tired of the war? What sacrifices have the rest of us made in the war effort? How has the war effected us? What burdens have we had to bear because of it?

Perhaps people don't mean that they themselves have been in any way inconvenienced by the conflict but that they're tired of young Americans dying in the struggle to stabilize Iraq. This doesn't seem quite plausible, though. It's true that the deaths of young Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hard to bear, but if it's deaths of Americans that have caused so many to demand an end to the war why aren't they upset about the far greater number of Americans who are murdered each year on the streets of our cities?

More Pennsylvanians were murdered just in the city of Philadelphia last year than have been killed in Iraq since the war began (approx. 400 to 170), but no one is demanding that we do anything much about urban violence. It certainly hasn't become a dominant issue in the Presidential campaign.

Why aren't those who are upset about American deaths in Iraq also upset about the six thousand teenagers who are killed each year in automobile accidents? These deaths could be largely prevented simply by raising the driving age, but the concern over them apparently isn't strong enough to cause us to take such a relatively easy step. If we're not losing sleep over those deaths why do the casualties in Iraq upset us?

But if it's not American deaths per se which have people so war weary what exactly is it? Perhaps we're just tired of hearing about the war on the news and want it over with. If so, that's a reason which does little to flatter the common sense of the American people. Being tired of hearing about the struggle for the survival of millions of people, including perhaps, our own children, is about the very worst reason we could have for withdrawing our troops from Iraq.

Perhaps people just tell pollsters that they're tired of the war because they think that saying that they're not tired sounds somehow callous or indifferent. It would be like telling a pollster that of course we're fed up with the blood on our city streets, even if we've never given it a thought, because to say otherwise seems almost an endorsement of the violence.

But if this is the reason why polls show many Americans to be weary of the war then those poll results are completely meaningless. They tell us nothing about how Americans really feel about what's going on in Iraq.

RLC

Al Qaida in Iraq

Christopher Hitchens considers the argument sometimes made by anti-war folk that we created al Qaida in Iraq and that if we'd just leave they'd have no reason to continue their butcheries. According to advocates of this line of thinking, it's our fault that Iraqis are dying at the hands of murderous savages and if we'd simply abandon the war the bloodshed would stop.

In the pantheon of ludicrous arguments this one, in my opinion, occupies a privileged niche. Hitchens explains why.

RLC

Human Evolution

An interesting article by Seth Borenstein on a new discovery related to human evolution raises a fascinating question. The discovery is that two previously alleged ancestors to modern humans, Homo habilis and Homo erectus were actually contemporaries and lived in close geographical proximity to each other. Here are some excerpts from the story:

The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution -- that one of those species evolved from the other.

Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. She and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in today's journal Nature.

The paper is based on fossilized bones found in 2000. The complete skull of Homo erectus was found within walking distance of an upper jaw of Homo habilis, and both dated from the same general time period. That makes it unlikely that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis, researchers said.

Here's the question: If all this is so how do we know that the two were different species? A species is defined as a population of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. There's no way to determine whether habilis and erectus could or could not do that. The fact that they were geographically and chronologically close and that they are classified in the same genus makes it entirely possible that they were interfertile.

One of the study's authors, however, smells trouble brewing along these lines and seeks to discourage speculation that the two may have been a single species:

Study co-author Fred Spoor, a professor of evolutionary anatomy at the University College in London [says that] the two species lived near each other, but probably didn't interact, each having its own "ecological niche," Spoor said. Homo habilis was likely more vegetarian while Homo erectus ate some meat, he said. Like chimps and apes, "they'd just avoid each other, they don't feel comfortable in each other's company," he said.

Now I have no idea how professor Spoor knows what he claims to know. I'm sure there's no record among the fossils of one group complaining of discomfort in the presence of the other. For all I and Professor Spoor know these groups intermingled both socially and sexually. Indeed, the fact that isolated fossils were found in separate locations doesn't mean that every member of those groups lived at those locations. They may well have lived together as members of the same species.

"The more we know, the more complex the story gets," he said. Scientists used to think Homo sapiens evolved from Neanderthals, but now we know that both species lived during the same time period and that we did not come from Neanderthals. Now a similar discovery applies further back in time.

The same problem as mentioned above occurs here. Our own species was contemporary with Neanderthals so how do we know that they're really two different species? The skeletal structure appears different, to be sure, but skeletal structure is irrelevant. The skeletal structure of Great Danes and Chihuahuas differs significantly but they're still the same species. The criterion for distinct species is reproductive isolation - the inability to produce fertile offspring - not skeletal structure.

Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist and co-author of the Leakey work, said she expects anti-evolution proponents to seize on the new research, but said it would be a mistake to try to use the new work to show flaws in evolution theory.

I don't know why it would be a mistake to use this to show the flaws of evolutionary theory. Generations of students have been taught that it's a demonstrated fact that our species is linearly descended from erectus which evolved from habilis. Students since the 19th century have been shown illustrations of the progressive evolution of modern man and have been assured by their teachers that the illustrations are reasonably accurate. Now we discover that they're not accurate at all.

Meanwhile, creationists of various types, most notably the Young Earth Creationists, have for sixty years been telling us that all hominids, despite their morphological differences, are the same species. They've been insisting that the conventional assumption of a linear evolutionary progression culminating in Homo sapiens is just wrong, that the evidence for it was very weak.

The Leakey discovery confirms the creationists' argument and refutes the traditional Darwinian view. I think the creationists have a right to point that out and to remind people that the evolutionists have been wrong about this aspect of their theory for over a century.

Anton then says this:

"This is not questioning the idea at all of evolution; it is refining some of the specific points," Anton said. "This is a great example of what science does and religion doesn't do. It's a continous self-testing process."

Of course. No Darwinian would ever think that any discovery, no matter how incompatible with their theory, would ever call that theory into question, but set that aside.

What does religion have to do with this discovery? The main question raised by the article is what reason is there for assuming that H. habilis and H. erectus - or Neanderthals and H. sapiens, for that matter - are all separate and distinct species? If it turns out that they're not that fact might have dramatic philosophical and religious implications, but to suggest, as Ms Anton seems to do, that simply questioning the Darwinian paradigm of human evolution is ipso facto religious is more than a little peculiar.

RLC

Horsepucky

Hillary Clinton, who, to my knowledge, has never been to Afghanistan, says we're beginning to lose the fight there. Ann Marlowe, who has been there eight times, says that's horsepucky. Who's more credible? Read Marlowe's essay and decide for yourself.

RLC

Political Voldemort

Hmmm. What's the Great Satan up to? We don't mean the United States, we mean Karl Rove. The timing of his retirement is suspicious, don't you think? Of course, the timing of everything the Bush administration does is a matter of great anxiety for the paranoid minds of those suffering from BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome,) but the timing of anything that Rove does is especially alarming.

Whatever nefarious business this political Voldemort has set afoot by announcing his retirement it can only work to the detriment of the poor and disenfranchised. No doubt he's plotting some insidious scheme that will short-circuit the will of the people in 2008, prevent Hillary from acceding to her rightful place on the throne, and further rob the people of even more of their constitutional rights.

