The God Delusion, Ch. 6

Author Richard Dawkins concerns himself in chapter 6 of The God Delusion (TGD) with an attempt to explain the relationship between God and morality and to argue that God is not necessary for good behavior. Richard Dawkins initiates the discussion with this question:

Isn't goodness incompatible with the theory of the selfish gene (the view that all of our behavior is determined by our genes to increase the chances that our genes will be perpetuated into the next generation)? The question could be asked more relevantly of atheism in general, but Dawkins replies to his query by claiming that evolution gives a much better explanation for morality than does the God Hypothesis.

Before we consider his answer we might pause for a moment to note something he says which I find intriguing. He argues that acts of altruism in animals are demonstrations of one individual's superiority over another:

The dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, "Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to give you food." Or "Look how superior I am, I can afford to make myself vulnerable top hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground." ....And when a subordinate [bird] attempts to offer food to a dominant individual, the apparent generosity is violently rebuffed.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I've long thought it an interesting quirk of human nature that many people resent favors done them by others. Rather than see the favor as a kindness people sometimes react to it as though it were a personal insult (Think of the ingratitude many Iraqis feel for American sacrifices on behalf of their freedom, for instance). Perhaps the ingratitude is due to the fact that at some subliminal level the beneficiary of the favor realizes that he is being implicitly told that he is inferior, and no one likes to be told that.

At any rate, Dawkins' point in chapter 6 is that we don't need God to be moral. The urge to be kind, for instance, is a product of our evolutionary history and we'd have that inclination whether God told us to be kind or not. There's much in his reasoning on this matter of which we can be critical.

The problem is not how to explain "moral" behavior. People can certainly do "good" things whether God exists or not. The problem is trying to account for moral obligation. How are we obligated to do something just because evolution has inclined us to do it? Why should we be kind if there's nothing in it for us or if cruelty will benefit us in some way? Why is it wrong to be cruel? What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" anyway? How do we justify the belief that moral good and bad have any non-arbitrary meaning apart from an objective transcendent moral authority?

Evolution has bestowed upon us other tendencies besides an inclination to kindness (which, by the way, not all humans appear to possess) which we do not consider good. How do we decide which of these tendencies are good and which are bad? Evolution has given us a tendency to be aggressive, to be selfish toward non-kin, to be sexually promiscuous, etc. Is yielding to these inclinations wrong? If so, why?

Dawkins comes very close here to committing the genetic fallacy, the error that says that because we are a certain way that therefore we should be that way. He also informs us that he is himself a consequentialist, one who bases rightness on the results of the act, but who do those results have to benefit in order to be right? Other people? Himself? How does he decide which it is to be, and why would it be wrong to just care about the benefits of one's actions for oneself?

Dawkins cites studies which show that there's little difference in the way atheists and believers make moral judgments and concludes from this that "we do not need God in order to be good." This is quite an unusual conclusion to draw from these studies. All they show, if they show anything at all, is that atheists have moral convictions that are completely unsupported by their deepest beliefs. Their atheism gives them no basis for thinking anything is right or wrong but they believe there is right and wrong anyway. What the studies Dawkins cites suggest is that most atheists inconsistent, since every atheist who makes a moral judgment is acting as if his atheism were not true.

Dawkins goes on to allege that the Christian tries to be good only to seek God's favor. He concurs with Michael Shermer that "If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself to be an immoral person."

This misunderstands the Christian motivation for the moral life. It's not fear of punishment and hope of reward that motivates Christians to do good deeds, when they do them, but rather love and gratitude to the God who has done so much for us. We do not seek God's love by being good. We are good, to the extent we are, because God loves us.

To say that anyone who rapes or murders is immoral, as Shermer and Dawkins do, begs the question. It assumes that the word "immorality" actually means something significant. For Dawkins an immoral act is merely an act which he doesn't like. If there is no God it can't be any more than this. To say that something is immoral is to say nothing more than that he wishes people wouldn't do it. Notwithstanding his wishes, the person who does do such things is no more "wrong" than a cat is wrong to torment a mouse.

In a classic illustration of the fallacy called Division Dawkins makes the ridiculous claim that rioters in Montreal during a police strike in the 1960s were mostly religious people because most Canadians are religious people. Perhaps we can forgive Dawkins this bit of asininity if it weren't that he comes right back on the next page and makes the same sophomoric argument again, this time by quoting a section from a book by fellow atheist Sam Harris.

Harris seeks to disprove the belief that religion leads to better behavior by observing that most of the crime in the U.S. occurs in our cities and most of the cities with the highest crime rates are in states which tend to vote Republican and are therefore most likely to be populated by Christian conservatives. I am not making this up. This is Harris' argument, and Dawkins signs on to it. What Harris and Dawkins are apparently unaware of is that even in Republican states the cities are overwhelmingly Democratic and secular. Instead of employing such a juvenile argument perhaps Harris should have just visited a prison and taken a poll of the inmates and asked them how many were devout, church-going believers who prayed daily at the time they committed their crimes. I wonder what the results would show.

It's hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people would make such embarrassingly dumb arguments, but when your task is to try to give a defense of morality without God you have to go with the best you can even if that means taking a chance on an argument that would be laughed at by middle schoolers.

The fundamental moral problem for the atheist, a problem which Dawkins never really addresses, is this: What is there which obligates us to behave in one way rather than another? What makes kindness better than cruelty? Why should I not just live for myself? Why should I care about others? What's wrong with selfishness? It's really no surprise that Dawkins doesn't address these questions. Indeed, the surprise would have been if he had, because for the atheist there just is no answer to them.

It's fitting to close with a quote from Dawkins' hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin writes in his Autobiography these words:

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best."

In the absence of God, all we have to guide us are our feelings and no one's feelings are any more authoritative than anyone else's. Unfortunately, the fact that for the atheist one's own subjective feelings are no more morally superior than anyone else's doesn't prevent Mr. Dawkins from repeatedly making moral judgments of others throughout his book and especially in the next chapter.

RLC

Bush Didn't Lie

James Kirchick, an assistant editor at the liberal New Republic, writes in the liberal LA Times that those who continue to push the meme that Bush lied us into Iraq are themselves being dishonest. Viewpoint has been saying much the same thing since 2003. It's simply disreputable to accuse Bush of having lied to precipitate a war with Iraq. It was disreputable in 2003 because there was insufficient evidence of a lie, and it's even more disreputable now because there's a lot of evidence that he did not lie.

Moreover, by discrediting the President his critics have succeeded in ratcheting up the threshold of provocation necessary to compel us to use military force to the point where it would be almost impossible, politically or psychologically, to employ force today on some new front. More timorous presidents than George Bush will be very reluctant to resort to military means even when it's clear that terrorist nations like Iran are implacably determined to produce nuclear weapons which they all but promise to use, either themselves or through terrorist surrogates.

Those who have so bitterly defamed the President's integrity over the last five years have made the future far less safe for our children and they've done it by despoiling the reputation of the one man who acted to prevent that from happening. To the extent that they slandered George Bush out of malice as well as a thirst for political power they deserve historical ignominy. If there is justice in the world their names will forever be uttered with contempt.

Kirchick's LA Times column is a fine piece of writing and a fresh breeze of honesty coming from a man who normally stands in political opposition to Republican policies.

RLC

Avoid the Argument from Good Works

Mary Eberstadt's third in her series of "Loser Letters," written to her atheist friends advising them as to how best to discredit Christians, is perhaps her best so far. In it she urges them, as it is their wont to do, not to make a big deal about how atheism is at least as serviceable as Christianity in providing grounds for good works. By all means, she enjoins, they should continue to hammer away at the various crimes committed 700 years ago by the Inquisition, but whatever they do, they should not tout atheism's own record of human kindness.

You'll find it hard to stifle a smile and an occasional chuckle as you read it. That is, unless you're an atheist.

RLC

Gays in the Military

Andrew writes to share some thoughts on the issue of gays serving in the military. I've posted his letter on the Feedback page and invite comment.

RLC

Like, You Know?

Taylor Mali, whom I'd never heard of before, does an amusing riff on the most "aggressively inarticulate generation" since whenever:

HT: Evangelical Outpost

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 5

Having shown to his satisfaction, if to no one else's, that there's almost certainly no Deity, Professor Dawkins next assays to consider where the whole business of religion came from anyway. He concludes in chapter 5 that religion is an evolutionary misfiring, or by-product, of something else. By way of explanation he invites us to consider the self-destructive behavior of moths which spiral into a flame. Why do they do this? Well, over the eons they have evolved light sensors that enable them to navigate by the moon and the stars. These luminous objects are very far away and seem to the moths like stationary beacons in the night sky, but when artificial light was introduced into the moths' environment the lights were so close that they appear to shift as the moth moves, requiring any moth that's fixing on them to also deviate from a straight-line path to keep the light at a fixed point. The result was that the confused moth takes a spiral path toward the light, or something like that.

