<i>Sic Semper Tyrannus</i>

Mohammed at Iraq the Model discusses how Iraqis of his acquaintance are viewing the trial of Saddam Hussein:

Today I was talking to victims of Saddam who are friends of the family; a mother (52) and her daughter (25). The rest of their family was exterminated by Saddam; the daughter lost her grandfather, father and uncle.

"I was one year old when that happened and I didn't realize the situation until years after but I tell you one thing, I never said 'DAD' in my life...

Why do you think the trial was fine? It was pathetically weak and you cannot imagine the pain I felt when I saw the bloody murderer being allowed to speak and to defy the court. I could see the smiles on the faces of the Ba'athists and the Arab mercenary who speak of Saddam as a brave lion, haven't you heard what Raghad (Saddam's daughter) said on Al-Arabiya? She said: I never saw a greater or a braver father.

She killed me again, killed me and my mother whom Saddam stole her life. I was small when my dad was murdered but I see sadness in my mother's eyes everyday, that woman had to bury her father, brother and husband.

I cannot celebrate justice now because to me justice means that Saddam must be cut into pieces and burned with his gang and family...justice means that the suffer like we suffered.

I am so depressed today, he ought to be kicked, slapped and humiliated in front of us. Where was justice when my grandfather, my dad and my uncle were murdered just because they had a different opinion than that of Saddam!!"

I stood silent and I couldn't answer back, I just told her that Saddam stole my life too but she wouldn't listen, she was only crying and repeating her words...

The mother who lost her father, husband and brother was calmer and actually she sounded happy when she told me "yesterday we avenged the blood of our martyrs, I can't say how happy I was to see fear and anxiety in Saddam's eyes. You don't know how much I awaited this moment, only yesterday I felt safe and I don't really care if they hang him or leave him to rot in jail, all I care about is that this time HE is in the cage, isn't that great? I don't have much time left son but you and your children shall harvest the fruits of this victory..."

If you're interested in knowing about the background of this family's story, I'd like to include snapshots from it:

Back in 1972, the Ba'ath created the "National Patriot Progressive Front" in order to attract the opposition parties, especially the communists, the Kurds and the pan-nationalists. These parties didn't realize that it was a trap designed by the Ba'ath to infiltrate the parties and identify their cadres. So after the Ba'athists seized control over the country they thought it would be a good idea to eliminate those in the opposition who naively thought the Ba'ath fascists wanted to share governance. My guest begins telling her story:

"It started first when they executed 34 members from the leadership of the communist party and this forced the rest of the higher ranks to runaway and hide. One woman activist (Ayda Yasin) sought refuge in my father's clinic (he was a dentist) and he did hide her there until she was spotted by the Ba'thists.

He was attacked and arrested in his clinic and then taken to some unknown location. We were scared and we felt the family was being watched including my brother who carried a PhD in geology. We kept a low profile waiting for news about my father but then we were fired from our jobs and the pressures increased upon us. Then came the horrible news that my father was executed and that the rest of us were on the hit list.

We decided to head north to the Kurdish region; me, my husband and brother joined the "Ansar" movement and we fought for years defending ourselves in the mountains that were besieged by the government's army.

I was pregnant with my 2nd daughter and I had to leave the mountains and escape to Syria and in 1983 I learned that my husband and my brother among 94 other heroes fell in a battle in the mountains outside Erbil. The world became black in my eyes, I lost everything and I'm responsible for two babies who know nothing about the disaster that fell upon us.

You know, we never thought of carrying arms and fighting, we were good citizens serving the country with the knowledge and degrees we earned with hard work and we never imagined we would be forced one day to carry arms and battle the Ba'athists in the mountains and deserts but it's Saddam and his oppressive regime that left us with no other choice...

I'm telling you this and I'm free again and I'm proud of what I and my family did while that miserable coward is sitting in a cage and about to beg for mercy."

Yes, I do feel that justice is winning....

Mohammed describes his friends' thoughts as they watched the trial on television:

We all sat in front of the TV; there were 8 of us hushing each other as we didn't want to miss a single word of the conversations and we wanted to catch every small detail of the trial just like we suffered every small detail of the disasters brought upon us by the hateful tyrant.

"Does he deserve a fair trial?" this was the question that kept surfacing every five minutes...he wasn't the least fair to his people and he literally reduced justice to verbal orders from his mouth to be carried out by his dogs.

Why do we have to listen to his anticipated rudeness and arrogant stupid defenses? We already knew he was going to try to twist things and claim that the trial lacks legitimacy or that it's more a court of politics rather than a court of law, blah, blah, blah...

"Why do we have to listen to this bull****?" said one of my friends. "I prefer the trial goes like this:

Q:Are you Saddam Hussein?

A:Yes.

Then take this bullet in the head."

Everyone could find a reason to immediately execute a criminal who never let his victims say a word to defend themselves "let's execute him and get over this."

When the day of reckoning comes for Saddam it should be broadcast around the world with the words scrawling continuously along the top of the picture - sic semper tyrannus! Such a scene might have a salutary effect on tyrants throughout the globe.

The Roots of Their Animosity

Why is there so much animosity on the Left for conservatives in general and George Bush in particular? Perhaps there are several reasons. One surely is that for many on the Left politics is an ersatz religion. They view opposition to their politics in the same way that some religious people view opposition to their religion. Any threat to one's deepest convictions is as dangerous as a threat to one's physical being. It is a causus belli.

Another reason is frustration amounting to bitterness. The movers and shakers on the contemporary Left came of age in the social and cultural rebellions of the 1960s. As the 60s morphed into the 70s many of those who were committed to pulling down the establishment realized that smoking dope, grooving on the Mommas and the Poppas, and looking scruffy would not, by themselves, accomplish much. So they cleaned up, entered the mainstream, and began their long march through the institutions. If they couldn't bring down the system from without, they'd do it from within. The revolution wouldn't be the sudden cataclysm they'd hoped for, but would instead be a gradual evolutionary process, like the frog which discovers too late that he's boiling in hot water. The brightest of the revolutionaries went into law, education, the arts, the media, the church, and politics. They advanced from entry level positions in the 70s, to mid-level positions in the 80s, and reached the zenith of their professions in the 90s. By this time, many of these fields were dominated by recast rebels who still held fast to the values, ideals, and dreams of their youth.

By the 90s social and cultural power was concentrated largely in the hands of those who wished to use it to transform the United States into the economically Marxist, socially libertine, militarily impotent nation they envisioned back in those hallucinogenic, halcyon days of the 60s. They were clearly succeeding. The culture was happy to throw off traditional moral norms and let it all hang out. Education had been transmogrified into a feel-good party for kids and sinecures for instructors, especially at the college level. The Church had largely abandoned traditional beliefs and doctrines, especially as these related to social matters like sexuality, and had thrown in its lot with the Zietgeist. The courts and the media were on board. Bill Clinton, the first president from the 60s generation, had been elected to the highest office in the land after the aberration of the Reagan years. Everything was ripe for the final stages of the transformation of America into a modern utopia. It seemed that success after all these decades of ideological toil was ineluctable. It would happen in their lifetime, as a result of their efforts, and the anticipation of it was doubtless intoxicating.

