Winter's Coming

There's been some news coverage, squeezed, where possible, into the interstices of reportage of the Casey Anthony trial, of the negotiations in Washington over what to do about the debt ceiling. The Democrats want to raise it and go on spending merrily away, like autumn grasshoppers (see below). Republicans want the Democrats to agree to spending cuts in exchange for raising the ceiling, but what happens if we arrive at the point where we have borrowed all the money that Congress has authorized and no additional authorization is granted?

Robinson O'Brien-Bours at No Left Turns gives us a helpful précis of what'll happen in about three weeks:

With less than a month to go until the United States of America reaches its debt ceiling, lawmakers are scrambling to address the crisis. President Obama is addressing it by comparing Members of Congress to schoolgirls and complaining about the rich being rich, Congressional Democrats are screaming about the impending doomsday, and Congressional Republicans are sticking to the "Just Say No to Taxes" mantra (for now).

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration and some intellectuals are looking into the silly notion that the 14th Amendment allows the president to do whatever he wants to ensure that the public debt of the United States is not defaulted on. This follows an even worse vein of logic than the "I don't need to talk to Congress about Libya because dropping bombs on human beings is not being hostile" argument of late.

[T]he United States is fully capable of paying off the interest on its debt if we needed to. As the Washington Examiner points out, defaulting would be a purely political choice. We would have the money to pay our interest payments if it came down to it; the debt ceiling just means that the government cannot accumulate any more debt. By the law of the 14th Amendment, the President would be forced to pay off the interest on our debt with the monies regularly collected by the Treasury Department; he is not legally allowed to let us default on the debt if those funds exist.

However, this would mean an instant end to almost all programs and offices of the federal government in order to pay our interest on the loans. We have the money to pay our interest, but then President Obama would have to choose between things like paying senior citizens their social security checks or paying for dropping bombs on the people in the not-war of Libya. We will not go into default if we hit the debt ceiling; the federal government would just stop most of its work.

And make no mistake on the severity of hitting the debt ceiling. Some people think it will be like when the government cannot pass a budget, as in the 1990s and as was threatened earlier this year-- this is false. In those instances, only nonessential parts of the federal government stop working immediately. If we hit the debt ceiling, everything stops. The FBI, the military, the TSA, Social Security, Medicare, the courts, federal prisons, IRS refunds, and every single employee of the federal government would instantly be forbidden from working. We will have $306 billion in expenses for the month of August, and only $172 billion in revenue.

That means $134 billion worth of government programs and offices would instantly need to be shut down-- and not just tiny ones, but major services that Americans are now used to. If we hit the ceiling, then come August 3rd we will have an instantly balanced budget by the pure fact that we have no choice but to just lay off millions of federal employees.

Obviously, no one is going to let this happen, but to raise the ceiling is to declare that there really is no ceiling. To raise it without imposing serious curbs on more spending is irresponsible, yet this is what the administration would have us do.

For those who may have never read their Aesop I offer this 1934 Disney version of the fable of the ants and the grasshopper to illustrate the difference between the two sides in these negotiations:

Winter's coming.

The Ends Justify the Means

When you're saddled with inferior ideas which, if explained clearly and honestly to people, no one would want to have anything to do with, how do you prevail in the American political system? Well, one way is to simply destroy your opponent's character and reputation. That's what liberal commentator Juan Williams accuses a prominent liberal fact-check organization of doing:

Character assassination isn't the only way many on the left seek to gain power. As we saw in the debate in Wisconsin over budget reform, they're not above physical intimidation, and, of course, there's always vote fraud.

Perhaps such tactics are not confined to the left (although I'm really not aware of an instance where lies, threats, or fraud have been employed in the service of conservative ideas), and certainly not all liberals endorse such methods. Williams, after all, is a liberal.

The problem is that when politics becomes one's god, as it has for many on the secular left, then the end of political success justifies whatever means it takes to achieve it. If character assassination, threats, fraud, and dissimulation work in securing political power, well, then, they're morally appropriate tactics, and not only is there no reason not to employ them, it's actually one's moral duty to employ them.

Luxury Items Create Real Jobs

President Obama continues to display an astonishing lack of understanding about how the rich create jobs for ordinary Americans by purchasing luxuries like jet planes. We discussed this very thing after the president suggested that ATM machines actually reduce jobs, and it's a bit surprising that he would stumble into the same pit again so soon after the last chastening he received.

Anyway, rather than cover the same ground as in the earlier post I'll defer to Michael Ramirez:

These are real jobs, it should be noted, not the artificial, temporary kind favored by Mr. Obama and created with stimulus money at a cost of $238,000 per job.

The Failure of Liberalism

In one short essay at National Review Online Victor Davis Hanson summarizes the complete failure of liberalism both here and abroad. After examining the economic crisis in Europe, precipitated by three generations of leftist policy, he turns his attention to the U.S.:

Here in the United States, we await the imposition of Obamacare, despite the fact that the public does not want it, the nation cannot afford it, politicians regret it, and companies seek exemption from it. Our current pace of $1.6 trillion annual deficits, for all the talk of Keynesian gymnastics, is unsustainable — and even acknowledged as such by those who are most responsible for the latest round of fiscal irresponsibility.

As we near 50 million Americans on food stamps, another year of 9-plus percent unemployment, and the third $1 trillion–plus budget deficit, even statists are beginning to see that statism does not work — a fact brought home not just by the disaster in Greece, but also by the growing divide between a successful red-state paradigm and California-like blue-state doldrums. What saves the United States for now is only the fact that, unlike California, it can print money — plus the fact that there is no red-state version of America to flee to.

