God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist

At least that's what atheistic Darwinian Richard Dawkins tells us in this article excerpted from his new book The God Delusion. Dawkins bases his certainty on several surprisingly weak arguments - I say "surprisingly" because he invests so much confidence in such thin ice.

His assurance that there almost certainly is no God is derived firstly from his belief that God's existence is highly improbable. This is a peculiar claim given that it's very difficult to see how one could know that God's existence is highly improbable. Dawkins argues that God's improbablity follows from the fact that there's no evidence that God exists, but how does an alleged lack of evidence makes God's existence highly improbable?

If there's no evidence for something then it might be argued that there's no reason to believe it, but that's not the same as saying that the existence of the thing is "improbable". There is no evidence for the existence of other universes or other dimensions but that by itself doesn't make their existence improbable. There's no evidence for the existence of life on other planets either, but Dawkins is at pains in this essay to convince the reader that, even so, extra-terrestrial life is another "almost certain" fact. Why are ETs almost certain to exist even though we have no evidence of them, but God is almost certain to not exist for the same reason?

What, secondly, of this claim that there's no evidence for God's existence? What is Dawkins' support for it?

Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.

First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished.

This is an unpromising beginning. The assertion that the arguments for God's existence are easily demolished is simply false. It's the kind of claim made by someone who doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. Dawkins is evidently unaware of the wrestling matches among experts on these arguments over the last 1500 years. He's unaware, too, of the contemporary work of people like William Lane Craig on the Cosmological argument and Alvin Plantinga on the Ontological argument. These people, and the hundreds of philosophers like them, may be wrong, but if anything is certain it is that the arguments they present are not "easily demolished".

Dawkins continues to embarrass himself:

Several of them [arguments for God's existence], such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself.

Surely, though, Professor Dawkins understands the concept of necessary existence. A necessary being has no need of explanation, only contingent being needs be explained. If God exists, he is a necessary being, i.e. he is the ultimate cause of all contingent beings, and thus, not only does he not need a causal explanation, there can be no causal explanation.

To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not.

God, of course, is not something which "just happens". God is. He is not an event like the Big Bang. He is the cause of all events, the cause of all contingent entities. Moreover, we need to ask why Dawkins thinks that ultimate causes must be simpler than their effects. What principle leads him to this conclusion? Couldn't we just as easily argue that the sufficient cause of X must be at least as complex as the effect it produces? Thus the cause of the universe would have to be at least as complex as the universe itself.

The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

This is a marvelous case of begging the question. The creative cause of the universe cannot be intelligence, Dawkins avers, because intelligence is part of the creation, not its cause. But whether the cause can be an intelligence is precisely the point at issue. Dawkins decrees by fiat that intelligence cannot be the cause because it is the effect, but this is ludicrous. If humans ever succeed in creating artificial intelligence (AI) in computers shall we conclude that intelligent humans couldn't really have been the creators because intelligence only comes along later in the scheme of technological development, when AI appears? It's a bit irregular to try to neatly define things so that one wins the argument, but this is what Dawkins does. He stacks the deck by stating as a premise the very thing he wants us to conclude.

The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today, sometimes called the Argument from Design .... is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered - and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.

And what precisely is the fallacy? Dawkins explains:

Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable?

I've already pointed out that Dawkins' assumption that God's existence is highly improbable is pure flummery. Apparently fond of circular reasoning he assumes a priori that the chances of God's existing are exceedingly low and goes on, then, to argue that none of the evidence for God's existence, obtained through the argument from Design, can really be evidence for a God because he's already demonstrated that God is too improbable to actually exist.

Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And - this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in - Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.

Here he underminines his own argument about God's improbability based on the lack of evidence by claiming that it is probable that life exists on billions of other planets even though we have no empirical evidence that there are billions of other planets and certainly no evidence that there is life on any planet but our own. He also shows here that he either hasn't read, or is deliberately ignoring, works like Rare Earth, Privileged Planet, The Fifth Miracle, Nature's Destiny, Ancient Faith Modern Physics, all of which emphasize the uniqueness of earth as a habitat for life, the numerous factors which have to be just right for a planet to sustain life, and the sheer unliklihood that other planets, even if they number in the billions, would possess more than a few of those necessary properties. In other words, Dawkins' argument that there are billions of planets in the universe capable of supporting life is about thirty years out of date.

The book from which Dawkins' essay was excerpted, The God Delusion, has been widely panned by philosophers and scientists, both theistic and atheistic alike. Judging from the arguments he offers above it's little wonder.

Keep Hope Alive

Ed Whelan at The Ethics and Public Policy Center argues that despite Democratic control of the Senate President Bush still has a good chance of getting a quality nominee onto the Supreme Court should an opening appear. Getting judges approved for the Federal Court of Appeals looks much more difficult but then it has been difficult for the last six years even with the Democrats in the minority.

The core of Whelan's case is this:

...the high-profile politics of a Supreme Court nomination enhances the case for confirmation of a strong pick. Opponents can't rely on obscure procedures to block the nomination. They need to make their case openly, and in the Internet age, unlike with the 1987 nomination of Judge Bork, their distortions won't go unanswered.

More importantly, the conservative case against liberal judicial activism has powerful public appeal across a broad swath of the political spectrum. Opponents of a strong nominee will have to be ready to pay a high price for their opposition. Plus, President Bush, having appointed two white males to the Court, still has the diversity card to play, so a nominee who is a committed proponent of judicial restraint and also a female or a minority would have added political punch.

Forty-one of 45 Democrats voted against Justice Alito's nomination. But the four Democrats who voted for him -- Byrd, Conrad, Johnson, and Ben Nelson -- would be decent bets to vote for the next strong conservative nominee. To be sure, the votes of Byrd, Conrad, and Nelson may have been influenced by the fact that they were up for re-election this year. But since their re-election prospects were never in serious peril, that factor would not seem a major one.

Besides, of course, other Democrats are now looking ahead to re-election in 2008. Along with Johnson (South Dakota), Senators Baucus (Montana), Landrieu (Louisiana), and Pryor (Arkansas) will be running in "red" states in 2008. Especially if they face the prospect of hefty Republican opponents, they won't be eager to be siding with Teddy Kennedy as he rants against the nominee.

Senator-Elect Casey of Pennsylvania is an eighth Democrat whom the White House could reasonably look to for a "yes" vote on confirmation. Casey might as well dance on the grave of his father (a hero of mine) if he would vote against a nominee who could provide the decisive vote to restore abortion policy to the democratic processes.

In sum, a high-quality conservative nominee with a good public presence -- and with the support of the broader conservative coalition that coalesced around Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito -- should be able to hold all, or virtually all, the 49 Republicans and to pick off the one or more Democrats needed for confirmation. Vice President Cheney's tiebreaking vote shouldn't even be needed.

He might have added to the mix that Jim Webb(VA) will be likely to support conservative judges and Joe Lieberman (CT) is not a safe bet to toe the party line set down by the Kennedy/Leahy/Kerry cabal. Another wild card is Hillary Clinton who will probably wish to appear moderate and reasonable in preparation for her presidential run in 2008.

All in all, things may not be quite as bleak as they seemed last Tuesday. There is a likelihood that at least one of the current liberal justices will step down now that the Democrats have captured the senate. Justice Stevens is 86, Justice Ginsburg is 73, and one or both of them may have been waiting until this election to retire with the expectation that a Democratic senate would prevent President Bush from nominating a conservative to replace them. We'll see whether or not they're calculation proves correct.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby

Gary Varvel explains why the Republicans got a "thumpin'" last Tuesday:

If the voters are given a choice between Republicans who act like Democrats or Democrats just being themselves, Republicans can hardly be surprised that the voters decided to elect the real thing.

Another Piece From Murray

Following up on last Sunday's post More on Murray, here's more perspective on the parable of the vine and the branches.

Abide In Christ, by Andrew Murray - In Affliction and Trial

"Every branch that bearest fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." - John 15:2

In the whole plant world there is not a tree to be found so specially suited to the image of man in his relation to God, as the vine. There is none of which the fruit and its juice are so full of spirit, so quickening and stimulating. But there is also none of which the natural tendency is so entirely evil - none where the growth is so ready to run into wood that is utterly worthless except for the fire. Of all plants, not one needs the pruning knife so unsparingly and so unceasingly. None is so dependent on cultivation and training, but with this none yields a richer reward to the husbandman. In His wonderful parable, the Saviour, with a single word, refers to this need of pruning in the vine, and the blessing it brings. But from that single word what streams of light pour in upon this dark world, so full of suffering and of sorrow to believers! What treasures of teaching and comfort to the bleeding branch in its hour of trial: "Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." And so He has prepared His people, who are so ready when trial comes to be shaken in their confidence, and to be moved from their abiding in Christ, to hear in each affliction the voice of a messenger that comes to call them to abide still more closely. Yes, believer, most specially in times of trial, abide in Christ.

