Missing Bush

Syrian protestors, having seen thousands of their countrymen, including hundreds of children, massacred by their government in Damascus, express their nostalgia for a man who actually did something about such injustice.

Think what you will about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They weren't always well-executed - few large-scale undertakings ever are - and they've been extremely costly, but they freed a total of 50 million people from tyrannical oppression and horror. The world is certainly better off without Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in it, and is also better off with a diminished al Qaeda, and Taliban. Almost all of the credit for this improved state of affairs goes to the Bush administration.

Evidently, the Syrians would like to add Bashir Assad and his cronies to the list of people with whom the world is no longer afflicted, and they miss having someone in the White House they could have counted on to help.

Thanks to The Weekly Standard for the pic.

RNA Interference and Naturalistic Fideism

Here's a fascinating video which shows the incredible, breath-taking complexity of the chemical machinery of every living cell. What is being shown is very arcane and really doesn't matter (Those who wish to read more about it can find an explanation here).

Just watch the video and marvel at how wondrous it is that the Crea ... oops, I mean blind, unguided processes operating solely by chance - orchestrated the construction of such an amazing organization of molecular machines which, once in place, are capable of carrying on these processes completely autonomously without any intelligent input.

To be sure, it takes faith to believe that there's an intelligent mind responsible for the universe and for life, but it takes, in my view, a superhuman effort of the will to believe that something like what's depicted on this video could have all come about through random chance and the laws of chemistry. One has to simply not want to believe that there is a Mind behind it all in order to come to the conclusion that there isn't.

There are some religious believers who hold that we should have faith regardless of what our reason says, regardless of what the evidence is. This view is called fideism. Fideists maintain that when they encounter difficult evidence or experience doubt they should just believe and not waver. Naturalism, the belief that natural processes and forces can account for all the phenomena we observe in the universe, is, in my opinion, a kind of fideism.

Everywhere the naturalist looks he sees evidence of intelligent design, but, scrunching up his will, he repeats ten times, "Nature can do it."

He has no evidence of this, however. He's never seen nature create a cell nor create the information needed to operate a cell, even though everyday he sees minds perform such amazing feats.

Even so, his faith that there exists no Mind capable of creating universes is so great that he's impervious to the lack of evidence and the existence of contrary evidence. He's a fideist of the the first order.

Respecting Women

A couple of weeks ago Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed indignation over the fact that in Israel some Orthodox Jews object to men and women sitting together on busses. She said the treatment reminded her of Iran. This was an odd observation since Israel is the one place in the Middle East where women are treated as full citizens with the same legal rights as men. In Saudi Arabia they're not even allowed to drive. In most Muslim countries they are betrothed to whomever their families choose for them and can be killed if they do anything of which the family, particularly the father, disapproves.

Ms. Clinton has had little to say about those affronts to decency and civilization, choosing instead, seemingly, to pander to the anti-Israel elements on the Left by taking a shot at Israel.

If she had chosen to direct her criticism of the status of women where it really is atrocious she might have fired a volley or two at Egypt. Perhaps the most vivid recent display of how women are treated in much of the Middle East is the state-ordained violence seen in a video that was taken in Egypt two days ago.

During the Arab Spring protests the military remained somewhat neutral and largely refrained from serious use of force against the pro-democracy demonstrators. Now that Mubarak has been toppled, however, all that has gone by the boards, and we're witnessing the ghastly savagery of the Egyptian security forces as they have been unleashed against those protesting what they consider the dawdling pace of democratization.

The beatings and shootings, both of which are caught on this videotape, began on Friday and, so far, a dozen people have been killed.

Don't watch this if you're squeamish:

Those are women among those being beaten and stomped on. It's hard to imagine women being brutalized like that by any Western police force. The next time Ms. Clinton feels the need to condemn the treatment of women perhaps she'll have the good sense to turn her gaze to those parts of the world where it really is abominable.

Whatever eventually happens in Egypt it's doubtful that democracy will flourish. If the military holds on to power things will be very much as they were under Mubarak. If the military falls, the Islamists will almost certainly gain control and establish Sharia. Either way, real freedom is not likely to flower in Egyptian soil.

Neither will women finally be given the respect and courtesy they've enjoyed in the West for centuries.

Intuiting Evil

Matthew B. O’Brien is a post-doctoral fellow at Villanova University who has written a fine piece in The Public Discourse that deals with the role of God in our moral lives. He wants to argue that morality cannot be separated from the existence of a transcendent moral authority, an argument with which I'm very much in agreement, but along the way I think he perhaps makes a slightly confusing misstep.

Before I discuss that let me quote from his lede:

If you are going to make a moral argument, whether in the seminar room or in the public square, people today expect you to avoid invoking God. Atheists and theists alike share this expectation, with atheists eager to show that their moral knowledge and action are uncompromised by disbelief in God’s existence, and theists eager to establish the rational credentials of their moral convictions and protect themselves against charges of fideism.

This expectation is unwarranted, however, because God’s existence is directly relevant to moral knowledge and action: If appeals to God get ruled out, either by disbelief in His existence or reluctance to rely upon it, then it isn’t possible to demonstrate that there are moral absolutes.

A moral absolute is an exceptionless norm against choosing a certain type of action that is intrinsically bad. Recognizing a moral absolute therefore involves two stages of evaluation: first, seeing that some act, such as killing an innocent person, is intrinsically evil, and second, seeing that one ought never to do evil. My contention is that a demonstration of this second stage of evaluation will need to appeal to God’s legislation against doing evil that good may come.

