Evil and Open Theism

Open Theism (OT) is the view that God does not know in advance what people will freely choose to do in the future. One of the reasons some find OT attractive is that it offers a potential solution to the problem of why, if God knew the evil that this world would contain, He didn't create some other world instead that had less evil. That is, there must be an indefinite number of possible worlds God could have created, some of which would contain less evil than this one. If God knows everything that will transpire in any world He creates and if He is perfectly good then He would be expected to create the least evil world it would be possible for Him to have created, so either this world is the least evil world possible, which seems hard to believe, or God is not perfectly good, or God does not know in advance the free choices that people will make.

OT has been advanced by some philosophers as the least objectionable way out of the problem (See here for more discussion on Open Theism).

Alexander Pruss, however, doesn't buy it and offers an objection to OT at Prosblogion. Here's his criticism:

It seems to me that some folks--perhaps not philosophers--think that Open Theism (OT) somehow significantly helps with the Problem of Evil. But I do not think it does. The natural reason to think OT helps is to say that if an omnipotent God foreknows that George will freely do some evil E, then God can prevent George from doing E, and OT means that God can't foreknow it, so we can't blame God for failing to prevent E. But this is confused. For it would be impossible for God to both foreknow--or even forebelieve--E and prevent E. Foreknowledge does let God put plans for an event into effect before the event happens, but for actual prevention of foreknown evils, what would be needed is Middle Knowledge, not foreknowledge.

Pruss is arguing, I think, that God knows the choices we will make but cannot prevent them because if He does then God wouldn't know that we would make that choice because, in fact, we wouldn't make it. I don't think Pruss is right about this, though. Under most views of omniscience God knows all of the choices which would be made in every possible world, but He, presumably, creates only one. Thus, by creating only one, He prevents a myriad of choices from being made. So, under the traditional view, God both foreknows the choices made in possible worlds He doesn't create and prevents those choices by not creating those worlds.

In other words, God could have foreknowledge of the evil that would exist in this world and prevent it by not creating this world. So why did He create this world when He could have created another in which people were free to choose but more often, or even always, chose to do right? The open theist argues that in fact, the traditional view of omniscience is wrong. God doesn't know what choices free beings would make in whatever world God placed them in, and therefore, He didn't know that man would sin in this world. He knew it was possible, He knew what His response would be if man did sin, but He didn't, the open theist claims, know that it would actually come to pass that man would fall.

God created, in this view, the best possible world He could create for Man and placed Man in it with the freedom to requite God's love or reject it. When Adam underwent the temptation in the Garden all of heaven held its breath because the outcome was uncertain and when Adam succumbed all of heaven and earth was devastated by his failure. In this view, the world's evil is entirely Man's responsibility. God could have prevented it only by either not creating a world or not creating mankind with libertarian freedom. Both alternatives would have defeated the whole purpose of creating Man in the first place which was to have beings with which He could live in a significant love relationship.

At any rate, OT is not without its problems, but I don't think Pruss's concern is one of them.

RLC

Government-Run Maternity Care

If you're a young woman planning on having a family in the next ten years and you're not sure what to make of the debate swirling around nationalized health care you may find this article from the British Daily Mail Online helpful:

Thousands of women are having to give birth outside maternity wards because of a lack of midwives and hospital beds.

The lives of mothers and babies are being put at risk as births in locations ranging from lifts to toilets - even a caravan - went up 15 per cent last year to almost 4,000.

Health chiefs admit a lack of maternity beds is partly to blame for the crisis, with hundreds of women in labour being turned away from hospitals because they are full.

It shows the incredible waste that has taken place that mothers are getting this sort of sub-standard treatment despite Gordon Brown's tripling of spending on the NHS. Labour have let down mothers by cutting the number of maternity beds and by shutting down maternity units.

The NHS employs the equivalent of around 25,000 full-time midwives in England, but the Government has promised to recruit 3,400 more. However, the Royal College of Midwives estimates at least 5,000 more are needed to provide the quality of service pledged in the Government's blueprint for maternity services, Maternity Matters.