Abide in Christ! This is indeed the Father's object in sending the trial. In the storm the tree strikes deeper roots in the soil; in the hurricane the inhabitants of the house abide within, and rejoice in its shelter. So by suffering the Father would lead us to enter more deeply into the love of Christ. Our hearts are continually prone to wander from Him; prosperity and enjoyment all too easily satisfy us, dull our spiritual perception, and unfit us for full communion with Himself. It is an unspeakable mercy that the Father comes with His chastisement, makes the world round us all dark and unattractive, leads us to feel more deeply our sinfulness, and for a time lose our joy in what was becoming so dangerous. He does it in the hope that, when we have found our rest in Christ in time of trouble, we shall learn to choose abiding in Him as our only portion; and when the affliction is removed, have so grown more firmly into Him, that in prosperity He still shall be our only joy. So much has He set His heart on this, that though He has indeed no pleasure in afflicting us, He will not keep back even the most painful chastisement if He can but thereby guide His beloved child to come home and abide in the beloved Son. Christian! pray for grace to see in every trouble, small or great, the Father's finger pointing to Jesus, and saying, Abide in Him.

Abide in Christ: so will you become partaker of all the rich blessings God designed for you in the affliction. The purposes of God's wisdom will become clear to you, your assurance of the unchangeable love become stronger, and the power of His Spirit fulfil you the promise: "He chasteneth us for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness." Abide in Christ: and your cross becomes the means of fellowship with His cross, and access into its mysteries - the mystery of the curse which He bore for you, of the death to sin in which you partake with Him, of the love in which, as sympathizing High Priest, He descended into all your sorrows. Abide in Christ: growing in conformity to your blessed Lord in His sufferings, deeper experience of the reality and the tenderness of His love will be yours. Abide in Christ: in the fiery oven, one like the Son of Man will be seen as never before; the purging away of the dross and the refining of the gold will be accomplished, and Christ's own likeness reflected in you. O abide in Christ: the power of the flesh will be mortified, the impatience and self-will of the old nature be humbled, to make place for the meekness and gentleness of Christ. A believer may pass through much affliction, and yet secure but little blessing from it all. Abiding in Christ is the secret of securing all that the Father meant the chastisement to bring us.

Abide in Christ: in Him you shall find sure and abundant consolation. With the afflicted comfort is often first, and the profit of the affliction second. The Father loves us so, that with Him our real and abiding profit is His first object, but He does not forget to comfort too. When He comforts it is that He may turn the bleeding heart to Himself to receive the blessing in fellowship with Him; when He refuses comfort, His object is still the same. It is in making us partakers of His holiness that true comfort comes. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter, not only because He can suggest comforting thoughts of God's love, but far more, because He makes us holy, and brings us into close union with Christ and with God. He teaches us to abide in Christ; and because God is found there, the truest comfort will come there too. In Christ the heart of the Father is revealed, and higher comfort there cannot be than to rest in the Father's bosom. In Him the fulness of the divine love is revealed, combined with the tenderness of a mother's compassion - and what can comfort like this? In Him you see a thousand times more given you than you have lost; see how God only took from you that you might have room to take from Him what is so much better. In Him suffering is consecrated, and becomes the foretaste of eternal glory; in suffering it is that the Spirit of God and of glory rests on us. Believer! would you have comfort in affliction? - Abide in Christ.

Abide in Christ: so will you bear much fruit. Not a vine is planted but the owner thinks of the fruit, and the fruit only. Other trees may be planted for ornament, for the shade, for the wood - the vine only for the fruit. And of each vine the husbandman is continually asking how it can bring forth more fruit, much fruit. Believer! abide in Christ in times of affliction, and you shall bring forth more fruit. The deeper experience of Christ's tenderness and the Father's love will urge you to live to His glory. The surrender of self and self-will in suffering will prepare you to sympathize with the misery of others, while the softening that comes of chastisement will fit you for becoming, as Jesus was, the servant of all. The thought of the Father's desire for fruit in the pruning will lead you to yield yourself afresh, and more than ever, to Him, and to say that now you have but one object in life - making known and conveying His wonderful love to fellow-men. You shall learn the blessed art of forgetting self, and, even in affliction, availing yourself of your separation from ordinary life to plead for the welfare of others. Dear Christian, in affliction abide in Christ. When you see it coming, meet it in Christ; when it is come, feel that you are more in Christ than in it, for He is nearer you than affliction ever can be; when it is passing, still abide in Him. And let the one thought of the Saviour, as He speaks of the pruning, and the one desire of the Father, as He does the pruning, be yours too: "Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth, that it may bring forth more fruit."

So shall your times of affliction become your times of choicest blessing - preparation for richest fruitfulness. Led into closer fellowship with the Son of God, and deeper experience of His love and grace - established in the blessed confidence that He and you entirely belong to each other - more completely satisfied with Him and more wholly given up to Him than ever before - with your own will crucified afresh, and the heart brought into deeper harmony with God's will - you shall be a vessel cleansed, meet for the Master's use, prepared for every good work. True believer! O try and learn the blessed truth, that in affliction your first, your only, your blessed calling is to abide in Christ. Be much with Him alone. Beware of the comfort and the distractions that friends so often bring. Let Jesus Christ Himself be your chief companion and comforter. Delight yourself in the assurance that closer union with Him, and more abundant fruit through Him, are sure to be the results of trial, because it is the Husbandman Himself who is pruning, and will ensure the fulfillment of the desire of the soul that yields itself lovingly to His work.

The Reason Why

Why have there been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11? It's certainly not that the terrorists haven't been trying. Harold Hutchison at Strategy Page explains the main reason for our good fortune:

The answer was a simple change of mission by the FBI and more communication between the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community.

In the 1990s, the FBI built criminal cases against terrorists - with the intention of locking them up in prison. This meant that making sure evidence of a terrorist's acts could be admitted to court. However, this led to problems, including the fact that when the evidence was provided to the attorneys for the accused terrorists, it eventually found its way back to terrorists still active, blowing methods of gathering intelligence in the process. In many cases, the FBI had to keep a wall between its intelligence side and its criminal prosecution side (some have called it the "Gorelick wall" after the author of one memo that was made public outlining the procedures to be used). Since 9/11, the FBI has changed its tactics, the wall has come crashing down, and attacks have been thwarted, with support networks also being rolled up.

The FBI's new approach has been to break up the attacks beforehand - with criminal cases being of secondary importance. This allows the FBI to do things it was not able to do earlier, like go to into chat rooms where recruiting occurs. It also means the FBI operates on a lower threshold. It is very similar to the approach the federal government used against Al Capone. Ultimately, Capone never served a day in prison for bootlegging or murder - his prison sentence was for tax evasion. Today, the FBI operates mainly to just stop the terrorists. They may not get jail time for terrorism, but there are other charges that can be used (immigration laws are one set of laws) if need be. Even these will break up cells - simply because the terrorists are human, and will make mistakes or do something illegal. If they are in prison, they cannot carry out attacks.

A number of human rights and civil liberties groups are not happy about this. In situations like those involving the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, this has led to lawsuits and hostile media coverage. These groups have viewed the intelligence community with suspicion at best - often they are downright hostile, despite the fact that the cooperation between the FBI and the intelligence community has broken up several attacks.

It will be interesting to see, now that the Democrats have some sway in the government, whether they push to return to the days of the "Gorelick wall" which was set up during the Clinton administration or whether they quietly allow the FBI to continue to do what they must to keep the rest of us safe.

In the meantime let's give the Bush administration some credit for having prevented any more attacks on our soil since 9/11.

A Giant Christmas Ball

That's what earth looks like in this photo taken from space, apparently with cloud cover removed:

It's beautiful in a way, but it's also a shame. All those lights obscure the night sky for modern viewers to the point where when we look up on a clear night we see only a fraction of what observers could see a hundred years ago. The real beauty, the beauty we're missing, is not the lights on earth, but the lights in the Milky Way.

Craig vs. Ehrman

One of the top Christian philosophers debated a professor of religious history at Holy Cross last March on the topic "Is There Historical Evidence For the Resurrection of Jesus?" The debaters were William Lane Craig of The Talbot School of Theology and Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina.

Craig laid out the evidence for Jesus' Resurrection and argued that the evidence is uncontroversial. What's at issue, he claimed, is not the evidence, but whether a miracle is the best explanation for that evidence. Ehrman maintained that it is not while Craig affirmed that it is. It's a fascinating exchange and you can read the transcript here.

Hypocrisy and Gay-ness

First Things has two fine pieces on the Ted Haggard fiasco. The first, by Robert Miller, is a meditation on hypocrisy and an explanation why Haggard's particular faults do not make him a hypocrite. The second, by Richard Neuhaus, is an addendum to Miller's piece and has some interesting things to say about homosexuality in general and particularly the opinion of some gays that the more the public hears about people like Ted Haggard and Mark Foley the more accepting of homosexuality they will be. Neuhaus thinks this is exactly wrong.