This appeal of course assumes that God exists and that He legislates the moral law. Without this appeal, it remains logically possible for someone to think that there are intrinsically evil acts, and to think that virtuous people will habitually refuse to consider committing such acts, while yet refusing to infer that such acts must be avoided in every situation whatsoever.

My very minor quibble with O'Brien is that though he's technically correct that it's logically possible to believe that there are intrinsically evil acts that nevertheless might be warranted in some cases, I think the atheist has no grounds for believing that there are, in fact, intrinsically evil acts.

O'Brien continues:

It is instructive at this point to consider Aristotle. Aristotle thought that there were intrinsically bad actions that nobody ought to consider choosing, and although Aristotle was a theist, his conception of God was not as a providential creator or moral legislator. Aristotle’s example is noteworthy because it shows that it is possible to arrive at the conviction that intrinsically bad actions exist without appealing to God’s legislation. But Aristotle’s example is noteworthy also because of what he does not try to do, which is to demonstrate the truth of such absolute prohibitions by appealing to some more basic set of moral reasons.

For Aristotle...the grounds for absolute prohibitions bottom out in the perception of actions as base and shameless. Such intuitionism is as far as I think non-theological ethics can go. Receiving the correct upbringing will get you to see that certain acts are intrinsically bad, and you ought never to choose them; but in order to go further and demonstrate why this is true, you need to be able to appeal to God’s legislation of the moral law, which is what proves the reasonableness of forbearing from evil in the extreme tight-corner situation.

I think this is slightly askew, or at least the way O'Brien frames it is a bit unclear. Receiving the correct upbringing may help you to intuit that some acts are distasteful, and you may believe them to be intrinsically bad, but, for the atheist, that belief is non-rational. It's like the conviction that the color green exists in the grass rather than in one's brain. On atheism, evil is not inherent in an act any more than greenness is inherent in the grass. It's an illusion.

In order to rationally regard an act as intrinsically bad one must, as O'Brien correctly insists, be able to refer to a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, no matter how horrific the act may be, it's not morally evil anymore than a shark attack on a child wading in the ocean is morally evil.

It's true, as O'Brien goes on to say, that most people don't realize this, but that's because most people don't think about it anymore than they think about where the color green is actually located. Even so, it needs to be pointed out to the atheist that his belief that he can make meaningful moral judgments is nonsense if God doesn't exist. Whenever he attempts such judgments he's piggy-backing on Christian (or, more generally, theistic) assumptions while at the same time denying that those assumptions are correct.

The moral opinions of non-theists are simply expressions of their subjective feelings and as such have no objective value or weight. They're irrelevant, or should be considered to be such, to our social life and discourse.

Readers interested in the topic should read O'Brien's piece. It's very good.

Vaclev Havel

Vaclev Havel passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer and related illnesses.

Like every other human being Havel had his flaws, but he nevertheless deserves much admiration for what he endured and accomplished in the struggle for freedom against the tyranny of Marxist socialist totalitarianism. CBS gives us an overview of his life. Here's an excerpt:

His political activism began in earnest in January 1977, when he co-authored the human rights manifesto Charter 77, and the cause drew widening attention in the West.

Havel was detained countless times and spent four years in communist jails. His letters from prison to his wife became one of his best-known works. "Letters to Olga" blended deep philosophy with a stream of stern advice to the spouse he saw as his mentor and best friend, and who tolerated his reputed philandering and other foibles.

The events of August 1988 — the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion — first suggested that Havel and his friends might one day replace the faceless apparatchiks who jailed them.

Thousands of mostly young people marched through central Prague, yelling Havel's name and that of the playwright's hero, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher who was Czechoslovakia's first president after it was founded in 1918.

Havel's arrest in January 1989 at another street protest and his subsequent trial generated anger at home and abroad. Pressure for change was so strong that the communists released him again in May.

That fall, communism began to collapse across Eastern Europe, and in November the Berlin Wall fell. Eight days later, communist police brutally broke up a demonstration by thousands of Prague students. It was the signal that Havel and his country had awaited. Within 48 hours, a broad new opposition movement was founded, and a day later, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets.

On Dec. 29, 1989, Havel was elected Czechoslovakia's president by the country's still-communist parliament. Three days later, he told the nation in a televised New Year's address: "Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling and stinking machine."

In July 1992, it became clear that the Czechoslovak federation was heading for a split. Considering it a personal failure, Havel resigned as president, but he remained popular and was elected president of the new Czech Republic uncontested.

He was small, but his presence and wit could fill a room. Even late in life, he retained a certain impishness and boyish grin, shifting easily from philosophy to jokes or plain old Prague gossip.

In December 1996, just 11 months after his first wife, Olga Havlova, died of cancer, he lost a third of his right lung during surgery to remove a 15-millimeter (half-inch) malignant tumor....

Holding a post of immense prestige but little power, Havel's image suffered in the latter years as his people discovered the difficulties of transforming their society in the post-communist era.

His attempts to reconcile rival politicians were considered by many as unconstitutional intrusions, and his pleas for political leaders to build a "civic society" based on respect, tolerance and individual responsibility went largely unanswered.

Media criticism, once unthinkable, became unrelenting. Serious newspapers questioned his political visions; tabloids focused mainly on his private life and his flashy second wife.

Havel himself acknowledged that his handling of domestic issues never matched his flair for foreign affairs. But when the Czech Republic joined NATO in March 1999, and the European Union in May 2004, his dreams came true.

