Our Administration Barks

I find it interesting to watch our present administration as they attempt to blame other countries for problems that are clearly the fault of the current and past administrations.

Specifically, while the administration and congress blusters to China with threats of tariffs if they don't let their currency float against the dollar Dr. Allan Greenspan has this to say.

From the link:

A move by China to revalue its currency "does not follow that that will lower our overall trade balance," Greenspan said. "Indeed, it's probably quite unlikely."

That's because companies are likely to turn to other countries, such as Thailand or Malaysia for goods, rather than U.S. producers. "So essentially what we will find is we're importing from a different area, but we will be importing the same goods," Greenspan said.

As Dr. Greenspan points out, the only thing that will help the US trade deficit is for Americans to buy less imports and more American products. Not very likely, especially given that America doesn't manufacture much of anything anymore.

It is interesting to note that Dr. Greenspan realizes that Americans will buy from any other country rather than from American manufacturers.

As I see it, there are either of two scenarios that are likely to unfold: American jobs and manufacturing will continue to be exported and the trade deficit will continue to grow until foreign countries cut off our credit - Mr. America, your card has been declined, or there simply won't be enough people in this country able to buy anything from anywhere because they have lost their jobs and are broke. In either case, the exportation of jobs and manufacturing will not stop until a state of equilibrium has been attained. I've mentioned this before. It means the average income and standard of living of Americans will decline as the average income and standard of living of their counter-parts in China, Mexico, etc., increases. This process is well under way. Welcome to the New World Order.

Not only are jobs and manufacturing being exported but also the R&D is being outsourced. This means that products will and are being completely developed overseas from concept to finished product and then imported and sold under an American label while the American companies lay off "non-essential" personnel to save costs and boost their stock price. But the day will come when those doing all the work realize they can go direct to the American consumer and the rest of the world as well, and cut out the middle man i.e. the American corporation who bought into the whole idea of outsourcing leaving them with no reason for being. Now that's the definition of justice.

The Demarcation Problem

One of the oft heard criticisms of Intelligent Design theory is that it is putatively non-scientific, i.e. it doesn't meet the criteria of an acceptable scientific hypothesis. Design or creationist theories have been alleged to be necessarily unscientific for a number of reasons: they do not explain by reference to natural law, they invoke unobservables, they are not testable, they do not make predictions, they are not falsifiable, they provide no mechanisms, they are not tentative, and they have no problem-solving capability.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer addresses the first three of these alleged short-comings in an article at the Discovery Institute's website. The essay is lengthy and somewhat technical, but it's an excellent analysis of the problem of trying to determine what constitutes science and what does not. In the philosophy of science this is called the Demarcation Problem, and, as many philosophers have noted, trying to find the boundaries of science is often counterproductive and is in any event a devilishly difficult task.

Before concluding that Intelligent Design is not science and Darwinism is, one should read Meyer's article. It would also be good, for the individual of a philosophical/scientific turn of mind, to read Del Ratszch's Science and its Limits and William Dembski's Design Revolution.

And Throw Away the Key!

Here's a switch. The ACLU is actually trying to get the authorities to put lawbreakers into jail. Surprised? Well, the surprise might fade some when you hear that the criminals are not cop-killers or child molestors. No. It turns out that the villainous rogues the ACLU is so concerned about incarcerating are school administrators and teachers who are defying a court imposed ban on school prayer:

NEW ORLEANS - Teachers and administrators in Tangipahoa Parish continue to violate a court-imposed school prayer ban, according to the ACLU, which on May 18 asked a federal judge to send them to jail.

For the fourth time in less than two months, the ACLU has formally notified the judge that school officials are flouting the prayer ban, imposed to settle a lawsuit the civil liberties group filed for a parent in 2003.

This time, the group says, an elementary school teacher in Tangipahoa Parish repeatedly held prayers in her fourth grade class, encouraged students to bring their Bibles to school, held Bible study classes in the cafeteria of D.C. Reeves Elementary School, and admonished students who didn't show up for the class.

In addition, the ACLU cites a prayer it says was recently given at Amite High School, over a loudspeaker, at an awards banquet. The prayer ended with the words "In Jesus' name we pray," violating the ban; the principal of the school sat silently by.

"The consent judgment is repeatedly violated by these individuals because they do not believe anything will happen to them," the ACLU said in the court filing. "Their refusal to comply with the consent decree should and must result in their removal from society."

The ACLU expends vast resources to keep criminals, even felons, out of prison, but strives to bring the hammer down on Christians who choose to practice civil disobedience. Wonderful folks, those lawyers at the ACLU.

Ideological Taxonomy

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has an interesting test that will pigeon-hole your ideological predilections for you. As with all such tests, some of the questions are irritating because neither of the options given accurately describe one's position, but even so, the overall results seem pretty accurate. Once the test is completed a link takes you to a page which describes the typical person in your political niche, of which there are about seven or eight.

Viewpoint, it turns out, falls into the "Enterpriser" category.

Use it and They Lose it

Republicans have called for cloture on the debate over the nomination of Priscilla Owen. A cloture petition requires the approval of 60 of 100 senators, to end debate on Owen's nomination. Under Senate rules that petition must rest two days while the Senate is in session and will thus come up for a vote on Tuesday.

If five Democrats do not join with the Senate's 55 Republicans to give the GOP the 60 votes they need to proceed to an up-or-down vote for Owen, Senator Frist will probably carry through with his threat to change the rule and ban the use of judicial filibusters in the Senate. That vote, known alternately as the nuclear or constitutional option, is likely to occur on Tuesday.

Frist will need 50 senators to vote for the rule change in order for it to carry. He'd win a tie since Vice-president Cheney would vote as president of the Senate to break the deadlock. Assuming he has the votes, and it's highly doubtful he would move to vote on a rule change if he didn't, Bush's nominees will be confirmed, beginning with Owens on Tuesday.

Ironically, the only way the Democrats can stop the ban on the filibuster is to give Frist his 60 votes for cloture on Tuesday. If they do, then the vote to change the rule will not come up until at least the next nominee is considered. In other words, the Dems are in the position of being able to save their chief weapon of judicial obstructionism only by choosing not to use it.

Cheap Ethics

A recent Zogby poll of 18 to 24 year olds finds that:

Young Americans entering the workforce overwhelmingly value honesty and integrity, with 92% saying they believe that doing the right thing is more important than getting ahead in their careers-but there is also a strong undercurrent of competing values, placing loyalty to friends, love and getting ahead personally above honesty in business dealings.

In addition to the 34% who say that doing the right thing can be too costly, another three-in-ten (31%) say ethics are important as long as they do not compromise personal goals.

In other words, doing the right thing is important for a significant fraction of this age group only so long as it doesn't get in the way of their ambitions. Lying is wrong, for example, except when it's necessary to advance oneself or to keep out of trouble. Such devotion to integrity is not very encouraging.

Ethicist Michael Josephson reminds us that, 'Ethics is having the character and the courage to do the right thing even when it costs more than we want to pay.' If we want to build long-term trusting relationships, each of us should strive to make a stronger commitment to practice the kinds of ethical values many of our grandparents have lived by - honesty, integrity, loyalty, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship."

The difference is that our grandparents believed that Josephson's virtues were objectively right, that they were grounded in something beyond ourselves. For many today virtue is entirely subjective and grounded in nothing more than our own feelings. Given that view, there really is no reason to embrace the virtues when they run counter to our own wants and desires.

There's much more on the survey at the link.

Imagine

Ed Whelan at NRO poses the following scenario:

Imagine, if you will, that a Democrat President nominated a judge whose constitutional and policy views were, by any measure, on the extreme left fringes of American society.

Let's assume, for example, that this nominee had expressed strong sympathy for the position that there is a constitutional right to prostitution as well as a constitutional right to polygamy.

Let's say, further, that he had attacked the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts as organizations that perpetuate stereotyped sex roles and that he had proposed abolishing Mother's Day and Father's Day and replacing them with a single androgynous Parent's Day.

And, to get really absurd, let's add that he had called for an end to single-sex prisons on the theory that if male prisoners are going to return to a community in which men and women function as equal partners, prison is just the place for them to get prepared to deal with women.

Let's further posit that this nominee had opined that a manifest imbalance in the racial composition of an employer's work force justified court-ordered quotas even in the absence of any intentional discrimination on the part of the employer. But then, lo and behold, to make this nominee even more of a parody of an out-of-touch leftist, let's say it was discovered that while operating his own office for over a decade in a city that was majority-black, this nominee had never had a single black person among his more than 50 hires.

Imagine, in sum, a nominee whose record is indisputably extreme and who could be expected to use his judicial role to impose those views on mainstream America. Surely such a person would never be nominated to an appellate court. Surely no Senate Democrat would support someone with such extreme views. And surely Senate Republicans, rather than deferring to the nominating power of the Democrat President, would pull out all stops-filibuster and everything-to stop such a nominee.