They're good reading, and I recommend them to you.

New Neuroscience Blog

Denyse O'Leary has started a new blog, called The Mindful Hack, dedicated to discussion of issues surrounding the nature of mind and the materialist/immaterialist debate in neuroscience. This is a cutting edge field in biology and philosophy, and I urge you to give her site a look. O'Leary says this about her new effort:

A word about me: I am a Toronto-based journalist and author, who also blogs at the Post-Darwinist.

A word about the Mindful Hack: Just as the Post-Darwinist was started in 2005 in order to update By Design or by Chance?, my investigation of the intelligent design controversy, Mindful Hack notes recent events that might interest you if you care about the ongoing controversy between materialist and non-materialist neuroscience.

The Mindful Hack represents the non-materialist side. You will not learn here that you are a meat puppet, a robot vehicle for your selfish genes, or nothing but a pack of neurons. You will get a chance to explore the other side of the argument, as I have time to blog on it.

Publishing this blog distracts me from anxiety while I await the copy edit of The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007), of which I am the coauthor. Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard is the lead author.

Because I have been a book editor as well as a journalist for many years, I worry, even though the boss editor assures me that the copy editor is one of the best in the business (and I bet that's true). I expect to learn a lot from reviewing her work. Meanwhile, here are a couple of fun little items to get us started.

Blogs are like gardens, always in some state of development. So you will notice blank side beds, because I have not got round to starting a blog roll, but that too will happen. About the name, Mindful Hack, it is a play on "mind hack," a person who studies cognitive science, usually from a materialist perspective. Make what you like of that!

O'Leary's blog should be an excellent source of news on developments in this fascinating field.

Betraying the Base

The far left George Soros, Michael Moore wing of the Democratic party is soon going to conclude that it's been had, and they're not going to be happy about it. After having given themselves to their Democratic suitors they're waking up the morning after only to find themselves alone in bed. First, Nancy Pelosi backs off from a committment to seek impeachment of George Bush and then she backs away from any suggestion that the Democrats will push for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

Then Howard Dean appears on Chris Matthews' show and, much to Matthews' dismay, seems to back away some more from any prospect of an early end to the Iraq war. Here's a video clip that lends strong support to the supposition that the Democrats don't have a clue about what they're going to do with Iraq.

It's easy to yelp, snipe, and nip at the president's ankles like a pack of dogs as he tries to erect a permanent outpost of freedom in the Middle East, but it's going to be something else altogether to actually come up with a plan that differs significantly from the president's plan without it amounting to a surrender to the Islamo-fascists.

The voters in their frustration, impatience, and, I would suggest, poor judgment, voted the Republicans out and replaced them with ....what? Presumably, the MoveOn, TruthOut, and Democracy Underground people are right now in the first stages of a seething anger as the feeling of betrayal begins to creep over them.

The Current State of Strings

Those of you interested in the esoterica of modern physics might like to read this article by Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, and the author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Greene talks about the present state of string theory and the criticism it is weathering for its inability so far to come up with verifiable predictions. It's a very interesting piece which ends with this:

String theory continues to offer profound breadth and enormous potential. It has the capacity to complete the Einsteinian revolution and could very well be the concluding chapter in our species' age-old quest to understand the deepest workings of the cosmos. Will we ever reach that goal? I don't know. But that's both the wonder and the angst of a life in science. Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty.

I can't help but wonder why tolerating uncertainty is okay for scientists who work in the realm of the testable and empirical but not okay for religious believers who are constantly admonished by such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins that their beliefs are untenable precisely because there's too great an element of uncertainty in them.

It's also worth noting that string theory is a perfectly acceptable topic for discussion in high school physics classes even though, because it's not testable, it does not meet the criteria of a scientific theory. Yet intelligent design, even though it, too, "could very well be the concluding chapter in our species' age-old quest to understand the deepest workings of the cosmos," is ruled out of bounds in public schools because it's allegedly not testable. Very strange.

Military Deaths in Perspective

The number of Americans killed in Iraq continues to climb and October was a particularly awful month with the number of dead hovering at a little above 100. This is terrible, of course, but the media, in their unceasing attempt to discredit what is being accomplished there, deliberately conveys the misleading impression that this number is somehow an intolerable calamity.

That it is tragic there is no doubt, but the numbers dying in Iraq might be put into some context. For example, in the days preceding the Normandy invasion of WWII close to 800 American soldiers were killed just during the rehearsal for the landing.

More contemporaneously, throughout the month of October there were approximately 3450 people killed in traffic accidents in the U.S., and roughly 1400 people murdered.

These numbers dwarf the number of fatalities in Iraq but they are never trumpeted on the evening news. Why is that? These victims are every bit as precious to their loved ones. Their lives are no less important. So why do the networks not keep a running tally of how many people have been killed in traffic accidents or by homicide? The reason apparently is that there is no political benefit to be gained by reminding the public of the number of accident and murder victims every night. As long as the military deaths can be blamed directly on George Bush, however, we'll continue to hear about them. It's not that it's news, it's that it's politics, and the news media are major players.

The question that needs to be asked and openly debated by the media is not how many soldiers have been killed today but rather is their sacrifice worth the cost? Does what we're accomplishing in Iraq justify, in the long term, the loss of American lives? This is a debate it would be very worthwhile having, but don't count on the major news outlets to hold it. Many of them are simply not interested in looking seriously and candidly at the likely consequences of pulling our troops out of harm's way.

Dennett Defies Death and Denies Deity

Daniel Dennett, the famous atheistic Darwinian philosopher from Tufts University, has recently suffered a life-threatening heart problem. He discusses his condition here and graciously thanks his believer friends for their prayers but, not believing that there's really anyone to pray to, wishes they would do something more rational and efficacious.

In the course of his remarks he makes some confused comparisons between the ethical standards of medicine and the ethical standards of religion, but we may charitably chalk these up to the effects of his medication.

In any event, his meditations may be of interest to those who are familiar with Dennett's work.

Stem Cell Breakthrough

Another potential breakthrough involving stem cells has emerged in England. This time as a treatment for heart attack victims. The stem cells, however, are not the morally problematic embryonic stem cells, but are cells taken from the victim's own bone marrow:

Emergency heart attack patients will be injected with their own stem cells in a dramatic new treatment. The procedure, being pioneered by British doctors, holds out hope of a 'cure' as the stem cells repair damaged heart muscles.

The low-cost treatment, which involves removing stem cells from the patient's bone marrow, could be given within a few hours of a heart attack. It is intended to stop patients suffering further attacks and developing heart failure, something existing treatments fail to do in many cases.

If the initial trials in London are successful, the treatment is likely to be extended to NHS hospitals across the country. Researchers have called the project - the first of its kind in the world - "very exciting" and say it could have a significant impact on the annual toll of deaths from heart disease.

Read the rest of the article here.

Thoughts on the Debacle

Yesterday's electoral results were dispiriting for those who believe, as I do, that conservative principles are generally much better for the well-being of our country than are liberal principles, but the news about the election was not entirely bleak. There were outbreaks of common sense here and there around the country. An affirmative action referendum was shot down in Michigan, resolutions opposing gay marriage were successful in a half dozen states, and a lot of the Democratic winners were fairly conservative candidates.

Even so, as hard as it has been over the last six years to accomplish anything worthwhile in Washington, yesterday guaranteed that it'll be almost impossible now.

Here are some thoughts on three groups who had a major stake in this election:

Republicans: The Republicans as a group got what they deserved. They utterly failed to articulate a principled philosophy of governance or to sell the nation on the major undertakings of the administration. The Iraq war, for example, is not going as badly as the media would have us believe, but the average voter has no way of knowing that. President Bush should have been out every week telling us about the progress being made there, not in general terms as is his irritating habit, but in specifics. Yet there was no such leadership coming from the White House. All we heard was "stay the course", but the voters were never told how "stay the course" was actually working.

Instead, a lot of voters, inhaling the media's daily dose of gloom and doom, decided that it must be pretty bad over there, and nothing they heard from the President gave them reason to think otherwise. The Republicans failed also to take a firm stand on the issue of illegal immigration which has many people extremely concerned, they spent money like Great Society Democrats, and they allowed themselves to grow fat and corrupt. Mark Foley was a blow that perhaps could not have been foreseen, but the Jack Abramoff scandal surely could have been. A lot of people may well have figured that if we're going to have people who act like Democrats in Congress then we may as well elect the real thing.

Democrats: The Democrats got better than they deserved. They ran on nothing other than slogans and code words. "Change" is not a policy by which a party can govern and is indeed an insult to the intelligence of every thoughtful voter, a class which may not have been particularly conspicuous in many precincts around the country. The Democrats never articulated any real or coherent alternative to the administration's conduct of the war. They complained endlessly about the economy which is, in fact, one of the best in history, and they pointed with glee to Republican scandals confident that the media would keep quiet about the likes of William Jefferson, Robert Menendez, Harry Reid and other Democratic malefactors. The Democrats are a party whose only strategy for governing is to oppose whatever George Bush tries to accomplish and to make his last two years in office a political nightmare.