At the same time almost half of all midwives are set to retire in the next decade.

There are more details at the link. When government controls the health care system women give birth on toilets. What a metaphor.

RLC

Somali Pirates

We haven't heard as much about piracy off the coast of Somalia lately. Part of that may be due to the fact that three pirates were killed by U.S. Navy SEALS when they took an American ship captain hostage, and some of it is due to measures that merchant crews are taking to thwart piracy. Strategy Page fills us in:

Off Somalia, 136 ships have been attacked so far this year, and 28 (21 percent) have been taken. Last year, the pirate success rate was 40 percent. Moreover, 80 percent of the attacks defeated do not involve the foreign warships now patrolling the coast. The merchant sailors, and the ship owners, have adopted defensive measures that have become remarkably successful in defeating pirate attacks. For the captain himself, the best defense is knowing what speeds and maneuvers his ship can use to keep the pirates away. Larger ships can create dangerous wakes for the pursuing speedboats, by zig zagging. Captains also have to learn how fast their ship can accelerate to escape oncoming speed boats. Normally, captains are more skilled at moving their ships at slower speeds. Putting the pedal to the metal and hot roding around the high seas is not normally part of their skill set. But that's how you avoid getting hijacked by pirates. Captains are learning, and so are their crews.

Ship captains are organizing and drilling their crews on things that can be done to keep the pirates from getting aboard. This ranges from stringing barbed wire around likely boarding points, to practicing the use of fire hoses and other tools (like long poles) to keep the ladders or grappling hooks from enabling the pirates to get aboard. These drills build confidence in the ability of the crew to defend their ship.

The sailors also now keep track of where the nearest warships are, and prepare a "safe room" (an area of the ship the crew can barricade themselves in, until help arrives.) This includes providing emergency communications in the safe room. All this takes advantage of the fact that the pirates cannot take control of the ship unless they have the crew. Usually this comes down to barricading the crew in the engine compartment. If the crew prepares for that eventuality (having a radio available to contact the warships, along with water, food and medical supplies there), just getting everyone into the engine room when it appears that the pirates are going to get on board, means that the pirates will be caught between the crew they cannot reach, and the approaching warship that can certainly reach the pirates.

This is all good as far as it goes, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier to just let it be known that there are teams of armed guards on board these ships. Whether there are or not, it would certainly deter the dilletantes among the brigands and at least give pause to the more resolute careerists.

RLC

Lopsided Playing Field

Over at National Review Online John Pitney explains that contrary to what some might think, the President and his party enjoy every advantage a political party could hope for, yet they nevertheless may fail utterly to impose their agenda and to lead the country into the land of socialist milk and honey to which the leadership wants to take it.

The list of advantages is probably unprecedented in our political history. Here's Pitney:

Start with Congress. A few years back, House Democrats complained that the Republican majority was shutting them out of the legislative process. Now Speaker Pelosi and company are pulling tricks that Tom DeLay never dreamed of. A Brookings study concludes: "The number and percentage of restrictive rules used by Democratic leaders to control debate and amending activity on the House floor exceeded the degree of control and departure from regular order exercised by their Republican predecessors." The ruling party is even unfairly censoring Republicans' official mailings to constituents.

Senate Democrats have 60 votes, enough to close debate if they all hang together. Such strength is extraordinary. Democrats last crossed that line in the 95th Congress (1977-1979), and Republicans have not done so in more than a hundred years. Democrats claim that their majority is less decisive than it seems because they are more fractious than Republicans. But they aren't. In roll call votes during 2008, Senate Democrats scored higher in party unity (87 percent) than Republicans (83 percent).

Democrats do not exactly face a hostile media environment, either. The evening news broadcasts of the Obama-friendly Big Three networks have dropped in the ratings, but they still draw far more viewers than Fox News. That's why the Gibson and Couric interviews could do so much damage to Sarah Palin.

