Do You Trust This Man?

Ron Fournier a liberal columnist at National Journal wrote a piece we quoted from a few days ago that was very critical of Barack Obama. This week he sounds even more upset that the man in whom he had invested so much hope seems so untrustworthy:

Especially when it comes to the presidency, Americans tend to trust their guts, and in Obama's case, lately, something doesn't feel right. Can I trust this guy?

There is a common element to the so-called Obama scandals—the IRS targeting of conservatives, the fatal attack in Benghazi, and widespread spying on U.S. journalists and ordinary Americans. It is a lack of credibility.

In each case, the Obama administration has helped make controversies worse by changing its stories, distorting facts, and lying.

The abuse of trust may be taking a toll on President Obama's reputation....

A month into Obama's presidency, 74 percent of Americans answered "yes," saying the terms "honest and trustworthy" applied to him .... This month, only 49 percent of Americans say Obama is honest and trustworthy. That is a 9-point drop since May 17-18. Obama still may be able to recover. But he would need to take immediate steps to show accountability, transparency, and credibility.

No more slow-walking the truth as the White House did with the cause of the Benghazi attacks and with the names of West Wing officials notified about IRS targeting. No more lies, such as the IRS claiming for months that the targeting did not take place, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denying the existence of the NSA programs weeks before they were revealed.

No more doublespeak such as the president earnestly claiming, "Your duly elected representatives have consistently been informed" of the NSA programs. He knew that wasn't quite true, or should have known.

Obama needs to take action, too.

The IRS scandal needs to be aggressively investigated, with the seizure of White House and Obama campaign e-mails as well as interviews, under oath, with members of Obama's team. Those responsible for the abuse must be punished....

There is no time to waste. Obama already has earned the ignominious distinction of running against Bush's surveillance programs, then adapting it as president, and expanding it. Does he also want to repeat his predecessor's credibility crisis?

All good advice, to be sure, but Fournier is basing it on the assumption that the White House has nothing to hide. Yes, the president should clean house, but what if it's his house that turns out to be dirty? In fact, it seems to me that given what the president has to lose in terms of his credibility by not being forthcoming about these matters it's overwhelmingly in his interest to find the guilty parties and get rid of them.

That he doesn't do this creates a presumption that perhaps the guilty parties are too close to home and that publicly humiliating them would induce them to divulge information unflattering to the president about why they undertook to do what they did. If the president doesn't clean up the mess then the American public is warranted in assuming that it's because he himself is part of it.

The Hummingbird's Tongue

This clip on how hummingbirds extract nectar from a flower is just a small excerpt from a wonderful new video by Illustra Media on birds:

The title of the video is Flight: The Genius of Birds. Watching it one marvels at the astonishing engineering of these creatures and the gorgeous beauty and diversity that pervades the avian world.

One also suspects that those who insist that this engineering and beauty are the accidental product of blind, undirected forces and processes must make quite an effort to suppress their doubts that intelligent agency played a role.

Jihadis Needn't Fear the Eye of Sauron

We've been assured and reassured by our political leaders in Congress, the White House, and at the NSA that we have nothing to fear from the intrusive surveillance they're conducting on every electronic communication of every American. The goal, we're promised, is to keep us safe, it's for our own good, it has prevented terror attacks in the past, and we can trust them.

Well, maybe so, although when government tells its citizens that it's doing something for their own good we can be quite certain that we're about to lose another chunk of our liberty. When this administration tells us that we can trust them we feel a little like the young woman about to have her chastity debauched by the smooth-talking rake. Where is the evidence, after all, that these people can be trusted to be honest about anything?

At any rate, Mr. Obama's assurances might have a little more credibility if it weren't for the fact that one of the places our intrepid snoops refuse to aim their antennas is the very place one is most likely to find future terrorists incubating - Islamic mosques.

Investors Business Daily informs us of this puzzling exception:

The White House assures that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won't snoop in mosques, where the terrorists are. That's right, the government's sweeping surveillance of our most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown terrorists are radicalized.

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee. Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel's formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.

Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

Rather than violate the politically incorrect taboos against ethnic profiling our liberal protectors instead eavesdrop on every American in the country except the very people most likely to present the greatest threat. It's analogous to airport security strip-searching children and grandparents and allowing sullen Arabic-speaking men with box cutters to board the plane unchallenged.

Perhaps it makes sense to the policy makers in the White House to scrutinize your mail and mine to nip in the bud any atrocities we may be plotting against our countrymen while fastidiously averting their eyes from the very communities which have spawned so many of these crimes in the past, but it doesn't make any sense at all to most normal Americans.

Evolution Always Wins

In the movie Man of Steel Superman is getting a sound thrashing from a female villain whose power appears to be superior to his. In the course of administering the drubbing she says to him:

"The fact that you possess a sense of morality and we do not gives us an evolutionary advantage and if history has proven anything it is that evolution always wins."

Well, this got me to thinking. It does seem that being unburdened by a sense of moral obligation to others would confer an evolutionary advantage. Behavior unrestrained by conscience or guilt would seem more likely to promote the survival and thus the reproductive success of those who exhibit it.

So why, then, does morality exist? Why do we have a conscience and experience guilt? Why do we have such a strong sense that some things are right and others are wrong? Why would a sense of moral duty have ever evolved? Such things would seem to be handicaps in the struggle for survival and thus have little evolutionary utility.

I'm sure the Darwinian sachems have an explanation for this, as they do for almost everything which challenges the doctrines of their creed, no matter outlandish the explanation may seem to those not imprisoned behind the bars of a materialist metaphysics, but I'd like to hear it.

I'd like to hear how, if evolution always wins, morality, conscience, and guilt increase our fitness for survival. I suspect that any explanation that's forthcoming will involve a certain amount of magic wand-waving, the fortuitous occurrence of dozens of genetic mutations at just the right time, and lots of vague speculations about how prehistoric societies probably benefited from the presence of those individuals who subordinated their own interests to the interests of others.

Aside from the scientific veneer that usually overlays such accounts the story will doubtless have all the characteristics normally associated with a fairy tale, not the least of which will be a requirement that we suspend our credulity while undirected, blind processes work their magic.

Anyway, here's the scene from Man of Steel. Apologies for all the extra stuff that I couldn't figure out how to get rid of:

Get More: Movie Trailers, Movies Blog

Killing Confidence in Big Government

We argued several weeks ago (see here and here) that the President was doing a good job, in an Inspector Clouseau sort of way, of making the case for smaller more accountable government even as he has tried to expand it and grow its control over our lives.