Then came 2000 and a Republican running on a Reaganite platform garnered fewer votes than their champion but was nevertheless ensconced in office by the Supreme Court. This was infuriating enough, auguring as it did another delay in their ultimate ascendency, but George Bush's retrograde first term witnessed a resurgence of enthusiasm for the American military, tax cuts, and conservatives being placed in high judgeships. Suddenly everything was threatened by this interloper from Texas. It was bad enough, too, that Rush Limbaugh was on the air, but now there was the Washington Times, Fox News, Sean Hannity, and the blogosphere and the feeling that all they had worked so hard for for so many years was coming undone.

Then came 2004 and an even more genuine left-wing candidate was also defeated by Bush who seemed now, despite numerous difficulties, to be in a position to have his way with the courts, the crucial linchpin in any success that the Left would have. The resentment boiled over in the aftermath of the election. Unable to mask their disappointment, resentment, and bitterness the Left launched a vicious assualt on the President and his supporters, especially Evangelicals, and has been determined ever since to do everything it can to punish and discredit Bush to limit the damage that he's done.

If he can be made to look weak, stupid, and venal, the thinking evidently goes, the Left will have a much better chance of persuading the electorate to repudiate all things Republican at the polls in 2006 and 2008. Thus nothing is out of bounds. There are no rules to limit what may be done. Spurious memos on Bush's National Guard service, phony indictments of Republican leaders, repeated allegations of deliberate deceptions by the administration to get us into war, discrediting the administration's ability to respond to disasters like Katrina - every slander on the character of the President and his appointees is in play.

The Left, having been denied its prize after having come so close to grasping it, is lashing out with vitriolic hatred at the people who have frustrated their designs, and demanding of its Democratic surrogates in Congress that there be total all-out war against the President and everything he stands for. Any Republican attempt to reach across the aisle in a quest for bi-partisan cooperation for the good of the country is to be rebuffed. Every Republican initiative is to be opposed, every Bush policy is to be condemned no matter what the cost. The Left is determined to gain its revenge and to recover its momentum by adopting the words of Malcolm X as their tacit slogan: "By whatever means necessary."

And that's why, and how, we've come to be where we are today.

C, DE, and ID

There continues to be a great deal of confusion, much of it seemingly deliberate, over the nature of the Intelligent Design (ID) hypothesis as well as the nature of the basic assumptions of Darwinian evolution (DE) and creationism (C). This post is an attempt to clarify things a little.

Let's start with the commonly heard refrain that DE is science whereas ID is religion.

The fundamental claim of DE is that all of life has arisen solely as a result of blind, unguided, impersonal processes. ID is, in its essence, simply the denial or contrary of this claim. ID states that mechanistic processes are inadequate by themselves to account for what we find in the realm of living things and that one of the causal factors which must be invoked to fully account for life is intelligence. Whatever philosophical status the basic assertion of DE enjoys its contrary also enjoys, and vice versa. If the proposition that life is completely explicable in terms of blind, impersonal processes is a scientific assertion then so is it's denial. If the proposition that life bears the impress of intelligent purpose is religious then so is it's contrary.

ID is not C. Creationism is an attempt to vindicate the Genesis account and to reconcile it with science. It starts with the assumption that Genesis is true, and it will not accept any explanation that is incompatible with this assumption.

Similarly, DE starts with the assumption that only naturalistic forces can be employed to account for living things and will not accept any explanation which is incompatible with this assumption.

Both C and DE are inferences from an a priori metaphysical commitment and are more like each other in this regard than either is like ID.

ID starts with observations of living things and infers from the empirical data that intelligence must have played a role in the development of life. As such, ID is an observation-based hypothesis and is therefore more scientific, in this sense at least, than either of its competitors. It's inference that purpose and intentional design underlie life on earth is based not on a presupposition that there is a designer (though many ID theorists doubtless hold such a presupposition in their private lives), but rather upon several obvious facts about the world. Here are three:

1) The abundance of specified complexity (information) in the biosphere: Information is not generated by purposeless processes. A computer, for example, does not produce simulated organisms by blind chance. The computer must be programmed to follow an algorithm which is itself the product of intelligence. Likewise, DNA and proteins which carry far more information than does the average library, are not adequately explained by purposeless processes any more than are the books in the library.

2) The existence of ostensibly irreducibly complex structures and processes: If irreducible complexity exists in living things - and despite the claims of critics, no one has been able to put forward a convincing case that it does not - then this would be evidence of an intelligent agent at work. The nature of biochemical machines and pathways, cellular assembly lines and factories, and highly complex chemical cascades (like blood clotting) all point to purpose. The idea that these things could have arisen through random mutations and natural selection apart from any intentional engineering would be regarded as extremely implausible were it not necessitated by a prior commitment to materialistic explanations.

3) The telic nature of the cosmos: That life is telic (i.e. evinces purpose) is in dispute. That the cosmos is telic is much more difficult to gainsay. Cosmologists can invoke no mechanism like natural selection to explain the exquisite fine-tuning that is being discovered to exist throughout the warp and woof of the cosmos. If the cosmos as a whole bears witness to having been intricately engineered for a purpose, it is plausible to think that certain aspects of the cosmos, like the structures in living things, which appear to be designed for a purpose, actually are.

Indeed, we must keep in mind that the current debate is not about whether there is design in the biosphere. Everyone agrees that there is. The debate is over the source of that design. Is it nature blindly selecting for survival advantage, or is it an intelligence of some kind, a "World Soul", a Platonic demiurge, an idealist "Absolute", or the God of classical theism? ID offers no opinion.

It must be stressed that, strictly speaking, ID does not conflict with evolution (E), the theory of descent by modification. It conflicts only with DE, which insists that descent is a thoroughly naturalistic, mechanistic process. E simply asserts, however, that organisms share common ancestors. It does not require one to believe that the process of descent from these ancestral forms was purely mechanistic.

Thus there are among the top ranks of ID advocates a number of evolutionists of various stripe, and there are also some who are more creationist in their beliefs. ID is compatible with both, although either, or both, could be wrong and ID would be unaffected. What ID is not compatible with is DE.

ID is scarcely even related to C except insofar as both theories hold that an intelligence was involved in the emergence of life. To see the vast difference between them one need only realize that all of Genesis could be proven wrong but, although C would be thoroughly devastated, the theory of ID would be unscathed. ID is not dependent upon Genesis or any other religious or metaphysical book or doctrine for its content.