Hot Air notes the absurdity that Barack Obama, Al Gore, and Yassar Arafat were all awarded the Noble Peace Prize but Vaclev Havel was not. Perhaps if Havel had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, or had made a film about global warming, or been skilled at reading speeches off of teleprompters the Noble committee would have seen fit to bestow upon him the honor of their prize.

By coincidence the warden and chief executioner of the totalitarian prison that is North Korea, Kim Jong Il, also died yesterday. As Europeans mourn Havel's death, North Koreans - secretly, of course - mourn Kim's life.

Rich Man, Poor Man

It has been a frequent asseveration here at VP that American poverty is like nothing else the world has ever seen in that our poor are unimaginably better off in economic terms than not only the poor elsewhere in the world but even better off than the world's wealthy throughout almost all of history. Contrary to what we are often led to believe, those who cannot, or will not, work are better provided for in this country by those who do work than are most people who have ever lived.

Bill Whittle illustrates the point in this video:

When we hear politicians and others talk about the need to tax us more so that we can spend more on the poor we should show them Whittle's charts and ask them, who, exactly they're talking about and how much more we should give them.

There is poverty in America that needs our attention, to be sure, but, for the most part, the poverty is spiritual and moral, often exacerbated by the very programs designed to relieve economic poverty. Chronic economic impoverishment - if measured by the possession of life's goods and access to things like food, shelter, medical care, and education - is relatively rare in the United States.

The Problem With American Education

Mark Twain once said that there are thousands of people hacking at the branches of evil but very few hacking at the roots. He could have been talking about the state of American public education rather than evil.

The root of the poor performance of so many of our kids is not inadequate buildings or equipment or teachers. Kids don't need more computers or extravagant campuses or even top-notch teachers in order to learn. Those things, especially the last, are certainly helpful, but their lack is not the real problem.

The real problem is that too many kids come from homes where the parent, and there's usually only one, is either too harried or otherwise unable or unwilling to instil in the child the value of learning. Children who come to school without the discipline it takes to benefit from the opportunity they've been given will not learn, will hamper the learning of others, and will suck up a disproportionate share of the school district's resources in the attempt to discipline and remediate them. When such children reach a critical mass of the school population the entire school becomes dysfunctional.

James Barham, writing at The Best Schools blog, has a fine piece on this that everyone who cares about education should read even though teachers, unlike politicians, have known this stuff for years. Barham opens with a discussion of the inadequacies of two recent education articles in the New York Times and then says this:

That the heart of the problem with our educational system is not just cognitive deficit, but virtue deficit, is a nearly unthinkable thought in our culture. That is because it contravenes the most cherished axiom of the liberal educational establishment—moral and cultural relativism. I am not saying that correcting this sitution will be easy. In a pluralistic society like ours, introducing virtue explicitly into the classroom is bound to be contentious and messy. But until we begin to incorporate the most important missing ingredient into education reform, nothing else is likely to change very much.

Acknowledging that if a child is to succeed in school, it needs to be read to by its parents and it needs to hear a rich vocabulary used in its environment — all of this is finally becoming sayable among education professionals. And that is surely a step in the right direction. But it does not go nearly far enough.

If a child is to succeed in school, it also needs to be loved and encouraged and corrected and disciplined by its parents, not left to sit in front of the television set for hours on end, at one extreme, or to run wild, at the other. It needs to learn the bourgeois virtues of cleanliness and politeness and punctuality, and the universal virtues of truth-telling and promise-keeping and duty and responsibility. Above all, it needs to know that its success in school, and learning for its own sake, are things that its parents value.

In a word, a child needs discipline. Because self-discipline can only be acquired through loving parental discipline, and every child must acquire self-discipline if it is to have any chance at a decent life, in this or any other society.

Where these things are missing in the home, of course, there is only so much that the school can do to compensate. Perhaps a more comprehensive approach will ultimately be required that holds parents responsible to society as parents. I don’t know. But this is a conversation we must begin to have. And the focus of the conversation must be what it means for a human being to lead a flourishing life.

Until we begin to address the state of the American family, and see that state as a result of moral, not economic, poverty, no amount of cash infusion into our schools is going to make any difference. Spending ever greater amounts of money on public schools is simply a waste of resources if nothing is done to change the homes failing kids come from.

Teachers on the front lines have known this for decades, but the bureaucrats in our state capitals and the federal Department of Education aren't interested in what mere teachers think. They have their degrees in education and sociology, they know the research, and they have their ideological presuppositions. What they don't have are workable answers to the problem.

How They Did It

In an exclusive story in the Christian Science Monitor an Iranian engineer explains how the Iranians managed to hijack a top-secret American surveillance drone and land it in Iran.

Here's the lede:

Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.

"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

This is an intelligence coup for the Iranians who will now be able to enlist the Russians and the Chinese to develop other countermeasures for the drones. It's also an embarrassment to have our president decline to destroy the drone while it was on the ground and instead abjectly ask the Iranians, who doubtless found the request an occasion for merriment, to give it back.

Perhaps if he had publicly bowed to Ahmadinejad like he did to other Middle East and Asian leaders the obeisance would have softened Iranian hearts and persuaded them to return the drone instead of selling access to it to the Russians and Chinese. I'm surprised he didn't try it.

How to Sound Like a Complete Doofus

There's a conviction among many liberals that conservatives have no heart and a similar conviction on the right that liberals have no brains. I don't know to what extent either side is correct, but this guy, a politically liberal rabbi named Joshua Hammerman certainly reinforces the stereotype. He claims that if the Denver Broncos were to win the Super Bowl Christians might be running through the streets burning down mosques and deporting immigrants.

