Americanism

David Gelernter has a remarkable essay in Commentary which examines what he calls the religion of Americanism. Gelernter scrutinizes its origins and attributes and the reasons for the hatred much of the world has for America. Some main points follow, but it should be borne in mind that Gelernter elaborates on each of these at some length. We encourage you to follow the link and read the essay in its entirety.

Americanism is potent stuff. It is every bit as fervent and passionate a religion as the anti-Americanism it challenges and rebukes.

That Americanism is a religion is widely agreed. G.K. Chesterton called America "the nation with the soul of a church." But Americanism is not (contrary to the views of many people who use these terms loosely) a "secular" or a "civil" religion. No mere secular ideology, no mere philosophical belief, could possibly have inspired the intensities of hatred and devotion that Americanism has. Americanism is in fact a Judeo-Christian religion; a millenarian religion; a biblical religion. Unlike England's "official" religion, embodied in the Anglican church, America's has been incorporated into all the Judeo-Christian religions in the nation.

Few believing Americans can show, nowadays, how Americanism's principles are derived from the Bible. But many are willing to say that these principles are God-given. Freedom comes from God, George W. Bush has said more than once; and if you pressed him, I suspect you would discover that not only does he say it, he believes it. Many Americans all over the country agree with him. The idea of a "secular" Americanism based on the Declaration of Independence is an optical illusion.

I believe that Puritanism did not drop out of history. It transformed itself into Americanism. This new religion was the end-stage of Puritanism: Puritanism realized among God's self-proclaimed "new" chosen people-or, in Abraham Lincoln's remarkable phrase, God's "almost chosen people."

The idea of an "American creed" has been around for a long time. Samuel Huntington lists its elements as "liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property." I prefer a different formulation: a conceptual triangle in which one fundamental fact creates two premises that create three conclusions.

The fundamental fact: the Bible is God's word. Two premises: first, every member of the American community has his own individual dignity, insofar as he deals individually with God; second, the community has a divine mission to all mankind. Three conclusions: every human being everywhere is entitled to freedom, equality, and democracy.

In the American creed, both premises and all three conclusions refer back to the Bible.

When I say that Americanism equals American Zionism, I am in one sense merely adding up statements by eminent authorities. John Winthrop in 1630: "Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us." Thomas Jefferson in his Second Inaugural address: "I shall need . . . the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life." Abraham Lincoln declared his wish to be a "humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty and of this, His almost chosen people."

Hundreds of other statements along the same lines might be gathered from the whole formative period of Americanism, from the early 1600's through the Civil War.

There have been at least four crucial turning points-"climacterics," Churchill would have called them-at which Americans spoke explicitly and simultaneously about the religious content and the world mission of Americanism. The first was when the colonies declared their independence.

The second climacteric was the Civil War. Lincoln's understanding of that conflict, writes Edmund Wilson, "grew out of the religious tradition of the New England theology of Puritanism." In 1862, Lincoln made "a solemn vow before God" to free the South's slaves.

World War I marked the third turning point...During Wilson's administration, Americanism accomplished a fundamental transition. It had always included the idea of divine mission. But what was the mission? Until the closing of the frontier in the last decade of the 19th century, the mission was to populate the continent. With the frontier closed, the mission became "Americanism for the whole world."

The final climacteric was the cold war-its start and its finish....President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine. From then on, the Soviets would no longer be allowed unlimited scope for their imperialist ambitions; the United States had decided to get into the game.

Truman's announcement was in the spirit of classical Americanism. It recognized America's message and duty to all mankind: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure....The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. Although historians often skip over this point, Truman's world-view centered on the Bible nearly to the extent Lincoln's had."

The end of the cold war was presided over by Ronald Reagan, who returns us (once again) to the nation's beginning.

That Americanism is the successor of Puritanism is crucial to anti-Americanism. In the 18th century, anti-Americans were conservative, monarchist anti-Puritans. (Boswell reports Samuel Johnson's announcement that "I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.") In the 19th century, European elites became increasingly hostile to Christianity-which inevitably entailed hostility to America. In modern times, anti-Americanism is closely associated with anti-Christianism and anti-Semitism.

Anti-Americans are still fascinated and enraged by Americans' bizarre tendency to believe in God.

And we needn't go to Norway or Britain to find angry denunciations of President Bush and the Americans who support him in religion-mocking terms. The President's faith, said one prominent American politician in September 2004, is "the American version of the same fundamentalist impulse that we see in Saudi Arabia, in Kashmir, and in many religions around the world."

The speaker was former Vice President Al Gore. His comments were offensive and false. Today's radical Islam is a religion of death, a religion that rejoices in slaughter. The radical Christianity known as Puritanism insisted on choosing life. Americanism does, too.

It has become commonplace in some Christian circles to reject the notion of American exceptionalism, and for good reasons. If unchecked, it tends to foster an attitude of national infallibility and arrogance. Even so, Gelernter prods us to consider that in our commendable desire to remain nationally humble we tend to go too far in the other direction and ignore, or forget, the fact that America really is in many ways a special land.

Specialness, however, comes at a price. As Europe has become increasingly secular, and the Muslim world grows rich from the oil beneath its feet and less isolated from the West, expressions of jealousy and rage directed at nations which retain at least a simulacrum of their Christian or Jewish heritage grow increasingly frequent and virulent. Hatred for Jews has always been with us, but hatred for Christians and for America is a relatively recent phenomenon. Gelernter's point is that Christianity is an extension of Judaism and Americanism is an extension of Christianity. Together the combination is an irresistible target for the roiling animosities and resentments of secularists and Islamists everywhere, including here. Gelernter says in a footnote that, "It has been many centuries since Christians in the West have been routine objects of organized hatred; they do not even have a word for it. But they had better find one."

We should mention, too, that Gelernter is exactly right when he ascribes the creed or values of Americanism to the fundamental theism of the Founders and their successors. The emphasis in America on freedom, equality, human rights, and so, derive from only one possible source. These are not the deliverances of Enlightenment Reason, nor are they grounded in human biology or evolutionary history. They are grounded in the fact that we are created in the image of God and that we are loved by Him. Take God out of the picture, secularize the nation, scrub the public square clean of all religious residue, and freedom, equality, and human rights will, like a plane out of fuel, glide along at ever decreasing altitude until they crash to the ground. We refer you to an earlier discussion of this topic on Viewpoint here.

Evangelical Outpost has made this essay the focus of a blog symposium so one can find much more commentary and, no doubt, much more insightful analysis of it there than we're able to offer here.

Fossils and Human Evolution

Derek at Weapons of Mass Distraction links us to an article in the Telegraph on fossils and human evolution. The article mentions that in the past "fossil-hunters" were quick to place new fossil finds into different species so that today,

"The number of human species claimed by fossil-hunters now stands at around 10, while the total number of human-like species exceeds 50. Such claims have long been based on supposedly significant differences in sizes and shapes of fossil bones. Now they have all been thrown into doubt by research showing that the differences lie within the range expected for just a single species."

In other words, all those charts we saw in high school showing man evolving through several progressive stages until finally arriving at his present exalted state as Homo sapiens are now lining canary cages.

Prof Henneberg found that the fossils show clear evidence of evolution, with substantial increases in both skull sizes and body-weight. However, he also found that the fossils show no evidence of being anything other than a single species which had grown bigger and smarter over time. According to Prof Henneberg, the much-vaunted differences in fossil size used to identify "new" species all lie within the normal range expected for one species.

Notice here the subtle bit of professional CYA the good professor is indulging in. He claims on the one hand that all the fossils of early hominids are really H. sapiens, but not wanting to give succor to the creationists who have been saying precisely this for the last fifty years he notes that they nevertheless show "clear evidence of evolution." He uses the word evolution here to mean simple variability (microevolution), but the general reader will perhaps assume that he means that the fossils show clear evidence of having evolved from one basic form of life into a radically different form (macroevolution). By this locution he manages to undo a century and a half of Darwinian orthodoxy without exposing himself to the charge of heresy.

Henneberg's findings suggest that disputes among scientists as to the evolutionary relationships among the various types of fossil hominids are meaningless, as they ignore the possibility of huge differences within the same species.

In discussing the relationship of Neanderthals and humans, for instance, he states that "What evidence there is...is consistent with Neanderthals being from the same species as modern humans."