Ron Fournier, a liberal at National Journal reluctantly agrees that the incompetence and turpitude of this administration have pretty much put the kibosh on the argument that government is a good thing and that the more of it there is the better it is for everyone.

Fournier writes:

I like government. I don't like what the fallout from these past few weeks might do to the public's faith in it.

The core argument of President Obama's rise to power, and a uniting belief of his coalition of young, minority and well-educated voters, is that government can do good things -- and do them well.

[But] look at what ... the past few weeks wrought.

He goes on to elaborate on a half-dozen of what he calls "clichés," but which a conservative might call obvious truths amply verified by history. They are, in his words, that big government is intrusive, Orwellian, incompetent, corrupt, complicated, heartless, secretive, and untrustworthy. He explains how the events of the past few weeks have confirmed each element of this unfortunate indictment of the Leviathan state. The essay is very much worth reading. Fournier's disappointment and disillusionment with the current administration and the punch it has delivered to the solar plexus of his liberal faith in government are keenly felt.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this and similar laments from those on the port side of the ideological ship is that they often express consternation that someone as savvy, intelligent, knowledgeable, and virtuous as is President Obama could have allowed all this to happen. Those who were somehow seduced by Mr. Obama's rhetorical charms just can't bring themselves to believe that it was all a fraud.

But when the conclusion - in this case that our government has massively screwed up - is obviously true but doesn't follow from the premise - i.e., that our nation is led by a nearly omnicompetent man of dazzling brilliance and goodness - there's usually something wrong with the premise.

Bad things happen in the administration of highly competent and ethical individuals, to be sure, but when so much bad happens - not only the most recent scandals, but the scandals surrounding Fast and Furious, the Solyndra cronyism, the abysmal employment picture, and at least a half dozen lesser disgraces - one eventually has to reexamine one's assumption that we really are being led by highly competent and ethical individuals.

Media Bias

One of our favorite topics here at Viewpoint is the various derelictions, delinquencies, and sundry other vices of a media that has abandoned all pretense of objectivity in its political news reporting, and has become pretty much an organ for the promotion of the Democratic Party.

It's a favorite target because it's an example of a social injustice that doesn't seem to be of much concern to those, many of whom are themselves in the media, who otherwise so earnestly voice their passionate desire for social justice, and because poking fun at media hypocrisies and fatuities is such easy sport that it's irresistible.

Mary Katherine Ham is a kindred spirit. She highlights in a piece at Hot Air, for example, the disparity between the picture the media often paints of Tea Party protests and their depictions of protests conducted by the left. Here's her lede:

I mentioned yesterday the ongoing liberal protests in North Carolina dubbed “Moral Mondays.” Protesters are self-consciously modeling their efforts on Wisconsin’s, which as I noted, doesn’t necessarily bode well for them. But it does give us a chance to witness, once again, the breathtaking double standard in media coverage for protests populated by liberals vs. protests populated by conservatives.

You’ll remember back in 2009, conservatives packed health care town halls to object to Obamacare. There was pointed questioning, occasional yelling, and rare cases (nonetheless very well publicized) of physical altercations of some sort. Back in 2009, in my post-mortem on the August town halls, which had inspired national media to openly fret about the impending doom of the Republic, I calculated that there were about 11 incidents of documented violence at more than 500 health care town halls, and that the majority of them were perpetrated by liberals on conservatives.

This, of course, was not the narrative that emerged from that month or what most people remember from it because the media was busy freaking out about how all these peaceful demonstrators and pointed question-askers were bringing the nation to the brink of collapse.

Since then, we’ve seen the destruction of public parks, total disregard for permitting rules, frequent violent eruptions, and occasional sexual assaults or mysterious deaths [at] Occupy Wall Street glossed over by media in their fervor to continue a national dialogue about inequality and stuff. Had a Tea Party ever resulted in mass arrests, defecating on cop cars, or sexual assaults of attendees, the public policy concerns of the protest’s participants would have been quickly dismissed and the group demonized. For Tea Partiers, those things happened despite holding actual peaceful protests in which public lands were left often better than they were found.

Now, we have “Moral Mondays.” Check out the L.A. Times’ coverage and imagine this kind of press release ever appearing on a Tea Party gathering in national news. Now, imagine that Tea Party protest had included hundreds of arrests. Laugh with me, people.

As Ham goes on to recount the Times' coverage of these "Moral Monday" protests one marvels at the sympathetic tone and the almost heroic portrayals of the demonstrators, especially when compared to the history of demonization of the Tea Partiers. You can read more of what Ham says about it at the link.

The media may profess a certain disapprobation of the treatment meted out to conservatives by the IRS - which was an attempt to limit their effectiveness in the political arena by treating them in ways that liberal groups were not treated - but, other than the fact that the media is not a government entity, how is their behavior significantly different? What the IRS did was done for political reasons and was unethical, unjust, and dishonest. The distorted portrayals of Tea Party groups by the media is no less so.

In fact, it could be argued that it was these very misrepresentations that convinced the IRS in the first place that conservative groups needed special scrutiny and even needed to be thwarted.

Coulter on Immigration "Reform"

The Republican Party is on the verge of committing political suicide. So fearful are they of being portrayed as hard-hearted bigots that they're soon going to vote to put illegal aliens on a path to citizenship without requiring first that the border be secured.

This is the political version of self-immolation. Most rank and file members of the party believe that those who came here illegally should not, in the first place, be granted citizenship at all and, in the second, that whatever we do about them, it should be contingent upon first ensuring that future waves of immigrants cannot cross the border illegally. No one paints their living room while the roof is still leaking.

The arguments made by those Republicans who think it's somehow politically expedient for them to do what they seem about to do make no sense, as Ann Coulter points out in a recent column. Coulter launches her assault against what she sees as Republican doltishness with this:

Democrats terrify Hispanics into thinking they'll be lynched if they vote for Republicans, and then turn around and taunt Republicans for not winning a majority of the Hispanic vote.

This line of attack has real resonance with our stupidest Republicans. (Proposed Republican primary targets: Sens. Kelly Ayotte, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.) Which explains why Republicans are devoting all their energy to slightly increasing their share of the Hispanic vote while alienating everyone else in America.

It must be fun for liberals to manipulate Republicans into focusing on hopeless causes. Why don't Democrats waste their time trying to win the votes of gun owners?