What of all-powerful talk radio? Rush Limbaugh reaches up to 25 million Americans, many more than other syndicated hosts. That's a big number, but it means that at least 80 percent of voters are not listeners. More significant, polls show that most Americans have a low opinion of El Rushbo. So the "Limbaugh Did It" theory works only if he can mesmerize millions who dislike him and/or don't even listen to him.

Liberals and Democrats also dominate the hot medium of our time, the Internet. During the 2008 campaign, the Obama campaign mastered social networking and other online technologies. By far the most popular political blog is The Huffington Post. Along with Talking Points Memo and others, HuffPo conducts a great deal of investigative journalism that advances liberal causes. As the Politico reported last year, the Right lags badly in this regard.

What about money? According to stereotype, the well-heeled GOP can bury the Democrats in campaign cash. That image is obsolete: Any Republican financial advantage is long gone. In 2008, Barack Obama smashed all fundraising records and got most of his money from large donors.

He raised twice as much as McCain from physicians and other health professionals, and three times as much from the health-service and drug industries. And listening to his attacks on the insurance industry, you would never guess that it supplied him with almost as much money ($2.3 million) as it did McCain ($2.4 million). No wonder Obama could co-opt business opposition to the health plan and strike a deal with Big Pharma: His corporate ties were a pre-existing condition.

The Democrats continue to hold the money edge. So far in the 2010 election cycle, Democratic national committees have raised $12 million more than their Republican counterparts.

And as in the past, liberals have the upper hand at foundations and universities. Research from these institutions has been especially important during the health-care debate. A Yale professor, for instance, devised the "public option."

So why is it proving so hard to get any more of their legislation passed? It's a testament to two things: the egregiousness of the legislation and the political incompetence of the leadership. Even so, they might still prevail by the sheer force of all that they have going for them.

RLC

Three Tips

Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute offers students going back to school this fall three good suggestions if they're expecting to study evolutionary theory in their classes, but his advice is good regardless of the courses students might be taking.

Here are his tips:

• Never opt out of learning evolution. In fact, learn about evolution every chance you get.
• Think for yourself, think critically, and question assumptions.
• Proactively learn about credible scientific viewpoints that dissent from Darwinism on your own time, even if your classes censor those non-evolutionary viewpoints.

The real value of Luskin's advice is in his explanations of these three recommendations. Check them out at the link.

RLC

He Won't Do It

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal that President Obama is on the brink of failure but that he can save his presidency by taking a lesson from Bill Clinton:

Back in 1994, Mr. Clinton faced pretty much the same problem. Though he too had won the White House promising to be a new kind of Democrat, his first two years had a distinctly liberal tenor: battling over gays in the military, promoting a new energy tax, turning a promised middle-class tax cut into a huge tax hike, and trying to push through universal health care. Though he continues to deny GOP contributions to his success, after his 1994 health-care defeat, Mr. Clinton did what all smart pols do: He appropriated the most appealing parts of his opponents' agenda.

The result was a new Bill Clinton, embracing everything from deregulation and welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act. In his 1996 State of the Union, he even struck a Reaganite chord by announcing that "the era of Big Government is over." From this newly held center, Mr. Clinton advanced his presidency and pushed, both successfully and unfairly, to demonize Mr. Gingrich. Mostly he got away with it.

In his book "The Pact," historian Steven M. Gillon puts it this way: "Ironically, Gingrich's revolution may have saved the Clinton presidency by freeing him from the control of his party's more liberal base in Congress, giving him the opportunity to return to the moderate message that helped him win election in the first place.

McGurn says that If Obama loses on health care he would be wise to follow Clinton's example and move to the right. The problem with this is that it assumes that Obama has no ideological principles. It assumes that he's just a politician who doesn't care about policy except insofar as it keeps him in office. I think this misreads the man. President Clinton was by nature a moderate. It was not difficult for him to wrest himself free of the leftists in his party and seek accomodation and compromise with the more conservative Newt Gingrich. Obama, however, is a left-wing ideologue. The Progressive agenda is his life-blood. It's the air he breaths. He can no more move to the right than Rush Limbaugh can move to the left.