It's impossible to say how many of his colleagues agree with him although evidently some do:

Other authorities hailed Prof Henneberg's findings as a much-needed reality check. "Clearly there is a need to be more aware of the possibility of variation - but that is not the inclination today," said Geoffrey Harrison, emeritus professor of biological anthropology at the University of Oxford. "It has been a problem because the discoverers [of the fossils] have usually put so much effort into finding the evidence, so they want it to be important".

Skeptics, of course, have long thought the evidence for numerous hominid species was tenuous. It was, after all, based upon purely structural differences. If the bones of various breeds of dogs were pried from different rock strata they'd doubtless be classified as different species based on morphological considerations, but, in fact, every dog from Great Danes to Daschunds are members of the same species. The problem is that the concept of species is slippery. Scientists define it as a reproductively isolated population of organisms, which means that if two members of a population can produce fertile offspring then they are members of the same species. There is, however, no way to tell by looking at a few bones whether or not members of the populations from which the bones came were capable of producing fertile offspring.

Perhaps one reason why scientists were so confident that the bones they had unearthed over the years were from different species of hominids is that they were absolutely convinced that man has evolved from an ape-like ancestor. If there is no question that species evolve over time, then bones taken from rock strata separated by millions of years just must be from different species. In other words, the reproductive isolation of the hominids was assumed, based on the theory of human evolution, and then the assumption that the hominids were different species was employed as evidence to reinforce the theory that humans have evolved from ape-like ancestors.

It's a nice, tight little circle.

Bad News For Iraqi Terrorists

Strategy Page has an interesting fact about the Iraqi police:

Since November 10th, anti-government forces made twelve attacks on police stations, and were defeated every time. Earlier in November, nine police stations were overrun and no attacks were defeated.

If you read the whole post you'll come away with a much different picture of the Iraqi military and national guard than what you get from watching the evening news. As the above quote suggests, they are growing in strength and competence. The process is slow, and there are problems finding good leadership, but there is good reason for cautious optimism.

This is especially important inasmuch as our own military is being stretched. The more troops the Iraqis can field to provide for their own security, the more pressure it will take off the United States to come up with adequate manpower to keep the peace.

The Ethics of Torture

The ethics of torture are back in the news, and again the question first from our lips should be how the word torture is being defined. It's difficult to say whether or not torture is justified when we don't know what it is we're talking about.

Part I, Article I of the Geneva Convention Against Torture defines torture as:

... any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

The problem with this definition is twofold. First, the word "severe" is frustratingly imprecise. Second, the signatories to this agreement did not envision the kind of world in which we live today. World-wide terrorism and weapons of mass destruction have rendered the Geneva definition anachronistic.

Viewpoint has discussed this matter before, particularly here and here, and we don't wish to cover too much of the same ground now, but there are some things that bear elaboration. One is the problem with the use of the word "severe."

A pair of articles by Steve Weissman at TruthOut.org. illustrate the difficulty. In the first essay Weissman decries the military's resort to "torture" in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The first clue became visible at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, when American soldiers systematically put cloth sacks over the heads of their captives, whether al-Qaeda, Taliban, or some poor Afghan villager mistakenly taken prisoner.

In part, a hood, blindfold, or spray-painted goggles made prisoners easier to control. But the visual deprivation began the process of disorienting them, enhancing psychological stress as the CIA's torture manuals recommended.

The troops kept the prisoners standing or kneeling in painful positions for hours at a time, forced them into other agonizing postures, often stripped them naked, humiliated them non-stop, threatened them, deprived them of sufficient food and sleep, or left them in freight containers, where they suffered extremes of heat and cold. The soldiers also withheld medical treatment and needed medication, especially painkillers, and kicked their prisoners around a bit, just to show who was boss. For selected captives, like those on the long flight to Guantanamo, the sensory deprivation became more elaborate. Full-face hoods took away their sight and some of their hearing. Thick gloves reduced their sense of touch. The 30-hour flight to a completely unknown destination added to the effect, cutting them off from anything known and reassuring.

Weissman evidently lumps all of these acts together under the rubric of "torture", but should he? Is it torture to put a hood over someone, to limit their food or sleep, to make them stand for hours at a time? In other words, when does discomfort become severe pain? And is inflicting severe pain always wrong? If so, why so? Is there anyone reading this who would balk at inflicting severe pain upon someone if that was the only way to save the life of their child?

Imagine that terrorists have been apprehended, and the military has reason to think that their associates are planning to attack an elementary school, as happened in Beslan, Russia. The authorities don't know where or when, but they have good reason to believe that the captured men know. By putting them under stress, duress, and even some pain they might be able to get the information from them, but, heeding the advice of such as Mr. Weissman, they decline to do this. The attack takes place, it turns out to be the school to which you send your children, several hundred terrified youngsters are murdered, your child among them. Would you feel that the military had made the correct decision? If you answer yes, then the question you should then answer is: Why is the comfort of a terrorist killer more important and valuable to you than the life of your and other people's children?

Weissman seeks in Part II to reply to examples such as this. He writes:

From the viewpoint of those who would use it [i.e. torture], the inescapable problem with torture is its lack of efficiency. Interrogators never know whether their victims are telling the truth or making up stories just to end the pain. Investigators then waste valuable time chasing down false leads. In the absence of rock-hard supporting evidence, intelligence analysts never know how much faith to put in some tidbit of coerced information. And governments often end up ignoring the scrap of truth they should heed.

Well, of course, one never knows whether one is getting the truth, but this is a ludicrous argument. The principle Weissman articulates here is that nothing should ever be chanced unless it is guaranteed of success. Because the "torture" may not work, we are to believe, therefore it should not be used. We can imagine the reaction of people across the land after having witnessed New York City be vaporized in a mushroom cloud if they discover that the NYPD had apprehended the terrorist who had planted the nuclear bomb hours before it was set to go off. They perhaps could have prevented the blast, but they had accepted Mr. Weissman's reasoning that they shouldn't torture the recalcitrant mass murderer to learn the bomb's location because, after all, he just might lie to them. Better to try to entice the bomb's location from him with bon homie and free tickets to Radio City Music Hall.

We agree that torture should not be used indiscriminately, but there is no moral case against using it upon those there is probable cause to think are willfully withholding information which could save human lives. Moreover, it should only be used when it is necessary to prevent harm to others, it should never be employed simply to hurt or punish someone. This leaves a lot of room for gray areas and judgment calls, but that's the way life is.

We also think that some distinction needs to be made between depriving a person of certain comforts and doing them lasting harm. Playing loud rock music should not be considered torture. It is unpleasant, to be sure, but unpleasantness should not be a criterion of illicit torture. Nor should making terrorists stand for several hours be considered beyond the pale. If stress and discomfort constitute torture then confining criminals to jail cells would be a violation of the Geneva Convention since it certainly is both stressful and uncomfortable for most people.

Perhaps the oddest thing about this debate is the assumption that torture, however we define it, is ipso facto immoral. We need a vigorous debate in this country of the grounds for that assumption.

Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism

Books and Culture has an interview of Christian Smith conducted by Michael Cromartie in which Smith assesses the spiritual state of American youth with wonderfully impressive precision. The interview should be an absolute must read for every parent, teacher, and religious leader in America. It's an extensive piece and is filled with wisdom and insight. Indeed, Smith says things that many parents and teachers have intuitively believed to be true but seldom saw endorsed by any cultural authority and rarely so cogently. Smith is such an authority. Here's the introduction B&C gives him:

Christian Smith is Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. One of the most influential and widely cited sociologists of his generation, he is the author of many provocative books....His latest book, due in March from Oxford, is Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton. Based on the National Study of Youth and Religion, an unprecedented survey conducted from 2001 to 2005, the book opens a window on the religious beliefs and practices of American teens.

In the course of the interview Smith points out, among other things, the following:

Teenagers today (and I am talking about 13- to 17-year-olds) are invested in society as it is and in mainstream values. They are well socialized into the mainstream, they are committed to it, and they want to succeed in it. From the Sixties we've inherited the notion of the "generation gap," but that model simply isn't adequate to describe what we are dealing with today. For the most part, young people have a great deal in common with their parents and share their values. That may not be immediately apparent, but underneath, not too far below the surface, there is a lot of commonality.

We've been conditioned to look for kids who can't stand traditional religion. But that's just not the case! Most kids are quite happy to go with whatever they are raised to believe; they are not kicking and screaming on the way to church. On the contrary: most teenagers have a very benign attitude toward religion.

