Low Entropy

Sean Carroll is a physicist at Cal Tech and a proponent of the idea of the multiverse, the notion that reality consists of an infinite number of "universes". He was interviewed recently by the LA Times and the first part of the Q&A provides us with a good explanation of what the multiverse hypothesis is.

The most interesting part of the interview for me, though, was the second part. Carroll is inclined toward belief in a multiverse because, among other things, it provides a possible naturalistic explanation for a very puzzling aspect of our universe. Our universe started out, according to the standard Big Bang model, in a state of exceedingly low entropy. This means that it was very highly ordered. It's like mixing hot and cold water and having all the hot molecules, just through their random motions, all collect on one side of the basin and the cold molecules all collect on the other. It's possible but highly improbable.

Carroll compares it to opening a new pack of cards and finding the cards arranged in sequence by suit. We're not surprised by that when we buy a new deck of cards because we know that the cards were put into order at the factory. Since the universe was highly ordered when it was brand new, which is an extraordinarily improbable state, there must have been some other universe, or factory, from which it came because for it to have started out this way by chance is breathtakingly improbable.

Let's read the interview:

So what's the problem?

If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that's a very difficult fact to explain. . . .

There's no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.

So you think the way the universe began is unnatural?

Low-entropy configurations are rare.

If you take a deck of cards and you open it up, it's true that they're in order. But if you randomly chose a configuration of a deck of cards it would be very, very unlikely that they would be in perfect order.

That's exactly low entropy versus high entropy.

The universe is more than what we see?

The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and it's in perfect order is not because it's just easy and natural to find it in perfect order, it's because the deck of cards is not a closed system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory somewhere that arranged it. So I think there is a previous universe somewhere that made us and we came out.

We're part of a bigger structure.

Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?

Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don't observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.

I'm not saying this is true; I'm saying this is an idea worth thinking about.

Indeed it is, so let's think about it. What Carroll doesn't mention is that the low entropy of the playing cards is due to the fact that there was an intelligently designed system at the factory which was intentionally constructed to place the cards in an orderly sequence. If there was a "factory" which produced a low entropy Big Bang then, following Carroll's deck of cards analogy, the factory should consist of an intentional, intelligent agent.

Carroll is asked by the interviewer about whether God has a role in his physics, and he pretty much answers no, but everything he has said in the interview up to that point leads to the conclusion that whatever produced the universe, it very likely was intelligent.

Carroll thinks that our universe was somehow spawned by another world in the multiverse, but this just sets the problem back a step. It doesn't really explain why or how our universe had such low entropy at it's beginning. It's as if his deck of cards was packed in perfect sequence just by coincidence. He's left clinging to the very unscientific belief that there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of initial conditions and that one of them just has to have had the initial conditions ours did.

The problem is that we know intelligent agents can produce low entropy states, but we don't have any evidence that there are an infinite number of other worlds, or if there are, that there were an infinite number of initial conditions. Each of the infinite worlds could have the exact same initial conditions for all we know. Postulation of the multiverse is an act of metaphysical desperation that enables those who are disinclined to believe in a purposeful creation to avoid having to draw the conclusion that it sure looks like it was intentionally designed.

It's funny that the multiverse hypothesis is an acceptable topic for discussion among scientists and would be a fascinating topic for a high school physics class, even though there's not a shred of empirical evidence for it. Yet our students must at all costs be protected from exposure to the toxic implications of believing that our universe is the only one that exists. They must not, on pain of litigation, have it suggested to them that a low entropy Big Bang entails the possibility of a purposeful origin to the universe.

RLC

The Roots of Civilization

George Will maintains that Western civilization owes its very existence to beer, of all things. Here's part of his interesting column:

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

Back in my college days there were a number of people I knew whose appetite for this beverage seemed extraordinary. Now, thanks to Mr. Will's column, I see that their excesses were in fact a heroic and altruistic attempt to improve the genetic stock of the species, and that they deserve the gratitude of humanity.

HT: Jason

RLC

Merci Beaucoup

Senator Obama believes it's more important for Americans to learn Spanish than to have a law making English the national language:

Powerline believes the Senator is out of touch with the mainstream of American opinion on this matter:

Attending to the news of the day, Scott Rasmussen polled the comparative importance to Americans of immigrants learning English versus Americans learning a foreign language. Rasmussen reports, in English, that Americans reject Obama's call for bilingualism, with 83 percent of respondents placing a higher priority on encouraging immigrants to speak English as their primary language. Just 13 percent took the opposite view saying it is more important for Americans to learn other languages. Rasmussen does not report how many respondents associated the latter view with Obama.

