Mixing Science and Philosophy

One of the arguments against teaching intelligent design in science classes is that ID is a philosophical hypothesis, and only scientific hypotheses should be taught in science classes, especially in public schools. Even if it were the case that ID falls short of the criteria which define science, criteria which no one has ever really been able to satisfactorily identify, that should hardly disqualify it from mention in the science classroom. There are, after all, dozens of topics and ideas discussed in science classes, especially those populated by the brighter students, which surely share the same philosophical status as ID.

Here's a partial list of examples taken from a Viewpoint post from a couple of years ago:

1. The Many Worlds Hypothesis: The idea that ours is just one of a nearly infinite number of universes, all of which are closed off from each other thus defying detection.

2. The Oscillating Universe Hypothesis: The theory that our universe has expanded and collapsed an infinite number of times.

3. String theory: The idea that the fundamental units of material substance are unimaginably tiny vibrating filaments of energy.

4. The existence of other dimensions: The theory that the four dimensions of space-time are only part of physical reality.

5. Principle of Uniformity: The assumption that the laws and properties of the universe are homogenous and constant everywhere throughout the cosmos.

6. Assumption of Uniformitarianism: The idea that the same processes and forces at work in the world today have always been at work at essentially the same rates.

7. The Scientific Method: The idea that there is a particular methodology that defines the scientific process and which ought to be followed.

8. The Law of Parsimony: The principle that assumes that the simplest explanation which fits all the facts is the best.

9. The assumption that human reason is trustworthy: The notion that a faculty which has evolved because it made us better fit to survive is also a dependable guide to something else, truth, which has no necessary connection to human survival.

10. The assumption that we should value truth: The idea that truth should be esteemed more highly than competing values, like, for instance, personal comfort or group advancement.

11. The preference in science for naturalistic explanations: This is a preference based upon an untestable assumption that all knowable truth is found only in the natural realm.

12. Naturalistic Abiogenesis: The belief that natural forces are sufficient in themselves to have produced life.

13. The assumption that if something is physically possible and mathematically elegant then, given the age of the universe, it probably happened.

14. The assumption that the cosmos is atelic. I.e. that it has no purpose.

15. The assumption that there's a world external to our own minds.

16. Materialistic Reductionism: The conviction that all phenomena, including mental phenomena, can be ultimately explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry.

17. Assumption that the universe arose out of a "vacuum matrix" rather than out of nothing.

18. Ethical claims regarding the environment, nuclear power, cloning, or genetic engineering.

19. The Concept of the Meme: According to biologist Richard Dawkins memes are the cultural analog to genes. They are ideas or customs that are believed by Dawkins and others to get passed along according to their survival value rather than their truth value (see #9, above). An example of this, unfortunately, is the concept of the meme itself.

20. The criteria by which we distinguish science from non-science.

Mention of none of these in public school science classrooms precipitates the levitation of a single eyebrow among the custodians of science purity yet every one of them is a matter of metaphysical preference, not empirical fact. Why, then, do those custodians suddenly wax squeamish when the topic of discussion turns to the possibility that incredibly complex information-based systems in the living cell are the product of intentional engineering?

RLC

Beautiful Birds III

Here are a couple more pics of some of the more brilliant examples of our North American avifauna. The first is a Wood duck, one of the most common waterfowl in the northeast. Despite their abundance they're not often easy to see up close. They're shy, they inhabit wooded ponds and streams, and will often take flight before they are even spotted. Nevertheless, if the male can be seen at close range or with good optics in good light, it's stunningly colorful.

This next little fella' inspired one of America's most famous naturalists and artists, Roger Tory Peterson, to devote his life to the pursuit of birds. As a boy he was walking in New York City's Central Park one May, and a birder directed his gaze to a Magnolia warbler flitting in the bushes. Once he saw it he was hooked for life.

Finally, this last photo is of perhaps the most colorful songbird in all of North America. It's a male Painted bunting. These are found across the south and only rarely wander north of the Mason-Dixon line. Nevertheless, there was a female in Philadelphia's John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge throughout the winter of 2006.

Nature offers so much beauty to delight the senses and enrich our lives. It's a shame that we have so little time, and, sadly, too little inclination, to take it in.

RLC

The Future of Faith Pt. I

David Brooks has a column in the New York Times (free subscription may be required) which has already sparked some lively discussion. He talks about how advances made in the field of neuro- and other cognitive sciences are ultimately going to undermine belief in the Bible and in the soul, but not in the existence of a transcendent deity.

His last paragraph provides a good summary of his essay:

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They're going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I'm not qualified to take sides, believe me. I'm just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We're in the middle of a scientific revolution. It's going to have big cultural effects.

Actually, the future Brooks predicts has been with us for almost two centuries. Ever since Darwin, and even before, scientific naturalism and religious faith have been at daggers drawn. Moreover, for the last several decades we've seen the growth of a syncretistic "New Age" religion which seeks to hold onto transcendence while pretty much disposing of inconvenient religious doctrines.

In any event, Brooks thinks that our deepening understanding of the brain is going to somehow hasten the process of dissolving religious particularism. He believes that Christian belief will become less and less persuasive for more and more people as science learns more and more about how the brain works. If he's right then those churches and Christian institutions which have failed to teach their young the basis for belief and ground them in a solid understanding of why they believe what they believe have done the faithful a real disservice and will indeed come to be seen as increasingly irrelevant.

He writes:

Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or merely adds to our appreciation of the entity that created it.

Brooks makes an assumption here about the soul that needs be teased out. He seems to be conflating soul and mind, which is not an unusual association, but neither is it necessary. Mind and soul may well be two different entities, in which case the question is not whether the soul survives the death of the body but rather whether the mind does. In other words, even if the materialist view is correct that we are just atoms, and that mind is just a word we use to describe the function of the brain, that doesn't necessarily eliminate the soul.

In the materialist view the soul, life, emotions, and consciousness are nothing but the products of chemical processes which have reached a certain critical mass and give rise to certain astounding emergent phenomena. But we need not accept this dehumanizing reductionistic materialism, a view which, by the way, is thoroughly unscientific because there's no way to test it, in order to grant that it might be that there's no soul, in the classic sense, residing in persons. It is possible that we have a mind which works in concert with the brain and is necessary for its proper function and also have a soul which is not necessarily a mental entity.

Perhaps the soul is not some gossamer, wraith-like entity that inhabits our body like a ghost-in-a-machine, to use Gilbert Ryle's famous metaphor. Perhaps instead we can think of it as the sum total of information which describes us as a person. It is, on this view, the totality of our history, our personality, hopes, dreams, loves, and fears. It encompasses a complete description of our physical, emotional, and moral selves. It is a comprehensive account of every aspect of our being all stored like a computer file folder in the data base that is the mind of God. As such it is eternal and indestructible unless God chooses to delete it. Even at the death of the body we have the potential to exist as long as God holds us (the information which describes us) in being in His mind. God may, if He chooses, reinstantiate us when our body gives out by downloading selected files from our folder into another suitable structure in some other reality.

Thus the materialists could be correct that we (our bodies) are comprised solely of material substance (I don't think they are, though, because I have my doubts that matter alone can fully explain consciousness) but they could still be wrong in asserting that there is no soul.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it's going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

This is probably true, but it's not news. The Bible has been under assault for at least two hundred years. Despite the exegetical difficulties presented by certain passages, especially in the Old Testament, it has weathered many storms. Whether it will continue to do so depends, at least from the human side of things, on the scholarship and skill of its defenders. Again it must be said there will be increasing need for well-educated, committed Christian scholars to face these challenges. If we don't produce them Christianity could well become sociologically and culturally marginalized.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Here we see one of the many vulnerabilities of secular materialism. If our moral sense is just a by-product of genetic evolution then we're no more obligated to obey our instinct for fairness, say, than we are to obey our instinct to be promiscuous or aggressive. Instincts impose no demands and are not moral imperatives. They carry no moral value. To act contrary to human instinct, if indeed such a thing exists, is to do nothing that can be judged morally wrong.

The best explanation for universal moral intuitions, and the only one that gives them any moral sanction, is that they were woven into the universe by an omnibenevolent, omniscient mind which insists, on pain of eternal consequences, that they be obeyed.

Brooks says more on the future of faith that I'd like to talk about in a separate post.