Professor Dawkins doesn't trouble himself to explain why moths need to navigate by celestial objects in the first place since they don't migrate and spend much of their adult lives confined to a localized area. When they do travel it's along chemical trails of pheromones produced by females. So why would they have evolved these light sensors? But this is a digression. His point is that the spiraling behavior of moths is really a by-product of something else and that likewise religious behavior in humans is a by-product of some other behavior which evolved because it conferred a selective advantage.

Dawkins avoids the simpler explanation that religion itself confers a selective advantage and thus humans evolved it. This is an unacceptable explanation, even if it has the merit of being less cumbersome, because if it were the case Dawkins would have to admit that atheism is a maladaptive mutation, and he certainly doesn't want to have to make the case that atheists are genetic mutants.

So what is religion a by-product of? It turns out that all we have are guesses, but one guess is that natural selection produced in children the tendency to believe whatever their parents and other elders tell them, a bit of news that'll surprise most parents. This aids the children in survival. Parents tell kids about God so kids grow up believing in God.

It's not clear whether children lose this gullibility as adults, but if they do why do they retain belief in God when they don't retain other childhood beliefs like belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Why, too, do so many people come to belief as adults? Why isn't Dawkins himself religious since he received a lot of exposure to it when he was a child? If one's belief about God is a result of psychological misfires in the brain then isn't atheism also a result of such a misfire and thus can't we conclude that atheists don't believe in God because of evidence but because of some psychological quirk? Professor Dawkins doesn't help us with these questions. He's in too much of a hurry to rush on to his next grievance against the religious - their irritating tendency to be dualists - which he also sees as a holdover from childhood.

There are other guesses as to what religion is a by-product of, of course, - love, projection, wishful thinking - but the general idea Dawkins wants to advance is that it's a by-product of something advantageous for survival.

Another reason why religion has survived and diversified has to do with memes. A meme is like a mental gene. It embodies an idea or set of ideas (called a memeplex) that spreads through a culture. For example, the belief in human rights is a meme, as is any belief. Natural selection acts to weed out unsatisafactory memes in the same way it culls unfit genes. Religious beliefs are also memes which have spread, not because they are true, but because they afforded those who held them some survival advantage.

Dawkins is obviously pleased with this explanation for the widespread occurrence of religion even though the theory is completely speculative and even self-defeating. After all, if all our beliefs are merely memes then so is atheism a meme, so is Darwinian evolution a meme, and, indeed, so is belief in memes a meme.

He closes the chapter with a rambling discussion of cargo cults, religions that spring up among primitive people when they encounter for the first time the "magic" of modern technological society. He notes that ignorant people often regard the radios and machines of visiting Europeans as being supernaturally produced because they never see them being made or repaired. None of this, like much else in the remainder of the book, has anything at all to do with whether God exists.

Dawkins is apparently convinced that the existence of God and the manner in which some people express their homage to that God are one and the same thing. He seems to think that if he can discredit religious beliefs then he can discredit belief in God. Perhaps this is the strangest "God delusion" of all.

Critiques of previous chapters in The God Delusion can be found here:

Chapter 4 (part III)

Chapter 4 (part II)

Chapter 4 (part I)

Chapter 3

Chapter 2

Chapter 1

RLC

Left or Right

No doubt you've heard people speak of the difference between being left or right "brained," but perhaps you were unsure what it meant or which of the two describes you. If so, you might want to read this interesting little self-assessment which AOL featured recently:

Are you a genius at certain jobs but feel like a half-wit when trying to complete other types of work? The two sides of the brain each have distinct preferences and capabilities, and your strong suits and weaknesses are frequently based upon the side of your brain that is dominant. Take this quiz to find out whether or not you are a right or left brain thinker and check out the career choices that might be best for you.

1. Are you better at math and science than art and literature?

YES - People who are left-brain thinkers are often better at and enjoy math and science over art and literature, making them perfect candidates for a career in engineering.

NO - People who are right-brain thinkers are often better at and enjoy art and literature over math and science, making them perfect candidates for a career in grant writing.

2. Do you love playing sports outdoors over reading indoors?

YES - The great outdoors and athletics are favorites of people who are right-brain thinkers, and a career that can combine the two, like one as a recreation director, is perfect.

NO - Staying indoors and reading are favorites of people who are left-brain thinkers, and a career that can combine the two, like one as a librarian, is perfect.

3. Do you prefer verbal communication over physical communication?

YES - Left-brain thinkers love to work things out by talking, enjoying jobs like career counseling, where they are very effective.

NO - Right-brain thinkers are more likely to think that actions speak louder than words and prefer showing their worth without words. A career path of yoga instructor would fit their preferences.

4. Would you rather draw pictures freehand instead of putting together a model airplane?

YES - People who are right-brain thinkers aren't fans of tremendous structure and prefer having some creativity at work, which makes marketing a perfect career for them.

NO - People who are left-brain thinkers are in need of structure and prefer having specific guidelines at work, which makes computer programming a perfect career path for them.

5. Do you like being in groups more than being alone?

YES - Group-oriented people are usually right-brain thinkers, making a job in retail a good fit for their lifestyle preference.

NO - Loners are usually left-brain thinkers, making a job in accounting a good fit for their lifestyle preference.

6. When given instructions, are lots of pictures easier to understand than lots of text?

YES - Right-brain thinkers love picture explanations over textual explanations, and this visual preference usually lends well to a career in interior design.

NO - Left-brain thinkers love textual explanations over pictorial explanations, and this preference usually lends well to a clerical career.

Most people are doubtless a blend so I suppose the question is in each case do we tend to have more of one of these traits than another.

RLC

Damning with Faint Praise

DaveScot at Uncommon Descent shares this pithy thought with us:

We often hear from Darwinists that "the theory of evolution is as well tested as the theory of gravity". Strangely though, we never hear physicists saying that the theory of gravity is as well tested as the theory of evolution.

Anyhow, I was just reading yet another Darwinian Narrative on the genetic similarities and differences between man and chimp but how we don't really know which differences are the important ones. In point of fact, we don't really know if the DNA differences are even significant. The only thing we really know is that a chimp is a chimp because its mother was a chimp. Beyond that, it's nothing but guesswork.

Then I thought about how this compares to the theory of gravity. We know enough about gravity so that we routinely spend billions of dollars launching interplanetary unmanned exploratory spacecraft that, with exquisite precision predicted long before the craft is launched, it moves about the solar system, arriving at known points within meters and seconds years after it is launched and after having traveled circuitous routes for billions of miles.

Contrast that with how well we can predict what it takes to turn a chimp into a human. That, my friends, is a true example of how well the theory of evolution has been tested. It hasn't been tested at all. It's nothing but WAGs and hand waving. Gravity, on the other hand, is indeed well tested. And that's why you'll never hear a physicist saying the theory of gravity is as well tested as the theory of evolution.

To compare evolutionary theory to gravity, as many Darwinians do, is to damn with faint praise. We know almost nothing about gravity. We don't know what it is, how it "pulls" on objects, how matter produces it, how it can seem to travel at infinite speed, or how it can warp space. All we know is that it can be described in mathematical formulas and, as DaveScot points out, the mathematics can be employed to impressive effect, but no such mathematical precision inheres in evolutionary theory.

About the most we can say about the similarities between evolution and gravity is that they share in common the fact that they're both believed to exist.

RLC

A Good Man is Gone

HT: Gary Varvel

RLC

Shocker Stat

This statistic just shocks the socks off us:

A city Health Department study finds that more than a fourth of adult New Yorkers are infected with the virus that causes genital herpes. The study, released Monday, says about 26 percent of New York City adults have genital herpes, compared to about 19 percent nationwide. The department says genital herpes can double a person's risk for contracting HIV.

This is in ultra-liberal New York, no less - where children receive condoms as a baptismal gift and are taught the virtues of safe sex from the time they're potty trained - one in four adults has herpes. How can that be?

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 4 (part III)

Although supremely confident that he has just demolished any rationale for believing in God with his argument based on God's alleged improbability, professor Dawkins loads another round into the chamber just in case theism is still twitching.

