Nancy the Mad Hatter

Maybe Ramirez read our post yesterday titled Nancy in Wonderland.

Don't laugh, he could have:

RLC

Making Babies Cry

The E-Trade ads are better, but these are still pretty good:

Thanks to Hot Air.

RLC

Time and the Multiverse

Wired Magazine has an interview with physicist Sean Carroll in which he discusses his research on the nature of time. His work has led him to conclude that there are other universes, or more precisely, other regions of space that are closed off to our region - a version of the multiverse hypothesis. Carroll is not a theist but when he describes the origin of our space-time as a splitting off from a parent universe he seems to be describing God:

HT: Telic Thoughts

Wired.com: Can you explain your theory of time in layman's terms?

Sean Carroll: [T]he particular aspect of time that I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an omelet into an egg.

Basically, our observable universe begins around 13.7 billion years ago in a state of exquisite order, exquisitely low entropy [disorder]. It's like the universe is a wind-up toy that has been sort of puttering along for the last 13.7 billion years and will eventually wind down to nothing. But why was it ever wound up in the first place? Why was it in such a weird low-entropy unusual state?

That is what I'm trying to tackle. I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing. It's all because of conditions of the Big Bang.

Wired.com: So the Big Bang starts it all. But you theorize that there's something before the Big Bang. Something that makes it happen. What's that?

Read the interview to see how Carroll answers the question. One of the things he says that I think he's mistaken about is this:

Even in empty space, time and space still exist. Physicists have no problem answering the question of "If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" They say, "Yes! Of course it makes a sound!" Likewise, if time flows without entropy and there's no one there to experience it, is there still time? Yes. There's still time. It's still part of the fundamental laws of nature even in that part of the universe. It's just that events that happen in that empty universe don't have causality, don't have memory, don't have progress and don't have aging or metabolism or anything like that. It's just random fluctuations.

First, whether the tree makes a sound when there are no observers present depends on whether we define sound as a sensation or as compressions propagating through the air. The falling tree generates compression waves, to be sure, but the sensation of sound is produced by our hearing apparatus, not the tree. Sensations require senses, if there are no senses present there is no sensation, just energy.

Likewise with time in completely empty space. Time requires events, as Carroll acknowledges, but what events would there be in an empty space? If time exists despite the complete lack of events then what is it that's existing? It's not material, it's not energy, it's not a substance of any kind, so what could it be? If it's simply a dimension similar to the three dimensions of space we might wonder whether the idea of time apart from events makes any more sense than the idea of space apart from material objects makes sense.

The interview concludes with Carroll acknowledging that so far his view is merely speculative:

If you think you understand the rules of gravity and quantum mechanics really, really well, you can say, "According to the rules, universes pop into existence. Even if I can't observe them, that's a prediction of my theory, and I've tested that theory using other methods." We're not even there yet. We don't know how to have a good theory, and we don't know how to test it. But the project that one envisions is coming up with a good theory in quantum gravity, testing it here in our universe, and then taking the predictions seriously for things we don't observe elsewhere.

If this is all that his theory is, if there's no way to test it, then in what sense is it science? Why would it be okay to discuss Carroll's ideas in a science class but not the ideas of intelligent design theorists? Is it because Carroll's ideas are not a threat to metaphysical naturalism but the implications of ID are?

RLC

The View from Britain

Simon Heffer of the Telegraph U.K. wonders aloud if it's not the end of the road for Barack Obama's presidency. His column opens with this:

It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth - a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable - and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama's own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician - a Democrat and a supporter of the President - told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people.

Mr. Heffer goes on to suggest that it's not premature to be writing Mr. Obama's political obituary, but perhaps there are a couple of problems with his analysis. First, he seems prone to exaggeration as for example when he states that FOX News "pours out rage 24 hours a day." There are, maybe, two hours of programming a day in which one could say that the network expresses something more than mere displeasure with the Obama administration. To aver that it "pours out rage" is to discredit one's case.