Lots of people think that a key category for young people is "spiritual but not religious." What we found is that this concept is not even on their radar screen. But one thing that most teens emphatically don't want to be is "too religious." They want to be religious, but they don't want to be perceived as overzealous, uncool, embarrassingly intense about their faith. They have an image in their mind of one kid in their high school who walks around with buttons and badges all day carrying a Bible, and they think that that's wacko.

It really struck us in our research that very few teens are getting a chance to practice talking about their faith. We were dumbfounded by the number of teens who told us we were the first adults who had asked them what they believed. One said: "I do not know. No one has ever asked me that before."

Very few teens are hardcore relativists. In fact, they are quite moralistic. They will confidently assert that certain things are right or wrong. What they can't do is explain why that's the case, or what's behind their thinking.

Based on our findings, I suggest that the de facto religious faith of the majority of American teens is "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." God exists. God created the world. God set up some kind of moral structure. God wants me to be nice. He wants me to be pleasant, wants me to get along with people. That's teen morality. The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good, and good people go to heaven. And nearly everyone's good.

It's unbelievable the proportion of conservative Protestant teens who do not seem to grasp elementary concepts of the gospel concerning grace and justification. Their view is: be a good person.

It turns out when you look at the structure of teenagers' lives, and their schedules, religion fits in a very small piece of all that. It's actually amazing to me that religion has any effect in teenagers' lives. Part of the structure, too, is that what really matters to teenagers is their socially significant relationships. If teenagers have socially significant relationships that cross at church, that cross with other families of believers, then that helps out a lot. But many teenagers have their socially significant relationships almost exclusively through school; even if they have friends at church, the youth group is a satellite out there on the fringe of their life, rather than at the center.

Despite their abject failure at the level of conscious articulation of their faith, on every measure of life outcome-relationship with family, doing well at school, avoiding risk behaviors, everything-highly religious teens are doing much better than non-religious kids. It's just a remarkable observable difference....there are all sorts of other benefits from simply being connected to a religious organization-social capital, social ties, and so on-that empirically make a difference. That's not excusing the relative failure of religious educators, but the difference is there. Highly religious American teens are happier and healthier. They are doing better in school, they have more hopeful futures, they get along with their parents better. Name a social outcome that you care about, and the highly religious kids are doing better.

Non-religious teens are more likely to say, "who cares?" Who cares about suffering, who cares about old people? By every measure we have, religious kids are more likely to live out their faith in terms of volunteering and taking care of people. It's the more religious kids who are more involved in their communities, more civically active. So there are real differences.

This is one of the things that really hit us hard: that parents still have an enormous amount of influence on their kids' lives, even though I'm sure that's very hard for them to believe at times. Adolescents are not routinely coming to their parents and saying "thanks so much for steering me in the right direction. I really appreciate it. I really want you to know that you are a big influence." They don't say it, but it's still a fact. Parents have a lot more influence, and therefore responsibility, than they realize. Teenagers will never admit that they look to their parents for guidance, but most do.

Most, though not all, religious educators in this country are failing. Most young people are not being formed primarily by their religious faith traditions; rather, they are being formed by other notions and ideologies. And in part this is because adults are afraid to teach. They are afraid of young people. They are afraid of not looking cool when they teach real substance....And yet youth actually want to be taught something, even if they eventually reject it. They at least want to have something to reject, rather than an attitude of anything goes. Teens need an opportunity to articulate, to think and to make arguments in environments that will be challenging to their faith. And I don't think they are getting that. In general, religious traditions that expect more and demand more of their youth get more. And those that are more compromising, more accommodating, more anything-goes, end up not getting much.

There's much more at the link. One of the messages that comes through in this piece is that parents should not be reluctant to talk to their children about the fundamentals of their religious faith, and they should be very willing to put up with whatever resistance some kids might offer to attending religious services. The benefits to the child in the long run are, of course, immeasurable.

On the other hand, parents also should ensure that the services they take their kids to offer more than just babysitting and social interaction. Teenagers both want and need to talk about their deepest convictions. They want and need to learn what it is their religion is all about, what it's based upon, and how it answers the most profound questions of life. Even if they reject it down the road, as Smith says, they need to know that they're rejecting something substantial and consequential. If they do the chances that they'll eventually come back to it are far better than if they perceive shedding their faith to be on a par with discarding a threadbare, ill-fitting, unfashionable coat.

City of Brotherly Love

Reader Ryan H. links us to Laer at Cheat Seeking Missiles who relays a notice from the journal of the American Family Association. The gist of it is that four people were arrested last October in Philadelphia for protesting at a homosexual rally:

Along with founder Michael Marcavage, members of Repent America-with police approval--were preaching near Outfest, a homosexual event, handing out Gospel literature and carrying banners with Biblical messages.

When they tried to speak, they were surrounded by a group of radical homosexual activists dubbed the Pink Angels. A videotape of the incident shows the Pink Angels interfering with the Christians' movement on the street, holding up large pink symbols of angels to cover up the Christians' messages and blowing high pitched whistles to drown out their preaching.

Rather than arrest the homosexual activists and allow the Christians to exercise their First Amendment rights, the Philadelphia police arrested and jailed the Christians!

They were charged with eight crimes, including three felonies: possession of instruments of crime (a bullhorn), ethnic intimidation (saying that homosexuality is a sin), and inciting a riot (reading from the Bible some passages relating to homosexuality) despite the fact that no riot occurred.

If the facts are as they are related here this is an outrage. When has anyone ever been arrested for protesting at a Christian rally or event? The charges are so absurd that they could only have been concocted by a lawyer. Since when, for example, are homosexuals an ethnic group?

If these four protestors are convicted the courts will have in effect ruled that public objection to homosexuality is a hate crime, and it will be just a matter of time until opposing homosexuality from the pulpit will be ruled illegal. On that day the entire first amendment will lay in tatters.

This case represents a powerful and insidious assault on both the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion in America. We're therefore anxiously awaiting word that the ACLU has entered the fray on behalf of the protestors. In the meantime, the AFA has vowed to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. If the protestors win, let's hope they sue the city officials responsible for this travesty for every penny of the graft they've doubtless managed to stash away over the years.

More details of the whole sordid affair can be found here.

Our Friends the French

The French can always be depended upon to sink to the occasion. The Belgravia Dispatch has some commentary on a piece which appeared recently in the French newspaper Le Monde snidely venting its jealousy of the ability of the U.S. to mount a massive rescue effort in Indonesia while the French, a third-rate power whose only consolation is a much undeserved seat on the U.N. Security Council, stands by in relative impotence.

Here's a sip of French whine:

Colin Powell, who is in Bangkok and is on his way to Jakarta, tries to make sense of the [U.S. initiative]: "We are not looking for any political advantage," assured the U.S. Secretary of State. "We are not trying to make ourselves look better in the eyes of Muslims," he affirmed. "We are doing it because human beings need it, even desperately need it." In other words, the P-3 Orion American reconnaissance planes that are flying over Aceh are only surveying the destruction to facilitate the humanitarian effort. [emphasis added]

Note the sarcastic implication. The U.S. is only doing what it is because it's preparing for some military adventure against Muslims. The French, in an act of moral projection, cannot imagine any nation, least of all the U.S., doing something simply because it's the right thing to do. Viewing the rest of the world through the lens of their own cynicism and corruption, they assume there must be insidious motivation behind our willingness to amass such an effort. In the process they defame and insult the U.S. government and the American people who are funding and conducting the relief effort underway in the Indian Ocean. This is the sort of sniping one engages in, we suppose, when one bitterly resents that fact that his own nation's accomplishments are as insignificant as those of the modern French.

There's more on Le Monde's whimpering at the Dispatch.

What Smart People Believe

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost directs us to a website called Edge which asks 120 well-known intellectuals "What do you believe even though you can't prove it?"