Recall that his argument is a reply to the theist's claim that the complexity of the universe, its finely-tuned forces and parameters, are so extraordinarily improbable as to make an intelligent cause the only plausible explanation for them. Dawkins has argued, incorrectly, that this cause would itself have to be even more extraordinarily improbable and therefore not a plausible explanation at all. The theist cannot explain God and therefore has no reason to believe he exists, or so Dawkins implies.

Now he imagines himself to be applying the coup de grace to theism by presenting what he fancies to be a more plausible explanation for the universe's existence. Since we should always believe that which is more plausible instead of that which is less plausible we should accept his explanation he's about to offer rather than the God Hypothesis. His argument combines what has come to be called the Anthropic Principle (actually Dawkins employs what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle, WAP) with the Many-Worlds Hypothesis MWH).

Suppose you purchase a lottery ticket and learn that you are the only person who did so. Nevertheless, on the day of the drawing your five-digit ticket number, as highly improbable as it may be, comes up. You've won. The odds against it are extraordinary, but there's no point in objecting that it's almost impossible that your number could have been randomly drawn since you obviously won and the only way that could have happened is if your number was the one selected.

The universe is something like that. It's admittedly incredible that the forces and structural parameters are what they are, but we shouldn't be too surprised, the argument goes, since if they weren't exactly as they are the universe, if it existed all, would not have been able to produce life, and we wouldn't be here to notice the fact. Thus, the universe has to be the way it is for us to be here at all. That's the WAP and, Dawkins believes, it's all the explanation that's needed or which can be given for how the world happens to be so exquisitely calibrated for life.

This, of course, sounds like sophistry to most people who don't think like atheists. Consider a prisoner placed in a room with a dozen card tables each of which has on it ten complete packs of thoroughly shuffled playing cards. The man is told that from each of the decks on each of the tables he is to draw four cards at random. The first time he draws something other than an ace a poison gas will be released and he will die instantly. The man begins his task, despairing of making it past even the first card. Yet to his astonishment he completes the first table having drawn all aces, then the second, and finally the last. Unable to comprehend his good fortune, he wonders aloud how it could possibly have happened that he drew all aces, purely by chance, and is still alive. He's convinced, quite reasonably, that someone must have tinkered with the cards. A voice comes over the intercom, the voice of Richard Dawkins, say, and intones that he shouldn't conclude that there was any tinkering. Would it not be even more astonishing that an invisible man of some sort had somehow influenced the card selection? No, it was all just coincidence, and the prisoner shouldn't marvel that he drew 120 aces because if it had been otherwise he wouldn't be alive to notice. That's essentially Dawkins' explanation for the way the world is.

Needless to say, many people find this less than persuasive, so Dawkins imports another idea to buttress it. This is the theory that our universe or at least our region of the universe is just one of a near infinite number of such regions (called domains) all having different physical properties. Dawkins seizes upon this idea, the Many Worlds Hypothesis, and argues that given so many possibilities it's highly likely that there's at least one domain which has the particular set of properties necessary to sustain advanced life forms, and it just happens that we're in it. In other words, if enough lottery tickets are sold one of them just has to have the winning number.

The MWH serves as a deus ex machina for Dawkins and by combining it with the argument from God's improbability Dawkins has atheist hearts palpitating the world over. You, however, may be asking yourself several questions:

1. Is a near infinite number of worlds likely to exist? Dawkins replies that no, it's very unlikely, but it's even less likely that God exists so it makes more sense to believe the MWH than to believe in God.

2. You may also wonder where all those universes came from and how they came to have the properties they do. If you do you're wondering about more than Dawkins does. There is no conceivable mechanism for generating these universes, nor for producing the laws which would govern them. How do physical laws get created anyway?

3. You may also be asking whether this has anything to do with science. After all, Dawkins tells us several times in the book that he bases his beliefs on evidence. What's the evidence for other worlds? There is none. The MWH violates the principle that the preferred explanation be one for which we have evidence or which can be inferred from what we already know. We have reason to believe that information and fine-tuning can be produced by minds. We have no evidence, nor can have, of other universes. We have evidence that minds can create beauty, elegance, harmony, etc. but no evidence that chance can.

Yet Dawkins is prepared to believe, despite the lack of any empirical evidence, there are an infinite number of universes before he'll believe that there's a mind behind it all. It reminds me of something I read about Michael Shermer, another prominent atheist. Shermer once said that even if we were to discover a planet with the words "Yahweh Made Me" inscribed in letters so large as to be visible from a vast distance he'd still believe that it was an amazing accident.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga observes that Dawkins seems to be arguing that because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:

It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like:

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p; Therefore, p is true.

Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.

Dawkins rests his entire case on the arguments of chapter 4, but those arguments come nowhere near demonstrating what he thinks they do. Indeed, they're an exceedingly flimsy platform upon which to rest a conclusion so weighty as that God does not exist. Perhaps aware of the logical mire into which he has stepped, he subtly changes the subject, diverting our attention from his attack on God to his attack on creationism, organized religion, and anything else religious that crosses his field of vision. Whatever may be the merits of these criticisms, they're irrelevant to the question of the existence of God. Indeed, belief in God is left completely unscathed by The God Delusion.

RLC

Black Gold

Gary Varvel shows us why we're paying $4.00 a gallon at the pump:

RLC

Gas Prices

Four dollars a gallon got you down? Pity our poor congresspersons heavy-laden with the burden of finding a solution to this intractable and economically distressing problem, a problem which is doing real harm to millions of people. Surely with all their resources congress will come up with a creative, innovative, and wise solution:

On the other hand, perhaps some problems just have no solution. If Nancy Pelosi's best and brightest can't find one maybe a solution just doesn't exist ...

HT: Ramirez

Newt Gingrich suggests three things we can and should do to reduce the price of oil and in so doing demonstrates the intellectual fertility of conservatism. One measure would have an immediate effect, one would have an effect in the mid-term, and one is a long-term solution:

Now if only we could persuade the Democrats that windfall profits taxes are simply a feel-good measure designed to punish oil companies and which won't produce a single drop more oil, nor lower the price of oil a single cent.

Gingrich suggested on television last night that Sen. McCain ought to invite Sen. Obama to join with him in pushing Congress to enact these measures with all deliberate speed, and if Obama declines, which he probably would, to point out that Obama's energy policies are actually punishing the working poor. The problem is that on energy in general, and drilling for domestic oil in particular, McCain's not much better than Obama.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Darwinian Slip

Eric Smith in The Scientist commits a gaffe (i.e. he utters an uncomfortable truth):

This theory of evolution is really a framework for thinking about change in the living world. It provides no specific guesses for the kinds of traits that may exist, no strong requirements or prohibitions on how they may interact to make a complex organism or ecosystem, and no commitments to how innovation can occur. Even the problem of how a differentiated population ultimately divides into two distinct species (posed in the title of Darwin's seminal work) remains a major technical problem in evolutionary biology (Emphasis mine).

Darwinians cannot explain the origin of life. Nor can they offer anything but fanciful conjectures for the origin of insect metamorphosis, echo-location, flight, and sexual reproduction. The theory is at a loss to explain the emergence of specified complexity, consciousness, or our relatively short human life spans (there should, after all, be tremendous selection pressure for long lives). They know that evolution has to do with genetic mutation, but they've never been able to figure out how cumulative mutations can produce evolutionary "progress." They're no longer confident that natural selection plays as important a role in evolutionary change as had been thought for the last 150 years, or even much of a role at all. And now, on top of all this, Smith tells us that biologists don't even know how species split off from each other.

Well, one thing many evolutionists know is that it happened, it didn't take God to make it happen, and anyone who doubts it happened "is either ignorant, stupid or malicious" (Richard Dawkins). Of this they're absolutely certain.

HT: Robert Crowther at Evolution News and Views.

RLC

Fill the Vacancies

Jason sends a long a troubling article from The Economist:

For more than a year, two seats on the Fed's seven-member board of governors have been empty, because the Senate has been unwilling to confirm George Bush's nominees to the job. It has also refused a new term for the Bush-appointed Randall Kroszner, who is hanging on in limbo. On May 28th Rick Mishkin, another governor, said he would depart in August. If the Senate continues to delay, the Fed's board will have only four members--fewer than at any time since at least the 1930s.

No one doubts Mr Bush's candidates are qualified. The hold-up is ideological. Democrats want to wait until after November's election so that a new president can, as one senator put it, "remake the Fed" by appointing a clutch of new people at once. That is reckless on several counts.

The rest of the article explains several reasons why failure to confirm Bush's appointees is irresponsible. The most serious reason is this:

Mr Bernanke's term as Fed chairman expires in 2010. With lots of governors to appoint at once, and the prospect of a new chairman within two years, the next president will have unprecedented power to reshape the Fed. Governors are appointed for overlapping 14-year terms precisely to avoid this concentration of power.