Mr. Heffer also seems to underestimate the fickleness of the American people who, though they may be abandoning Mr. Obama in droves today, might well return to him in droves tomorrow if the economy, despite the President's best efforts, turns around and jobs reappear.

Mr. Heffer also misses the mark somewhat when he notes that:

A thrashing of the Democrats in the mid-terms would not necessarily be the beginning of the end for Mr Obama: Bill Clinton was re-elected two years after the Republicans swept the House and the Senate in November 1994. But Mr Clinton was an operator in a way Mr Obama patently is not. His lack of experience, his dependence on rhetoric rather than action, his disconnection from the lives of many millions of Americans all handicap him heavily. It is not about whose advice he is taking: it is about him grasping what is wrong with America, and finding the will to put it right.

Mr. Obama's problem, however, is not that he lacks the will to put things right. His problem is that his view of what is wrong and what can be done to fix it are both obfuscated by the left-wing lenses through which he views the world. You can't fix a problem if a) you don't know what the problem is and/or b) you do know what the problem is, but your remedy is greater government control, higher taxes, and deeper debt.

During the Vietnam war the Left hooted in derision when some general justified bombing a village that harbored the enemy by opining that sometimes you had to destroy a village in order to save it. Today the Left's avatar, Mr. Obama, has adopted the same philosophy concerning the country. He seems to believe that he must destroy it in order to save it.

RLC

Nancy in Wonderland

It's hard to believe that someone who has climbed all the way to the rarified heights of political accomplishment attained by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and who has maintained even a minimum level of consciousness throughout the battles over Health Care Reform that have ebbed and flowed across the nation over the past year would say something as bizarre as Ms Pelosi said yesterday.

In a speech to the National Association of Counties the Speaker intoned:

You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America .... It's going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. (Emphasis mine)

Isn't this exactly backwards? Shouldn't we know what's in the measure before we pass it? Do the congresspersons who'll be voting on this 2000 page monstrosity of a bill really know what's in it, or are they, too, waiting until they pass it so they can find out? Is there any significant difference between Congress and Lewis Carroll's Wonderland?

Here's the incriminating video of the Speaker articulating her political dyslexia:

It's no wonder Americans think so little of their politicians. The Mad Hatter is more sensible.

RLC

100 Best

For movie buffs Moviefone lists the 100 best explorations of spiritual or religious themes of all time.

The films don't have to be explicitly religious to make the cut, nor do they have to be made with religious intent. Some of the films are made by atheists. I've only seen about ten of the films on the list myself so I can't judge their choices, but I do heartily agree with the inclusion of several of them. The Ingmar Bergman films, Seventh Seal and Winter Light, certainly deserve to be on it (I would have added The Silence), and I also agree that The Apostle and Man for All Seasons merit inclusion, but I'm really puzzled about the omission of Bella, Lord of the Rings, the Passion of the Christ, and, for that matter, Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth. I also would have added The Hiding Place, and perhaps Namesake, Arranged, and End of the Spear.

On the other hand, I wasn't a big fan of Bergman's Wild Strawberries or Babette's Feast, though I'm probably in the minority on this one, and I have to object, too, to the inclusion of Au Revoir Les Infants which I found disappointing.

Anyway, you can check the list out for yourself here.

RLC

Peter and Christopher

The Mail Online features a poignant, even lovely, piece by Peter Hitchens on his conversion from atheism and his lifelong feud with his brother, Christopher. Many readers will recognize Christopher Hitchens as the brilliant journalist who also has made it his mission to wage a personal jihad against all theistic religious belief. After publication of his book, God Is Not Great, Christopher embarked upon a tour of the United States debating various spokespersons of the Christian faith on the question, Does God Exist. In one of those debates in 2008 he and his brother Peter crossed swords in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Peter's account of their relationship is sad, although it does contain a somewhat happy ending.

In the course of his essay Peter offers some very insightful observations about the weaknesses of the atheist's belief system. After explaining his own long journey back to God he remarks that:

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.

The one reliable force that restrains the hand of the man of power. In an age of power worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.