On the immigration front, there will still be some quibbling, but the liberal argument for open borders has been lost, both here and in Europe. The United States simply cannot afford any longer the $50 billion that flows to Latin America each year in remittances, coupled with multibillion-dollar costs for providing social services to seek parity for illegal aliens, in addition to vast new outlays in education and criminal justice.

California elites swear that a multimillion-person community of illegal aliens has nothing to do with our near-bottom ranking in public-school math and science scores, but privately even the most die-hard unionist teachers confess that it does. When Los Angeles has more resident Mexican nationals than do most cities in Mexico, and when the liberal paradigm of the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot is into its fifth decade, then it is logical, not aberrant, that tens of thousands in the Rose Bowl would not merely cheer a Mexican soccer team over a home-team American one (understandable, though regrettable, garden-variety ethnic chauvinism), but trump that by booing even the mention of the United States.

Hanson goes on to describe the failure of liberal foreign policy, education policy, and the fact that many of the most influential liberals don't really believe their own rhetoric:

We live in an age in which advocates do not believe in their own advocacy: A “planet is doomed” Al Gore refuses to fly economy; a statist John Kerry won’t pay taxes on his yacht unless he is caught; an anti-war Barack Obama won’t honor the War Powers Act he once deified; and the liberal congressional and media establishment will not put their children in the D.C. schools that are the reification of their own ideology.

In short, the generation that came of age in the 1960s succeeded in bringing to life the Frankenstein’s monster it designed in its own image — but suddenly it seems terrified of the very thing it created.

Hanson pretty much swishes a three pointer in this column. Like the government functionaries in totalitarian countries whose leader has died but who seek to hide his demise from the people, statism is everywhere in various stages of senescence despite its acolytes' sunny insistence that it's really in ruddy good health.

Disgrace to the Profession

Young teachers having little luck finding a job might consider moving to Atlanta where there's soon likely to be a hundred or more openings for elementary and middle school teachers.

It appears that almost two hundred teachers and administrators have been caught in a massive cheating scandal in which teachers were changing their students' grades on standardized tests in order to render the results less embarrassing to the district. The scandal reaches all the way to the top and includes the district superintendent.

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reports:

Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.

In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.

The voluminous report names 178 educators, including 38 principals, as participants in cheating. More than 80 confessed. The investigators said they confirmed cheating in 44 of 56 schools they examined.

How can adults teach children that it's wrong to cheat when so many of them do it themselves? If this is the quality of educator that Atlanta's children are learning from it's little wonder that scores are so low that cheating is needed to raise them to meet standards. On the other hand, it seems that to their credit many of the teachers objected to having to change answers but were coerced and intimidated by their administrators into doing so. According to the AJC article a number of those administrators face felony charges:

For teachers, a culture of fear ensured the deception would continue. “APS [Atlanta Public Schools] is run like the mob,” one teacher told investigators, saying she cheated because she feared retaliation if she didn’t.

These people, like their colleagues in Wisconsin who defrauded the taxpayers by securing phony doctor's excuses during the budget debate in Madison last spring, are an embarrassment to public school professionals everywhere and have no business in any position where they work with kids or collect a salary and benefits paid by the taxpayer. They should be fired, decertified, and deeply ashamed of themselves.

Feeding Racism

America has done much, perhaps more than any nation in history, to try to expunge racism from our public life, but all those efforts are eroded every time stories like this one about groups of young blacks beating, robbing and killing appear in the news, which they do with alarming frequency. One rarely reads of white mobs beating black victims, but the reverse seems almost a daily occurrence.

Of course, whites are not supposed to take notice. It's racist, we're told, to observe that such savage behavior is disproportionately a phenomenon indigenous to black communities. We're to pretend that there's no racial correlation, but the fact is that there is, and the problem will only get worse unless people start confronting it and stop calling people racist for pointing it out.

There's something very deeply wrong in the black community and people are tired of being told, after fifty years of bending over backwards to give blacks every advantage, every opportunity, that the problem is white racism. Nobody except a few left-wing fringies really believes that anymore. The problem is the inability of too many blacks to function appropriately in a civilized society and until prominent black leaders start acknowledging the problem and stop blaming the larger society for the barbarisms perpetrated by other blacks, the problem will never be solved.

Moreover, all the progress made in changing white attitudes toward blacks over the last sixty years, the progress made in teaching whites to see blacks as just like themselves and to treat them with the same dignity and respect they want to be treated with, is almost certain to unravel.

The era when blacks are given a pass for behavioral and intellectual inadequacies that would not be excused in a white person is coming to a close. When mobs march through an American city (Peoria) shouting "kill all the white people" more and more angry and exasperated whites are going to ask what's wrong with these people. When that question begins to be asked, and answered, openly racial animosities and prejudices that have been suppressed for fifty years in the white community are going to bubble back to the surface of our common life.

It will be a tragic day in America, to be sure, one that I fervently wish we'd never see, but when it comes it'll be primarily the result of whites being no longer able or willing to ignore the intolerable levels of hatred and violence in the black population.

What the World Needs Now Is More Oxytocin

Patricia Churchland is a philosopher who has written extensively on the philosophy of mind, consciousness, and the insights neuroscience brings to those discussions. She's a philosophical materialist and a metaphysical naturalist (the two often go together) and has written a book, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality, in which she seeks to explain ethics in light of naturalism. Her view is that what we call morality is really the result of eons of evolution which has produced chemicals like oxytocin which operate in the brain to facilitate social interaction.

Christopher Shea, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes an essay on Ms Churchland's ethical thinking and the importance she attaches to neurochemicals as a biological basis for our moral decision-making. Shea says this about Churchland's views:

Oxytocin's primary purpose appears to be in solidifying the bond between mother and infant, but Churchland argues—drawing on the work of biologists—that there are significant spillover effects: Bonds of empathy lubricated by oxytocin expand to include, first, more distant kin and then other members of one's in-group. (Another neurochemical, aregenine vasopressin, plays a related role, as do endogenous opiates, which reinforce the appeal of cooperation by making it feel good.)