RLC

The Loser Letters

A former Christian who has converted to atheism initiates a series of letters to her new colleagues cautioning them about some of their attitudes and rhetoric. The preliminary letter as well as the first installment can be read at National Review Online. The ex-Christian admonishes her new friends in the letter to be very careful about how they talk about sex.

Those who have enjoyed C.S.Lewis' Screwtape Letters will appreciate this clever addition to the genre.

RLC

The Culture War

The California State Supreme Court has ruled 4-3 that there is in the state's constitution, evidently, a right to marry for same sex couples. This decision overrules a law favored by over 60% of the state's citizens that restricts marriage to a man and a woman.

Several observers have noted that there's nothing in the majority's decision which would prevent plural marriage or incest, only a tepid footnote which states that "our nation's culture has considered [those] relationships inimical to the mutually supportive and healthy family relationships promoted by the constitutional right to marry."

Well, has not our nation's culture long considered homosexual marriage to be inimical to healthy family relationships? If the gender of the people entering marriage no longer matters why should the number of people?

In Pennsylvania, where there's an ungoing struggle to pass a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a covenant between one man and one woman, a man testifying before the state senate was grilled by one senator with this question: If two homosexuals are allowed to marry will that harm your marriage to your wife? The witness was temporarily at a loss for a response and the Senator interpreted that as some sort of victory for the gay marriage advocates.

The appropriate answer to the Senator is that the problem is not the effect that opening marriage to same sex couples will have on particular heterosexual unions. The problem is the effect it will have on the institution of marriage in general.

If court decisions like that in California are allowed to stand (California voters will have the opportunity to effectively overturn it in a referendum scheduled for November) they will act as a social acid gradually but inexorably eating away at the institution of marriage and the family, dissolving both. Once any combination of people can marry each other then marriage will come to mean anything at all, and, consequently, nothing at all.

RLC

On Dignity

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard, has written something of a screed in The New Republic in which he's very critical of a book produced by the President's Council on Bioethics addressing the role of human dignity in formulating public policy. He's even more critical of the book's contributors and passes up no opportunity to insult them for their views and the religious assumptions which inform them. Pinker is an atheist and is therefore of the belief that dignity, if it exists at all, is irrelevant to human ethical thinking.

There are three sections of his piece to which I'd like to call special attention. In the first Pinker writes:

The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy--the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele's sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, "dignity" adds nothing (Italics mine).

This is a good illustration of the confusions in which one gets mired once one abandons the notion of transcendence. The italicized claim is a non-sequitur. How does it follow from the fact that we share certain traits in common that therefore no one has the right to "impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another?" What is the logical connection between the two propositions? There simply isn't any.

Moreover, Macklin and Pinker confuse autonomy with dignity. It is not our autonomy that confers rights upon us. It's the fact that we have dignity. Our autonomy follows from the fact we have a prima facie right, bestowed by God, to be treated with respect. Indeed, this is what dignity is and we have that right because we are created in the image of God and because He loves and values each one of us.

If there is no God, if we're simply a cosmic accident, then not only has no one any right to be treated with respect but no one has any natural rights at all. Whatever rights we have are purely legal, they're just words on paper.

Pinker adds:

To be fair, most of the chapters in the Dignity volume don't appeal directly to Catholic doctrine, and of course the validity of an argument cannot be judged from the motives or affiliations of its champions. Judged solely on the merits of their arguments, how well do the essayists clarify the concept of dignity?

By their own admission, not very well. Almost every essayist concedes that the concept remains slippery and ambiguous. In fact, it spawns outright contradictions at every turn. We read that slavery and degradation are morally wrong because they take someone's dignity away. But we also read that nothing you can do to a person, including enslaving or degrading him, can take his dignity away. We read that dignity reflects excellence, striving, and conscience, so that only some people achieve it by dint of effort and character. We also read that everyone, no matter how lazy, evil, or mentally impaired, has dignity in full measure. Several essayists play the genocide card and claim that the horrors of the twentieth century are what you get when you fail to hold dignity sacrosanct. But one hardly needs the notion of "dignity" to say why it's wrong to gas six million Jews or to send Russian dissidents to the gulag.

Well, then. Why is it wrong for those who have the power to murder and enslave others to actually do it? David Berlinski in The Devil's Delusion quotes Heinrich Himmler, faced with the difficulties posed by Germany's treaty obligations with surrounding countries, as wondering aloud, "What, after all, compels us to keep our promises?" Indeed, Berlinski asks, what does?

On what grounds does Pinker, or any atheist, deny that might makes right? Like many atheists, Pinker believes that somehow moral right, wrong, and obligation can exist in a world where human beings are simply flesh and bone machines. This is the atheist delusion, if you will. They think they can still make meaningful moral judgments after having sawn off the metaphysical branch upon which they're sitting. Having rejected any adequate transcendent ground for moral right and wrong they're left with nothing but their own subjective feelings upon which they base moral pronouncements proclaimed ex cathedra, as though they were grounded in some inexorable law of the universe.

Here's an example:

Worst of all, theocon bioethics flaunts a callousness toward the billions of non-geriatric people, born and unborn, whose lives or health could be saved by biomedical advances. Even if progress were delayed a mere decade by moratoria, red tape, and funding taboos (to say nothing of the threat of criminal prosecution), millions of people with degenerative diseases and failing organs would needlessly suffer and die. And that would be the biggest affront to human dignity of all.

Forget about the obvious mendacity of the first sentence. Ask instead, yet again, what grounds Pinker has for being outraged by such an affront were it really the case. Once more, all he's doing is emoting, telling us something about his own likes and dislikes, declaring to all and sundry that he doesn't feel good about allowing moral constraints to hold up biomedical progress. But of course, that's no reason for him to think such impediments are actually wrong. On his view they can be nothing more than an unfortunate inconvenience.

Pinker suffers from an advanced case of the atheist's delusion, the belief that moral obligation can be grounded entirely in one's own feelings, and perhaps only a miracle, ironically enough, can cure him.

Yuval Levin offers a devastating response to Pinker's other claims at NRO.

RLC

Happy Birthday to Us

Today is a special day here at Viewpoint. Four years ago today we put up our first post (on gay marriage). Since then we've tallied 4290 posts and almost 259,400 visitor hits. Special thanks to my brother Bill for keeping everything up and running and to all of our faithful readers who visit us regularly and give us the inspiration to keep going.

RLC

The Atheist Delusion

William Lane Craig is a philosopher in the tradition of the ancient Greek Socrates. He believes that philosophical ideas, particularly religious ones, should be debated in the public square rather than confined to academic cloisters. Consequently, he finds himself frequently invited to debate prominent atheists in public forums.

He recently engaged Dr. Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachussetts, on a topic that gets a lot of print here at Viewpoint: "Is God Necessary for Morality?" Craig reflects on the debate here.

One of the exchanges he mentions had to do with a problem first raised by Epicurus over 2000 years ago and frequently cited by skeptics ever since. Here's Craig's summary of it:

In her opening speech .... [Dr. Antony] went on the offensive and argued that moral values cannot depend on God .... Her argument was an old, familiar one: either something is good because God wills it or else God wills something because it is good. The first alternative is unacceptable, since it makes what is good (or evil) arbitrary, and the second alternative implies that the good is independent of God. So moral values cannot depend on God.

David Berlinski presents this same argument in his otherwise enjoyable Devil's Delusion. Berlinski claims that there are three possible answers to the question of what sanctions our moral sentiments - God, logic, and nothing. Berlinski claims that all three are inadequate. He's right about the last two but not about the first. His mistake is to think that if morality derives from God's will then if God's will were to change what's wrong today - rape, murder, and cruelty - could all be right tomorrow. The problem with this is that morality doesn't derive from God's will but rather from His nature. His will simply reflects His nature and His nature is unchanging.

Craig responds to Antony in similar fashion:

In my second speech I immediately dispatched this false dilemma by explaining a third alternative: God wills something because He is good. This is the classical theistic position: God's nature determines what is good (so the good is not independent of God) and His nature necessarily expresses itself toward us in the form of His commandments (so that they are not arbitrary).

The atheist just cannot circumvent the fact that if atheism is true moral obligation is an illusion and nothing is more absurd than an atheist delivering himself of moral opinions and judgments, which, of course, many of them do with amusing regularity. This is what might be called the atheist delusion.