Well, not quite. The hypothetical nominee I have just described is, in every particular except his sex, Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the time she was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993.

President Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg on June 22, 1993. A mere six weeks later, on August 3, 1993, the Senate confirmed her nomination by a 96-3 vote.

(The source for the information in the second through fourth paragraphs is "Report of Columbia Law School Equal Rights Advocacy Project: The Legal Status of Women under Federal Law," co-authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brenda Feigen Fasteau in September 1974. The information in the fifth paragraph can be found in the transcript of Ginsburg's confirmation hearing.)

Democrats don't see jurists like Ginsburg as "extreme", of course, because they agree with her. An extremist, in their lexicon, is anyone more conservative than they are, which is probably 80% or more of the nation and probably every man who as ever served as president of this country.

Purging Religion From Public Life

Here are four posts from Tongue-Tied which show just how unwilling some people are to honor and celebrate the diversity which makes us a great nation, at least when the diversity takes the form of Christian displays and themes:

Florida Today is reporting that the family of one graduating high school senior in that state wants its child's graduation moved from a local chapel to a more secular venue.

The parents of a Palm Bay High School student, with the help of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, are threatening to sue unless the school district covers up all religious symbols at Calvary Chapel in West Melbourne for the ceremony. Barring that, they say they want the ceremony moved.

"Nobody wants this graduation to be disrupted," said Alex Luchenitser, senior litigation counsel for AUSCS. "We just want this to take place in a way that all students feel comfortable, no matter what religion they believe in."

School officials say moving the ceremony would disrupt three more public school graduations scheduled at the church, and have said they will not change their plans.

How many Christian students, do you suppose, would feel uncomfortable were the graduation ceremony held in a Synagogue? Why is it that the only people who seem to be tolerant of other peoples' expressions of faith are Christians? Just asking.

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A weekly newspaper in Richmond, Va. has come across what it calls a "blooming violation" of the clause requiring separation of and state - a bed of azalea bushes in the shape of a cross on public property.

Style Weekly says the display in Bryan Park dates back more than half a century, but a local gadfly says the 12-by-20 foot show of spring color is long past its prime.

"You can understand in the sensibilities of the time 40 or 50 years ago," says Mike Sarahan, a former attorney with the city of Richmond. "But in the sensibilities of our time, in a multicultural and interfaith society, we should be more attuned" to the meaning such symbols evoke, he says.

Yes, and since the cross is often referred to as a tree in Christian hymns and writings, in light of our present sensibilities and our multicultural and interfaith society (whatever that means), we should demand that every tree in our public parks be removed forthwith.

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Malcontents in Arkansas are pressuring the University of Arkansas to bar a Christian group from using Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville for one of their meetings because they don't like what the group stands for, according to the Northwest Arkansas Times.

Various groups in the area say the Promise Keepers, an group of predominantly evangelical Christian men dedicated to preserving morality and family values, are intolerant and shouldn't be allowed to use campus facilities.

Melanie Dietzel, president of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women, insists that she is for freedom of speech and faith but "not when it's something designed to hurt other people ... (the Promise Keepers') rhetoric is certainly hurtful to people and I don't think that's something the university should encourage."

Evidently, swearing fidelity to, and respect for, one's spouse is hurtful rhetoric, but one wonders who is being hurt by it. The only people we can think of would be the women these men would otherwise be philandering with.

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Officials in Washington State are trying to determine whether a Bible verse can be considered offensive after a nimrod complained about one such verse on a vanity license plate, according to KOMO-TV.

Jane Milhans of Tacoma has had a plate reading "John 3-16" for some 21 years without a complaint, but a woman recently called the state to say it was an illegal endorsement of religion by the state.

The woman's complaint read in part: "I was offended that I have to be 'prayed over' by a license plate... What happened to keeping church and state separate?"

Milhans will now have to defend her plate in front of a review committee, which will decide next month whether she can keep it.

UPDATE: The state has decided that Milhans can keep her plate.

That's a relief. It would be an additional relief to read that the woman who filed the complaint is receiving the psychiatric care she obviously requires.

Prager on Moral Absolutes

Viewpoint has frequently observed that in order for there to be any meaningful morality there must be a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, each person simply decides right and wrong based upon his or her own preferences and predilections.

Dennis Prager has an interesting piece on this very topic in installment XI of his excellent series on Judeo-Christian values. One point Prager makes that is of some interest is that:

[B]elievers in Judeo-Christian moral absolutes often assume that situational ethics is the same thing as moral relativism and therefore regard situational ethics as incompatible with Judeo-Christian morality. They mistakenly argue that, just as allowing individuals to determine what is right and wrong negates moral absolutes, allowing situations to determine what is right and wrong also negates moral absolutes.

This is a misunderstanding of the meaning of moral absolutes. It means that if an act is good or bad, it is good or bad for everyone in the identical situation ("universal morality").

But "everyone" is hardly the same as "every situation." An act that is wrong is wrong for everyone in the same situation, but almost no act is wrong in every situation. Sexual intercourse in marriage is sacred; when violently coerced, it is rape. Truth telling is usually right, but if, during World War II, Nazis asked you where a Jewish family was hiding, telling them the truth would have been evil.

So, too, it is the situation that determines when killing is wrong. That is why the Ten Commandments says "Do not murder," not "Do not kill." Murder is immoral killing, and it is the situation that determines when killing is immoral and therefore murder. Pacifism, the belief that it is wrong to take a life in every situation, is based on the mistaken belief that absolute morality means "in every situation" rather than "for everyone in the same situation." For this reason, it has no basis in Judeo-Christian values, which holds that there is moral killing (self-defense, defending other innocents, taking the life of a murderer) and immoral killing (intentional murder of an innocent individual, wars of aggression, terrorism, etc.).

This will upset some who recoil from any suggestion that Christian ethics can be situational, but I think Prager is correct about what he says here. Even so, the important point is this: The choice people make as to how they should live is purely arbitrary unless they are following the will of God. If there is a God there is right and wrong. If there is no God then right and wrong are almost completely meaningless terms, and those who believe that God is irrelevant to our everyday life could not be more wrong.

<i>Newsweek's</i> Hypocrisy

Newsweek's decision to run a false story about military interrogators flushing a Koran down a toilet is of a piece with Dan Rather's decision to run a story, which also turned out to be false, about George Bush supposedly having shirked his National Guard duties. In their lust to discredit the Bush administration by any means necessary both have corrupted the profession of journalism and, in Newsweek's case, incited ignorant barbarians to riot and murder.

Ann Coulter spotlights the stark inconsistency displayed by Newsweek's editors in their decisions about whether or not a story should appear in their pages:

When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.

When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey's nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.

When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones' accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff's then-employer The Washington Post -- which owns Newsweek -- decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.

So apparently it's possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it.

Why no pause for reflection when Isikoff had a story about American interrogators at Guantanamo flushing the Quran down the toilet? Why not sit on this story for, say, even half as long as NBC News sat on Lisa Meyers' highly credible account of Bill Clinton raping Juanita Broaddrick?

Somehow Newsweek missed the story a few weeks ago about Saudi Arabia arresting 40 Christians for "trying to spread their poisonous religious beliefs." But give the American media a story about American interrogators defacing the Quran, and journalists are so appalled there's no time for fact-checking -- before they dash off to see the latest exhibition of "Piss Christ."

Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas justified Newsweek's decision to run the incendiary anti-U.S. story about the Quran, saying that "similar reports from released detainees" had already run in the foreign press --"and in the Arab news agency al-Jazeera."

Is there an adult on the editorial board of Newsweek? Al-Jazeera also broadcast a TV miniseries last year based on the "Protocols of the Elders Of Zion." (I didn't see it, but I hear James Brolin was great!) Al-Jazeera has run programs on the intriguing question, "Is Zionism worse than Nazism?" (Take a wild guess where the consensus was on this one.) It runs viewer comments about Jews being descended from pigs and apes. How about that for a Newsweek cover story, Evan? You're covered -- al-Jazeera has already run similar reports!

Ironically, among the reasons Newsweek gave for killing Isikoff's Lewinsky bombshell was that Evan Thomas was worried someone might get hurt. It seems that Lewinsky could be heard on tape saying that if the story came out, "I'll (expletive) kill myself."

But Newsweek couldn't wait a moment to run a story that predictably ginned up Islamic savages into murderous riots in Afghanistan, leaving hundreds injured and 16 dead. Who could have seen that coming? These are people who stone rape victims to death because the family "honor" has been violated and who fly planes into American skyscrapers because -- wait, why did they do that again?

