The God Delusion, Ch. 5

Having shown to his satisfaction, if to no one else's, that there's almost certainly no Deity, Professor Dawkins next assays to consider where the whole business of religion came from anyway. He concludes in chapter 5 that religion is an evolutionary misfiring, or by-product, of something else. By way of explanation he invites us to consider the self-destructive behavior of moths which spiral into a flame. Why do they do this? Well, over the eons they have evolved light sensors that enable them to navigate by the moon and the stars. These luminous objects are very far away and seem to the moths like stationary beacons in the night sky, but when artificial light was introduced into the moths' environment the lights were so close that they appear to shift as the moth moves, requiring any moth that's fixing on them to also deviate from a straight-line path to keep the light at a fixed point. The result was that the confused moth takes a spiral path toward the light, or something like that.

Professor Dawkins doesn't trouble himself to explain why moths need to navigate by celestial objects in the first place since they don't migrate and spend much of their adult lives confined to a localized area. When they do travel it's along chemical trails of pheromones produced by females. So why would they have evolved these light sensors? But this is a digression. His point is that the spiraling behavior of moths is really a by-product of something else and that likewise religious behavior in humans is a by-product of some other behavior which evolved because it conferred a selective advantage.

Dawkins avoids the simpler explanation that religion itself confers a selective advantage and thus humans evolved it. This is an unacceptable explanation, even if it has the merit of being less cumbersome, because if it were the case Dawkins would have to admit that atheism is a maladaptive mutation, and he certainly doesn't want to have to make the case that atheists are genetic mutants.

So what is religion a by-product of? It turns out that all we have are guesses, but one guess is that natural selection produced in children the tendency to believe whatever their parents and other elders tell them, a bit of news that'll surprise most parents. This aids the children in survival. Parents tell kids about God so kids grow up believing in God.

It's not clear whether children lose this gullibility as adults, but if they do why do they retain belief in God when they don't retain other childhood beliefs like belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Why, too, do so many people come to belief as adults? Why isn't Dawkins himself religious since he received a lot of exposure to it when he was a child? If one's belief about God is a result of psychological misfires in the brain then isn't atheism also a result of such a misfire and thus can't we conclude that atheists don't believe in God because of evidence but because of some psychological quirk? Professor Dawkins doesn't help us with these questions. He's in too much of a hurry to rush on to his next grievance against the religious - their irritating tendency to be dualists - which he also sees as a holdover from childhood.

There are other guesses as to what religion is a by-product of, of course, - love, projection, wishful thinking - but the general idea Dawkins wants to advance is that it's a by-product of something advantageous for survival.

Another reason why religion has survived and diversified has to do with memes. A meme is like a mental gene. It embodies an idea or set of ideas (called a memeplex) that spreads through a culture. For example, the belief in human rights is a meme, as is any belief. Natural selection acts to weed out unsatisafactory memes in the same way it culls unfit genes. Religious beliefs are also memes which have spread, not because they are true, but because they afforded those who held them some survival advantage.

Dawkins is obviously pleased with this explanation for the widespread occurrence of religion even though the theory is completely speculative and even self-defeating. After all, if all our beliefs are merely memes then so is atheism a meme, so is Darwinian evolution a meme, and, indeed, so is belief in memes a meme.

He closes the chapter with a rambling discussion of cargo cults, religions that spring up among primitive people when they encounter for the first time the "magic" of modern technological society. He notes that ignorant people often regard the radios and machines of visiting Europeans as being supernaturally produced because they never see them being made or repaired. None of this, like much else in the remainder of the book, has anything at all to do with whether God exists.

Dawkins is apparently convinced that the existence of God and the manner in which some people express their homage to that God are one and the same thing. He seems to think that if he can discredit religious beliefs then he can discredit belief in God. Perhaps this is the strangest "God delusion" of all.

Critiques of previous chapters in The God Delusion can be found here:

Chapter 4 (part III)

Chapter 4 (part II)

Chapter 4 (part I)

Chapter 3

Chapter 2

Chapter 1

RLC

Left or Right

No doubt you've heard people speak of the difference between being left or right "brained," but perhaps you were unsure what it meant or which of the two describes you. If so, you might want to read this interesting little self-assessment which AOL featured recently:

Are you a genius at certain jobs but feel like a half-wit when trying to complete other types of work? The two sides of the brain each have distinct preferences and capabilities, and your strong suits and weaknesses are frequently based upon the side of your brain that is dominant. Take this quiz to find out whether or not you are a right or left brain thinker and check out the career choices that might be best for you.