Well, that's an interesting question, but to pursue it would get her off track. There's data to support her position that the attempt to woo Hispanics by granting amnesty and allowing the border to remain open is political fool's gold:

As journalist Steve Sailer recently pointed out, the Hispanic vote terrifying Republicans isn't that big. It actually declined in 2012. The Census Bureau finally released the real voter turnout numbers from the last election, and the Hispanic vote came in at only 8.4 percent of the electorate -- not the 10 percent claimed by the pro-amnesty crowd.

In raw numbers, nearly twice as many blacks voted as Hispanics, and nine times as many whites voted as Hispanics. (Ninety-eight million whites, 18 million blacks and 11 million Hispanics.)

So, naturally, the Republican Party's entire battle plan going forward is to win slightly more votes from 8.4 percent of the electorate by giving them something they don't want....

As Byron York has shown, even if Mitt Romney had won 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost. No Republican presidential candidate in at least 50 years has won even half of the Hispanic vote.

Coulter has more statistics with which to beat the leading lights in what has been called, not without justification, the "stupid party" over their heads.

The (pro-amnesty) Pew Research Hispanic Center has produced poll after poll showing that Hispanics don't care about amnesty. In a poll last fall, Hispanic voters said they cared more about education, jobs and health care than immigration. They even care more about the federal budget deficit than immigration!

So why are Senators Rubio, Graham, McCain et al so determined to grant amnesty to those who are here without first plugging the leaks in the border?

Maybe the greedy businessmen now running the Republican Party should talk with their Hispanic maids sometime. Ask Juanita if she'd like to have seven new immigrants competing with her for the opportunity to clean other people's houses, so that her wages can be dropped from $20 an hour to $10 an hour.

A wise Latina, A.J. Delgado, recently explained on Mediaite.com why amnesty won't win Republicans the Hispanic vote -- even if they get credit for it. Her very first argument was: "Latinos will resent the added competition for jobs."

But rich businessmen don't care. Big Republican donors -- and their campaign consultants -- just want to make money. They don't care about Hispanics, and they certainly don't care what happens to the country. If the country is hurt, I don't care, as long as I am doing better! This is the very definition of treason.

For my part I favor legalizing those who are here, but without a path to citizenship and without the taxpayer-subsidized benefits that would accrue to citizens. People brought here illegally as children should be allowed to qualify for citizenship if they complete high school or serve in the military, but adults didn't come here to be citizens, they came here to work. Very well. Let them work and pay taxes as long as they don't break any more laws. If they deem those conditions too onerous or unfair then surely they can find their way back to whence they came if they'd prefer.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans, and some in the House, need to recognize the utter foolishness of legalization before the border is secure. Once these immigrants are legalized and on the road to citizenship there'll be no incentive whatsoever for the Democrats to stop the influx. Coulter summarizes the situation:

Hispanic voters are a small portion of the electorate. They don't want amnesty, and they're hopeless Democrats. So Republicans have decided the path to victory is to flood the country with lots more of them!

If the current immigration proposals pass without securing the border, a measure vigorously opposed, understandably enough, by the Democrats who see Hispanics as a bonanza of new Democratic voters, two things will happen to make Republicans a permanent minority party in the United States: Hispanics will be enrolled as Democrats in overwhelming numbers, and a lot of Republican voters will quietly leave the party and become independents.

To avert this debacle Republicans need to insist that there be no amnesty without border security and that no one be rewarded with citizenship who broke the law to come here. If they don't their political future will be as bright and robust as that of the Whigs.

The Young's Disillusionment with the Church

Larry Taunton, executive director of the Fixed Point Foundation, has a column in The Atlantic in which he discusses the results of a survey of young college atheists active in Secular Student Alliances and Freethought Societies conducted by his Foundation. Here's how he describes the process:

Using the Fixed Point Foundation website, email, my Twitter, and my Facebook page, we contacted the leaders of these groups and asked if they and their fellow members would participate in our study. To our surprise, we received a flood of enquiries. Students ranging from Stanford University to the University of Alabama-Birmingham, from Northwestern to Portland State volunteered to talk to us. The rules were simple: Tell us your journey to unbelief. It was not our purpose to dispute their stories or to debate the merits of their views. Not then, anyway. We just wanted to listen to what they had to say. And what they had to say startled us.

What they learned was that many of these young atheists had grown up in the church, but they found the message and mission of their churches vague, and/or they felt their churches offered only superficial answers to life’s difficult questions. Many of them expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously, and were put off by ministers who didn't really seem to believe what the church taught.

Most of the students with whom Taunton spoke had their worldview shaped when they were between 14-17 years of age, and often embraced unbelief for emotional reasons, reacting to personal pain and suffering.

He discusses his findings in more detail in the article. Elaborating on the feelings many of his respondents expressed about the message and mission of their churches being vague or offering superficial answers to life’s difficult questions he writes:

These students heard plenty of messages encouraging "social justice," community involvement, and "being good," but they seldom saw the relationship between that message, Jesus Christ, and the Bible. Listen to Stephanie, a student at Northwestern: "The connection between Jesus and a person's life was not clear." This is an incisive critique. She seems to have intuitively understood that the church does not exist simply to address social ills, but to proclaim the teachings of its founder, Jesus Christ, and their relevance to the world. Since Stephanie did not see that connection, she saw little incentive to stay. We would hear this again.

When our participants were asked what they found unconvincing about the Christian faith, they spoke of evolution vs. creation, sexuality, the reliability of the biblical text, Jesus as the only way, etc. Some had gone to church hoping to find answers to these questions. Others hoped to find answers to questions of personal significance, purpose, and ethics. Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant. As Ben, an engineering major at the University of Texas, so bluntly put it: "I really started to get bored with church."

Perhaps part of the problem, at least in much of the church today, is that the people charged with teaching young people about these things either can't or won't teach them or don't actually believe them themselves. Perhaps so many young people have left because the people who lead the church are uneducated, ill-informed, indifferent, or otherwise inadequate to the task to which they've been appointed.

When church leaders either don't really believe what they're teaching or can't communicate in ways that are culturally relevant and compelling, people, especially intelligent, educated people, aren't going to find much in the church to keep them there.

Shameless Rerun of Book Promotion

This is a rerun from last week in case there are any readers out there who missed it:

Father's Day is coming up and if dad is a reader may I suggest that In the Absence of God would make a fine gift. It was written primarily about men and for men, although a lot of women have also told me how much they enjoyed it and appreciated its message.