If Obama doesn't get health care reform he will keep fighting for the liberal policies he believes in. He'll fight for big government, for cap and trade, for the fairness doctrine, for a private security force, for union card check, as long as he's president. He has surrounded himself with people who are as ideologically committed as he is. He can no more abandon all that than a fish could abandon water.

If President Obama does not get health care reform he will probably be severely weakened and unlikely to get much else. If so, he will probably be a one-term president, but he will never be a moderate.

RLC

Ted Kennedy (1932-2009)

We woke this morning to the news that Senator Ted Kennedy has succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. Much will be said about his political legacy, which will be substantial, having served in the U.S. Senate for 47 years, but I'm struck by a more prosaic thought. Senator Kennedy was one of four Kennedy brothers - all of whom seemed destined for political greatness - and all of whom except Ted died long before their time. In fact, their deaths spanned my lifetime. The oldest, Joe, was killed in WWII. John and Robert were both assassinated in the 1960s (The only time I ever saw Ted in person was when the train bearing JFK's body passed my house and Ted was standing on the back of the train as it passed).

Senator Kennedy's life was filled with scandal and tragedy, but he managed despite it all to become one of the most influential voices ever to serve in American politics. As a young man he seemed the least promising of the Kennedy brothers, but he managed to overcome personal shortcomings and inadequacies to become one of the most influential politicians of the last forty years.

He will be mourned by friends on both sides of the political aisle.

RLC

Apocalypto

Robert Cheeks at PostModern Conservative places Mel Gibson's Apocalypto on his list of ten best movies. I agree that it's quite worth seeing. It's one of the best "good versus evil" movies I've come across, and it does an excellent job, perhaps unintentionally, of exploding the Rousseuian myth of the goodness of man in the state of nature. The heart of man is desperately wicked, Jeremiah says, and Gibson certainly does a masterful job of reinforcing the prophet's sentiment.

Cheeks has some interesting things to say about the film in his review at the link.

RLC

Promises, Promises

President Obama, after having promised last February that he would cut the nation's deficit in half by the end of his first term - much to the astonishment of anyone who was paying attention - now informs us, on his way to Martha's Vineyard, that he'll actually be raising it another two trillion dollars. Hey, what are promises for if not to bamboozle the gullible?

The President is promising prosperity down the road while all many people can see out ahead is a looming economic cliff. But, in fairness to Mr. Obama, he does speak well, and his heart may be in the right place, and he's very smart, so we're told.

Perhaps we can cling to those comforts as we hurtle over the precipice.

HT: Moderate Voice

RLC

Whither Lutherans?

Rod Dreher sees three possibilities for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America now that they have decided to permit gays to serve as pastors in ELCA churches:

1. A significant number of conservatives will depart, accelerating the steady membership decline of the mainline Protestant denomination -- which, according to its own record-keeping, has lost 10 percent of its membership since 1987. This is a dying church, not a growing church, and this departure from Scripture and tradition will only make things worse.

2. Many conservatives may depart, making the short term situation worse, but the ELCA is on the right side of history. Younger people are dramatically more accepting than their elders of same-sex marriage. As these people age, start families, and go looking for a church, they're going to want to affiliate with a church that accepts gays fully. There will the ELCA be. Long-term, these Lutherans will benefit from their decision.

3. Many conservatives will depart, further weakening the declining denomination. But those who remain and who anticipate a rebound because of demographic eventualities will be disappointed, but not because conservatives will post absolute gains in membership. Rather, overall church attendance will continue to decline slowly as more Americans identify as secular. America will track the European model somewhat: conservative churches/denominations will prosper relative to liberal ones, because they offer a clear alternative to mainstream culture. In other words, the Christians who stay active in churches will tend to be those who are more highly motivated to affiliate with churches that offer a clear alternative -- but overall, secularization will continue steadily, with fewer Americans interested in church at all, and the gay-clergy decision won't have proved to have mattered much in the overall scheme of things.