Contrary to the insistent claims of its critics, and the hopes of some of its advocates, ID is not religious. It requires no commitment to a god, it prescribes no worship nor doctrine. It has no clergy nor holy books. It simply holds that blind, unguided processes are inadequate by themselves to account for living things and that at some point, in some way, intelligence must have played a role. This is hardly a religious assertion, and unlike religious assertions, may even lend itself to testing. If it could be shown, for instance, that some mechanistic process does indeed produce information or an increase in information, if it could be plausibly and convincingly demonstrated that DNA or proteins could have arisen by chance through purely natural processes, then intelligent agency will have been shown to be a superfluous add-on, and ID will be decisively refuted.

Some may wish to use ID as a wedge to get religion into schools, but ID should be judged on its merits and not on the motives of some of its proponents. There are some who insist, after all, that DE be taught because they see it as a way of inculcating atheism into students. There are others who have used DE to justify social Darwinism and even genocide. It would be an error to judge DE on the basis of such misuses by its votaries, and it's equally wrong to judge ID by the misuses to which some of its adherents wish to put it.

There can be no harm, despite the hysteria of the ACLU and its allies in the scientific community, in informing students, when they are studying evolution, that although many scientists believe the process requires only mechanistic engines like mutation and natural selection, others disagree. It hurts no one to inform students that there are many scientists and philosophers who believe that whether evolution accurately describes how life came to be or not, the fundamental causes of life must have included intelligent purpose among them.

Things Are Better Than You Think

Everything that you thought was true about the state of the world is apparently false. If you don't believe it, read the Commission on Human Security Report titled War and Peace in the Twenty First Century. The report is filled with fascinating information. Did you know for instance that:

Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways. Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply. International wars, now only a small minority of all conflicts, have been in steady decline for a much longer period, as have military coups and the average number of people killed per conflict per year.

*Armed conflicts around the world have actually declined by 40% since the early nineties.

*Between 1991 (the high point for the post-World War II period) and 2004, 28 armed struggles for self-determination started or restarted, while 43 were contained or ended.

*There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts under way in 2004, the lowest number since 1976.

*Notwithstanding the horrors of Rwanda, Srebrenica and elsewhere, the number of genocides and politicides plummeted by 80% between the 1988 high point and 2001.

*International crises, often harbingers of war, declined by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001.

*The dollar value of major international arms transfers fell by 33% between 1990 and 2003.

*Global military expenditure and troop numbers declined sharply in the 1990s as well.

*The number of refugees dropped by some 45% between 1992 and 2003, as more and more wars came to an end.

*The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval of uninterrupted peace between the major powers in hundreds of years.

*The number of actual and attempted military coups has been declining for more than 40 years. In 1963 there were 25 coups and attempted coups around the world, the highest number in the post - World War II period. In 2004 there were only 10 coup attempts - a 60% decline. All of them failed.

According to the Report each of the following examples of conventional wisdom is actually little more than myth:

� The number of armed conflicts is increasing.

� Wars are getting deadlier.

� The number of genocides is increasing.

� The gravest threat to human security is international terrorism.

� 90% of those killed in today's wars are civilians.

� 5 million people were killed in wars in the 1990s.

� 2 million children were killed in wars during the last decade.

� 80% of refugees are women and children.

� Women are the primary victims of war.

� There are 300,000 child soldiers serving around the world today.

The Report states that, "Not one of these claims is based on reliable data. All are suspect; some are demonstrably false. Yet they are widely believed because they reinforce popular assumptions. They flourish in the absence of official figures to contradict them, and conjure a picture of global security trends that is grossly distorted. And they often drive political agendas."

Then there is this astonishing fact:

According to the World Bank, the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001 pushed millions of people in the developing world into poverty, and likely killed tens of thousands of under-five year-olds, a far greater toll than the total number of deaths directly caused by the attack.

The report gives the lion's share of the credit for the decline in violence to the end of both colonialism and the cold war, which is certainly a major factor, and to the efforts of the U.N., which is certainly a singularly ludicrous attribution. Nowhere in the report is there mention of the fact that since the 1980s, evil-doers have been put on notice that if they persist in doing their neighbors ill they may well receive a knock on the door from an American JDAM precision guided munition.

Such a prospect has probably done more to concentrate the minds of the world's villains than all of Kofi Anan's proclamations, programs, and thieveries put together. Yet it receives no mention. Nor have we seen this report in the MSM. Too much good news for the chronically dyspeptic gloom and doomers to assimilate, we suppose.

Thanks to Belmont Club for the tip.

Complexity: A Visual Aid

ID folks frequently mention how complex living systems are, but many non-scientists really have no idea what they're talking about. One example of complexity is the biochemical pathways that are found in every cell of a higher animal's body. To get an idea of just what a scientist means by the word "complexity" check this out. As you look at it, bear in mind that this is what Darwinian evolutionists believe was produced by the action of blind, unguided, random processes, and it's what they don't want students to be told may be the product of an intelligent bio-engineer.

Click anywhere on the chart to magnify that section of it.

Thanks to Bill Dembski for the tip.

Theological Reflections

The highly esteemed theologian J.I. Packer forthrightly addresses in a Christianity Today article the question whether Christian theology allows that others besides Christians might be granted eternal life.

This is a very difficult question for Christians to discuss with devout members of other faiths because the orthodox answer seems heartless and parochial. Packer doesn't shrink from it, however, and states clearly that:

"All are called to turn to Jesus Christ and so become God's adopted children, and eternal life comes only to those who do this."

This is the mainstream evangelical position and is the heritage of two thousand years of orthodox Christian belief on the matter. Even so, I think it fair to say that everyone, including Dr. Packer, might hope that this traditional interpretation is incorrect. It breaks one's heart to think of the implications of its being right. Millions of wonderful people who deeply love God as they understand him are nevertheless lost forever if it is. Either they spend eternity suffering the torments of hell or they are completely annihilated, but in either case, Christians who are called by Christ to love the lost cannot contemplate that fate without hoping that it's not so, without hoping that God has some alternative plan for the millions of children and adults who have lived their lives without ever hearing the gospel or who have, for whatever reason, never been able to perceive its truth.

Yet whatever such a plan might be (C.S. Lewis addresses this very issue, albeit obliquely, in his wonderful short work The Great Divorce), it must be consonant with the Biblical witness on the matter, especially the doctrine that it is only because of the price that God himself paid on the cross that anyone at all can be saved. Salvation is possible for anyone who receives it only because of what Christ did, but whether it also depends upon a person's knowing what Christ did and knowing who Christ was is less clear.

Packer goes on to outline two alternatives to the orthodox view that Christians have put forward throughout the history of the church and finds them both inadequate:

[S]ome pursue two lines of speculation. The first is universalism, the belief that despite the New Testament witness to the contrary, God will somehow bring all who leave this world as nonbelievers to share the inheritance of those who die living in Christ. This requires successful postmortem evangelism for some and heart-changing corrective discipline for others....