You can read more about Absence at the link at the top of this page. Here's a representative sample of the feedback I've received about it:

I finished reading In the Absence of God yesterday, which isn't anything to marvel at other than the fact that I also started reading In the Absence of God yesterday. I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one sitting before, and I certainly wasn't planning on reading this book in one day, but I simply couldn't put it down.

Also, I don't think a book has ever affected me so deeply as this one has, I cannot stop thinking about the ideas that were presented throughout In the Absence of God. I was nervous when I started reading the book that I would be bored by an abundance of philosophical ideas but the conversations in the book were engaging and masterfully weaved throughout the action and plot.

The speech at the end by "Smerk" gave me chills as I was reading it, and I was deeply disturbed by how true it was that this was the logical conclusion of a materialist worldview. I identified with Professor Weyland in that I have been through some very difficult struggles with my faith because it seems as though the more "intellectual" and "logical" way to look at the world is through the lens of materialism.

This book answered many questions that I've been asking for a long time, and I feel stronger in my faith because of it. One quote in particular stuck with me as I finished the book, "For so much of his life Weyland simply took for granted that atheism made so much more sense, was so much more reasonable, so much more intelligent, than theism, but he could no longer think that. He'd never again be able to think his rejection of God, if that was the choice he ultimately made, was because atheism was so much more appealing or satisfying. What appeal is there in a worldview that has no answer to life's most important questions?"

This describes where my mind was before reading this book. Thank you for writing this book and reminding me of the truth I should have known all along.

I'm sure a lot of dads would enjoy it as much as this reader did. You can order it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, both of which have it on e-books, or you can get it from Hearts and Minds Bookstore, as well as Berean, Lifeway, and BAM bookstores.

Lost in the Multiverse

Physicist Adam Frank is impressed, as most scientists are, with the degree of fine-tuning scientists are finding in the cosmos. He writes:

As cosmologists poked around Big Bang theory on ever-finer levels of detail, it soon became clear that getting this universe, the one we happily inhabit, seemed to be more and more unlikely. In his article, Scharf gives us the famous example carbon-12 and its special resonances. If this minor detail of nuclear physics were just a wee bit different, our existence would never be possible. It’s as if nuclear physics were fine-tuned to allow life. But this issue of fine-tuning goes way beyond carbon nuclei; it infects many aspects of cosmological physics.

Change almost anything associated with the fundamental laws of physics by one part in a zillion and you end up with a sterile universe where life could never have formed. Not only that, but make tiny changes in even the initial conditions of the Big Bang and you end up with a sterile universe. Cosmologically speaking, it’s like we won every lottery every imaginable. From that vantage point we are special—crazy special.

Indeed, the figure of one part in a zillion hardly begins to capture the incomprehensible precision with which these cosmic constants and forces are set, but lest one conclude that perhaps it's all purposefully engineered, Frank quickly waves the reader away from that unthinkable heresy:

Fine-tuning sticks in the craw of most physicists, and rightfully so. It’s that old Copernican principle again. What set the laws and the initial conditions for the universe to be “just so,” just so we could be here? It smells too much like intelligent design. The whole point of science has been to find natural, rational reasons for why the world looks like it does. “Because a miracle happened,” just doesn’t cut it.

This is a bit too flippant. Intelligent design doesn't say "a miracle happened" as though that were all that's needed to account for our world. ID says simply that natural processes are inadequate by themselves to explain what we're finding in our equations. Even so, it's ironic that every naturalistic theory of cosmogensis does say that the origin of the universe was miraculous if we define a miracle as an extraordinarily improbable event that does not conform to the known laws of physics.

So, how do scientists who wish to avoid the idea of purposeful design manage to do so? Well, they conjure a near infinite number of universes, the multiverse, of which ours is just one:

In response to the dilemma of fine-tuning, some cosmologists turned to the multiverse. Various theories cosmologists and physicists were already pursuing—ideas like inflation and string theory—seemed to point to multiple universes.

Actually, these theories allowed for the existence of other universes, they don't require them, but be that as it may, the advantage of positing a multiplicity of different worlds is that the more different worlds you have the more likely even a very improbable world will become, just as the more times you deal a deck of cards the more likely it will be that you'll deal a royal flush. Frank, though, issues a caveat:

There is, however, a small problem. Well, maybe it’s not a small problem, because the problem is really a very big bet these cosmologists are taking. The multiverse is a wildly extreme extrapolation of what constitutes reality. Adding an almost infinite number of possible universes to your theory of reality is no small move.

Even more important, as of yet there is not one single, itty-bitty smackeral of evidence that even one other universe exists (emphasis mine)....

Finding evidence of a multiverse would, of course, represent one of the greatest triumphs of science in history. It is a very cool idea and is worth pursuing. In the meantime, however, we need to be mindful of the metaphysics it brings with it. For that reason, the heavy investment in the multiverse may be over-enthusiastic.

The multiverse meme seems to be everywhere these days, and one question to ask is how long can the idea be supported without data (emphasis mine). Recall that relativity was confirmed after just a few years. The first evidence for the expanding universe, as predicted by general relativity, also came just a few years after theorists proposed it. String theory [upon which the multiverse idea is based], in contrast, has been around for 30 years now, and has no physical evidence to support it.

I'm surprised Frank doesn't mention the irony in this. Scientists feel impelled to shun ID because it's not scientific to posit intelligences for which there's no physical evidence (set aside the fact that the existence of a finely-tuned universe is itself pretty compelling evidence). Yet, in its stead they embrace a theory, the multiverse, for which, as he readily admits, there's no physical evidence and they think this is somehow more reasonable.

When you're determined to escape the conclusion that the universe is intentional, you'll embrace any logic and any theory, no matter how bizarre, that allows you to maintain the pretense of having avoided the offending view.

Pretty amusing.

Can a Conservative Be an Atheist?

Andrew Klavan and Bill Whittle discuss whether a conservative who lacks a belief in the existence of God is being consistent. Their answers are interesting and helpful, after the first thirty seconds of silliness, but I wonder if there's not more that can be said about this.

It's true that conservatives are often, though not always, theists, particularly Christian theists, but maybe it's equally as interesting to ask why Christians are usually (but certainly not always) conservatives. One reason for this correlation, perhaps, is that Christians believe in the inherent depravity of men. Thus, they tend to believe that when power is centralized in a big, bureaucratic government in which anonymous men and women are unaccountable to the people they putatively serve but whom they in fact rule, then all manner of evils ensue. Thus the Christian doctrine of man's fallenness fits snugly with the conservative predilection for small, accountable government.