From there, culture and society begin to make their presence felt, shaping larger moral systems: tit-for-tat retaliation helps keep freeloaders and abusers of empathic understanding in line. Adults pass along the rules for acceptable behavior—which is not to say "just" behavior, in any transcendent sense—to their children. Institutional structures arise to enforce norms among strangers within a culture, who can't be expected to automatically trust each other.

These rules and institutions, crucially, will vary from place to place, and over time. "Some cultures accept infanticide for the disabled or unwanted," she writes, without judgment. "Others consider it morally abhorrent; some consider a mouthful of the killed enemy's flesh a requirement for a courageous warrior, others consider it barbaric."

It's all very interesting, but what might have been emphasized a bit more in Shea's piece is that what Churchland and others in her camp are doing is reducing morality to a mere illusion. This is, indeed, what all naturalistic attempts to explain the moral sense wind up doing. Shea quotes one colleague of Churchland's who admits as much:

Duke's Owen Flanagan Jr. defends this highly pragmatic view of morality. "Where we get a lot of pushback from philosophers is that they'll say, 'If you go this naturalistic route that Flanagan and Churchland go, then you make ethics merely a theory of prudence.' And the answer is, Yeah, you kind of do that. Morality doesn't become any different than deciding what kind of bridge to build across a river. The reason we think it makes sense is that the other stories — that morality comes from God, or from philosophical intuition — are just so implausible."

This is surely correct. If the "God hypothesis" is implausible then morality is just chemical reactions in the brain, and decisions about whether to help one's fellow man or kill him are no different than decisions about whether or not to build a bridge across a river.

As we've argued here on previous occasions, one who holds to this view must perforce embrace some form of ethical subjectivism, and the most compelling candidates are egoism or nihilism.

If helping the poor gives you an oxytocin high, well, then do it. If ignoring the needs of others in order to advance your own welfare is what elicits the flow of neurochemicals then it's not wrong to do so. There's no reason to think treating others cruelly or selfishly is anything more than behavior some find rewarding and others find distasteful. Like putting mayonnaise on a peanut butter sandwich, it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a matter of taste.

I wonder whether Ms Churchland has followed her convictions to their logical conclusion and forswears all moral judgments about other peoples' behavior, which, indeed, she must do if she believes that morality is just the percolations of chemicals through neurons. I wonder if she really looks at sex trafficking, torturing for amusement, and the long-term destruction of our planet as simply cases of different strokes for different folks.

Perhaps, but I doubt it. The only people who call themselves materialists who actually live as though they really believed materialism is true are nihilists and egoists, and Ms Churchland strikes me as neither.

Zombies

Bob Hope gets in a zinger in this old clip I came across at No Left Turns:

Pretty funny.

Hot and Cold

Proponents of the hypothesis that the earth is getting warmer have been insisting that the warming is occuring because we're polluting the atmosphere with CO2 and that the mean global temperature is spiking. It has turned out, however, that the earth is not warming, and that the prognostications of impending disaster have been wrong. Why?

Evidently climatologists overlooked another factor. Developing nations like India and China are pumping tons of sulfur into the atmosphere by burning coal. Atmospheric sulfur cools the earth and offsets the effects of CO2, but if we remove the sulfur, we're told, the earth will warm very fast.

So how do we know that the climatologists know that? Well, we have to take their word on it. We have to trust them and place our faith in their competence.

They tell us it's science, but it sounds a lot like religion. Here's an excerpt from the Reuters article linked above:

Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution.

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.

The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland's University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

In other words, there is no global warming. What there is is an increase in both CO2 and sulfur emissions. The above article notes that warming will be unimpeded when third world countries crack down on sulfur pollution, a prospect that the article implausibly implies is inevitable and imminent.

Reading this, one wonders why climatologists aren't alarmed by the global cooling that will occur if developed countries limit their CO2 output while the third world continues to churn out sulfur. Isn't this really the most likely scenario?

One reason for their reticence, I'll bet, is that the climatological community knows that if they now start expressing alarm over imminent global cooling after all the panic over "hockey stick" increases in global temperatures they'll become a laughingstock and no one would ever believe another word they said.

Is it Ever Right to Lie?

Note: I just returned from a week in Guatemala and found that in a couple of the posts I had prepared to have my brother Bill post for me while I was away entire sections were transposed, rendering them incoherent.

Some readers may be tempted to opine that incoherence is nothing new here on Viewpoint, but, be that as it may, this was worse than usual, and was entirely my fault. In my rush to prepare for the trip I simply got careless.

Anyway, I'm reposting below the corrected version of what was, I hope, the most severely distorted one.

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When a group called Live Action used deception and subterfuge to surreptitiously record Planned Parenthood personnel violating the law there was some debate over the ethics of their tactics. Live Action members posed as prostitutes and pimps and lied about their purposes to PP staff in order to record the staffers giving advice that was clearly in violation of the law, but is it ever right to lie, in the service of what many consider to be a good cause, i.e. saving the lives of unborn children?

Catholic ethical philosopher Janet Smith argues at First Things that the answer is yes. This answer puts her in uncomfortable conflict with Thomas Aquinas (and also, though she doesn't mention him, with Immanuel Kant), nevertheless I think she's clearly correct.

There's a lot of solid thinking in her essay and the reader interested in the morality of lying should read the entire article. Here's a sample of her disagreement with Aquinas:

Aquinas has zero tolerance for false signification [communication], even to save an innocent life. According to his principles, it would be wrong to say to a Nazi seeking to kill Jews hiding in an attic: “There are no Jews in the attic.” He also maintained that it was wrong to cause someone to have a false opinion by telling the truth.