Our guess is that he's plotting to somehow secure a third term for George Bush, perhaps by going to Pakistan to single-handedly apprehend Osama bin Laden. The acclaim he would win by such a dastardly trick would vault Bush into office for four more years despite the constitution's proscriptions of third terms. We don't put such treachery past either of them.

There are other possibilities, of course, and no one can anticipate the multiplicity of cabals and machinations of which this man is capable. Check out this site for additional speculations on Rove's plans to destroy the nation.

RLC

An Iraqi's Thoughts

Michael J. Totten has a fascinating interview with an Iraqi interpreter. It's must reading for anyone who wishes to understand the problems of Iraq.

RLC

Pakistan's Terror Camps

Bill Roggio brings us grim news from Waziristan in Pakistan. The Taliban and al Qaida have emptied their camps in Wazaristan, having gotten wind from sympathizers in the Islamabad government that U.S. intelligence knew where they were, and now no one knows where they've gone or what they're up to.

One fear is that they know that a major attack is planned against the United States and they've fled to avoid certain reprisal. Another is that these cadres are preparing to mount a major offensive against Pervez Musharraf's military in hopes of toppling Musharraf and capturing his nuclear weapons.

Our question is if we knew where these camps - 29 of them - were, why didn't we hit them a long time ago? How serious can George Bush be about fighting the WOT if he's leaving it to Musharraf to deal with these killers?

RLC

A Free Man's Worship

We have been nothing if not persistent here at Viewpoint trying to make the case that if atheism is true human existence is an empty, pointless exercise in absurdity. But let's let an atheist speak for himself on the subject. Here's one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, writing on A Free Man's Worship:

"Such in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the d�bris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

From Mysticism and Logic, Chapter 3, of "A Free Man's Worship" (1929)

HT: Denyse O'Leary

As for us we find it a little difficult to engage in a "worship" the logical consequence of which is despair and nihilism. This is hardly a view of life that a "free man" can rejoice in. Russell and his anti-theistic successors chain themselves to a worldview that oppresses and robs its votaries not only of meaning, but of hope. It's a worldview that makes suicide a logical, understandable way out. Some freedom that is.

RLC

Inexhaustible Oil

Well-known physicist Freeman Dyson of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study has a piece in Edge in which he challenges the conventional wisdom on global warming. Along the way he mentions a very interesting theory on the origin of hydrocarbons like oil and natural gas in the earth's crust. The conventional view, which always struck me as highly implausible, is that the oil we consume today was formed millions of years ago by the decomposition of organic matter, such as rafts of floating vegetation.

Some scientific heretics, like Immanuel Velikovsky, theorized back in the fifties that the petroleum actually rained down upon earth as the planet passed through the tails of hydrocarbon-rich comets. Dyson, however, leans toward a theory espoused by the late Thomas Gold. Here's what he writes:

Later in his life, Tommy Gold promoted another heretical idea, that the oil and natural gas in the ground come up from deep in the mantle of the earth and have nothing to do with biology. Again the experts are sure that he is wrong, and he did not live long enough to change their minds. Just a few weeks before he died, some chemists at the Carnegie Institution in Washington did a beautiful experiment in a diamond anvil cell, [Scott et al., 2004]. They mixed together tiny quantities of three things that we know exist in the mantle of the earth, and observed them at the pressure and temperature appropriate to the mantle about two hundred kilometers down. The three things were calcium carbonate which is sedimentary rock, iron oxide which is a component of igneous rock, and water.

These three things are certainly present when a slab of subducted ocean floor descends from a deep ocean trench into the mantle. The experiment showed that they react quickly to produce lots of methane, which is natural gas. Knowing the result of the experiment, we can be sure that big quantities of natural gas exist in the mantle two hundred kilometers down. We do not know how much of this natural gas pushes its way up through cracks and channels in the overlying rock to form the shallow reservoirs of natural gas that we are now burning. If the gas moves up rapidly enough, it will arrive intact in the cooler regions where the reservoirs are found. If it moves too slowly through the hot region, the methane may be reconverted to carbonate rock and water. The Carnegie Institute experiment shows that there is at least a possibility that Tommy Gold was right and the natural gas reservoirs are fed from deep below. The chemists sent an E-mail to Tommy Gold to tell him their result, and got back a message that he had died three days earlier. Now that he is dead, we need more heretics to take his place.

I don't know how this explains the deposits of oil, unless the conditions necessary to form natural gas also form oil, but if Gold was right we have an almost inexhaustible supply of the stuff just waiting for us to develop the technology to go down deep enough to get it.

Just an aside: It's ironic that Edge runs a piece extolling the role of heretics in science when most of their contributors are decidely uncongenial to the most sweeping "heresy" in modern times - the "heresy" of Intelligent Design.

RLC

Fatherlessness and Crime

Cities are struggling to find ways to prevent crime. Gunshot detection monitors, increased police presence, better school facilities, safe harbors for children, job programs, etc. are all being added to our communities to try to reduce the terrible violence which plagues our communities. These measures are all fine as short-term palliatives, but what none of them do is address the reason there is so much crime in our cities in the first place.

We have crime because the family, especially in the minority communities which are most heavily represented in urban areas, has all but disintegrated. Too many children are growing up feral with no parental supervision to speak of and especially no father to give guidance and discipline to young boys.

Consider these excerpts from a City Journal article by Steve Malanga who, in the wake of the recent murders of three college students in Newark, tells us this:

Behind Newark's persistent violence and deep social dysfunction is a profound cultural shift that has left many of the city's children growing up outside the two-parent family - and in particular, growing up without fathers. Decades of research tell us that such children are far likelier to fail in school and work and to fall into violence than those raised in two-parent families. In Newark, we are seeing what happens to a community when the traditional family comes close to disappearing.

According to 2005 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 32 percent of Newark children are being raised by their parents in a two-adult household. The rest are distributed among families led by grandparents, foster parents, and single parents-mostly mothers. An astonishing 60 percent of the city's kids are growing up without fathers. It isn't that traditional families are breaking up; they aren't even getting started. The city has one of the highest out-of-wedlock birthrates in the country, with about 65 percent of its children born to unmarried women. And 70 percent of those births are to women who are already poor, meaning that their kids are born directly into poverty.

3,750 kids are born every year into fatherless Newark families.

The economic consequences of these numbers are unsettling, since single parenthood is a road to lasting poverty in America today. In Newark, single parents head 83 percent of all families living below the poverty line. If you are a child born into a single-parent family in Newark, your chances of winding up in poverty are better than one in five, but if you are born into a two-parent family, those chances drop to just one in twelve.

And the social consequences are even more disturbing. Research conducted in the 1990s found that a child born out of wedlock was three times more likely to drop out of school than the average child, and far more likely to wind up on welfare as an adult. Studies have also found that about 70 percent of the long-term prisoners in our jails, those who have committed the most violent crimes, grew up without fathers.