Craig challenges Antony with this very point:

In my opening speech I presented three challenges to any atheist who, like Prof. Antony, wants to cling to objective morality in the absence of God. (1) If there is no God, what is the basis for objective moral values? In particular, what is the basis for the value of human beings? (2) If there is no God, what is the basis of objective moral duties? Who or what imposes these obligations and prohibitions upon us? (3) If there is no God, what is the basis of moral accountability? Since all human life ends in death, morality becomes vain, since our fate is unrelated to our moral behavior. I knew that Dr. Antony, though an atheist, believes in objective morality, so what I was challenging her to give was some positive account of how morality is objective in the absence of God.

Apparently, Dr. Antony declined to respond to those challenges, but that's not surprising. There's really nothing she could have said by way of reply. You can read more on the debate at the link.

RLC

The Winner

Larry Wright's cartoon tells a strange story. The media which fawned all over Senator Clinton when she first announced her candidacy and which staunchly defended her and her wayward hubby throughout the nineties despite their numerous crimes, misdemeanors, malfeasances and peccadilloes, has now, like a middle aged man undergoing a mid-life crisis, tossed Hillary aside for a younger, sexier political novice.

It's bad enough that she has suffered this treatment from her husband but to suffer it now at the hands of a fickle press who has left her for a candidate she probably regards as a political bimbo must be almost unendurable.

Another ironic thing about the narrative of this primary is that Hillary may well wind up with a higher popular vote total than Obama if Michigan and Florida are counted. She has won almost all of the big states and would possibly have more appeal to moderate Republicans and independents than Obama would once his views are fully vetted. Yet the Democrats seem determined to go with a virtual novice, a complete unknown.

Fortunately for them their opponent is John McCain who is himself determined to do whatever he can to alienate his Republican base.

RLC

Beautiful Birds II

Spring is full of delights to the eye. Flowers and butterflies, for example, are incredibly beautiful when viewed up close. My favorites, though, as I noted the other day, are the birds: Here are pictures of three North American species that are particularly lovely. The first is found anywhere in the east there are mature trees in relatively open woodlots. It's the bird for which the major league Baltimore orioles are named:

This next is a fairly common migrant, and in fact I just had one in my backyard today. It's called a Rose-Breasted grosbeak and the combination of black, white and red makes it a gorgeous bird:

This striking creature is harder to find unless one lives south of the Mason-Dixon line. It inhabits wooded swamps and nests in cavities, mostly in the south. It's a prothonotary warbler, and it played a prominent role in the famous Alger Hiss spy trial back in 1948.

There are lots more feathered jewels of spring so I'll post a few more pics in a day or so.

RLC

Unelectable?

Is Senator Obama unelectable? I'd feel more confident that he was if it weren't for McCain's propensity for thumbing his nose at conservative Republicans. Enough Republicans may vote for McCain, but few are enthusiastic about him, and enthusiasm is crucial. It translates into volunteers, contributions, and friends and family being persuaded to vote for the candidate one feels strongly about.

If the Republican party had had the foresight to groom and nominate someone with administrative experience, personality and solid conservative credentials Obama would be a flash in the pan. As it is he may very well prove to be our next president. If so, he will probably be the furthest any president has ever been from the philosophical mainstream of the American people.

RLC

Time to Invade Burma?

Gosh. Time magazine, of all people, has an article all but calling for the U.S. to invade Burma in order to rescue the suffering millions from the wicked delinquencies of their leaders. Can this be the same Time magazine that has been reliably opposed to our efforts to do pretty much the same thing in Iraq where we have far more in the way of national interest at stake than we do in Burma?

Is the difference between the two cases merely that Iraq was George Bush's idea and therefore misguided, but invading Burma would be a liberal idea and therefore noble? I don't know, and I don't necessarily oppose military action to rescue those poor wretched peasants in principle. I just wonder why Time would think military force in Burma more justifiable than military force in Iraq.

See also here, and National Review Online starting here.

RLC

Philosophers' Version of Fight Club

Two prominent philosophers whose specialty is the study of mind have been at each other's throats, as it were, for twenty five years, all because of an impolitic remark one made about the other's girl-friend. No one holds grudges with the tenacity and bitterness of intellectuals.

One of them has written a book which has been reviewed by the other. This article in The Guardian describes the review:

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. "This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad," begins Colin McGinn's review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. "It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent."

The ending isn't much better: "Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others)."

Ouch. There's more at the link including some amplification by both combatants.

HT: Mindful Hack

RLC

Unassisted Triple Play

This has happened only fourteen times in major league history - an unassisted triple play:

Triple play
by krs601

It happened tonight in a game between the Indians and the Blue Jays. You'd think the announcers would be a little more excited about having witnessed it.

RLC

Regarding Reagan

My friend Jason passes along a Newsweek piece in which a liberal, Sean Wilentz, and a conservative, George Will, discuss the legacy of Ronald Reagan. It's an interesting conversation in its own right, not least because Wilentz has a lot of admiration for Reagan and suggests that he's becoming more universally recognized as a historic president. I urge any reader interested in recent history to give it a look.

The thing about it that I found most fascinating, however, is that almost everything both men say about Reagan could also be said about George W. Bush. I've said before that I believe Bush will go down in history as a much more consequential president than Ronald Reagan, especially if Iraq and Afghanistan are long-term successes. I don't like everything that George Bush has done, but most people forget that there was a lot about Reagan that even members of his own party didn't like (Will and Wilentz mention a few). People point to Bush's approval numbers and scoff at any suggestion that he'll be vindicated by history, but they forget that Harry Truman, who is widely respected by historians today, had even lower numbers than Bush does.

Bush's legacy, especially among conservatives, will someday eclipse that of Ronald Reagan who is justly regarded by contemporary conservatives as an icon. Bush's impact on the Supreme Court and on tax policy, the relative health of the economy despite terrific shocks (9/11, Katrina, the lending crisis), his liberation of 50 million people from oppression, his success in preventing further terrorist attacks on our soil, his stand for life, his compassionate outreach to the poor around the world, especially in Africa, the culmination under his leadership of Reagan's dream of a ballistic missile defense, his personal grace, virtue and faith, his appointments of minorities to positions of power, all of these and more are either the equal of RR or exceed what Reagan was able to accomplish.

Anyway, read the article. It's well worth the ten minutes it'll take you to do it.

RLC

Operation Chaos

There's been a flurry of media attention over the last several days on the matter of Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos," i.e. the talk show host's attempt to persuade Republicans to cross over and vote for Hillary in those Democratic primaries where voting is "open" to anyone. He's also urging Republicans to change their registration to Democrat for the sole purpose of voting for Hillary in those primaries which are closed. The putative purpose of all this is to keep Senator Clinton close enough to Senator Obama in the balloting that she'll be encouraged to stay in the race until the convention. Rush's thinking is that the longer this race goes on, especially if it goes all the way to the convention in August, the weaker the Democrat candidate who emerges from the fray will be.

Some Democrats are upset by this, but exit polls show that Mitt Romney defeated John McCain among Republicans in several states that McCain won because he garnered more of the non-Republican vote. So, the Democrats really have no right to complain.

There's been some media commentary on the ethics of all this, but it is legal, and that brings us to the topic of this post. Whether Rush succeeds in weakening the Democratic party or not, Operation Chaos will have served a salutary purpose, in my opinion, if it accomplishes two things:

First, it will be a good thing if the blatant manipulation of one party's nominating process by members of the other party causes both parties to realize that open primaries are a political absurdity. Why should Democrats, for example, have a say in who the Republicans will run against them? Perhaps after this primary season state parties will start asking themselves that question and close their primaries to all but members of their own party.

Second, there has been a trend for the last several decades toward doing everything possible to make voter registration easier. In some states you can join a party and vote in their primary just a few weeks, or even one day in the case of Connecticut, prior to the election. If the rules were changed to require that registration be closed, say, by Dec. 31st of the year before the primaries begin, that would effectively end tactics like Operation Chaos. Months before the voting started voters would be less likely to know whether there would be a close race in their own party and would thus be more reluctant to change their affiliation just for the sake of voting in another party's contest.