He also emphasizes a point that we have made numerous times here on Viewpoint:

He [his brother] often assumes that moral truths are self-evident, attributing purpose to the universe and swerving dangerously round the problem of conscience - which surely cannot be conscience if he is right since the idea of conscience depends on it being implanted by God. If there is no God then your moral qualms might just as easily be the result of indigestion.

Yet Christopher is astonishingly unable to grasp that these assumptions are problems for his argument. This inability closes his mind to a great part of the debate, and so makes his atheist faith insuperable for as long as he himself chooses to accept it.

One of the problems atheists have is the unbelievers' assertion that it is possible to determine what is right and what is wrong without God. They have a fundamental inability to concede that to be effectively absolute a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter. On this misunderstanding is based my brother Christopher's supposed conundrum about whether there is any good deed that could be done only by a religious person, and not done by a Godless one. Like all such questions, this contains another question: what is good, and who is to decide what is good?

Left to himself, Man can in a matter of minutes justify the incineration of populated cities; the deportation, slaughter, disease and starvation of inconvenient people and the mass murder of the unborn.

I have heard people who believe themselves to be good, defend all these things, and convince themselves as well as others. Quite often the same people will condemn similar actions committed by different countries, often with great vigor.

For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself.

Its most powerful expression is summed up in the words 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends'.

The huge differences which can be observed between Christian societies and all others, even in the twilit afterglow of Christianity, originate in this specific injunction.

Peter Hitchens gives us an interesting, honest, very human account of alienation and redemption. It's well worth the few minutes it takes to read.

RLC

Technology and Happiness

My friend Matt discusses the interesting relationship between Technology, Excellence and Flow on human happiness. He offers a lot of good insights on the effects of technology and excellence on our sense of well-being and also on the importance of hard work in order to be able to do anything well. Musicians will be especially interested in part 2. Give them a look:

RLC

Irreconciliation

Yuval Levin at NRO clarifies a bit of confusion that surrounds the current debate over what's called "Obamacare." The House of Representatives is going to vote in a couple of weeks on the bill passed by the Senate on Christmas eve. If the House approves it, it will go directly to the President's desk to be signed into law. All the talk about the bill going back to the Senate for a reconciliation vote is something of a red herring. There will be no need for reconciliation if the House passes this bill because it's the same bill the Senate has already approved:

It's worth reiterating something [others] have pointed out: The focus on reconciliation in the past few days confuses things a bit. The question in the health-care debate at the moment is whether Nancy Pelosi can get enough of her members to vote for the version of Obamacare that passed the Senate late last year. If the House passes that bill, it will have passed both houses, will go to the president, and will become law.

Some liberal House Democrats have problems with that bill - especially with some of its tax provisions, though also a few other things. So to get some of their votes, the leadership is now telling them that if they vote for the Senate bill, the House could then pass another bill that amends the Senate bill to fix some of what they don't like about it. The Senate could then pass that amendment bill by reconciliation and it would also become law, and so the sum of the two laws would be closer to what they want.

But that amending bill wouldn't change the basic character of what would be enacted (and to the extent it would change it at the edges, it would be mostly for the worse): Either way, if the House passes the Senate bill then Obamacare would become law, complete with its massive, overbearing, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended to replace the American health-insurance industry with an enormous federal entitlement while failing to address the problem of costs. Just about everything the public hates about the bill is in both versions. The prospect of reconciliation is just one of the means that the Democratic leadership is employing to persuade members of the House to ignore the public's wishes and their own political future and enact Obamacare.

In other words, any House Democrats who vote for the Senate bill thinking that the Senate will then revisit it to make it more palatable to them, are deluding themselves. Once the House passes this bill there'll be no need for the Senate to do anything. It'll be law.

This puts House Dems who don't want to buck their party but who do want changes made to the bill in the position of having to either vote against the bill, and keep it from becoming law in its present form, or vote for it and trust Obama and the Democratic senators to keep their word that they'll remove some of the more offensive provisions in reconciliation. The House Dems will have to trust that both the Senate and House leadership as well as the White House will work to produce a more moderate bill when in fact all three want a more liberal bill. They have to trust the party leadership even though neither Obama nor the Democrats have anything to gain and much to lose by going through the reconciliation process.