The starkness of these statistics makes it astonishing that our politicians and policy makers ignore the subject of single parenthood, as if it were outside the realm of civic discourse. And our religious leaders, who once preached against such behavior, now also largely avoid the issue, even as they call for prayer vigils and organize stop-the-violence campaigns in Newark. Often, in this void, the only information that our teens and young adults get on the subject of marriage, children, and family life comes through media reports about the lifestyles of our celebrity entertainers and athletes, who have increasingly shunned matrimony and traditional families. Once, such news might have been considered scandalous; today, it is reported matter-of-factly, as if these pop icons' lives were the norm.

Until our society begins to address the real root cause of crime nothing else we do is going to make any significant difference, and our cities will continue to descend toward something like Fallujah in 2003.

So why don't we do something to reverse the course? In my opinion there are two reasons: First, the left would have to admit that its grand social revolution of the sixties and seventies was an abject failure. The relaxation of sexual restraint, no-fault divorce, the view that women don't need men to raise children, along with the corrosive effects of the welfare state all combined in a perfect storm to destroy the family. The left will never acknowledge that this is the root of the problem, but we'll never be able to neutralize the acids dissolving our social fabric until they do or until they are rendered politically irrelevant.

Second, any change would require not only a return to the social mores of the fifties, which seems very unlikely, but it would also require an official stress on the importance of personal morality which would entail making a concerted effort to restore religion to a place of prominence in peoples' lives. This a secular society is ill-prepared and even less willing to do.

RLC

Michael Vick

J.C. Watts makes an important point about the charges against Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. The deeds for which Vick has been charged are inhumane and reprehensible, but they're no more savage or cruel than ripping the limbs off of an unborn baby.

We are sickened to read about what happened to dogs on Vick's property, but a large segment of people in this country, some of them the same folks who are deeply repulsed by the dog-fighting culture, believe that cutting a baby to pieces in an abortion should be legal at any point in a pregnancy up to, and including, the moment of birth.

A lot of folks apparently care more about the well-being of defenseless, innocent animals than they do about the lives of defenseless, innocent human beings.

If Vick had been licensed to kill unborn babies on his property for Planned Parenthood he wouldn't be in the difficulty he's in today. Instead he's charged with killing dogs and it may cost him millions.

RLC

The Wages of Coal

As we take time out from praying for the Utah miners and their families perhaps we might be reminded that almost 700 coal miners have died in the U.S. between 1990 and 2006. If we add to that total the health risks and economic damage caused by acid rain and other by-products of coal-burning the human cost of using this resource to produce electricity has been staggering.

The question thus presents itself: How many people have died in the U.S. since 1990, or since 1970, for that matter, from nuclear power? The answer, I think, is zero.

So why do we still rely on coal to produce our energy and refuse to build more nuclear reactors?

RLC

The Hazards of Extrapolation

Darwinians have long scoffed at the notion that there are limits to the miracles that natural selection and genetic mutation can perform. They're fond of taking evidence of relatively small variations in the genotypes and phenotypes of a population of organisms - what's called microevolution - and then extrapolating from those tiny changes to the enormous diversity of living things we see in our world. In other words, the argument goes, if one bacterium can develop a resistance to a certain antibiotic, then given enough time bacteria can develop into elephants, or something like that.

It is the argument of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution that this extrapolation is not grounded in empirical evidence and is, in fact, an assumption based upon materialist metaphysics. If natural processes are all there are, the reasoning is, then the extrapolation just has to be licit, and the diversity of life simply must have arisen by slow gradual changes over long periods of time.

Behe's counter-argument is technical and empirical, but there's an earlier case made against this kind of extrapolation which is much less technical, just as persuasive, and pretty humorous besides. I don't know if the author had Darwinism in mind when he wrote it but what he says about the hazards of extrapolation certainly applies to the Darwinian view of life:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolithic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token, any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -----Mark Twain

Darwinians begin with the fact that things change and deduce from that humble observation that the entire cosmos is a result of purely physical, mechanical processes. Like Twain says, one gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. Perhaps that's part of the appeal of Darwinism.

RLC

Bush's Immigration Legacy

Word comes that the Bush administration is going to crack down on illegal immigration. Tragically, the news is a little late for the three college students murdered in Newark last week by an illegal alien. I wonder if the families of these students are cheered to learn that illegal immigrants with rap sheets a mile long might finally find themselves a little less welcome in this country:

Jose Carranza had at least three prior arrests and was facing an aggravated assault charge in a separate case at the time of the killings.

According to court records ... Carranza was indicted twice this year - in April on aggravated assault and weapons charges; and in July on 31 counts including aggravated sexual assault of a child younger than 13. He was free on bail on the indictments.

This picture may well become the symbol of George Bush's immigration legacy.

Perhaps the grieving families of Carranza's victims should be consoled by the fact that officials turn the other way when slugs like Carranza slither by because it means that American businessmen can hire plenty of cheap labor.

It's too bad those families can't sue George Bush and every other official who either declined, or made it difficult, to deport Carranza when he first fell under the notice of authorities. Maybe if they stood to lose their shirts these people would fulfill their obligations to enforce our laws.

RLC

Cosmic Catastrophe

Four far-away galaxies, each the size of the Milky Way, collided five billion years ago, and the light from that cataclysm is just reaching us now (see photo below). The story can be found here.

One interesting thing about this is that this cosmic collision presages a similar catastrophe that will take place 5 billion years from now between the Milky Way and its neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, and the chances human life will survive such an event are pretty slim. Of course, our sun will probably die before then so there's not likely to be any life left on earth to witness the collision anyway.

In any event, here's a question for our atheist friends: What will anything anyone has done in their lives matter when the earth is blown to bits? What will all the human suffering and striving, pleasure and pain, amount to when the day of annihilation arrives?

Life looked at from the big picture perspective is pretty much an exercise in futility, a chasing after wind, a wisp of smoke, that ultimately comes to nothing - at least if atheism is true.

RLC

Re: Very Odd

A recent post here at Viewpoint received some mention at Telic Thoughts and triggered a lively discussion there. Truth to tell, most of those who disagreed with our post pretty much missed the point.

That point is this: Few academics would undertake to review a book that was not in his/her professional discipline. To do so is to cast doubt on the value of the review and the competence of the reviewer. The reviewers of Behe's latest book The Edge of Evolution are predominately scientists. It follows, therefore, that they must feel that the parts of the book that they critique deal with matters of science. Otherwise, they may as well be engineers critiquing a book on medieval poetry.

Now Behe is one of the seminal figures in what has become known as the Intelligent Design movement, and he makes it clear in EOE that he believes there is empirical evidence which points to the utter inadequacy of materialistic, naturalistic processes to do the job of creating molecular machines and systems. That conclusion leads in turn to the further conclusion that a mind is in some way or another involved in the evolution of life.

Thus his book is an ID text, written by a prominent ID advocate and reviewed by scientists who are evaluating the case he makes. They're not saying that his arguments are not scientific. They may think him wrong, but they're not dismissing him for writing a religious or philosophical book. The critics, at least those who go beyond name-calling and insult, address the evidence that Behe adduces and try to show that he's drawing the wrong theoretical conclusions from it. Whether they're correct or not, their engagement with the EOE argument makes it puzzling that some people still assert that ID is religion not science. After all, what are scientists doing reviewing religious arguments?