Liberals and progressives, on the other hand, tend to see human beings as basically good and even perfectable. They believe that by creating better incentives, better environments, by freeing men from their inhibitions and guilt, we can construct a better world. Creating these conditions, they also believe, can best be accomplished by a strong central government. Like atheists, liberals tend to see the world in evolutionary terms, and the idea of progressively evolving toward something better than we are today resonates with them. Thus the atheistic belief in evolutionary advance fits well with the liberal belief that the state should be the engine of that progress.

Conservatives and Christians, of course, think the idea of state induced human improvement is a fantasy. Human beings are basically flawed. They're by nature selfish, violent, promiscuous, and power-hungry. Since that is their nature, changing their environment without changing their heart will only bring about marginal improvements in their behavior. Moreover, investing autonomous power in the government only insures that these human vices will be writ large in the state.

Conservatives also believe deeply in the social value and efficacy of the mediating institutions of family, church, school, voluntary associations, etc. and that government has no role in these except to prevent abuses within the institutions. This conviction dovetails neatly with the Protestant notion of sphere sovereignty and the Catholic idea of subsidiarity, which gives conservatives and Christians another point of resonance that is not so important to liberal statists. Indeed, liberals often place little value on these mediating institutions and the omnicompetent government they endorse is one which often seeks to squeeze them out of existence so that nothing remains between the individual and the state. The progressive statist wants the individual's greatest allegiance to be not to his community, his family or to his God but to his government.

Furthermore, both Christians and conservatives also believe that our rights derive from God, not from the state. Our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not bestowed upon us by bureaucrats, they are bestowed by God and are thus unalienable. One who does not believe in God has nothing in which to ground unalienable rights, nor, for that matter, human worth and dignity. Christian conservatives believe with John Locke that, though man is fallen, he nevertheless is created in the image of God and is loved by God and therefore has worth and dignity. Atheist progressives believe that man is an animal in many important respects just like any other animal and is therefore nothing "special." His rights are arbitrary gifts bestowed upon him by the state because the state finds them expedient and are granted or revoked depending upon the current needs of the state.

So conservatives can be, and sometimes are, atheists, but the metaphysical basis for conservatism in the West is the Christian tradition. As was pointed out in the video, no nation without this tradition has ever placed a value on individual freedom and worth.

An atheist who embraces conservative principles, and there are many who do, does not do so because of the theistic ground upon which conservatism rests but because he or she simply believes conservatism works best to produce the ends he/she desires.

A Story for Our Time

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is resonant with allegorical applications to events unfolding in Washington D.C. Its plot and characters make a fascinating template for interpreting what we read in our daily news.

Consider, for example, the simple Hobbits. They're innocent, ordinary folk who just want to be left alone, much like contemporary Tea Party and Christian conservatives, but they're hounded and pursued, threatened and persecuted, by the fearsome Nazgul, just like the IRS hounds, audits and makes life miserable for any group which identifies itself as conservative and which opposes the current administration.

Meanwhile, the all-seeing eye of Sauron surveys the land of Middle Earth. Almost nothing escapes its notice, just like our NSA, sweeping the cyber-landscape, searching relentlessly for those who would deny Sauron the Ring of Power.

Sauron, whom good manners prevents me from identifying, but you can figure it out, seeks the Ring that will make him unstoppable and invincible, the same effect, if you think about it, that a Democratic sweep of Congress in 2014 would have.

Meanwhile, the Huru-Kai (i.e. Rush Limbaugh's "low information voters") are unleashed on the land as the means by which Sauron seeks to crush all opposition and carry out his quest for power.

I'm sure there are other parallels between our current perilous state of affairs and the frightening goings on in Middle Earth. Readers who think of some are welcome to submit their ideas through the Contact Us button.

Syria's Not Our Fight

A friend sent along a link to an article by Michael Gerson advocating American military intervention on behalf of the rebels in Syria. My friend asked me what I thought about Gerson's piece. Here's the gist of my reply:

Once again I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to disagree with Gerson, a man I deeply admire.

I sympathize with the notion that we have an obligation to prevent the slaughter of innocents when we can. Clinton balked in Rwanda, which I thought was wrong, and he intervened in Bosnia, which I thought was (partly) right. One of the great merits of Bush's presidency, I've argued in the past, is that he freed from tyranny 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Syria is different. Unlike Rwanda we would not be intervening against people armed only with machetes. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan there's no immediate national interest at stake in Syria. There's no threat to the world's oil supply, as there was in Kuwait and Iraq, and neither, so far as I know, is Syria harboring terrorists who are planning to attack us, as Afghanistan was. Nor do they have nuclear weapons that they're threatening to use against us, as Iran and North Korea do.

The only reason for intervening in Syria would be to stop the slaughter of Syrians by Syrians, and we should have learned from recent experience with Egypt and Libya that picking a side in such affairs often turns out badly. We favored the freedom-lovers in Egypt over our ally Mubarak, and what we and the Egyptians got for our efforts is the Muslim Brotherhood. We favored the rebels over Quaddafi in Libya and what we got was Benghazi.

The Syrian rebels are not just a bunch of Jeffersonian Democrats. If they were I'd feel differently, but they're largely composed of elements of al Qaeda and affiliated groups hostile to both us and Israel. If they succeed in toppling Assad it will only catapult al Qaeda into power because, surely, if the rebels prevail, they'll quickly come to be dominated by the most extreme factions in their coalition. This is what happened in Egypt and as is threatening to happen in Libya, and as indeed happened in just about every communist revolution of the 20th century. Do we want to send American troops and pilots to die and be captured and tortured so that al Qaeda will rule Syria?

Moreover, should the rebels succeed, they'd doubtless launch their own mass killing of the supporters of Assad. Would we then feel morally compelled to intervene again on the side of the Alawites who are supported by Iran and Hezbollah?

The war in Syria is largely a Sunni/Shia conflict. If we're going to intervene in internecine bloodshed, why not go back into Iraq where we have much more at stake. We've already made a huge investment in Iraq and since we've pulled out, that nation threatens to unravel. Would those who counsel intervention in Syria agree with going back into Iraq if the situation there deteriorates further?

Indeed, Iran is a much greater threat to the peace and stability of the region, and to us, than is Syria. How can we justify bombing Syrians while allowing Iran to continue to develop nuclear weapons which they've promised to use against Israel?

Syria shares a 600 mile border with Turkey, a largely Sunni nation, and another border with Israel. These are the two most powerful militaries in the Middle East. If the civil war is a threat to the region then the regional nations should handle it, just as the regional nations should have handled Bosnia. Why we should go further into debt and risk more American lives when Turkey and Israel are capable themselves of dealing with Damascus Gerson doesn't explain.