No matter how I look at it, I can't grasp the editorial judgment that kills Isikoff's stories about a sitting president molesting the help and obstructing justice, while running Isikoff's not particularly newsworthy (or well-sourced) story about Americans desecrating a Quran at Guantanamo.

Even if it were true, why not sit on it? There are a lot of reasons the media withhold even true facts from readers. These include:

A drama queen nitwit exclaimed she'd kill herself. (Evan Thomas' reason for holding the Lewinsky story.)

The need for "more independent reporting." (Newsweek President Richard Smith explaining why Newsweek sat on the Lewinsky story even though the magazine had Lewinsky on tape describing the affair.)

"We were in Havana." (ABC president David Westin explaining why "Nightline" held the Lewinsky story.)

Unavailable for comment. (Michael Oreskes, New York Times Washington bureau chief, in response to why, the day The Washington Post ran the Lewinsky story, the Times ran a staged photo of Clinton meeting with the Israeli president on its front page.)

Protecting the privacy of an alleged rape victim even when the accusation turns out to be false.

Protecting an accused rapist even when the accusation turns out to be true if the perp is a Democratic president most journalists voted for.

Protecting a reporter's source.

How about the media adding to the list of reasons not to run a news item: "Protecting the national interest"? If journalists don't like the ring of that, how about this one: "Protecting ourselves before the American people rise up and lynch us for our relentless anti-American stories."

A year or so ago a bunch of Palestinian terrorists entered a Christian church in one of the Palestinian towns and proceeded to desecrate the place, spreading excrement and urine throughout the sanctuary and using pages from the Bible as toilet paper. Not a single Muslim, as far as I know, suffered even the slightest injury at the hands of an outraged Christian over this indecency. Nor did the MSM bestir themselves to expatiate on what disgusting swine those Palestinians must be. The American mainstream media only care about such things when they can be used to make their fellow Americans look bad in the eyes of the world.

Dr. Eller Replies

Last month we posted some commentary on the 31st National Convention of American Atheists, titled Atheists Convene. We specifically noted some of the comments made to the press by Dr. David Eller, an anthropologist from Boston University. Dr. Eller has replied to our criticism of his remarks and his response can be found in our May feedback forum.

He makes three points which merit a reply:

First, he takes the word "belief" to signify a conviction held in the absence of evidence. This is, in my opinion, an idiosyncratic use of the word. The usual sense of belief is something one holds to be true. Period. It may be something that can be demonstrated (e.g. I believe the Pythagorean theorem), it may be something for which there is good evidence which nevertheless falls short of proof (e.g. I believe the universe had a beginning), or it may be something for which there is little or no evidence (e.g. I could believe that there is life elsewhere in the universe).

Dr. Eller specifies in his reply that he is to be understood as intending this last sense only. Very well, but then his claim that he holds no beliefs is rather uninteresting. There probably aren't very many people who hold a belief for which there is no evidence. We can quarrel about what constitutes good evidence and how much evidence is necessary to warrant a belief, but most beliefs people hold are based on some kind of evidence.

Even so, not all beliefs are based upon evidence, and I suspect that Dr. Eller holds some beliefs for which there not only is no evidence, but for which there can be no evidence. He believes, I'm willing to bet, that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong, that a Mercedes is more attractive than a garbage truck, that a Mozart symphony is more pleasant to listen to than gangster rap. He probably holds beliefs about all of these things, or perhaps their contraries, and yet I doubt that those beliefs are based upon any evidence more substantial than his own subjective preference.

Second, Dr. Eller writes: "if I cannot provide some facts or some logic to support a claim, I should not support that claim; rather, I should reject it, at least provisionally" but what facts or logic can he adduce to support this claim itself? If what he says is true then he should reject it as lacking factual support, yet he obviously doesn't.

We might also ask why a person is not justified in holding to a belief in the absence of supporting facts until the evidence against it becomes persuasive? Why cannot beliefs be considered innocent until proven guilty? Take, for instance, my belief that the world is more than five minutes old, that it did not come into being five minutes ago complete with an apparent history that it does not really have. I have no way to prove this nor are there any facts which support my belief that cannot also be explained by the hypothesis that the world really is only five minutes old. Yet, until I'm shown evidence which contradicts my belief, I'm perfectly justified in holding it, and indeed, would be perverse not to.

Third, Dr. Eller states that my unsympathetic treatment of his claim that atheism is rational but theism "holds onto peoples' hearts even as they lose their minds" is "ugly and condescending" and smacks of "a petty mind that enjoys bringing better minds down".

What I said that elicited these strong words was that "There are few sensations more gratifying to an academic than the satisfaction of knowing that one is intellectually superior to one's fellows. We should avert our eyes from professor Eller's unseemly arrogance, acknowledging that the pleasure he derives from flaunting his superior rational gifts doubtless makes the practice of it irresistible for him."

Perhaps Dr. Eller didn't intend for his suggestion that theists are irrational and atheists are paragons of Reason to sound like an arrogant manifestation of intellectual snobbery, but it does. Moreover, when he declares that labeling as arrogant his claim that atheists are intellectually superior "smacks of a petty mind which enjoys bringing better minds down" he confirms the very assessment he objects to. What sort of person is it, after all, who would insist that his mind is better than that of his opponents if not one who enjoys flaunting what he perceives to be his superior intellectual gifts?

Back From Costa Rica

I'm back from five days of birding the cloud forests of Costa Rica and am trying to shift gears from peering through binoculars at the unbelievably gorgeous Resplendent Quetzals which inhabit those remote mountain jungles to peering at a computer monitor trying to catch up with current events.

Evidently, the big news is that the MSM has disgraced itself yet again with a bogus story that this time has cost peoples' lives. Of course, bogus news stories are no longer news. Nor, unfortunately, is it news that the people at Newsweek, which ran the story about Americans having desecrated the Koran, were taken by surprise at the violence their story provoked. These people are amazingly naive about the world in which we live and they're oblivious to the harm their recklessness and mendacities do to real people who have to live in a world of gullible savages.

Newsweek has now admitted that its story was unfounded. We wonder whether they feel any remorse for the fifteen deaths which resulted from it, and we wonder what measures they will take to punish those responsible for its publication.

All in all it's a pretty depressing tale, and it makes me want to hop on a plane back to the rain forest. I think I'd much rather be marvelling at the beauty of Costa Rica's birds and other wildlife than read about journalists, eager to discredit the American military, printing stories which incite riots and lead to the deaths of innocents.

Reply to an ID Critic

Dr. Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute wrote a column for our local paper last Friday critical of Intelligent Design. His essay can be read here. I replied with the following:

Dr. Lockitch writes that ID theorists are being disingenuous when they claim that their theory does not require that the designer be the Judeo-Christian God. He argues to the contrary that:

Imagine we discovered an alien on Mars with a penchant for bioengineering. Could such a natural being fulfill the requirements of an "intelligent designer?"

It could not.... Any natural being capable of designing the complex features of Earthly life would...require its own designer.... intelligent design cannot be satisfied with a designer who is part of the natural world.

Such a designer .... would not explain biological complexity as such. The only designer that would stop their quest for a design[er]... is one about whom one cannot ask any questions or who cannot be subjected to any kind of scientific study -- a designer that transcends nature and its laws... in short: a supernatural designer.

This is somewhat misleading. Here are four reasons why:

1. ID theorists ask whether biological information such as we find in the DNA, proteins, cellular machinery, and cellular assembly lines of living things can be produced by blind, purposeless, undirected forces or whether they require intelligent input. It may be that we can never learn anything about the designer at all, but we need know nothing about it's characteristics in order to deduce that there must be one.

If it turns out that we are able to identify the designer of earth-bound life then of course we might ask whether or not this designer itself shows evidence of design, but it is hardly a criticism of ID that it seeks a more satisfactory explanation for the complex, information-bearing structures of life than that these are just accidental products of the laws of physics and chemistry.

2. If ID theorists are going beyond the bounds of science by seeking to take the chain of causation as far as our human limitations allow, then so are cosmologists out of bounds for seeking to probe the origin of the universe as far back to the beginning as we are able. What should cosmologists do if their researches lead to the conclusion that the universe had a cause outside of itself? Abandon their quest for causes?

3. An intelligent entity, even a supernatural one, is not necessarily the God most people think of. The God of theism is not merely intelligent but is in fact the greatest possible being. Nothing in ID theory leads to such a being. For all anyone knows the designer of life could be similar to a Platonic demiurge that fashions pre-existing matter into living things. Just because some ID theorists personally believe that the designer is the God of theism, however, should no more discredit ID than the fact that many biologists think that Darwinian evolution justifies atheism should discredit Darwinism.