Thus I believe that it would violate Aquinas’ principles to use true speech to mislead Nazis. Someone who had no Jews in his attic, but who answers the door of his neighbor’s house where Jews in fact are hidden, cannot morally say, “There are no Jews in my house,” since he would be leading the Nazi to think falsely about reality. Similarly, a soldier can hide in the bushes to ambush his enemy, but he cannot place his empty tent strategically to deceive the enemy about his whereabouts, for that would be to lead another to think falsely about reality.

This rigorous view extends to the social uses of falsehood as well. Aquinas condemns all false representations of reality, including saying something false for the sake of amusement, ruling out what is known as a “jocose lie.” The same holds for dissimulation designed to smooth over awkward social situations or designed to calm the immature or deranged.

This does not mean that Aquinas holds that all false significations are mortal sins. Lying to the Nazi at the door, exaggerating a story for entertainment, and pretending to enjoy a meal that does not please all fall under the category of a venial sin. Nonetheless, by his way of thinking all false signification is a sin, and as such can never be employed.

Aquinas’ rigorism about uttering falsehoods is certainly cogent, but hard to reconcile with some of his other positions. Aquinas (and the Church) approve of killing someone for the sake of protecting innocent life as well as commandeering or destroying the property of another to protect other goods. Thus the question: Why shouldn’t Aquinas (and the Church) permit false signification uttered in order to protect innocent life and other important goods?

Good question. Consider this variation of an example that Kant employs: A man walking on a city street witnesses an attempted murder. The victim manages to break away and flee past the witness up an alley where she hides. The thug, knife in hand, pursues. When he gets to the witness he grabs him and demands at knifepoint that he tell him where the victim has gone.

Kant (and presumably Aquinas) insists that if the witness says anything he must tell the truth. It's absolutely wrong to lie. Now, suppose that the witness realizes that the victim is his teenage daughter. I submit, that it's morally preposterous to obligate the witness in such an instance to tell the thug where his daughter is hiding or to remain silent.

Anyway, despite my overall agreement with Smith I think she's mistaken about one part of her analysis. She draws a distinction between lying, which she thinks is absolutely wrong, and false signification, which she thinks may sometimes be justified:

Can the defense of some false signification be squared with the traditional absolute prohibition of lying? A close consideration of the analogy with the use of lethal force and the taking of property should help us see that the absolute prohibition can be retained. Neither Aquinas nor the Church understands the use of lethal force in defense of innocent life to be an “exception” to the prohibition of murder.

Nor does the taking or destroying of property belonging to another when necessary to avert some great evil function as an “exception” to the prohibition of theft. Murder is the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being. Theft is taking something against the reasonable will of the owner, and a reasonable owner would approve of taking property to protect important goods.

Therefore, properly stated, although killing and the taking of property are sometimes morally permissible, the norms against murder and theft remain absolute, without exception. Similarly, I believe that the telling of some falsehoods and other forms of false signification are compatible with the absolute prohibition of lying.

The problem here, it seems to me, is that the examples she gives of killing/murder and taking/theft really are not analogous to the examples of false signification/lying. Not all killing is murder, but if one knowingly tells the Nazis there are no Jews in the attic when there are that is a lie. If a guest tells the host that he enjoyed the meal when he didn't that is a lie. Not only is it a lie, but, it seems to me (and to Smith) that it's the right thing to do. If so, then lying cannot be absolutely wrong.

One final thought tangential to the main theme of this post. Smith inadvertently raises a theological conundrum when at one point she uses an example of false signification from the Bible. She cites the account (Jn. 7:8-10) of Jesus leading his followers to believe that he was not going to attend the Feast of the Tabernacles and then, after they went without him, he went.

Did Jesus lie or did He change His mind? Christians will reject the former, but if they endorse the latter then it seems they also have to accept that Jesus in his human incarnation did not have exhaustive knowledge of the future. This will not sit well with those who believe that since Jesus was fully divine He was omniscient even though incarnated in a human body.

Perhaps there's a third alternative. I leave it to readers to suggest one.

All Men Are Created Equal

As I write this my neighborhood is awash in the sights and sounds of fireworks as Americans here and across the nation celebrate the anniversary of our independence and, by extension, the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

This is as it should be, of course, and yet there are two propositions in the Declaration that modern, secular Americans are implicitly celebrating but whose celebration makes no sense, at least not for them. The first is the claim that all men are created equal and the second is the claim that all men are endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I say that these make no sense in a secularized, post-Christian nation because both of them are nonsense unless, as Thomas Jefferson insisted, we really have been created by a Creator. The only reason I can think of that would explain why so many who've abandoned the notion of a Creator nevertheless still cherish these ideas is that few people are willing, thoughtful, or consistent enough to follow their secularism to its logical endpoint.

Suppose we accept the prevailing view among our cultural elite that we're not intentionally created beings but rather the product of purely material forces acting randomly and blindly over long periods of time. Upon what, then, would we base a belief in the equality of all men or a belief in human rights?

Why should we think that all men are equal? The only sense in which people could be equal is in the eyes of God. If we're simply a product of chance and the laws of chemistry the idea that we are somehow equal, even under the law, is risible.

Moreover, where does the notion of inherent human rights come from? Why should we think that a human being has any rights at all other than what the state arbitrarily deigns to give him? Where do inherent rights come from? Why is any government, or indeed, anyone who has power, obligated to respect them?

Once the Creator has been banished to the nether regions of historical fantasy people will eventually come to believe that equality, dignity, and rights are all just as mythical and superstitious as the God in which they were grounded.

In other words, the belief in human equality, human dignity, and human rights cannot be supported and sustained by any worldview other than one that sees man as the purposeful creation of a personal God who deliberately endows us with those rights.

