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