4. Even if it should turn out that the designer is a being similar to the God of theism that wouldn't make ID religious. The assertion that a Creator exists is no more religious than asserting the existence of other universes. The belief that there is more to reality than matter and energy is not in itself a religious claim and affirming the possibility of its truth is hardly a manifestation of religion. It would only constitute "religion" if the ID theorist were to advocate some sort of human obligation or responsibility to the designer, which, of course, no ID theorist has.

Indeed, what do we mean by the word religion, anyway? How do we recognize it? Not one person in a hundred who voices the objection that ID is religion masquerading as science can give a compelling definition of what "religion" is. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy acknowledges that the term eludes definition. Some religions have a moral code, some don't. Some religions have a god, some don't. Some religions involve worship of their deity, some don't. ID neither entails the existence of the God of any major monotheism nor does it prescribe worship of one. The fact that ID may lead to an intelligence which transcends the universe is hardly grounds for calling it religious.

Doubtless many ID adherents are religious as individuals and would like to see ID used as a means to point others to the Judeo-Christian God, but then many Darwinians are atheistic and see Darwinism as a useful tool for turning people toward materialism or naturalism. Neither the religious motivations of individual scientists on both sides of the debate nor the religious implications of their theories are relevant to the intellectual merits of their ideas.

The Collapse of the Sunni Boycott

The fallout from appointing a Sunni as defense minister in the new government includes a surge in military enlistments among Sunnis. Arthur Chrenkoff has the story:

After the Iraqi government confirmed the appointment of a Sunni in the position of defense minister. Iraqi Arab Sunnis started heading for the army enlisting centers to join the new Iraqi Army. This was evident by the long lines and large crowds of young men outside these centers in the largely Sunni area of Baghdad. This is the main reason for the increase in the terrorist activities in and around these centers.

The high unemployment amongst the Sunnis is due to non-participation in the electoral and governmental process. This is due to their religious leaders forbidding them from joining the government and the security forces in the past. This situation has now changed. We witnessed thousands of Iraqi Arab Sunnis coming from different provinces to military enlisting station in Baghdad.

Ahmend Mahmud, age 30, from Aathamiah came to the enlisting office to join the new Iraqi military. "I came because I desire to join in protecting the peace and my country," he said. Adnan Hussein from Meqdadieh who was in the old Army said; "Since the fall of the old regime I had no employment to feed my kids, thus I decided to join the new military, which pays a decent wage, and I heard a number of (Sunni) religious leaders call for us to join the new army". Luaai Ahmed from Aathamiah said, "I voluntarily enlisted in the new military because I wanted to and upon advise from my relatives".

Chrenkoff concludes with this observation: "The Sunni involvement in the new government and new security forces is a nightmare scenario both for the neo-Baathist insurgents and Al Zarqawi's jihadis - it means the loss of their only constituency."

We are not at the end of this struggle, but all indications are that we are moving in the right direction. We suspect that if Zarqawi has been captured or killed the morale of the insurgents, which is already very low, will hit rock bottom and thousands of them will just pack it in. The foreign fighters, too, will look for other ways to fight their jihad against a foe that they might be able to defeat at least on occasion. We'll see, perhaps soon.

Correction

Brother Dick is out of town for a couple of days and asked me to post our anniversary message. In my enthusiasm of the fact that we have been online for an entire year, I hastily posted the notice but as it turns out, I was a bit premature as Monday, the 16th is the one year anniversary of viewpoint.

Nonetheless, a special thanks goes out to all of our viewers, yes, you, who consider what we have to say worth your time.

Thank you,

One Year Anniversary

Today is the one year anniversary of Viewpoint. In the last twelve months Bill and I have compiled over 1060 posts and received over 28,000 hits on our traffic meter. Our sincere thanks to everyone who has visited us. We deeply appreciate your interest and hope to continue offering fare worthy of your time and attention.

The Necessity of Free Will

Last month we cited the thread at Evangelical Outpost addressing the free will /determinism problem. It's a difficult puzzle, for which a satisfactory resolution has eluded philosophers for over two thousand years.

The fundamental question is this: Is there more than one possible future, or is the future wholly determined by our environment, our genes, and/or God?

Those who argue for determinism often make two arguments, one stronger than the other. The weaker is simply an untestable assertion that we always act in accord with our strongest desire. Our strongest motives determine our action. As many people have pointed out, however, this is based upon a tautology since our strongest desire is defined as whichever one we act upon. It's therefore true that we always act upon our strongest desire, but its a trivial truth.

We might break out of the tautology and define strongest desire as whichever one we feel most urgently, but then, since it is possible to act on desires that we're not aware of at all, the claim that we always act in accord with our strongest desire becomes problematic. The determinist has no way to demonstrate that we always act in accord with the desire we feel most strongly and his position is thereby undermined.

The determinist's second, more compelling argument, is based on the difficulty of stating exactly what is meant by a free choice. The determinist rightly points out that an absolutely free choice cannot be one which has no causes. If our choices, or at least some of them, were completely uncaused then they would be spontaneous, constantly surprising, and totally unpredictable. But if our choices do have causes then, the argument goes, isn't it those causes which determine the choice? If so, in what sense is the choice free?

We might say that if atheism is true there would really be no point in defending the idea that we are in some sense, at least, free and that the future is open. If atheism is true then the world is almost certainly a closed system of cause and effect under the tyranny of unyielding physical laws. There's no more reason to believe that human freedom can exist in such a system than there is to believe that opposite poles of magnets can choose not to attract.

What difference, then, does God make? The theist believes, first of all, that we are morally responsible. This is implied in the teaching of the Bible, but such teaching would be incoherent were we not free to make moral choices. Responsibility entails freedom to choose. We may be unable to accurately describe what that freedom consists in, but that it exists must be the case if we are significantly responsible for our actions.

Secondly, the theist believes that human beings have dignity and worth, but if our behavior is purely the result of mechanistic forces over which we have no control then we are little more than a particularly interesting form of laboratory rat with no dignity at all. We simply respond to the stimuli in our environment and the pressures of our genetic complement just like the rat does. Since human dignity and worth are the grounds for human rights, if we are just flesh and bone machines there really is nothing upon which to build any notion of "rights". Thus significant moral freedom is a pre-condition for human rights.

Thirdly, theists believe we are created in God's image. Part of what that entails, perhaps, is having the power to choose. God is not constrained by anything outside of Himself, nor by anything in His past that He does not choose. It is possible that we, too, share in God's freedom, at least to some extent.

Fourthly, theists believe that God is good and just, but we confess that these words must mean something completely different to God than they do to us if we are not morally free. If God has created beings to live a vanishingly brief time on earth with no freedom to choose their destiny and then to be divinely consigned to eternal punishment for living and choosing in ways for which they were programmed by their environment, genes, or by God Himself, then we at are a loss to understand what is meant by God's goodness and justice.

Immanuel Kant said that we cannot prove we have free will but we have to assume that we do in order to make sense out of our lives, but the assumption itself makes no sense unless there is a God who somehow grants us a measure of moral freedom.

Our belief that we possess a significant degree of such freedom is based on our belief that God is good and just in ways which are meaningful to us, that we are created in His image, that we are morally responsible for our actions, and that we have dignity and worth. No doubt there are atheistic materialists who believe in free-will but it seems that such a belief is inconsistent with their atheism. Take God away and there is no moral responsibility, there is no human dignity or worth, and there is no basis for believing we are free except the powerful conviction that we are.

In a Godless world, however, that conviction is a chimera.

Operation Matador

The Fourth Rail has some analysis of the fighting going on in western Iraq in Operation Matador in which three Marines and over 100 insurgents have already lost their lives.

Perhaps one of The Fourth Rail's more interesting observations is this:

Col. Stephen Davis states, "The insurgents we're fighting today are not the guys getting $50 to put [a roadside bomb] on the side of the road... These are the professional fighters who have come from all over the Middle East. These are people who have received training and are very well-armed." The insurgents are fighting to the death from bunkers, basements and other concealed positions that do not provide for easy escape. Similar tactics were used by dead-enders in Fallujah, and similar results - the enemy's defeat - will occur during Operation Matador, dealing yet another blow to al Qaeda's jihad in Iraq.

Belmont Club has maps and additional details.

The war is gradually, maybe even quickly, evolving from an indigenous insurgency to a foreign invasion. This is going to make it much harder for the radicals on the loopy Left to claim that the insurgents are just Iraqis patriots trying to expel foreign infidels. We're confident, though, that somehow they'll find a way to turn these alien fighters into naturalized Iraqi citizens.

See UPDATE below.

Unconfirmed Rumor

Word is passing around the blogs about a report that Abu al-Zarqawi has either been seriously wounded or killed in the fighting in western Iraq. The report is encouraging but there's been no confirmation of it as yet. Read Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail for more on this and related developments pertaining to Operation Matador.