1. Are you better at math and science than art and literature?

YES - People who are left-brain thinkers are often better at and enjoy math and science over art and literature, making them perfect candidates for a career in engineering.

NO - People who are right-brain thinkers are often better at and enjoy art and literature over math and science, making them perfect candidates for a career in grant writing.

2. Do you love playing sports outdoors over reading indoors?

YES - The great outdoors and athletics are favorites of people who are right-brain thinkers, and a career that can combine the two, like one as a recreation director, is perfect.

NO - Staying indoors and reading are favorites of people who are left-brain thinkers, and a career that can combine the two, like one as a librarian, is perfect.

3. Do you prefer verbal communication over physical communication?

YES - Left-brain thinkers love to work things out by talking, enjoying jobs like career counseling, where they are very effective.

NO - Right-brain thinkers are more likely to think that actions speak louder than words and prefer showing their worth without words. A career path of yoga instructor would fit their preferences.

4. Would you rather draw pictures freehand instead of putting together a model airplane?

YES - People who are right-brain thinkers aren't fans of tremendous structure and prefer having some creativity at work, which makes marketing a perfect career for them.

NO - People who are left-brain thinkers are in need of structure and prefer having specific guidelines at work, which makes computer programming a perfect career path for them.

5. Do you like being in groups more than being alone?

YES - Group-oriented people are usually right-brain thinkers, making a job in retail a good fit for their lifestyle preference.

NO - Loners are usually left-brain thinkers, making a job in accounting a good fit for their lifestyle preference.

6. When given instructions, are lots of pictures easier to understand than lots of text?

YES - Right-brain thinkers love picture explanations over textual explanations, and this visual preference usually lends well to a career in interior design.

NO - Left-brain thinkers love textual explanations over pictorial explanations, and this preference usually lends well to a clerical career.

Most people are doubtless a blend so I suppose the question is in each case do we tend to have more of one of these traits than another.

RLC

Damning with Faint Praise

DaveScot at Uncommon Descent shares this pithy thought with us:

We often hear from Darwinists that "the theory of evolution is as well tested as the theory of gravity". Strangely though, we never hear physicists saying that the theory of gravity is as well tested as the theory of evolution.

Anyhow, I was just reading yet another Darwinian Narrative on the genetic similarities and differences between man and chimp but how we don't really know which differences are the important ones. In point of fact, we don't really know if the DNA differences are even significant. The only thing we really know is that a chimp is a chimp because its mother was a chimp. Beyond that, it's nothing but guesswork.

Then I thought about how this compares to the theory of gravity. We know enough about gravity so that we routinely spend billions of dollars launching interplanetary unmanned exploratory spacecraft that, with exquisite precision predicted long before the craft is launched, it moves about the solar system, arriving at known points within meters and seconds years after it is launched and after having traveled circuitous routes for billions of miles.

Contrast that with how well we can predict what it takes to turn a chimp into a human. That, my friends, is a true example of how well the theory of evolution has been tested. It hasn't been tested at all. It's nothing but WAGs and hand waving. Gravity, on the other hand, is indeed well tested. And that's why you'll never hear a physicist saying the theory of gravity is as well tested as the theory of evolution.

To compare evolutionary theory to gravity, as many Darwinians do, is to damn with faint praise. We know almost nothing about gravity. We don't know what it is, how it "pulls" on objects, how matter produces it, how it can seem to travel at infinite speed, or how it can warp space. All we know is that it can be described in mathematical formulas and, as DaveScot points out, the mathematics can be employed to impressive effect, but no such mathematical precision inheres in evolutionary theory.

About the most we can say about the similarities between evolution and gravity is that they share in common the fact that they're both believed to exist.

RLC

A Good Man is Gone

HT: Gary Varvel

RLC

Shocker Stat

This statistic just shocks the socks off us:

A city Health Department study finds that more than a fourth of adult New Yorkers are infected with the virus that causes genital herpes. The study, released Monday, says about 26 percent of New York City adults have genital herpes, compared to about 19 percent nationwide. The department says genital herpes can double a person's risk for contracting HIV.