That's a lot of trust to place in politicians.

RLC

More on Son of Hamas

Over the weekend I read a book I talked about a little bit last week. The book is titled Son of Hamas and is written by Mosab Yousef the eldest son of one of the founders of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization (though it wasn't founded as a terrorist organization). Yousef became a spy for the Israelis when he was 18 and converted to Christianity shortly after that. It's a fascinating story, but something about it leaves me dissatisfied or maybe curious is a better word.

Yousef never really explains how it was seemingly so easy for him to start working for Shin Bet (the Israeli security service). He was devoted to his father. He admired him and wanted to emulate him yet he betrayed him (His father, as well as the rest of his friends and family, have all since disowned him). He also abandoned his Islamic faith (which his father loved above all else) and embraced Christianity. This spiritual transition was gradual, but nonetheless, for a young Arab living in Ramallah it must have been more wrenching than Yousef makes it appear.

At any rate, there's no doubt that Yousef is a brave man, though he never trumpets his courage, and he certainly saved a lot of lives. Indeed, it was his refusal to assist in the assassination of a group of Hamas terrorists that eventually led to the demise of his career as a spy. Surely his life is at risk now that his story has been published, and, given the sort of people he betrayed, it takes incredible courage to publicly discuss what his former friends and fellow Hamas members will certainly see as treachery.

Indeed, the picture he paints of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations is exceptionally ugly and brutal - their brutality is one reason he offers for accepting the Israelis' offer to work for them. The Palestinian people have much more to fear from their fellow Palestinians than they do from the Israelis.

The Wall Street Journal has a very fine review of the book, and I encourage any readers who are interested in Yousef's story to check it out. The book itself can be ordered at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds. I highly recommend it.

RLC

Does a Multiverse Help?

Last Wednesday we discussed the weakness of the weak anthropic principle as a reply to the argument for a designer of the universe based on the mind-boggling precision of the cosmic parameters. These finely calibrated values are set with breath-taking exactitude to just the values necessary to produce a universe which can sustain life. We mentioned in that post that there's a second more popular rejoinder to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a designer that's gained a lot of currency in the last decade or so called the multiverse hypothesis (MH).

The MH comes in several different permutations but essentially it acknowledges that though our universe is extraordinarily improbable if it's the result of chance, the probabilities can be raised by assuming that there are a near infinite number of universes, all different in their basic laws. If this is the case, then it becomes much more probable that in all these worlds there will be one like ours, just like it becomes more probable that you will draw an ace from a deck of cards by increasing the number of draws. In fact, if the number of worlds is nearly infinite the existence of every possible world, including ours, becomes a near certainty, and we shouldn't be surprised that such a world exists.

This being the case a lot of materialist scientists who seek to avoid the unpleasant metaphysical implications of a universe that has been designed by an intelligent agent have embraced instead the theory that ours is just one of an untold number of worlds out there.

Unfortunately for the materialists, the MH doesn't help much. Indeed, it winds up making the existence of a designer far more likely than the materialist might have originally feared.

The problems with the MH are many. For instance, it's exceptionally unparsimonious, i.e. it multiplies entities beyond what's necessary to explain the facts of our world. Any theory that posits an infinity in order to explain the existence of the unimaginable precision of the fine-tuning of this world is by definition unparsimonious, especially if the alternative is to posit a single entity - an intelligent designer. This is especially true given that there's no evidence of any other universes, much less an infinity of them. All we know is that some versions of string theory allow for them, but we don't even know if string theory is true.

The MH violates the principle that it's always preferable to accept the theory for which there's evidence over the alternative for which there's no evidence. We have plenty of evidence, of course, that precision and fine-tuning can result from the actions of intelligent agents. But we have no evidence whatsoever either that fine-tuning on this scale of precision can result from sheer chance or that there any universes besides our own exist.

