Can't Buy Me Love

Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times sees a lot of positives arising out of the current financial distress. For example:

Income doesn't have much to do with happiness. Americans haven't become any happier as they have prospered in the last half-century. And winning the lottery doesn't make people happier in the long term.

This is called the Easterlin Paradox: Once they have met their basic needs, people don't become happier as they become richer. In recent years, new research has undermined the Easterlin Paradox, yet it's still true that happiness has less to do with money than with friendships and finding meaning in a cause larger than oneself.

"There's pretty good evidence that money doesn't matter much for how you feel moment to moment," said Alan Krueger, a Princeton University economist who is conducting extensive research on happiness. "What seems to matter much more is having good friends and family, and time to spend on social activities."

There's lots else for which to be grateful that we're headed into a recession (I'm kidding). Read Kristoff's column to find out what some of the other "benefits" are.

RLC

Childhood Dualism

Paul Bloom is a developmental psychologist and an atheistic materialist. In a fine essay at Edge he tackles the question of whether we have a soul, and although he believes we don't he says some fascinating things about that topic as well as the development of such beliefs in children.

He writes, for instance, that:

I think children are dualists from the start. Even babies start off with this sort of body-soul split. To put it somewhat differently, they start off with two distinct modes of construal, or systems of core-knowledge, one corresponding to bodies, the other to souls. Because these systems are distinct, common-sense dualism emerges as a natural by-product.

For much of our recent intellectual history, in philosophy and psychology, this claim about babies would be thought to be utterly ludicrous. Total madness. It was said that babies and young children know nothing about bodies, and know nothing about souls. They are blank slates. Rousseau called the baby a perfect idiot. And Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who got developmental psychology going in the last century, was adamant that babies have no notion of what an object is, and no notion of what a person is.

But over the last two decades there is decisive evidence showing that this minimalist perspective is wrong. In fact, babies, before they hit their first birthday, have a rich and intricate understanding of bodies and of souls.

First, there is a lot of research from psychologists like Elizabeth Spelke, Renee Baillargeon and Karen Wynn showing that young babies have a powerful understanding of physical objects. They understand that physical objects obey gravity. If you put an object on a table and remove the table, and an object just stays there - because there's a hidden wire - babies are surprised, they expect the object to fall. They also expect objects to be solid, and that objects should move on continuous paths over space, And, contrary to Piaget, they don't think that once you look away objects go out of existence. They understand that objects persist over time even when they aren't being observed. Show a baby an object, and then put it behind a screen. Wait a little while and then remove the screen. If the object is gone, babies will be surprised.

Karen Wynn showed that babies can even do addition and subtraction, of a rudimentary sort. You put an object down, a screen rises to hide it, and then you put another object behind the screen. Then the screen drops, and there is one object, two objects, or three objects. If there's one object there, babies are surprised. If there are three objects, babies are surprised. They know one plus one equals two.

I wonder what the implications of all this are for the belief that we are hard-wired with certain kinds of knowledge, knowledge that we have a priori. Discoveries like those Bloom adumbrates would seem to be fatal all by themselves to an empiricist epistemology.

Second, even young babies are social creatures. They prefer to look at faces over just about anything else. They quickly come to recognize different emotions-anger, fear, happiness. They imitate people. As soon as they begin to move their bodies in different ways, they can do clever things to manipulate emotions and behaviors of other people.

Then there's a lot of recent work from people like David Premack and Gyorgy Gergely and also from my own lab, that before children learn how to talk, they can make sense of social interaction. A typical experiment involves showing them movies where a character moves in a way that makes sense from an adult perspective-pursuing a goal, moving away from something-or in a way that doesn't make sense from an adult perspective. What we find is that even children before their first birthday get it. They expect people to act in certain ways. They expect people to pursue goals.

Bloom goes on to explain why he thinks we are predisposed to believe in substance dualism (the belief that the world is comprised of at least two disparate essences, matter and mind, or soul)and that this belief appears early on in childhood.

It's a fascinating essay, but it suffers from one drawback. it seems to me that the problem that must be settled before we can even begin to talk about whether we have a soul is the problem of what exactly the soul is. Until we know what it is that we either have or don't have we can't say much about whether we have it or not.