The second speculation is inclusivism, positing a possibility of salvation for sincere devotees of faiths in which Jesus Christ is either unknown or is rejected as the divine Savior. On what, biblically speaking, might this possibility be based? Not, clearly, on sincerity or devotion as such, nor on personal merit (no one has any), nor on any intrinsic efficacy of unchristian rituals. On what then?

It has been urged that if non-Christian devotees come to know themselves as guilty, defiled, and unworthy, and to confess and renounce their sins, asking mercy from whatever gods there may be, they will receive the forgiveness they seek because of the Jesus they do not yet know, but will know hereafter. God forbid we should dispute this. But have we reason to think there are such people? The New Testament only speaks of penitents being saved through knowing about, and coming to trust, the crucified and risen Lord....

Both speculations, biblically, must be judged failures.

We discount universalism for reasons we need not go into now, and we agree with Dr. Packer that if any non-Christians are saved it is not on the basis of sincerity, merit, or rituals. However, it may be that these do not exhaust all the possibilities. Most Christians, after all, believe that children and mentally handicapped persons who die without recognizing themselves as "guilty, defiled, and unworthy," and confessing and renouncing their sins, "asking mercy from whatever gods there may be," are nevertheless not condemned by their lack of understanding.

Many Christians also believe that people who lived before the Christian era are also held to a different standard and are not necessarily denied salvation even though they may never have had the faintest glimmer of who Christ would be. So, it seems reasonable to hope that it is at least possible that adults in the present age who've never heard the gospel or who, for reasons transcending the biblical "hardness of heart," find themselves unable to discern its truth, are judged on a quite different basis than those who have heard the gospel and who have no other reason for rejecting it than that they simply don't want it to be true.

The gospel tells us in many places that all those who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and savior will have eternal life, but it rarely suggests that only those who accept Christ will be saved. In those passages (like Jn.8:24, I Jn.2:22,23 and I Jn. 5:10) which do seem to imply this exclusivism it is possible to read the text as referring to those contemporaries who have been given so much evidence that Jesus was the Son of God that their persistent unbelief is without excuse.

Perhaps when each of us stands before God he will ask of us a single question. Perhaps he will ask not whether we have believed this or that point of doctrine, however important these may be, but rather he will ask of each person: "Do you love me?" It could be that this is for God the all-important issue, the overriding question. Our love is what he most earnestly desires. It could be, too, that we will not respond to this question in words, but rather that our whole life will serve as our reply.

On the other hand, it may well be that this is not the case at all and that Packer's interpretation of the Gospel's teaching is correct, but he, and every other Christian, should be fervently hoping that it isn't. We should all hope that there's a "wideness to God's mercy" and grace that judges us accountable for the love of God, or lack of it, that we hold in our heart and not for the knowledge of the scripture, or lack of it, which we hold in our head.

Squeezing the Pig

The Fourth Rail has a good visual that enables the viewer to track the progress made by coalition forces over the last year in its transition from "search and destroy" to "clear and hold missions." The visual illustrates pretty starkly that the number of towns being held by the coalition is expanding rapidly toward the Syrian border now that Iraqi combat troops are growing increasingly competent and available.

Of course, there may still be terrorist activity in towns that are under Iraqi military control, as there was recently in Ramadi, but these towns are no longer sanctuaries for terrorists. The bad guys know their range of operations is growing more and more restricted. They no doubt feel like a pig in the coils of a python. An apt simile, that.

No New Strategy

Fareed Zakaria includes the following bit of silliness in a column he writes for Newseek:

This shift could be seen in microcosm in a report last week in The Wall Street Journal on the town of Tall Afar. Tall Afar was an insurgent stronghold, where last month American and Iraqi forces launched a major operation, killing and arresting hundreds. But to avoid the mistakes of the past, when cities were won only to be lost again in a few months, the commanding officer of the American squadron, Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, spent a great deal of time, energy and attention constructing a local political order that would hold. That meant empowering both the Sunnis and Shiites. Hickey reached out to the main Sunni tribal sheik, a man who only a few months earlier had been considered an insurgent leader and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. "Reconciliation is the key to this thing," explained Col. H. R. McMaster, commander of U.S. forces in north-western Iraq. "This insurgency depends on sectarian tension to move and operate." McMaster articulates a strategy that is part military and part political.

Many military experts have weighed in on the need for a better counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq-one that defends towns and regions, thus securing people's lives, rather than simply killing bad guys. In fact, that strategy is being adopted, using Iraqi troops and local leaders as the crucial ingredients to keeping the peace. That's why conditions in several key trouble spots in Iraq-Sadr City, Mosul, Fallujah, Najaf and Tall Afar-are much, much better than they were a year ago. There is a general recognition even among many Shiite leaders that a purely military strategy will not defeat the insurgency.

Iraq is still in rough shape, but the Bush administration's strategy has moved in the right direction.

Zakaria gives the impression that the current "clear and hold" tactics that coalition forces are employing along the Euphrates River and elsewhere in the Sunni triangle are a novel development. He makes it sound as if the administration could have been setting up local forces in cleared towns all along but were too obtuse to see the value of it and are just now getting around to revising their strategy. This is nonsense.

The fact is that it has been administration policy from early on to train Iraqi troops to handle precisely this sort of mission, but it has taken time to prepare the Iraqis for that task. Now, however, there are dozens of battalions ready to fight the Islamists and provide security in Iraqi towns and more troops are coming on line every month. As the troops are becoming available the policy is coming to fruition, but the policy isn't new. It's only that people who are loath to give the present administration any credit for anything wish us to think that somehow they have just come to see what everyone else has been seeing for months, i.e. that we need a new strategy.

We didn't need a new strategy, the Henny-Pennys and Chicken Littles among us notwithstanding. What we needed was patience and resolve to see the strategy we already had through to it's culmination. Bush had it and it's now clearly paying off.

Prom Night

In case you missed this story, Joanne Jacobs provides us with the link:

Kenneth M. Hoagland had heard all the stories about prom-night debauchery at his Long Island high school: Students putting down $10,000 to rent a house in the Hamptons for a weekend bash. Pre-prom cocktail parties followed by a trip to the dance in a limo loaded with liquor. Fathers chartering a boat so their kids could go out on a late-night "booze cruise."

Enough was enough, Hoagland said. So the principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School fired off a 2,000-word missive to parents at the start of the school year informing them that the Catholic school would no longer put on the spring prom.

"It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be; it is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity's sake -- in a word, financial decadence," Brother Hoagland said, fed up with what he calls the "bacchanalian aspects" of the prom.

"Each year it gets worse -- becomes more exaggerated, more expensive, more emotionally traumatic," he added. "We are withdrawing from the battle and allowing the parents full responsibility. (Kellenberg) is willing to sponsor a prom, but not an orgy." The move has brought a mixed, albeit passionate, reaction from students and parents.

"I don't think it's fair, obviously, that they canceled prom," said senior Alyssa Johnson of Westbury. "There are problems with the prom, but I don't think their reasons or the actions they took solved anything."