Nor have we any explanation for how these universes have been produced, and no way to test, or falsify, the claim that they exist.

Moreover, it is necessary, to make the argument work, to assume that all the universes are different, but this assumption is itself based on string theory, and, as noted above, we don't even know if string theory is true.

But worst of all for the multiverse proponent trying to escape the conclusion that there's a cosmic designer, is the fact that the MH actually winds up being an argument for the existence of a designer. To see this, assume there are a near infinite number of universes exhibiting a near infinite variety of physical constants, laws, and other states of affairs. If so, then any possible state of affairs would have to exist somewhere among them. The existence of a universe designed by an intelligent being is a possible state of affairs, therefore in at least one of our universes it must be true to say that a designed universe exists. Therefore, a designer exists, and since we know a designer has designed at least one world then, since our world certainly appears to be marvelously designed, it's reasonable to believe that the designer engineered our world as well.

Another way to put this is in the form of a modal argument for the existence of a maximally great being (MGB). If there is a state of affairs among worlds in which every possibility is realized then we can conclude that there must exist an MGB. We can conclude this because it's possible that an MGB exist (it would only be impossible if the concept of an MGB were incoherent), so if the multiverse is a state of affairs in which every possibility is actualized then every possible being must be actualized.

Thus, an MGB exists somewhere in the multiverse, but if a being is maximally great it must exist not just in one part of the multiverse but in every part, otherwise it's not maximally great. Therefore we can conclude that if there are a near infinite number of universes there must exist a maximally great being which designed and created them all.

In any event, neither the weak anthropic principle nor the multiverse hypothesis give the skeptic a safe escape from the conclusion that our universe was intentionally and intelligently engineered for life.

RLC

City of Angels

For those who remember the horror stories about urban crime coming out of Los Angeles a decade or so ago Timothy Egan's post at Opinionator may come as a surprise, or even a shock:

Since the 90s, homicide is down nearly 80 percent through this year, and overall violent crime has taken a similar plunge. In 2008, the last year for full F.B.I. statistics, even Omaha, Neb., had a slightly higher murder rate than L.A.

And the trend continues: murder in L.A. is now down 50 percent from the relatively placid levels of two years ago.

Nationwide, the story of crime falling to half-century lows is an ongoing miracle. How New York went from the crack-addled days to tourist theme park is well known. But it's a pattern that's been repeated all over the United States, with the exception of a few hard patches - cities like New Orleans, Detroit and Baltimore.

The causes are many, and mostly speculative:

A high-tech mapping strategy, where police move on crime hot spots in something close to real time, was pioneered in New York and mastered here (give praise to William Bratton, who oversaw the departments in both cities, for that effort); the stuffing of prisons with career criminals also gets much of the credit; the role played by legalized abortion, according to the authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in their book "Freakonomics," in preventing a generation of unwanted children from being born; and the settling down of the drug trade, the source of so much violence during the formative years of narcotic fiefdoms, to such a degree that in many parts of the city there are now more medical marijuana dispensers in Los Angeles than Starbucks outlets.

See here for a post on some of the controversy surrounding this aspect of the book Freakonomics

This is a good example of good news/bad news, at least for conservatives, especially black conservatives. Urban crime is trending sharply down - that's good news. It's going down largely because conservatives were right that tough sentencing of criminals would keep them off the street - that's good news. But it's also going down because we're aborting tens of thousands of potential criminals every year, particularly in the inner cities where the population is mostly black.

If you are pro-life, or you are African American, or both - that's not good news. If you fall into one of these categories what do you think about this? Does achieving a more civilized inner city justify the abortion of over a million black and Hispanic babies every year?

RLC

Strings, Extra Dimensions, and Other Worlds

This is the follow-up to the Leonard Susskind video on string theory. In this segment Susskind explains how it is that string theory allows for a near infinite number of possible universes, a fact that some advocates of the multiverse idea have latched on to to justify their belief that these other universes actually do exist. In fact, Susskind himself seems in the video to embrace both the weak anthropic principle and the multiverse hypothesis:

Susskind once admitted that the only alternatives are a multiverse or God. Nothing else can explain the breath-taking precision of the cosmic fine-tuning. I wonder what he'll do if string theory is ever shown to be unworkable.