Whatever effect Operation Chaos has had, and Obama's people have said that it gave Hillary 7% in Indiana, a state she won by 2%, it would have been impossible to pull off at all had primaries been closed to non-members and had registration been closed long before the primaries began. If these two reforms gain wider consideration because the Democrats have been manipulated into a self-destructive primary campaign, then Operation Chaos will have been, on balance, a very good thing.

RLC

Heroes Must Be Punished

There's a certain type of person, unfortunately all too common, who's like a mechanical device. Whenever input A is received, output B is spit out. It doesn't matter what the circumstances are, A must always result in B. As with automatons, there can be no exceptions, no deviations, only a rigid, unthinking, invariable stimulus/response. These people would be no more willing to actually think about what they do than they would be willing to donate their monthly paycheck to a local street gang. They possess consciousness, but prefer not to use it, opting instead to act like mental zombies. Such are the corporate overlords who run Super America:

A local gas station employee is out of a job after he thought he was helping save someone's life. Mark Beverly was one of two employees inside a Roseville Super America when a robber came into the store on March 26.

Beverly was cleaning the bathroom when he heard the store clerk cry out. He came out to find a robber attacking the female employee.

"I just jumped on his back and trying to hit his head and pushed him over the counter. I jumped back over and he was out of there," he said.

Later that day, Beverly returned to work only to be punished for his actions.

"I didn't think I was going to get fired for it," he told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS.

Super America issued a statement, saying that 'employees are never to take action that could endanger themselves or others. It's regrettable this happened.'

"I didn't care about the money, I know Super America is insured. But I thought he was attacking her, that's why I jumped on him," he explained.

The Roseville Police Department has not made any arrests regarding the robbery. Beverly has been denied employment with Super America.

Mr. Beverly is a hero, but he's treated as though he were caught sleeping on the job. It makes sense to have a policy of non-resistance to robbers, but that's not what was happening here. A co-worker was being beaten. What do the corporate sages at Super America, who have probably never risked anything to help anyone in their lives, suggest that Mr. Beverly should have done? Dialogue with the mugger? Call 911 and let the woman be beaten for five long minutes until the police responded? Continue to mop the floor and pretend nothing was happening?

It doesn't matter to the lobotomized suits who inhabit the Super America penthouse suite that Mr. Beverly did the only thing that any decent human being in his position could do. All they know is that he breached company policy and so must be made an example for any other would-be decent human beings in their employ. This is how we reward those, their dismissal of Mr. Beverly warns, who have the insolence to care about the well-being of other people enough to risk harm to themselves to help them.

I hope there are some businessmen in the twin cities region who possess brains as well as spine and who will see in Mr. Beverly the kind of humanity and courage that they would like to have working for them. He's obviously over-qualified for Super America.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Re: Bailout

About a week ago we did a post on an opportunity for readers to express their displeasure with Congress' plans to bail out lenders and borrowers who can no longer make payments on their mortgages by signing a petition.

One reader who signed the petition offers his reasons on our Feedback page. I'm sure he speaks for millions of Americans, and his letter will help those who might not quite understand what the fuss is about to see the issue more clearly.

To read it click on the Feedback button to the left.

RLC

Evangelical Manifesto

The Evangelical Manifesto we wrote about earlier this week has been released, and although I haven't had time to examine it thoroughly it seems on first reading to be a very impressive document. The concerns I expressed in the earlier post have been largely allayed.

The Manifesto's twenty pages are much too rich to summarize in a single post, but I certainly urge everyone to study it. Christians should familiarize themselves with it because it's a lodestone for people of faith looking to navigate the currents of modern culture, and non-Christians should study it because it's a Rosetta stone for those who seek to go beyond media stereotypes of Christianity and to decipher and understand for themselves who Christians are and what they really believe.

The Manifesto can be read here. A list of signatories can be found here.

RLC

Self-Evident Moral Truth

There's a fascinating discussion going on at Uncommon Descent over the question of whether there are self-evident moral truths. The springboard for the conversation is a passage from Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov in which Dostoyevsky has Ivan tell this story - which is believed to be based on actual events - in order to illustrate the utter depravity of human beings (Caution: This story describes acts of sickening violence):

People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother's womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother's eyes. Doing it before the mother's eyes was what gave zest to the amusement.

Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.

The question is whether what the soldiers did was self-evidently and absolutely wrong. The answer is, if there is a God then yes; if there isn't then, no, it's not wrong at all. If there is no transcendent moral source then there are no absolute moral wrongs nor, indeed, is there such a thing as moral right and wrong. There are only things people do which we like or don't like.

My contribution to the debate is comment #90.

RLC

Rosie on Wright

Forget about Rosie's gaffes in this clip (it's 3/5, not 3/4; the Tuskegee program was reprehensible, but the government did not give the men syphillis). Set aside the implied slur against black preachers that Rosie delivers when she says that Wright is just doing what black preachers do, i.e. lie. Forget that when Rosie says that Wright made sense to her that was all anyone teetering on the fence about Wright might need to justify abandoning any hope of ever sympathizing with the guy.

Ignore all that and ask yourself: Aren't you getting a little weary of people insisting that if we're going to scrutinize Jeremiah Wright then we ought to also scrutinize John Hagee, who endorsed John McCain, and indeed every other preacher in the U.S.?

John McCain did not sit under John Hagee for twenty years, Hagee did not baptize his children or wed McCain and his wife. McCain has not, so far as I know, donated thousands of dollars to Hagee's church nor does he consider Hagee a close personal friend and spiritual mentor. In other words, there is no relevant comparison between McCain's relationship with Hagee and Obama's relationship with Wright. There's even less reason to insist that if Jeremiah Wright is going to be deconstructed then so too should Pat Robertson and others. These preachers are not ideological influences on John McCain in the way that Wright has been on Obama.

So why do people like the women in this video clip keep insisting that there's some sort of equivalence between Hagee and Wright and that fairness demands that we treat both McCain's relationship to Hagee and Obama's relationship to Wright the same?

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Beautiful Birds

I went for a bit of a field trip yesterday to a park near my home and had one of these gorgeous creatures land in a branch just a few feet from me. The picture is very good but even it doesn't give a full sense of the loveliness of this little bird:

The bird is a hooded warbler and is found in mature woodlands throughout much of the eastern U.S.

Since I'm posting bird pics, here are three other beauties I was lucky enough to see on my hike. I should note that I didn't take any of these photos:

This is one is an indigo bunting. It's very common on telephone wires near open fields in the eastern U.S., but it's so small and just looks dark when seen in poor light that most people never notice them, which is a pity because if they're seen in good light they're breathtakingly pretty.

This striking blackbird is called a bobolink. It breeds in extensive open areas like old hay fields, etc. Since extensive open areas are becoming increasingly scarce this fellow is, unfortunsately, not particularly common.

This last gorgeous little jewel is a denizen of woodlands and parks and can be found pretty easily if you learn it's song. It's called a scarlet tanager.

When a few hours of walking produces so much beauty it gives one an incentive to get out more often. Maybe tomorrow I'll post a few other photos of some of the beautiful birdlife that can be seen in spring if one just looks around a little.

RLC

Out of His Depth

David Berlinski responds to a scathing review of Expelled by National Review's John Derbyshire. Derbyshire is an intelligent, well-educated man who often writes sagely except when he turns his pen to the topic of intelligent design and related matters. Then he seems to come all unraveled and says and does the silliest things, like reviewing a movie he hasn't seen.

In any event, despite his acumen, he's no match for Berlinski, and he should have known better than to insult Berlinski in his review, tacitly referring to him as an eccentric non-Christian crank. Berlinski's riposte is a treat to read.

If you read both essays, do Derbyshire's first. If you have time for only one, read Berlinski's.

RLC

American Jew Hatred

David Horowitz brings us up to date on the parlous condition freedom of speech finds itself in on American university campuses. According to Horowitz the major threat comes from an alliance of leftists and Muslim student groups. Reading his report one can't help but think that if the holocaust ever recurs in the West, it'll start in our institutions of higher learning.