We can choose to abandon this God if we wish, as much of the West seems happy to do, but we do so at great peril. Let's not pretend that the choice to push God out of our public life will be free of consequences. Ask anyone who lived under communism or nazism in the 20th century what happens to equality and rights when a state seeks to live consistently with its atheism.

Such states always promise to replace the heaven in the hereafter with a heaven on earth. What they deliver, however, is almost always much more like hell.

The Goldilocks Enigma

In his book The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (2006) physicist Paul Davies discusses the options for those trying to explain why the universe is so finely-tuned for life. That is, why are the forces, constants, and parameters that underlie the physical world "just right" to allow life to exist? The enigma is that it's incomprehensibly improbable that such a universe, a "Goldilocks" universe, exists by chance.

An obvious reply, perhaps, is that it doesn't exist by chance, that the universe is the intentional creation of an intelligent agent. This explanation doesn't sit well with many scientists, however, in whose ranks there are many metaphysical naturalists who are ill-disposed to countenance any explanation that involves non-natural causes.

Many scientific naturalists simply say that the universe just is, it's a brute fact, and we can't explain why it is the way it is nor should we even worry about it. The problem with this is that once scientists give up trying to discover why things are the way they are then science comes to a screeching halt..

Another possibility that's gaining in popularity is one version or another of the many-worlds hypothesis or the multiverse hypothesis. These are really two different theories, but we may consider them together for the purpose of our discussion. They both hold that there are in fact innumerable other universes, perhaps an infinity of other worlds, inaccessible to, and different from, ours.

If this is so then the laws of probability require that, if there are indeed enough worlds, and if they are all different in terms of their laws and properties, then, as improbable as our world seems to be, at least one world like ours must exist. To see this consider that the odds of getting a head on a coin flip are 1 in 2. If you flip a coin ten times you should expect on average to get five heads.. If the odds of an event are 1 in 100 then you would expect that out of a thousand trials it would occur ten times on average. Likewise, an event whose likelihood is 1 in a trillion should occur at least once in a trillion chances and in an infinity of chances everything which is possible, no matter how improbable, should happen.

Thus, if there are an infinity of different worlds then our world, as incredible as it is, must exist and we need not posit intelligent designers to explain it.

So, there are two live options on the table for those who want an explanation, the multiverse and intelligent design. Many non-theists choose the multiverse and conclude that there's no need for a designer, but actually the existence of a multiverse, so far from being a defeater for ID, actually makes intelligent design more likely to be true – for a number of reasons. Here are two:

In The Goldilocks Enigma Davies explains that in an infinite number of worlds it's probable that some of them would be inhabited by beings advanced enough to create simulated universes. The sims, for reasons Davies explains, would probably far exceed the number of real universes. Thus, any world that exists is more likely to be a designed simulation than not and our universe is therefore more likely than not to be such a “Matrix” world, designed by a superintellect, in which case intelligent design is true.

A second reason is that if there are an infinity of different worlds then every possible world would be actualized. Since a world that is the product of a designer is a possible world then such a world must exist somewhere.

Whether ours is that world or not, it must still be true to say that there is an intelligent designer that has designed at least one world (actually, it would be a near infinity of them) in the multiverse. The question then becomes, “Are there any good reasons to think that ours is or is not one of them?" There are no good reasons to think our universe is not designed (given the existence of a designer and numerous designed worlds) and many good reasons to think it is. Therefore, since we should believe what we have good reasons to believe we should believe that our world is probably one of the worlds designed by the intelligent designer.

Davies himself doesn't like the metaphysical implications of designed universes. If the universe is designed then it would seem that there is something like God out there and Davies balks at this conclusion. But what else is there?

Surprisingly, perhaps, Davies opts for a fourth possibility. Circulating among some physicists is the bizarre notion that as the universe unfolds it evolves ever greater forms of intelligence until at some point superminds are produced which have the power to actually cause events in the distant past. One of the events that these superminds cause is the origin of the universe itself. In other words, the universe was brought into being by minds that didn't exist until the universe was many billions of years old. The universe is thus like a loop which in some fashion manages to create itself.

This seems to me to be an act of metaphysical desperation, but it shows the lengths that some will go to in order to avoid having to agree with the psalmist who said that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows forth the work of His hands."

Even though Davies himself ultimately rejects intelligent design, almost every chapter in The Goldilocks Enigma contains something that points to the fact that the universe is underwritten by an intelligence, a mind, that has structured it so as to support living things. It's a very interesting and readable book for anyone interested in the interface of cosmology, philosophy, and religion.

Atheism's Moral Problem

Will Provine is a biologist at Cornell who has been a staunch advocate of atheistic darwinism throughout his career. What makes him especially interesting is his clarity in facing up to and acknowledging the implications of atheism.

He once stated this, for example:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear - and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death .... There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will....

Provine is saying that atheism is inconsistent with a belief in any of these, and readers of Viewpoint know that I agree with him, which is why I think that the only consistent position for an atheist is to be a nihilist about meaning and morality.

Provine himself is what most people would consider a "good guy", but I think there's a disconnect between the way he chooses to live his life and what he believes to be true. It's an inconsistency that I think many atheists like him have to accept because they simply can't, or don't want to, live consistently with the implications of their naturalistic worldview.

He recently spoke to a high school class on some of these matters (Where was the ACLU?). At around the 3:30 mark he addresses the subject of morality. Listen to what he says:

His parents brought him up to get a good feeling from being kind, and that's how we all should raise our kids.

Well, yes, but this elides a very important question. If atheistic evolution is true what reason do we have for thinking that kindness is "good"? If someone was brought up to be cruel, as many are, why would that be bad? Would it be bad because we don't like it, or it doesn't give us a good feeling? Is kindness good because it gives some people a good feeling? Of course not. Whether we like or don't like something, whether it makes us feel good or bad, hardly makes something right or wrong.