Alzheimer's Vaccine

A story at Fox News.com on work being done to develop a vaccine to slow or prevent Alzheimer's disease is encouraging:

A vaccine that triggers the immune system to fight against the plaque-building protein implicated in Alzheimer's disease may still be a viable option in the future for treating -- or perhaps even preventing -- the devastating disease, according to new research.

[T]wo new studies that followed the participants suggest that the approach may slow the memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease by reducing the buildup of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain.

"The idea of inducing the immune system to view beta-amyloid as a foreign protein, and to attack it, holds great promise," says researcher Sid Gilman, MD, a neurologist at the University of Michigan Health System, in a news release. "We now need to see whether we can create an immune response safely and in a way that slows the progression of Alzheimer's disease and preserves cognition."

Follow the link to read the rest of the story.

Priscilla Owen

Senator John Cornyn of Texas makes the case at NRO for giving Priscilla Owen a straight up or down confirmation vote. The fact that a nominee of her caliber has been held hostage for four years to partisan power struggles by the Democrats really is unconscionable. Cornyn begins his piece with this:

I know Priscilla personally, because we served together on the Texas supreme court. Throughout her life, she has excelled in virtually everything she has ever done. She was a law-review editor, a top graduate from Baylor Law School at the remarkable age of 23, and the top scorer on the Texas bar exam. She entered the legal profession at a time when relatively few women did, and after a distinguished record in private practice, she reached the pinnacle of the Texas bar - a seat on the Texas supreme court. She was supported by a larger percentage of Texans than any of her colleagues during her last election, after enjoying the endorsement of every major Texas newspaper.

Unsurprisingly, then, the American Bar Association, after careful study, unanimously rated her well qualified to serve on the federal bench - their highest rating.

Unsurprisingly, she enjoys the enthusiastic support of a bipartisan majority of senators.

Yet a partisan minority of senators now insists that Owen may not be confirmed without the support of a supermajority of 60 senators - a demand that is, by their own admission, wholly unprecedented in Senate history. Why? Simple: The case for opposing her is so weak that changing the rules is the only way they can defeat her nomination.

What's more, they know it, too. Before her nomination became caught up in partisan special-interest politics, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee predicted that Owen would be swiftly confirmed. On the day of the announcement of the first group of nominees, including Owen, he said he was "encouraged" and that "I know them well enough that I would assume they'll go through all right." Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the Minority Leader announced that Senate Democrats would give Justice Owen an up-or-down vote - albeit only if Republicans agreed to deny the same courtesy to other nominees.

The senator goes on to discuss her critics' objections to her appointment - a flimsy and insubstantial lot. The only reason for objecting at all, of course, is that the Democrats have to offer some reason for opposing her other than the real reason, which is that she's Bush's nominee.

The sooner we see that metaphorical mushroom cloud in the senate chamber, the better.

The Saudis Are Not Our Friends

The Saudi government underwrites the propagation of radical Wahhabist Islamic beliefs in mosques all across the United States. A recent examination by Freedom House's Center For Religious Freedom of the literature that is pressed into the hands of the members of these American mosques has turned up some chilling material. Here's part of Freedom House's report:

The 89-page report, "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques," is based on a year-long study of over two hundred original documents, all disseminated, published or otherwise generated by the government of Saudi Arabia and collected from more than a dozen mosques in the United States.

The propagation of hate ideology by Saudi Arabia is known to be worldwide, but its occurrence within the United States has received scant attention until now. Within worldwide Sunni Islam, followers of Saudi Arabia's extremist Wahhabi ideology are a distinct minority, as is evident by the millions of Muslims who have chosen to make America their home and are upstanding, law-abiding citizens and neighbors.

Among the key findings of the report:

Various Saudi government publications gathered for this study, most of which are in Arabic, assert that it is a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and warn against imitating, befriending, or helping them in any way, or taking part in their festivities and celebrations.

The documents promote contempt for the United States because it is ruled by legislated civil law rather than by totalitarian Wahhabi-style Islamic law. They condemn democracy as un-Islamic.

The documents stress that when Muslims are in the lands of the unbelievers, they must behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines. Either they are there to acquire new knowledge and make money to be later employed in the jihad against the infidels, or they are there to proselytize the infidels until at least some convert to Islam. Any other reason for lingering among the unbelievers in their lands is illegitimate, and unless a Muslim leaves as quickly as possible, he or she is not a true Muslim and so too must be condemned. For example, a document in the collection for the "Immigrant Muslim" bears the words "Greetings from the Cultural Attache in Washington, D.C." of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia, and is published by the government of Saudi Arabia. In an authoritative religious voice, it gives detailed instructions on how to "hate" the Christian and Jew: Never greet them first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never imitate the infidel. Do not become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.

One insidious aspect of the Saudi propaganda examined is its aim to replace traditional and moderate interpretations of Islam with extremist Wahhabism, the officially-established religion of Saudi Arabia. In these documents, other Muslims, especially those who advocate tolerance, are condemned as infidels. The opening fatwa in one Saudi embassy-distributed book, published by the Saudi Air Force, responds to a question about a Muslim preacher in a European mosque who taught that it is not right to condemn Jews and Christians as infidels. The Saudi state cleric's reply rebukes the Muslim cleric: "He who casts doubts about their infidelity leaves no doubt about his." Since, under Saudi law, "apostates" from Islam can be sentenced to death, this is an implied death threat against the tolerant Muslim imam, as well as an incitement to vigilante violence.

Sufi and Shiite Muslims are viciously condemned.

For a Muslim who fails to uphold the Saudi Wahhabi sect's sexual mores (i.e. through homosexual activity or heterosexual activity outside of marriage), the edicts published by the Saudi government's Ministry of Islamic Affairs, and found in American mosques advise, "it would be lawful for Muslims to spill his blood and to take his money."

Regarding those who convert out of Islam, the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs explicitly asserts, they "should be killed."

Saudi textbooks and other publications in the collection, propagate a Nazi-like hatred for Jews, treat the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion as historical fact, and avow that the Muslim's duty is to eliminate the state of Israel.

Regarding women, the Saudi publications instruct that they should be veiled, segregated from men and barred from certain employment and roles.

We're sure that just as soon as the Michael Jackson trial is over the MSM will get right on this story. Until then we can thank Little Green Footballs for their vigilance.

The full report from Freedom House can be read here.

James FitzJames Stephen

"The way in which the man of genius rules is by persuading an efficient minority to coerce an indifferent and self-indulgent majority."

James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity

If we substitute liberalism for the words "man of genius" in Stephen's quote, and replace "efficient minority" with the words mainstream media then perhaps we have a pretty fair explanation for the last half-century of American history.

Keep Talking Harry

Senator Harry Reid claimed recently that President Bush's judicial nominees, including Janice Rogers Brown, were "bad people". Senator Reid is evidently intent on proving himself a buffoon. It seems that every time he opens his mouth he says something astonishingly intemperate.

Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters posts excerpts from an editorial in the liberal Sacramento Bee showing just how silly Reid is and how impoverished is his judgment. The post is worth reading by anyone interested in determining Ms Brown's fitness for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

17,000 Scientists Oppose Kyoto

Little Green Footballs tips us to an article that our environmentalist friends ought to read if they can manage to wrest themselves away from bashing the president for his refusal to sign the Kyoto accords. The article comes from Canadafreepress.com and is written by Gary Pritchard. Pritchard says:

Last Thursday, I received a telephone call from Douglas Leahey, Ph.D., representing a group of Canadian scientists under the umbrella of "Friends of Science." It seems that they had been talking to Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, and he had mentioned to them that they should get in touch with me.

Dr. Leahey began by asking me how they could get a 27-minute documentary on television. I have 15 years experience of fighting with federal and provincial slush funds for that very thing. I asked some routine questions at first: Did they have a letter of licence? Had they rolled a camera before they got permission? Had they talked to the big broadcasters? Did they have a "pitch" and a budget?

Then I found out what their documentary was about. The story was incredible: it documented scientists--from Canada--speaking out against the $10-billion scam known as the Kyoto Protocol. Yes, the very same Kyoto Accord that our government has committed Canada and Canadians to support.

I understood instinctively that getting two scientists to agree at what time the sun is coming up tomorrow is--at best--difficult. But here were tens of thousands, from around the world, all agreeing on one issue: that there is no scientific evidence of man-made global warming.

The numbers of scientists staggered me--17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two thirds with advanced degrees, are against the Kyoto Agreement. The Heidelberg Appeal--which states that there is no scientific evidence for man-made global warming, has been signed by over 4,000 scientists from around the world since the petition's inception. I strongly questioned these high numbers, since I've had benefit of the Canadian government's public relations machine on this issue. Dr. Leahey has since sent documentation to back his figures up.

All those scientists were in total agreement: the Kyoto Protocol was complete fiction. The scientists are so committed to fighting the Kyoto Accord and its misrepresentation of the truth, that they produced a 27-minute documentary and paid for its production with their own money.