RLC

Stock Market Jitters

The stock market has been on a roller coaster the last week or so due to investor jitters over the possibility that a lot of lending institutions which make home mortgage loans to buyers with modest resources and bad credit (called sub-prime loans) are finding that defaults on those loans are rising. If these institutions have to foreclose on the debt they'll lose money and have less to lend which means business expansion will suffer.

Jerry Bowyer thinks the fears are overblown and puts the matter of sub-prime mortgages in perspective in a helpful column at National Review Online:

Currently there are about 44 million mortgages in the U.S., and less than 14 percent of them are sub-prime. And only about 13 percent of those are late on payments, with the majority of late payers working through their problems with the banks.

So, all in all, when you work through the details and get down to the number that really matters, only about 0.6 percent of U.S. mortgages are currently in foreclosure. That's up a hair from roughly 0.5 percent last year. That's it.

Actually,...things are better than the numbers suggest, since sub-prime-mortgage homes are less expensive than prime-mortgage homes. This makes sense. Wealthier people, generally, can afford costlier homes than less-wealthy people. The recent sub-prime surge brought large numbers of moderate-income families into the home-ownership market, and their houses are less expensive than most. Therefore, the dollar impact of the sub-prime default is smaller than if it were a prime default.

With approximately 254,000 mortgages in foreclosure at the moment - up from roughly 219,000 last year - the sub-prime meltdown has given us an increase of 35,000 mortgage foreclosures over the last quarter. Since the average sub-prime mortgage clocks in at almost exactly $200,000, we're looking at an approximate $7 billion increase in foreclosed value in the first quarter of this year.

Household net worth in the U.S. is about $53 trillion. In other words, the recent increase in sub-prime foreclosures amounts to 0.01 percent of net U.S. household wealth.

So, according to Bowyer, sub-prime foreclosures are not that big a deal to the American economy and sooner or later, we assume, the Market is going to realize this and settle down. Let's hope he's right.

RLC

Who Should it Be?

As the presidential race heats up let's talk a little about which candidates are best qualified for the office they seek.

Among the Democratic hopefuls for president the best qualified is without question New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Not only has he served as governor but he has been a cabinet secretary, a congressional representative, and an ambassador to the U.N. In a healthy democracy where substance trumps image Richardson would be the front-runner for the nomination. As it happens, he's running against Hillary Clinton who in six years in the Senate has achieved nothing except gain celebrity status based on her marriage to President Clinton, and Barack Obama who's only been in the Senate for three years and whose main qualifications for the lofty office to which he aspires are his charm and the color of his skin. John Edwards is an also-ran who only spent one term in the Senate and whose singular claim to fame, besides his $400 haircuts, is that he was John Kerry's running mate in 2004.

Among the Republicans it's a harder call. Almost all of the likely candidates (I'm assuming that neither Newt Gingrich nor Dick Cheney will be running) have a lot of experience in government and several of them have actually administered a state or, as in Guiliani's case, a major city. This, in my mind, is a much stronger qualifier for the White House than merely having served in the Senate.

That being the case, Mitt Romney would be our pick if he didn't seem like such an opportunist, only having become pro-life when a run for president loomed large in his future. Guiliani seems to be the kind of man we need to lead us in the war on terror and he's good on economic matters, but he's a virtual Democrat on key social issues (This endorsement, for instance, can't possibly help him). Senator McCain is too unstable, both politically and emotionally, for the job. Fred Thompson has never served as an administrator, and I wonder about both the depth of his conservatism and his staying power.

That takes us into the second tier of candidates where we find several intriguing possibilities. Ron Paul is appealing, but is grievously mistaken on the war on terror. Tom Tancredo is great on immigration but has been rather reckless on some of his foreign policy pronouncements. Duncan Hunter is also an outstanding congressional asset, but his government experience is limited to his role as a member of the House of Representatives.

That leaves us with the man who, at this point, appears to be the most attractive candidate in the field - Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee. There's plenty of time to change one's mind, of course, but if our state primary were held today he's the man I'd be voting for. To learn a little more about him check out this Weekly Standard article.

In a country in which character and qualifications mattered the contest in 2008 would be between Richardson and Huckabee. Unfortunately, we don't live in such a country.

RLC

Sociological Tut-Tutting

Christopher Hitchens enumerates the many crimes emanating from Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland and wonders why the police have been loath to act against these cretins until it became too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey.

Now, again, I am just asking, but what if this racket had been named the White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor? (Motto and mission statement: "Don't F*** With Us.") I think that Oakland's mayor, Ron Dellums-who I was startled to find was still alive-would have joined a picket line around the store (as would I). The same would doubtless have been true of Rep. Barbara Lee, in whose district the YBMB was situated. But instead, in its role as a "community business," the YBMB enjoyed warm support and endorsement from both the mayor and the congresswoman. And the guns for past and future slayings were inside the store.

If this isn't softness on crime, then the term is meaningless....If I had stood outside that hideous bakery with a sign saying "Black Muslims Are Racists and Fanatics," I think the cops would have turned up in a flat second and taken me into custody. I might well have been charged with a hate crime. As I have written before and am sure I will write again: This has to stop, and it has to stop right now, before sharia baking comes to a place near you.

Of course he's right. Crimes committed by blacks, especially when committed against other blacks and especially if the perpetrators are Muslim, are simply not treated with the same urgency as crimes committed by whites. It's as if the authorities, so burdened by what Shelby Steele calls white guilt, think it's indicative of racial bigotry to treat black crime seriously.

It's not just the police. The media is even worse. On those exceedingly rare occasions when a black person is assaulted or murdered by a white person the media wring their hands for weeks and months about the residual and endemic stain of racism that pervades the land, but on the almost daily occasions when blacks assault whites, the race of those involved is scarcely even mentioned.

Here in our fair city we've had a recent illustration of this phenomenon. In 1969, York, like a lot of other cities in the sixties, suffered a series of race riots. At the height of the disturbances a black woman was shot by a white teenaged sniper and killed. It was a tragedy for which the city has been flagellating itself for forty years, and all sorts of racial lessons have been drawn from it.

However, a year ago a young black man with a shotgun walked up to a pregnant white woman in the parking lot of a food market and, because he wanted to kill some "white devil," unloaded the gun at her head. Miraculously, the woman survived, but the racial implications of this horrific crime have been completely ignored by the media. It's as if black on white crime has no racial significance, but white on black crime, to the extent that it exists, is filled with it.

Gangs of black youths roam our city's streets preying on white victims, but one has to read between the lines to learn the race of those involved. Recently, in broad daylight a retired former superintendent of one of our local school districts was savagely beaten by three black "youths" in the rest room at a public park during a festival, but the media, while deploring the incident, thought the racial aspects too unimportant to mention. One may be assured, though, that if a group of white thugs had beaten a black superintendent we'd be facing another forty years of racial soul-searching here in York.