As frank as he is about the implications of atheism, what Provine fails to acknowledge is that if atheistic darwinism is true then the logical ethical consequence is might-makes-right egoism. Provine would doubtless recoil from such an ethic himself, but his reasons for doing so would be purely a matter of subjective repugnance. What he can't say is that someone who embraces such an ethic is wrong.

Free Speech in Extremis

Geert Wilders is a Dutch Member of Parliament who has been hounded for almost two and a half years by jurists wishing to appease their large Muslim population and who have no stomach for defending the freedom of speech against those who threaten violence in the Netherlands. After this long, sad saga Wilders was finally acquitted of charges of "hate speech", i.e. speech which offends somebody, but, as Nina Shea writes at NRO the victory is hardly comforting:

While Wilders was understandably happy and relieved he is not going to be spending the next 16 months behind bars, the significance of his victory seems overstated.

Wilders case demonstrates the continued willingness of authorities in Europe’s most liberal countries to regulate the content of speech on Islam in order to placate Muslim blasphemy demands. Wilders’ acquittal does not change that.

The presiding judge in the case determined that Wilders’s remarks were sometimes “hurtful,” “shocking,” and “offensive.” But the Court of Amsterdam reached its decision, as Reuters reported, by noting that “they were made in the context of a public debate about Muslim integration and multiculturalism, and therefore not a criminal act.” Thus, this case was decided on the basis that Wilders’s remarks were made in the proper context — in an ongoing public debate on specifically legitimate issues. Using this subjective criterion, the court evaluated the content of Wilders’ words to determine that they were lawful. In another context, or evaluated by another court, they might not be.

Wilders is not the first Dutch parliamentarian to have faced anti-Muslim hate-speech charges, and, based on today’s decision, he may not even be the last. Before Wilders, Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali was accused of hate speech against Muslims. In 2003, Hirsi Ali, a women’s rights activist born a Muslim in Somalia, was subject to a criminal investigation for hate speech for her statements linking Islam’s Prophet Mohammed to abuses against women in Muslim communities.

While that case was dropped, she was subsequently forced to stand trial in a civil action in the Netherlands for hate speech after announcing plans for a film on the treatment of homosexuals in Islam, a prospect the complainant — Holland’s main Muslim lobbying group — found to both cause “a great deal of pain” and be “blasphemous.” The court did not rule against the defendant but merely reprimanded the MP for having “sought the borders of the acceptable.”

The lesson here seems to be that in Holland, and soon enough here, given a few more progressive Supreme Court justices, any group willing to credibly threaten violence can immunize itself against criticism by claiming that the criticism is hurtful and blasphemous.

One wonders whether, had Wilders been outspoken in his criticism of, say, Catholicism or Judaism, the courts would have been as eager to assuage Catholic or Jewish sensibilities by subjecting him to prosecution.

In any event, I doubt had he offended either of these groups that he would require bodyguards to accompany him in public, but having offended Muslims, he needs them, and currently employs them. That's as troubling as is the precarious state of free speech in the Netherlands.

What Went Wrong

Hillel Ofek has a wonderful essay in The New Atlantis on why the engine of Muslim science and learning ground to a halt despite having been one time the world leader in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Ofek writes:

To anyone familiar with this Golden Age, roughly spanning the eighth through the thirteenth centuries a.d., the disparity between the intellectual achievements of the Middle East then and now — particularly relative to the rest of the world — is staggering indeed. In his 2002 book What Went Wrong?, historian Bernard Lewis notes that “for many centuries the world of Islam was in the forefront of human civilization and achievement.” “Nothing in Europe,” notes Jamil Ragep, a professor of the history of science at the University of Oklahoma, “could hold a candle to what was going on in the Islamic world until about 1600.”

Algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, alkali, nadir, zenith, coffee, and lemon: these words all derive from Arabic, reflecting Islam’s contribution to the West.

Today, however, the spirit of science in the Muslim world is as dry as the desert. Pakistani physicist Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy laid out the grim statistics in a 2007 Physics Today article: Muslim countries have nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand people, compared with a world average of forty-one. In these nations, there are approximately 1,800 universities, but only 312 of those universities have scholars who have published journal articles.

There are roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, but only two scientists from Muslim countries have won Nobel Prizes in science (one for physics in 1979, the other for chemistry in 1999). Forty-six Muslim countries combined contribute just 1 percent of the world’s scientific literature; Spain and India each contribute more of the world’s scientific literature than those countries taken together.

In fact, although Spain is hardly an intellectual superpower, it translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years. “Though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West,” Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg has observed, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.”

So what changed and why?

As Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an influential figure in contemporary pan-Islamism, said in the late nineteenth century, “It is permissible ... to ask oneself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such a live light on the world, suddenly became extinguished; why this torch has not been relit since; and why the Arab world still remains buried in profound darkness.”

Ofek goes on to assert that the Islamic disinterest in secular scholarship can be traced back to the ascendency in the tenth and eleventh centuries of the Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world:

With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life.

While the Mu’tazilites [predecessors to the Ash'arites] had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.

According to the occasionalist view, tomorrow coldness might follow fire, and satiety might follow lack of food. God wills every single atomic event and God’s will is not bound up with reason. This amounts to a denial of the coherence and comprehensibility of the natural world.....It is not difficult to see how this doctrine could lead to dogma and eventually to the end of free inquiry in science and philosophy.