The rest of the column explains how the scientists have been blocked from airing their documentary on Canadian television. Apparently, these thousands of scientists have drawn conclusions about man-made global warming which are much at variance with liberal orthodoxy on the subject and must therefore be prevented from corrupting the minds of impressionable viewers with their noxious documentary.

The great liberal tradition of encouraging a free flow of competing ideas is dead in Canada as elsewhere. Today the only ideas that stand a chance of being disseminated in the Canadian media are those bearing the Left's stamp of approval.

We wish the Canadian scientists would bring their documentary to the States. We bet Fox would run it if nobody else would. There's a link at LGF to the full video.

Republicans Need to Act Like Winners

Rush Limbaugh discussed a Roll Call magazine report today that Senators Trent Lott and Ben Nelson are working on a deal that would block the Republicans from invoking the "nuclear option" in the senate. Rush said:

"They [Roll Call] are reporting that the two senators believe they're close to a deal that could avert triggering of the so-called nuclear option. The deal would do this. It would involve having a half dozen members of each party sign a memo of understanding that would bind all of them to certain actions on judicial nominations. The six Republicans would agree to block Majority Leader Bill Frist's plan to invoke the nuclear option and to give up trying to seek confirmation of three of the seven federal appeals court nominees who were filibustered in the last Congress. For their part the six Democrats would pledge to allow votes on the other four nominees, and vote to cut off filibusters on all other judicial nominees named by President Bush for the next year and a half, except in 'extreme circumstances'". The deal would include nominees for the Supreme Court, which could see one or two vacancies this summer. No commitments would be made for any nominations made after the 2006 elections.

This is essentially the deal floated last week by David Broder and Joe Biden and would allow the Democrats to veto Janice Rogers Brown and any other nominee they deemed to be "extreme". Rush had a lot to say about this that's worth reading (see here), and he says it much better than we could.

We'll repeat what we said last week about this, however. We're quite certain that if the Republicans cave on the matter of getting judges confirmed it will be the end of the Republican party as we know it. The need for conservative judges is the reason why a substantial number of voters cast their ballots for George Bush and other Republicans in November. It was the reason why Arlen Specter almost lost his primary race against Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania last spring and probably would have lost were it not for the endorsements he received from Rick Santorum and George Bush.

If Republicans show themselves unwilling to act like a majority party on this issue then conservatives will abandon it in numbers that will make the Israelite exodus from Egypt look like a few stragglers on a Crop Walk. Republicans scoff and ask where the conservatives will go. They'll go nowhere. They'll simply stay home from the polls and keep their check books in the desk drawer. And the Republican party will once again be the minority party it will deserve to be.

UPDATE: ConfirmThem.com has this from Sen. Lott's office:

Susan Irby, Lott's communications director, issued a statement saying there was in fact no deal and that Lott remained committed to having an up-or-down vote on all the pending judicial nominees.

We're relieved but still wary. These are Republicans, after all, that we're dealing with. These are people who couldn't find the political jugular if it was circled with magic marker. They think winning is not getting beat too badly. In other words, we'll believe it when we see the votes taking place for the judges on the senate floor.

Men on the Run

Abu al-Zarqawi's laptop continues to bear fruit. The latest announcement of a captured high ranking terrorist is of what the military describes as a key associate of al-Zarqawi's named Ghassan Amin who was apparently a pretty bad guy. See the link for details on his apprehension.

Meanwhile, over the past several months, coalition troops and Iraqi security forces have captured or killed more than 20 of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's trusted lieutenants and other high-ranking network members, military officials in Baghdad reported in a written statement on Friday. Hundreds of other members of the fugitive Jordanian's terror network also have been captured and killed as coalition and Iraqi forces continue to degrade his organization, the statement from Multinational Force Iraq headquarters said.

This link has some excellent insight into how Zarqawi's insurgency is being worn down by coalition pressure.

More on Ms Wilbanks

Jennifer Wilbanks apparently has a criminal record, having been arrested several times in the 1990s for shoplifting. We just thought we'd share that on the off chance that anyone might be interested.

It's both strange and sad that her parents can afford a wedding with 600 guests and yet she feels compelled to shoplift.

Bodies in the Garbage Dump

According to Strategy Page those fourteen bodies which turned up recently in an Iraqi garbage were Sunnis, probably victims of revenge killings by Shia tired of being bullied by the Sunni and angered by the murders of dozens of their fellow Shia whose bodies were found floating in a nearby river.

If this exchange of murders presages a larger conflict between Sunnis and Shia the terrorists may finally be on their way to achieving one of their goals, fomenting civil strife between these two sects.

Emoting About Our Feelings

No Left Turns tips us to the meditations of Mr. David Velleman at Left 2 Right who offers a particularly lucid illustration of the existential problem which atheism poses to its votaries. He approaches the problem with this prelude:

I am especially troubled by the phrase "people of faith and moral conviction," which expresses the ever proliferating fallacy that moral seriousness, of the sort that is desirable in public servants, depends on religious belief. I suspect that one of the sharpest divisions among voters in the last election was between those who read elaborately flaunted religiosity as a sign of moral seriousness and those who read it instead as humbug.

Perhaps I wasn't tuned into the right news sources last Fall, but I don't remember anyone running for major office who indulged in "elaborately flaunted religiosity". Maybe Mr. Velleman considers it "elaborately flaunted religiosity" simply to acknowledge that one is a Christian because in the circles in which he travels, we may surmise, that's an admission which no one would dream of making, nor have occasion to.

It's a quirky thing about the times in which we live that complete strangers can tell us the most intimate details about their sexual preferences, they can inscribe their predilections across their t-shirts even, and we're supposed to take it all in stride like true sophisticates. But let someone happen to mention that he believes in God and is a Christian, and he's accused of elaborately flaunting his religiosity, a breach of manners so egregious that it causes the true sophisticates like Mr. Velleman to shake their heads in disgust and disapproval.

Mr. Velleman then zeroes in on the main point:

I spend a fair proportion of my working hours trying to show how moral imperatives are grounded in reason, but I take this to be a possibly endless task whose results thus far are inadequate to the profundity of the values at stake. At the end of each day, there remains a gap between what I can demonstrate and what I believe, a gap that I expect to bridged by reason in the long run but that must in the meantime be bridged by faith.

Mr. Velleman here puts his finger directly on the sore spot, presses hard, and even rubs it around a bit. His problem is that the project which engages his energies is quite an impossible task. Reason cannot provide a ground for moral values. Reason cannot even provide a ground for trusting our reason. Any argument which seeks to establish the trustworthiness of reason, after all, must presuppose the truth of the very thing it's trying to establish.

Mr. Velleman has been unsuccessful in arriving at a rational basis for his moral sentiments precisely because there is no purely rational basis for any morality except, perhaps, egoism. Reason can offer no answer to the question of why I shouldn't hurt others if doing so benefits me and if I can get away with it. Indeed, reason must actually condone such behavior. It inevitably leads to an ethic of might makes right. Any other outcome to his ethical inquiries can be attained only through one of Mr. Velleman's non-rational leaps of faith.

I long ago stopped identifying myself as an agnostic precisely because the label seemed to me a sign of intellectual timidity about a question on which people should be willing to have an opinion. I now consider myself an atheist, not because I think that I have conclusive reason for denying the existence of a personal God, but because I take His nonexistence, as it were, on faith. My willingness to embrace this indemonstrable vision of the universe is of a piece, to my way of thinking, with my commitment to the incommensurable value of persons as ends in themselves, the value that underwrites my moral code.

In other words, he denies the existence of God not because God's non-existence is something for which he has a great deal of evidence, but because he simply doesn't want the world to be the kind of place where a God might be lurking. His atheism, he would have us believe, is consonant with his high view of the value of persons. This claim must have an odd sound to the multitudes of victims of the sundry state atheisms which plagued the twentieth century, but never mind. The really odd thing about Mr. Velleman's last sentence is the complete arbitrariness of his decision to value human beings and the artificiality of the nexus by which he relates it to atheism.

If Mr. Velleman wishes to value persons that's fine, but if his atheism is correct, anyone who chose to treat persons cruelly instead of kindly would not be making a wrong choice, just a different one. There is simply no basis in atheism for his choice to treat people kindly. It's a decision he makes purely on the basis of his subjective inclinations and preferences which could as easily have been otherwise and which in other people are indeed otherwise.

Here's Mr. Velleman's predicament, indeed the predicament of most of his atheist colleagues: They want to hold on to morality while at the same time dispensing with the only thing which gives morality any meaning, the transcendent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator of the universe. If there is no such being then all of Mr. Velleman's moralizing is nothing more than emoting about his feelings. His talk of moral values may be interesting from a psychological point of view, but there's absolutely no reason why anyone should otherwise care about them. He can give his students no rational answer to the question of why he holds the values he does rather than some other.