I know it sounds bizarre, but here's an excerpt of his exact words courtesy of Jammie-Wearing Fools:

People are always looking for signs of God’s beneficence, and a victory by the Orange Crush over the blue-clad Patriots, from the bluest of blue states, will give fodder to a Christian revivalism that has already turned the Republican presidential race into a pander-thon to social conservatives, rekindling memories of those cultural icons of the ‘80s, the Moral Majority and “Hee Haw.”

The culture wars are alive and well, and, if the current climate in Washington is any indicator, the motors are being revved up for what will undoubtedly be the most cantankerous Presidential campaign ever. When supposedly well-educated candidates publicly question overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change and evolution and then gain electoral traction by fabricating conspiracies about a war on Christmas, these are not rational times.

Into the middle of it all rides [Broncos quarterback Tim] Tebow. Absolutely confident that God is on his side, he comes across as a humbler version of the biblical Joseph, who, in this week’s Torah portion, audaciously lays claim to being the Chosen One, and then goes out and proves it. Tebow’s sanctimonious God-talk has led even pious peers like Kurt Warner to suggest that he cool it. Joseph could have used the same coaching.

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants. While America has become more inclusive since Jerry Falwell’s first political forays, a Tebow triumph could set those efforts back considerably.

Some people are apparently convinced that the best way to attract attention to themselves is to talk like a blithering idiot, a task that's easier for some than for others, I suppose. Hammerman's buffoonery is as if someone had made the claim that Sandy Koufax's amazing performance for the Dodgers in the 1965 World Series should have so buoyed American Jews that they might have been expected to run about New York City burning mosques and bashing Muslims.

In any case, I wonder what the rabbi would think if a Christian were to make remarks about Jews as bigoted as his were about Christians. I also have to wonder how many Christians the rabbi actually knows.

Why Not Newt?

I can't remember an election when the Republican front-runner claimed to be a conservative and yet was so vigorously opposed by so many of the leading lights in the conservative movement. Newt has managed to secure the disendorsement of Senator Tom Coburn, columnists George Will, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Peggy Noonan, Kathleen Parker, and Charles Krauthammer, talk show guy Glenn Beck, prominent blogger Eric Errickson, and a host of others.

Now National Review, the foremost conservative journal of opinion, founded by conservative icon William F. Buckley, has lent it's prestigious voice to the anti-Newt chorus:

A hard-fought presidential primary campaign is obscuring the uncharacteristic degree of unity within the Republican party. It has reached a conservative consensus on most of the pressing issues of the day. All of the leading candidates, and almost all of the lagging ones, support the right to life. All of them favor the repeal of Obamacare. Most of them support reforms to restrain the growth of entitlement spending. All of them favor reducing the corporate tax rate to levels that will make the U.S. a competitive location for investment. Almost all of them seem to understand the dangers of a precipitate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, and of a defense policy driven by the need to protect social spending rather than the national interest.

Conservatives may disagree among themselves about which candidate most deserves support, but all of us should take heart in this development — and none of us should exaggerate the programmatic differences within the field.

Just as heartening, the White House seems winnable next year, and with it a majority in both houses of Congress, so that much of this conservative consensus could actually become law. A conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a halt to the march of regulation, free-market health-care policies: All of them seem within our grasp. But none of them is assured, and the costs of failure — either a failure to win the election, or a failure to govern competently and purposefully afterward — are as large as the opportunity.

We fear that to nominate former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in the polls, would be to blow this opportunity. We say that mindful of his opponents’ imperfections — and of his own virtues, which have been on display during his amazing comeback.

Very few people with a personal history like his — two divorces, two marriages to former mistresses — have ever tried running for president. Gingrich himself has never run for a statewide office, let alone a national one, and has not run for anything since 1998. That year he was kicked out by his colleagues, the most conservative ones especially, who had lost confidence in him.

During his time as Speaker, he was one of the most unpopular figures in public life. Just a few months ago his campaign seemed dead after a series of gaffes and resignations. That Gingrich now tops the polls is a tribute to his perseverance, and to Republicans’ admiration for his intellectual fecundity.

Both qualities served conservatives well in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Gingrich, nearly alone, saw the potential for a Republican takeover of Congress and worked tirelessly to bring it about. Even before the takeover, Gingrich helped to solidify the party’s opposition to tax increases and helped to defeat the Clinton health-care plan. The victory of 1994 enabled the passage of welfare reform, the most successful social policy of recent decades.

Gingrich’s colleagues were, however, right to bring his tenure to an end. His character flaws — his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas — made him a poor Speaker of the House. Again and again he combined incendiary rhetoric with irresolute action, bringing Republicans all the political costs of a hardline position without actually taking one. Again and again he put his own interests above those of the causes he championed in public.

There's much more at the link. Newt rose to the top because the party conservatives are looking for an alternative to Mitt Romney and Newt certainly seemed like the best qualified candidate in terms of intellect, accomplishment, and stature. Even so, as more information has emerged about him, largely from those who worked with him in congress in the 90s and others who have observed his career, huge doubts have been raised which make it unlikely that his lead will prove sustainable. I don't see how a candidate who's running as a conservative can campaign successfully when most of the most influential conservatives in the country don't want him as their president.

If that turns out to be the case the question then becomes to whom do the anti-Romney folks turn? Ron Paul? Jon Huntsman? Rick Santorum? Michelle Bachmann? I don't know but it seems that for now Romney is in the driver's seat.