Rasmussen also found that only 26 percent believe that every American should be able to speak at least two languages. Breaking the results down along party lines, Rasmussen found that 79 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats reject the idea that all Americans should know multiple languages. Sixty-eight percent of independent voters rejected the importance of American bilingualism.

The question I have for Senator Obama is, if all the rest of the world can speak our language, why do we need to learn theirs?

Anyway, if Senator Obama wins in November maybe we would all do well to learn Arabic.

RLC

Guillermo Gonzalez Update

Readers with good memories will recall that Guillermo Gonzalez is a distinguished astronomer and author of The Privileged Planet who was denied tenure at Iowa State University ostensibly because he believes that planet earth is uniquely situated to permit the development of life forms (us) capable of doing astronomical research. In other words, it looks to professor Gonzalez as though earth was intentionally placed precisely where it is in the cosmos so that we could learn about the universe. Almost any other location would have stifled man's ability to study the heavens and science probably would never have progressed beyond the most rudimentary stages. It's a fascinating thesis and in his book he makes a powerful case for it, a case for which his materialist colleagues at Iowa state have made him pay dearly.

At any rate, it now turns out that Dr. Gonzalez has obtained a teaching and research position at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania where he will continue his fascinating work.

Photo of solar eclipse taken by Dr. Gonzalez

RLC

<i>Bella</i>

Like many folks, I guess, I rarely see movies until they're out on DVD, and even then it's often a year after their theater release that I finally catch up to them. Such is the case with the film I watched last night, but if you haven't seen it you shouldn't put it off.

The movie is Bella, the inaugural effort of a small indy film company released last fall. In the behind the scenes stuff that's included on the DVD one of the actors notes that this may be the first film made about Mexicans that's not about drugs, murder and foul language. Indeed, Bella is a movie about family, love, redemption and forgiveness. It's a simple but beautiful story of a troubled, lonely young woman, Nina, who finds herself pregnant and who wrestles with whether to have an abortion (it reminds me in this respect of Maria, Full of Grace which, however, was much more violent and dark), and a young man, Jose, whose professional soccer career has been shattered by an accident, and who finds himself befriending Nina and changing both her life and his.

The film struck me as a cinemagraphic version of the parable of the lost sheep in the New Testament with Jose as an obvious but understated Christ-figure.

The acting is excellent, even among the supporting cast, and you grow fond of every character in the film. Parts of the story might be confusing or troubling for younger children, but I enthusiastically recommend Bella for families with older children looking to share an evening together. It'll give you a lot to talk about.

If you do watch it be sure to also watch the extra background material on the DVD.

RLC

Squeezing Us

This is not an endorsement of NozzleRage.com about whom I know nothing except that they've made a video which is a pretty good parable of the consequences of our failure to become energy independent:

HT: PowerLine

RLC

LSEA

John G. West at National Review Online explains why the recently passed Louisiana law protecting teachers who try to promote critical analysis of ideas in their classrooms is a good step for Louisiana and the nation. If you haven't been following this act as it has been buffeted and battered along its way through the state legislature suffice it to say that it has been opposed by the usual enemies of free speech and academic freedom among the Darwinists and other secularists, but in the end only three legislators voted against it.

Here's West's introduction:

To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life.

Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is "anti-science." In reality, the opposition's efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific inquiry. Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren't well explained by existing theories.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the "scientific" view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

You can read the rest of West's article at the above link. To read more about LSEA you can go here.

RLC

Why I Won't Vote for Barack Obama

Voting is a grave responsibility. When one casts one's ballot he votes for the kind of future he wants for his children and grandchildren. John McCain would not ordinarily be my first choice for President, but he is, by my lights, far more qualified for the office than is Barack Obama.

Obama voted "present" almost 130 times in the Illinois state senate, refusing to take positions on tough votes, but he roused himself sufficiently to vote against a bill that would have given protection to babies born alive after a failed abortion procedure. He surrounds himself with shysters, charlatans, and unrepentant terrorists. His early experience as a community organizer was working with the far-left group ACORN which has a reputation for voter fraud and other malfeasances. He often seems to take multiple positions on issues of importance and switches his position when it's politically expedient (a partial list of such changes includes his views on nuclear power, FISA, gun laws, campaign financing, Jerusalem, NAFTA, gay marriage, welfare reform, and Iraq. He even vowed in 2006 that he would not run for president). He sacrificed his pastor and friend to political expediency after telling us that he couldn't do such a thing and was willing to denigrate his own grandmother to advance his political fortunes.