Unfortunately, Bloom doesn't see fit to define what he means by the soul except to say that it's an immaterial substance. he does seem to imply that the soul is, in his view, identical to what most people call a mind. In any event, Bloom, being a materialist doesn't believe there is anything immaterial about us, yet he seems enchanted by the universal belief, present from birth, evidently, that there is more to us than just the matter that makes up our bodies.

For my admittedly speculative view of what the soul might be see this post.

RLC

Without God (IV)

Related to the matter of qualia, which we discussed in the previous post in this series, is the question of beauty, or more precisely, why it is that gazing at or listening to something beautiful should fill us with delight, or even rapture. It's possible, I suppose, to formulate some convoluted ad hoc hypothesis in terms of purposeless physical forces acting over billions of years on dozens of fortuitous mutations to produce response mechanisms to certain stimuli in our neuronal architecture. But why? Why should a sunset fill us with wonder and a mountain range fill us with awe? Why and how would blind, unintentional processes produce such responses? What urgency would such seemingly gratuitous responses have in the struggle for survival that the whole panoply of mutations and selective pressures would be brought to bear to cultivate them?

A simpler explanation for such phenomena, perhaps, is that our encounters with beauty, like our encounters with good, are intimations of God. Beauty is one means by which God reveals Himself to us in the world. Our encounters with beauty are glimpses He gives us of Himself, and the delight we feel in them is a prelude to heaven.

Yet another aspect of the world that is better explained in terms of a theistic rather than an atheistic or naturalistic worldview is our sense that reason is a trustworthy guide to truth. It seems that the atheist has no warrant for this belief. If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, all of our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explicated in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if materialism is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. The atheistic materialist is in the intellectually unenviable position of having no rational basis for believing that materialism, or anything else, is true.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth."

In other words, if there is no God then our reason is a product of evolution, and evolution selects traits for their survival value, not their ability to lead to truth.

Only if our reason is an endowment from a good and omniscient Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument. And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness is itself irrational.

Thus the theistic hypothesis not only makes better sense of beauty than does atheism, but it's the only hypothesis upon which we can logically suppose that our cognitive faculties are reliable guides to truth.

RLC

Why Not Obama?

Hot Air has an excellent "video essay" by two young journalists (plus Ed Morrissey) who work for major news organs and who explore in their piece the qualifications Barack Obama brings to his candidacy for the presidency. The column is well-documented and brings together a number of themes that have caused people to have serious reservations about the man who may well be our next Commander-in-Chief. Their summary provides a good introduction to their case, and I urge everyone who plans to vote on November 4th to read their entire argument at the link.

Here's the summary:

All three of us have written many, many times on all of these issues. Taken individually, most of them would create doubt about the readiness and honesty of any political candidate. Put together as a narrative, we believe this paints the picture of a man who has few real credentials for the office he seeks beyond the Constitutional minimum, and a politician who has succeeded in obfuscating his hard-Left ideology.

Perhaps if Barack Obama had taken more time to build his resum� - especially with executive experience - he might have made a more compelling candidate, and might have demonstrated at least a little of the moderation he has claimed. Instead, Democrats want America to support at once the most radical and least qualified candidate for President in at least a century. They have tried to conceal this with the complicity of a pom-pom-waving national media that has shown much more interest in the political background of a plumber from Ohio than in a major-party candidate for President.

America deserves better than that. Voters deserve the truth from the press, not vague cheers of "hope" and "change" while willfully ignoring or air-brushing Obama's record. We hope to set that record straight with our essay.

RLC

If Philosophers Played Soccer

A student commends this Monty Python video to his fellow philosophy students:

RLC

Without God (III)

In this third installment of our series comparing the explanatory power of theism and atheism we'll consider two more facts about the world that are more easily accounted for on the assumption of theism than on the assumption of atheism.