Ofek sheds further light on the problem by contrasting Islam with Christianity:

... [I]t is helpful to briefly compare Islam with Christianity. Christianity acknowledges a private-public distinction and (theoretically, at least) allows adherents the liberty to decide much about their social and political lives. Islam, on the other hand, denies any private-public distinction and includes laws regulating the most minute details of private life. Put another way, Islam does not acknowledge any difference between religious and political ends: it is a religion that specifies political rules for the community.

Such differences between the two faiths can be traced to the differences between their prophets. While Christ was an outsider of the state who ruled no one, and while Christianity did not become a state religion until centuries after Christ’s birth, Mohammed was not only a prophet but also a chief magistrate, a political leader who conquered and governed a religious community he founded.

Because Islam was born outside of the Roman Empire, it was never subordinate to politics. As Bernard Lewis puts it, Mohammed was his own Constantine. This means that, for Islam, religion and politics were interdependent from the beginning; Islam needs a state to enforce its laws, and the state needs a basis in Islam to be legitimate. To what extent, then, do Islam’s political proclivities make free inquiry — which is inherently subversive to established rules and customs — possible at a deep and enduring institutional level?

There's much, much more in this fascinating essay for those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the Islamic world and how a society's fundamental religious presuppositions can be either high octane fuel for the engine of technological progress or sand in its gears. I encourage you to read it.

It Took Long Enough

Finally, after years of huge financial losses, dozens of deaths, and dozens of people taken hostage the U.N. has finally done what it should have done years ago:

The UN has kind of, sort of, unofficially but grudgingly given shipping companies "permission" to hire armed guards for vessels passing through pirate infested waters off the Somali coast. This was done via "interim guidelines" issued last month by the UN and the IMO (International Maritime Organization)..

Until now, it was understood that armed guards on merchant ships was a grey area, and companies allowing it were risking lawsuits from their victims (even if they were armed pirates) and anyone caught in the crossfire. Some countries flatly forbid ships flying their flag from employing armed guards. This has caused some shipping companies to shift the registration of ships plying pirate infested waters, or threatening to do so if their current country of registration does not openly allow armed guards. Some nations, like the United States and France, have done this, and gone after any pirates seizing ships flying the French or American flag..

Before the new UN/IMO guidelines, only about ten percent of the ships moving through pirate infested waters carried armed guards. It was noted by all that these were the ships least likely to be taken, and frequently the cause of pirates being shot dead (and not officially reported). With the new guidelines, more ships are believed ready to employ armed guards.

The pirates may respond by threatening to kill hostages, but this would invite what the pirates least want; an invasion of their coastal bases. So the UN move may prove to be one of the most effective anti-piracy actions in years.

Sometimes it takes bureaucrats a long time to see the common sense solutions that ordinary people espy at once.

Here's another suggestion that would improve not only this situation but the efficiency and vigor of economies throughout the Western world: Decertify 80% of the lawyers who specialize in tort law or at least reform the law. Lawsuits and the threat of them are perhaps one of the greatest impediments to our communal well-being and our national economic growth. Reducing the number of people who get rich off of suing others will greatly improve the quality of life of the rest of us.

Think of it as another attempt to thwart piracy.

Chauncey in the White House

Maureen Dowd wondered last Sunday in the New York Times who, exactly, the president is and what, exactly, he believes. No one, at least among the public, seems to know. Writes Dowd:

Our president likes to be on both sides at once.

In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy — and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.

On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.

On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending. On the environment, he wants to increase energy production but is reluctant to drill.. On health care, he wants to get everybody covered but will not press for a universal system. On Wall Street, he assails fat cats, but at cocktail parties, he wants to collect some of their fat for his campaign.

On politics, he likes to be friends with the other side but bash ’em at the same time. For others, bipartisanship means transcending their own prior political identities. For President Obama, it means that he participates in all political identities. He does not seem deeply affiliated with any side except his own.

He was elected on the idea of bold change, but now — except for the capture of Osama and his drone campaign in Pakistan and Yemen — he plays it safe. He shirks politics as usual but gets all twisted up in politics.

[H]e has tried to explain his reluctance on gay marriage as an expression of his Christianity, even though he rarely goes to church and is the picture of a secular humanist.

The man who was able to beat the Clintons in 2008 because the country wanted a break from Clintonian euphemism and casuistry is now breaking creative new ground in euphemism and casuistry.

Here's my take on Obama. He's a progressive leftist in the sense that many undergrads are progressive leftists. The socialist dream sounds good to them in the abstract and in general, but they don't really understand the history, the details of what collectivism entails, or the best arguments against it.

Thus, Mr. Obama rode the wave to election in 2008 in the hope of being able to change the country, not by leading it to a new socialist paradise, but by appointing people who themselves had the competence to articulate the principles and the power to impose them.

Despite the image of confidence that he projects, Mr. Obama, I suspect, realizes that he's largely ignorant of economics, history, and world affairs and is thus reluctant to get out front on any issue that bears on these matters. Nothing in his background, after all, has prepared him to wrestle with complex economic issues. I imagine that he came to office knowing that he wanted to have government pay for everyone's health care, for instance, but what the economic implications of this would be he had no idea and little concern. Those were for others to worry about while he gave speeches written by others, played golf, and flew off to exotic vacation spots.

Mr. Obama, in other words, is a symbol, a figurehead, like the Queen of England. Calls for him to show up at the debt-ceiling negotiations will be resisted because he fears being exposed as knowing little about the questions being debated and having nothing helpful to contribute. He fears being exposed as a real life Chauncey Gardiner.

But this is only my opinion. I could, of course, be completely mistaken.

Bellow, Jr.

Adam Bellow, son of Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow, is a former editor at Doubleday and is currently in senior management at HarperCollins. He's also a former liberal who began to wander rightward when he realized that the myth of the open-minded tolerant liberal is all too often not the reality.