This is in ultra-liberal New York, no less - where children receive condoms as a baptismal gift and are taught the virtues of safe sex from the time they're potty trained - one in four adults has herpes. How can that be?

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 4 (part III)

Although supremely confident that he has just demolished any rationale for believing in God with his argument based on God's alleged improbability, professor Dawkins loads another round into the chamber just in case theism is still twitching.

Recall that his argument is a reply to the theist's claim that the complexity of the universe, its finely-tuned forces and parameters, are so extraordinarily improbable as to make an intelligent cause the only plausible explanation for them. Dawkins has argued, incorrectly, that this cause would itself have to be even more extraordinarily improbable and therefore not a plausible explanation at all. The theist cannot explain God and therefore has no reason to believe he exists, or so Dawkins implies.

Now he imagines himself to be applying the coup de grace to theism by presenting what he fancies to be a more plausible explanation for the universe's existence. Since we should always believe that which is more plausible instead of that which is less plausible we should accept his explanation he's about to offer rather than the God Hypothesis. His argument combines what has come to be called the Anthropic Principle (actually Dawkins employs what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle, WAP) with the Many-Worlds Hypothesis MWH).

Suppose you purchase a lottery ticket and learn that you are the only person who did so. Nevertheless, on the day of the drawing your five-digit ticket number, as highly improbable as it may be, comes up. You've won. The odds against it are extraordinary, but there's no point in objecting that it's almost impossible that your number could have been randomly drawn since you obviously won and the only way that could have happened is if your number was the one selected.

The universe is something like that. It's admittedly incredible that the forces and structural parameters are what they are, but we shouldn't be too surprised, the argument goes, since if they weren't exactly as they are the universe, if it existed all, would not have been able to produce life, and we wouldn't be here to notice the fact. Thus, the universe has to be the way it is for us to be here at all. That's the WAP and, Dawkins believes, it's all the explanation that's needed or which can be given for how the world happens to be so exquisitely calibrated for life.

This, of course, sounds like sophistry to most people who don't think like atheists. Consider a prisoner placed in a room with a dozen card tables each of which has on it ten complete packs of thoroughly shuffled playing cards. The man is told that from each of the decks on each of the tables he is to draw four cards at random. The first time he draws something other than an ace a poison gas will be released and he will die instantly. The man begins his task, despairing of making it past even the first card. Yet to his astonishment he completes the first table having drawn all aces, then the second, and finally the last. Unable to comprehend his good fortune, he wonders aloud how it could possibly have happened that he drew all aces, purely by chance, and is still alive. He's convinced, quite reasonably, that someone must have tinkered with the cards. A voice comes over the intercom, the voice of Richard Dawkins, say, and intones that he shouldn't conclude that there was any tinkering. Would it not be even more astonishing that an invisible man of some sort had somehow influenced the card selection? No, it was all just coincidence, and the prisoner shouldn't marvel that he drew 120 aces because if it had been otherwise he wouldn't be alive to notice. That's essentially Dawkins' explanation for the way the world is.

Needless to say, many people find this less than persuasive, so Dawkins imports another idea to buttress it. This is the theory that our universe or at least our region of the universe is just one of a near infinite number of such regions (called domains) all having different physical properties. Dawkins seizes upon this idea, the Many Worlds Hypothesis, and argues that given so many possibilities it's highly likely that there's at least one domain which has the particular set of properties necessary to sustain advanced life forms, and it just happens that we're in it. In other words, if enough lottery tickets are sold one of them just has to have the winning number.

The MWH serves as a deus ex machina for Dawkins and by combining it with the argument from God's improbability Dawkins has atheist hearts palpitating the world over. You, however, may be asking yourself several questions:

1. Is a near infinite number of worlds likely to exist? Dawkins replies that no, it's very unlikely, but it's even less likely that God exists so it makes more sense to believe the MWH than to believe in God.

2. You may also wonder where all those universes came from and how they came to have the properties they do. If you do you're wondering about more than Dawkins does. There is no conceivable mechanism for generating these universes, nor for producing the laws which would govern them. How do physical laws get created anyway?