The first is the existence of biological information. The biosphere is information-rich, a fact which raises the question where this information came from and how it got here. The naturalist's answer is that information, such as we find in DNA and cellular processes, resulted from blind mechanistic forces acting purposelessly and randomly over eons of time. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, of course, but if we're going to limit ourselves to the lessons of experience, as scientists should, we must acknowledge that information whose provenience we can ascertain is always the product of an intelligent mind, never the result of chance.

Random processes can produce highly improbable structures (like the particular pattern of rocks in a field) and they can produce very specific recognizable patterns (like the repetition of a single letter typed by a monkey), but we've never observed a random, non-teleological process generate both (such as an instruction manual). Yet that is precisely what we have in the genetic code.

There may someday be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information, but until that day arrives the obvious existence of that information suggests that an intelligent agent lurks somewhere in its history.

Another fact about the world that comports better with the assumption of theism than with atheism, particularly atheistic materialism, is the existence of human consciousness.

How does it happen, for example, that mere matter can produce qualia (e.g. the sensation of red or the taste of sweet)? How do electrochemical reactions in our neurons produce a value, a doubt, gratitude, regret, expectation, or frustration, boredom, or disappointment? How does material substance produce forgiveness, resentment, or wishes, hopes, and desires? How does it appreciate (e.g. beauty, music, or a book)? How does it want, worry, have intentions, or understand something? How does matter come to be aware of itself and its surroundings? How does matter come to hold beliefs?

These are vexing questions for those holding an atheistic view of the world and materialists have no answer to them. It may be that if we put the proper chemicals in a flask under the appropriate conditions the flask would become aware of itself, but we have no idea how it could do so, and the belief that it could is simply an article of materialist faith.

In other words, on the assumption that matter is all there is consciousness is inexplicable. Its existence suggests that material substance is not the only constituent of reality, which may be one reason why some materialists (called eliminative materialists) just embrace the very odd belief that consciousness doesn't exist at all. I say it seems an odd belief because presumably one must be conscious in order to hold it.

At any rate, the problem posed by consciousness is an embarrassment to the materialist, but the theist can simply point out that our consciousness is bestowed on us by God who is Himself a conscious being. Human consciousness derives from God's consciousness, but it's very difficult to account for in a universe without God.

RLC

Low Life

From Pajamas Media:

While the Democrat-leaning media continues to scare undecided voters with bedtime stories about some mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen, here is a real district attorney's complaint documenting an unprovoked assault by an enraged Democrat against a McCain volunteer in midtown Manhattan: "Defendant grabbed the sign [informant] was holding, broke the wood stick that was attached to it, and then struck informant in informant's face...

But you probably knew about this because it happened a month ago and it's been all over the media. Or maybe not.

The attacker was a paunchy middle-aged male and the victim was a woman. The writer of this post, Oleg Atbashian, speculates that the media reaction would have been considerably different had a male McCain supporter hit a female Obama supporter. As it is all we've heard from the MSM about this episode is the sound of snoring.

There are details of the assault at the link and a photo of the perp. I have to say that he looks like he knew what he was doing when he picked on a woman to assault rather than a man.

RLC

Genuine Compassion

A reader writes to comment on the post titled More on the Right to Health Care. In that post I commented that when people are encouraged to turn to the church for their needs it benefits both them and the church in ways that government is simply unable to match. She writes:

...God provides support for those who trust in Him through His body of believers. This fosters gratitude and thankfulness because it is much easier to feel gratitude towards your brothers and sisters in Christ than the government.

I have experienced this personally. This summer my Dad fell from a ladder 25 feet and landed on his head. He miraculously survived, but his journey to recovery entailed critical care, rehab, surgery, and lots of money. Although our family of eight depended on his income, we were never in want through the whole time. Our church family surrounded us and took care of whatever needs we had. Our health care covered only a fraction of the medical expenses, but the church supplied the need. If the government had had complete control over our finances and health care, our family would have missed out on the biggest overflow of God's grace we have ever experienced.

The problem is that not everyone is a Christian who has this kind of support from a local body of believers. This is where the church can reach the world for Christ. They can supply the basic human needs that a government can never fulfill, and they can do it in a way that also supplies spiritual needs.