World magazine has an interview with him in which he says some interesting things about his journey from left to right and about the emergence of conservative media. Some excerpts (questions are in boldface):

What did you learn there [at an early job at the New York Daily News]? My time at the News got me out of my liberal cocoon. I grew up going to school with the New York City elite. Everyone had the same political opinions: anti-war movement, hatred of Nixon. At Princeton, I was among people of the same background. It wasn't until I went to the News that I met people outside of my background.

A lot of these guys had never gone to college, and in many cases, their fathers had worked at the paper as well, and their sons worked there. I saw a strong core of decency, of patriotism, of willingness to go out of their way for someone who was considered part of the family. Once I had gone through the hazing, I was embraced.

When you went to graduate school at the University of Chicago and Columbia, which professor most influenced you? I studied with Alan Bloom before he wrote his best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind, a book of inestimable value. The next blow to my liberalism was that liberal intellectuals were too dishonest to read the book, and instead joined the chorus of Orwellian hate for having broached a wall they had thought unbroachable. They merely branded him a thought criminal.. This offended me personally and I got into a number of discussions and debates about the book with people. I would ask people if they had read the book, and if they said no, I told them that I didn't think that they should have an opinion on the book until they had read it. It took my opinion of the Columbia faculty down several notches.

While liberalism is still dominant in academia and media, don't we now have a conservative media establishment? What do you think of it? It's possible now to make known books by conservatives without the help of the liberals. In my humble opinion, the Becks, the Hannitys, and the O'Reillys are all a bunch of inflated egos, like balloons at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, bumping into each other. I shouldn't be saying this, but part of what you're thinking as an editor is "How can I make this more interesting to Glenn Beck?" You really don't want to be doing that, but it's like in the solar system, certain planets affect the gravitational fields.

In my own opinion Bellow might have substituted Rush Limbaugh for Glenn Beck and he'd have been more accurate. Beck seems to me to be the most humble guy of all the major talkers on radio or television. He's certainly the one most able to criticize and laugh at himself. It's a big part, I think, of why people like him and why he's so effective.

Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly do indeed have the most inflated egos among radio/television talkers, at least on the conservative side, but in my opinion only Limbaugh's ego is justified by his ability. O'Reilly too often comes across as arrogant, rude, and pompous, and Hannity often sounds like a narcissistic mediocrity with no particular qualifications, other than good looks, for doing what he's doing - sort of a conservative mirror image of ... well, never mind.

Anyway, Bellow finishes with this:

Many publications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries began by being sensational, as Glenn Beck tends to be. Then, to become more respectable, they became serious. Eventually they became solemn, and then lost the fun of it and became a snooze. That lost them their audience, and the cycle would begin again, with people who were having fun as they published. Having fun in business is important. When you're watching TV, you can tell when the actors are having fun.

When I was young and Saturday Night Live debuted, it was clear that they were having a blast. It's clear that they're having a blast at 30 Rock, at the Daily Show, and at Glenn Beck, whereas at 60 Minutes, I don't think they're having fun. I think part of why they're not having as much fun is that they've realized that they don't have as much clout as they once did. At one time, they sat at the top of the media pyramid, and now that's not the case, and I think it takes away from some of the enjoyment of what they do.

There's something to this. When people are no longer having fun doing their jobs they appear to be just going through the motions, and, as anyone who has ever sat in a classroom or stood at the front of one can tell you, it's hard to keep people interested when they suspect that the speaker himself doesn't really love and enjoy what he's doing.

Stepping Onto the Slippery Slope

New York state has struck a blow for equality, so we are told, by legalizing gay marriage.

I'd like to register a dissent. This is not just about equality. If it were there'd be little reason to oppose granting homosexuals the right to legal marriage. For many who have struggled to get gay marriage passed into law it may be an equal rights issue, but for many others it's about preserving marriage.

As we've argued here before, once marriage is no longer to be regarded as one man uniting with one woman, once the gender of the people entering into the relationship no longer matters, then there's no longer any logical reason for insisting that the number of people matters, or for that matter, that they even have to be people.

Once we've crossed the threshold of erasing the gender distinction in marriage we've placed ourselves on a slippery slope and will slide ineluctably to a nadir where marriage will be anything anyone wants it to be.

Some object that this is preposterous, that no one will want to legalize polyamory (group marriage), polygyny (multiple wives), polyandry (multiple husbands), or most bizarre, interspecies marriage. The objection is naive. There are already groups advocating all of these things and having eliminated the traditional gender distinction, there remains no logical, non-arbitrary basis to prevent society from going further if someone has the financial resources to press the matter in the courts and legislatures.

It's unfortunate that our politicians don't seem to care about the long-term consequences of what they're doing to marriage, but it's not surprising. None of the media discussion on the issue seems to be concerned with what transforming marriage portends for the future either.

Darwin's Influence

Marvin Olasky at World Magazine pens an essay that serves as an illustration of the aphorism that ideas have consequences.

Darwinism has inspired ideas in matters as diverse as politics, economics, sociology, morality, theology and many others. Indeed, it is probably the case that no thinker in modern times, except maybe Marx, has had the influence on the world that Darwin has had. Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea maintains that Darwin's theory of evolution is a "universal acid" that eats through every idea, ideology, and worldview, dissolving them all in the corrosive solution of Darwinian materialism.

On politics, for example, Olasky writes that:

Woodrow Wilson started federal government expansion in 1912 by opposing the "Newtonian" view that the government should have an unchanging constitutional foundation, somewhat like "the law of gravitation." He argued that government should be "accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. . . . Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice." Wilson was the president who started the modern pattern of disregarding the Constitution, and in the 2012 election we will either start a second century of governmental expansion or yell, "Stop!"

Olasky has more to say on how Darwin influenced our attitudes on sex, abortion, infanticide, and economics. Check out his column at the link.