RLC

Brother Minister

Christopher Hitchens wonders whether Michelle Obama is behind her husband's unfortunate association with Jeremiah Wright. This is an interesting question in itself, but even more interesting was something Hitchens reminds us of in his essay that I had completely forgotten:

So numbed have I become by the endless replay of the fatuous clerical rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that it has taken me this long to remember the significant antecedent. In 1995, there appeared a documentary titled Brother Minister about the assassination of Malcolm X. It contained a secretly filmed segment showing Louis Farrakhan shouting at the top of his lungs in the Nation of Islam's temple in Chicago on "Savior's Day" in 1993. Farrakhan, verging on hysteria, demanded to know of the murdered Malcolm X: "If we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?" His apparent admission of what had long been suspected-that it was the Black Muslim leadership that ordered Malcolm's slaying-is not understood or remembered (or viewed) as often as it might be.

I invite you to look at the film of Farrakhan's sweating, yelling, paranoid face and to bear in mind that this depraved thug, who boasts of "dealing with" one of black America's moral heroes, is the man praised by Jeremiah Wright and referred to with respect as "Minister Farrakhan" by the senator who hopes to be the next president of the United States.

I had forgotten that Farrakhan had been implicated in the murder of Malcolm X, though nothing was ever proven. What was never in doubt, however, was that Farrakhan approved of the killing of the man who was a hero to so many African Americans. In fact, Malcolm's daughter, Qubilah Shabazz, was arrested back in the 90's for trying to hire a hit man to assassinate Farrakhan to avenge her father's murder.

So why do blacks let Jeremiah Wright get away with being cozy with Farrakhan? Why do blacks let the Obamas get away with being cozy with Wright? It's as deep a mystery, perhaps, as why African Americans let the Democrat party get away with keeping them on the political plantation while doing almost nothing to assuage their grievances.

RLC

Devil's Delusion

David Berlinski is a charming example of that rare species among our intellectual flora and fauna - a genuine agnostic. Despite his own personal theological uncertainties he has written a book which offers a defense of modern religious belief. The work is titled The Devil's Delusion, an obvious play on Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Here's what the Product Description at Amazon says about the book:

Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement-one that now includes much of the scientific community.

"The attack on traditional religious thought," writes David Berlinski in The Devil's Delusion, "marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion."

A secular Jew, Berlinski nonetheless delivers a biting defense of religious thought. An acclaimed author who has spent his career writing about mathematics and the sciences, he turns the scientific community's cherished skepticism back on itself, daring to ask and answer some rather embarrassing questions:

Has anyone provided a proof of God's inexistence? Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here? Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life? Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought? Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral? Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good? Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences? Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational? Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt? Dead on.

Berlinski does not dismiss the achievements of western science. The great physical theories, he observes, are among the treasures of the human race. But they do nothing to answer the questions that religion asks, and they fail to offer a coherent description of the cosmos or the methods by which it might be investigated.

This brilliant, incisive, and funny book explores the limits of science and the pretensions of those who insist it can be-indeed must be-the ultimate touchstone for understanding our world and ourselves.

I hope to have more to say about The Devil's Delusion once I get it read.

HT: Mindful Hack

RLC

Evangelical Manifesto

Some 80 conservative Christian luminaries have composed a manifesto which, according to this article, says that these leaders:

...believe the word "evangelical" has lost its religious meaning plan to release a starkly self-critical document saying the movement has become too political and has diminished the Gospel through its approach to the culture wars.

The statement, called "An Evangelical Manifesto," condemns Christians on the right and left for "using faith" to express political views without regard to the truth of the Bible, according to a draft of the document obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

"That way faith loses its independence, Christians become `useful idiots' for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology," according to the draft.

The declaration, scheduled to be released Wednesday in Washington, encourages Christians to be politically engaged and uphold teachings such as traditional marriage. But the drafters say evangelicals have often expressed "truth without love," helping create a backlash against religion during a "generation of culture warring."

"All too often we have attacked the evils and injustices of others," they wrote, "while we have condoned our own sins." They argue, "we must reform our own behavior."

The document is the latest chapter in the debate among conservative Christians about their role in public life. Most veteran leaders believe the focus should remain on abortion and marriage, while other evangelicals - especially in the younger generation - are pushing for a broader agenda. The manifesto sides with those seeking a wide-range of concerns beyond "single-issue politics."

Among the signers of the manifesto are Os Guinness, a well-known evangelical author and speaker, and Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a leading evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif. Organizers declined to comment until the final document is released.

I hope the manifesto is more specific than is this news article as to how often Evangelicals have failed to be loving in their proclamation of the truth and how, exactly, they have condoned their own sins. It's easy to criticize using nebulous allegations which reflect conventional prejudices, especially when one is reasonably assured that relatively few people will take the trouble to ask how prevalent and serious the problem really is.

I also hope the manifesto explains how a pastor can preach the gospel without preaching on the themes of justice and compassion and how, unless he speaks in terms so circumspect and vague as to be meaningless, he can preach on doing justice and compassion in this world without also urging people to be politically engaged. How political is "too political"?

Were not the early abolitionists like William Wilberforce, who is much admired by Os Guinness, politically engaged? Were not the churches havens for the American civil rights movement and, for better or worse, the anti-war movement of the sixties? How can we fight against hunger and oppression around the world without being politically involved? How can we effectively oppose the wanton killing of millions of unborn children without trying to elect pro-life politicians? How can we insist on decency and academic quality in our schools without being willing to elect like-minded school board members and legislators?

Perhaps we'll see on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Joe Carter has some good things to say in addressing the issue of evangelicals in politics.

RLC

Gambler's Ruin

I've long wondered why Darwinians place so much confidence in the ability of random mutation and natural selection to evolve the amazing panoply of living things. It always seemed to me that the conviction that an advantageous mutation - i.e. a mutation which conferred a slight advantage in the struggle for survival and which is granted by Darwinians to be relatively rare - would very likely be lost as soon as it appeared due simply to random events like the death of the organism because of accident, predation, etc.

A mutation that allowed an organism, for instance, to more effectively smell food might be lost simply because the organism perishes at the hands of a natural predator. In other words, having an advantage of one kind only makes survival of that organism very slightly more likely, and if the organism doesn't make it then the mutation is lost until it arises again in some future generation.

I've never seen much written about this problem, but Salvador Cordova has a fascinating discussion of it at Uncommon Descent. He talks about it in terms of what's called the Gambler's Ruin, the topic of a book written in the sixties by a mathematical genius at MIT named Edward O. Thorp. Thorp's book explained how one can beat the Las Vegas casinos, and the movie 21 is based on his work.

Cordova explains its relevance to Darwinian evolution in his article. The upshot is that natural selection is scarcely more likely to preserve a beneficial mutation than is random chance:

Darwin was absolutely wrong to suggest that the emergence of a novel trait will be preserved in most cases. It will not! Except for extreme selection pressures (like antibiotic resistance, pesticide resistance, anti-malaria drug resistance), selection fails to make much of an impact.

What this all means is that Darwin's great contribution to evolutionary biology, the theory of natural selection, is just wrong, or at least it's wrong if it's taken to be an unguided process. If evolution occurred at all it was not, nor could have been, a completely materialistic, mechanistic process.

Check out the entire post if this is a topic that interests you.

RLC

Regrets

Joe Trippi, former adviser to Sen. John Edwards', D-N.C., second presidential bid, http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/05/trippi-edwards.html says he should have "gone with his gut" and convinced the 2004 vice presidential candidate to stay in the race:

In an essay for "Politics" magazine, Trippi writes "I didn't tell him what I should have told him: that I had this feeling that if he stayed in the race, he would win 300 or so delegates by Super Tuesday and have maybe a one-in-five chance of forcing a brokered convention."

Trippi writes that the path "would be extremely painful, but could very well put him and his causes at the top of the Democratic agenda."

"In politics anything can happen," Trippi says in his essay, "Even the possibility that in an open convention with multiple ballots an embattled and exhausted party would turn to him as their nominee."

"My regret that I did not do so -- that I let John Edwards down -- grows with every day that the fight between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continues," Trippi continues.

Trippi shouldn't let it get him down. By not urging Edwards to stick to his goal of becoming president he did what was best for the country.

RLC

Bug-Bots

I don't know how close we are to putting these new devices in the field but they sure would make life tough for the bad guys. AllahPundit asks us to imagine "the utter paranoia it'll engender in the enemy once the word gets out. Every time a spider crawls past or a dragonfly floats by, they'll look and wonder." Indeed:

RLC

Bail Out

If you think it's a bit unjust to be asked to bail out those who bought homes they couldn't afford and now find themselves unable to keep up with their mortgage payments, you can go here to sign a petition to Congress to that effect. If you think there's something absurd about being asked to help those living in $500,000 houses pay for their homes while you can't even afford to buy a house at all then you might consider signing the petition.