Whites, especially white liberals, are so burdened by their fear of being seen as "insensitive" that they cannot bring themselves to point out that the kind of virulent racism that really harms people is alive and well in our cities, and resides almost entirely in the black community. Intimidated by race hustlers like Al Sharpton and paralyzed by belief in their own guilt, their denunciations of violent black crime are usually limited to feeble expressions of sociological tut-tutting.

Thanks to Steve Martin for the link to Hitchens' column.

RLC

Synonym for <i>Bigotry</i>

All the Democratic candidates for president except Joe Biden made the pilgrimmage last weekend to the YearlyKos conference in order to have their progressive bona fides reauthorized. Senator Durbin, who is not running for president, couldn't make it so he sent instead an obsequious video message (which has since been pulled from YouTube) praising the people who write for the DailyKos and their "progressive" influence on the Democratic party.

So what's the problem? The DailyKos is the biggest blog in the country, several dozen people write for it, and politicians need to score points with their audience. Why not attend?

Suppose, however, Republican candidates went to a conference sponsored by a right-wing blogger whose writers, readership, commenters included a large number of racial bigots. How would the media respond to the willingness of the Republicans to associate themselves with such people? I expect that the folks over at MSNBC and elsewhere in liberaldom would go nuts, as they should.

But then why are these folks silent about the Democrats going to the YearlyKos conference? The staff and reasership at The DailyKos aren't racial bigots but an uncomfortably high percentage of them appear to be anti-semitic bigots. This piece from the Washington Times fills in the details.

So the question this raises is why do Clinton, Obama, and Edwards fawn over these people? Why do the media let them get away with it? Is "Progressive" being turned into a synonym for "anti-semitic"?

RLC

OUT

The militant anti-theists are coming OUT, or at least they want to. Here's part of the rationale for their OUT campaign:

Atheists along with millions of others are tired of being bullied by those who would force their own religious agenda down the throats of our children and our respective governments. We need to KEEP OUT the supernatural from our moral principles and public policies.

Well. I think the atheists' concern that theists will interject "the supernatural" into their moral principles is a little misplaced. The better point to make is that the concept of non-subjective, non-arbitrary moral principles is incomprehensible if atheism is true. There is nothing more metaphysically odd than an atheist talking about morality.

And then there's this from Richard Dawkins' introduction:

Moreover, even if the religious have the numbers, we have the arguments, we have history on our side, and we are walking with a new spring in our step - you can hear the gentle patter of our feet on every side.

Actually, notwithstanding his springing step and pattering feet Dr. Dawkins is quite mistaken. Atheism certainly does not have the best arguments nor does it have history on its side (the communists used to say this very thing and look where they are today). In fact, there are no good arguments for Dawkins' brand of atheism at all. Dawkins holds to what we might call "hard atheism," the view which asserts that there is no God (as opposed to soft atheism or what is fashionably called agnosticism). There are, as far as I know, no good arguments in defense of hard atheism, nor does Dawkins himself offer any. He simply rants against religion and tries to show that because the classical arguments for God's existence are not proofs therefore they're not good arguments, as if he thinks an argument has to be a proof to be compelling.

Dawkins adds the reassurance that "Atheists are just people with a different interpretation of cosmic origins, nothing to be alarmed about."

Nothing to be alarmed about? Such a statement can only arise from the pen of a man who has not thought through the logical implications of his atheism. As we've argued elsewhere (See here for example), if there is no God there is plenty to worry about, not least of which are people who assure us that God's non-existence doesn't change much about our view of morality, human worth, human dignity, and human rights.

RLC

Twilight of Atheism

Marvin Olasky recites examples of the hyperventilations found in the anti-God books of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens and then notes this:

So why, despite the evidence, are authors such as Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens so doctrinaire in their denunciations? Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath offer a reason in their book, The Dawkins Delusion: "Until recently, Western atheism had waited patiently, believing that belief in God would simply die out. But now a whiff of panic is evident. Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded."

Alistair McGrath wrote an earlier book which he titled The Twilight of Atheism and in which he expands on the idea that atheism is a dying belief system. It's a good book, offering as it does a helpful historical overview of the rise and decline of atheism, and well worth a read.

One evidence of the intellectual feebleness of the atheist's position is the form that their argument almost always takes. They assert that belief in God is intellectually untenable and then they support that conclusion by trotting out all sorts of irrelevant eccentric religious beliefs that people hold. Arguing that belief in God is nonsense because some religious expressions are absurd is like arguing that physics is quackery because there have been scientists who have believed nutty things.

Yet that's the kind of argument that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens offer. But it's all they've got so they have to go with it and hope that if they wrap an empty argument in enough stridency a lot of people will be impressed.

RLC

Very Odd

Something very significant is going on with Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution, and it seems to be going largely unremarked.

Virtually all the critics of the book have been scientists. Why is that and why is it significant? If Intelligent Design isn't science why don't these scientific critics just pass the book on to philosophers or theologians? They don't, and they don't criticize the book on the basis of it not being science, either. They critique it, not very sucessfully in my opinion, on the basis of the merits of its scientific claims.

Now this is very odd. If ID is not science then many scientists are reviewing a book that discusses matters on which they have no expertise, and no one seems to think this inappropriate. Somebody call Judge John Jones who ruled in the Dover case that ID wasn't science. Maybe he can help us understand this phenomenon.

RLC

The Evolving Case for Surrender

Now that even erstwhile anti-war liberals are conceding that the military is successfully moving toward suppressing the terrorists in Iraq a lot of war opponents are shifting their rationale for pulling out.

They're now placing their chips on the argument that the Maliki government is a failure and that nothing can be done to pump life back into it.

This may be true, but how does it follow that we should therefore withdraw from Iraq?

Suppose the military situation gets to the point where we are taking only one or two casualties a month, or a year, from Iraqi insurgents. Suppose further that the current government remains dysfunctional moving only glacially toward the benchmarks Congress has set for them.

Why should that be a reason for withdrawal? If we leave there will be, all hands agree, a vacuum that will turn into a slaughterhouse. If we leave civil war will ensue resulting in famine, disease, retribution, and millions of deaths. If we leave the region will probably embark upon a nuclear arms race to defend themselves against Iranian hegemony. If we leave there will almost surely be an attack against Israel. This is more than speculation, it's common sense given the history and nature of the region.

If our presence there staves off this holocaust, if it helps maintain a modicum of stability, why should we not stay? What possible argument can there be for abandoning the region to the kind of consequences likely to follow upon our withdrawal?

We stayed in Japan for sixty years after WWII, and we're still in Europe. We're also still in Korea fifty seven years after the end of that civil war, and we remain in Bosnia ten years after President Clinton said we'd be out. The stakes are just as high if not higher in Iraq as they are in any of these regions.