American people: The American voters yesterday blithely but resolutely went to the polls to make Nancy Pelosi third in line for the presidency, Alcee Hastings, who was impeached and removed as U.S. District Court judge by Congress in 1989 for bribery and perjury, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and John Conyers who is as close to a bolshevik as there is in the House now that Bernie Sanders has been elected to the Senate, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

The American people voted yesterday, in other words, to insure that there would be no more judges of the caliber of John Roberts or Samuel Alito. They voted for people who have promised that our taxes will go up, our borders will be thrown open, and that we will soon be aboard the last helicopters out of Baghdad, leaving Iraq to stew in a bloodbath rather than sacrifice another soldier or another dollar.

I wonder how many of those who voted to throw the Republicans out yesterday had any idea what they were replacing them with.

This Week's Feedback

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Why Major in Philosophy?

This is a post I put up about a year ago and which I'd like to re-post because a number of students have asked what I thought the advantages of pursuing a philosophy major or minor might be:

In the course of my teaching I often encourage students to consider an undergraduate philosophy major because I believe that a study of the questions philosophers have addressed provides the most important background a thoughtful and intelligent student could acquire. Students often ask, though, what they can do with such a degree. My reply is that most majors don't do anything professionally with their degree but rather they find it excellent preparation for the sorts of careers they do choose to pursue. Employers in most occupations prefer to train their employees themselves in the skills they'll need, and most professions require graduate level work in a specific field. Philosophy prepares a student well for either path.

A friend sent along a link to a post by Dr. Roy Clouser, author of the outstanding book The Myth of Religious Neutrality, and professor of philosophy at Trenton State College, in which he addresses these same questions. His post is entitled Why Major in Philosophy? and it contains a lot of good advice for a young high schooler or undecided undergrad who thinks they might enjoy philosophy but isn't sure if it will prepare him or her for making a living. Clouser writes:

For most students arriving at college, philosophy is the one subject they've never had before so it's natural that it's one of the last they consider majoring in. It's also natural to wonder what the major is good for--after all, few people ever plan to be professional philosophers! Yet, year after year, students switch their major to philosophy, and others tell us they wish they'd discovered it sooner so they could have done so.

What these students discovered - surprising as it sounds - is that philosophy is the single most useful major in the entire undergraduate curriculum! (Yes, useful!)

It's true, of course, that not many people become professional philosophers. But neither do most history majors become historians or English majors go on to become novelists. The fact is that most students don't pick a major because they plan to make their living in that field. They choose a major based on their interests and on how well it will prepare them for the widest possible number of occupations after college. If you are deciding that way too, we can say this for certain: If you have the interest, philosophy is best possible major - hands down.

Let me explain.

Philosophy deals with theories about the most basic beliefs and values that people have. These include topics like the nature of reality and human nature, the nature and sources of knowledge and morality, the proper structure for society and government, and the nature of religious belief. It also studies theories about the nature of science, art, language, and law. In this way, every philosophy major is exposed to the most influential interpretations of the most important issues people face across the entire spectrum of human experience.

But more than simply learning about these issues, philosophy includes a keen training in logic and critical thinking - in the ability to argue and debate the truth of the various theories and viewpoints that are studied. It sharpens one's ability to spot difficulties, pose questions, and to weigh the evidence for and against the reasons given for any view on any topic. (A bank V.P. once told me that his logical training was the most valuable thing he got in his entire undergraduate education - even more valuable than his business courses.)

Even from this short description you may be able to see why a philosophy major is the best possible background for anyone who wants to deal with the public or who wants to write - whether as a novelist, or news reporter. It is also the very best major for those thinking of pursuing any sort of career in religion. And it should come as no surprise that law schools consider it the best background for the Law SAT and a career in law. (Speaking of standardized tests, the highest GRE scores consistently come from three majors: math, physics, and philosophy.)

But there's more. It seems that a solid background in the influential viewpoints over a wide range of issues, and an ability to think logically about them, is also splendid training for a career in business according to several top business schools. But what may be most surprising of all is that the records of some of the best medical schools show philosophy as the undergraduate major of some of their most outstanding alumni!

So, if you have doubts about the major that's best for you - especially if you are presently an undeclared major - why not make an appointment at the philosophy department to talk over your interests with one of our faculty? Philosophy might, at least, be the ideal minor subject for you even if you decide not to major in it.

I offer only one caveat. Philosophy departments, like departments in any of the humanities, often are loaded with instructors who favor a particular school or style of philosophy. Some of these styles may be deadly dull to students who expect their philosophy experience to be an exciting intellectual excursion into the best that's been thought and written about life's most important questions. The student who wants to major in philosophy would do well to check out what approach the department is inclined toward before committing him or herself to majoring in it.

The Road

I recently picked up Cormac McCarthy's latest novel titled The Road. It's a story about a man and his son, neither of whose names we ever learn, whom we come upon while they are journeying together through a post-apocalyptic world. They're trying to reach a vague destination along the coast, and the story is about their struggle to stay alive and avoid the evils which lurk along the vehicle-less highway they're following.

Their world is relentlessly barren, gray, cold, wet, and lifeless. All life, except for handfuls of human survivors, seems to have been extinguished in what we assume was a nuclear holocaust several years earlier. The lives of these remnants are reduced to finding food, staying dry and warm, and avoiding human predators.

McCarthy tells us very little about the man and his son except that they deeply love each other. The dialogue between them is spare, truncated, and taciturn but brimming with affection and mutual commitment. We do learn that the man doesn't believe in God, and this, I think, provides one key to how a reader might understand this compelling tale.

I wondered as I read the book whether McCarthy was consciously offering an allegory of life in a thoroughly secular age. The man and his son can easily be taken to be a synecdoche for the whole human race which finds itself journeying through modern life with no real destination and no real hope that there will be anything better for them when they finally get there. Along the road there are terrors and pain, a constant struggle to survive, to find food and shelter, but with no real reason to press on except that we love each other and want to live for those we love, and they for us. The man and boy are spurred along by the hope that they will find something, anything, along the coast that will help them survive, something that will give their lives point and purpose, but the man, at least, has no real expectation that there really is anything there.

The journey along the road is about as bleak as it can be. There's no meaning in anything. Justice and morality are as dead as the forests and streams through which they pass, except in the hearts of the man and the young boy. Their only delights come in finding a jar of preserved fruit, a can of beans or a dry blanket.

I don't know that McCarthy was trying to imagine a metaphor for the dismal emptiness and hopelessness of a world in which there is no reasonable expectation of life after death, but if he were, he couldn't have done it any better than what he offers us in The Road.

It's a book worth reading.

Believing in God

Atheistic philosopher Ken Taylor is puzzled that smart people can still believe in God in a technological age. The fact that we live in the modern world should, folks like Taylor think, preclude belief in pre-modern superstitions, as if belief is made obsolete by the development of air conditioning and DVD players.

Anyway, Taylor says this:

One should want to believe in the existence of god only if one is confident that such belief is capable of being ratified by either reasoned argument or direct experience.

Actually, no. One should want to believe in the existence of God because God is a necessary condition for there to be meaning, morality, justice, and dignity in life. God is also a ground for man's hope that there is life beyond corporeal death. Thus one might well be inclined to hope that there is a God and, finding no good arguments that dash that hope and several good reasons to think there is a God, is rational if he allows that hope to evolve into a belief.

At the very least, an atheist can, I think, argue the theist to a stand-still with counterarguments. If you start out neutral with respect to god and try to reason your way to his existence by appeal to any of the traditional philosophical arguments, you just aren't going to get all the way to positive belief, in my humble opinion.

But why start out neutral? Lots of people start out believing that God exists. They have reasons for their belief and no serious reason not to believe. So why shouldn't they continue to believe? A man might believe that his wife loves him although he can't prove it, but the inability to gain proof is no reason to asdopt a stance of neutrality. Why, if a person is convinced that God exists, should they somehow try to stifle that belief? Isn't that irrational?

The very worst that can be said for them [arguments for God's existence] is that they are all demonstrably invalid and incapable of compelling rational belief in the existence of god.

This is not true, either. The classical arguments for the existence of God fall short of being proofs, not because they are invalid, but because one is not logically compelled to accept some of the premises of the argument. For example, elementary forms of the Cosmological argument might run like this:

• 1. Every event has a cause
• 2. No event causes itself
• 3. The coming to be of the world is an event
• 4. Therefore, the coming to be of the world has a cause outside of itself.

This argument is perfectly valid, but it's not philosophically compelling for two reasons: First, it's possible to deny the first premise, and, second, even if the first premise is granted, the argument doesn't lead to the existence of the God of theism. It simply leads to some nebulous cause of the initial cosmic explosion.