In his letter, Hoagland cited a litany of problems that he says have developed over the years. He began a dialogue on the future of the prom last spring after it was discovered that 46 Kellenberg seniors made a $10,000 down payment on a $20,000 rental in the Hamptons for a post-prom party. When school officials found out, they forced the students to cancel the deal; the kids got their money back and the prom went on as planned. But Hoagland said some parents went ahead and rented a Hamptons house anyway.

Amy Best, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at George Mason University in Virginia and the author of "Prom Night: Youth, Schools and Popular Culture," said this is the first time she has heard of a school canceling the prom for such reasons.

"A lot of people have lamented the growing consumption that surrounds the prom," she said, noting it is not uncommon to see students pay $1,000 on the prom and the surrounding folderol: dresses that cost hundreds, tuxedo rentals, flowers, limousines, pre- and post-prom parties. Best pinned some of the blame for the burgeoning costs on parents, who are often willing to open their wallets for whatever their child demands. "It is a huge misperception that the kids themselves are totally driving this."

Edward Lawson, the father of a Kellenberg senior, said he and other parents are discussing whether to organize a prom for their children without the sponsorship of the 2,500-student school, which features pristine athletic fields, immaculate hallways and the latest in audio-visual technology. "This is my fourth child to go through Kellenberg and I don't think they have a right to judge what goes on after the prom," he said. "They put everybody in the category of drinkers and drug addicts. I don't believe that's the right thing to do."

Some parents lined up in their cars outside the school to pick up their children on a recent afternoon said they are backing Hoagland. "The school has excellent values," said Margaret Cameron of Plainview. "We send our children here because we support the values and the administration of the school and I totally back everything they do. I trust my child with them and I trust everything, all the decisions they make for them."

Hoagland said in an interview that parents, who pay $6,025 in annual tuition, have expressed appreciation for his stern stand. "For some, it (the letter) was an eye-opener," he said. "Others feel relieved that the pressure is off of them."

Chris Laine, a senior from Rockville Centre, said the cancellation was "unfortunate, but you can't really argue with the facts they present. ... It's just what it's evolved into. It's not what it was 20, 30 or 40 years ago. It's turned into something it wasn't originally intended to be." He insisted, "there's never been a problem at the prom, but everything that happens after it has turned into something ... it's what an average 17 or 18 year old is doing, but it's not necessarily what they should be doing."

Besides, Laine noted, the senior class still has a four-day trip to Disney World scheduled for April. "We go to all the parks with our friends," he said just before hopping into his jet-black Infiniti and driving off to meet friends for an after-school bite to eat. "We fly down together and stay in the same hotel and so it's not like we're totally losing everything."

They may not be losing everything, but Ms Johnson and Mr. Lawson are certainly missing the point. The expense extravagance and licentiousness of these affairs is as ludicrous as it is obscene. For the school to continue sponsoring the event is to assume responsibility for the message it sends, i.e. that such behavior is morally acceptable. We're delighted that a high school principal had the steel to stand up to parents and students and refuse to let his school capitulate to the crass materialism and sensuality that the parents encourage their kids to indulge in.

The article doesn't say it, but we assume from the fact that the students pay tuition that Kellenberg is a private school. It will be interesting to see how many public school administrators this year, and in the years ahead, demonstrate the character and wisdom displayed by Mr. Hoagland.

The Sweating Starts in Syria

Belmont Club's Wretchard and The Fourth Rail's Bill Roggio see the ratification of the Iraqi constitution as the beginning of a new phase in the war. according to these observers, the insurgency has diminished to the point where it's unable to do much more than snipe around the margins of the Iraqi juggernaut, and the administration, who's eyes have been turned toward Damascus for some time, now feels a little more latitude to turn up the threat of military action against the Syrians who have been making mischief in Iraq ever since the end of the invasion phase of the war.

Roggio says that:

The Times Online states the Bush administration has offered Assad the "Gaddafi deal" via a third party, which consists of the following:

1) Co-operate full with investigation into Rafik Hariri's assassination and hand over any suspects for trial.

2) Cease all further interference in Lebanese affairs.

3) Halt funding, planning and training of Iraqi insurgents on Syrian territory.

4) Stop support for militant groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

A 'senior Arab diplomat' is cited in the article as saying "Assad is facing a tough time ahead and he has very few friends left... He is desperately looking for a way out of this predicament." However, a 'source close to the ruling family' stated "The regime has calculated that it has the resources to survive for quite some time even if it is isolated... The strategy could be to manage the conflict until external pressures ease."

Whatever the outcome of these negotiations, it is clear the war in Iraq has moved its center of gravity from central Iraq to the border with Syria, and perhaps all the way to Damascus. The establishment of permanent outposts in Tal Afar, Sa'dah and along the Euphrates in towns astride the ratlines from Syria, along with political progress in Iraq and the development of the Iraqi Security Forces has shown the Syrians the limitations of the insurgency. While the insurgency may be able to conduct attacks on infrastructure and kill Iraqi citizens, it is unable to derail the political process, obtain mass support or take and hold territory.

Syria's hand in the insurgency can no longer be hidden, and this has furthered the isolation of the Syrian government and created the conditions for the Syrian problem to be addressed. The Assad regime is now under diplomatic and military pressure to denounce its state sponsorship of Hezbollah and Hamas, eliminate the jihadi's use of its territory for attacks on Iraq, and quit its interference with Lebanon's affairs.

Assad calculated that America did not have staying power in the Middle East, and pursued a policy of opposition to the establishment of democracy in Lebanon and Iraq. The effort in Iraq and pressure at the U.N. Security Council over Hariri's assassination are proving him wrong.

Wretchard adds this thought:

I think most rational observers, however anti-American, must have by now come to the grudging conclusion that the insurgency is a lost cause in Iraq. As Athena at Terrorism Unveiled and Dan Darling pointed out in their analysis of the captured letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi, the insurgency's terror tactics have been a huge mistake from Day One. Athena puts summarizes Zawahiri's message to Zarqawi eloquently. "His cowboy ways aren't winning him any strategic alliances. And on the sectarian strife among Sunni Muslims, Zawahiri is basically saying 'Drop it.' "

If Zawahiri is now looking for a Mr. Nice Guy, however, Zarqawi is probably the wrong place to start. But it doesn't matter. Any realist must guess that we are now moving into the post-OIF era. While there will continue to be fighting in Iraq and many challenges remain, the ultimate outcome is no longer a mystery. One hint this is understood by Washington is a New York Times sourced article ... describing the hitherto hidden border fighting with Syrian soldiers:

A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials. ...

In a meeting at the White House on Oct. 1, senior aides to Mr. Bush considered a variety of options for further actions against Syria, apparently including special operations along with other methods for putting pressure on Mr. Assad in coming weeks.