By waiting until the Democrats have the White House they can pack the Board with politically sympathetic members and thereby turn the Fed from an independent institution into an instrument of their political will. It's a similar tactic to that employed by FDR when in 1937 he tried to have the number of Supreme Court Justices increased by six so that he could pack the Court with his own appointees.

The Democrats have dragged their feet in appointing the President's selections for the federal judiciary and they're doing likewise with his nominations to the Federal Reserve Board. The political gamesmanship and jockeying for power is unconscionable when the welfare of the country is at stake. The Democrats' demurrals virtually invite the Republicans to engage in the same behavior as soon as they're in a position to do so, and the whole childish business portends a government that will at some point cease to function.

Of course, those responsible for this calamity will still have their taxpayer subsidized pensions and health care so why should they be concerned?

RLC

Re: Do Messiahs Forget?

Byron alertly calls my attention to the fact that my source for the Do Messiahs Forget? post the other day made an error in the chronology which makes a big difference in the way Senator Obama's claims to have never called for a troop pullout from Iraq should be viewed.

I apologize for the mistake.

The updated piece at Hot Air can be accessed here.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 4 (part II)

On Tuesday we began a critique of the crucial chapter 4 in Richard Dawkins' atheistic best-seller The God Delusion. We pointed out that Dawkins' whole book rests on the argument he offers in this chapter in support of the claim that God almost certainly does not exist. Dawkins takes the theist's argument that the complexity of the world and of living things makes their existence highly improbable without a designer to account for them and seeks to turn it against the theist. His argument distills to the following steps:

1. The universe and life are very complex and therefore their existence is improbable.

2. Whatever creates the complex world must itself be even more complex than what he creates and his existence is therefore even more improbable than that of the world.

3. Thus, whatever creates the world must itself be explained in terms of another creator, and so on, in an infinite regress of creators.

4. It's absurd to posit an infinite regress. It's more parsimonious to conclude that the world is just a brute fact and that there is no creator.

As we stressed in yesterday's post all the assertions in steps 2 and 3 are false and their falsity is fatal to Dawkins' argument. Dawkins, despite his confident assertions to the contrary, hasn't come anywhere close to proving that God "almost certainly doesn't exist." But there's more that's wrong with chapter 4 than this.

Dawkins argues that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that the universe and living things could have easily come about without any divine intervention. In support of this claim he cites the marvels of evolutionary theory. Does life's complexity lead you to believe that there must be something supernatural behind it? Then you are too naive, or unobservant, or unimaginative to see that the appearance of design is just an illusion. Dawkins quite astonishingly compares the illusion of design to a magic trick done by Penn and Teller. Just as there is a perfectly natural explanation for the magic trick there's a perfectly natural explanation for the illusion of design in living things. I say that this is an astonishing comparison because it doesn't seem to occur to him that he's completely defeating his own case. The magic trick is performed by intelligent agents, it would not happen without intelligent purpose and skill. If the "design" of living things really is analogous to a magician's trick then that design should be recognized as the result of intelligent agency, just as the trick is.

Dawkins shoots himself in the foot again when he says that the complexity of living things can be built up by natural processes much like a stone arch is built by craftsmen. The arch cannot function or stand by itself until the keystone is finally added, so in order to support it while it's under construction a scaffolding is erected to hold the stones in place until the arch is completed. The scaffolding is then removed and the arch has the appearance of having been erected without it. This, Dawkins believes, is analogous to how irreducibly complex structures in cells, structures like the famed bacterial flagellum, are put together by evolution. Molecular scaffolding holds the components in place until the whole structure is complete and functioning and then the scaffolding disappears. The problem with his analogy, though, is that the arch's scaffolding is intentionally erected by intelligent artisans with a specific end in mind. A scaffolding erected for the purpose of holding up stone arches is much more closely analogous to intentional design than it is to blind, purposeless evolution.

Almost every line in chapter 4 drips with an unseemly disdain for scientists like Michael Behe, an evolutionist who nevertheless thinks that intelligence has somehow played a role in the creation of life. Dawkins' contempt for this view leads him to say the most ridiculous things. For example he caricatures scientists like Behe in these words:

Here is the message that an imaginary 'intelligent design theorist' might broadcast to scientists (note that for Dawkins ID theorists are in a separate class than scientists): 'If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.'

Notwithstanding the fact that many of the greatest minds in the history of science have held to ID in some form, or the fact that many scientists today are theists and believe that God is somehow behind the phenomena they study, or the fact that there is no example of such reasoning as Dawkins invents ever having been offered by anyone in the ID camp, blithely indifferent to all of this Dawkins claims that belief in God is a "science stopper." He's dismissive of these men and women who labor everyday in their labs to unlock the mysteries of nature despite the fact that he himself hasn't done any real scientific research since his doctoral work. He simply writes books about the work of others. It ill-becomes him, then, to speak so disparagingly of the science being done by others just because he despises their metaphysical commitments.

In any event, not having yet satisfied his apparently uncontrollable impulse to intellectual self-immolation Professor Dawkins concludes the chapter by insisting that if it's possible for something to happen then it's almost certain that it did happen. We'll address this peculiar argument next time.

RLC

Liars' Club

Have the Democrats been playing political games with the Iraq war and the welfare of our troops? Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D, PA) seems to be boasting that they have:

"I'll tell you my impression. We really in this last election, when I say we...the Democrats, I think pushed it as far as we can to the end of the fleet, didn't say it, but we implied it. That if we won the Congressional elections, we could stop the war. Now anybody was a good student of Government would know that wasn't true. But you know, the temptation to want to win back the Congress, we sort of stretched the facts...and people ate it up."

Of course when confronted with his statement he tries to deny he said it:

What are we to make of this? One conclusion we can draw is that at least some Democrats don't mind lying in order to get a firmer grasp on political power. Another is that they apparently see their constituents as a bunch of gullible dolts.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

More Vindication for GWB

This column by The Washington Post's editorial page editor Fred Hiatt is remarkable. Democrats since 2003 have been charging George Bush with being a liar about our reasons for going into Iraq, and chief among his accusers has been Senator Jay Rockefeller whose Select Committee on Intelligence has released a report which Rockefeller tries unsuccessfully to spin as lending support to the Bush lied meme. Hiatt suggests, however, that the reader will scour the report's pages in vain searching for substantiation of the charge.

In other words, the WaPo, no friend of the Bush administration, concludes that there's no evidence that George Bush had any reason to believe anything about Iraq and Saddam Hussein than what he told us in the run-up to the war. Well, now. Will those who were so quick to defame and mock the President be called to account by the media for their own malicious mendacity and, in Rockefeller's case, brazen hypocrisy? Will their names be highlighted for future historians to scorn for their contemptuous behavior?Will the Bush Lied, People Died allegation go down in history as a slogan conjured by some of the most unsavory participants in the political debate?

We're not betting on it.

Our culture has debased itself to the point where one can say any defamatory thing one wishes about a political opponent and, if he's on the right side of the media zeitgeist (which is actually the left side), he can do so with impunity. It is nice, though, to see the WaPo take a few honest steps against the tide.

RLC

Do Messiahs Forget?

Ed Morrissey wonders whether Senator Obama reads his own website or whether he just makes it up as he goes along. The website declares that, if he's elected president, he will pull almost all of our troops out of Iraq ASAP. Indeed, he introduced legislation in January 2007 at the start of the surge that would have removed all of our troops by this past March. This, Morrissey notes, is why he's the favored candidate of Code Pink and MoveOn.org.

But then in April of this year, in an interview for a Chicago tv station the Senator denies he ever called for a withdrawal:

Maybe he just forgot.

RLC

Fatal Attraction

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign reminds me of the movie Fatal Attraction with Hillary in the role of the Glenn Close character and the Democratic party in the role of Michael Douglas and his family. Douglas, you may recall from the movie, decides to have a fling with Close whilst his wife is out of town, but once he has let the lady into his life he can't get her out. She's obsessed with having what she wants, and she'll do anything to get it. No matter what Douglas does she won't be bought off or dissuaded. At the end Close's obsession is a threat to undo Douglas's marriage and murder everything he holds dear. Even when he thinks she's dead she comes back for one last furious burst of vengeance.

Senator Clinton looks like she's politically dead as a presidential candidate right now, but perhaps the story isn't over yet. The Democrats' ill-advised fling with the Clintons in the 90's may well yet turn into their own political horror flick. Stay tuned.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 4 (part I)

Chapter 4 is the crux of The God Delusion. It's here that Richard Dawkins sets out to demonstrate, as the chapter heading states, why there almost certainly is no God.