As Carter says, some of the answers are intriguing, many are banal, and others just plain absurd. Here are some samples:

Evolution

"I can't prove it more than anecdotally, but I believe evolution has purpose and direction." -- DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, Media Analyst

"I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection." -- RICHARD DAWKINS, Evolutionary Biologist

"That our ability to perceive signals in the environment evolved directly from our bacterial ancestors." -- LYNN MARGULIS, Biologist

"I believe, though I cannot prove it, that three-not two-selection processes were involved in human evolution. The first two are familiar: natural selection, which selects for fitness, and sexual selection, which selects for sexiness. The third process selects for beauty, but not sexual beauty-not adult beauty. The ones doing the selecting weren't potential mates: they were parents. Parental selection, I call it." -- JUDITH RICH HARRIS, Writer and Developmental Psychologist

Conciousness

"I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery." -- NICHOLAS HUMPHREY, Psychologist

"I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness-in the strong sense of there being a subject, an I, a 'something it is like something to be.' It would follow that non-human animals and pre-linguistic children, although they can be sensitive, alert, responsive to pain and suffering, and cognitively competent in many remarkable ways-including ways that exceed normal adult human competence-are not really conscious (in this strong sense): there is no organized subject (yet) to be the enjoyer or sufferer, no owner of the experiences as contrasted with a mere cerebral locus of effects." - DANIEL DENNETT, Philosopher

"I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are." -- ALISON GOPNIK, Psychologist

"I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness,..." -- JOSEPH LEDOUX, Neuroscientist

"Strangely, I believe that cockroaches are conscious." -- ALUN ANDERSON Editor-in-Chief, New Scientist

"Your mind may arise not simply from your own brain, but in part from the brains of other people." -- STEPHEN KOSSLYN, Psychologist

"Tribal Mind." -- ALEX (SANDY) PENTLAND, Computer Scientist

"I believe, but cannot prove, that memory is inherent in nature. Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits." -- RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Biologist

"I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists." -- DONALD HOFFMAN, Cognitive Scientist

"If we believe that consciousness is the result of patterns of neurons in the brain, our thoughts, emotions, and memories could be replicated in moving assemblies of Tinkertoys. If our thoughts and consciousness do not depend on the actual substances in our brains but rather on the structures, patterns, and relationships between parts, then Tinkertoy minds could think. If you could make a copy of your brain with the same structure but using different materials, the copy would think it was you." -- CLIFFORD PICKOVER, Computer scientist

Language

"I believe this correspondence between human language and raven language is more than coincidence, though this would be difficult to prove." -- GEORGE B. DYSON, Science Historian

Universe

"I believe our universe is not unique." - LAWRENCE KRAUSS, Physicist

"That our universe is infinite in size, finite in age, and just one among many." -- JOHN BARROW, Cosmologist

Religion

"I believe in belief-or rather: I have faith in having faith. Yet, I am an atheist (or a "bright" as some would have it)." -- TOR N?RRETRANDERS, Science Writer

"I believe, but cannot prove, that religious experience and practice is generated and structured largely by a few emotions that evolved for other reasons, particularly awe, moral elevation, disgust, and attachment-related emotions. That's not a prediction likely to raise any eyebrows in this forum." -- JONATHAN HAIDT, Psychologist

Science

"I believe in science. Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved.They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would not believe them." -- SETH LLOYD Quantum Mechanical Engineer

Humans

"Human Behavior is Unconsciously Controlled." -- ROBERT R. PROVINE Psychologist and Neuroscientist

"True love." -- DAVID BUSS, Psychologist

"Progress." -- NEIL GERSHENFELD, Physicist

"I know that it sounds corny, but I believe that people are getting better. In other words, I believe in moral progress." -- W. DANIEL HILLIS, Physicist

Extraterrestrial Life

"I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy." -- KENNETH FORD, Physicist

"Life is ubiquitous throughout the universe." -- J. CRAIG VENTER, Genomics Researcher

"I believe that life is common throughout the universe and that we will find another Earth-like planet within a decade." -- STEPHEN PETRANEK, Editor-in-Chief, Discover Magazine

"Is there a fourth law of thermodynamics, or some cousin of it, concerning self constructing non equilibrium systems such as biospheres anywhere in the cosmos? I like to think there may be such a law." -- STEWART KAUFFMAN, Biologist

"Yet I don't believe that life is a freak event. I think the universe is teeming with it." -- PAUL DAVIES, Physicist

Huh?

"The universe is ultimately determined, but we have free will." -- MICHAEL SHERMER Publisher, Skeptic magazine

"I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist."-- CARLO ROVELLI Physicist

"I believe nothing to be true (clearly real) if it cannot be proved." -- MARIA SPIROPULU, Physicist

We would have thought that the answer to the question would have been "almost everything that we believe" since very little in life can really be proved, but then we're not intellectuals and we lack the wit to say things like "time does not exist" or that "nothing is true if it cannot be proved." With regard to this last, one of the comments to the post at EO pointed out that:

"Maria Spiropulu (a physicist, no less) has a problem: The law of noncontradiction and the law of causality, basic to the scientific method, are axioms of rationality and not provable. According to her own statement she believes nothing that cannot be proven. She has just declared herself irrational."

And Joe Carter reflects upon Daniel Dennett's contribution which says in part that "I believe, but cannot yet prove, that acquiring a human language (an oral or sign language) is a necessary precondition for consciousness". Carter asks whether Dennett would tell Helen Keller that she wasn't conscious until she had learned a language.

What makes reading the pontifications of intellectuals so much fun is that they are often so unconsciously loopy.

The Marketplace of Ideas

John Leo gives us a taste of life on one American college campus:

In the fall of 2000, I promised my daughter the freshman that I wouldn't write about Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.) until she graduated. As a result, you readers learned nothing from me about the naked dorm, the transgender dorm, the queer prom, the pornography-for-credit course, the obscene sidewalk chalking, the campus club named crudely for a woman's private part, or the appearance on campus of a traveling anti-Semitic roadshow, loosely described as a pro-Palestinian conference. Instead of hot news items like these, you usually just hear that Wesleyan is very "diverse." Newsweek once hailed the school as the "hottest" diversity campus in America, apparently using the word diversity in its normal campus meaning of "no diversity at all." A one-liner about the campus is that "Wesleyan is so diverse that you can meet people here from almost every neighborhood in Manhattan." And the students tend to have opinions from every known corner of MoveOn.org.

After the 2000 election, my daughter told me that 80 percent of the students had voted for Al Gore. "Bush got only 20 percent of the vote?" I asked. "No, Dad," she explained, "the 20 percent was for Nader." Visiting speakers who challenge any aspect of campus orthodoxy are as rare as woolly mammoths. However, columnist Nat Hentoff, whose son had gone to Wesleyan, showed up in 2002 and criticized the lack of intellectual diversity and free speech.

At a Manhattan holiday party last week, hosted by a friend with Wesleyan ties, I overheard my daughter explaining that no real debate takes place on campus. This was a major frustration, since she is feisty and brilliant and loves to argue ideas. She is politically liberal but wonders how Democrats of her generation will be able to speak convincingly to the middle of the political spectrum when so many of them shun the complexity of arguments and simply spout the party line.

Two years ago the Argus, the student newspaper, ran a survey and found that 32 percent of the students feel "uncomfortable speaking their opinion." Orthodoxy plays a role, of course, but so does an exaggerated fear of giving offense. Identity politics is so strong that criticizing other students' ideas can seem like a faux pas, if not a challenge to their core identity. Better to keep your head down and stick to standard opinions.

The naked dorm and the porn course were both examples of Wesleyan's determination to accommodate as much sexual confusion as possible. The porn course, which had some students filming S&M scenarios, ended when the teacher died. The popularity of the naked dorm, which featured nude wine and cheese parties, seems to have faded. "I just sometimes feel the need to be nude," a Wesleyan male told the New York Times in 2000. "If I feel the need to take off my pants, I take my pants off." The obscene chalkings, which included colorful references to the sexual practices of professors, are now forbidden, possibly because they were upsetting donors and enraging some faculty.

But the Wesleyan campaign to stamp out diversity continues, this time in a move against fraternities. The university is pressuring its frats to accept women as members or pay a stiff financial price. The anti-fraternity campaign is standard on the politically correct campus these days, usually with an announced aim of reining in a boozy, sexist, right-wing culture. But this is Wesleyan, which has no right-wing culture and no sexist, out-of-control frats. The Argus has quoted gays and women saying mild and kind things about the Wesleyan frats, some of which are receptive to gays and set rooms aside for female residents. Much of the opposition to the frats seems to depend on the gross national image of fraternities, not the essentially harmless frats at Wesleyan.