It is true, of course, that government has financial resources that churches cannot muster and that there's a role for government to play, but churches are much better positioned to give people what government cannot - love, concern, and life skills. They can, in the case of the poor, offer them training in the virtues necessary to get and keep a job and also help them to learn how to properly raise their children. The kind of help many people need today, and which churches are uniquely situated to provide, goes well beyond finances, but people will never seek out the church's assistance, and the church will never develop its full potential to do good in the community, if the government is at the doorstep with a check every time they need it.

I mentioned Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion in the previous post on this subject. It really is a book that should be read by everyone concerned with the poor and the best way to help them.

RLC

Pro-Abortion Extremism

Byron forwards us a link to an essay by George Weigel of the Witherspoon Institute. Weigel offers a compelling explanation as to why Senator Obama's defense of his vote as an Illinois state senator against legislation that would have protected babies born alive after a failed abortion attempt is simply false. After having methodically stripped away any possible justification for Obama's vote Weigel closes with this:

Some of Senator Obama's supporters are now making one last, rather desperate-sounding attempt to defend his votes against protecting infants born alive after unsuccessful abortions. Their argument goes this way: Permitting children who survive attempted abortions to be abandoned is so heinous, so barbaric, that for someone to accuse Senator Obama, a decent man who is himself the father of two daughters, of supporting what amounts to legalized infanticide is too outrageous to merit an answer. There is a problem, though. In light of the documentary evidence that is now before the public, it is clear that the accusation against Senator Obama, however shocking, has the very considerable merit of being true.

It may be worth mentioning in passing that Obama has promised Planned Parenthood that his first act as president will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act.

Speaking to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund on July 17, 2007, Obama said, "The first thing I'd do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing that I'd do."

This act would invalidate all laws regulating abortion, including laws prohibiting partial birth abortion. The National Right to Life Committee explains:

Obama is a cosponsor of the so-called "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA) (S. 1173), which would nullify all state and federal laws that "interfere with" access to abortion before "viability" (as defined by the abortionist). The bill would also nullify all state and federal laws that "interfere with" access to abortion after viability if deemed to enhance "health." Because the term "health" is not qualified in the bill, no state would be allowed to exclude any "health" justification whatever for post-viability abortions, because to do so would impermissibly narrow a federally guaranteed right. In short, the FOCA would establish a federal "abortion right" broader than Roe v. Wade and, in the words of the National Organization for Women, "sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies." The chief sponsors and advocacy groups backing the legislation have acknowledged that it would make partial-birth abortion legal again, nullify state parental notification laws, and require the state and federal governments to fund abortions.

Whatever his views on other issues, Senator Obama is certainly a pro-abortion extremist.

RLC

Get Joe

An ordinary guy, a plumber named Joe Wurzelbacher, asks Senator Obama a simple question in a rope line and someone catches it on video. The candidate's answer reveals him to be pretty much of a Marxist socialist, and the revelation threatens to do Obama great political harm. So what does the left do? They do whatever they can to slime the poor guy who was only asking a sensible question. Naturally.

Joe the Plumber has become the center of media attention, and as with Sarah Palin, the subtext is that he must be discredited. A full scale investigation is launched by the left to dig up whatever dirt they can find on the guy who asked the question. Here's some of what they're publicizing now to embarrass him:

• He doesn't really make $250,000 a year (He never said that he did. He said that he was thinking of buying a business that did $250,000 to $270,000 wiorth of business).
• His name isn't Joe, it's Sam (His middle name is Joe).
• He owes back taxes (So does Charlie Rangel).
• He's a racist (He said that Obama's tap dance around the answer to his question was almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr).
• He's divorced (So is half the country).
• He's not a licensed plumber (So what?).

I don't care if the guy is the incarnation of Lucifer, what does any of this have to do with his question about what Obama's tax policy will be for small businesses? It was Obama's answer that has gotten him into trouble, not the question. Obama's reply was that he thinks everyone is better off if we "spread the wealth around", a classic Marxist sentiment:

The left's attempt to smear an ordinary guy who asked a simple question just makes them seem mean, vindictive and moronic.