Unfortunately, I agree with Dreher that #3 is the most likely scenario. It's not what I'd like to see happen, but it's what I think will happen. Religious faith, at least the Christian sort, is simply becoming less and less relevant to an affluent, pleasure-oreiented society that has learned to live by its feelings, gratify its desires, and reject anything that would impose restraints on its appetites and inclinations.

RLC

Ugly in its Own Way

I realize that it's fashionable among properly educated people to insist that no culture or society is any better than any other, but, in my opinion, that's a lot like professing admiration for the naked emperor's fine haberdashery. In order to maintain the charade one has to ignore an awful lot of evidence that's right before our eyes.

Imagine, for example, that an American is convicted of murdering several hundred women and children in a foreign country as was, say, Lt. William Calley who led a murderous rampage on the village of My Lai in Vietnam in 1968 during which 500 women, children and old people were brutally gunned down. Imagine, too, that after serving a couple of years of his sentence the murderer was released and, upon returning home, was greeted by throngs of thousands of cheering admirers showering him with confetti and hailing him as a hero.

Having trouble picturing that? If so, you're tacitly acknowledging that cultures are not all "beautiful in their own way." Nor do all cultures deserve to be celebrated. A culture which would treat William Calley as a hero would be a very sick culture. Certainly ours wouldn't and didn't. People who did celebrate someone like that would justly be considered pariahs among civilized people everywhere. Yet something almost analogous to our scenario happened Friday in Libya when Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was convicted of murdering the 270 passengers on Pan Am 103 that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, returned home:

Libya, and any other Arab nation which glorifies such men as Al Megrahi, should be regarded as a moral cesspool fit only for the company of barbarians and savages. No nation or culture in which such men are lionized can be said to be anything other than degenerate and contemptible.

RLC

Time to Correct the Textbooks

Anyone who has taken 10th grade biology remembers that one of the most persuasive arguments for the theory of descent by modification is based on the existence of putative vestigial structures in organisms, and one of the most popular examples of an evolutionary vestige is the human appendix. Vestigial structures are the remnants of structures that at one time had some function but because of changing needs, no longer do. Other examples are arm hair, the coccyx, wisdom teeth, hip bones in whales, junk DNA, and so on. Charles Darwin himself cited the appendix as evidence that the human species changes and evolves because it was thought that the appendix was a structure which no longer served any purpose.

Well, whatever the status and usefulness of other vestigial structures to evolutionary theory, the human appendix is now being quietly retired.

Science Daily reports:

The lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.

Now, some of those same researchers are back, reporting on the first-ever study of the appendix through the ages. Writing in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Duke scientists and collaborators from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University conclude that Charles Darwin was wrong: The appendix is a whole lot more than an evolutionary remnant. Not only does it appear in nature much more frequently than previously acknowledged, but it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected.

"Maybe it's time to correct the textbooks," says William Parker, Ph.D., assistant professor of surgical sciences at Duke and the senior author of the study. "Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a 'vestigial organ.'"

Jonathan Wells argued in his book Icons of Evolution that textbooks are filled with certain evidences of evolution which enjoy the status of classic proofs in the world of evolutionary biology but which are, in fact, based on false, and even falsified, data. The Piltdown man was an early example which comes to mind, as does the peppered moth, and Ernst Haeckel's fraudulent drawings of embryos that seemed to support the notion that embryonic development recapitulated evolutionary history. Junk DNA is no longer on the list because functions performed by this material are being discovered with increasing frequency.

Despite the fact that so many of these icons have been discredited some textbooks still present them to students as solid evidence for Darwinian evolution. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes before the appendix joins the expanding list of evolutionary vestiges that aren't really vestigial at all.

RLC

Charming Liar?

As you watch and listen to the embed keep in mind that it was taken from Air America, the leftmost radio network in the nation. The male voice you hear is that of Greg Palast a journalist so far to port that he's in danger of falling off the ship. The left is understandably upset that the man in whom they invested so much of their emotional and economic resources has broken several campaign promises in order to do a deal with "big pharma" that guaranteed they wouldn't have to lower the price of their drugs. This deal came after the President had promised on several occasions in the campaign that he would not do precisely what he has done.