There may be some who have built up a lot of equity in their homes and stand to lose it, but for many of those facing default on mortgages on which they had to put little or nothing down, their situation seems to be no different than if they were renting the house for the time they lived in it. All they lose, if the house is repossessed by the lender, is the monthly mortgage payments they had been making, which were just like paying rent. The big loser is the lending agency which is now in possession of a house which they probably will not be able to sell for the value of the original mortgage.

But then that's the risk they took when they underwrote loans to people with dubious ability to pay.

RLC

Medical Marvel

We've reported previously on developments with skin stem cells showing that they can be programmed to behave like embryonic stem cells. Now comes word that skin stem cells have been used to regenerate heart tissue:

Stem cell researchers at UCLA were able to grow functioning cardiac cells using mouse skin cells that had been reprogrammed into cells with the same unlimited properties as embryonic stem cells.

The finding is the first to show that induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells, which don't involve the use of embryos or eggs, can be differentiated into the three types of cardiovascular cells needed to repair the heart and blood vessels.

The discovery could one day lead to clinical trials of new treatments for people who suffer heart attacks, have atherosclerosis or are in heart failure, said Dr. Robb MacLellan, a researcher at the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research and senior author of the study.

There is more on this at the link, including additional links to a number of related articles.

RLC

Starving Children

None of the answers given by the presidential candidates to the problem of high gas prices really addresses the problem. Simply put, the problem is that there's not enough supply to meet the global demand. As long as this imbalance exists, prices at the pump will continue to rise and the cost of food will rise with it, and reducing the federal tax on gas and other palliatives will only help temporarily.

Moreover, as long as corn and other grains are in demand as a source of ethanol the cost of those grains, including what is grown in poor countries, will also rise. While people starve, grain raised in their own country will be exported rather than used locally because the growers will get far more money for it if they export it than if they sell it domestically.

Unless we're prepared to see starvation on a large scale in the world's poorest countries we need to use grain for food, not fuel, and we need to increase the supply of oil and gasoline. No medium term solution that omits these will avoid the looming disaster.

RLC

Truth Hurts

Paul Shaheen criticizes Hollywood for presenting too many stereotypical images of Arabs and Muslims. He has praise for the movie Babel, which is much deserved, but he criticizes The Kingdom for making Arabs out to be bad guys. This makes me wonder whether he even saw the movie. The film is about terrorists in an Arab country. Mr. Shaheen may not have read any newspapers lately, so someone might tell him that this actually happens. Some very bad people are Arab Muslims, and it's to Hollywood's credit that they didn't shrink from portraying this reality. Moreover, one of the heroes of the film is an Arab.

Nevertheless, Mr. Shaheen seems miffed that every now and then Hollywood goes against its instincts and actually portrays things as they happen to be.

It is, no doubt, people who think as Mr. Shaheen does who have declared use of the words jihadist, mujahedeen, and Islamo-fascism to be henceforth unacceptable language in the U.S. State Department. There's a fear among the experts at Foggy Bottom, you see, that using words correctly and accurately will offend the delicate sensibilities of Muslim moderates.

See Andy McCarthy at NRO for more on this peculiar development.

You might also listen to what Robert Spencer has to say about the, ah, you-know-who who are waging world-wide you-know-what against Western civilization:

RLC

Galaxies in Collision

NASA has released some pics of galaxies interacting with each other taken with the Hubble space telescope. Amazing photos.

Bear in mind that each of these galaxies is roughly similar to our Milky Way and that if our sun were in the picture it would be so tiny it probably wouldn't be visible. The earth would most definitely not be visible.

RLC

The Case for Civility

I've met and spoken with Os Guinness on several occasions and even shared a meal with him once. He's a fine man, a brilliant speaker and a prolific author. He's also dismayed at the current state of discourse in this country, and his dismay is certainly warranted. Out of that concern has emerged yet another book from a man who has already authored or edited over two dozen of them.

The Case for Civility And Why Our Future Depends on it is one of the most important of the many themes he has addressed over his long career as a public intellectual, but unfortunately it's not one of his strongest efforts.

Os urges us to elevate the level of our discourse and disagreements. He's dismayed by the "culture wars" raging in the U.S. over issues like abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, Iraq, etc. He calls for leadership from our politicians in promoting a civil public square. In all of this I cheer him on, but he cripples his case in the very beginning of the book, and continues to do so sporadically throughout its 175 pages, by taking precisely the kind of cheap shots at President Bush, though not always by name, that irritate people like me who think that this President has been one of the most civil, longsuffering, and least vindictive men ever to hold the office of president.

Bush has been relentlessly, and sometimes viciously and unfairly, vilified in the press by the Democratic opposition and even by some Republicans, yet he has never once, so far as I know, responded in kind, at least not publicly. He has tried repeatedly to demonstrate good will toward his political opponents only to be whacked in the head for his trouble. Nevertheless, rather than hold him up as an exemplar of the very attitude Os urges upon the rest of us, rather than cite his willingness to turn the other cheek as an example of how civility might work itself out in our politics, Os seizes whatever opportunities present themselves to take a few whacks himself.

On pages 5 and 6, for instance, he says: "I write as a longtime European admirer of the United States, with the deep conviction that the quest for civility in world affairs has to begin in America; but also with a growing sadness that America's recent leadership has not matched up to her global responsibilities." How so? In what way has our leadership failed to exercise civility on the world stage? Is this a reference to Afghanistan or Iraq? If so, in what sense do these ventures demonstrate an unfortunate lack of civility? They can do so only if they were inexcusably misguided, but if Os thinks they were then he needs to make that case because it's certainly not self-evident.

He also writes on page 6 that, "Like a later American president's 'Mission Accomplished' in Iraq, Allenby's rash claim was soon to be contradicted..." This is simply uncharitable. The Navy suggested the "Mission Accomplished" sign after deposing Saddam and the completion of the aircraft carrier's mission to Iraq. The White House okayed it, but Bush probably wasn't even informed of it. The President even said in his speech aboard the ship that the mission had to continue and that the work was not done. One can understand, perhaps, why partisans might exploit this opening to insult Bush, but why would a man calling for more civility in our politics do so? If the sign has to be mentioned at all why not try to put the best construction on it rather than the worst?

The book also suffers from a lack of specificity. Os bemoans "culture warring" throughout the work, particularly on pages 16 and 17, but he's never clear about exactly what he has in mind by the term. He talks about the need "to wrest back the culture wars from the domineering pundits and activists who have become the warlords of American public life," but who are these people and in what ways are they domineering and what's wrong, exactly with being an activist?

He warns us not to remain passive before the bullying of the culture warriors, but the reader has no idea what or whom he's talking about.

On page 18 he conflates the two biggest weaknesses of the book, his lack of specifics and his predilection for taking swipes at Bush: "The tie-in between the religious right and the person and policies of George W. Bush, has provoked a mounting backlash that has made the liaison a severe liability for both."

Is Os criticizing Bush's "person" here? What is it about Bush's person that makes him so odious? Which of his policies should Bush have not pursued? Appointing qualified pro-life judges? Opposing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research? Doing more than any president in history to help alleviate the suffering of the poor in Africa? What exactly?

Guinness adds that "...certain Christians form the bulk of one of the two great extremes in the American culture wars and are stirring up against themselves some of the most vehement antireligious animosity in the modern world." Who are these Christians? How are they stirring up animosity, and why is this bad? If the world hates Christians for taking a stand against modern social trends why is that the Christians' fault? Os doesn't explain.

He laments the militancy of atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins and seems to blame it on the Religious Right (p.18) as if had Jerry Falwell never existed Dawkins would never have felt the need to write The God Delusion. Could it not be argued just as easily that the Religious Right is the backlash and that the debasement of our culture by the secularists is the stimulus?

He also gets a little too full of himself on page 19 where he writes that he's "setting out a vision of civility in the American public square that, if realized, could be the key to resolving the cuilture wars, could be a stunning tribute to the brilliance of the 'great experiment' devised by the American founders, and also could stand as an encouragement and as a model for public civility in other parts of the world." He sounds here like he's campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize.