3. You may also be asking whether this has anything to do with science. After all, Dawkins tells us several times in the book that he bases his beliefs on evidence. What's the evidence for other worlds? There is none. The MWH violates the principle that the preferred explanation be one for which we have evidence or which can be inferred from what we already know. We have reason to believe that information and fine-tuning can be produced by minds. We have no evidence, nor can have, of other universes. We have evidence that minds can create beauty, elegance, harmony, etc. but no evidence that chance can.

Yet Dawkins is prepared to believe, despite the lack of any empirical evidence, there are an infinite number of universes before he'll believe that there's a mind behind it all. It reminds me of something I read about Michael Shermer, another prominent atheist. Shermer once said that even if we were to discover a planet with the words "Yahweh Made Me" inscribed in letters so large as to be visible from a vast distance he'd still believe that it was an amazing accident.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga observes that Dawkins seems to be arguing that because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:

It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like:

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p; Therefore, p is true.

Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.

Dawkins rests his entire case on the arguments of chapter 4, but those arguments come nowhere near demonstrating what he thinks they do. Indeed, they're an exceedingly flimsy platform upon which to rest a conclusion so weighty as that God does not exist. Perhaps aware of the logical mire into which he has stepped, he subtly changes the subject, diverting our attention from his attack on God to his attack on creationism, organized religion, and anything else religious that crosses his field of vision. Whatever may be the merits of these criticisms, they're irrelevant to the question of the existence of God. Indeed, belief in God is left completely unscathed by The God Delusion.

RLC

Black Gold

Gary Varvel shows us why we're paying $4.00 a gallon at the pump:

RLC

Gas Prices

Four dollars a gallon got you down? Pity our poor congresspersons heavy-laden with the burden of finding a solution to this intractable and economically distressing problem, a problem which is doing real harm to millions of people. Surely with all their resources congress will come up with a creative, innovative, and wise solution:

On the other hand, perhaps some problems just have no solution. If Nancy Pelosi's best and brightest can't find one maybe a solution just doesn't exist ...

HT: Ramirez

Newt Gingrich suggests three things we can and should do to reduce the price of oil and in so doing demonstrates the intellectual fertility of conservatism. One measure would have an immediate effect, one would have an effect in the mid-term, and one is a long-term solution:

Now if only we could persuade the Democrats that windfall profits taxes are simply a feel-good measure designed to punish oil companies and which won't produce a single drop more oil, nor lower the price of oil a single cent.

Gingrich suggested on television last night that Sen. McCain ought to invite Sen. Obama to join with him in pushing Congress to enact these measures with all deliberate speed, and if Obama declines, which he probably would, to point out that Obama's energy policies are actually punishing the working poor. The problem is that on energy in general, and drilling for domestic oil in particular, McCain's not much better than Obama.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Darwinian Slip

Eric Smith in The Scientist commits a gaffe (i.e. he utters an uncomfortable truth):

This theory of evolution is really a framework for thinking about change in the living world. It provides no specific guesses for the kinds of traits that may exist, no strong requirements or prohibitions on how they may interact to make a complex organism or ecosystem, and no commitments to how innovation can occur. Even the problem of how a differentiated population ultimately divides into two distinct species (posed in the title of Darwin's seminal work) remains a major technical problem in evolutionary biology (Emphasis mine).

Darwinians cannot explain the origin of life. Nor can they offer anything but fanciful conjectures for the origin of insect metamorphosis, echo-location, flight, and sexual reproduction. The theory is at a loss to explain the emergence of specified complexity, consciousness, or our relatively short human life spans (there should, after all, be tremendous selection pressure for long lives). They know that evolution has to do with genetic mutation, but they've never been able to figure out how cumulative mutations can produce evolutionary "progress." They're no longer confident that natural selection plays as important a role in evolutionary change as had been thought for the last 150 years, or even much of a role at all. And now, on top of all this, Smith tells us that biologists don't even know how species split off from each other.

Well, one thing many evolutionists know is that it happened, it didn't take God to make it happen, and anyone who doubts it happened "is either ignorant, stupid or malicious" (Richard Dawkins). Of this they're absolutely certain.

HT: Robert Crowther at Evolution News and Views.

RLC

Fill the Vacancies

Jason sends a long a troubling article from The Economist:

For more than a year, two seats on the Fed's seven-member board of governors have been empty, because the Senate has been unwilling to confirm George Bush's nominees to the job. It has also refused a new term for the Bush-appointed Randall Kroszner, who is hanging on in limbo. On May 28th Rick Mishkin, another governor, said he would depart in August. If the Senate continues to delay, the Fed's board will have only four members--fewer than at any time since at least the 1930s.