Christopher Hitchens

We've had numerous occasions to mention Christopher Hitchens on these pages over the years. He was a brilliant writer and speaker, despite his too frequent predilection for unkindness and his obvious contempt for lesser minds, of which there are many.

Hitchens spent much of the last fifteen years or so writing what can justly be called screeds against belief in God, including an attack against Mother Teresa, of all people, as well as the book God Is Not Great.

He was diagnosed with esophygeal cancer last year but continued to write for Vanity Fair between his radiation and other treatments. Those treatments in the end proved unavailing. Christopher Hitchens died yesterday at the age of 62.

If he was wrong about the existence of God presumably he now realizes his error. If he was right, which I doubt very much, then he'll never have the satisfaction of knowing that he was right. Such is the tragedy of atheism.

Plantinga's New Book

Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times has a fine piece on one of the most consequential philosophers of the last half century, Alvin Plantinga, on the occasion of the release of Plantinga's new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

Schuessler writes:

There are no atheists in foxholes, the old saying goes. Back in the 1950s, when the philosopher Alvin Plantinga was getting his start, there were scarcely more religious believers in academic philosophy departments.

Growing up among Dutch Calvinist immigrants in the Midwest, Mr. Plantinga was used to intense theological debate. But when he arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate, he was startled to find equal intensity marshaled in favor of the argument that God didn’t exist, when classmates and teachers found the question worth arguing about.

Had he not transferred to Calvin College, the Christian Reformed liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Mich., where his father taught psychology, Mr. Plantinga wrote in a 1993 essay, he doubted that he “would have remained a Christian at all; certainly Christianity or theism would not have been the focal point of my adult intellectual life.”

But he did return, and the larger world of philosophy has been quite different as a result. From Calvin, and later from the University of Notre Dame, Mr. Plantinga has led a movement of unapologetically Christian philosophers who, if they haven’t succeeded in persuading their still overwhelmingly unbelieving colleagues, have at least made theism philosophically respectable.

“There are vastly more Christian philosophers and vastly more visible or assertive Christian philosophy now than when I left graduate school,” Mr. Plantinga said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Grand Rapids, adding, with characteristic modesty, “I have no idea how it happened.”

Mr. Plantinga retired from full-time teaching last year, with more than a dozen books and a past presidency of the American Philosophical Association to his name. But he’s hardly resting on those laurels. Having made philosophy safe for theism, he’s now turning to a harder task: making theism safe for science.

Alvin Plantinga

The rest of the article discusses his book and some of the reaction of his atheistic colleagues to his work. It's good to know that Plantinga, though retired form teaching, is still in the trenches waging intellectual combat.

Rape of the Soul

Several posts in recent days have centered around the moral predicament postmodern man finds himself in having discounted the existence of any moral authority beyond human subjectivity. My friend Mike has responded with a poem which addresses this theme:

Rape Of The Soul

I want to seek out
Those who won’t come out
Of their lust-licensing oblivion,
Those envelope-pushing minions.
I will raise an acute rage
Against the naked emperors
In Bertrand Russell’s relativistic parade.
Against those who would violate us all,
Who would rape our souls,
By pretending God and morality
Are things we chose,
Like sweetener in our Starbucks,
Or the color of our clothes.
“All meta-narratives are suspect,”
Says the trendy postmodern prof.
Not nearly as much as the thug who murders his wife;
Trendy philosophies are flimsy
When applied to your own life.
Take your subjective morality
To Nanking or Rwanda or Darfur.
You’ll be an Ivan Karamazov,
Left writhing in hope for more
Than your childish evasion
That puts up love and justice for sale,
That frees your money and libido
To go wherever your appetite drives them,
And frees the forces of evil to drive the world to Hell.

As an illustration of the last few lines of Mike's poem consider the post immediately below this one.

Normalizing Pedophilia

Janice Shaw Crouse, the author of "Children at Risk," reveals in the Washington Times the agenda of organizations which are lobbying to make pedophilia and pederasty legal.

It may be hard to believe that these organizations even exist, but when a society can no longer talk about moral good and evil, when right is whatever you feel good about and wrong is whatever makes you feel bad, then there's no limit to the perversity men will pursue.

Crouse writes:

B4U-ACT is a small group of mental health professionals and pedophile activists who seek greater tolerance for "minor-attracted persons" (pedophiles). Indeed, those involved in the lobbying want to decriminalize, even normalize, pedophilia. They are working to change public perceptions so that raping children is acceptable behavior.

Among the academics lending respectability to these efforts by speaking at the recent conference in Baltimore were researchers from Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the universities of Louisville and Illinois.

The fringe activists promise to disrupt future meetings of the APA until they are successful in normalizing pedophilia, a strategy successfully employed in the 1970s to get homosexuality removed from the DSM [Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] - not because of new scientific evidence, but because of political pressure by a small group of activists. For instance, in 1990, the Journal of Homosexuality published a special double issue devoted to adult-child sex, calling it "male intergenerational intimacy."

Now the pedophilia activists are flexing their political muscles and with some success, changing the culture through changing the language of social science and medical terminology. To be released in 2013, the DSM proposes subtle yet significant revisions to its featured section on "paraphilic" disorders. The term "paraphilia" encompasses a wide range of aberrant sexual urges and behaviors, including but not limited to pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, sexual sadism and masochism.