Meanwhile, as the media digs furiously to unearth whatever dirt they can find on Joe, they haven't shown any interest at all in probing into the life of, say, Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright. Why have there been no interviews with either of these men to help us learn a little more about their relationsghip to Barack Obama? Indeed, we now know more about Joe the Plumber than we know about Barack Obama's college years. I can't help but wonder why that is or what kind of people we have doing journalism in this country that they're more interested in humiliating an ordinary citizen than in learning more about who Obama is.

RLC

Kill Him

The story of the guy in Sarah Palin's audience who yelled "kill him" when one of the warm-up speakers mentioned Barack Obama's name has taken on the status of an urban legend. You can't read a liberal columnist or watch a leftist television talk show without hearing the story mentioned with embellishments and much agonizing over what this says about the dark and ugly passions to which the Republican ticket is appealing.

Now it turns out that like most urban legends this one has absolutely no warrant. Here's the story:

The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled "kill him" when presidential hopeful Barack Obama's name was mentioned during Tuesday's Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Obama's name a man in the audience shouted "kill him."

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

"I was baffled," he said after reading the report in Wednesday's Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, from news media to ordinary citizens in attendance at the rally for the Republican vice presidential candidate held at the Riverfront Sports Complex. He said Singleton was the only one to say he heard someone yell "kill him."

"We have yet to find someone to back up the story," Slavoski said. "We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it."

Hackett said he did not hear the remark.

Slavoski said Singleton was interviewed Wednesday and stood by his story but couldn't give a description of the man because he didn't see him he only heard him.

When contacted Wednesday afternoon, Singleton referred questions to Times-Tribune Metro Editor Jeff Sonderman. Sonderman said, "We stand by the story. The facts reported are true and that's really all there is."

In other words, Sonderman is saying, it's a good story and we're not concerned that there's no evidence to support it. Even if it didn't really happen it could have, so what's the difference?

RLC

Without God (II)

This post is the second in the series on whether atheism or theism offers a more cogent explanation for the world and our experience of it. The second fact that's easier to explain on the theistic rather than the atheistic hypothesis is that the parameters, forces and constants which govern the cosmos are exquisitely fine-tuned. Here's one example of the dozens which could serve:

If the initial density of matter in the universe had deviated by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th power (a value referred to by scientists as the "density parameter"), the universe would have either fallen back on itself or expanded too quickly for stars to form. This is an unimaginably fine tolerance.

Imagine a stack of dimes stretching across 10 to the 30th universes like our own. Let the dimes represent calibrations on a gauge displaying every possible value for the density parameter. Imagine, too, that a needle points to the dime representing the critical value. If the initial density of our cosmos deviated from that critical value by a single dime our universe, if it formed at all, would not be suitable for life.

Or imagine a console featuring dials and gauges for each of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of constants, parameters, and other cosmic contingencies which define the structure of our world. Imagine that each dial face shows trillions upon trillions of possible values. Each of those dials has to be calibrated to precisely the value to which it is actually set in our world in order for a universe to exist and/or for life to thrive.

Of course, it could be an astonishing coincidence that all the dials are set with such mind-boggling precision. Or it could be that there are a near infinite number of regions in our universe (the multiverse hypothesis) having all possible values and that ours just happens to be one that is perfectly calibrated for life. But not only is this an extraordinarily unparsimonious hypothesis, it also elicits the question of what it is that's generating these universes, why they must be thought to possess all possible values rather than being identically calibrated, and what evidence we have that they even exist.

It's much simpler to apply Ockham's razor and assume that there's just one universe and that its structure manifests a level of engineering of breath-taking precision, a conclusion perfectly compatible with the idea that there's an intelligent agent behind it all. "It's crazy," as Richard Swinburne says, "to postulate a trillion universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job."

One further point: Scientists assume as they study the universe that it's rational, that it lends itself to rational inquiry, but if so, then an entirely non-rational explanation for it seems less likely than an explanation which incorporates rational causes.

So, the explanation for what appears to be an amazingly brilliant engineering job is either the existence of trillions upon trillions of discrete regions in a multiverse, for which there's absolutely no evidence, or the existence of a transcendent engineer. It seems to me that the latter explanation is at the very least as plausible as the former. Indeed, it would seem far more plausible to most people were it not that they rule out the engineer hypothesis a priori because it doesn't fit their materialist worldview.