RLC

Are There Secular Reasons?

Last November I mentioned a fine book by Hunter Baker titled The End of Secularism which explained how the project to secularize the public arena is dying a death of intellectual inanition.

A reader named Bill passes along an article on the same theme written for the New York Times' Opinionator blog by Stanley Fish which he titles Are There Secular Reasons?

Fish draws on a book by professor of law Steven Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, in which Smith argues that the secularist ideal of a public discourse sterilized of any religious premises is doomed to vacuity. It can only accomplish anything by smuggling in metaphysical, or religious, presuppositions "incognito."

Here's Fish writing about Smith's argument:

...the "truncated discursive resources available within the downsized domain of 'public reason' are insufficient to yield any definite answer to a difficult issue - abortion, say, or same sex marriage, or the permissibility of torture . . . ." If public reason has "deprived" the natural world of "its normative dimension" by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, "could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?" No way that is not a sleight of hand. This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the "pure" investigation of "observable facts." It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By "smuggling," Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway - but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include "notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian 'final causes' or a providential design," all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction - to even get started - "we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations - to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise."

There's much more of value in Fish's essay, and I thank Bill for recommending it.

One way this "smuggling" occurs, we might note, is that the secularist will make a moral claim to appeal for support among people who agree with the claim on religious grounds, even though the secularist does not himself share those grounds. For example, he might argue that we should not selfishly exploit the planet's resources and Christians will nod their heads in agreement because they believe for religious reasons that selfishness is wrong. It never occurs to many of them, though, to ask the secularist why he thinks it's wrong. Thus, the secularist is able to exclude religious reasons from the public square even though he piggy backs into the square on the shoulders of those reasons.

RLC

Another Non-Missing Link

Eventually the media will get burned by over-enthusiastic scientists enough times to make them chary about hyping every new fossil primate as a portentous discovery for the evolution of human beings. These stories, it seems, follow a predictable pattern: A fossil is found that generates exuberant media coverage and intemperate claims from the discoverers only to have further study of the find reveal that it's nothing at all special. The original discovery is trumpeted on the front pages and on all the news networks. The more sober assessments are buried somewhere around page ten.

Such is the case, evidently, with "Ida" (Darwinius masillae):

A fossil that was celebrated last year as a possible "missing link" between humans and early primates is actually a forebearer of modern-day lemurs and lorises, according to two papers by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

In an article now available online in the Journal of Human Evolution, four scientists present evidence that the 47-million-year-old Darwinius masillae is not a haplorhine primate like humans, apes and monkeys, as the 2009 research claimed.

They also note that the article on Darwinius published last year in the journal PLoS ONE ignores two decades of published research showing that similar fossils are actually strepsirrhines, the primate group that includes lemurs and lorises.

"Many lines of evidence indicate that Darwinius has nothing at all to do with human evolution," says Chris Kirk, associate professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. "Every year, scientists describe new fossils that contribute to our understanding of primate evolution. What's amazing about Darwinius is, despite the fact that it's nearly complete, it tells us very little that we didn't already know from fossils of closely related species."

When you just know that Homo sapiens has evolved from more primitive primates then your faith and your zeal will cause you to see confirmation of your belief in the most ambiguous evidence, or even where there's no confirmation at all.

RLC

Porn for Bibles

Somewhere in this story there's a telling moral. Atheists on the San Antonio campus of the University of Texas are encouraging Christians and members of other theistic religions to trade in their holy books in exchange for pornography.

Let's see: Christians offer atheists an answer to all of life's most crucial questions, including the key to eternal happiness, and atheists offer Christians ..... porn. It says something about atheism, I think, that some atheists implicitly hold pornography in the same esteem as Christians hold the Bible. If they don't why is porn for Bibles considered an exchange of equal value? It also says something about the atheist worldview that in it something as degrading to both men and women as is pornography is such a highly prized commodity:

Thanks to Breitbart for the video.