Nevertheless, that is not nothing. The believer could hold that the first premise is reasonable, even if it can't be proven, and therefore conclude that the argument does suggest the strong possibility of the existence of a transcendent creative agent.

The problem with this approach, as I see it, is that if you take yourself to be positing god merely in order to endow one's life with meaning and you do so with no rational basis for really and truly believing that god exists, then you seem to be engaging in a kind of pretense.

The trouble with Taylor's statement is that by "rational basis" he means deductive proof. If deductive proof were the only rational basis we had for our believings then there would be very few things we'd believe. Among the things we would not be able to believe if we required certainty for our beliefs is that believing in God without proof is a "pretense". There is, after all, no proof for that strange claim.

The Plausibility of Life

Jonathan Wells at Books and Culture reviews a new book on evo devo (evolutionary development)which purports to solve some of the last major problems of evolutionary theory. According to Wells, the book actually does no such thing. Here are some excerpts from his review:

Darwinian evolution is widely advertised to be a fact, as firmly established as the shape of the Earth. Defenders of the theory insist that there is no scientific controversy over it, and people who question or criticize it are typically accused of being ignorant or religiously motivated. Yet every few years a book comes along-written by scientists-claiming to remedy some major flaw in evolutionary theory.

The Plausibility of Life, by Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, is such a book.

There are other major transitions in the history of life that Kirschner and Gerhart also concede remain unexplained. One of these was the "invention" of the first eukaryotes, cells with nuclei that are very different from bacteria. "Generating the first eukaryotic cell was a major and enduring accomplishment," they write. "Extensive innovation showed up in the complexity and organization of the eukaryotic ancestor." Another major transition was the origin of multicellular organisms, which require complex mechanisms for cells to aggregate and communicate with each other. Still another unexplained transition was the origin of animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion. "Once again," write Kirschner and Gerhart, "a new suite of cellular and multicellular functions emerged rather quickly and was conserved to the present."

Some other major transitions that Kirschner and Gerhart concede remain unexplained are the origin of limbs in the first land vertebrates, the origin of neural crest cells that sculpt the heads and nervous systems of vertebrates, and the origin of the neocortex in vertebrate brains. "The origin of these processes and properties would seem to be the primary events of evolution, requiring high novelty," but the authors admit they cannot explain them. So, what does their theory explain?

Their theory purports to explain how organisms that share a given set of conserved core processes-say, land vertebrates-can diversify into a wide variety of forms.hat are we to make of The Plausibility of Life? Its authors claim to complete Darwin's theory by closing its last remaining major gap, yet they concede that the completed theory has no explanation for the origin of core processes in the first cells, the first eukaryotes, the first multicellular organisms, animal body plans, or vertebrate limbs, heads and brains. There seem to be more gaps in evolutionary theory now than there were before Kirschner and Gerhart got started.

Despite the dubious nature of their theoretical proposal, Kirschner and Gerhart imply that anyone who continues to be skeptical of Darwinian evolution is close-minded. In particular, people who think that intelligent design might provide a better explanation for some features of living things are dismissed as ignorant, religiously motivated, and covertly seeking ways to evade the law. Like many of their fellow Darwinists, Kirschner and Gerhart ultimately resort to personal insults.

Does the theory of facilitated variation make life plausible? Not at all, since it assumes the existence of life in the first place. Does the theory of facilitated variation rebut intelligent design? Not at all, since it assumes the existence of irreducibly complex core processes in the first place. The principal take-home lesson from The Plausibility of Life is that evolutionary theory still suffers from major weaknesses, but anyone who says so without reaffirming Darwinism and condemning [intelligent design] is a close-minded, ignorant, Bible-thumping subverter of the Constitution.

Where's the novelty in that?

The very title of the book is a rhetorical ploy to lead the reader away from the manifest fact that life itself is extraordinarily implausible. The chances that a living metabolizing, reproducing cell could have emerged from a primordial broth of its constituents purely by the action of blind, mechanical processes has been compared to the chances that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard would leave in its wake a fully assembled, fully functional jet airliner. And that was an estimate given by someone (Fred Hoyle) who was sympathetic to the evolutionary program.

Pace Kirschner and Gerhart life is not at all plausible. It is indeed prohibitively improbable unless the processes which led to it were somehow guided by an intelligent agent. More and more people are coming to this conclusion. It's only the Darwinian naturalists, holding out like isolated Japanese soldiers who continued to fight years after WWII was lost, who think otherwise.

Read the rest of Wells' review at the link.

<i>Viewpoint</i> Predicts

A friend asked me the other day what I thought Rick Santorum would do if he loses tomorrow to challenger Bob Casey. I don't know, of course, but I made an impetuous and no doubt ill-advised prediction. I recklessly repeat it here, confident that if it doesn't come about no one will remember my poor judgment and if does mirabile dictu turn out to be true a month or so down the road, I can always rerun this post and gloat over my prophetic powers or astonishingly lucky guess.

What I said to my friend is that I would not be surprised that, if the Democrats win the House and if Santorum loses his senate seat (which would be a real shame for the country), Donald Rumsfeld will resign as Secretary of Defense and Santorum will be appointed to take his place.

You heard it here first.

Since I'm making wild predictions I might as well give voice to another thought that has been bubbling in the back of my mind for the past couple of days.

All of the polls and pundits notwithstanding, I don't think Santorum is going to lose. Turn-out is everything in an election and Casey's voter strength is in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia whose citizens are not easily moved to turn out for a mid-term election. Minorities, especially, are not likely to be particularly excited by the phlegmatic, uncharismatic Casey. Should Philadelphians and their counterparts in Pittsburgh find other things to do tomorrow, Santorum may well pull this chestnut out of the fire. I think it's going happen.

If it doesn't, don't remind me. I'll feel badly enough without having salt rubbed into the wound.

The DOW's Not Done

For you students of the stock market James J. Cramer predicts that the DOW will reach 1300 by this time next year. He states his case here.

Wallis and Boyd

In a friendly debate before an overflow crowd Sojourners' editor Jim Wallis and pastor/theologian Greg Boyd exchanged views on what should be the nature and extent of the involvement of Christians in politics.

Wallis argues that the church should be deeply involved in the political wars and that a Biblical politics would look a lot like contemporary liberalism. It's through political engagement that one lives out the Gospel in the world. He urges Christians to follow the examples of Dietrich Bonhoffer and Martin Luther King in working for justice in the societies in which we live:

To be a Christian means to care about social justice. Gandhi and King didn't just live the principles: They engaged the culture to fight for them.

Aside from the fact that mention of Ghandi as an example of Christian obligation seemed a little dissonant, I agree with Wallis on his general point. Christians should be politically engaged. Part of the reason that our culture is in the depauperate condition it is is because too many Christians had, throughout the 30s, 40s, and 50s, ceded much of the culture to the world and retreated to the shelter of personal piety largely disengaged from the arts, education, science, philosophy and politics. By the time this started to change in the 60s there was simply too much ground to make up, the church was too far behind, and the train of secularization and degeneration was accelerating unimpeded down the track.

On the other hand, I think Greg Boyd is correct when he insists that no political stance should be labeled Christian and that a Christian is defined by his or her imitation of "the self-sacrificial love of Christ," and not by his/her political stance. He's also on target when he says this:

Jesus never said a word about political issues .... I worry about calling some stands 'God's politics' (The title of Wallis' recent book). It invites polarizing politics into the church. Republican Christians care as much about the poor as Democratic Christians do; they just have different ways of approaching it. Good Christians can agree or disagree on war, abortion, taxes and immigrants.

There's more on their debate at the link.

More From Murray

Last Sunday I posted an article about a book titled Andrew Murray on Prayer. This book is simply packed with meat for the soul. I mentioned last week that Andrew Murray on Prayer is actually a compilation of six of his works and here's another chapter from Abide in Christ, As the Branch in the Vine.

"I am the vine, ye are the branches." - John 15:5

It was in connection with the parable of the Vine that our Lord first used the expression, "Abide in me." That parable, so simple, and yet so rich in its teaching, gives us the best and most complete illustration of the meaning of our Lord's command, and the union to which He invites us.

The parable teaches us the nature of that union. The connection between the vine and the branch is a living one. No external, temporary union will suffice; no work of man can effect it: the branch, whether an original or an engrafted one, is such only by the Creator's own work, in virtue of which the life, the sap, the fatness, and the fruitfulness of the vine communicate themselves to the branch. And just so it is with the believer too. His union with his Lord is no work of human wisdom or human will, but an act of God, by which the closest and most complete life-union is effected between the Son of God and the sinner. "God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts." The same Spirit which dwelt and still dwells in the Son, becomes the life of the believer; in the unity of that one Spirit, and the fellowship of the same life which is in Christ, he is one with Him. As between the vine and branch, it is a life-union that makes them one.

The parable teaches us the completeness of the union. So close is the union between the vine and the branch, that each is nothing without the other, that each is wholly and only for the other.