American officials say Mr. Bush has not yet signed off on a specific strategy and has no current plan to try to oust Mr. Assad, partly for fear of who might take over. The United States is not planning large-scale military operations inside Syria and the president has not authorized any covert action programs to topple the Assad government, several officials said.

The timing of this release suggests that Syria's participation is now an issue which Washington is prepared to publicly discuss. While the situation in Iraq seemed doubtful, the US could not credibly address the Syrian issue because its Iraqi commitments precluded any action against Damascus. Now the Assad regime knows that US forces will not long be occupied in Iraq they are sweating bullets. Ironically the availability of US forces means that they will probably not have to be used in Syria.

Newsweek Magazine claims that the US had considered launching cross-border operations against Iraqi insurgent targets Syria on October 1 -- another publicly released telltale that US policy is ready to come out of the closet -- but were dissuaded by Condoleeza Rice who argued that "diplomatic isolation is working against al-Assad, especially on the eve of a U.N. report that may blame Syria for the murder of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri". Diplomacy would not have been enough while the insurgency tied down America. With the insurgency fading fast, diplomacy may be enough.

Just as the ouster of Saddam by OIF touched off a wave of changes in Libya, Lebanon and the entire region, the impending defeat of the insurgency will paradoxically enhance the ability of diplomacy to address many of the remaining issues. Saddam's defeat confirmed what many military analysts knew from Desert Storm, that it was impossible for any conventional army to stand up against US forces. And that modified the behavior of many rogue states. Yet there remained the hope that the terrorist model of warfare, forged in Algeria and refined against Israel in Lebanon, would bring America to a halt: that rogue regimes acting discreetly could operate within that strategic shadow.

Now, for the first time since Algeria, a terrorist force of the highest quality, supported by contributions from oil-rich countries, in the heart of the Arab world, with sanctuary in a friendly regime across the border and eulogized as "freedom fighters" by dozens of major international publications is on the verge of total and ignominious defeat. There are no more strategic shadows.

Assad's meddling in both Lebanon and Iraq is going to have consequences, none of which will be pleasant for him.

We speculate, though, that the administration's primary target is not Syria and that American policy will be merely to cow the Syrians into submission. The country that should be concerned that our troops are being increasingly freed up in Iraq by the improvements in the Iraqi forces is Iran. The mullahs in Tehran must be wondering what is in store for them if they persist in developing nuclear weapons.

As long as American forces were tied down in Iraq the Iranians knew there was little chance of an American initiative against their nuclear program, but now that troops are becoming available for operations elsewhere, the operational sites at which this program is based suddenly find themselves in much greater jeopardy. The Iranians have American blood on their hands and they should be gravely concerned about that.

Hyping and Hoping

The MSM, ever intent upon displaying its own shallowness, spiralled into paroxysms of glee the other day over the apparently staged meeting that President Bush had with some Iraq war vets. One would think from listening to Andrea Mitchell and others breathlessly describing the nefarious "coaching" of the soldiers as they prepared for their encounter with the President that a scandal of unprecedented proportions was in the offing. As usual, though, there was much less there than the media had hyped and hoped.

One soldier who was at the interview with the President expresses his dismay at the media's hyperventilations here.

The Left is determined to destroy, or at least discredit, this administration by any means necessary, but every time they get their hopes up that the White House has finally stumbled into the pig poop those infernal bumblers emerge from the mire as clean as spring water and smelling like peppermint. Meanwhile, the desperate lefties in the media, like the incredible shrinking man of the 1950's sci-fi movie, keep making themselves smaller and more insignificant. It must be as frustrating for them as it is amusing for the rest of us.

A case in point is MSNBC's Chris Matthews who has Karl Rove all but swinging from the gallows on his Hardball show. Matthews is so convinced that somebody from the administration, either Rove or Lewis Libby, is going to be indicted for the Valerie Plame business and he's so eager to see it happen, that should these men walk free, Matthews' friends will have to place him under a suicide watch.

If perchance the District Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, who's investigating this affair closes out his grand jury investigation without handing down any indictments of top White House officials, I hope I'm able to see Matthews' show that night. It'll be most illuminating to listen to Matthews explain how these people are as guilty as Lucifer, and everybody knows it, dammit, but that there just wasn't enough evidence to indict. It'll be great fun.

For What It's Worth

A USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup telephone survey of 1,005 people on Sept. 8-11 produced some interesting results:

How much have you thought about the different explanations for how human beings came to exist on Earth (evolution guided by God, evolution without God's involvement or creation as described in the Bible)?

Great deal: 41%

Moderate amount: 35%

Not much: 17%

Not at all: 6%

How much does it matter to you which of these theories is correct?

Great deal: 40%

Moderate amount: 26%

Not much: 19%

Not at all: 14%

Which comes closer to your view about the relationship between science and religion?

Agree with each other: 24%

Conflict with each other: 35%

Not related: 36%

Which statement comes closest to your views?

God created human beings in their present form exactly as described in the Bible.

All: 53%

Men: 45%

Women: 60%

18-29: 54%

30-49: 50%

50-64: 50%

65 and older: 60%

By income level

$75K and up: 37%

$50K-$74.9K: 51%

$30K-$49.9K: 56%

Under 20K: 70%

By religion

Catholic: 38%

Protestant: 66%

Non-Christian: 15%

None: 16%

Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, and God guided this process.

All: 31%

Men: 34%

Women: 29%

18-29: 27%

30-49: 38%

50-64: 32%

65 and older: 20%

By income level

$75K and up: 41%

$50K-$74.9K: 31%

$30K-$49.9K: 22%

Under 20K: 19%

By religion

Catholic: 50%

Protestant: 25%

Non-Christian: 31%

None: 29%

Human beings have evolved, but God had no part in the process.

All: 12%

Men: 17%

Women: 8%

18-29: 17%

30-49: 10%

50-64: 15%

65 and older: 11%

By income level

$75K and up: 29%

$50K-$74.9K: 12%

$30K-$49.9K: 11%

Under 20K: 4%

By religion

Catholic: 10%

Protestant: 6%

Non-Christian: 47%

None: 48%

The most interesting thing to us about this poll is the fact that only 12% of the people surveyed accepted some form of materialistic evolution. The vast majority were either creationists or theistic evolutionists. Seventy six percent of those polled have thought about the matter somewhat or a lot, and 66% say that it makes some difference to them which view is correct.

This does not, of course, have any bearing on which view is correct, but it does suggest how far out of the mainstream naturalistic views of life are in this country.

Let it Rest

Even Richard Cohen, the solidly left columnist at the Washington Post thinks the brouhaha over who outed Valerie Plame is a tempest of Lilliputian proportions. Cohen actually calls for the District Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, to just call the whole thing off:

The best thing Patrick Fitzgerald could do for his country is get out of Washington, return to Chicago and prosecute some real criminals. As it is, all he has done so far is send Judith Miller of the New York Times to jail and repeatedly haul this or that administration high official before a grand jury, investigating a crime that probably wasn't one in the first place but that now, as is often the case, might have metastasized into some sort of coverup -- but, again, of nothing much. Go home, Pat.