The administration and radical feminists oppose the frats for violating the campus nondiscrimination rule by not allowing women as members. However, they don't bother to apply the same objection to Womanist House (a residence for females) or Malcolm X House, which caters to blacks.

And how much are you paying to send your child to college this year?

Is God Punishing the Tsunami Victims?

Poll results at BeliefNet are discouraging.

Thirty eight percent of those who participated in the online poll said they believed that God caused the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Eleven percent of those said that God was either testing us or punishing us. This isn't a big number, to be sure, but the fact that anyone intelligent enough to regularly access Belief Net would think that God deliberately triggered the earthquake in order to kill so many, including so many children, is depressing. What crime were those thousands of children guilty of that God decided to destroy them? What sin had their parents committed that parents all over the world haven't committed that God chose to visit this grief upon them? To think that this horror was somehow a Divine punishment is complete nonsense.

We don't presume to possess exhaustive understanding of God's ways, of course, but nevertheless we find it most unlikely that God deliberately visits suffering and grief upon people. God has created a world that, for whatever reason, is subject to natural laws, and those laws are blind to the moral goodness of the people affected by them.

Good people sometimes suffer painful illnesses and experience horrible grief. Bad people often live opulently and die seemingly happy at a ripe age. God doesn't bring this injustice about. He may permit it to happen for reasons that have mystified believers for thousands of years, but He doesn't cause it. He may "use" it when it happens, but He doesn't make it happen.

God, we suspect, intervenes less frequently in the world than some apparently believe, and we doubt that He ever intervenes to deliberately cause innocent people harm. To think otherwise is to imagine Him to be a cruel and vindictive deity, and that is not the God of Christian belief.

Iraq in 2005

Strategy Page has predictions for 2005 in Iraq:

Election security, will Iraqis refuse to come out and vote because they are scared?

No. The 80 percent of the population that is Kurdish and Shia Arab are eager, willing and able to vote. Some of the Sunni Arabs may be able to vote as well, in areas where the terrorists are not strong enough to scare people away from the polling places.

Election legitimacy, will the rest of the world believe that the elections are real?

Yes. With 80 percent of the population voting, and the 20 percent not voting prevented from doing so by terrorists within their community, it will be a legitimate vote. One group calling for a boycott does not invalidate a vote. This is not a new problem, terrorists often threaten democracy by trying to prevent people from voting.

Osama bin Laden called for Iraqis to not vote. Will he be obeyed and is he still a strong figure in Arab world?

No. Because of all the Iraqis killed by al Qaeda terror attacks in Iraq, bin Laden and al Qaeda are widely despised and hated. Moreover, bin Laden and his Taliban buddies openly tortured and killed Shias in Afghanistan, thus the 60 percent of Iraqis who are Shia see bin Laden as an enemy.

Is Abu Musab al Zarqawi now stronger and a bigger public figure than Osama bin Laden?

No. Zarqawi is "stronger" than bin Laden right now because he is bankrolled and protected by the Baath Party in Iraq (and the Baath Party in Syria as well, and possibly Shia Islamic radicals in Iran as well.) Zarqawi was a lower level al Qaeda leader in early 2003, living in Baghdad as a guest of Saddam. He's not a very bright guy, more mouth than anything else. Right now Baath is using him as a front man to attract suicidal volunteers, and to mask the Baath Party's sordid record of atrocities in Iraq. Bin Laden is trying to get other al Qaeda commanders into Iraq, but that is proving difficult, as these guys tend to get killed quickly. Some suspect Baath assassins are more responsible than US troops.

Go to the link and read their post for December 31st which gives an analysis of the state of the insurgency. They write:

How long will this last? Not much longer. Areas of Baath Party control continue to shrink. Baath Party control was allowed to expand in 2004 as the government attempted negotiations with Sunni Arab leadership. This didn't work, as the Sunni Arab leaders were terrified by Baath and al Qaeda terror. The battle of Fallujah, and offensive operations throughout Baath strongholds in central Iraq, sharply reduced the extent of "safe areas" for terrorists. The government has not given up on negotiations with Sunni Arab leaders, but has ordered a military offensive in the meantime. The Iraqis are determined to hold elections at the end of January, 2005, with, or without, Sunni Arab participation. The attitude seems to be, if the Sunni Arabs would rather fight, or cower in their homes, than vote, then so be it. Sunni Arabs have tyrannized Iraq for too long, and most Iraqis are ready for a change.

Let's hope they're right.

Intelligent Design and Falsifiability

Imago Dei has an interesting series of posts on the matter of whether Intelligent Design is a scientific or a metaphysical theory. The difference hinges on whether or not ID is falsifiable.

A theory is falsifiable, in the philosophical sense, if there is some conceivable set of observations which, if they occurred, would disconfirm the theory. If there is no imaginable observation which would ever count against the theory, then it is not falsifiable. This doesn't mean that one would ever make the observation, only that such an observation could be imagined. For example, the claim that there are an infinite number of other universes is unfalsifiable since there's no conceivable observation we could make which would prove it wrong. It may be true or it may be false, but it's not a scientific claim. Falsifiability is one of the criteria which distinguish scientific assertions from metaphysical claims.

As Imago Dei points out, ID's critics must think it falsifiable because many of them are trying hard to convince us that it's false. I had an amusing experience with this myself not long ago.

ID is falsifiable at least to the same extent as is the Darwinian assertion that natural selection is an unguided, purposeless process that is totally efficacious in itself to produce the grand diversity of life. Thus, if the latter claim is legitimately permitted in high school science classes, for example, then ID should likewise be permitted.

In a recent column for the local paper in which I supported the idea that ID was a legitimate topic for high school science classes, I made the point that if it could be demonstrated that a molecular machine like Michael Behe's bacterial flagellum could be shown to be constructed through mechanical means without intelligent input then, although ID might not be falsified in the strict sense (since it could still be argued that God had designed the mechanisms that led to the development of the structure), it would certainly be de facto discredited.

Someone wrote in to the paper and stated in rather snarky accents that in fact this had already been done and cited the web site to prove it.

Well, the writer's grandiose assurances were not justified by the information at the web site that he had commended to the paper's readers, but that wasn't the most important aspect of his reply. People who oppose having ID taught in science classes often do so on the premise that it's not science, and they buttress the opinion that it's not science by claiming that it's not testable, i.e. not falsifiable. My critic didn't seem to be aware that by asserting (wrongly) that a major ID claim had been shown to be false he was tacitly acknowledging that ID meets a crucial criterion of scientific theories. Without realizing it he was sawing off the branch upon which he sat.

Critics of ID are in a tough spot. They can't allege that ID is false without admitting that it's falsifiable, and they can't acknowledge that it's falsifiable without admitting that it's a valid topic for a science class.

The links at Imago Dei have much more on this controversy.

Preachers of Hate

Since 9/11 there has been a flood of books on the nature of Islamo-fascism and the crisis in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Readers interested in this subject, and we think everyone should be, need to sit down with Ken Timmerman's Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War on America.

Actually the title is a little misleading because Timmerman's main topic is the resurgence of anti-semitism in the Arab world, Europe, and in certain precincts in the United States. Unlike the twentieth century outbreak of this irrational and virulent disease, the more recent renascence is not confined to the uneducated, marginal, skinhead right. The real danger today is that in Europe and America it is a contagion infecting primarily the sophisticated and influential elites on the ideological Left.

The depth and intensity of anti-Jewish hatred that exists in the Arab world and elsewhere is stunning, and Timmerman presents us with all the evidence. He also does a masterful job of exposing the murders and corruption of Yasser Arafat (The book came out before Arafat's death) who had stolen millions of dollars from the Palestinian people and been directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Israelis. He explains, too, the genesis of al Qaida and Osama bin Laden's rise to influence and the motivations behind his ascendancy.

Along the way he unmasks some of the Islamo-fascist's American and European sympathizers, most notably Noam Chomsky on the Left and Grover Norquist on the Right. It may seem odd that the Left is so sympathetic to a fascist movement, but as Timmerman reminds us, Left and Right meet at the bottom, and the bottom is their mutual hatred for Jews in general and Israel in particular.

Despite being densely packed with facts and difficult Arab names the book is quite readable and in some places it's riveting. His description of a suicide bombing at a wedding reception in Israel is almost as fascinating as it is heart-rending.