RLC

What Is Truth?

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that Obama told at least three whoppers during last night's debate. He denied having launched his political career with Bill Ayers' help, he denied having given $800,000 to ACORN, and he misrepresented the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act which he voted against.

Morrissey has details at the link if you'd like to check them out.

For my part, I'm a little reluctant to call Obama a liar, as Morrissey does, but I'm beginning to think that his problem (and thus ours) runs even deeper than lying. I'm beginning to think that Obama has a very pragmatic, Rortian view of truth. In this view, if a particular fact is unpleasant or inconvenient or impedes achieving the goals one has set for oneself then it's simply not a fact. It's not true for him. Truth is what works and obviously the sorts of claims that McCain was making about Obama's association with terrorist Bill Ayers, his support for ACORN, an organization which is being investigated all across the country for voter registration fraud, and his vote on the BAIP act, which is essentially a vote to permit infanticide, are not helpful to his candidacy. Thus he's able to persuade himself, and say with a straight face, that such claims are not "true", they're not "facts".

Truth, according to the late philosopher Richard Rorty, is whatever your peer group will let you get away with saying. Obviously, Obama's peer group of radical leftists, socialists and media liberals have no problem with what he says and thus tacitly validate his claims. The truth for him as well as for many of those who want to see him attain the presidency is simply not the same as what is true for his critics. Therefore, his denial of the facts McCain cites is probably not technically a lie since he believes he's telling the "truth", or at least what's true for him.

I don't know, then, that it's quite accurate to call Obama a liar, a charge I deem to be very serious in any event, but he certainly does appear to be epistemically challenged.

RLC

Hiding in the Tall Grass

Senator Obama and his allies are fond of laying the blame for the subprime lending fiasco at the feet of Republican fondness for deregulation, but although a supine MSM has largely let him get away with this misrepresentation of the historical truth, Peter Wallison at The Wall Street Journal does not.

In a column that deserves to be read in its entirety because it sets the record straight on several mythical elements of the Democrats' campaign narrative, Wallison says this:

In the summer of 2005, a bill (co-sponsored by Senator McCain) emerged from the Senate Banking Committee that considerably tightened regulations on Fannie and Freddie, including controls over their capital and their ability to hold portfolios of mortgages or mortgage-backed securities. All the Republicans voted for the bill in committee; all the Democrats voted against it. To get the bill to a vote in the Senate, a few Democratic votes were necessary to limit debate. This was a time for the leadership Sen. Obama says he can offer, but neither he nor any other Democrat stepped forward.

Instead, by his own account, Mr. Obama wrote a letter to the Treasury Secretary, allegedly putting himself on record that subprime loans were dangerous and had to be dealt with. This is revealing; if true, it indicates Sen. Obama knew there was a problem with subprime lending -- but was unwilling to confront his own party by pressing for legislation to control it. As a demonstration of character and leadership capacity, it bears a strong resemblance to something else in Sen. Obama's past: voting present.

Not willing to buck his party's leadership the senator refused to do the right thing. Instead he laid low, hiding in the political tall grass. His behavior in this episode displayed neither leadership nor political courage. Indeed, Senator Obama has never done anything to evince either of these virtues yet somehow he has managed to persuade a majority of American voters that he has both of them in abundance.

Is it that we are gullible, naive, or stupid? Or are we all three?

RLC

Voting for Change

A friend passed along this thought:

George Bush has been in office for just under eight years. For the first of them the economy was pretty good. For example, a little over one year ago:

• Consumer confidence stood at a 2 1/2 year high
• Regular gasoline sold for $2.19 a gallon
• The unemployment rate was 4.5%
• The DOW hit a record 14,000+
• Americans were buying new cars, taking cruises, overseas vacations overseas, etc.