Listen to the exchange between the host and Palast and note the promises Mr. Obama makes in the video clips:

The left is a long way from giving up on Mr. Obama - he is, after all, one of them - but the wind in their sails has faded to a zephyr. If he doesn't deliver on the public option in the health care reform bill the perception among the lefties will be that he's a sell-out, and internecine warfare will break out in the Democratic party.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

ELCA Crosses the Rubicon

Delegates of the Evangelical Church in America (ELCA), meeting in convention in Minneapolis, voted Friday to permit homosexuals to serve as leaders, including pastors, in the church. The ELCA has for many years been moving ineluctably toward this position and it was just a matter of time before they could muster the votes to get it passed.

The resolution carried 559 to 451 and states that people in "publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships" will be allowed to serve as rostered leaders of the church, i.e. they'll be allowed to serve in pastoral ministry.

The fear among many Lutherans who believe that legitimizing gay relationships is a repudiation of the scriptural teaching on homosexuality is that this step will trigger a mass exodus from the ELCA. It remains to be seen whether it will in fact have that result, but it seems certain that the denomination will be forever changed by this vote.

RLC

Political Cynicism

The Wall Street Journal Online has a piece that illustrates the cynicism with which democracy is viewed by some of our public servants in Congress:

Senator Ted Kennedy, who is gravely ill with brain cancer, has sent a letter to Massachusetts lawmakers requesting a change in the state law that determines how his Senate seat would be filled if it became vacant before his eighth full term ends in 2012. Current law mandates that a special election be held at least 145 days after the seat becomes available. Mr. Kennedy is concerned that such a delay could leave his fellow Democrats in the Senate one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority for months while a special election takes place.

"I therefore am writing to urge you to work together to amend the law through the normal legislative process to provide for a temporary gubernatorial appointment until the special election occurs," writes the Senator.

What Mr. Kennedy doesn't volunteer is that he orchestrated the 2004 succession law revision that now requires a special election, and for similarly partisan reasons. John Kerry, the other Senator from the state, was running for President in 2004, and Mr. Kennedy wanted the law changed so the Republican Governor at the time, Mitt Romney, could not name Mr. Kerry's replacement. "Prodded by a personal appeal from Senator Edward M. Kennedy," reported the Boston Globe in 2004, "Democratic legislative leaders have agreed to take up a stalled bill creating a special election process to replace U.S. Senator John F. Kerry if he wins the presidency." Now that the state has a Democratic Governor, Mr. Kennedy wants to revert to gubernatorial appointments.

When it looked as if a Republican governor would get to appoint a senator Mr. Kennedy wanted the law changed to prevent that. When it looks like a Democrat governor will get to appoint a senator Mr. Kennedy wants the law changed to allow that. It's all about power and whatever works to get it and keep it. No wonder the folks at town halls are showing such contempt for their elected representatives.

RLC

Taking Fire from the Left

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes a column to express his dismay and that of his fellow leftists' with President Obama. As far as he and his progressive amigos are concerned President Obama is betraying them, not because his policies are too socialist, but because they're not socialist enough. This is fascinating. The most left-wing president in history is insufficiently left to suit progressives like Krugman:

According to news reports, the Obama administration - which seemed, over the weekend, to be backing away from the "public option" for health insurance - is shocked and surprised at the furious reaction from progressives.

Well, I'm shocked and surprised at their shock and surprise.

A backlash in the progressive base - which pushed President Obama over the top in the Democratic primary and played a major role in his general election victory - has been building for months. The fight over the public option involves real policy substance, but it's also a proxy for broader questions about the president's priorities and overall approach.