In every version of the DSM, such forms of sexual deviance have been classified as paraphilic disorders. But now, radical fringe groups with a bully pulpit are arguing that people with "atypical, culturally forbidden or religiously proscribed sexual interests" should not be labeled ill, and they are putting tremendous pressure on the APA to comply.

Surely, the skeptic in all of us wants to cry out, "This can never happen. Pedophilia can never be normalized." After all, it doesn't take a medical or theological degree to know that child rape is wrong. But as David Brooks noted in a NewYorkTimes column, "Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it's thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart."

Due to our human sensitivities and American values of fairness and equality, our nation has been duped into accepting the unacceptable, all because the lies have been packaged for us so nicely. We were told that morality is relative and that right and wrong are simply cultural preferences. We were told that adhering to an absolute truth that judges between good and evil is narrow-minded. We were told we needed to alter our language to become more politically correct - that pedophiles are simply "minor-attracted persons" who are the victims of societal stigma, bigotry and intolerance. We are told that our children are sexual from birth and have the capacity to be willing participants in intercourse from their infancy.

A society that abandons its Judeo-Christian heritage and embraces secularism should not be shocked, I guess, that there are those who wish to turn the country into a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. Unfortunately, we've forfeited as a society the only ground we had to stand on from which we could oppose this agenda, i.e. the assurance that there are behaviors which are objectively and absolutely wrong. Using children for sexual gratification is one of them. We need to reclaim that ground before Jerry Sandusky is no longer seen as an aberration but rather as a common type.

Electrified Embryos

We've all learned that DNA programs the cell to create the thousands of proteins the body needs to develop and flourish, but how do those proteins "know" what three-dimensional body plan to construct? How, for example, do the proteins which make up a starfish know to make a five-armed structure? This is a mystery of long-standing and some biologists have speculated that there is in organisms a source of information that is separate from the nucleotide sequences in DNA.

Now a team of researchers has discovered evidence that this is in fact the case.

Jonathan Wells writes:

Many biologists believe that embryo development is controlled by a genetic program encoded in DNA. Other biologists maintain that development cannot be reduced to a genetic program. Although DNA is involved in specifying the amino acid sequences of proteins, other sources of information are needed to specify the three-dimensional structure of the embryo. One such source is a system of spatial coordinates communicated, in part, by an endogenous electric field -- that is, an electric field generated by the embryo itself.

These electric fields circulating through and around the developing embryo superintend the development of the specific morphology that the organism will take on.

This, however, raises another question: How are these electric fields produced and regulated? It's all so very complex that it takes your breath away to think that blind, purposeless forces could have ever produced such a system. They must have, though. At least you better be prepared to say they have if you're an untenured university biology instructor who wants to keep his or her job.

Anyway, here's a short video of two members of the research team talking about their discovery:

Thanks to Evolution News and Views for the clip.

Barbarisms

Stanford journalism professor Joel Brinkley takes us on a quick tour of the underside of what passes for civilization in much of the world and concludes that relativism, both cultural and moral, seems simply foolish when confronted with the barbaric cruelties imposed on women and children in some foreign climes.

The relativist wants to say that what's wrong for us is not necessarily wrong for others. We're not perfect, the relativist avers, nor are we in the position of God that we can pass judgment on other societies, but as I argued last week in the case of Bibi Aisha, to refuse to condemn cruelty and injustice is to dehumanize both ourselves and those who suffer. Injustice is wrong wherever it occurs. Cruelty is evil wherever it occurs. Anyone who can read the following excerpt from Brinkley's column and not agree with those claims is morally underdeveloped:

On her final full day in office, President Roza Otunbayeva of Kyrgyzstan became the first senior Kyrgyz official to forcefully denounce “bride kidnapping,” an entrenched custom in her Central Asian state.

“Bride kidnapping is a tradition of the Kyrgyz people,” she acknowledged as she was preparing to leave the presidential palace on Nov. 29. “But these crimes often force women to commit suicide.”

Young men kidnap about 15,000 girls each year, Otunbayeva said. They simply grab a girl walking down the street, stuff her in the car, kicking and screaming, and take her home. He may rape her – or not. Either way, after she’s locked up overnight in an unrelated man’s house, the girl is unfit to wed anyone else. Her family won’t permit her to come home. So she’s forced to marry her kidnapper.

No one keeps precise statistics, but estimates suggest that half of Kyrgyz wives are married in this way. The outgoing president urged her people to stop romanticizing bride kidnapping and inaugurated a month-long campaign to fight the practice.

Around the world, numerous nations cling to longstanding traditions that, to Western eyes, seem barbarous – or worse. Most of them victimize girls.

In Northwestern Thailand, I interviewed a woman, one of many, preparing to sell her 12-year-old daughter to traffickers who would force her into prostitution. The mother intended to use the trafficker’s payment for her daughter to buy a new refrigerator. “It’s our tradition,” she explained.

In Saudi Arabia, centuries-old religious convention allows middle-aged men to marry prepubescent girls – some as young as 7 or 8 years old.

Pakistani officials use gang rape as a government-sanctioned punishment.

In Cameroon “breast ironing” remains an honored custom. After their daughters reach puberty, mothers heat a flat rock in the fire and then press it forcefully onto each of her daughter’s breasts – burning away breast tissue, leaving them flat-chested so avaricious young men will leave them alone.

“Breast ironing has existed as long as Cameroon has existed,” gynecologist Sinou Tchana told the Inter Press news service. Women “told us that it was normal for them.”