No one doubts Mr Bush's candidates are qualified. The hold-up is ideological. Democrats want to wait until after November's election so that a new president can, as one senator put it, "remake the Fed" by appointing a clutch of new people at once. That is reckless on several counts.

The rest of the article explains several reasons why failure to confirm Bush's appointees is irresponsible. The most serious reason is this:

Mr Bernanke's term as Fed chairman expires in 2010. With lots of governors to appoint at once, and the prospect of a new chairman within two years, the next president will have unprecedented power to reshape the Fed. Governors are appointed for overlapping 14-year terms precisely to avoid this concentration of power.

By waiting until the Democrats have the White House they can pack the Board with politically sympathetic members and thereby turn the Fed from an independent institution into an instrument of their political will. It's a similar tactic to that employed by FDR when in 1937 he tried to have the number of Supreme Court Justices increased by six so that he could pack the Court with his own appointees.

The Democrats have dragged their feet in appointing the President's selections for the federal judiciary and they're doing likewise with his nominations to the Federal Reserve Board. The political gamesmanship and jockeying for power is unconscionable when the welfare of the country is at stake. The Democrats' demurrals virtually invite the Republicans to engage in the same behavior as soon as they're in a position to do so, and the whole childish business portends a government that will at some point cease to function.

Of course, those responsible for this calamity will still have their taxpayer subsidized pensions and health care so why should they be concerned?

RLC

Re: Do Messiahs Forget?

Byron alertly calls my attention to the fact that my source for the Do Messiahs Forget? post the other day made an error in the chronology which makes a big difference in the way Senator Obama's claims to have never called for a troop pullout from Iraq should be viewed.

I apologize for the mistake.

The updated piece at Hot Air can be accessed here.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 4 (part II)

On Tuesday we began a critique of the crucial chapter 4 in Richard Dawkins' atheistic best-seller The God Delusion. We pointed out that Dawkins' whole book rests on the argument he offers in this chapter in support of the claim that God almost certainly does not exist. Dawkins takes the theist's argument that the complexity of the world and of living things makes their existence highly improbable without a designer to account for them and seeks to turn it against the theist. His argument distills to the following steps:

1. The universe and life are very complex and therefore their existence is improbable.

2. Whatever creates the complex world must itself be even more complex than what he creates and his existence is therefore even more improbable than that of the world.

3. Thus, whatever creates the world must itself be explained in terms of another creator, and so on, in an infinite regress of creators.

4. It's absurd to posit an infinite regress. It's more parsimonious to conclude that the world is just a brute fact and that there is no creator.

As we stressed in yesterday's post all the assertions in steps 2 and 3 are false and their falsity is fatal to Dawkins' argument. Dawkins, despite his confident assertions to the contrary, hasn't come anywhere close to proving that God "almost certainly doesn't exist." But there's more that's wrong with chapter 4 than this.

Dawkins argues that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that the universe and living things could have easily come about without any divine intervention. In support of this claim he cites the marvels of evolutionary theory. Does life's complexity lead you to believe that there must be something supernatural behind it? Then you are too naive, or unobservant, or unimaginative to see that the appearance of design is just an illusion. Dawkins quite astonishingly compares the illusion of design to a magic trick done by Penn and Teller. Just as there is a perfectly natural explanation for the magic trick there's a perfectly natural explanation for the illusion of design in living things. I say that this is an astonishing comparison because it doesn't seem to occur to him that he's completely defeating his own case. The magic trick is performed by intelligent agents, it would not happen without intelligent purpose and skill. If the "design" of living things really is analogous to a magician's trick then that design should be recognized as the result of intelligent agency, just as the trick is.

Dawkins shoots himself in the foot again when he says that the complexity of living things can be built up by natural processes much like a stone arch is built by craftsmen. The arch cannot function or stand by itself until the keystone is finally added, so in order to support it while it's under construction a scaffolding is erected to hold the stones in place until the arch is completed. The scaffolding is then removed and the arch has the appearance of having been erected without it. This, Dawkins believes, is analogous to how irreducibly complex structures in cells, structures like the famed bacterial flagellum, are put together by evolution. Molecular scaffolding holds the components in place until the whole structure is complete and functioning and then the scaffolding disappears. The problem with his analogy, though, is that the arch's scaffolding is intentionally erected by intelligent artisans with a specific end in mind. A scaffolding erected for the purpose of holding up stone arches is much more closely analogous to intentional design than it is to blind, purposeless evolution.