Nevertheless, some argue that the failure of Iraq's government to reach Western standards of political harmony means we have to get out as soon as possible. Joe Klein, for example, writing in Time delivers himself of these four utterly incomprehensible rationales for surrender:

• Is there any role we can play in alleviating the coming internecine Iraqi chaos? (My guess is, not much of one...although a U.S. military drawdown, starting now, might induce some sobriety on the part of the various Iraqi factions.)
• Is there any danger that the Iraqi chaos will spill the country's borders and become regional? (Yes, of course, but not necessarily the broad regional cataclysm that people like John McCain posit.)
• Is there anything we can do to limit the possibility of regional conflict? (Yes, but the good we can do is mostly diplomatic, not military.)
• Is there anything left for our military to do in Iraq? (Yes, continue to press the case against the jihadis. But that can be done with far fewer troops.)

Let's take each of these in turn: What a drawdown will do is cause Iraqis who were willing to stick their necks out because they thought we were going to be there to protect them to start turning back to clan and militia for their protection. Millions of others will seek to flee the country to avoid the inevitable retribution of the terrorists. It will be Cambodia 1975 all over again.

Klein states blithely that the cataclysm won't necessarily be broad, but this is an asinine assertion. Of course there's a logical possibility that a cataclysm will be relatively contained, but why take the chance that the bare possibility will be actualized? The liklihood is that the whole region will be at war. Iran will move into Iraq to protect Shia Muslims from Sunni. Turkey will seek to settle their Kurdish problem once and for all. Syria will want to grab oil fields. There will be enormous pressure on Sunni Muslim nations to come to the defense of their fellow Sunnis.

Once we have withdrawn there is nothing that will get us to go back in. Israel's neighbors will see that as a golden opportunity to mount a large scale attack on the "Zionists" and fulfil their dream of destroying the Israeli state.

Regional conflict can only be prevented by diplomacy, Klein says, but he fails to understand the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. Diplomacy is necessary to achieve stability but by itself it's not sufficient. Diplomacy unsupported by military force and peace is useless, especially in that part of the world. It reduces to offering people bribes to play nice, but our bribes don't interest them, and they don't want to play nice.

The last assertion is the most astonishing. The reason we're having success against the jihadis is because we increased the number of troops. Now Klein says we can have that same kind of success with fewer troops. On what does he base this? It couldn't be done before the surge, but the armchair general writing from his cozy New York office is certain it can be done now.

If Klein's argument is the best that the advocates of surrender can muster then one grows more confident than ever that we simply have to stay on the course we're on for the sake of the Iraqi people and for the peace of the whole world.

RLC

Five Questions

Here are five questions I hope the Democratic candidates for president, or indeed, candidates for any federal office, get asked over and over again before the 2008 elections:

• If it looks in September as though the administration's Iraq policy is working would you support it? If not, why not?
• Would you favor sending combat troops to Darfur to stop the genocide there? If not, do you believe we have no business interfering with genocidal tyrannies?
• Would you permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons rather than employ military force to stop them? If not, why not?
• If it could be conclusively demonstrated that lower tax rates actually stimulate the economy and produce more revenue for the government would you nevertheless favor rescinding the Bush tax cuts? If so, why?
• Do you think that among the qualifications for the office of president should be experience with having actually governed and/or run an administration?

I'd love to see these questions asked, but they won't be, of course.

Maybe if you have a liberal friend you might pose them to him/her to see what sort of response you get. My guess is that the reply will consist of lots hems, haws and circumlocutions.

RLC

Racist, Bigot, Xenophobe

Ruben Navarrette, evidently unable to engage the arguments for sealing our borders, resorts instead to ad hominem. It's a time-honored technique for persuading the uncritical of the justness of one's own position, and Navarrette employs it deftly. He attacks not only the motives of those with whom he disagrees but also insults them personally.

In a recent column Navarette strongly suggests that opposition to open borders is due to racism and nativism. His evidence consists of surveys which show that Hispanics tend to feel that there's been an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment.

He also cites some of the hostile e-mail he's received as if this proves that the objections to the recent immigration reform bill were invalid.

He acknowledges that it wasn't "just hate" or only hate that drove the opposition, thereby cleverly implying that hate played a substantial, if not solitary, role. So that we don't miss the implication, he relates the story of a racist assault on a 16 year-old Hispanic American.

He finishes by demonstrating how he thinks political discourse should be conducted by essentially calling his opponents xenophobes, demagogues, and bigots. Nice. Never once in his column did he offer any reason why we should not seek to control our borders. He simply insisted, or implied, that those who believe we should are racists.

Should Mr. Navarrette ever decide to actually argue that our borders should be open, perhaps he'll answer the question at the end of this little thought experiment:

Imagine that Mr. Navarrette and I are neighbors. Imagine, too, that my children are constantly running into his house, breaking in through windows, jimmying doors, and availing themselves of his refrigerator, bathroom, bedroom, etc. Suppose that despite his complaints, I do nothing to stop this. So, in his exasperation, he decides to build a fence around his property and put secure locks on his doors and windows.

I am outraged. I call him up and demand that he allow my children to enter his house any time they wish. I point out to him that the children sometimes wash his dishes and mow his lawn. He should have the decency to allow them access to his home when they want it. I suggest to him that the only reason he doesn't want my kids in his house is because they're of Irish descent, and that his fence and locked doors are proof of his xenophobia and racism.

Which of the two of us in this little vignette is acting irrationally?

RLC

Higher Truths

The New Republic has come in for a lot of criticism for running anonymous reports which eventually turned out to be written by a soldier named Scott Beauchamp. Beauchamp's stories were alleged to be eye-witness accounts of various acts of callousness, coarseness, and insensitivity that reflected poorly on our troops.

The Left lapped it all up, of course, but it turns out that investigations have failed to find any substantiation for Beauchamp's reports and he has subsequently admitted to having essentially fabricated most of them. This is very disappointing for the lefties eager to believe the very worst about our soldiers and Marines, but one crest-fallen individual who goes by the name Artista merits special mention. Artista writes:

While Beauchamp's claims were not factually true, they illustrated a greater truth about the American military and the insidious effects that Bush's illegal war has one [sic] the troops.

This is perfect. It doesn't matter what the facts are, Beauchamp's allegations conform to the Left's preconceptions and prejudices and are therefore true in a more transcendent way. Artista's comment reminded me of an incident during the Clarence Thomas hearings when he was alleged by Anita Hill to have made a vulgar remark in her presence. No one could be found to substantiate Hill's claims of impropriety, but that didn't deter Catharine McKinnon, a feminist law professor, from intoning that the charges against Thomas didn't have to reflect any actual facts. They are illustrative of the greater truth that men frequently objectify and sexually harrass women. Thomas, according was guilty not because of what he did but because he was a male.

The far left worldview is completely impervious to falsification. Facts don't matter, truth doesn't matter. All that matters is that one embraces the Left's higher "truths" which serve as the Rosetta stone by which all of life is to be interpreted.

BTW, here's an irony. The Left is smearing the blogger who has done more to expose Beauchamp's fraud than anyone else. According to Hot Air Huffpo has dug up that this Marine was at one time a gay porn star and are bashing him for it. What relevance this has is beyond me, but apparently some lefty bloggers think his past completely discredits the guy's work. It sounds to me like some people are just trying to hurt the guy for the sake of punishing someone who doesn't share their "higher truth." Typical stuff.