One would think his reason would have shown him all this a long time ago.

Winners and Losers

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid called George Bush "a loser" yesterday. Well. One wonders what facts the senator calls upon to justify such a judgment. The 2000 election? The 2002 mid-term election? The 2004 election? The Afghanistan war? The Iraq war? In what, exactly, does Bush's "loser" status consist?

Perhaps part of the Democrats' slide into political senescence is due to the fact that they regard the above as instances of losing, and presumably consider Al Gore, John Kerry, and Saddam Hussein to be winners. Such an idiosyncratic view of success and failure might explain a lot about the Democratic party's fortunes of late.

If Senator Reid wants to see an example of a real "loser" all he needs do is observe what happens when he seeks to thwart the appointments of Bush's judicial nominees in a week or so. Unfortunately, given the Senator's perverse definitions, he will no doubt hail it as a smashing success for both his leadership and his party as one after another of Bush's nominees is confirmed on the senate floor.

A Heavy Toll

Arthur Chrenkoff has some before and after photos which illustrate the hazards of the terrorist life-style. The profession certainly appears to have taken a toll on these practitioners. The last pair of photos offers an especially vivid lesson to those who are considering the pros and cons of taking up the trade themselves.

The War of Attrition

Bet you didn't read about this in your morning newspaper or hear of it on the evening news:

The Iraqi Army, police and U.S. Soldiers apprehended 84 suspected terrorists in 19 different combat operations conducted in and around Baghdad May 1 and 2.

The largest operation netted 40 terror suspects during raids carried out early in the morning May 2. Thirteen more suspected terrorists were captured in four other missions conducted Monday morning.

On May 1, Iraqi Security Forces and U.S. Soldiers conducted seven different missions and took 31 terror suspects into custody. The largest operation occurred after a terrorist fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a Task Force Baghdad patrol.

The insurgents are still capable of devastating destruction, but their targets grow softer and softer. Their attacks on Americans are generally thwarted or futile, and they haven't been able to successfully attack an Iraqi police station in months. The only way they can do harm, consistently, is by launching suicide attacks against civilians. It's no wonder that they've alienated most of the Iraqi population and much of the Arab world.

There are more details at the link.

How Low Will They Sink?

Little Green Footballs tips us to a line of clothing, advertised at this site, which encourages the murder of Republicans. Sick folks at work here, to be sure, but this is no longer especially surprising rhetoric coming from the liberal left.

A quick perusal of the site turned up further evidence of the moral degeneracy of people who would emblazon their shirts with the words "Kill Republicans". One of the women who manages the site writes:

I've never had any children. I mean I've never given birth or anything horrid like that. I didn't mean that I had never had or been with any children - which I of course have not. I don't hold with any of that sex with children nonsense....So lets be clear: I've never shot a bloody, mucus addled, 7 lb, parasite out of my vagina and I'm sincerely hoping I never will. I figure if you're able to say without hint of sarcasm or longing that you won't risk ruining your figure for the sake of bearing children...

We'd finish the quote, but that's about as much as we can stand.

David Hackworth, 74

David Hackworth, war hero, author, and columnist is dead at the age of 74 after a battle with bladder cancer. Hackworth enlisted in the army at the age of 15 in 1946 and rose through the ranks to full colonel in Vietnam where he was highly decorated, earning roughly 80 medals.

In his later years he had become an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq.

More details of his life can be found at the link.

Marine Exonerated

Common sense prevails:

A Marine corporal captured on video shooting an apparently injured and unarmed Iraqi did not violate the rules of engagement and will not face a court-martial, the Marine Corps announced.

A review of the evidence showed the Marine's actions in a Fallujah mosque last year were "consistent with the established rules of engagement and the law of armed conflict,'' Maj. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, said in a statement Wednesday.

There are more details here.

Painful Acknowledgements

The Guardian's Max Hastings finds himself dragged by the facts, his fingernails leaving scratch trails in the dirt, to grudging and qualified admission of George Bush's success in the Middle East. His chief criticism of what the administration has accomplished seems to be that he doesn't like the "triumphalist mode" that the White House exudes. Some of what he writes follows:

The greatest danger for those of us who dislike George Bush is that our instincts may tip over into a desire to see his foreign policy objectives fail. No reasonable person can oppose the president's commitment to Islamic democracy. Most western Bushophobes are motivated not by dissent about objectives, but by a belief that the Washington neocons' methods are crass, and more likely to escalate a confrontation between the west and Islam than to defuse it.

Such scepticism, however, should not prevent us from stepping back to reassess the progress of the Bush project, and satisfy ourselves that mere prejudice is not blinding us to the possibility that western liberals are wrong; that the Republicans' grand strategy is getting somewhere.

It seems wrong for either neocon true believers or liberal sceptics to rush to judgment. We of the latter persuasion must keep reciting the mantra: "We want Iraq to come right, even if this vindicates George Bush."

Those who say that Iraqis are incapable of making a democracy work may well be proved right. But until we see what happens on the ground over the months ahead, we should not write off the possibility that the Iraqi people will forge some sort of accommodation. A premature coalition withdrawal promises catastrophe for them, not us.

Hastings is holding his nose as he gives credit where it's due, but he at least has the honesty to acknowledge that much of what Bush has accomplished, though halting and precarious, would never have been accomplished in any other way by any other nation and certainly not by the U.N:

Here, indeed, is the nub of the issue about American foreign policy. The Bush vision is founded upon the exercise of military power. It is hard to regard Condoleezza Rice's "charm offensive" or the state department's protestations that in the second Bush term diplomacy will blossom, as more than cosmetic. The president himself has declared that, while he welcomes more allies, they must accept that the game will be played on Washington's terms.

We must respect American power, and also acknowledge that the world sometimes has much need of it. As Sir Michael Howard, wisest of British strategic thinkers, often remarks: "If America does not do things, nobody else will." We should acknowledge the limitations of the UN. The pitiful performance of many international peacekeeping contingents, not least in Afghanistan, highlights the feebleness of what passes for European security policy.

Although the Bush team knows how to wage war they are inept at diplomacy and stand to lose all unless they become more sensitive to the feelings of others:

Yet it still seems reasonable to question the optimism currently prevailing among Washington's neocons, because this remains founded upon a woefully simplistic vision. It is true that, in some chronic, unstable regions, some bad governments - those of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein - have been removed by the Americans. But the fragile advantages gained will be lost, unless Washington can match its boldness in the deployment of military power with a new sensitivity to alien cultures, matched by far more subtle political skills.

We're quite sure that Mr. Hastings is not pleased with President Bush's nomination of the decidedly insensitive and unsubtle John Bolton to be our representative at the U.N. We're confident that Mr. Bolton is emphatically not what Mr. Hastings had in mind, but we wonder whose diplomatic skills he thinks the Bush people should emulate. Those of the esteemed Kofi Annan? Bill Clinton? Jacques Chirac? Gerhard Schroeder? Vladimir Putin? These men are exemplars of the art of getting nothing done while simultaneously filling one's own wallet.

For our part, we think the administration's diplomacy is working just fine considering the difficulties it faces. Unlike the gentlemen listed above, the White House's diplomacy is based upon a realistic assessment of the people with whom we must deal. Some of them, to be sure, can be motivated by emoluments, others can be moved only by fear, still others are intransigently hostile and must be dealt with by force.

The enlightened ones in the salons of Europe believe all men are vulnerable to the blandishments of reason and self-interest. They're convinced that everyone can be seduced by economic bribes if the seducer is skillful enough. Lacking ideology and religious conviction themselves, they fail to understand the power these exert in the lives of others, and have been making this same error since at least the 1930's. They couldn't see the true nature of the Nazis or the communists in the 20th century, and they fail to see what makes the jihadis so implacable today. Their blindness would be the death of the West were it not for men like Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush who have a clearer vision, who recognize that men are often driven by imperatives other than simple greed, and have had the courage and steadfastness to do what needs to be done to preserve us from them.

Anti-Christian Rhetoric in the MSM

Former New York Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips has a delightful piece in Wednesday's Washington Post in which he indicts a number of commentators, but particularly the Times' Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, and Paul Krugman for their super-heated anti-Christian rhetoric, their secularist paranoia, and their utter lack of historical understanding. He notes that there have been 13 opinion columns in the WaPo and the NYT in a one month stretch between March 24 and April 23 which have been of the "sky is falling and it's the Christians' fault" variety.

Phillips then closes with this:

It is said, again and again and again, that the evangelical/Catholic right is out of accord with the history of our republic, dangerously so. What we are out of accord with is not that history but a revisionist version of it vigorously promulgated by those who want it to be seen as other than it was.