Without the vine the branch can do nothing. To the vine it owes its right of place in the vineyard, its life and its fruitfulness. And so the Lord says, "Without me ye can do nothing." The believer can each day be pleasing to God only in that which he does through the power of Christ dwelling in him. The daily inflowing of the life-sap of the Holy Spirit is his only power to bring forth fruit. He lives alone in Him and is for each moment dependent on Him alone.

Without the branch the vine can also do nothing. A vine without branches can bear no fruit. No less indispensable than the vine to the branch, is the branch to the vine. Such is the wonderful condescension of the grace of Jesus, that just as His people are dependent on Him, He has made Himself dependent on them. Without His disciples He cannot dispense His blessing to the world; He cannot offer sinners the grapes of the heavenly Canaan. Marvel not! It is His own appointment; and this is the high honour to which He has called His redeemed ones, that as indispensable as He is to them in heaven, that from Him their fruit may be found, so indispensable are they to Him on earth, that through them His fruit may be found. Believers, meditate on this, until your soul bows to worship in presence of the mystery of the perfect union between Christ and the believer.

There is more: as neither vine nor branch is anything without the other, so is neither anything except for the other.

All the vine possesses belongs to the branches. The vine does not gather from the soil its fatness and its sweetness for itself - all it has is at the disposal of the branches. As it is the parent, so it is the servant of the branches. And Jesus, to whom we owe our life, how completely does He give Himself for us and to us: "The glory Thou gavest me, I have given them"; "He that believeth in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works shall he do." All His fullness and all His riches are for thee, O believer; for the vine does not live for itself, keeps nothing for itself, but exists only for the branches. All that Jesus is in heaven, He is for us: He has no interest there separate from ours; as our representative He stands before the Father.

And all the branch possesses belongs to the vine. The branch does not exist for itself, but to bear fruit that can proclaim the excellence of the vine: it has no reason of existence except to be of service to the vine. Glorious image of the calling of the believer, and the entireness of his consecration to the service of his Lord. As Jesus gives Himself so wholly over to him, he feels himself urged to be wholly his Lord's. Every power of his being, every moment of his life, every thought and feeling, belong to Jesus, that from Him and for Him he may bring forth fruit. As he realizes what the vine is to the branch, and what the branch is meant to be to the vine, he feels that he has but one thing to think of and to live for, and that is, the will, the glory, the work, the kingdom of his blessed Lord - the bringing forth of fruit to the glory of His name.

The parable teaches us the object of the union. The branches are for fruit and fruit alone. "Every branch that beareth not fruit He taketh away." The branch needs leaves for the maintenance of its own life, and the perfection of its fruit: the fruit itself it bears to give away to those around. As the believer enters into his calling as a branch, he sees that he has to forget himself, and to live entirely for his fellowmen. To love them, to seek for them, and to save them, Jesus came: for this every branch on the Vine has to live as much as the Vine itself. It is for fruit, much fruit, that the Father has made us one with Jesus.

Wondrous parable of the Vine - unveiling the mysteries of the Divine love, of the heavenly life, of the world of Spirit - how little have I understood thee! Jesus the living Vine in heaven, and I the living branch on earth! How little have I understood how great my need, but also how perfect my claim, to all His fullness! How little understood, how great His need, but also how perfect His claim, to my emptiness! Let me, in its beautiful light, study the wondrous union between Jesus and His people, until it becomes to me the guide into full communion with my beloved Lord. Let me listen and believe, until my whole being cries out, "Jesus is indeed to me the True Vine, bearing me, nourishing me, supplying me, using me, and filling me to the full to make me bring forth fruit abundantly." Then shall I not fear to say, "I am indeed a branch to Jesus, the True Vine, abiding in Him, resting on Him, waiting for Him, serving Him, and living only that through me, too, He may show forth the riches of His grace, and give His fruit to a perishing world."

It is when we try thus to understand the meaning of the parable, that the blessed command spoken in connection with it will come home to us in its true power. The thought of what the vine is to the branch, and Jesus to the believer, will give new force to the words, "Abide in me!" It will be as if He says, "Think, soul, how completely I belong to thee. I have joined myself inseparably to thee; all the fulness and fatness of the Vine are thine in very deed. Now thou once art in me, be assured that all I have is wholly thine. It is my interest and my honour to have thee a fruitful branch; only Abide in me. Thou art weak, but I am strong; thou art poor, but I am rich. Only abide in me; yield thyself wholly to my teaching and rule; simply trust my love, my grace, my promises. Only believe; I am wholly thine; I am the Vine, thou art the branch. Abide in me.

What sayest thou, O my soul? Shall I longer hesitate, or withhold consent? Or shall I not, instead of only thinking how hard and how difficult it is to live like a branch of the True Vine, because I thought of it as something I had to accomplish - shall I not now begin to look upon it as the most blessed and joyful thing under heaven? Shall I not believe that, now I once am in Him, He Himself will keep me and enable me to abide? On my part, abiding is nothing but the acceptance of my position, the consent to be kept there, the surrender of faith to the strong Vine still to hold the feeble branch. Yes, I will, I do abide in Thee, blessed Lord Jesus.

O Saviour, how unspeakable is Thy love! "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me: it is high, I cannot attain unto it." I can only yield myself to Thy love with the prayer that, day by day, Thou wouldest unfold to me somewhat of its precious mysteries, and so encourage and strengthen Thy loving disciple to do what his heart longs to do indeed - ever, only, wholly to abide in Thee.

While I feel all of this is truly inspiring, what really aroused my sense of conviction of falling short was the paragraph about the fruit. It is so counter to our nature of the Flesh to live for anything other than ourselves. Yet our new nature of the Spirit not only calls us to live for others but also provides the means to do so through Jesus. Robert Mulholland made the same point in The Deeper Journey as he developed the theme that "we are to live in God for the world".

The parable teaches us the object of the union. The branches are for fruit and fruit alone. "Every branch that beareth not fruit He taketh away." The branch needs leaves for the maintenance of its own life, and the perfection of its fruit: the fruit itself it bears to give away to those around. As the believer enters into his calling as a branch, he sees that he has to forget himself, and to live entirely for his fellowmen. To love them, to seek for them, and to save them, Jesus came: for this every branch on the Vine has to live as much as the Vine itself. It is for fruit, much fruit, that the Father has made us one with Jesus.

Got fruit?

The Bush Plan

Bob Casey, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, was asked recently what he would do differently than Rick Santorum to promote success in Iraq. He replied that the first thing would be to get rid of Don Rumsfeld. Firing a cabinet secretary, of course, is not within the power of a senator so it's not something that distinguishes Mr. Casey from Mr. Santorum. Even so, it appears that Mr. Casey has no recommendations for Iraq that differ substantially from what the Bush administration is already doing there, unless he believes we should withdraw from Iraq immediately. This, however, he does not say, so his plan appears to be essentially to do what Bush is already doing, except do it better, whatever that means.

What is the Bush policy for Iraq? Do the Bush people really have a strategy? I think they do, but for whatever reason they're not very interested in articulating it. Their plan, as best as I can tell, involves the following four elements:

1. Hold the lid on in Baghdad for the time being. Most of the violence that is occurring in Iraq is occurring in and around Baghdad. There are two reasons for this. The coalition has been effective in suppressing the insurgency in much of the rest of the country, and second, the insurgency knows that if they're going to break the will of the American people they have to strike where the American media are.

2. Gradually secure the border (would that that were part of their domestic plan as well). As long as the insurgents are able to be resupplied across the Iranian and Syrian borders destabilization efforts by those neighbors will continue. The infiltration of men and material has to be stopped, but this takes time. Once the border is secured the insurgency in Baghdad will begin to suffocate.

3. Continue to build and protect the infrastructure of the country so that the people have a sense of being better off than they were under Saddam. This means, in addition to building schools, hospitals, electrical grids, etc., supporting the government of Iraq until it is strong enough to withstand the sundry threats to its existence.

4. In the long-term Syria and Iran must be dealt with. Until they are they will continue to make the lives of the Iraqis as hellish as they possibly can.

That's what I surmise the Bush plan to be, and I think that's what they're doing. Indeed, what else could they do short of nuking the entire country? Certainly none of the Democrats have offered an alternative course of action that makes any sense. I just wish the administration had a better PR program to explain their goals to the American people, and I wish they had more troops there to help expedite #1 and #2.

If the Democrats win the House and/or Senate on Tuesday it will, of course, be very much more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve these objectives, and, if they're rendered unattainable, the only recourse will be to withdraw. Withdrawal, however, would precipitate an unmitigated human disaster. The reasons why this would be so are explained here.

Israel Will Go To War Again. Soon.

John Keegan predicts in The Telegraph U.K. that before the year is out Israel will again be at war with Hezbollah, and this time it will be for keeps.