There needs to be made a case for civility, and I thank Os for keeping that need before us. I just wish he'd be more specific and civil himself.

After a historical longuer on the first amendment and the challenges of pluralism, Os gets to the heart of his topic in Chapter 4.

He sees two impediments to a more civil discourse in this country. First, is the desire by some (don't expect him to name names or cite examples) to try to sacralize the public square. Here he steps into a trap to which many fair-minded commentators seem prone. In trying to be credible he wants to pronounce a pox on both the houses of the left and the right which implies a kind of moral equivalence between them. Thus he either has to dredge up some specific example of right-wing perfidy or continue to speak in mind-numbing nebulosity. He chooses to do both:

"As one who holds the Hebrew prophets in the highest esteem, I am outraged by the false prophets of fundamentalism, who violate the biblical canons of prophecy and pronounce in the name of the Lord what is theologically obscene and historically untrue.... I am appalled by the way the Religious Right attacks its fellow believers and demonizes its enemies. Shame on the scurrilous attacks in much Christian direct mail, and on fundamentalist pastors and their followers who hold placards in public such as 'God Hates Fags,' 'Thank God for Maimed Soldiers,' and 'God Hates You.'"

This sort of behavior is indeed deplorable and I join Os in deploring it, but who's doing it and what wickedness does the direct mail contain? Without that information we're left in the dark as to whether this really is a significant phenomenon. Is it limited to people like the dozen or so family members who comprise the Westboro Baptist Church or is it much more typical of the Christian right?

He complains (p. 94) that "many in the Religious Right are more obviously fundamentalists than they are Christians." This may well be true, but it would help if he would give us examples of what he means so that we can judge whether it's true that "many" religious conservatives are actually guilty of the charge.

He gives some advice to Christians on this page that is worth repeating. In talking about how Christians sometimes portray themselves as victims of secular persecution he enjoins us to, in effect, get a grip. He reminds us that what Christians are facing in the U.S. is nothing compared to what they're facing in China, North Korea, Burma, and Sudan.

He makes another interesting point on page 96 where he points out that it is a bit of a mistake to think that the genocidal tendencies of Islam are a throwback to the 7th century. He writes: "Its view of its advocates as a revolutionary vanguard, and their belief in the power of violence to remake humanity are highly modern ideas and closer to the views of the nineteenth century anarchists and nihilists than to those of their Muslim forebears. As such Islamism is truly a modern reaction to the modern world."

He's also helpful when he notes on page 102 that, "whichever side it comes from, politicized preaching is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church." These are words that should be meditated upon by the Jesse Jackson's, Jeremiah Wrights and Al Sharptons of the world as well as those normally thought to be on the Religious Right.

The best line in the book comes in his chapter on saying no to the naked public square when he says that he finds it "curious to be treated by Muslims as a second-class citizen and by atheists as a second-class thinker - a dhimmi to one and a dummy to the other."

He's at his best in defending the open public square and this chapter (Chapter 5) is worth the price of the book. Unfortunately, he never overcomes his penchant for vague generalizing and thus never brings himself to explaining exactly what civil discourse would or should look like (perhaps because it might look too much like G.W. Bush). On pages 150-152 he talks about what it is not, but leaves us to form our own opinions as to where the boundaries of civil discourse actually lie.

Nevertheless, Os is to be commended for directing our attention to the need and importance of civil disagreement, and we would all do well to keep in mind that we do nothing to advance our own causes when we resort to aspersions, name-calling and attempts to embarrass and humiliate those with whom we disagree.

RLC

Ten Ways

Joe Carter has a good series of posts on Ten Ways Darwinists Help Intelligent Design at Evangelical Outpost. If you're interested in the controversy go to the link and scroll down.

RLC

He Who Hesitates

Nine days ago "Mookie" al Sadr threatened a third uprising unless coalition forces stopped forcing his Mahdi militiamen to obey the law. Since then 186 of those militiamen have died trying to kill Americans and Iraqis. Mookie better soon get on with the uprising or else he won't have anyone left to uprise with.

RLC

Rove's Fingerprints

If Reverend Jeremiah Wright was working for the Clinton campaign he probably wouldn't do anything differently than he has been over the last four days. His speeches seem to be deliberately designed to sabotage Obama's candidacy. There's speculation that Wright feels betrayed and embittered by Obama who dissed him by relegating him to the basement during the announcement of his candidacy and who has consistently tried to distance himself from Wright's views ever since.

When Wright opined that Obama is just saying that he disagrees with the Chicago preacher because as a politician he has to say that sort of thing, he effectively called the Illinois senator a liar and implied that Obama really does share his radical, racialist, paranoid views.

It's true that the simplest explanation for what Wright has been doing is that he's very angry at the treatment he's received from his protege and is resolved to make him pay for the lese majeste. I admit, though, that it is possible he's been turned by the Clinton machine. They're like that.

But my own opinion is that thirty years ago the perfidious Karl Rove foresaw this whole scenario unfolding and planted Reverend Wright as a GOP sleeper in Trinity Church to destroy the candidacy of any potential presidents that might emerge from that congregation. I wouldn't put it past him.

I can see lefty heads everywhere nodding knowingly in agreement.

RLC

McGovern or Carter?

Is Senator Obama more like George McGovern (1972) or Jimmy Carter (1976)? Andrew Busch at No Left Turns thinks it's Carter:

Like Carter, Obama is a substantively vacuous charmer with minimal big-time experience. Carter had four years in the Georgia governor's mansion; if he is elected, Obama will have had four years in the U.S. Senate.

Like Carter, Obama has based his campaign on a general promise of change and a general posture of piety.

Like Carter, Obama is devoted to "healing" the nation after a harsh period of divisiveness.

Like Carter, Obama has suffered gaffes, but has maintained a reservoir of support that refuses to desert him. Like Obama waxing eloquent about the benighted folks in small-town Pennsylvania, Carter uttered his comment about maintaining the "ethnic purity" of neighborhoods in the weeks leading up to the Pennsylvania primary. Carter won Pennsylvania; Obama lost but retained his national lead in delegates and polls.

And, like Carter, despite his flaws, he is still the odds-on favorite to win the presidency in November. Republicans have not gone into a presidential election facing such stiff headwinds since-well, 1976. On Election Day of that year, Carter squeaked by Gerald Ford after possessing a large set of objective advantages. Obama, should he go on to win the Democratic nomination, will go into the election with at least as large a set of objective advantages.

Busch sees other similarities which you can read at the link.

RLC

Hume on Miracles

My Philosophy of Religion class has been reading and critiquing David Hume's argument against miracles this past week. Those students and others may be interested in perusing this post at Uncommon Descent on that very subject. Some of the comments that follow are also worthwhile.

RLC

Is Wright Wrong

There's been much written in the last day or two about Rev. Jeremiah Wright's recent speeches and his sundry and persistent offenses against reason and common sense, but with it all I haven't seen any comment on something he said at the NAACP speech Sunday night. The Reverend cited research in that speech which shows that whites tend to be left-brained, logical, and analytical while blacks are right-brained, intuitive, and feeling-oriented. The races differ, the preacher intoned, in both their learning styles and their dispositions toward particular modes of thought.

I expected that this disquisition on racial difference would set off a firestorm of protest, especially among African-Americans, because in his attempt to defend the different ways black children learn he tacitly acknowledged that blacks simply can't measure up to whites in the kind of thinking required for careers in engineering, math, physics, etc. The implicit corollary of this is that if there are different types of learning then there may be good reason to resurrect the old and discredited idea of "separate but equal" schools. If blacks and whites have different aptitudes then what works well for whites won't succeed with blacks and vice versa so why not educate them differently? In a single speech Rev. Wright catapulted the racial conversation all the way back to 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education, and inadvertently laid the premise for a return to racial segregation, at least in education.

If Jeremiah Wright is correct then we can never hope to see robust numbers of blacks in fields that require left-brained thinking, and if those fields are to be ceded to whites and Asians as their exclusive domain then how will blacks avoid being tagged with the stigma of intellectual inferiority? If a white speaker had made the point Wright made there would be howls of protest at the inherent racism of the claim, but Wright's NAACP audience appeared to receive the news of black inferiority with enthusiasm.