The message that Timmerman illustrates and documents throughout the book is that modern radical Islam is not just at war with Israel. It is at war with the entire Western world. It is a war fueled by hatred for our values, our freedoms, our view of social justice, our belief in tolerance, our separation of church and state. It is a war that the Islamists will fight until Israel is destroyed, all Jews are dead, and all Americans and Europeans are either dead or converts to Islam. If you think this is too strong an indictment then you really must read Preachers of Hate.

Copies can be ordered through our favorite bookseller Hearts and Minds Bookstore.

Leaders Are Readers

Jollyblogger urges us to reflect upon the fact that, "Leaders are readers and readers are leaders."

He then goes on to quote from Hugh Hewitt's book In But Not Of, wherein Hewitt writes that:

If the prospect of reading - a lot - daunts you, then you are not serious about genuine influence. The people who run the world are readers and constantly in search of more information.

Leadership, Hewitt goes on to say later, "is not a specific talent. It is a package of skills and disciplines, one of which is intellectual curiosity. This curiosity is the first ingredient of leadership."

One of the reasons for the tepidness of so many Christian churches is the fact that many Pastors either have no time, or no inclination, or both, to read. With little of the best of what has been thought or written going into their minds during the week there is little that the Pastor can offer to his parishioners from the pulpit on Sunday morning. Consequently, a lot of sermons are insipid, uninteresting and uninspiring.

The same is true of public school administrators. It is astonishing how few of them read even fiction let alone non-fiction. Lacking engagement with the ideas of the culture they are often ill-positioned to lead a faculty, particularly those faculty who teach academic disciplines like literature, history, sociology, and science. This is perhaps the main reason that administrators are managers rather than educators.Or perhaps it is because they are managers rather than educators that they don't read.

In any event, it is as unfortunate for our schools as it is for our churches when the leadership does not take the trouble to immerse themselves in good books.

John O'Neill: Man of the Year

David Horowitz's Front Page Mag bestows its Man of the Year award on John O'Neill, the Swift Boat vet who led the fight to expose John Kerry as the poseur he is. In our opinion, if they weren't going to give the honor to George Bush then O'Neill is the next best choice. You can read their rationale for it here.

Iranian "Two Fer"

Iran claims that all its forces are committed to defending their nuclear facilities from an attack by the Israelis or the Americans:

Iran suspects that Israel may attack its nuclear sites because of fears that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons. Iran says it held at least 10 people for allegedly spying on atomic sites for Israel and the US in the past year.

"The air force has been ordered to protect the nuclear sites, using all its power," Gen Salimi told a government newspaper. "All our forces including land forces, anti-aircraft [and] radar tactics are protecting the nuclear sites and an attack on them will not be simple," he added.

Hmmm. Looks like an attack on their nuclear weapons production facilities could pretty much take out their military capability as well. We're not military strategists, but we wonder why Iran would offer its enemies such a tempting opportunity for a "two fer".

Perpetual Regression

It looks like nothing much has changed for the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas is just Yasser Arafat writ small. FoxNews.com has this report:

Israel has demanded a crackdown on violent groups, which Mahmoud Abbas (the leading candidate to replace the late, unlamented terrorist murderer Yasser Arafat) has repeatedly rejected.

In an interview Saturday with The Associated Press, Abbas said Palestinians are beholden to the gunmen for their resistance against the Israeli occupation and have a duty to protect them from reprisals.

At a rally Sunday in a basketball stadium in the central Gaza town of Deir el-Balah, Abbas pledged before thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of gunmen, not to abandon them.

"We say to our fighting brothers that are wanted by Israel, we will not rest until you can enjoy a life of security, peace, and dignity, so you can live in your country with total freedom," he said.

Abbas also promised to follow in Arafat's footsteps, saying he would not rest until an independent Palestinian state was established, Israeli settlements were dismantled and Palestinian refugees got their rights.

"The principles of Yasser Arafat, and his sayings, are his will and it is our duty to implement it," Abbas said.

Mahmoud Mashabat, head of the Jenin Martyrs' Brigades, a small, local militant group, embraced Abbas and kissed him.

After Abbas left, the gunmen began shooting in the air.

On Saturday, Abbas was warmly welcomed by dozens of Palestinian gunmen in the Rafah refugee camp, a frequent flashpoint of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. During that rally, he praised Palestinian fugitives wanted by Israel as heroes.

Look for the carnage to continue until the Israelis finally get tired of burying their children's body parts and either pull up stakes and leave or decide to eradicate the PLO and it's terrorist affiliates. Those are the only two realistic options for Israel. Peace with the Palestinians is achievable only through mass evacuation, total conquest, or total surrender. Nothing less will appease the Palestinians and anyone who thinks otherwise is not living in the real world. Unfortunately, the world is full of people who are not living in the real world.

Logan's Story

Maybe we could trade Michael Moore, Alec Baldwin, and a whiner to be named later for this kid. It certainly wouldn't be a fair trade, but we'd sure be better off. Read the story to find out why.

Starve The Beast

Andrew Sullivan.com directs us to this op-ed by Will Wilkinson who argues against the conservative philosophy that cutting revenues (taxes) will result in lower spending. He refers to this as the "starve-the-beast" strategy for reducing spending and hence the size of government, and he concludes that it doesn't work:

When current spending is financed by current taxes, voters see it as their money being spent, and so are more motivated to be frugal. But when current spending is financed by debt, voters see it as future voters' money being spent. If voters prefer to benefit now and have some one else pay later, there is no good reason to think legislators will see deficits as a reason to restrain themselves.

But we need principled political discipline now more than ever. It is not enough to cut out the pork. According to economists Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Cato Institute and Kent Smetters, cutting the entire discretionary budget forever would still not be enough. The real fiscal beasts are Social Security and Medicare. Unless they are tamed by serious reform, they will grow out of control and devour almost all future federal revenues.

A sustainable and just America requires the principled will to eliminate the unconstitutional, the inessential and the ineffective, and the courage to reform Social Security and Medicare today so that future generations will inherit a world at least as well-off as our own.

It's an interesting argument that Wilkinson makes and readers should peruse the entire piece at the link.

Dawkinsian Dissimulation

Here's an interesting link to a story about Richard Dawkins' integrity, or lack thereof, that will interest anyone familiar with Dawkins and the Intelligent Design/Naturalism debates.

One frequently hear's charges of dishonesty levelled at ID proponents. Whether or not those charges are sometimes true, and most of them turn out to be bogus, it's worth pointing out that some Darwinians find deliberate falsehood an agreeable tactic when it suits their purpose.

Kudos to the pro-Darwinian Dispatches From the Culture Wars for being willing to expose the dishonesty of a famous ally. The author of the blog, whose name is unknown to me, writes:

I am, as should be obvious to everyone who has read any of my writings on this page, a staunch advocate of evolutionary theory and a dogged opponent of the attacks that creationists of all types make against it. I have spent many years actively fighting against creationism and defending evolution and I'm the co-founder of an organization that exists solely for that purpose. But I also strongly believe in honesty, and I have no patience for those on either side of a dispute who believe that it's okay to distort the truth as long as it benefits "your side". Second, let me say that I still regard Richard Dawkins as one of our finest evolutionary scholars, and an even better writer and popularizer. But to put him on a pedestal would be a mistake; he is a human being, and as such he is as prone to dishonesty and ego protection as any of us, as I think this story will illustrate.

Follow the link above for a full explanation of what exactly Dawkins did.

Environmental Religion

This 2003 speech to the Commoonwealth Club by science novelist Michael Crichton is a real stem-winder. Crichton argues that environmentalism is a religion and a very harmful one at that. Anyone interested in the environmental movement will find Crichton's remarks either very welcome or very disturbing, depending upon where your sympathies lie. Here are a few excerpts from Crichton's talk:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.

There's much more. Crichton gainsays the conventional wisdom about everything from DDT, population growth, Greenhouse emissions, oil depletion, and second hand smoke.

We're skeptical about some of his claims, although we confess that we're not in a position to assess them, and it probably isn't fair to expect that he would cite sources in a speech, but if he's right then an awful lot of what we've always known to be true, just isn't.

Thanks to Dick F. for passing the link along to us.

New Year's Wishes

Bill and I wish all of our readers here at Viewpoint a great 2005! We thank you for spending time with us in 2004, and we hope that you include visiting with us on a regular basis among your New Year's resolutions.

God Bless you and your loved ones,

Where Was God?