We should, at least for now, continue humanitarian aid to those who are suffering, but if we're going to kill Muslims on one side in order to save Muslims on the other, and risk having our own sons killed or captured in the process, I think we're going to be playing a very dangerous game with our own future. In order to justify intervention we need to have much more to lose by staying out than by going in. Failing that, let the nations in the region handle it.

Father's Day Gift Idea

Father's Day is coming up and if dad is a reader may I suggest that In the Absence of God would make a fine gift. It was written primarily about men and for men, although a lot of women have also told me how much they enjoyed it and appreciated its message.

You can read more about Absence at the link at the top of this page. Here's a representative sample of the feedback I've received about it:

I finished reading In the Absence of God yesterday, which isn't anything to marvel at other than the fact that I also started reading In the Absence of God yesterday. I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one sitting before, and I certainly wasn't planning on reading this book in one day, but I simply couldn't put it down.

Also, I don't think a book has ever affected me so deeply as this one has, I cannot stop thinking about the ideas that were presented throughout In the Absence of God. I was nervous when I started reading the book that I would be bored by an abundance of philosophical ideas but the conversations in the book were engaging and masterfully weaved throughout the action and plot.

The speech at the end by "Smerk" gave me chills as I was reading it, and I was deeply disturbed by how true it was that this was the logical conclusion of a materialist worldview. I identified with Professor Weyland in that I have been through some very difficult struggles with my faith because it seems as though the more "intellectual" and "logical" way to look at the world is through the lens of materialism.

This book answered many questions that I've been asking for a long time, and I feel stronger in my faith because of it. One quote in particular stuck with me as I finished the book, "For so much of his life Weyland simply took for granted that atheism made so much more sense, was so much more reasonable, so much more intelligent, than theism, but he could no longer think that. He'd never again be able to think his rejection of God, if that was the choice he ultimately made, was because atheism was so much more appealing or satisfying. What appeal is there in a worldview that has no answer to life's most important questions?"

This describes where my mind was before reading this book. Thank you for writing this book and reminding me of the truth I should have known all along.

I'm sure a lot of dads would enjoy it as much as this reader did. You can order it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, both of which have it on e-books, or you can get it from Hearts and Minds Bookstore, as well as Berean, Lifeway, and BAM bookstores.

Crazy Logic

The more evidence of malfeasance that accumulates against Attorney General Eric Holder the more need there is, obviously, to investigate him and his tenure at the Department of Justice. Yet there's a Catch-22 buried in this observation. It turns out that the more the Republicans investigate the AG the more the Democrats complain that the Republicans are just "out to get" him, and, the more dubious the Democrats are of the legitimacy of Republican complaints, the less inclined they are to go along with any investigation of them.

In other words, the worse the AG behaves the more innocent the Democrats believe him to be. Perhaps the only way these Dems could be persuaded to assist with an investigation of an Obama appointee would be if the individual were known apriori to be squeaky clean and was not the target of any Republican allegations of wrongdoing.

The New York Times rather obliquely and tacitly acknowledges that this is, in fact, the view of at least some Democrats. Their article begins with a depressing summary of Eric Holder's inadequacies:

Under his leadership, the department scaled back a voter-intimidation lawsuit from the Bush era involving the New Black Panther Party, a decision that conservatives used to portray the black-nationalist fringe group as a political ally of the Obama administration. He reopened criminal investigations into the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogations of terrorism suspects and tried to prosecute five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks in civilian courts rather than military tribunals, which provoked accusations that he was soft on terrorism. And he abandoned the legal defense of a law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage that social conservatives viewed as a bulwark against attacks on the traditional family.

The party-line furor peaked with hearings into Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun-trafficking investigation by federal agents based in Arizona. When Mr. Holder, after Mr. Obama invoked executive privilege, refused to provide department e-mails relating to the fallout after the operation ended, the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. A report by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general essentially exonerated Mr. Holder of accusations that he had sanctioned risky investigative tactics that were used in the case, but that did not satisfy Republican lawmakers who are still pressing for a court order for the e-mails.

One might think that this indictment of the AG's suitability for the office he holds would elicit the antagonism of any honest, fair-minded Democrat, but the Times closes its piece with this:

Yet Democrats remain reluctant about furthering what they see as a partisan campaign against the attorney general. “There is a set of recurring patterns on the Republican side trying to grind him into the dust, so we’re a bit dubious of their complaints,” said Representative Peter Welch of Vermont.

Has it occurred to Rep. Welch that perhaps the pattern is recurring because the AG's delinquencies are recurring? Does he think there's some point at which Mr. Holder should be rewarded with immunity for achieving the distinction of being the most scandal-ridden AG in history? Does Rep. Welch think that when the number of ethical derelictions reaches a certain level it's just partisan politics to continue to investigate them?

For the Dems, it seems, it doesn't matter whether Holder is actually an inveterately incompetent, unscrupulous, deceitful, partisan misfit heading up the DoJ. What matters is that the GOP is out to get him (precisely because he is an inveterately incompetent, unscrupulous, deceitful, partisan misfit) and therefore the Democrats resist. The idea of doing what's best for the country? Who cares about that? A similar tactic, of course, is employed by Democrats in defense of the President.

As the scandals swirling around the White House grow thick as flies in a horse barn the more assured we may be that the President's defenders will accuse his critics of being motivated by racism. It works like this: The more Mr. Obama is shown to be out of his depth, intellectually and ethically, in the Oval Office the more he's criticized. The more he's criticized the more his defenders see the criticisms as racially motivated. So, the more Mr. Obama screws up the more racist the Republican critics prove themselves to be.

The syllogism may be more simply stated thusly: Pres. Obama is a black man. Pres. Obama is criticized. Therefore the criticism is obviously due to the fact that he's a black man. If you think no one could be so addlepated as to argue like this, you haven't watched MSNBC.

As if taping a training video to illustrate the tactic here's MSNBC's Martin Bashir demonstrating it for us:

Such is the logic of those who feel compelled to defend the indefensible.

Hope for MS Sufferers

From the frontiers of medical science comes word that a treatment has been developed which may be effective in halting the advance of multiple sclerosis. This will give hope to millions of people who are in various stages of this disease and for whom heretofore there was little chance that the degeneration of their nervous systems would ever be arrested.