RLC

Neuhaus on Dawkins on Behe

Richard John Neuhaus has an excellent essay at First Things on the odd decision of the New York Times Book Review to assign Richard Dawkins to review Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution.

Neuhaus doesn't say this in his piece, but the weakness of Dawkins' "argument" against Behe's book is telling. Behe puts the materialists in a real pickle. He grants that evolution has occured and then uses the evidence of molecular genetics to argue that it couldn't have occured through purely mechanistic processes. The Darwinians are left to show that he's mistaken, but they have no empirical evidence to support the claim. All they have is their faith that there is nothing other than mechanistic processes at work in the world. Since there is no God, or He's uninvolved in the creation, physical processes like mutation and natural selection must be the whole explanation for the diversification of life.

Dawkins offers little else, beyond copious insults, in his review. He sputters about Behe being a creationist (he's not). He scoffs that Behe stands against the accumulated wisdom of many Darwinian worthies (so what). He misrepresents Behe's argument in Darwin's Black Box (and also overstates the success of the responses to that argument), and he ridicules Behe for the fact that his colleagues at Lehigh don't agree with him (Of course, many of Darwin's colleagues didn't agree with him, either). The only scientific argument Dawkins musters is the embarrassing claim that the many different breeds of dogs proves Behe wrong, which, of course, they do not.

Behe doesn't argue that there's no variability among living things, rather he argues that there's a limit to how much variability can be produced by genetic mutation. This argument Dawkins steers clear of and for good reason. He has no answer to it except a derisive sneer.

Check out Neuhaus' essay.

RLC

Robo-Soldiers

The military has now deployed three armed robots to Iraq. These are the first such robots ever designed for actual combat missions. Danger Room has the story and an impressive video of the capabilities of these machines.

RLC

Practicing Their Religion

An Oakland newspaper editor was shot and killed in the street the other day in what was an apparent assassination. Arrests have been made and it turns out the suspects were devotees of the Religion of Peace. Who would have thought?

RLC

Syria Postpones

According to DEBKAFile the Syrians have for some reason postponed the commencement of hostilities against Israel until November:

This piece of intelligence was behind the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's comment Tuesday, July 31: "I think this summer and fall will be less hot than we expected." He was addressing a ceremony ending a course at the National Security College in Jerusalem on expectations from the Syrian front and in the Lebanese Hizballah.

DEBKAfile's military sources report that the latest intelligence update on Syria's intentions reached Jerusalem via Washington in the last few days. It indicated that Syria's political and military leaders had rescheduled the start of hostilities against Israel on the Golan for the second two weeks of November, 2007, postponing their original planning by more than two months.

According to those sources, Syria plans to kick off its offensive with a series of terrorist raids by commando units on civilian villages, military bases and highways, as well as cross-border fire on IDF vehicles and positions guarding the border.

At that stage, the Syrian command will be testing Israel's military responses before mapping out its next moves accordingly.

Israel's military responses should include raids that take out the Syrian government, air force and missile batteries. Then they should commence destroying the Syrian army and intelligence apparatus. Whoever's left in Damascus can then "map out their next moves."

RLC

The Atheist Manifesto

Byron sent along a link to a story by Dinesh D'Souza on one of the hottest selling atheist books in Europe. It's titled The Atheist Manifesto and it's by Michael Onfray.

According to D'Souza, Onfray actually undertakes to do what less intrepid atheist writers usually shrink from doing. Following the German philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche he follows the rejection of God to its logical conclusion, at least in terms of the consequences for morals and human worth.

For Onfray, like Neitzsche, moral values are to be determined by the "overmen," those who are strong and masterful. Think, for example, of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, et al.

Onfray also argues that we must get over the Christian notion that each individual has a right to life. Individuals have no rights except what the overmen give them. Thus, Onfray's atheism would entail that genocidal holocausts of people whose existence is inconvenient for those who wield power would be justifiable.

This is the brave, new world that the new atheism would bequeath us - a bloody Darwinian struggle for survival, an incessant war of every man against every man, a world in which might makes right. It would be a world in which the most ruthless and psychopathic would rule and murder would not only be no crime, it would become morally obligatory.

If more atheists begin to see the logic of their position, and if sufficient political power devolves into their hands, a new dark ages would descend upon mankind, and the whole world would become a vast killing field. Life would be a Hobbesian nightmare: nasty, brutish, and short.

Perhaps this sounds a little overwrought, but ideas have consequences and the major consequence of atheism, as Onfray points out, is that without God there can be no objectively right or wrong conduct and no value to human beings. If sufficient numbers of people ever come to believe this what else could the consequences be?

RLC

Principled Politicians Retraction

In yesterday's post titled Principled Politicians it was strongly suggested that the President's senatorial critics of his terrorist spying program were being hypocritical by voting to pass a security bill the other day which allows the program to continue after they had expressed such outrage over it a year ago.

This was misleading since 28 senators voted against the bill and among these were some of the most vocal of the President's opponents on this issue. So, those critics were entirely consistent, and it was an error to suggest otherwise.

RLC

Principled Politicians

After all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the White House spying on innocent Americans, after all the calls for impeachment and howls of outrage over creeping tyranny, what did the Democrat-controlled Senate do with yesterday's opportunity to stand for freedom, justice, and the American way?

They passed the administration's spy bill which gives the President even greater authority to eavesdrop on potential terrorist communications.

Isn't it thrilling to watch people display the courage of their convictions?

Of course, passing the bill was the right thing to do. The buffoonery was in the faux outrage over the spying in the first place. It was all part of an effort to weaken the President, even at the expense of national security.

No wonder the term "principled politicians" has become an alliterative oxymoron.

RLC

Barack's Blunder

Barack Obama is coming in for some criticism from conservative talkers like Sean Hannity for his comment that he'd be willing to invade Pakistan to chase down terrorists, and thereby widen the war in the Middle East.

I think it's a little silly, if not hypocritical, of Hannity to try to make hay out of this since Hannity would be all for it if Bush had said the same thing, which he essentially did in the aftermath to 9/11.

I also think that Obama is right. We should go after terrorists wherever they are. If Pakistan won't do it then we should. Obama's blunder was not in affirming that the war on terror is a war without borders, his blunder is in saying something so viscerally at odds with the views of the bulk of his supporters.

Obama is very popular with the anti-war left which sees Hillary as a bit of a sell-out on the war. If now it transpires that he's saying he would launch an invasion of Waziristan then he leaves his supporters on the left with two options. They can drop him as just another political hypocrite, or they can console themselves by thinking that he's only talking tough in order to get elected, in which case he's still a political hypocrite.

The problem all the Democrat candidates have is that they're torn between their left-wing base, which wants to effect the emasculation of this nation, and presenting an image to the general public of being willing to do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves from those who would destroy us. The two political necessities are at cross-purposes, keel-hauling the candidates under the ship of their campaigns. The Democrats are thus in the unenviable, if not unaccustomed, position of having to deceive either their base or the majority of American voters.