The death toll is at 120,000 and still rising. It is, as far as we know, the greatest natural disaster ever to befall humanity in a single day. A friend, Steve M., directs us to Andrew Sullivan's blog which has a short piece linking the reader to Martin Kettle at the Guardian and Stephen Bainbridge at Mirror of Justice who raise the inevitable and vexing question: How could a good and all-powerful God allow this incomprehensible tragedy to happen? It's the same question with which Voltaire skewered the believers of his day after an earthquake killed fifty thousand residents of the city of Lisbon in 1755.

Kettle closes his column with these words:

A non-scientific belief system, especially one that is based on any kind of notion of a divine order, has some explaining to do, however. What God sanctions an earthquake? What God protects against it? Why does the quake strike these places and these peoples and not others? What kind of order is it that decrees that a person who went to sleep by the edge of the ocean on Christmas night should wake up the next morning engulfed by the waves, struggling for life?

From at least the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes. Earthquakes do not merely kill and destroy. They challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. Europe in the 18th century had the intellectual curiosity and independence to ask and answer such questions. But can we say the same of 21st-century Europe? Or are we too cowed now to even ask if the God can exist that can do such things?

Mirror of Justice writes this:

The tsunamis that have spawned mind-boggling human suffering across Asia represent perhaps the most difficult challenge to the anthropological presumptions driving the project that we've undertaken on Mirror of Justice. How can we insist on the theologically grounded dignity of the human person when the natural order itself appears to defy such dignity? Nature's challenge is especially poignant during this Christmas season, as the divine concern for humanity promised by the Incarnation seems relatively meaningless given the utter absence of concern embodied in the shifting of the earth's plates deep under the ocean.

Clinging to a belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good deity appears hopeless in the wake of these deadly waves. Invoking human free will offers little help, as the earthquake (unlike all war, much famine, and many diseases) is not causally related to any human act or omission. Chalking it up to the mystery of God is understandably seen as a cop-out. Another common response is to insist that creation fell along with humanity, and this world is obviously not as God desired. But why would God have wired the earth itself to unleash death and destruction once humanity rejected Him? Murder is a human creation; plate tectonics are not. Is not God culpable for earthquakes? And if God is culpable, is not the entire Christian worldview proved to be the illogical relic portrayed by critics?

It seems to me that if we want a moral anthropology rooted in the Incarnation to be taken seriously, we must try to offer an explanation of a world in which tsunamis rip children from their mothers' arms. This is an age-old question, but it must lie at the heart of any effort to engage a culture made skeptical of our "Catholic legal theory" project, at least in part, by pervasive human suffering seemingly caused by the God we embrace.

It would take astonishing chutzpah to think that one can offer a convincing answer to these challenges, and so close to the catastrophe one is loath to even discuss it for fear that it may seem as though the pain and grief hundreds of thousands are experiencing are something abstract and unreal. Even so, the questions are being raised and to refrain from attempting an answer might seem like ducking the issue. So we offer the following, fully aware that no argument, no matter how successful, does anything to console the grieving or to alleviate their pain. Arguments and explanations are for the observers of suffering, not those who are immersed in it.

Nor are we presumptuous enough to think that the answer we suggest resolves all the questions, but we do think that it lies in the direction any theist who seeks an answer to these enormously difficult matters needs to tread.

We start by noting that much evil in the world is the result of human volition, and ever since Augustine the free-will defense of God's goodness has been, if not trouble free, at least serviceable. One problem with it, however, is that it only addresses the problem of moral evil. It does not help us answer those who ask how a good God could allow suffering caused by natural calamities such as storms, accidents, famine, and disease. Or earthquakes. Whatever the reason God may have for permitting moral evil, wouldn't a perfectly good and all-powerful creator have designed a world in which there was no natural evil?

Before going further, we should stipulate that although we hold that God is powerful enough to create universes, we do not hold that His power is unbounded. God's capabilities are constrained by, inter alia, His own nature, and one aspect of that nature is that it is rational and logical. God cannot act irrationally or illogically since to do so would be to put Himself in conflict with Himself. Thus God's power is such that He can do anything that is logically possible to do, i.e. God can do anything that does not entail a contradiction or a logically inconceivable state of affairs. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it. Nor is it within God's power today to create a state of affairs in which it would be true to say that the reader of these words never existed.

Perhaps one way to answer the question, then, is to suggest that it may not be possible, even for God, to create a world governed by physical laws in which there is no potential for harm. For example, any world governed by gravity and the law of momentum is going to contain within it the potential for people to fall and suffer injury. Thus the laws of gravity and momentum are not compossible with a world free of the potential for injury. Once God decided to create a world governed by laws, those laws entailed the possibility of harm.

For instance, as Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee explain in their wonderful book Rare Earth, it appears that a planet suitable for life must have plate tectonics, and so, if God is going to create a habitable planet it must have the potential for earthquakes and thus injury and death.

It might be objected, of course, that many theists hold that God creates heaven and that heaven is a world in which there is no natural evil, so it must be possible for a world governed by laws of some kind to exist without there being any human suffering. If God could create heaven, why wouldn't He, if He was perfectly good, create this world like that one?

Perhaps the answer is that God did create this world like that. Maybe the reason that there is no natural evil in heaven is that God's presence suffuses that world, fills every nook and cranny, and acts as a governor, an override, on the laws which might otherwise result in harm to beings which exist there. The skeptic might rejoin that even were he to grant that God's presence in heaven is superordinate to the laws which govern that world, that doesn't help the theist because there's no reason why God couldn't do something similar here in this world as well. Since He obviously doesn't, He must not be perfectly good.

This is, however, exactly what Christian theology says that God did, in fact, do. The account goes something like this: God created a world regulated by the laws of physics and indwelt that world with man, his presence suppressing or negating any harmful effects the expression of those laws may have had. Although the potential for harm existed, there was no disease, suffering, accident, or even death.

At some point, however, man betrayed the idyllic relationship that existed between himself and God. In an act of cosmic infidelity, man chose to use his freedom in a way, the only way, apparently, that God had forbidden in order to assert his autonomy and independence from God.

It was as if a good and faithful husband returned home to discover the love of his life in bed with his worst enemy. If, as "open theists" suggest, God did not foresee this crushing blow coming, it must have broken his heart, metaphorically speaking. Man had made a choice to treat with contempt the wishes of his Creator. He had implicitly demanded that he be completely free to do as he pleased, and God would not force him to do otherwise. Grief-stricken at the rejection He suffered at the hands of His beloved, God withdrew his presence from the world, leaving man, in his self-imposed, self-chosen alienation and estrangement, to fend for himself against the laws and forces which govern the universe.

From time to time that estrangement has terrible consequences. Usually those consequences are drawn out over months or years, like famines or epidemics of influenza or plague. Once in a while, though, they are compressed into relatively brief intervals of time, and it is human to wonder at such moments, where is God? Perhaps God is right at hand, weeping for a world which rejects and excludes Him one moment while blaming Him for not intervening to prevent our suffering the next.

Maybe someone has a better answer. Maybe there is no answer. But this, at least, is our answer.

Stinginess Watch

This site has a list of the contributions of all donor nations and organizations on record as having pledged disaster relief to nations hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami. Two things are noteworthy: All the oil-besotted Muslim nations combined (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and U.A.E.)will send to their Islamic brethren a little more than half of what Australia, England, or the United States have pledged individually, and France's contribution is not much more than the value of my house.

Indian Ocean Tsunami Animation

Go here for animation of the propagation of the tsunami across the Indian Ocean and other information on the catastrophe. Thanks to Belmont Club for the tip.

Meanwhile Keith Olberman at MSNBC is determined to find some way to make the administration look bad in this terrible event. The man is obsessed with blaming someone, preferably Republicans, for every bad thing, whether great or small, that happens in the world. We expect him to announce soon that there is evidence that the earthquake was most certainly a result of Bush's environmental indifference, and that there is no reason not to think that Halliburton played some nefarious role.

Barna's Year-End Review

The Barna Group, a Christian polling organization, has compiled a summary of their findings for the year 2004. Their results are very interesting:

After a year of interviewing thousands of adults, ministers, and young people, many insights into the spiritual contours of Americans emerged from the studies conducted by The Barna Group. In his annual yearend summary of some of the highlights and lowlights from his company's research, cultural analyst George Barna noted that there is reason to be encouraged - and concerned.