RLC

Son of Hamas

There's a fascinating story in Haaretz about the son of one of the founders of Hamas who converted to Christianity ten years ago, served for over a decade as an informant for Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, and then fled the region in 2007. Mosab Hassan Yousef is credited with having saved dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lives by passing along information on imminent terror attacks on Israel.

Yousef must have a great deal of courage. He has to know that even though he's now living in the United States he's still a target for Islamist assassins. Nevertheless, his story is about to be published in an article to be released this Friday, and there's a book on his life that's just been released.

Here's an excerpt from the Haaretz piece:

Yousef was considered Shin Bet's most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname "the Green Prince" - using the color of the Islamist group's flag, and "prince" because of his pedigree as the son of one of the movement's founders.

During the second intifada, intelligence Yousef supplied led to the arrests of a number of high-ranking Palestinian figures responsible for planning deadly suicide bombings. These included Ibrahim Hamid (a Hamas military commander in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti (founder of the Fatah-linked Tanzim militia) and Abdullah Barghouti (a Hamas bomb-maker with no close relation to the Fatah figure). Yousef was also responsible for thwarting Israel's plan to assassinate his father.

The story of Yousef's spiritual transformation appeared in Haaretz Magazine in August 2008. Only now, however, is Yousef exposing the secret he kept since 1996, when he was first held by Shin Bet agents seeking to enlist him in infiltrating the upper echelon of Hamas.

"So many people owe him their life and don't even know it," said his Shin Bet handler, named in Yousef's book as Captain Loai. "People who did a lot less were awarded the Israel Security Prize. He certainly deserves it."

I saw Yousef in a television interview last night and heard him warn us not to fall for the moderate/extremist distinction as applied to Muslims. Muslims are devoted to the Koran and the Koran teaches the use of violence to spread Islam.

This is a point others have made before but perhaps it will have more purchase coming from Yousef. Individual Muslims may not engage in violence themselves, but they don't really oppose the use of violence by other Muslims as long as it's directed at infidels.

RLC

Confusion among the Skeptics

Freddie at L'Hote is an atheist who takes his fellow non-believers to task for being so religious about their unbelief. What he says reminds me of a passage in Eric Hoffer's The True Believer:

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not. The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. He is an atheist with devoutness and unction. According to Renan, "The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men."

Freddie says some interesting things in his post, but along the way he falls into a confusion that is oddly common among those who don't believe in God. To wit, he writes that:

Above, beyond, and separate from any moral or ethical duty that atheists have to extend basic elements of tolerance and restraint towards the religious in a pluralistic society, there is a compelling, even essential, argument for an atheism of absence that is fundamentally an argument towards self-interest.

As we have noted on more occasions on this blog than I care to count atheists have no moral or ethical duties. Such duties must be imposed upon one and there's no one, other than themselves, who is in a position to lay such an imposition on anybody if there is no God.

If the individual atheist says that he does indeed place the duties upon himself, that's fine (though arbitrary), but he surely can't bind other atheists to that obligation as Freddie does above.

He goes on to chide Christopher Hitchens for writing, "as if atheists have some duty to oppose religion. [But] the absence of belief and the absence of duty are symmetrical qualities."

Hitchens is spanked for suggesting that is one's duty as an atheist to oppose religion, but Freddie thinks this is wrongheaded. The absence of belief, he avers, entails the absence of duty (a formulation with which I agree), but then what does Freddie mean in the first paragraph above when he talks about the duties his fellow atheists have to extend tolerance and restraint? First he says atheists have duties, now he says they have none. Which is it?

Then later there's this:

[T]here are those who shamelessly insert their religion into politics, in defiance of Enlightenment values and the American character, and yes they have to be fought.