The fact is that our founders did not give us a nation frightened by the apparition of the Deity lurking about in our most central places. On Sept. 25, 1789, the text of what was later adopted as the First Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress, and subsequently sent to the states for ratification. On that same day , the gentlemen in the House who had acted to give us that invaluable text took another action: They passed a resolution asking President George Washington to declare a national day of thanksgiving to no less a perceived eminence than almighty God.

That's president, that's national, that's official and, alas, my doubting hearties, it's God - all wrapped up in a federal action by those who knew what they meant by the non-establishment clause and saw their request as standing at not the slightest variance from it. It's a pity our phalanx of columnists cannot crawl into a time machine to go back and reinstruct them.

It's an outstanding column and we invite our readers to read the whole thing.

Rolling Up the Enemy

Recent days have brought us two very significant developments in the war against al Qaida. The first was the interception of a letter written to al Zarqawi by a mid-level commander named al Qusaymi who paints a bleak picture of al Qaida's situation in Iraq.

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail has some outstanding commentary on the letter. After analyzing its contents he concludes with this:

Assuming this letter is authentic, the picture al-Qusaymi draws of the current state of al Qaeda in Iraq is not positive [for al Qaeda, that is]. Their soldier's morale is very low and for good reason. They are being mistreated by their own leaders, they feel they are being sacrificed without any positive effects on the outcome, they do not feel they have direction, and some are deserting. No doubt incidents like the failed and costly assaults on Abu Ghraib and Camp Gannon contribute to the feelings of being thrown to the wolves.

There is great distrust between local commanders and Zarqawi's inner circle. al-Qusaymi asks to meet Zarqawi face to face as he does not trust his lieutenants. This can stem from several sources, the main one being that al-Qusaymi is not impressed with their command decisions. The recent spate of arrests of Zarqawi's lieutenants means that less experienced and qualified commanders rise through the ranks. Despite media portrayal that al Qaeda has a limitless supply of experienced operatives and leaders, organizations do not gain strength by losing their best and most seasoned leaders, particularly while under fire.

Al-Qusaymi is writing this letter to attempt to correct problems within al Qaeda's organization. His capture should be a high priority for the Coalition, as he is both insightful and brave enough to approach Zarqawi to address some perceived fundamental flaws in the organization. al-Qusaymi will have detailed information on the weaknesses of al Qaeda which can be exploited, as well as operational information on the makeup and organization of terror cells and their leaders. Removing the smart leaders and allowing the poor ones to remain in place is an effective way to destroy terrorist organizations, as the poor leaders will make bad decisions that will likely alienate both their own recruits and the Iraqi people.

The overall message of al-Qusaymi's letter to Zarqawi is supported by past letters intercepted or published on the web by al Qaeda. Al Qaeda leaders have complained that the Muslim world is shirking jihad and not supporting the fight in Iraq, indicated there are manpower issues in Iraq and Afghanistan and recruiting problems. The lack of quality recruits combined with the Coalition's dismantling of the organization and the arrest of senior leaders is having a negative affect on the morale of both the foot soldiers and leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq. This letter is further evidence that Iraq has provided for the opportunity to deal an operational defeat to al Qaeda.

The other development is the capture announced yesterday of Abu Farj Farj al Liby, bin Laden's third in command. One wonders if his location wasn't gleaned from al Zarqawi's laptop. In any event, he himself should prove to be a treasure trove of information on the whereabouts and operations of other al Qaida bigwigs, perhaps of bin Laden himself and his second in command Ayman al Zarwahri.

Rolling up this terrorist organization is like rolling a snowball down a mountain. Pretty soon it gathers so much momentum that it becomes an avalanche. Each low-level prisoner has information that leads to others which in turn leads to others until top people are being smoked out. When the leadership is interrogated the information inflow takes a huge leap and the pace of shutting down terror operations accelerates even more.

One thing about all this that's important to remember. It's hard to imagine how any of it would have happened had we not invaded Iraq. When the administration told us that draining that swamp was essential to winning the war on terror, it was right. Had we not invaded Iraq, Saddam would bestride the Middle East like the mythical colossus, few if any of the terrorists who've been apprehended would today be in custody, Libya would still be producing nuclear weapons, Syria would still be in Lebanon, Pakistan would be an indifferent ally in the WOT, and the Arab world would be smelling the scent of victory over a decadent west which lacked the will to defend itself against the armies of Allah.

It's good to remind ourselves every now and then.

Incoherence

"What are we to believe in, then? Nothing. That is the beginning of Wisdom. It is time to rid ourselves of 'Principles' and to espouse Science, objective inquiry."

Gustave Flaubert

The problem with so much of skepticism is that it is self-refuting. Flaubert's aphorism is an example. If he really means that we should believe in nothing then he has to admit that he doesn't believe that we should believe in nothing. This, of course, is incoherent.

Flaubert wants to make an exception to his skepticism for Science, but in order to believe in Science he has to believe in a host of other things as well. He has to believe, for example, that Reason leads to truth, he has to believe in the trustworthiness of his senses, he has to believe in the orderliness and uniformity of nature, the reality of an external world, and so on. In order to place his faith in science he must set his skepticism aside, otherwise it's sure to get in the way.

Despite his silly assertion about throwing out all one's beliefs, Flaubert didn't really mean that we should literally believe in nothing. I don't think he was a complete nihilist. But it would be interesting to know what sorts of things he thought unworthy of belief and what his reasons were for not believing in them. Maybe a reader can enlighten us on the matter.

Basic Genetics

Professional scientists have for a long time been critical of much of what passes for science education in some American public schools. After reading this story in our local paper we're inclined to think they may have a point:

Artis Hicks 28, of Clarion, demanded a paternity test when a woman identified him as the father of her newborn son and asked for child support, prosecutors said. Then Hicks allegedly sent his brother, Walter Hicks, 35, of York, to take the test, York County Senior Assistant District Attorney Geoffrey McInroy said Wednesday. When the brother's signature didn't match that on file for Artis Hicks, further DNA testing uncovered the switch, and showed a 99.99 percent probability that Artis Hicks was the child's father, investigators said.

The brothers face charges including forgery, criminal solicitation and tampering with evidence and public documents. Both waived preliminary hearings before District Judge Paula Correal and she ruled that they will face trial in Cumberland County Court.

Dave Rudy, a domestic relations enforcement officer, said a support order was secured against Artis Hicks and he is paying child support.

Let's see. Artis tried to avoid paying child support by demanding a DNA test and then sending his brother to submit the sample. How different Artis thought his brother's DNA would be from his own, the article doesn't say. Let's put a charitable interpretation on Mr. Hicks' scheme and allow that perhaps Artis and Walter are adoptive brothers.

Iranian Youth

A recent poll of Iranian students (Scroll to May 1st: Life and Liberty in Iran) at Regime Change Iran gives reason to think that if we can avert a military showdown with Iran long enough the fundamentalist regime might fall like a rotted tree in the winds of popular contempt.

In early 2003 a large Internet poll of students of the Amir Kabir University (the second most prestigious university in Iran) was conducted. Here are some of the results:

For example, a government conducted survey revealed that 86 percent of the youth say that they do not perform the obligatory daily Islamic prayer.

Only 6 percent of the students said that they support the hardliners, while another 4 percent said they support the reformists within the regime.

In other words, only ten percent of respondents supported the regime at all.

Most significantly, 85 percent of the students said that they would support the establishment of a secular and democratic republic.

The balance of the post discusses why the mullahs still retain their power despite their immense unpopularity. The analysis includes with this:

While apathy may be the outward appearance, there is a cumulation of repressed anger, which may explode by a trigger. A potential trigger may be an outrageous act by regime elements as occurred in Lebanon by the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Another trigger may be American military attacks on fundamentalist coercive apparatuses such as Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Basij corps, Ansar-e Hezbollah vigilantes, Ministry of Intelligence headquarters, and the like.

We do not believe that any military strikes on the nuclear facilities would serve as a trigger for mass uprising as some have argued in Washington. The reasons being that with coercive apparatuses being intact, they have not only the power to crush any uprising, but also the added motivation and anger to do so. Iranians are angry at the coercive apparatuses for having oppressed and repressed them for so long but not at any inanimate nuclear facility.

Perhaps we shouldn't place too much confidence in the poll results, since it was conducted over the net and there's no explanation of the measures taken to insure a representative cross-section of respondents nor of the measures taken to prevent fraud. Nevertheless, it is suggestive.

The discussion of what might trigger a revolution in Iran makes a very interesting and important point about the sources of Iranian resentments. It could be that an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities will produce only a shrug from the people themselves. This could be disappointing, but it could also be good news if such an attack becomes necessary. If the popular reaction tends toward indifference it makes such an attack somewhat less perilous.