Almost every line in chapter 4 drips with an unseemly disdain for scientists like Michael Behe, an evolutionist who nevertheless thinks that intelligence has somehow played a role in the creation of life. Dawkins' contempt for this view leads him to say the most ridiculous things. For example he caricatures scientists like Behe in these words:

Here is the message that an imaginary 'intelligent design theorist' might broadcast to scientists (note that for Dawkins ID theorists are in a separate class than scientists): 'If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.'

Notwithstanding the fact that many of the greatest minds in the history of science have held to ID in some form, or the fact that many scientists today are theists and believe that God is somehow behind the phenomena they study, or the fact that there is no example of such reasoning as Dawkins invents ever having been offered by anyone in the ID camp, blithely indifferent to all of this Dawkins claims that belief in God is a "science stopper." He's dismissive of these men and women who labor everyday in their labs to unlock the mysteries of nature despite the fact that he himself hasn't done any real scientific research since his doctoral work. He simply writes books about the work of others. It ill-becomes him, then, to speak so disparagingly of the science being done by others just because he despises their metaphysical commitments.

In any event, not having yet satisfied his apparently uncontrollable impulse to intellectual self-immolation Professor Dawkins concludes the chapter by insisting that if it's possible for something to happen then it's almost certain that it did happen. We'll address this peculiar argument next time.

RLC

Liars' Club

Have the Democrats been playing political games with the Iraq war and the welfare of our troops? Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D, PA) seems to be boasting that they have:

"I'll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we...the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn't say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn't true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts...and people ate it up."

Of course when confronted with his statement he tries to deny he said it:

What are we to make of this? One conclusion we can draw is that at least some Democrats don't mind lying in order to get a firmer grasp on political power. Another is that they apparently see their constituents as a bunch of gullible dolts.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

More Vindication for GWB

This column by The Washington Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is remarkable. Democrats since 2003 have been charging George Bush with being a liar about our reasons for going into Iraq, and chief among his accusers has been Senator Jay Rockefeller whose Select Committee on Intelligence has released a report which Rockefeller tries unsuccessfully to spin as lending support to the Bush lied meme. Hiatt suggests, however, that the reader will scour the report's pages in vain searching for substantiation of the charge.

In other words, the WaPo, no friend of the Bush administration, concludes that there's no evidence that George Bush had any reason to believe anything about Iraq and Saddam Hussein than what he told us in the run-up to the war. Well, now. Will those who were so quick to defame and mock the President be called to account by the media for their own malicious mendacity and, in Rockefeller's case, brazen hypocrisy? Will their names be highlighted for future historians to scorn for their contemptuous behavior?Will the Bush Lied, People Died allegation go down in history as a slogan conjured by some of the most unsavory participants in the political debate?

We're not betting on it.

Our culture has debased itself to the point where one can say any defamatory thing one wishes about a political opponent and, if he's on the right side of the media zeitgeist (which is actually the left side), he can do so with impunity. It is nice, though, to see the WaPo take a few honest steps against the tide.

RLC

Do Messiahs Forget?

Ed Morrissey wonders whether Senator Obama reads his own website or whether he just makes it up as he goes along. The website declares that, if he's elected president, he will pull almost all of our troops out of Iraq ASAP. Indeed, he introduced legislation in January 2007 at the start of the surge that would have removed all of our troops by this past March. This, Morrissey notes, is why he's the favored candidate of Code Pink and MoveOn.org.

But then in April of this year, in an interview for a Chicago tv station the Senator denies he ever called for a withdrawal:

Maybe he just forgot.

RLC

Fatal Attraction

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign reminds me of the movie Fatal Attraction with Hillary in the role of the Glenn Close character and the Democratic party in the role of Michael Douglas and his family. Douglas, you may recall from the movie, decides to have a fling with Close whilst his wife is out of town, but once he has let the lady into his life he can't get her out. She's obsessed with having what she wants, and she'll do anything to get it. No matter what Douglas does she won't be bought off or dissuaded. At the end Close's obsession is a threat to undo Douglas's marriage and murder everything he holds dear. Even when he thinks she's dead she comes back for one last furious burst of vengeance.