If there are no duties, moral or ethical, how or why is anything at all "shameless?" Why, exactly, must it be "fought?" Surely not because it's wrong to insert religion into politics because for the atheist nothing is really wrong. Rather it must be because Freddie doesn't like it, but the fact that someone dislikes something is hardly a sufficient reason, by itself, to fight it.

One wishes that if people are going to insist on touting their atheism they'd at least have the good sense to stop making moral judgments. Or, failing that, at least explain to the rest of us upon what those judgments are based.

RLC

String Theory

In this video Leonard Susskind, one of the premier theoretical physicists working in string theory, explains what string theory is. It's hard to imagine that the fundamental units of reality might be bits of stuff a billion billion times smaller than a proton:

RLC

WAP

The Weak Anthropic Principle has been offered as a rebuttal to the astonishing level of fine-tuning we find in the physical forces, constants, and parameters of the universe. These are calibrated to such fine tolerances that had they deviated from their actual value by as little, in some cases, as 1 part in 10^120 the universe never would have formed and/or life would have been impossible. Robin Collins, author of one of the most notable and accessible arguments for theism based on cosmic fine-tuning, lists the following among the dozens of examples he could have mentioned:

1. If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as 1 part in 1060, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible. [See Davies, 1982, pp. 90-91. (As John Jefferson Davis points out (p. 140), an accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.)

2. Calculations indicate that if the strong nuclear force, the force that binds protons and neutrons together in an atom, had been stronger or weaker by as little as 5%, life would be impossible.

3. Calculations by Brandon Carter show that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by 1 part in 10 to the 40th power, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. This would most likely make life impossible.

4. If the neutron were not about 1.001 times the mass of the proton, all protons would have decayed into neutrons or all neutrons would have decayed into protons, and thus life would not be possible.

5. If the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life would be impossible, for a variety of different reasons.

Imaginatively, one could think of each instance of fine-tuning as a radio dial: unless all the dials are set exactly right, life would be impossible. Or, one could think of the initial conditions of the universe and the fundamental parameters of physics as a dart board that fills the whole galaxy, and the conditions necessary for life to exist as a small one-foot wide target: unless the dart hits the target, life would be impossible. The fact that the dials are perfectly set, or the dart has hit the target, strongly suggests that someone set the dials or aimed the dart, for it seems enormously improbable that such a coincidence could have happened by chance.

The response made by some has been that we shouldn't be surprised that the universe is as precisely calibrated as it is for if it weren't we wouldn't be around to notice. The universe would never have formed or wouldn't be able to sustain life. It has to be the way it is in order for us to exist at all.

Stephen Hawking offers an example of the response to this cosmic precision that Collins is talking about: "Why," he asks, "is the universe the way we see it? The answer is simple: If it had been different, we would not be here."

What are we to make of such a reply?

Imagine that you have just learned that a complete novice at chess had just won the world championship. As a chess fan you're incredulous and you express your amazement that a rank beginner had beaten all of the world's best players. Suppose you were then admonished that you shouldn't be surprised, really, because, after all, if he hadn't beaten the best players he wouldn't be the world champion.

Wouldn't you think this response somewhat misses the point? The question that screams for an answer is not whether this tyro beat the world's best, we know he must have, but rather how did such a prodigy occur? Was there an illicit design or plot to have these grandmasters lose to the amateur?

Whatever the alternatives wouldn't you be inclined to think that the least plausible explanation was that it was just some sort of freakish coincidence? Yet those who invoke the weak anthropic principle are giving a response to cosmic fine-tuning analogous to those who tell us we shouldn't think there was some sort of thought-out plot behind the beginner's victory at the chess tournament.

We know we're here, and of course we know that the universe, therefore, has to be the way it is. The question is how did such a miracle happen? Was it a result of intention or was it just a happy accident? In terms of plausibility there's no contest between the hypothesis that the universe is intelligently designed and the hypothesis that the universe is the way it is because of serendipity.

Indeed, it's the need to explain this extraordinary fine-tuning that leads many skeptics to embrace the multiverse theory, about which we'll have more to say tomorrow.

RLC