Reflecting on the more than 10,000 interviews his firm completed during 2004, Barna identified some of the outcomes he felt were most noteworthy. Those facts were divided into four types: the most encouraging outcomes, the most surprising findings, the most disappointing revelations, and the most significant challenges.

Here are just a few of their findings. Explanations of these and the rest of their results can be found at the link:

America's youngest pastors are more aware of, and responsive to, the battle for the minds and hearts of children than are the older pastors.

Half of all born again adults have endeavored to share their faith in Christ with a non-believer in the past year. Although a large share of those efforts are indirect - such as "lifestyle evangelism" - and few believers are aware of anyone accepting Christ as a result of their efforts, there is a veritable army of Christians who understand and accept the importance of bringing the good news to the world.

For many years, the long-term commitment to Christ by people who were saved as children has been questioned. A national survey revealed, however, that people who embrace Christ before the age of 13 are more likely to remain absolutely committed to Christ in their adult years than are people who accept Christ in their teenage or adult years.

Faith has had a limited affect on people's behavior, whether related to moral convictions and practices, relational activities, lifestyle choices or economic practices. Evangelical Christians, who are just 7% of the national population and less than 10% of those who consider themselves to be Christian, are the exception.

Just half of all Protestant Senior Pastors (51%) meet the criteria for having a biblical worldview. The criteria are believing that God is the all-knowing and all-powerful creator of the universe who still rules it today; that Jesus Christ never sinned; that Satan is real; that salvation is received through faith in Christ, not by good deeds; that every follower of Christ has a responsibility to share their faith with non-believers; that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches; that absolute moral truth exists; and that absolute moral truth is described in the Bible.

Only 8% of teenagers consider music piracy - defined as copying their CDs for friends and making unauthorized downloads of music from the Internet - to be morally wrong.

There seems to be a consistent degree of attrition of men from the Christian faith. The numbers of men who are unchurched is rising, while the numbers of men who are "deeply spiritual" and those who possess an active faith (attend church, pray and read the Bible during the week) is declining.

People who accept Christ as their savior when they are adults are less likely to embrace biblical theology than are those who accept Christ when they are children.

Female pastors are substantially different in their theological beliefs than are male pastors. They tend to be much more liberal in their views, are less likely to have a biblical worldview, are less likely to be born again, and more likely to have been divorced.

Four out of ten adults have seen a movie in the past two years that has caused them to think more seriously about their faith. As the mass media and customized media capture an increasing share of people's attention, Christians are challenged to figure out how to harness or address the power of such communication vehicles for the advancement of Christianity.

Read the whole report, especially if you're interested in the state of the Christian church and faith in America.

Donations For Tsunami Victims

Evangelical Outpost offers links to some sites where readers can contribute to relief for tsunami victims. "Stingy" Americans may disregard this post.

Saddam's Lawyer

If you knew that an American was going to help defend a murderous tyrant in a court of law who would you guess the American lawyer to be? You would probably try to think of someone who has spent much of his life defending murderous thugs of one sort or another and you would probably think of someone who has spent his life working to undo whatever good the United States has accomplished in the world, a sort of lawyerly Noam Chomsky.

William Kunstler would be a good guess, but he's dead. Did we hear you say Ramsey Clark? Congratulations! That's the correct answer. We admit that it was a little obvious, though, once we said that the mystery lawyer had spent his life defending tyrants and opposing American efforts to neutralize them.

Quake Animation

Go here for animation and information on the Sumatra quake. Thanks to Belmont Club for the tip.

Meanwhile Keith Olberman at MSNBC is determined to find some way to make the administration look bad in this terrible event. The man is obsessed with blaming someone, preferably Republicans, for every bad thing that happens in the world. We expect him to announce soon that there is evidence that the earthquake was a result of Bush policies, and that there is no reason not to think that Halliburton played a role.

Abortion Confusion

Adam Nagourney has a column in the New York Times (free subscription) in which he quotes a number of leading Democrats offering thoughts on where the Party needs to go on the issue of abortion. Some of the quotes are revealing. Others are amusing, and some are just incoherent.

"All these issues that put us into the extreme and not the mainstream really hurt us with the heartland of the country," said Donna Brazile, a Democratic Party leader who managed Al Gore's campaign in 2000. "Even I have trouble explaining to my family that we are not about killing babies."

So, a liberal Democrat is acknowledging that being pro-choice on abortion and in favor of gay marriage are extremist positions. And here we had been given to believe during the campaign that the traditionalists were the extremists.

"If somebody is willing to stick with us who is pro-life, that means they are the right kind of pro-life person," said Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont. "What I don't want to do is to have a national message that makes it impossible for you to be a conservative, or to be a progressive who can't win."

The right kind of pro-life person for Dr. Dean is one who goes along with the Democrats' position that there should be no restrictions on a woman's right to have an abortion. In other words, the right kind of pro-lifer is really a pro-choicer.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said Republicans had "been successful at painting the view of the pro-choice movement as abortion on demand - and nothing can be farther from the truth."

This is a simply breathtaking statement. If the signature conviction of the pro-choice movement is no longer that abortion should be available to anyone who wants one at any time in a woman's pregnancy, then when did they change? Pro-choicers are unshakably committed to Roe v. Wade which protects exactly this legal right. Why are they?

"I think it's a big mistake for Democrats to think they can win politically by moving away from a pro-choice stand," said Nancy Keenan, president of Naral Pro-Choice America. "It's time for Democrats to stop playing the defensive role on this issue and of doing a better job of showing how extreme the other side really is."

Ms Keenan needs to check with Ms Brazille about who the extremists are on this issue.

Gloria Feldt, the president of Planned Parenthood, said Democrats "need to stop allowing the extreme, anti-choice right wing of the Republican Party to paint them into a corner where all they talk about is abortion. We have the high ground here if we focus our policy and our discussion on the prevention of unintended pregnancies."

In other words, let's change the subject so that no one sees how incoherent we are on the issue of abortion.

"We let the Republicans define us as the abortion any time, anywhere party," said Gordon Fischer, the departing Democratic chairman of Iowa, a state where Mr. Kerry suffered one of his more frustrating losses to President Bush. "The Republicans get by as targeting us as the doctrinaire party, when they are the doctrinaire party."

So there! You are! No, you are!

Mr. Wolfson said that if Mr. Bush tried to replace a justice who supports Roe v. Wade with one who opposes it, than an all-out battle would begin. But he and other Democrats said that would not necessarily be the case if the president sought to replace one justice who opposes Roe v. Wade with another.

Mr. Wolfson needs to confer with Sen. Feinstein. Repeat ten times: Democrats are not the party of abortion on demand and to say that they are couldn't be further from the truth.

This emerging debate is the latest fallout from Mr. Kerry's loss as Democrats argue the reasons for his defeat. In doing so, the party is struggling to balance the views of its most loyal members with the need to block Republicans from broadening their appeal through cultural issues.

Or, more simply, if the rank and file Democrats really knew where both parties stood on the main cultural issues of our time they would abandon the Democratic party in droves.

Bush/Blair : Roosevelt/Churchill

The Churchill historian and biographer Sir Martin Gilbert writes a column in The Observer guaranteed to ruin the Liberals' day:

People often ask how history will remember our generation of leaders in comparison with Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Many comment that today's leaders look small compared with the giants of the past. This is, I believe, a misconception. In their day, both Churchill and Roosevelt were frequently criticised, often savagely, by their countrymen, including legislators who had little knowledge of the behind-the-scenes reality of the war.

The passage of time both elevates and reduces reputations. Today there is a cult of Churchill, particularly in the United States, but also far greater scholarly criticism, which regards him, increasingly, as a flawed war leader. The same is true of Roosevelt: his recent biographers are constantly revealing - to their satisfaction, at least - feet of clay.

Although it can easily be argued that George W Bush and Tony Blair face a far lesser challenge than Roosevelt and Churchill did - that the war on terror is not a third world war - they may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill. Their societies are too divided today to deliver a calm judgment, and many of their achievements may be in the future: when Iraq has a stable democracy, with al-Qaeda neutralised, and when Israel and the Palestinian Authority are independent democracies, living side by side in constructive economic cooperation.

If they can move this latter aim, to which Bush and Blair pledged themselves on 12 November, it will be a leadership achievement of historic proportions.

Read the rest of Gilbert's rationale for ranking Bush/Blair with Roosevelt/Churchill here.