Senator Clinton looks like she's politically dead as a presidential candidate right now, but perhaps the story isn't over yet. The Democrats' ill-advised fling with the Clintons in the 90's may well yet turn into their own political horror flick. Stay tuned.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 4 (part I)

Chapter 4 is the crux of The God Delusion. It's here that Richard Dawkins sets out to demonstrate, as the chapter heading states, why there almost certainly is no God.

His argument amounts to this:

Creationists (for Dawkins this is anyone who believes in God) hold that the world and life are astronomically improbable and therefore could not have come about on their own. Thus, the creationists believe, there must be an intelligence which lies behind it all, i.e. God. However, anything intelligent enough to create the world must itself be highly complex and therefore at least as improbable as the world it creates. Thus, if the improbability of the universe is so great as to render it inexplicable apart from a designer, then that designer, being even more improbable, must itself require an explanation. This leads to an infinite regress of "designers" which is an absurdity. Therefore, the simplest, most reasonable alternative to believing an absurdity is to believe that the universe is all there is.

Dawkins thinks this is a knock down argument against the rationality of believing in God's existence, but it fails for at least reasons:

1. The assumption that the source of complexity must itself be complex is false.

2. The argument from improbability is based on a category mistake.

3. The argument is based on the assumption that the theist is forced to accept an infinite regress.

4. The argument commits the fallacy of claiming that if there's no good reason to think an event didn't happen that it therefore almost certainly did happen.

We'll consider 1 and 2 today and 3 and 4 tomorrow.

Dawkins argues that if life is designed the designer must be at least as complex as what he designed and therefore at least as improbable and therefore at least as much in need of an explanation for his complexity.

Yet Dawkins believes that the ultimate source of the universe and all the complexity it contains was a simple, homogenous point (singularity) which, in the Big Bang, ultimately produced the present world. He also believes that the first cell to appear in the long chain of living things was far less complex than the myriad life forms into which it has evolved. He also believes, I assume, that the zygote which gives rise to an adult human is much less complex than the adult it gradually forms itself into. So, it's not clear to me, in light of these examples, why he would stake his argument on the claim that complexity can only be generated by even greater complexity. The assertion seems to be just false.

If God is simple, as many theologians and philosophers believe, then Dawkins' claim that he's even less probable than the universe comes to nothing. But this is a relatively minor point. The second - and I think the greatest - problem with Dawkins' argument is that it uses the idea of improbability in an ambiguous and logically illicit manner.

When we say that the complexity of the living world is improbable we mean that it is unlikely that it could have arisen solely by unguided processes. We mean that it is astonishing that it would have just happened by coincidence, without any purposeful input. It is highly improbable, for instance, that a stick would appear to be whittled to a point if only mechanical forces ever acted upon it, but it's not at all improbable that the stick takes on this appearance given the existence of a boy with a knife.

In other words, complex universes containing complex living things are improbable only on the assumption that they arose by sheer chance. They're not at all improbable if there's an intelligent agent involved in their origin.

Moreover, although it's indeed highly improbable that complex things like cells and universes could be produced by purely mechanical processes, God, unlike the boy with the knife, is not something which is produced. God has for centuries been thought of by philosophers as a necessary being, one which does not depend on anything else for his existence. Thus, it is a category mistake to talk about the improbability of God coming to be in the same sense that the universe comes to be. It is the origin of the universe and the origin of life that beg for a causal explanation. God is not the sort of thing that has an origin and therefore not the sort of thing which depends upon some cause outside himself and not the sort of thing to which the term "improbable" applies.

The universe can be defined as the sum of all contingent entities. Contingent entities require a necessary entity as their ultimate cause. This ultimate cause of the constituents of the universe cannot itself be contingent (dependent) upon anything else or it would, by definition, be part of the universe. Thus the ultimate cause must be something which does not "come to be" and which exists entirely independently of any contingent entity. It must have necessary existence.

Dawkins doesn't seem to understand the distinction between necessary and contingent being. If he did he wouldn't confuse God with contingent entities. When the difference is understood, the argument from improbability, in which he invests so much, collapses.