The alleged crime involves the outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative whose husband, Joseph Wilson IV, had gone to Africa at the behest of the agency and therefore said he knew that the Bush administration -- no, actually, the president himself -- had later misstated (in the State of the Union address, yet) the case that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger.

Wilson made his case in a New York Times op-ed piece. This rocked the administration, which was already fighting to retain its credibility in the face of mounting and irrefutable evidence that the case it had made for war in Iraq -- weapons of mass destruction, above all -- was a fiction. So it set out to impeach Wilson's credibility, purportedly answering the important question of who had sent him to Africa in the first place: his wife. This was a clear case of nepotism, the leakers just as clearly implied.

Not nice, but it was what Washington does day in and day out. (For some historical perspective see George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck'' about Edward R. Murrow and that most odious of leakers-cum-character assassins, Joseph McCarthy.) This is rarely considered a crime. In the Plame case, it might technically be one, but it was not the intent of anyone to out a CIA agent and have her assassinated (which happened once) but to assassinate the character of her husband. This is an entirely different thing. She got hit by a ricochet.

Now we are told by various journalistic sources that Fitzgerald might not indict anyone for the illegal act he was authorized to investigate, but some other one -- maybe one concerning the disclosure of secret material. Here again, though, this is a daily occurrence in Washington, where most secrets have the shelf life of sashimi. Then, too, other journalists say that Fitzgerald might bring conspiracy charges, an attempt (or so it seems) to bring charges of some sort. This is what special prosecutors do and why they should always be avoided. (The one impaneled in 1995 to investigate then-HUD Secretary Henry G. Cisneros for lying about how much he was paying his mistress is still in operation, although the mistress most certainly is not.)

I have no idea what Fitzgerald will do. My own diligent efforts to find out anything have come to naught. Fitzgerald's non-speaking spokesman would not even tell me if his boss is authorized to issue a report, as several members of Congress are now demanding -- although Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, tells me that only a possibly unprecedented court order would permit it. Whatever the case, I pray Fitzgerald is not going to reach for an indictment or, after so much tumult, merely fold his tent, not telling us, among other things, whether Miller is the martyr to a free press that I and others believe she is or whether, as some lefty critics hiss, she's a double-dealing grandstander, in the manner of some of her accusers.

More is at stake here than bringing down Karl Rove or some other White House apparatchik, or even settling some score with Miller, who is sometimes accused of taking this nation to war in Iraq all by herself. The greater issue is control of information. If anything good comes out of the Iraq war, it has to be a realization that bad things can happen to good people when the administration -- any administration -- is in sole control of knowledge and those who know the truth are afraid to speak up. This -- this creepy silence -- will be the consequence of dusting off rarely used statutes to still the tongues of leakers and intimidate the press in its pursuit of truth, fame and choice restaurant tables. Apres Miller comes moi.

This is why I want Fitzgerald to leave now. Do not bring trivial charges -- nothing about conspiracies, please -- and nothing about official secrets, most of which are known to hairdressers, mistresses and dog walkers all over town. Please, Mr. Fitzgerald, there's so much crime in Washington already. Don't commit another.

Needless to say, the rest of the left is seriously miffed by Cohen's apostacy, but then they're so filled with hatred for Bush they'd crawl a mile over broken glass to get a high ranking Republican indicted. Whether the indictment has merit or not doesn't matter. They're not interested in justice, they're interested in destroying political enemies, and every effort must be made, in their view, to bring about that noble end.

The Miracle of the Cell

Bill Dembski directs us to this 38 minute video which uses computer simulation to illustrate some of the reasons why most people, other than the true believers, are skeptical of the putative powers of blind nature to produce living things.

The resolution is a little fuzzy, but it's worth a look.

Ill-Starred Nomination

John Fund tells us how the Miers nomination came about. The core of his column is these paragraphs:

Regardless of whether or not the vetting process was complete, it presented impossible conflicts of interest. Consider the position that Mr. Bush and Mr. Card put Mr. Kelley in. He would be a leading candidate to become White House counsel if Ms. Miers was promoted. He had an interest in not going against his earlier recommendation of her for the Supreme Court, or in angering President Bush, Ms. Miers's close friend. As journalist Jonathan Larsen has pointed out he also might not have wanted to "bring to light negative information that could torpedo her nomination, keeping her in the very job where she would be best positioned to punish Kelley were she to discover his role in vetting her."

Mr. Lubet, [a Northwestern professor], says "all the built-in incentives" of the vetting process were perverse. "In business you make an effort to have disinterested directors who know all the material facts to resolve conflicts of interest," he told me. "In the Miers pick, the White House was sowing its own minefield."

"It was a disaster waiting to happen," says G. Calvin Mackenzie, a professor at Colby College in Maine who specializes in presidential appointments. "You are evaluating a close friend of the president, under pressure to keep it secret even internally and thus limiting the outside advice you get."

Indeed, even internal advice was shunned. Mr. Card is said to have shouted down objections to Ms. Miers at staff meetings. A senator attending the White House swearing-in of John Roberts four days before the Miers selection was announced was struck by how depressed White House staffers were during discussion of the next nominee. He says their reaction to him could have been characterized as, "Oh brother, you have no idea what's coming."

A last minute effort was made to block the choice of Ms. Miers, including the offices of Vice President Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It fell on deaf ears. First Lady Laura Bush, who went to Southern Methodist University at the same time as Ms. Miers, weighed in. On Sunday night, the president dined with Ms. Miers and the first lady to celebrate the nomination of what one presidential aide inartfully praised to me as that of "a female trailblazer who will walk in the footsteps of President Bush."

The conservative displeasure with the Harriet Miers selection shows no signs of abating. No one expects George Bush to pull her nomination, but there's a lot of money being wagered that she'll withdraw of her own volition. It's hard enough to face the judiciary committee when half of the Senators are in your corner, but it'll be an especially difficult ordeal for Harriet Miers because the best she can hope for is that a couple of Senators on an otherwise hostile panel might be lukewarm.

Heads Up

As the above announcement indicates, Viewpoint is going to be down for some server maintenance this weekend. Bill has discovered the reason our blog has been intermittently unavailable over the last month or so, and he's going to be correcting the problem tomorrow. We expect to be down starting Friday afternoon for an indefinite period. We may be back by Friday night or maybe not until Sunday. Check back with us when you get the chance.

I wish to take the opportunity of this post to thank all of our readers for your interest in what we're doing. It's gratifying to know that people are reading us and finding us worth their time. If you come across one of our posts that warrants it, please link us to your friends.