What happens in MS is that the sufferer's own immune system attacks the myelin sheath that insulates nerve fibers. As these sheaths are degraded the fibers lose the ability to transmit signals which eventually results in paralysis of the limbs.

The new treatment involves programming the immune system to recognize the myelin protein as part of the body and to leave it alone. The treatment also does nothing to alter the immune system in any other way.

It's been tested on mice and it works. If it works as well in humans, which it's expected to do, it'll be a fantastic breakthrough. You can read more on the details of the treatment here.

Big Brother Is Watching You

It appears the dam has broken in Washington and people who otherwise would have kept what they knew to themselves for fear of retribution are now leaking it fast and furiously (sorry). Revelations of Orwellian practices by this government are spilling forth so rapidly it's hard to keep up. No sooner did we learn that the Obama National Security Agency was downloading the data on millions of Verizon users that we learned that the NSA and the FBI have also been monitoring the internet usage of the customers of nine different internet providers.

The Washington Post has the story.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

An internal presentation on the Silicon Valley operation, intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. According to the briefing slides, obtained by The Washington Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil. (italics mine)

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

There's much more at the link. The story concludes with a bit of explanation as to how the WaPo got this information:

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin explains why all of this spying on American citizens is qualitatively and quantitatively different from what the Bush administration was doing. One obvious difference, of course, is that the Bush NSA was eavesdropping on terrorism suspects. The Obama administration is eavesdropping on everyone. Perhaps Mr. Obama considers every American a terrorism suspect.

Even the New York Times seems to have had about all it can stand. At least for now. In an editorial yesterday the Times wrote that the Obama administration has lost all credibilty on its promise to be transparent and accountable. In the opinion of most people, of course, they lost credibility a long time ago, but the Times apparently believes in being fashionably late to the party, unless the party is a Bush bash, in which case they'd be the first to show up with the chips and pretzels.

As I followed the events of the last few weeks I kept thinking of a movie that I urge readers of Viewpoint to watch this summer. The film is titled The Lives of Others and it's about how the East German secret police spied on East German citizens prior to the Berlin Wall being torn down. It's a chilling but superb movie and every American should make it a point, in the age of Obama, to see it.

Please don't think it can't happen here. It is happening here.

Atheist Inspirations

Lawrence Krauss is a cosmologist of some note and a militant atheist. In fact, judging by this interview, he'd much rather talk about why he rejects religious belief than about the science that is his profession.

One of the interesting things about the interview is that Krauss tries to argue that despite the fact that atheism leads to some very distressing conclusions about the human predicament it's nevertheless more inspiring to be an atheist than to be a theist who believes in eternal life. For example, he says - using the word "science" as a synonym for "naturalism," that:

I don't mean that science isn't spiritually uplifting. I do think it is, but for the very reasons — the very antithetical reasons to religion, I guess, is the fact that it causes us to feel less comfortable. [It] should provoke us to try and understand what we can do and what meaning we can make in the universe. So learning that we're more insignificant or learning that the universe isn't made for us, or there's no evidence that it is, is profoundly inspiring or should be.

Why it should be inspiring to learn that we are far more insignificant than we could ever know, as he tells one audience member during the Q&A, and that the universe is a meaningless, purposeless, indifferent, and hostile place Krauss doesn't explain. The interviewer, Kate Tippett, later presses him on the point:

Ms. Tippett: What does science have to say to death, to dying, not to the biological breakdown of a body, but to the existential moment of dying?

Dr. Krauss: I think it has a tremendous amount to say. I mean, it has to say to us that, you know, first of all, it has to say what dying is. What is dying? What's the process of dying?

That's it? That's the "tremendous amount" that naturalistic science has to say about what death is and what it means? Well, maybe not exactly. There's also the fact, Krauss tells us, that death means the end of our existence. Perhaps Prof. Krauss finds that inspiring, too:

I mean, we're all going to experience it [death], and I think a realistic assessment of what the process is helps us understand what we're going to experience and try and make sense of it. It seems to me you can't make sense enough to make even an ethical or moral decision without understanding the basis in reality.

What seems to me what science could say is what I've sort of said in the book is that - look, what I'm about to say is going to sound awful, and I'm not going to go to someone's bedside and offer this, OK? It's up to them to decide if they want to look at these things - but we should at least offer the possibility of that knowledge that there's no evidence — in fact every bit of evidence that there's no afterlife, that you're here, but in fact the meaning of your life is the meaning that you make.

And in your life, you've made incredible meaning. You created love for other people. You've brought up children. You've allowed people to have livelihoods and that meaning has made your life worthwhile and enjoy every second of being alive. And death is a sad but necessary part of being alive. That may not sound like the same comfort of saying that, you know, you're going to have eternal life and you're going to be with your family ...

Indeed. In fact, it's hard to see how there's much comfort in this at all, particularly if we're talking about a tragic death of a young person rather than the death of someone at a ripe old age. What Krauss offers, so far from being comfort, so far from giving hope, is despair.

Of course, that doesn't mean that he's wrong about the existence of God and an afterlife. He could well be right. It could turn out that the truth is very depressing, but what is silly of him to say, in my opinion, is that atheism offers a view of the world that is at least as inspiring as the theistic view. The theistic view may be wrong, but any belief system that offers the hope of eternal happiness is far more inspiring, it seems to me, than one that offers nothing more than the prospect of eternal annihilation.

Perhaps this has something to do with why Christianity has inspired far more art, music, science and moral progress than has atheism which has inspired pretty much nothing.

At any rate, Tippett then makes the observation that although Krauss is calling his view the scientific view, it's really not:

Ms. Tippett: But what you just said isn't science.

Dr. Krauss: Yes, it is. It's saying there's no evidence. I mean, here's what we're saying is that...

Ms. Tippett: But you can't put meaning under a microscope. You can't shoot particles at it in a Large Hadron Collider.

Dr. Krauss: No, but I don't understand what meaning is till I ask the questions of how the universe behaves.

Which is a complete non-sequitur, but Krauss plows on undeterred by logic.

You know, some people say that religion gives meaning to their lives, but to me, the knowledge that the meaning we have is the meaning we make should inspire us to do better. So I think that — I personally think that every single thing that religion provides, rationality, empiricism and science can provide, and not only that, it can provide it better.

Well, no. It can't. Especially if Krauss is using science as a place-holder for atheism. It can't give our lives ultimate meaning, it can only tell us there is no meaning. It can't give us an objective ground for morality, it can only tell us that any moral system we live by is purely arbitrary. It can't give us hope, it can't give us a reason for desiring truth, it can't even give us a basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga has so cogently argued in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies.