If it’s “normal for them,” how should Western societies regard practices like these? Anthropology’s “cultural relativism” rule suggests that we should not judge other countries by the standards of our own society. But some acts are just too vile, and cultural courtesies don’t stop human-rights groups from wagging their fingers at these states.

Brinkley is right. We avoid passing a judgment on these behaviors because we've bought into the paralyzing fallacy that moral right and wrong are matters of personal taste, and just as we should not criticize those who choose to eat roast dog meat so too should we refrain from criticizing those who press hot rocks to little girls' chests, or perform clitorectomies on young women, or practice "honor" killings, or shake crying babies until they suffer brain damage, or hold babies in scalding hot water.

When we can no longer say that these things are wrong no matter where they're practiced we're no longer a sophisticated, civilized people. We're barbarians.

Biomimetics

Salvo magazine has an interesting piece by ID advocate Casey Luskin on Biomimetics, the application of nature's designs to technological innovation. It's amazing how many of our modern technological marvels were inspired by studying how nature solves certain problems.

One might think that this should be considered evidence that nature is designed since if intelligent agents like human beings couldn't hit upon these solutions by themselves how could random chance and genetic mutations discover them, but, of course, you shouldn't think like that. We know that exquisite designs are the product of purely natural, unguided, blind forces because those are the only kinds of forces there are, and we know they're the only forces there are because we can explain every exquisite design in terms of them.

If you're concerned that this sounds like circular reasoning then you're insufficiently steeped in the wisdom of people like Richard Dawkins and other materialist illuminati.

Anyway, Luskin lists a number of examples of biomimetic advances (there are many more):

• Faster Speedo swimsuits have been developed by studying the properties of sharkskin.
• Spiny hooks on plant seeds and fruits led to the development of Velcro.
• Better tire treads were created by understanding the shape of toe pads on tree frogs.
• Polar bear furs have inspired textiles and thermal collectors.
• Studying hippo sweat promises to lead to better sunscreen.
• Volvo has studied how locusts swarm without crashing into one another to develop an anti-collision system.
• Mimicking mechanisms of photosynthesis and chemical energy conversion might lead to the creation of cheaper solar cells.
• Copying the structure of sticky gecko feet could lead to the development of tape with cleaner and dryer super-adhesion.
• Color-changing cuttlefish have inspired television screens that use a fraction of the power of standard TVs.
• DNA might become a framework for building faster microchips.
• The ability of the human ear to pick up many frequencies of sound is being replicated to build better antennas.
• The Namibian fog-­basking beetle has inspired methods of desalinizing ocean water, growing crops, and producing electricity, all in one!
• Airplane design flowed from studying the body shapes of birds.

One of the arguments against using biomimetics as an indicator of intelligent agency behind the designs in nature is that nature too often presents us with poor design. It's hard to see, though, how this is an argument against an intelligent designer. After all poor design is still design. No one would think that because a particular automobile design was flawed that therefore it must not have been designed by intelligent agents.

Flawed design might be an argument against postulating that the designer is the omnipotent, omniscient God of Christianity, but intelligent design doesn't say that the designer is God. It simply says that there's powerful evidence that the universe and life have been designed by an intelligent agent. That's a scientific conclusion. The scientific critic who wishes to discredit ID by pointing out that an omniscient God wouldn't design things the way nature has is making a religious argument about how God would act, which is an odd thing for a scientific person to do.

One of the examples the critic uses to buttress the claim that living things are often poorly designed is the human eye, but Luskin replies that this is an unfortunate choice inasmuch as the eye, it has turned out, may very well have an optimal design. Luskin writes:

Some materialists attack design arguments not by alleging that biological systems lack high levels of specified complexity, but by alleging that they are full of "flaws." Yet anyone who has used Microsoft Windows is painfully aware that flawed designs are still designed. But theistic evolutionist biologist Kenneth Miller argues that evolution would naturally lead us to expect the biological world to be full of "cobbled together" kluges that reflect the clumsy, undirected Darwinian process.

For example, Miller maintains that the vertebrate eye was not intelligently designed because the optic nerve extends over the retina instead of going out the back of the eye—an alleged design flaw. According to Miller, "visual quality is degraded because light scatters as it passes through several layers of cellular wiring before reaching the retina."

Similarly, Richard Dawkins contends that the retina is "wired in backwards" because light-sensitive cells face away from the incoming light, which is partly blocked by the optic nerve. In Dawkins's ever-humble opinion, the vertebrate eye is "the design of a complete idiot."

A closer examination shows that the design of the vertebrate eye works far better than Dawkins and Miller let on.

Dawkins concedes that the optic nerve's impact on vision is "probably not much," but the negative effect is even less than he admits. Only if you cover one eye and stare directly at a fixed point does a tiny "blind spot" appear in your peripheral vision as a result of the optic nerve covering the retina. When both eyes are functional, the brain compensates for the blind spot by meshing the visual fields of both eyes. Under normal circumstances, the nerves' wiring does nothing to hinder vision.

Nonetheless, Dawkins argues that even if the design works, it would "offend any tidy-minded engineer." But the overall design of the eye actually optimizes visual acuity.

To achieve the high-quality vision that vertebrates need, retinal cells require a large blood supply. By facing the photoreceptor cells toward the back of the retina, and extending the optic nerve out over them, the cells are able to plug directly into the blood vessels that feed the eye, maximizing access to blood.

Pro-ID biologist George Ayoub suggests a thought experiment where the optic nerve goes out the back of the retina, the way Miller and Dawkins claim it ought to be wired. Ayoub finds that this design would interfere with blood supply, as the nerve would crowd out blood vessels. In this case, the only means of restoring blood supply would be to place capillaries over the retina—but this change would block even more light than the optic nerve does under the actual design.