His argument amounts to this:

Creationists (for Dawkins this is anyone who believes in God) hold that the world and life are astronomically improbable and therefore could not have come about on their own. Thus, the creationists believe, there must be an intelligence which lies behind it all, i.e. God. However, anything intelligent enough to create the world must itself be highly complex and therefore at least as improbable as the world it creates. Thus, if the improbability of the universe is so great as to render it inexplicable apart from a designer, then that designer, being even more improbable, must itself require an explanation. This leads to an infinite regress of "designers" which is an absurdity. Therefore, the simplest, most reasonable alternative to believing an absurdity is to believe that the universe is all there is.

Dawkins thinks this is a knock down argument against the rationality of believing in God's existence, but it fails for at least reasons:

1. The assumption that the source of complexity must itself be complex is false.

2. The argument from improbability is based on a category mistake.

3. The argument is based on the assumption that the theist is forced to accept an infinite regress.

4. The argument commits the fallacy of claiming that if there's no good reason to think an event didn't happen that it therefore almost certainly did happen.

We'll consider 1 and 2 today and 3 and 4 tomorrow.

Dawkins argues that if life is designed the designer must be at least as complex as what he designed and therefore at least as improbable and therefore at least as much in need of an explanation for his complexity.

Yet Dawkins believes that the ultimate source of the universe and all the complexity it contains was a simple, homogenous point (singularity) which, in the Big Bang, ultimately produced the present world. He also believes that the first cell to appear in the long chain of living things was far less complex than the myriad life forms into which it has evolved. He also believes, I assume, that the zygote which gives rise to an adult human is much less complex than the adult it gradually forms itself into. So, it's not clear to me, in light of these examples, why he would stake his argument on the claim that complexity can only be generated by even greater complexity. The assertion seems to be just false.

If God is simple, as many theologians and philosophers believe, then Dawkins' claim that he's even less probable than the universe comes to nothing. But this is a relatively minor point. The second - and I think the greatest - problem with Dawkins' argument is that it uses the idea of improbability in an ambiguous and logically illicit manner.

When we say that the complexity of the living world is improbable we mean that it is unlikely that it could have arisen solely by unguided processes. We mean that it is astonishing that it would have just happened by coincidence, without any purposeful input. It is highly improbable, for instance, that a stick would appear to be whittled to a point if only mechanical forces ever acted upon it, but it's not at all improbable that the stick takes on this appearance given the existence of a boy with a knife.

In other words, complex universes containing complex living things are improbable only on the assumption that they arose by sheer chance. They're not at all improbable if there's an intelligent agent involved in their origin.

Moreover, although it's indeed highly improbable that complex things like cells and universes could be produced by purely mechanical processes, God, unlike the boy with the knife, is not something which is produced. God has for centuries been thought of by philosophers as a necessary being, one which does not depend on anything else for his existence. Thus, it is a category mistake to talk about the improbability of God coming to be in the same sense that the universe comes to be. It is the origin of the universe and the origin of life that beg for a causal explanation. God is not the sort of thing that has an origin and therefore not the sort of thing which depends upon some cause outside himself and not the sort of thing to which the term "improbable" applies.

The universe can be defined as the sum of all contingent entities. Contingent entities require a necessary entity as their ultimate cause. This ultimate cause of the constituents of the universe cannot itself be contingent (dependent) upon anything else or it would, by definition, be part of the universe. Thus the ultimate cause must be something which does not "come to be" and which exists entirely independently of any contingent entity. It must have necessary existence.

Dawkins doesn't seem to understand the distinction between necessary and contingent being. If he did he wouldn't confuse God with contingent entities. When the difference is understood, the argument from improbability, in which he invests so much, collapses.

More on Dawkins' argument in chapter 4 tomorrow.

RLC

Re: Remaking a Great Nation

Byron writes to take exception to Mark Steyn's recent column on Barack Obama and my endorsement of it. His letter can be read on the Feedback page.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 3

We continue our walk through Richard Dawkins' best-selling attack on belief in God (though he calls it, rather pretentiously (p.57), an attack on God himself) with a look at chapter 3.

This chapter is ostensibly given to an adumbration of some of the arguments in favor of God's existence, although Dawkins can't resist the temptation to scoff at their alleged inadequacies as he summarizes them. Some of these inadequacies are genuine and some are due to Dawkins' tendentious explications of the arguments. As an example of the latter, he offers the long-discredited observation that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible since God must know today what he will do tomorrow, but if he knows today what he will do tomorrow then he can't change his mind tomorrow, which means there's something he can't do. Therefore, he's not omnipotent.

This is like the old paradox that asks whether God can create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it. Whether the theist answers yes or no he is tacitly agreeing that there's something beyond God's power to accomplish. One of several problems with this paradox is that it's incoherent. It suggests that there's something that can't be done by a being which can do anything. In other words, it seeks to show that God's inability to bring about a logically impossible state of affairs means he must not exist. This, as every freshman philosophy student learns, misconstrues God's omnipotence.

To say that God is omnipotent is to say that he can do anything it is logically possible to do. Philosophers at least since Aquinas have recognized that God cannot do anything which establishes a contradiction of some sort. He cannot, for instance, cause it to happen that he never existed, nor can he create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it. If it's logically possible to know the future then God can know what will happen tomorrow. All that follows from Dawkins' argument is that God's freedom to change his mind is constrained by his foreknowledge, just as his actions are constrained by his goodness. He has the freedom to change his mind, but if he knows that he won't, then he won't.

Dawkins spends a little time in this chapter deriding the ontological argument, calling it infantile just before acknowledging that philosophers have been of two minds about it's validity. The world has had to wait for Richard Dawkins to arrive to settle the matter and he does so by seemingly confusing Anselm's version of the argument with Descartes'. Conflating the two, he defeats Descartes, whose argument almost no one accepts anyway, and claims to have thus defeated Anselm. Moreover, he never mentions the more formidable versions of the ontological argument presented by contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Norman Malcolm, but perhaps he's not aware of them.

Another of the arguments he selects for ridicule in this chapter is what he calls the Argument From Admired Religious Scientists. This is the claim that since certain scientists believe in God and since scientists are intelligent that, therefore, belief in God is an intelligent option. This is indeed a bad argument, and I know of no educated person who would ever use it as a justification for belief, but equally as bad is Dawkins' response to it.

With a certain glee he points out that the more educated people are, the more intelligent they are, the less likely they are to be religious, but of course this argument by correlation is fraught with dangers. If we're going to argue that intelligent people are usually atheists we can also argue that the longer a person's criminal record the more likely he is to be an atheist, or that, at least in the non-Islamic world, the more blood-thirsty a tyrant the more likely he is to be an atheist. So, I don't know what we should make of the fact, if it even is a fact, that intelligence correlates to unbelief except to say that highly intelligent tyrants and criminals are even more likely to be atheists than are more modestly endowed thugs.

In any event, the argument from the correlation to intelligence is not very impressive. Intelligence is not wisdom. Intelligence is an ability, and ability in one sphere of life does not entail ability in other spheres. A man brilliant in his field is often an incompetent outside of it. Literary geniuses are often mathematical clods, and vice-versa. Indeed, the most striking examples of this are idiot-savants (Think of the movie Rain Man or even A Beautiful Mind). College professors are a close second. That a man is a brilliant biologist tells us nothing about his ability to discern the fingerprint of God in the world and in his life.

More later.

RLC

Calorie Counter

This link takes you to a quick calorie counter. Plug in your weight and sex, and check the box which best describes your activity level, and you're immediately told how many calories per day it takes to maintain your weight.

To lose one pound a week you need to reduce your intake by 500 calories a day which you can do by cutting out sugar and bread and by increasing your physical activity.

I know. If I'm such an expert why ain't I skinny? Because it's unfortunately a lot easier to know what to tell others to do than to do it yourself.

RLC

Winning the GWOT

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air writes that "Either the New York Times has replaced its entire editorial board, or the US has become so successful against al-Qaeda that they can't avoid reporting it. Today, Eric Schmitt informs the Times' readers that the US-led efforts against AQ and radical Islamist terrorism has the enemy in collapse, with its funding all but gone and popular support dissipating. Perhaps Manhattan pharmacies should stock up on smelling salts."

What is this deviation from liberal anti-Bush orthodoxy at the Times about which Morrissey writes?

Here's part of Schmitt's column:

The deadliest terrorist networks in Southeast Asia have suffered significant setbacks in the past three years, weakened by aggressive policing, improved intelligence, enhanced military operations and an erosion of public support, government officials and counterterrorism specialists say.