But we wanted change. So, in 2006 we voted in a Democratic Congress. Since then:

• Consumer confidence has plummeted
• Gasoline rose to over $4 a gallon
• Unemployment rose to 6.1% (a 10% increase)
• Americans have seen their home equity drop by $12 trillion dollars and prices are still dropping
• 1% of American homes are in foreclosure
• The DOW is below 8500. $2.5 trillion dollasrs has evaporated from stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investment portfolios

The president has no control over any of this. Only Congress could have done anything to prevent it but Congress has been preoccupied with trying to find Bush administration officials that they can put in jail.

In 2006 America voted for change and we got it.

Now Barack Obama promises that he is going to deliver real change.

Just how much more change can we stand?

RLC

Without God (I)

Among the indictments of religious believers recently registered by skeptics such as the coterie of anti-theists lead by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. is that belief in God is at best irrational and at worst pernicious. Theism is all faith and no evidence, the believer is condescendingly assured, but should a theist try to pin down his antagonist and ask him exactly what he means by "evidence", it often turns out that the word is being employed as a synonym for "proof."

Well, of course there's no proof that there is a personal God, as if God's existence were the conclusion of a deductive syllogism, but that's hardly a reason not to believe that one exists. We have proof for very little of what we believe about the world, yet we don't hold our beliefs less firmly for that.

The skeptic's claim that there's no evidence for God and that theistic belief is thus irrational is, ironically, the reverse of the truth. It is actually, in my view, more rational to believe that a personal transcendent creator of the universe exists than to disbelieve it. Moreover, if what I will argue in this series of posts over the next week or two is correct, the logical consequences of atheism turn out to be psychically and politically toxic.

Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests more comfortably on the side of the believer. This is because almost every relevant fact about the world, and every existential characteristic of the human condition, makes more sense when viewed in the light of theism than it does on the assumption of atheism.

Put differently, the conclusion that theism is true is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation. I don't mean to suggest that there are no facts about the world that militate against the existence of God - there are, of course. The existence of evil is the most troubling example. Nor do I mean to suggest that atheism can offer no account at all of the facts of human existence that I discuss in what follows. Perhaps it can. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism the facts are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism. If that is the case, it follows that it's more reasonable to believe that the explanation for them is the existence of a personal God.

The first of these facts, then, is our intuitive conviction that the universe must have had a cause and that it didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that the universe's existence depends upon something beyond itself, something which transcends space and time. It's possible, perhaps, that the universe somehow created itself, but that seems both counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator itself requires an explanation. As Del Ratzsch points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider an analogy to the discovery on Mars of a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium. Most people would think that the cube was produced by aliens and would regard the cube as virtual proof that aliens existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of aliens, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the cube and that until they can offer some account of the aliens the skeptic is under no obligation to believe they exist. Most reasonable people would think that the inability to say anything much about the aliens doesn't count at all against the theory that intelligent agents were responsible for the cube nor does it mean that the alien theory is on philosophical par with the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube would be a reasonable inference and would seem to be the most plausible explanation even if it could not be proven.

Likewise, given the contingency of the universe, the existence of a transcendent cause responsible for the universe is a reasonable inference. The alternatives, that the universe is eternal or that the universe brought itself into being, are possible but scientifically and philosophically no more compelling, and perhaps much less so, than the view that the universe had a transcendent cause.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Ghost Writer

Jack Cashill at The American Thinker does a literary analysis of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father and draws two interesting conclusions: Obama didn't write it and Bill Ayers probably did. If Cashill's correct, and he seems to have done some homework, the finding is significant. First, Senator Obama's reputation for intellectual brilliance is predicated largely on the grace and style of Dreams, and, secondly, it gives the lie to the senator's claim that he didn't have a very close relationship with Ayers.

The circumstantial evidence that Cashill amasses is, by his own admission, not dispositive, but it's much more than merely suggestive. Read his case for yourself and make your own judgment.

RLC

Only Eight

How many times will we have to hear that Obama was only eight years old when Bill Ayers committed his crimes before someone asks what that has to do with anything? No one thinks that Obama participated in Ayers bombings so why does his age at the time they happened matter? Would it be exculpatory if someone friendly with German nazi war criminals during the 1960s was only eight when the crimes were committed? Would we be saying that it doesn't matter that the man associated with nazis decades later since he was only eight when the nazis were perpetrating their evil?