RLC

Reconsidering the Right to Vote

Jonah Goldberg thinks there should be a test for voting, and there is much merit in his argument. The American public, including large swaths of the voting public, are abysmally ignorant of how our government works and what they're voting on. Millions of people pay no attention to politics for four years and then, a week before the election, listen to the news sound bites for some reason to vote against one candidate or the other.

Every election season our local newspapers urge people to get out and vote as if the act of voting itself indicated political responsibility and a healthy democracy. This advice is as wrongheaded as it can be. If anything, people should actually be discouraged from voting. Voting should not be made overly convenient and should only be undertaken by those who really want to vote and who have taken the time to learn a little bit about who and what they're voting for. No one who cannot name two or three Supreme Court justices, at least one of their U.S. Senators, or the Vice-president is, in my mind, qualified to enter the voting booth. Nor is one qualified who can't speak English.

Here's Goldberg:

So, maybe, just maybe, we have our priorities wrong. Perhaps cheapening the vote by requiring little more than an active pulse (Chicago famously waives this rule) has turned it into something many people don't value. Maybe the emphasis on getting more people to vote has dumbed-down our democracy by pushing participation onto people uninterested in such things. Maybe our society would be healthier if politicians aimed higher than the lowest common denominator. Maybe the opinions of people who don't know the first thing about how our system works aren't the folks who should be driving our politics, just as people who don't know how to drive shouldn't have a driver's license.

Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people about the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?

An uninformed citizenry is a threat to a democracy. An uniformed citizenry that votes is a calamity. The right to vote, like the right to bear arms, should not be granted to everyone without qualification.

RLC

Birds of a Feather

Senator Chris Dodd (D, CT) defended his participation in a conference sponsored by The Daily Kos on the O'Reilly show the other night despite the fact that Daily Kos is one of the more nasty blogs in the blogosphere and despite the sleazy photoshop of Bush, Rove and Leiberman that has been up at the site for over a year.

Video of Dodd's defense can be found here. The video also shows the photoshop that the Senator doesn't mind associating himself with.

Actually, his unwillingness to allow a little sleaze to deter him from the conference shouldn't surprise us, given the Senator's history and reputation, but it is ironic that he refused to participate in a candidates' debate on Fox News. His ostensible reason was that Fox has a reputation for being conservative, yet his scruples are not so fastidious as to keep him from mingling with people who put garbage like the aforementioned photoshop on their web log.

RLC

Shooting Themselves in the Foot

Strategy Page argues that the Taliban's own tactics are working against them in Afghanistan:

Kidnapping the 23 South Koreans eleven days ago is turning out to be a public relations disaster for the Taliban. First, the Koreans were there to help with reconstruction, to do good works. In that role, they are supposed to be treated as guests, and guarding the safety of guests is a big deal in Afghan culture. But worst of all, 18 of the 23 are women, and most Afghans see it as shameful to threaten women in this fashion....One Korean, who was apparently ill, has already been killed by the Taliban. Two Germans were also kidnapped by the Taliban, and one killed, as the Taliban demanded the release of some Taliban from jail.

If the government does not give in, which is apparently the strategy, the Taliban will have suffered yet another defeat. This, coupled with the war going on back in their Pakistani base areas, the continued NATO military pressure on strongholds in Afghanistan, leaves the Taliban looking like losers. This is not a good image to have in this part of the world.

In yet another catastrophe for the Taliban, Pakistan announced that it would close all Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan by 2009, sending some two million Afghans back to Afghanistan. Most of the camps are in the tribal areas along the Afghan border, and have long been used as Taliban bases, and centers of Islamic radical activity.

If the Taliban thinks these are catastrophic developments, wait until Barack Obama is elected president and the U.S. invades Waziristan province in Pakistan.

RLC

Comeuppance Therapy

Another thug receives some much-needed counselling from a kindly shop-owner.

There's not much doubt in my mind that the therapy this punk underwent on the video will be far more beneficial to him in the long run than all the programs put together to which the courts would have remanded him.

RLC

Just War

I recently sat down with Darrell Cole's book on Just War theory, When God Says War Is Right: The Christian Perspective on When and How to Fight. It's a good primer on the concept, introducing the reader to the views of some of the key figures in the development of the just war tradition, people like Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, and especially John Calvin. The book also addresses a couple of pacifist objections to the resort to war, and concludes that a war that meets the proper criteria must be seen not just as a legitimate option but as a moral obligation.

Cole considers, for example, the argument of pacifist writer John Howard Yoder that the early Christians were themselves pacifists. The author insists, persuasively, that the data simply don't support Yoder's claim.

A just war, Cole maintains, is an act of both justice and love. One might be tempted to laugh at the thought of war being an act of love, but I think he's right. To refuse to defend one's neighbors and family when they are under threat is an abrogation of our duty to defend those who rely on our protection. To fight to protect them against those who threaten them is an act of love and is eminently just.

Chapter four of the book addresses the concept of jus ad bellum, the justness of going to war, and chapter five takes up the matter of jus in bello, the question of how a war, once entered into, should be justly fought.

Each of these is defined by several criteria. For a nation to be just in going to war (jus ad bellum) the war must be declared by a legitimate authority, for a just cause, with right intention, when it is the only way or best way to right a wrong, and when there is reasonable hope for success.

For a war to be properly fought (jus in bello) non-combatants must not be deliberately targeted, and the force used against the enemy must not be disproportionate to the need (Nuclear weapons would have been a disproportionate application of force in the war against, say, Grenada).

The most interesting chapter, and also his most problematic, is chapter six where Cole seeks to bring the criteria of both jus ad bellum and jus in bello to bear in evaluating the justness of WWII, Vietnam, and the First Persian Gulf War.

He concludes that WWII was a just war fought in a largely unjust fashion. I agree with his conclusion although I think some of his arguments are a little weak. In my view, the deliberate targeting of civilians in both Japan and Germany was morally indefensible.

Vietnam he believes was an unjust war because South Vietnam was not the sort of state we should have gone to war to aid. This is highly problematic. Even more problematic is his use of the My Lai massacre as a synecdoche for American tactics throughout the war. He seems to conclude, though he never comes out and says it, that Vietnam fails the jus in bello standard because of the My Lai massacre. This, of course, is unconvincing. If My Lai was typical then Cole is correct but he offers no evidence that My Lai and the soldiers who perpetrated it were anything but an aberration.

Cole is at his fuzziest, however, in discussing the Gulf War. He first says that whether we were justified in going to war is ambiguous (or at least he's ambiguous about it), and then he says with regard to in bello criteria that it was one of the "most cleanly fought" of all modern wars. The strafing of fleeing enemy troops was troubling, he asserts, "but such incidents were isolated, and this makes all the difference. No inherently unjust tactics were carried out as a matter of routine practice during the Gulf War."

But why does he not give the Vietnam war the same pass. If he has information which suggests that atrocities were routine during Vietnam he certainly doesn't adduce it.

Other readers will perhaps find lots in this chapter to argue with and to agree with, but the book as a whole is well worth the time of anyone who wants a better understanding of the traditional Christian understanding of when it is right to fight.

It can be ordered from Byron's great bookstore, Hearts and Minds.

RLC