Three years after the region's last major strike - the attacks on three restaurants in Bali that killed three suicide bombers and 19 other people - American and Asian intelligence analysts say financial and logistical support from Al Qaeda to other groups in the region has long dried up, and the most lethal are scrambling for survival. In Indonesia, since 2005 authorities have arrested more than 200 members of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic group with ties to Al Qaeda. In the Philippines, an American-backed military campaign has the Abu Sayyaf Group, an Islamic extremist organization with links to Jemaah Islamiyah, clinging to footholds in the jungles of a handful of southern islands, officials said.

To be sure Southeast Asia is not the Middle East but it must nevertheless pain the Times to write that the terrorists are suffering and Bush's strategy is being vindicated in this part of the world. For five years his detractors at the Times and elsewhere have been telling us that Bush is incompetent, that his approach is all wrong, that the world hates us because of him, that we need to negotiate with terrorists not treat the conflict between us as a war. And yet the news over the last six months about the Global War on Terror has been consistently hopeful.

Imagine, though, where we'd be today had John Kerry, the avatar of surrender, won in 2004 or if Bush had listened to Barack Obama instead of John McCain and we had fled Iraq a year ago.

RLC

Remaking a Great Nation

Mark Steyn skewers the pretensions of Sen. Obama who wants to "remake this great nation" and promises, for good measure, to halt the ocean's rise:

The short version of the Democratic Party primary campaign is that the media fell in love with Barack Obama but the Democratic electorate declined to.

"I felt this thrill going up my leg," said MSNBC's Chris Matthews after one of the senator's speeches. "I mean, I don't have that too often." Au contraire, Chris and the rest of the gang seem to be getting the old tingle up the thigh hairs on a nightly basis. If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer warns that, if leg tingles persist for more than six months, see your doctor.

Out there in the voting booths, however, Democrat legs stayed admirably unthrilled. The more the media told Hillary she was toast, and she should get the hell out of it and let Obama romp to victory, the more Democrats insisted on voting for her. The more the media insisted Barack was inevitable, the less inclined the voters were to get with the program. On the strength of Chris Matthews' vibrating calves, Sen. Obama raised a ton of money - over $300 million - and massively outspent Sen. Clinton, but he didn't really get any bang for his buck. In the end, he crawled over the finish line. The Obama Express came a-hurtlin' down the track at 2 miles an hour.

But what does he care? Sen. Obama has learned an old trick of Bill Clinton's: If you behave like a star, you'll get treated as one. So, even as his numbers weakened, his rhetoric soared. By the time he wrapped up his "victory" speech last week, the great gaseous uplift had his final paragraphs floating in delirious hallucination along the Milky Way:

"I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people ... . I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal ... . This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation."

It's a good thing he's facing it with "profound humility," isn't it? Because otherwise who knows what he'd be saying.

Read the rest at the link. It's good stuff.

The line about halting the ocean's rise reminds me of John Edwards' promise in the last election that if John Kerry won, paraplegics like Christopher Reeve would rise up out of their wheelchairs and walk. Liberal Democrats sure don't lack for self-confidence. Unfortunately, their confidence is such that they apparently all think they're the second coming of Christ.

RLC

Object Lesson

Here's an item you might have missed on last night's evening news:

Whereas once [AIDS] was seen as a risk to populations everywhere, it was now recognised that, outside sub-Saharan Africa, it was confined to high-risk groups including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers and their clients.

Epidemiologist Dr Kevin De Cock said: "It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in other countries. Ten years ago a lot of people were saying there would be a generalised epidemic in Asia - China was the big worry with its huge population. That doesn't look likely. But we have to be careful. As an epidemiologist it is better to describe what we can measure. There could be small outbreaks in some areas."

Anyone who read Michael Fumento's book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS knew back in the early nineties that media prophecies regarding the scourge about to be visited upon our planet by heterosexual AIDS was all hype and no substance.

AIDS was never a threat to the heterosexual population outside of Africa, but we were nevertheless assured by various government and gay rights organizations that it was so that we would continue to subsidize research into a cure. The AIDS lobby feared that if the general population no longer thought itself to be at risk AIDS would quickly come to be seen as strictly a gay problem and funding would just as quickly evaporate. They also feared that if AIDS was seen as a uniquely gay disease it would diminish sympathy for gays in society. Thus the need to keep anxiety about the threat high.

Fumento's book exposed all this for the scam that it was, but because the book was so far out of the PC mainstream many stores wouldn't even carry it. Fumento argued to much derision that unless one is a homosexual, a sex partner of bisexual men, or an intravenous drug abuser, one was more likely to get struck by lightning than to contract HIV/AIDS. Everything we know today about the disease vindicates his claim.

There's a good lesson here for those of us who may be prone to get caught up in the crisis du jour. There's always something that the left and the media are in a panic about and which portends the end of civilization as we know it, but which never seems to amount to anything. In the seventies it was (American) nuclear weapons, in the eighties it was AIDS, today it's global warming. What will it be ten years from now? The only thing I can say with relative assurance is that there will be something.

Be skeptical.

RLC

The God Delusion Ch. 2

Richard Dawkins doesn't like God. He makes that quite clear in the opening lines of chapter 2 of The God Delusion (TGD) where he avers that "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Having exhausted his thesaurus' pejoratives, Dawkins mercifully jogs to a panting halt and gives us a preview of his main argument against the existence of the monster he has just described.

He recognizes, of course, that he has just created a straw man and that it's possible some believers in God do not see him quite the way Dawkins portrays him. Thus, he defines the God whose existence he will disprove by laying out for us what he calls The God Hypothesis: "There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us." One might think that it'd be very difficult to refute the existence of such a being and that the best Dawkins could do would be to argue that there's no reason to believe such a being exists. After all, what evidence might be adduced against it? But Dawkins is undaunted. He believes he has a knockdown argument and he's eventually going to give it to us, but first he wants to take a few more swipes at religion.

Confusing the question of the existence of God with popular religious expressions of belief in that existence, a confusion he indulges throughout the book, Dawkins launches into a rambling catalogue of complaints about tax exemptions, trinitarian theologizing, and the religious views of the American Founding Fathers. He claims to be attacking God ("I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural..."), but busies himself in chapter 2 with peripheral concerns having little to do with the question of the truth of The God Hypothesis.

At pains to show that the Founders were not Christians, he adduces a document drafted by Washington and signed by Adams as giving the lie to the belief that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. Washington writes in a treaty with Tripoli that "[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." This is true enough as far as it goes, but what it elides is that the U.S. was founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and human rights which arguably could not have been derived from any other worldview. In other words, the Founders imported into our nascent government ideas which were rooted uniquely in their Christian heritage while at the same time keeping the government neutral with respect to matters of religion. This distinction, however, escapes Dawkins' notice.

Dawkins repeatedly quotes Thomas Jefferson's hostile comments about the Christianity of his experience and deduces from these quotes that ... Jefferson didn't much like Christianity. This rather banal conclusion is hardly a surprise nor is it much to the purpose of demonstrating that God doesn't exist.

Dawkins is contemptuous not only of Christian believers but also of those timorous agnostics who hide behind their ignorance and refuse to take a stand against belief in God. In the course of chastising them for their pusillanimous fence-sitting he makes an astonishing claim, one that he insists upon several times throughout the chapter: He asserts that the question of God's existence "is a scientific question."

In one single sentence the dean of contemporary Darwinism has undone all the arguments that have ever been adduced against teaching intelligent design in public schools. Those arguments have been founded on two premises: Intelligent design is all about God, and, second, God doesn't belong in the science classroom. Now the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University has assured us that indeed God does belong in the science classroom. I'm sure the ACLU and Judge John Jones of the Dover Intelligent Design trial were not amused to read this.

Lest you think you maybe didn't read him right here he is again on pages 72 and 73: "I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other...it belongs in the same...box as the controversies over the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God's existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe..." And again on p. 82: The presence or absence of a super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question....So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories...."

As more than one commenter on the book has observed, one can almost hear Dawkins' Darwinian comrades yelling at him: "Richard, please shut up! You're giving away the game!"

The rest of chapter 2 is given to scoffing at such things as prayer experiments and those evolutionists who deny that evolution leads to atheism: "Any creationist lawyer who got me on the stand could instantly win over the jury simply by asking me: 'Has your knowledge of evolution influenced you in the direction of becoming an atheist?' I would have to answer yes and, at one stroke, I would have lost the jury."