In fact, earlier in the interview Krauss said something that implicitly undermines his claim that an atheistic worldview based on science can give better answers to the big questions than can religion. He said:

We've been, as I often say, like people locked in a room with sensory deprivation for 40 years. What happens? You hallucinate, and that's what most of the business of what I've been in is hallucinating for the last 40 years.

Most of the hallucinations we've had, namely theoretical physics, will be wrong. Most ideas are wrong. We don't celebrate that enough, but it's true. Most ideas are wrong, so all of the ideas may be wrong. But we won't know until nature points us in the right direction. And I think, and many other people think, that if what we really discovered is the Higgs, there's bound to be new things at the Large Hadron Collider that will point us in the much more interesting direction.

Ms. Tippett: And you don't even know what that direction is right now.

Dr. Krauss: No, no. I mean, I have speculations. I have ideas and so do other theorists. I always hope I'm wrong. I've often said the two greatest states to be in if you're a scientist is either wrong or confused, and I'm often both.

It seems rather odd to say on one hand that one's intellectual approach to truth leads either to error or confusion and on the other that it is nevertheless superior to other approaches. Any approach to truth that causes one to always hope he's wrong is hardly inspiring.

I can't help but think that all the talk about the wonder of life from the point of view of naturalism is just so much wishful thinking. Perhaps a more realistic assessment comes from another famous atheist Bertrand Russell. Russell wrote in A Free Man's Worship:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

I think Russell was closer to where things stand for the atheist than is Krauss, and I don't think many will find Russell's assessment of life in a world without God particular inspiring.

Contra Scientism

Man, it has been said, can't live without religion. Whether it be the ancient faiths of the semites, the polytheisms of the pagans, the ancestor worship of the orient, or the secular faiths of the moderns, religion is essential, it seems, to the human psyche.

Non-theists, or atheists, often object that they are not religious and don't need religion, but I think they don't realize their own religiosity and their dependence upon it. At least that's true of many of them. Their religion doesn't involve an afterlife or a transcendent, personal deity so it doesn't seem to them to count as a religion, but Buddhism lacks a belief in an afterlife and a personal deity yet it's still a religion.

One example of a secular religion is the modern faith in science, often called scientism, that pervades our culture. Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic recently gave a graduation address at Brandeis University in which he described scientism this way:

Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic, [question].

Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. There is no perplexity of human emotion or human behavior that these days is not accounted for genetically or in the cocksure terms of evolutionary biology.

It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the altruistic gene, which is lovelier, but it is still the gene that tyrannically rules. Liberal scientism should be no more philosophically attractive to us than conservative scientism, insofar as it, too, arrogantly reduces all the realms that we inhabit to a single realm, and tempts us into the belief that the epistemological eschaton has finally arrived, and at last we know what we need to know to manipulate human affairs wisely. This belief is invariably false and occasionally disastrous. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance.

Scientism stands to naturalism in much the same way that, say, Christianity stands to theism. Scientism is an expression of the belief that nature is "all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be" as Carl Sagan famously put it, and scientism offers its devotees all the trappings of traditional religion. There is a metanarrative (naturalism) that explains the cosmos, a faith (the conviction that science will usher in the eschaton)that unites the laity and offers them hope, an ethic (the principle that we should follow the promptings of our reason), a view of what is allowed to count as truth, there are dogmas (e.g. Darwinian evolution, climate change) to which one must adhere, there's a priesthood (scientists) whose authority is almost beyond question, there are sacred texts (e.g. Origin of Species), heresy trials, a view of salvation (see Luc Ferry's Brief History of Thought), holidays (Darwin Day), and all the rest.

But, as C.S. Lewis points out in Abolition of Man, this is a religion which ultimately dehumanizes. That's Wieseltier's point, too, in his remarks to the Brandeis graduates:

For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work.

Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life. Philosophy itself has shrunk under the influence of our weakness for instrumentality – modern American philosophy was in fact one of the causes of that weakness -- and generally it, too, prefers to tinker and to tweak.

The machines to which we have become enslaved, all of them quite astonishing, represent the greatest assault on human attention ever devised: they are engines of mental and spiritual dispersal, which make us wider only by making us less deep. There are thinkers, reputable ones if you can believe it, who proclaim that the exponential growth in computational ability will soon take us beyond the finitude of our bodies and our minds so that, as one of them puts it, there will no longer be any difference between human and machine. La Mettrie lives in Silicon Valley. This, of course, is not an apotheosis of the human but an abolition of the human; but Google is very excited by it.

Considering the boilerplate one often hears at Commencement exercises this really is a remarkable address. The students at Brandeis were fortunate. I just hope some of them were paying attention.

Boltzmann Brains

The attempt by philosophers and scientists to escape the conclusion that the universe is the work of an intelligent agent has led to some bizarre hypotheses but none more bizarre than what are called Boltzmann Brains.

Boltzmann Brains, named for the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) who was the first to suggest that the universe arose as a spontaneous fluctuation, are disembodied brains that should be abundant in the universe if the universe is old enough. Recall that Darwinians are fond of saying that although the spontaneous generation of life from inert matter purely by chance is extraordinarily improbable, given enough time it should happen just as given enough time a million monkeys typing away on a million typewriters should produce a Shakespearean sonnet.

The problem is that given a sufficiently vast amount of time we should also expect that everything not ruled out by the laws of physics and logic should happen. Thus, since these laws don't absolutely prohibit it, we should expect that in a universe of vast age atoms will randomly combine to form functioning minds/brains, and that the numbers of these brains would expand as the universe continues to age.

Sure it's breathtakingly improbable but given enough time the improbable becomes probable, or so we've been told by Darwinians, and the probable becomes actual. If time is the hero of the story of evolution then so, too, must it be the hero of the production of Boltzmann Brains.

This seems literally incredible, of course, but it's the sort of thing that's taken seriously by people who've embraced a naturalism that rejects the worldview of classical monotheism.

The irony is that naturalists scoff at the miracles believed in by theists, but on naturalism, miracles are not only possible, they are inevitable given enough time. If someone objects that miracles violate the laws of physics and are thus impossible, it need only be replied that the laws of physics are statistical probabilities. Given enough time, or enough universes, there's bound to be one in which a particular deviation from those laws occurs or in which the laws themselves are different. In any case, the naturalist seems to have very little grounds for rejecting the occurrence of a miracle.

After all, anyone who takes Boltzmann Brains seriously can hardly criticize those who believe that a virgin bore a child.