It's an indication of the weakness of the case that is made in Obama's defense that he and his supporters have to grasp at such an inane and irrelevant excuse.

Meanwhile, the candidate pretty much admits he's a Marxist socialist:

From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

RLC

Prelude to <i>Without God</i>

Recently, I wrote a trio of posts titled Hurtling Toward the Cliff in response to an article by physicist Stephen Weinberg titled Without God. Over the course of the next two weeks or so I'd like to elaborate on this theme in a series of posts which will examine a number of facts about the world and human existence and consider these facts in the light of both atheism and theism. The series will borrow for its title Weinberg's Without God.

It'll be my contention in the series that theism offers a far superior account of these facts, that it makes better sense of them, than does atheism and that the theistic view of the world is therefore more intellectually satisfying and more rational than is it's opposite. Seventeen facts or phenomena about the world and human life will be considered:

1. The fact that the universe had a beginning
   
2. The fact of cosmic design
   
3. The fact of biological information
   
4. The fact of human consciousness
   
5. The joy we experience in an encounter of beauty
   
6. The fact that we believe our reason to be reliable
   
7. Our sense that we have free will
   
8. Our desire for answers to life's deepest questions
   
9. Our sense of moral obligation
   
10. Our sense of guilt
    
11. Our belief in human dignity
    
12. Our belief in human worth
    
13. Our belief that there are basic human rights
    
14. Our desire for justice
    
15. Our need for meaning and purpose
    
16. Our belief that we have an enduring self
    
17. Our desire to survive our own death
    

In what follows it will be argued that theism provides an easier, more comfortable explanation for each of the above than does atheism. When taken together they add up to a powerful case for the proposition that it's eminently reasonable to believe that a personal mind, a mind similar to that imputed to the God of Christian theism, undergirds the world.

The first installment of the argument will be posted tomorrow.

RLC

More on the Right to Health Care

A few days ago I made the comment that Senator Obama's view that people have a fundamental right to health care/insurance strikes me as ill-considered. A couple of readers thought this sounded a bit callous and uncompassionate, but I think it's Obama's view, though no doubt well intentioned, that is the less compassionate. Here are a few reasons why:

1) A right held by one person entails an obligation owed by another. By conferring a right to health care on one person we obligate everyone else, including others who may be struggling to make ends meet, to fork over even more of their income to the person with the right. In other words, we give people who may or may not be in genuine need a claim on your wallet. That may seem compassionate to the recipient, but it's decidedly uncompassionate to the person who must hand over his purse rather than be allowed to use his resources to help his own family.

2) When someone feels they have a right to receive a benefit from the state it stifles gratitude. They expect the taxpayer to pay up, indeed they come to believe they're owed the benefit and are aggrieved if the taxpayer resists. Rather than fostering gratitude for the sacrifice others make on their behalf the right cultivates instead a sense of entitlement in the recipient.

3) Since a right to health care puts the taxpayer in relation to the recipient like a debtor stands in relation to the person he owes, the taxpayer tends quite naturally to feel resentful at the transfer of his resources to people who demand that he do so. This not only serves to foster bitterness between classes but, to the extent that the classes break along racial lines, it nurtures a seething racial animosity.

4) When people feel the government owes them a benefit it stifles their initiative. People who know that others will provide for their needs are much less motivated to work to provide them for themselves. If we didn't learn anything else from Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs we should have at least learned that dependency destroys the work ethic.

5) When charity becomes a government function it harms the church. Churches which have robust charitable ministries are often strong and vibrant, but churches which have had their outreach to their communities co-opted by the state often grow flaccid, weak, and cold. Charity should be the role of the church and people should turn first to churches when they're in need of help. Churches are then in a position to help these people not only with financial assistance but also to teach them how to manage money, how to parent, and instruct them in many other of the virtues necessary to rise out of poverty. When the government takes over this role, however, recipients have no expectations placed upon them and thus often fail to rise above the station in life to which they were born.

Marvin Olasky's Tragedy of American Compassion should be required reading for anyone who thinks that government "compassion" is the only way, or even the best way, to help people.

RLC