Ayoub concludes: "In trying to eliminate the blind spot, we have generated a host of new and more severe functional problems to solve."

In 2010, two eye specialists made a remarkable discovery that showed the elegant mechanism found in vertebrate eyes to solve the problem of any blockage of light due to the position of the optic nerve. Special "glial cells" sit over the retina and act like fiber-optic cables to channel light through the optic nerve wires directly onto the photoreceptor cells. According to New Scientist, these funnel-shaped cells prevent scattering of light and "act as light filters, keeping images clear."

Ken Miller acknowledges that an intelligent designer "would choose the orientation that produces the highest degree of visual quality." Yet that seems to be exactly what we find in the vertebrate eye. In fact, the team of scientists who determined the function of glial cells concluded that the "retina is revealed as an optimal structure designed for improving the sharpness of images."

ID-theorist William Dembski has observed that "no one has demonstrated how the eye's function might be improved without diminishing its visual speed, sensitivity, and resolution."

Luskin writes a good piece that should be perused by anyone interested in the arguments for ID.

Dissembler

Attorney General Eric Holder refuses to accept responsibility for Fast and Furious and perhaps he really wasn't responsible, but surely he knows who was, and yet he has refused to hold them accountable. This short video features Congresswoman Sandy Adams of Florida, who was a law enforcement officer, as was her late husband, trying to get Mr. Holder to explain to the American people what happened under his authority.

Unfortunately, the AG acts like a man who wants to avoid candor at all costs. What's he trying to hide?

Rep. Adams exudes competency, Mr. Holder exudes insincerity. We need more people like Ms Adams in government and many fewer people like Mr. Holder.

Thanks to HotAir for the video.

Blind Faith

This video from Reason tv explains why the Obama stimulus failed to do much to stimulate the economy.

The quick explanation is that you can't lower unemployment by giving money to people who are already employed, and, in any event, government is poorly equipped to spend money efficiently enough to really stimulate anything.

The best way to get the economy going, it seems to me, is not to throw money around but to provide incentives to business to hire people, and the best way to do that is to relieve the various economic burdens weighing them down.

Rather than follow the current model of imposing increasingly higher taxes, imposing increasingly onerous regulations, and imposing crushing costs as will be assessed against employers under Obamacare, we should lower the cost of doing business by reducing taxes, removing the threat of Obamacare, easing regulations, and exploiting our domestic energy resources so that fuel costs are reduced.

Not only would making energy more abundant reduce what it costs to manufacture and transport goods to market, it would put more money in the pockets of consumers, especially poorer consumers, which would enable them to purchase those products. The more products that are purchased the more products that'll be manufactured and the more manufacturing that's going on the more people who'll find employment.

Perhaps the Obama administration's policy of throwing massive amounts of money around, raising taxes and imposing ever more regulations on business will somehow work eventually, but after three years of it we're mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression. Blind faith is believing something despite the lack of empirical evidence, and there's certainly no empirical evidence that the Obama strategy has worked or will ever work.

Maybe it's time to take the ideological blinders off and try something, and someone, else.

The Wet Blanket Party

Joe Carter at First Things has begun a campaign for a new political party. He calls it the "Wet Blanket" party. I think he's on to something:

In the coming election we don’t need the second-coming of Teddy Roosevelt to fan the flames of National Greatness. What we need is a Coolidge clone that is able to brandish a wet blanket. In fact, we need a Wet Blanket movement—an enterprise of inactivity designed to sap any and all enthusiasm for political and governmental robustness.

Sadly, there is only one man who could lead such a movement and he died back in 1933. I’m speaking, of course, of our greatest modern president: Calvin Coolidge. The liberal journalist Walter Lippman, in his 1926 essay, “Calvin Coolidge: Puritan De Luxe,” wrote an unintentionally beautiful tribute to the patron saint of small-government conservatism that provides an outline for what is needed today:

"Mr. Coolidge’s genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is far from being an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity which keeps Mr. Coolidge occupied constantly. Nobody has ever worked harder at inactivity, with such force of character, with such unremitting attention to detail, with such conscientious devotion to the task. Inactivity is a political philosophy and a party program with Mr. Coolidge, and nobody should mistake his unflinching adherence to it for the soft and easy desire to let things slide.

Mr. Coolidge’s inactivity is not merely the absence of activity. It is on the contrary a steady application to the task of neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life.

The White House is extremely sensitive to the first symptoms of any desire on the part of Congress or of the executive departments to do something, and the skill with which Mr. Coolidge can apply a wet blanket to an enthusiast is technically marvelous. There have been Presidents in our time who knew how to whip up popular enthusiasm. There has never been Mr. Coolidge’s equal in the art of deflating interest. The mastery of what might be called the technique of anti-propaganda is worthy of prolonged study by students of public opinion.

The naive statesmen of the pre-Coolidge era imagined that it was desirable to interest the people in their government, that public discussion was a good thing, that indignation at evil was useful. Mr. Coolidge is more sophisticated. He has discovered the value of diverting attention from government, and with exquisite subtlety that amounts to genius, he has used dullness and boredom as political devices."

It is difficult to read this passage without a sigh of resignation. Our culture is able to provide us with innumerable dull and boring politicians. But how many have the ability to use tedium as a sophisticated political tool?

The rest of the post is equally amusing. I can almost promise that if you read it you'll be asking where you can go to sign up.