ID Critics Self-Destruct

One of the chief opponents of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools nevertheless encourages teachers to teach religion in science lessons in elementary schools. Steve Peterman at Telic Thoughts reports that:

In one fell swoop Eugenie Scott destroyed so many arguments of ID critics it is hard to believe it. The so called Wedge complaint. The complaint that IDists are trying to smuggle religion into high school science classrooms. The argument that ID=religion under the guise of science. The adamant assertion by ID critics that religion does not belong in science. That science is detached from metaphysical assertions and ideology. All gone in one fell swoop!

Eugenie Scott is the president of the National Council on Science Education and has frequently written against teaching ID in public schools because because ID is religion and religion doesn't belong in science classes, especially in classes of young students. Yet in the article linked above she endorses doing precisely what she wants to prohibit others from doing. Indeed, she recommends that teachers use religion to teach evolution to elementary students.

It's too bad that some newspaper reporter doesn't ask her to explain herself, but it's not likely that any of them will.

Idiots and Ignoramuses

A Stephen Gordon of Utah submits a letter to the 11/2005 Discover magazine:

"I am sick of scientists tiptoeing around the topic of religion. Scientists need to make it clear that if you believe in God you are most likely an idiot or at best uneducated....To treat beliefs as if they mean anything merely elevates them to equal status with science....it is pathetic when an adult thinks demons, angels, Satan, and God are real."

Well. Let's trot out a roster of those uneducated idiots: Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kant, Locke, Dostoyevsky, Galileo, Newton, Brahe, Boyle, Aggassiz, Faraday - we could go on, but you get the point. Perhaps Mr. Gordon would scoff and say that these are all pre-twentieth century thinkers, and that it was easier to believe back in their day than it is in ours. We might ask him, if we dare, why that is so. What do we know today that makes belief in God impossible for any but an idiot or an ignoramus? We should not hold our breath waiting for an answer to that one.

In any event, it doesn't matter whether or not Mr. Gordon has an answer for us since the basic assumption that only the mentally defective or uneducated can believe in God in the modern era is quite at variance with the facts. Let's take a look at just a few of those whose intellects are of the first rank and who also believe that God exists (and may even believe some of those other things Mr. Gordon contemptuously dismisses as well): Pope John Paul, George Marsden, Mark Noll, William Lane Craig, Karl Barth, Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, William Dembski, Os Guiness, Richard Swinburne, C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, J.R.R. Tolkein, Carl Henry, William Buckley, John Stott, Reinhold Neibhur, Alistair MacIntyre, Antonin Scalia, Richard Neuhaus, John Polkinghorne et multi, multi plus.

Among the scientists so esteemed by Mr. Gordon, as many of them believe today as believed a century ago, and the number of believing scientists is about the same as the number of their skeptical colleagues (see here, for instance).

Mr. Gordon may not be familiar with these names, but then one probably needs a modicum of education to be acquainted with them. Perhaps Mr. Gordon is indeed conversant with many of them but thinks them mere pygmies in comparison with his own intellectual gifts, and they may be. It's hard to say because, although I've heard of these Christian intellectuals and read their work, Mr. Gordon has till now escaped my notice, doubtless to my detriment. Consequently, I'm unaware of his scholarly credentials which must surely be impressive.

He'd Do it Differently

Former Vice President Al Gore said Wednesday he had no intention of ever running for president again, but he said the United States would be "a different country" if he had won the 2000 election.

Of the truth of this statement we have no doubt. One difference almost surely would be that under a President Gore we'd still be haggling with the U.N. to bring pressure to bear on Mullah Omar of the Afghan Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to the International Criminal Court.

Creationism, Evolution, and ID

The Detroit Free Press runs an excellent column by Brian Fahling which persuasively makes the case that Intelligent Design and Creationism are philosophically disparate paradigms and that Darwinian evolution is much more like Creationism than is Intelligent Design. This claim may surprise some, but Fahling provides a cogent explanation as to why it is so.

This article should be required reading for anyone who insists on using the disingenuous construction, "intelligent design creationism." The two frameworks share very little in common. Indeed, the essay should be required reading for anyone who sides with the plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case underway in Harrisburg, PA.

The heart of Fahling's argument is this:

Creationism is an a priori argument drawn from a particular interpretation of the Genesis account of creation. In the context of a public classroom, that means the God of the Bible is the starting point and assumed ground of life's origin and the origin of the cosmos. Drawing from a literal reading of Genesis, creationists postulate a "young Earth" and six 24-hour days of creation. All empirical data are subject to and analyzed within this interpretive grid.

Intelligent design, however, is an a posteriori argument; it is the inference drawn from examination of complex structures in living organisms and the universe.

As a matter of science, intelligent design theory is much more disciplined and modest in its claims than either the theory of evolution or creationism. Intelligent design theory merely infers, but does not attempt to identify a designer. Unlike creationism and the theory of evolution, intelligent design theory does not make dogmatic religious or philosophic claims about the origin of life.

Creationism and the theory of evolution, unlike intelligent design theory, are insular in their approach to science. Creationists reason downward from an article of religious faith and conduct their science within that paradigm. Evolutionists, too, reason downward from an article of faith and conduct their science with the same dogmatic zeal and selectiveness of their creationist counterparts.

Like creationism, the theory of evolution is an a priori argument drawn from the evolutionist's article of faith which holds that the origin of life and the cosmos can only be explained by undirected natural processes. This is a metaphysical claim, not scientific fact. Still, it is not in dispute that one may infer an evolutionary process from the data, but that is not what the evolutionist does.

Good science requires an open mind. There is more than a little irony, then, in the evolutionists' attempt to paint intelligent design theory with the creationist brush when it is the evolutionists who have the most in common with the creationists.

The only flaw in Fahling's piece is when he writes this:

Creationism requires a student to first affirm the creed that God created the heavens and the Earth, and the theory of evolution requires that a student affirm the creed that there is no God. Both are exclusive claims, neither is scientific, neither can be empirically verified.

Everything Fahling says here is true except that evolution does not require what Fahling claims that it does. One can be an evolutionist and still believe God exists. Ken Miller of Brown University is a very prolific writer on behalf of evolution and is a practicing Catholic. Michael Behe is also a Catholic, and he believes that God somehow pre-programmed evolution to produce the forms, processes and structures of living things.

It is the case, however, that Darwinian evolution requires an a priori commitment to the principle that whatever God's status may be he was not involved in the development and radiation of living things. This is, in fact, a religious a priori commitment, of course, so Fahling's larger point is still valid that Creationism and Darwinian evolution are more religiously and philosophically like each other than either is like Intelligent Design.

Fahling adds that:

Intelligent design theory, on the other hand, does not require that any creed about the origin of life and the cosmos be affirmed. It merely points to the evidence and suggests that the best explanation (though not the only explanation) for the design found in nature and the cosmos is a designer, whoever or whatever that may be.

In this respect ID is philosophically unlike either of the other two paradigms and, most importantly, is more scientific than either of the other two. We wonder if this fact will be emphasized in the Dover trial.