That the President is not as radical as his supporters would have him be is modestly good news, I suppose, if you're a conservative, but it raises an interesting question: If conservatives who criticize Mr. Obama and his proposals are motivated by racism, as many liberals have claimed, either explicitly or implicitly, are Krugman et al also racists? Just wondering.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma

Is kindness right because God commands it or does God command it because it's right? Thus runs the ancient dilemma posed by Socrates to Euthyphro some 300 years B.C. Philosophers have come down on both sides of the question with most atheistic philosophers arguing that if God commands it because it's right then we don't need God's command and thus we don't need God. Theistic philosophers argue that an act is right not because it's commanded by just any deity but because it's commanded by an omniscient, morally perfect Deity.

I think the theist has the better reply. If the moral authority is ab defino all-knowing and perfectly good then anything It commands would be necessarily good and It wouldn't command anything that wasn't good.

God commands certain behavior for the same reason that a car manufacturer puts a maintenance manual in the new car. Just as failure to operate the car properly ruins the car, certain behaviors - like cruelty - are harmful to human beings and certain other behaviors - like kindness - enhance human existence.

God commands us to enhance human existence because he loves us. To mistreat others is wrong not because it's wrong in itself, but because God obligates us to refrain from hurting those He loves. It's wrong, and this is crucial, only because it violates the will of God. If there is no God, as the atheist maintains, then whether the atheist decides to be cruel or kind is of no moral moment. There's nothing which obligates us not to hurt others except our own subjective preferences.

Just as the sun generates light and heat which would not exist if the sun ceased to exist, so, too, goodness is ontologically dependent upon God. It's an attribute of His essence. If God did not exist neither would goodness and neither would any obligation to perform one act rather than another. We are obligated to do justice and kindness only because God demands it of humans. Take away God and human beings would be animals just like sharks and wolves for whom moral categories and moral obligation simply don't exist.

So, its not that atheists can't be kind. They certainly can. It's that, on atheism, kindness is neither right nor wrong. It's no different, morally speaking, than cruelty. It's simply a personal preference like one's preference for Pepsi rather than Coke. In a Godless world morality is just a matter of taste.

RLC

Shameful Racial Legacy

Damon Root at discusses the attempt by Chip Berlet to link the opposition to Obamacare to white, right-wing racism:

Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at the liberal think tank Political Research Associates, went even further than that, telling New America Media: "For over 100 years-more like 150, you've had these movements, and they came out of the Civil War. It is a backlash against social liberalism and it's rooted in libertarian support for unregulated capitalism and white people holding onto power, and, if they see themselves losing it, trying to get it back."

Root is having none of it, however. If Berlet wants to go back 100 years to examine the history of racism in this country what he'll find is that it was largely a phenomenon of the left. Root provides chapter and verse:

Perhaps Berlet should consider the career of South Carolina's Benjamin "Pitchfork" Tillman (1847-1914), a leading progressive who railed against the sins of "unregulated capitalism" while preaching the salvation of white supremacy. An ally of the agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan, Tillman supported antitrust laws, railroad regulations, the free coinage of silver, and a host of other progressive panaceas. He first entered politics as a member of the Red Shirts, a Klan-like terror group that "came out of the Civil War" to menace African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction. When President Theodore Roosevelt entertained the black leader Booker T. Washington at the White House in 1901, Tillman served as a de facto spokesman for the Southern opposition, declaring: "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again." It's hard to imagine a nastier threat of political violence than that-and Tillman is obviously nobody's idea of a libertarian.

In fact, as the historian David Southern has documented, the worst evils of the South's Jim Crow regime, including segregation, disfranchisement, mob violence, and lynching, all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism."

In a separate post, Root's review of Southern's book titled The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900-1917 provides excellent insight into the virulence of white racism during the Progressive era. Writing of Southern's book Root asks:

How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? [Southern's] answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. "At college," Southern notes, "budding progressives not only read expos�s of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science."

Popular titles included Charles Carroll's The Negro a Beast(1900) and R.W. Shufeldt's The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of "race suicide," the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its adolescence.

Such thinking, which emphasized "expert" opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed "the working man," "the common man," or "the people," he typically prefixed the silent adjective white.