There will soon be another war in the Middle East, this time a renewal of the conflict between the Israel Defence Force (IDF) and Hizbollah. The conflict is inevitable and unavoidable. It will come about because Israel cannot tolerate the rebuilding of Hizbollah's fortified zone in south Lebanon, from which last year it launched its missile bombardment of northern Israel.

Hizbollah has now reconstructed the fortified zone and is replenishing its stocks of missiles there. Hamas is also creating a fortified zone in the Gaza Strip and building up its stocks of missiles. Israel, therefore, faces missile attack on two fronts. When the Israel general staff decides the threat has become intolerable, it will strike.

What happened in south Lebanon earlier this year has been widely misunderstood, largely because the anti-Israel bias in the international media led to the situation being misreported as an Israeli defeat.

It was no such thing. It was certainly an Israeli setback, but the idea that the IDF had suddenly lost its historic superiority over its Arab enemies and that they had acquired military qualities that had hitherto eluded them was quite false. Hizbollah suffered heavy losses in the fighting, perhaps as many as 1,000 killed out of its strength of up to 5,000 and it is only just now recovering.

Read why Keegan thinks a return to fighting is inevitable and imminent at the link.

It Must Stop Now

Everyone has by now heard of the allegations against Ted Haggard, pastor of New Life Church and president of the National Association of Evangelicals. It appears that the charges are true although the person who made them has nevertheless failed a polygraph test.

Whatever the case, if they are found to be factually correct then Mr. Haggard has done immeasurable harm to his family, his church, and to Christians everywhere. By maintaining a secret lifestyle steeped in sleaze, perversion, and illegal behavior he has brought discredit to everyone who calls him or herself a Christian and has done irreparable harm to the cause of keeping marriage a union of one man and one woman.

Much will be written about Mr. Haggard's hypocrisy in the days ahead but at this point the most important thing to be said, in my view, is that Christian leaders need to understand that if they are living lives that are a reproach to the principles they claim to cherish they must step down from their position of authority immediately. This goes for pastors and priests, parachurch ministry leaders, anyone, in fact, whose life is disgracing the name and body of Christ.

None of us is perfect. All of us have faults, but when our faults are such as to bring derision upon the Church we claim to love and serve, when our appetites are so undisciplined that we give the gospel of Christ a kick to the solar plexus, or worse, when we are found out, we have a moral obligation to step down from our pedestals until we get ourselves straightened out whether our derelictions have been discovered or not.

The image of the Church has suffered severely from the adulteries of the Jimmy Swaggarts and Jim Bakkers, and the pederastic abuses of dozens of priests over the last couple of decades. It has to stop, there has to be zero tolerance of such behavior among our putative leaders, and those who compromise the witness of the Church by living lives of debauchery while maintaining a facade of piety need to recognize the serious harm they are doing and need to withdraw themselves as models of Christian man and womanhood. Now.

Rick Santorum, Redux

We ran the following post at the end of last month, but, with the election coming up on Tuesday, I thought it important to have it on the current page. This is an important article, and I encourage readers who agree with that assessment to link it to their friends and family.

The New York Times has a column by David Brooks that a friend passed along and which one wishes every Pennsylvanian, indeed every American, would read. The complete essay follows:

Every poll suggests that Rick Santorum will lose his race to return to the U.S. Senate. That's probably good news in Pennsylvania's bobo suburbs, where folks regard Santorum as an ideological misfit and a social blight. But it's certainly bad for poor people around the world.

For there has been at least one constant in Washington over the past 12 years: almost every time a serious piece of antipoverty legislation surfaces in Congress, Rick Santorum is there playing a leadership role.

In the mid-1990s, he was a floor manager for welfare reform, the most successful piece of domestic legislation of the past 10 years. He then helped found the Renewal Alliance to help charitable groups with funding and parents with flextime legislation.

More recently, he has pushed through a stream of legislation to help the underprivileged, often with Democratic partners. With Dick Durbin and Joe Biden, Santorum has sponsored a series of laws to fight global AIDS and offer third world debt relief. With Chuck Schumer and Harold Ford, he's pushed to offer savings accounts to children from low-income families. With John Kerry, he's proposed homeownership tax credits. With Chris Dodd, he backed legislation authorizing $860 million for autism research. With Joe Lieberman he pushed legislation to reward savings by low-income families.

In addition, he's issued a torrent of proposals, many of which have become law: efforts to fight tuberculosis; to provide assistance to orphans and vulnerable children in developing countries; to provide housing for people with AIDS; to increase funding for Social Services Block Grants and organizations like Healthy Start and the Children's Aid Society; to finance community health centers; to combat genocide in Sudan.

I could fill this column, if not this entire page, with a list of ideas, proposals and laws Santorum has poured out over the past dozen years. It's hard to think of another politician who has been so active and so productive on these issues.

Like many people who admire his output, I disagree with Santorum on key matters like immigration, abortion, gay marriage. I'm often put off by his unnecessarily slashing style and his culture war rhetoric.

But government is ultimately not about the theater or the light shows of public controversy, it's about legislation and results. And the substance of Santorum's work is impressive. Bono, who has worked closely with him over the years, got it right: "I would suggest that Rick Santorum has a kind of Tourette's disease; he will always say the most unpopular thing. But on our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable."

Santorum doesn't have the jocular manner of most politicians. His colleagues' eyes can glaze over as he lectures them on the need to, say, devote a week of Senate floor time to poverty. He's not the most social member of the club. Many politicians praise family values and seem to spend as little time as possible with their own families, but Santorum is at home almost constantly. And there is sometimes a humorlessness to his missionary zeal.

But no one can doubt his rigor. Jonathan Rauch of The National Journal wrote the smartest review of Santorum's book, "It Takes a Family." Rauch noted that while Goldwaterite conservatives see the individual as the essential unit of society, Santorum sees the family as the essential unit.

Rauch observed, "Where Goldwater denounced collectivism as the enemy of the individual, Santorum denounces individualism as the enemy of the family." That belief has led Santorum in interesting and sometimes problematical directions, but the argument itself is a serious one. His discussion of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, is as sophisticated as anything in Barack Obama's recent book. If Santorum were pro-choice, he'd be a media star and a campus hero.

The bottom line is this: If serious antipoverty work is going to be done, it's going to emerge from a coalition of liberals and religious conservatives. Without Santorum, that's less likely to happen. If senators are going to be honestly appraised, it's going to require commentators who can look beyond the theater of public controversy and at least pretend to care about actual legislation. Santorum has never gotten a fair shake from the media.

And so after Election Day, the underprivileged will probably have lost one of their least cuddly but most effective champions.

Santorum is a wonderful example of "compassionate conservatism". He embodies so much of what voters claim they want their politicians to be, but he's about to fall victim to an adversary media and an uninformed public. The media doesn't seem to care about qualifications or accomplishments. They care about only three things: Party label, the candidate's stance on abortion, and his stance on the war.

Thus Santorum has three strikes against him and, short of a surge in Republican turnout, he will be replaced next week by a man, Bob Casey, whose only qualifications for the office seem to be that he has the right party affiliation, the right stance on getting out of Iraq, and his daddy was a popular governor. Santorum will lose the election, if he does, largely because the public simply hasn't taken the trouble to compare him with his opponent.

It's the sort of thing that sours people on American politics.

Mr. Compassionate Conservatism

OpinionJournal has a nice feature piece on former Bush speechwriter David Gerson who talks about his vision of compassionate conservatism, national polarization, foreign policy and other matters. It's an interesting article.

Here he is, for instance, on freedom and democracy:

Must there be a "democratic culture" before one can have a democracy? Mr. Gerson says that democracy took hold despite Confucianism in Asia, Catholicism in southern Europe and Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe. "All of these," Mr. Gerson notes, "were regarded as cultural impediments to democratic progress. In fact our ideals, the ideals of freedom, turned out to be more appealing than we thought." Mr. Gerson is confident that the same will prove true in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I have a deep belief that liberty improves human life. . . . People eventually find that to be true, but that doesn't mean they immediately find it to be true."

Mr. Gerson looks back on the last few years of trying to spread freedom as "a time of exhausting international engagement on a variety of fronts." And he doesn't see it ending any time soon. But if the war on terror is really going to occupy our focus for the foreseeable future, why should Republicans run on improving education and ending poverty? Did 9/11 spell the end of compassionate conservatism?

Mr. Gerson believes the answer is no; the administration's foreign policy, he says, represents an expansion of the philosophy of compassionate conservatism. Bringing freedom and democracy to other parts of the globe has required military action, but Mr. Gerson is annoyed by Mr. Bush's critics on the left who say the president only uses force to solve global problems. "The administration's increases in foreign assistance have percentage-wise been the largest since the Marshall Plan," he notes.

Read the rest of the column at the link.

The Boatman Is Closing In

Strategy Page discusses the implications of the recent strike on a terrorist training facility in Pakistan that killed over 80 Taliban.

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail also has several posts up on the strike (Go here and scroll down for other posts).