For the sake of African-Americans let's hope that those at the NAACP meeting didn't realize what they were applauding, and let's hope, too, that Rev. Wright is as wrong about this as he is about so much else.

RLC

The Times They Are a'Changin

Demand for oil, fueled by increasing affluence in India, China, and Russia as well as the production of cheaper cars making it possible for millions of people in these countries to own their own vehicles, will push oil prices as high as $8.00 a gallon within just four years according to this forecast at Breitbart. This will happen, it's claimed, despite the fact that consumption in the U.S. will decline due to high pump prices and flatter economy.

The U.S. can partly mitigate the coming calamity by opening up the Alaskan North Slope and our offshore fields, building more refineries, and constructing nuclear power generating facilities (which even the founder of Greenpeace favors). The question is whether a Democratic congress, thick with people who are averse to nuclear power and who have been calling for years for high gas prices as an environmental and conservation measure, will now reverse themselves. It'll take some strong leadership in Washington, and I don't know who among the current political class has the credibility, talent and political power required to turn the supertanker of state in time to keep it from running aground.

We can also forestall the crisis by developing public transportation and rapid transit infrastructure in some of our fastest growing regions. The sun may be setting on the day of the daily one to two hour round trip highway commute.

Meanwhile, if this prognostication is correct say good-bye to your SUVs, Hummers, and pick-up trucks. Inflationary gas prices will be a major inconvenience to us, to be sure, and will doubtless radically change the way we live, but it will be a total disaster to much of the world's poor who will likely starve to death as a result. It will moreover be very likely to precipitate increased warfare, perhaps even WWIII, as some nations seek to secure an oil supply and others seek to use their oil resources as a weapon.

We can't afford to wait to increase the supply of oil on the world market, but the ball is in the Democrats' court.

Exit question: Why are not any of the presidential candidates being asked what they will do to prevent this looming catastrophe?

RLC

Making Ben Stein's Case

Bill Dembski cleverly descries an irony in Yoko Ono's lawsuit against the producers of the recently released movie Expelled, featuring Ben Stein. She's suing because they used, presumably without permission, a clip from her husband's song Imagine which is copyrighted. The irony is in the lyrics of the song:

Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can. No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.

Apparently, Yoko's not actually cool with John's dream.

Dembski also recalls Elvis Costello's query in The Other Side of Summer: "Was it a millionaire who said 'imagine no possessions'"?

The funny thing about this is that Yoko and others are trying to stifle a movie which documents the contemporary threat to academic and intellectual freedom. By trying to hamper the film they're unwittingly doing precisely what the movie says they do. You can't buy that kind of publicity.

RLC

FOBs

This will certainly make the Israelis uneasy. A man by the name of Hatem El-Hady, formerly a big fund raiser for Hamas, an organization that specializes in blowing Israeli children to bits, has now devoted himself to raising money for the Barack Obama campaign. El-Hady was chairman of the Toledo-based Islamic charity Kindhearts, until it was closed down by the U.S. government in 2006 for terrorist fundraising.

El-Hady's web page listed three special friends, and one of the three turned out to be none other than Michelle Obama. One wonders what it feels like to be a "special friend" of a man who finances the murders of children. Since the story broke El-Hady has taken his web page down, but Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has the screen shots if you care to view them.

The FOBs (Friends of Barack) continue to make life difficult for the presidential candidate. One wonders if he has any associates at all who are neither under indictment (Tony Rezko), nor paranoid fabulists (Jeremiah Wright), nor terrorists (William and Bernadine Ayers and now El-Hady).

Senator Obama makes us hope - hope that we don't find out next that he's receiving contributions from Osama bin Laden.

HT: Powerline

RLC

Debt of Gratitude

By now you've probably heard that the CIA has reported to Congress that the Israeli air strike into Syria last September took out a plutonium reactor supplied by North Korea which would have been capable of eventually producing weapons grade fissile material had the Israelis not destroyed it. Once again the world owes Israel a debt of gratitude.

The North Koreans are embarrassed at being caught cooperating with Syria's pursuit of nuclear weapons and the Syrians are afraid there will be further reprisals by the U.S. So, one story has it, Syrian police took one of Saddam's most-wanted henchmen, Izzat Ibrahim, who had been hiding out in Syria, and pushed him across the border into Iraq as a good-will offering of sorts to the U.S.. There's been no U.S. confirmation of this story, but you can read about all of these developments at the DEBKAfile.

RLC

Stalking Horse

Back on April 3rd I opined that if Hillary doesn't win the nomination this time around I expect her to do everything she can, sub rosa, to help McCain win in November. It's in her interest, if she wants to be president in 2012, to see Obama lose this election, but she must appear to be supportive even as she undermines his candidacy by leaking unflattering information about him to the media or to McCain's people.

So, I was interested in this comment by Rick Lowry at National Review:

If Hillary can't win the nomination - and it's clearly very, very hard for her - she's basically a stalking horse for McCain. She's preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama. And she's softening Obama up for McCain, prodding at and exposing her fellow Democrats' weaknesses.

One consequence of staying in the race is that it makes it much harder for Obama to win in November. Lowry doesn't say that she's doing this intentionally, but why wouldn't she? If she stays in the fray there's a remote chance she could win the nomination, but even if she doesn't, by continuing to fight she increases the likelihood that Obama will lose in November which would open the door for her in 2012.

If you wish to understand the Clintons' political thinking, just ask yourself what course of action would be most likely to get her to the White House. It's also helpful to read Machiavelli. I'm sure she does:

UPDATE: Dan Abrams at MSNBC was saying last night that this same thesis is being bandied about by several congresspersons in D.C. I must say that I'm flattered that members of Congress are reading Viewpoint.

RLC

Road to the Holocaust

This is a clip from an early Nazi film seeking to justify forced sterilization on the basis of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Whatever the film says, though, don't fall for that anti-Darwinian humbug that there's any connection between Darwin's ideas and Nazi praxis. Gracious, no. That would be so uninformed of you:

HT: Evolution News and Views.

RLC

What a Country

No Left Turns asks a question that I've also wondered about:

Several blogs have linked to material about William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, noting that Dohrn and Ayers helped Obama start his political career in the 1990s.

The focus on Obama, and whether there is any significance to his connection (whatever it is) with Ayers, has obscured the real scandal here. Both Ayers and Dohrn are now faculty members in good standing at Universities in the Chicago area. Their views are virtually unchanged from those they held in their younger days. Moreover, their views are probably hard to distinguish from those held by a significant number of their colleagues. The scandal, in other words, is that no one has asked why that is the case, and how we might change it. Are our colleges and universities damaged beyond repair?

William Ayers teaches education courses to prospective teachers at University of Illinois at Chicago, a taxpayer funded school, by the way, and his wife teaches at Northwestern. Ayers was a self-confessed terrorist who bombed a number of buildings back in the sixties and tried to kill police. He would have gone to jail for attempted murder except for a technical mistake in the investigation which got him off. He has said recently that he wishes he had done more. His wife did go to jail for about a year for aiding and abetting the Weather Underground in a number of their crimes and according to Powerline has publicly and enthusiastically approved of the Charles Manson folks for their grisly murders of a pregnant movie actress and her companions. Today she teaches law at Northwestern.

One wonders whether the schools which employ Ayers and Dohrn would hire someone who bombed abortion clinics or the editorial offices of The New York Times. One wonders especially whether they would be permitted to teach education and law. I have a hard time picturing it.

Meanwhile, Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer who is by all accounts a fine man with a number of academic distinctions to his credit, was denied tenure by Iowa State University because he commited the grievous sin of thinking that the universe shows evidence of having been intentionally planned. So he's out of a job, and while he searches for a position through which he can make a positive contribution to society these two unrepentant psychopathic terrorists are being paid to teach our children to destroy their society, and the administrators and state legislators of Illinois are evidently fine with that.

What's more, this pair of violent felons is evidently chummy with the man who may well be the next president of the United States.

God help us.

Michelle Malkin has much more on Mr. and Mrs. Ayers and others who are connected to the man who promises us hope and change.

RLC

Solipsism

Abby passes along this cartoon which I thought I'd share for the benefit of those students who find the idea that "my" mind is all that exists a trifle amusing:

RLC