Throughout the post-civil war era the greatest impediment to the advance of the black man, especially in the South, was the Democratic party and Progressive infatuations with social Darwinism and eugenics. It's one of the ironies of our times that modern liberals are so eager to identify themselves as Progressives and that approximately 95% of African-Americans who voted in the last election voted for the most Progressive Congress and White House since Franklin Roosevelt - maybe since Woodrow Wilson.

One wonders how aware either liberals or African-Americans are of the history of twentieth century Progressivism in this country, not only the ugliness of its racism but also of its links to European fascism. If they are aware then their willingness to identify themselves with people who push the Progressive agenda is really puzzling.

In any event, it's important that we learn the lessons of history, philosopher George Santayana famously admonished, because if we don't we're just doomed to repeat them.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The Value of Argument

What use, we sometimes wonder, are arguments? People are rarely persuaded by them to accept something they're not already disposed to believe so why bother? People who disbelieve in God, for example, don't often change their mind because they've heard someone effectively argue the opposite position.

This is probably because disbelief is not usually a consequence of a lack of proof in, or evidence for, God's existence. More often it's due to either a bad experience with Christians or the church, an incredulity over the doctrine of Christian exclusivism, the prevalence of suffering and terror in the world, or a simple desire that Christianity not be true and that God not exist. As such it's not something that can be changed by appeals to a person's reason.

For most people, believers and unbelievers alike, faith is a matter of the heart, not the head. It's rarely arrived at, or decided upon, on rational grounds. People are drawn to faith through their hearts or they reject it because their hearts are closed to it. People are moved more by story, song, film, testimonial, and what they see in other people's lives than they are, say, by Anselm's ontological argument.

For a man to be convinced of an idea or a truth, his heart needs to be persuaded, and, it's important to note, the head will always follow the heart. But arguments are useless with the heart, they only appeal to the head. Since the heart is the gate to the head, if the heart is closed no argument will ever compel the head to accept it. On the other hand, if the heart is sold on an idea anyway, then arguments aren't necessary. In most human beings the heart is the master. The head is merely an advisor that submits to the will of the heart.

Thus arguments aren't of much use to people who are unwilling to accept the conclusion that God is real. A person who doesn't want a particular idea to be true, whose heart is closed to it, will not be persuaded no matter how compelling the argument. He'll always find some way to evade its force and reject the idea.

Yet arguments are not without value. Arguments can strengthen the faith of those who already believe and they can blow away intellectual smokescreens that skepticism often hides behind. Most importantly, perhaps, they can alter the intellectual ambiance of a culture so that the assumption that Christianity is intellectually disreputable is no longer prevalent among young people. Arguments can shape the culture so that whether people accept their conclusions or not they live and move in an environment in which they know that belief can no longer be credibly portrayed as irrational. Indeed, arguments can so influence the larger culture that people accept that belief is even the most rational option, even if they don't always submit to the realization.

There are good reasons to believe that God exists and that Christianity is true, but the person who doesn't want to accept those beliefs, whose heart is already dead set against them, will, like a man who can look at the sky at noon on a clear day and claim not to see the sun, fail to see those reasons.

Even so, most people who have watched the debates between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens or have read the work of any number of Christian philosophers and apologists will, whatever conclusions they eventually draw for their own lives, have a very difficult time holding on to the notion that being a theist is somehow for fools, dunces, and old people.

RLC

Somethin's Happenin' Here

Did you ever notice how, at family gatherings, the older folks sometimes seem to just sit quietly while the conversation and activity swirls around them? I'm beginning to understand why older people sometimes just feel "out of it," and according to this video it's not going to get any easier for them:

As impressive as all this is, I can't escape the feeling that any medium which reduces communication to a series of single words or sentence fragments, as happens on Twitter, for example, is not a good thing. Banal and trivial dialogue where no real thinking is taking place can't be good for one's mental development.

Of course, it's reactionary notions like this which are sure to render people who hold them completely irrelevant, and not just at family gatherings.

RLC