It appears that the sand is just about through the hour glass for al Qaeda's #2 guy Ayman al-Zawahiri. He's been spotted twice now and barely escaped both times. The intelligence on him must be pretty good, and like Abu al-Zarqawi, who managed to elude capture or death several times before being sent to his 72 virgins by a laser guided munition last summer, al-Zawahiri must realize that the boatman waiting to ferry his blood-drenched soul across the river Styx is breathing heavily down his neck.

Winning Through Racial Bigotry

News comes that black Democratic senator Barack Obama was derided this week by a conservative journal as a "lawn jockey". This is the sort of racist bilge we've come to expect of conservatives, I suppose. They can't defeat black candidates by engaging their ideas so they resort to racial epithets to disparage and dehumanize them.

What? You say you hadn't heard anything about this? You say that if it were true it'd be all over the media and all the anti-racist talking heads would be pontificating about how this kind of reprehensible talk has no place in our shared culture?

Well, maybe the media silence about the story has something to do with the fact that I apparently got the details confused. It wasn't a conservative journal that employed the insult, it was the very liberal Esquire magazine, and it wasn't the Democrat Barack Obama who was the object of the aspersion it was Republican senatorial candidate Michael Steele of Maryland. Steele is the black Lieutenant governor of Maryland who has suffered racist contumely from Democrats throughout his campaign for the Senate.

It's not just Steele, of course, who gets subjected to racial affronts by the "liberal" Left. Any black conservative can point to numerous instances of humiliations suffered at the hands of those who tout themselves as champions of racial comity and harmony. Clarence Thomas, Condaleeza Rice, Ken Blackwell, Alan Keyes, J.C. Watts, LaShawn Barber, Shelby Steele, Ward Connerly, Stephen Carter, and many others have all had to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous bigotry from the "anti-racist" Left.

It's past time that the media called them on their hypocrisy and their bigotry. See Michelle for more on the story.

Teaching Values at U of Pennsylvania

A lot of people wonder about the sense and sanity of our elite university administrators. They just don't seem to be living in the real world, some say. They're much too Politically Correct others aver. We think this is all a bunch of overwrought hooey, actually. We believe our university administrators are the best and brightest among us, dedicated to teaching our young to value those things which conduce to strong character like, say, peace and the intrinsic worth of human life.

Take Amy Gutmann, for example. She's the president of the University of Pennsylvania and demands high standards of deportment at Penn. She's the fairy queen on the right in the photo below. The picture was taken at a campus Halloween event, and she's shown in the company of an Islamic student dressed as a, uh, homicide bomber. Not that Ms Gutmann condones such things, you understand. You can tell by the stern expression on her face that she feels the Halloween jihadi is exhibiting very bad taste and insensitivity. You can tell by her angry look that she has no tolerance for those who appear to be glorifying murder. You can tell that she's outraged to be photographed with someone posing as a killer of women, children and American soldiers.

At least you can tell these things if you have a very good imagination. Otherwise, you might mistakenly think she's rather enjoying the company of this moral nitwit.

See Michelle for details.

Endorsing the Democrats

It's hard to believe that this article is not a spoof, but if it's indeed genuine, and it evidently is, it at the very least constitutes an endorsement the Democrats would undoubtedly rather not have. The article is the product of a number of interviews with various Palestinian terrorist leaders by Aaron Klein of World Net Daily. In the interviews these jihadists urge Americans to vote for Democrats next week. They as much as say that a victory for the Democrats will be a victory for jihad:

Everybody has an opinion about next Tuesday's midterm congressional election in the U.S. - including senior terrorist leaders interviewed by WND who say they hope Americans sweep the Democrats into power because of the party's position on withdrawing from Iraq, a move, as they see it, that ensures victory for the worldwide Islamic resistance.

The terrorists told WorldNetDaily an electoral win for the Democrats would prove to them Americans are "tired."

They rejected statements from some prominent Democrats in the U.S. that a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency, explaining an evacuation would prove resistance works and would compel jihadists to continue fighting until America is destroyed.

They said a withdrawal would also embolden their own terror groups to enhance "resistance" against Israel.

"Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND.

"This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because there is an atmosphere in America that encourages those who want to withdraw from Iraq. It is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud," said Jaara, speaking to WND from exile in Ireland, where he was sent as part of an internationally brokered deal that ended the church siege.

It gets better (or worse, depending upon your point of view). Read the rest of the article at the link.

Here's what the Islamic terrorists' reaction was to Nancy Pelosi's suggestion that we can end the insurgency in Iraq by pulling out:

WND read Pelosi's remarks to the terror leaders, who unanimously rejected her contention an American withdrawal would end the insurgency.

Islamic Jihad's Saadi, laughing, stated, "There is no chance that the resistance will stop."

He said an American withdrawal from Iraq would "prove the resistance is the most important tool and that this tool works. The victory of the Iraqi revolution will mark an important step in the history of the region and in the attitude regarding the United States."

Jihad Jaara said an American withdrawal would "mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (America)."

"Therefore, a victory in Iraq would be a greater defeat for America than in Vietnam."

Jaara said vacating Iraq would also "reinforce Palestinian resistance organizations, especially from the moral point of view. But we also learn from these (insurgency) movements militarily. We look and learn from them."

Hamas' Abu Abdullah argued a withdrawal from Iraq would "convince those among the Palestinians who still have doubts in the efficiency of the resistance."

"The victory of the resistance in Iraq would prove once more that when the will and the faith are applied victory is not only a slogan. We saw that in Lebanon (during Israel's confrontation against Hezbollah there in July and August); we saw it in Gaza (after Israel withdrew from the territory last summer) and we will see it everywhere there is occupation," Abdullah said.

It is disturbing to think that if the Democrats win 15 House seats next Tuesday Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House and third in line for the Presidency.

I wonder if the Republican ad companies are not right now turning this news report into television ads to run this weekend. If they're not they sure should be.

Hazleton's Attempt to Save Itself

How many American towns will follow the example of Hazleton, PA in passing laws which make it difficult for illegal aliens to live there? I suspect that if the courts uphold the Hazleton regulations a lot of other towns across the nation will follow suit. This is unfortunate for legal immigrants whose livelihoods depend upon a growing ethnic community, but if these towns are going to save themselves from ruin, both financial and cultural, measures like those taken in Hazleton really are necessary.

Some may disagree with this assessment, of course, but I urge anyone who does disagree to read not only the above-linked article but, more importantly, to also read Pat Buchanan's excellent book State of Emergency.

Five Crucial Differences

On Tuesday voters across the country will pull levers and poke computer screens to determine what sort of future we wish for our children. There's much at stake, and sometimes the clashing ads and unctuous voices make it difficult to know who the best person is to send to Washington to represent our views and concerns. One thing that's helpful in clearing up the confusion is that despite many loud laments to the contrary, the differences between the parties is perhaps more stark today than it has ever been. There are important matters at issue whose outcome will be very different depending upon whether it is Democrats or Republicans which control the congress.

The following is an outline of how I see the differences between the two parties on five of the most important of those issues:

War on Terror: The Democrats wish to abolish or weaken the Patriot act and the various terrorist surveillance programs initiated by the Bush administration. They want to treat terrorism as a police, rather than as a military, matter. They want to give terrorist detainees the same rights American citizens get in a court of law, including the provision of a lawyer, at taxpayer expense, to each suspected enemy combatant.

Republicans tend to believe that we must do everything legal to make it impossible for terrorists to strike us again here at home, and that terrorists should not have the same legal rights as foreign soldiers, much less American citizens.

War in Iraq: To the extent that the Democrats have a coherent policy on Iraq it is to get out immediately, if not sooner. Republicans see an early pullout as opening the sluice gates to disaster.

Taxes: Democrats are eager to raise taxes by rescinding the Bush tax cuts of the last few years. Republicans believe that people should be allowed to keep as much of what they earn as possible. They believe that the more money we have the more we'll spend, the more we spend the more jobs that will be created and the more total tax revenue that will ultimately flow back to the government. The Bush tax cuts are seen by Republicans as the reason why unemployment is currently down to near record lows and the stock market is up to record highs.

Illegal Immigration: The differences on this issue aren't quite as clear, but generally Democrats tend to favor open borders with Mexico and amnesty for illegals. Republicans tend to favor stopping the flow of illegals by increasing border patrols, technology and by building a fence. Even so, there are some Republicans who also favor open borders and some Democrats who oppose them. Both of these are minorities in their parties, however.

Life Issues/Supreme Court: Democrats almost universally favor abortion rights and will block the nomination of federal judges and Supreme Court justices they deem likely to be unsympathetic to the pro-choice cause. They tend to take a very flexible view of the constitution, interpreting it to mean whatever they think it should mean. Republicans believe that judges and justices should rule according to what the constitution actually says, and they don't think the constitution contains anywhere in it a right to abortion or a right to gay marriage.