Yes, and he's also blown the case for keeping intelligent design out of our science classes. If ID is forbidden because it points to God, why should not evolution be forbidden because it points away from God? If we are going to allow our children to be taught the one, why not the other?

RLC

Dear Viewpoint

Dear Viewpoint,

Our culture seems to be spinning out of control and our politicians appear to be insensible to the plight we're in. I'm a young person who wants my life to make a difference in the lives of others, I want our time on earth to count for something, I want to exert a positive influence on society and make it better, yet I have no idea how to do these things. What advice can you offer?

Sincerely,

Need Help

--------------

Dear Need Help,

There are lots of things I'd like to say, lots of things that I wish I had learned earlier in life than I did, but I'll limit myself to four:

1. Get all the education you can (especially history, literature, science and philosophy). Learn as much as you can about the issues at stake, even the ones you're not particularly interested in. Read the stuff written by people with whom you disagree so that you better understand them and can respond to them more effectively. Know so much more than anyone else that people recognize and respect your expertise and defer to it even if they don't want to agree with you.

2. Make a conscious effort to educate others, either in your family, church or school. Letters to local papers are helpful, especially in response to controversial matters.

3. Learn to be sensitive, humble and irenic. Don't force your opinions on others or be otherwise pushy and obnoxious. A good listener is often more effective than a good arguer.

4. Whatever career you pursue resolve to make your personal and professional life an example of how a life should be lived. Your life is the best argument you can make. No other argument will have any weight at all if your life does not reflect what you say you believe.

Good luck,

Viewpoint

720p/1080i

If, like me, you're totally mystified by all the high definition tv jargon, here's a brief article that lays out the basics pretty well and also makes some recommendations if you're considering a purchase. Here's the key graph:

First off, let's tackle what High-Definition means. A television works by painting an image over and over again, usually around 60 times per second. If half the image's lines are repainted every time the screen refreshes, it's called an interlaced scan technique. If the entire picture is repainted every time the screen refreshes, it's a progressive scan technique. A regular television displays a picture that's made of 480 lines from the screen's top to bottom.

The high-definition threshold begins when the number of lines shoots up to 720, packing in more detail for those sharp "I-can-actually-see-the-guy's-skin-pores!" details. Right now, the zenith of high-definition capability you can buy is 1080p-1080 lines, progressive scan. Critical viewers prefer progressive scan for its smoother look when watching content that packs a lot of motion (like sports), mainly due to the fact that you're seeing twice the amount of pictures per second (frame rate) as you'd get with interlaced scan. The only problem is, unless you're playing a game on a PS3 or feeding content through a high-end video card on your PC, there is no actual 1080p content available for your tv. Weird, huh?

High-definition cable is piped in at 1080i and high-definition movies are filmed at less than half the rate your screen is repainted at (24 frames-per-second)...and neither of those standards are likely to change anytime soon. Having said that, if you can still find a 1080i tv (1080 lines, interlaced scan) or you pick up a 720p model (720 lines, progressive scan), you'll be satisfied. As a matter of fact, it can be difficult to discern the additional detail differences between a 1080p unit and a 720p when viewing a screen size less than 50" (in the right viewing ranges).

There's more at the link, including recommendations, if you're interested.

RLC

The Olivet Controversy

Here's something for those readers who attend a conservative Christian college. Rick Colling has been prohibited from teaching biology at Olivet because he wrote a book advocating a kind of theistic evolution. Two questions: Did the college do the right thing? If so, did they handle it in the right way?

Read Colling's description of events and let me know what you think.

RLC

The God Delusion Ch. 1

I confess that despite all the buzz about it I had not until recently read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (TGD). I had read so much about it that I thought it would be redundant to actually spend time on the book itself. Recently, however, a friend of mine was challenged by an atheist acquaintance to read TGD, and I thought it might be useful to read it along with him and discuss it as we go.

I also thought that it might be worthwhile posting my thoughts on the book chapter by chapter to help others who may not be inclined to read it themselves to at least get one person's perspective on what Dawkins says that's good and what he says that's not.

With that in mind, then, here are some thoughts on Chapter 1:

Dawkins says in the preface that "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down." I don't know how successful he's been in achieving that goal - although I've heard more than one Christian say that the book really shook them - but the effectiveness of Dawkins' polemic, in my opinion, is due more to the emotional impact of his jackhammer indictments of religion than to the rigor of his arguments against the existence of God.

In chapter one he sets out to dispel the myth that Einstein and others were religious believers. In this he is, of course, correct. Einstein used the word "God" as a short hand for the mysteriousness of the cosmos. He did not believe in a transcendent, personal, creator. Dawkins' project in TGD is to destroy the basis for belief in the latter. He's indifferent about conceptions of God which immanentize him.

He then goes on to argue that religion and religious belief do not deserve any more respect than any other beliefs one holds. Religious beliefs should not be deemed out of bounds and beyond challenge and, he argues, we should not hesitate to press people on their religious beliefs even if this causes them to be offended. I happen to agree with him on this point as well. A man's belief in God should not be treated with the deference that we treat his belief that his wife is beautiful. In fact, I think the reason we often do treat a person's religious beliefs respectfully and deferentially is out of a certain politeness. We have learned through long experience that most people cannot give a coherent defense of their beliefs and that to press them to defend them would only embarrass them, like pressing a man to defend his conviction of his wife's beauty. Not wishing to embarrass people, and not seeing the matter as poarticularly significant, we generally don't pursue such questions.

This is fine if we are inclined not to create hard feelings, but I see nothing wrong with someone like Dawkins laying down the gauntlet to religious believers, especially if those believers are themselves evangelical and concerned to encourage others to accept their faith. Christians should always be prepared to give an account for the hope that is within us.

I disagree with him, though, when soon after he defends his right to poke his nose into what Christians most deeply believe he tells us that "the right to be Christian seems ... to mean the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives." He has in mind here Christian opposition to the homosexual political agenda, and Dawkins thinks it's simply intolerable that Christians would publicly declare homosexuality to be wrong. This is pretty funny coming from the man who thinks it's just fine to tell Christians that they're wrong.

In any event, the claim that any behavior is wrong is an odd one coming from a man who is promoting in his book the idea that there is no God and thus no basis for anything being right or wrong. But this discussion will have to wait until chapter 6 and 7.

RLC

New Politics

Senator Obama has promised us a new kind of politics but as Powerline reminds us:

Earlier this year, three-fourths of the Senate voted in favor of a resoution designating the Iranian National Guard as a terrorist organization. Among those who voted for the resolution were Hillary Clinton, Richard Durbin, Harry Reid, and Chuck Schumer. Obama voted against it.

Yesterday, however, Obama told the AIPAC convention that the Iranian National Guard is, in fact, a terrorist organization. He attempted to explain his recent vote to the contrary by claiming that the resolution contained language about military action. But this is false, and transparently so -- if it had contained such language Clinton, Durbin, Reid, and Schumer would have opposed it.

Obama's change in position on the Iranian National Guard is mirrored in other flip-flops, with more likely to come. On the vital issue of the Iraq war, for example, Obama spoke out against it as a state legislator. But when running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he declared that there is little difference between his position on Iraq and that of President Bush. After his election, differences quickly reappeared, and Obama's position continued to evolve over the next several years. When it comes to Iraq, Obama makes the John Kerry of 2004 look constant.

Is Obama dishonest? I'm not prepared to say that, but it's troubling that much of what he says turns out to be inconsistent with the facts. Perhaps there are reasons for this inconsistency. If so, I'd like to know what they are.

HT: Ramirez

A big part of the problem Obama faces is that if he's forthright about where he stands on most issues facing the country, he won't have much of a chance of winning in November. He likes to say that a McCain presidency will amount to a third George Bush term, but Obama looks very much like he would give us a second term of Jimmy Carter.

RLC

Conservatives Are More Honest

Speaking of honesty, The Examiner's Peter Schweizer tosses up a column that'll shock liberals and elicit little more than a "we-already-knew-that" nod from conservatives. The point of his essay is that several studies have shown that conservatives have much more integrity than liberals. The article is so interesting (to me, at least) that I'm going to copy most of it here:

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as "very liberal" said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are "very conservative." When Pew Research asked whether it was "morally wrong" to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: "You lose your job. Your friend's company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?"

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn't deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

Another survey by Barna Research found that political liberals were two and a half times more likely to say that they illegally download or trade music for free on the Internet.

A study by professors published in the American Taxation Association's Journal of Legal Tax Research found conservative students took the issue of accounting scandals and tax evasion more seriously than their fellow liberal students. Those with a "liberal outlook" who "reject the idea of absolute truth" were more accepting of cheating at school, according to another study, involving 291 students and published in the Journal of Education for Business.