More on Dawkins' argument in chapter 4 tomorrow.

RLC

Re: Remaking a Great Nation

Byron writes to take exception to Mark Steyn's recent column on Barack Obama and my endorsement of it. His letter can be read on the Feedback page.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 3

We continue our walk through Richard Dawkins' best-selling attack on belief in God (though he calls it, rather pretentiously (p.57), an attack on God himself) with a look at chapter 3.

This chapter is ostensibly given to an adumbration of some of the arguments in favor of God's existence, although Dawkins can't resist the temptation to scoff at their alleged inadequacies as he summarizes them. Some of these inadequacies are genuine and some are due to Dawkins' tendentious explications of the arguments. As an example of the latter, he offers the long-discredited observation that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible since God must know today what he will do tomorrow, but if he knows today what he will do tomorrow then he can't change his mind tomorrow, which means there's something he can't do. Therefore, he's not omnipotent.

This is like the old paradox that asks whether God can create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it. Whether the theist answers yes or no he is tacitly agreeing that there's something beyond God's power to accomplish. One of several problems with this paradox is that it's incoherent. It suggests that there's something that can't be done by a being which can do anything. In other words, it seeks to show that God's inability to bring about a logically impossible state of affairs means he must not exist. This, as every freshman philosophy student learns, misconstrues God's omnipotence.

To say that God is omnipotent is to say that he can do anything it is logically possible to do. Philosophers at least since Aquinas have recognized that God cannot do anything which establishes a contradiction of some sort. He cannot, for instance, cause it to happen that he never existed, nor can he create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it. If it's logically possible to know the future then God can know what will happen tomorrow. All that follows from Dawkins' argument is that God's freedom to change his mind is constrained by his foreknowledge, just as his actions are constrained by his goodness. He has the freedom to change his mind, but if he knows that he won't, then he won't.

Dawkins spends a little time in this chapter deriding the ontological argument, calling it infantile just before acknowledging that philosophers have been of two minds about it's validity. The world has had to wait for Richard Dawkins to arrive to settle the matter and he does so by seemingly confusing Anselm's version of the argument with Descartes'. Conflating the two, he defeats Descartes, whose argument almost no one accepts anyway, and claims to have thus defeated Anselm. Moreover, he never mentions the more formidable versions of the ontological argument presented by contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Norman Malcolm, but perhaps he's not aware of them.

Another of the arguments he selects for ridicule in this chapter is what he calls the Argument From Admired Religious Scientists. This is the claim that since certain scientists believe in God and since scientists are intelligent that, therefore, belief in God is an intelligent option. This is indeed a bad argument, and I know of no educated person who would ever use it as a justification for belief, but equally as bad is Dawkins' response to it.

With a certain glee he points out that the more educated people are, the more intelligent they are, the less likely they are to be religious, but of course this argument by correlation is fraught with dangers. If we're going to argue that intelligent people are usually atheists we can also argue that the longer a person's criminal record the more likely he is to be an atheist, or that, at least in the non-Islamic world, the more blood-thirsty a tyrant the more likely he is to be an atheist. So, I don't know what we should make of the fact, if it even is a fact, that intelligence correlates to unbelief except to say that highly intelligent tyrants and criminals are even more likely to be atheists than are more modestly endowed thugs.

In any event, the argument from the correlation to intelligence is not very impressive. Intelligence is not wisdom. Intelligence is an ability, and ability in one sphere of life does not entail ability in other spheres. A man brilliant in his field is often an incompetent outside of it. Literary geniuses are often mathematical clods, and vice-versa. Indeed, the most striking examples of this are idiot-savants (Think of the movie Rain Man or even A Beautiful Mind). College professors are a close second. That a man is a brilliant biologist tells us nothing about his ability to discern the fingerprint of God in the world and in his life.

More later.

RLC

Calorie Counter

This link takes you to a quick calorie counter. Plug in your weight and sex, and check the box which best describes your activity level, and you're immediately told how many calories per day it takes to maintain your weight.

To lose one pound a week you need to reduce your intake by 500 calories a day which you can do by cutting out sugar and bread and by increasing your physical activity.

I know. If I'm such an expert why ain't I skinny? Because it's unfortunately a lot easier to know what to tell others to do than to do it yourself.

RLC