A study in the Journal of Business Ethics involving 392 college students found that stronger beliefs toward "conservatism" translated into "higher levels of ethical values." And academics concluded in the Journal of Psychology that there was a link between "political liberalism" and "lying in your own self-interest," based on a study involving 156 adults.

Liberals were more willing to "let others take the blame" for their own ethical lapses, "copy a published article" and pass it off as their own, and were more accepting of "cheating on an exam," according to still another study in the Journal of Business Ethics.

Now, I'm not suggesting that all conservatives are honest and all liberals are untrustworthy. But clearly a gap exists in the data. Why? The quick answer might be that liberals are simply being more honest about their dishonesty.

However attractive this explanation might be for some, there is simply no basis for accepting this explanation. Validation studies, which attempt to figure out who misreports on academic surveys and why, has found no evidence that conservatives are less honest. Indeed, validation research indicates that Democrats tend to be less forthcoming than other groups.

The honesty gap is also not a result of "bad people" becoming liberals and "good people" becoming conservatives. In my mind, a more likely explanation is bad ideas. Modern liberalism is infused with idea that truth is relative. Surveys consistently show this. And if truth is relative, it also must follow that honesty is subjective.

Sixties organizer Saul Alinsky, who both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say inspired and influenced them, once said the effective political advocate "doesn't have a fixed truth; truth to him is relative and changing, everything to him is relative and changing. He is a political relativist."

During this political season, honesty is often in short supply. But at least we can improve things by accepting the idea that truth and honesty exist. As the late scholar Sidney Hook put it, "the easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists."

Yes, it is an easy rationalization, but if one believes that truth and morality have no objective basis it's foolish to accept their word on anything they tell you. Especially if he or she is a politician.

RLC

Zombie Bodyguards

Nature is certainly amazing, but this is almost unbelievable:

The parasitoid wasp Glyptapanteles lays its eggs, about 80 at a time, in young geometrid caterpillars. The eggs hatch and the larvae feed on the caterpillar's body fluids. When they are fully developed, they eat through the caterpillar's skin, attach themselves to a nearby branch or leaf and wrap themselves up in a cocoon.

At this point, something remarkable and slightly eerie happens. The caterpillar, still alive, behaves as though controlled by the cocooned larvae. Instead of going about its usual daily business, it stands arched over the cocoons without moving away or feeding. The caterpillar - now effectively a zombie - stays alive until the adult wasps hatch.

"We don't know exactly what kills the caterpillars, but it is fascinating that the moment of death seems to be tuned to the duration of the wasp's pupal stage," says Arne Janssen of the University of Amsterdam.

To test the manipulation hypothesis, Janssen's team allowed wasps to infect caterpillars in a laboratory setting. Once the larvae emerged and formed their cocoons, the researchers separated half the cocoons and the caterpillars. The separated cocoons were attached to a leaf next to an unparasitised caterpillar, which was prevented from moving away by a ring of insect glue around the stem.

When they added a stinkbug, a voracious predator of wasp cocoons, the team found that 17 of the 19 parasitised caterpillars thrashed their heads around in the direction of the bug. More than half the time, this knocked the bug off the branch or made it retreat. Unparasitised caterpillars barely noticed the bug, even when it climbed on top of them.

To see if the behaviour affected the survival of wasp cocoons in the wild, the researchers placed over 400 parasitised caterpillars in guava fruit trees one day before the larvae were due to break through their skin. Once the larvae had cocooned themselves on the nearby branches, the researchers removed half of their bodyguard caterpillars and watched what happened. The survival rate of "guarded" cocoons was twice as high as that of unguarded cocoons.

I wonder how many chance mutations must have occurred in both the wasp and the moth in order for this behavior to evolve. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that this wonderful dance of wasp and caterpillar is not just a result of natural processes acting blindly over long eons of time. I'm not saying that stuff like this suggests that there must have been some kind of intention somewhere along the way. I'm not saying that lots of random mutations at just the right time, together with natural selection, can't all by themselves work miracles. I've read my Dawkins, and I'm sure they can, but still....

RLC

Best Animated Films

Moviefone lists the top 25 animated movies of all time. I'm surprised at what was left off the list, but the raters evidently considered not just the quality of animation but the quality of the story, the characters, and the popularity of the movie. Still, I think Prince of Egypt and Ants should have made the cut and Ratatouille and Finding Nemo should have been ranked higher.

Anyway, check it out if you're a movie fan.

RLC

Pot Heads

This confirms what a lot of high school teachers have long suspected:

Long-term Cannabis (Marijuana)Users May Have Structural Brain Abnormalities

The hippocampus, thought to regulate emotion and memory, and the amygdala, involved with fear and aggression, tended to be smaller in cannabis users than in controls (volume was reduced by an average of 12 percent in the hippocampus and 7.1 percent in the amygdala). Cannabis use also was associated with sub-threshold symptoms of psychotic disorders. "Although cannabis users performed significantly worse than controls on verbal learning, this did not correlate with regional brain volumes in either group," the authors write.

No kidding.

RLC

Let's Drill

This article was passed along by my friend Richard Francis. There's been talk of the potential of this field for a long time, but now it appears that we're going to go after it, that is unless Congress throws up a roadblock:

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel oil field that could potentially make America energy independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology, the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America's Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC's short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

In the next 30 days the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) will release a new report giving an accurate resource assessment of the Bakken Oil Formation that covers North Dakota and portions of South Dakota and Montana. With new horizontal drilling technology it is believed that from 175 to 500 billion barrels of recoverable oil are held in this 200,000 square mile reserve that was initially discovered in 1951. The USGS did an initial study back in 1999 that estimated 400 billion recoverable barrels were present, but with prices bottoming out at $10 a barrel back then the report was dismissed since it would have cost $20-$40 a barrel to extract it.

It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil, that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in oil discovery since oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

The US imported about 14 million barrels of oil per day in 2007, which means US consumers sent about $340 billion dollars over seas building palaces in Dubai and propping up unfriendly regimes around the world. If 200 billion barrels of oil at $90 a barrel are recovered in the high plains the added wealth to the US economy would be $18 trillion dollars which would go a long way toward stabilizing the US trade deficit and could cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.

It's nice to know it's there. It'd be nicer to know that the Democrats will let us have it.

RLC

TANG II

A couple of days ago I discussed an argument by Michael Martin which he calls TANG (Transcendental Argument for the Non-existence of God). It's an argument against the existence of God based on logic, science, and morality. In that last post we talked about whether his claim that logic and science precluded God actually works. In this post I want to take the last of the three elements of TANG and see how a theist might respond to it.

Martin writes:

Consider morality. The type of Christian morality assumed by TAG (Transcendental Argument for the existence of God)is some version of the Divine Command Theory, the view that moral obligation is dependent on the will of God. But such a view is incompatible with objective morality. On the one hand, on this view what is moral is a function of the arbitrary will of God; for instance, if God wills that cruelty for its own sake is good, then it is. On the other hand, determining the will of God is impossible since there are different alleged sources of this will (The Bible, the Koran, The Book of Mormon, etc) and different interpretations of what these sources say; moreover; there is no rational way to reconcile these differences. Thus, the existence of an objective morality presupposes the falsehood of the Christian world view assumed by TAG.

One reply to this is that morality is not merely a function of God's will nor is it independent of God, rather it's a consequence of God's essential nature. Just as logic is part of the essential nature of God, so too is goodness. Thus, just as all the energy on earth ultimately derives from the sun and would not exist were it not for the sun's existence, whatever goodness there is in the world derives from God and would not exist were there no God. Goodness, and derivatively, morality, are objectively real but only because they are grounded in the being of God. Without God it's very hard to see how there could be any moral good or bad, right or wrong.

Even if it were true that we can't know what God's will is it doesn't follow that morality is independent of God. We grope, perhaps, to find the good, but if there were no God there'd be no good to find. Nevertheless, as J. Budziszewski argues in his books Written on the Heart and What We Can't Not Know God has impressed upon us the basics of morality much as we have been given a facility for learning language. We may disagree about the details, but everyone knows deep inside that kindness is better than cruelty, and that fairness is better than unfairness. Yet why should we think this if we are just a mass of atoms?

The fact that there are disagreements about what God's will is means nothing. People disagree on how the world came to be. It doesn't follow from that that there is no true explanation for the provenience of the world.

Thus, contrary to Martin's assertion, the existence of an objective morality presupposes the existence of a transcendent ground for moral good and evil. It presupposes a God.

RLC