He chooses Clinton administration officials as policy advisors while promising to break with the politics of the past. He opposes increasing our oil supply and any restrictions on partial-birth abortion. He favors open borders, high fuel prices, higher taxes, tax-payer funded abortion, and the redistribution of wealth from producers to non-producers. He also favors increased regulations on business, a universal health care plan that will, many experts claim, diminish the quality of health care in the country, and a toothless foreign policy.

Moreover, he is very likely to appoint judges and justices, like Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, who will use their power to create law rather than to interpret it, and has promised that he will appoint jurists to the Supreme Court who will uphold Roe v. Wade. At least that's where he stands as of today, tomorrow might be different.

Other than his personal charm and likeability he has nothing to commend him. He has no r�sum�. He has never been an executive or administrator. He has served neither in the business world nor the military. His only previous employment was as a "community organizer", whatever that is, and he has served in the U.S. Senate for about 150 days. There is nothing in his background which qualifies him for the post of either Chief Executive or Commander-in-Chief.

Abroad we are faced with an enemy determined to annihilate our way of life, our culture and our children. At home we are oppressed by an enormous regulatory bureaucracy and a culture of litigiousness that oppresses and stifles innovation and public life. Senator Obama is ill-prepared to confront the first - he was, in fact, endorsed by the terror organization Hamas - and is actually favorably disposed toward the second.

In short, based on what we know of him, I fear his election would be a grievous setback for our country and its people.

RLC

The Rock and the Hard Place

There seems to be some reason to think that Democrats may be starting to see the light on offshore oil drilling:

A top U.S. Democratic senator said in a newspaper interview published Wednesday that he would consider supporting opening up new areas for offshore oil and gas drilling.

"I'm open to drilling and responsible production," Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin told The Wall Street Journal, adding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could also support the move.

It's great that the Democrats are beginning to realize that their previous strategy of blocking offshore drilling was growing increasingly untenable with gasoline exceeding $4.00 a gallon at the pump, but I still have a couple of questions for them:

1. If their original opposition had been predicated on a desire to maintain the natural beauty of our coasts I would have thought them mistaken, but I would have empathized with their concern. However, the reason we heard from many Democrats (though I don't know if Durbin and Reid themselves ever specifically said this) was that even if we drilled today it would be years before the oil reached the market and anyway there wouldn't be enough of it to make a significant difference in the price. Now if this was really the basis for their opposition to drilling before why would they now change their view? Have the facts changed or were they being less than sincere before citizen outrage concentrated their minds?

2. Where does this put Barack Obama who opposes drilling and consequently now risks appearing to be out of step on this issue not only with most of America but also with his own party? Can he afford to switch yet another previously held position? Does he remain steadfastly opposed to drilling and suffer the slings and arrows of voter disenchantment? The more Democrats warm to tapping domestic reserves the more unsustainable becomes his opposition to it, and yet he can't change his mind without reinforcing his self-inflicted image as a complete political opportunist. Obama is going to find himself between a very hard rock and a very rocky hard place on this one.

RLC

Waiting for Godot

Listening to media forecasts of impending economic recession is like watching Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. Commentators keep insisting a recession is on its way, but it never seems to arrive. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and so far we have yet to have even one negative quarter, much less two in a row. I know the Dems want to paint this as the worst economy ever but, as is often the case, the facts are just not on their side.

The stock market is down and the economy is not great (1% growth in the last quarter), but it's not in recession. It could be, however, if Democrats have their way and taxes are raised on everything we earn, social security remains unfixed, fuel prices are allowed to continue their rise, and business is taxed and regulated into the economic doldrums. The left's solution to a sluggish economy is to smother it with taxes and regulations that drive investment and jobs overseas, the end result of which is to make the problem worse, rather than better.

Their slogan this election might well be: Bring Back the 70s; Vote for Obama!

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The God of the Philosophers

Philosopher William Craig offers readers of Christianity Today a fine introduction to natural theology, the attempt to demonstrate God's existence apart from special revelation. He points out that natural theology has been enjoying a renaissance among contemporary philosophers since the late sixties and his overview of the classical arguments for God's existence will be very helpful to students interested in Christian apologetics.

Perhaps the most interesting part of his essay, however, is the final section where he asks the question, why, in a postmodern age, should we concern ourselves with arguments? He writes:

However all this may be, some might think that the resurgence of natural theology in our time is merely so much labor lost. For don't we live in a postmodern culture in which appeals to such apologetic arguments are no longer effective? Rational arguments for the truth of theism are no longer supposed to work. Some Christians therefore advise that we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate in it.

This sort of thinking is guilty of a disastrous misdiagnosis of contemporary culture. The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism! That's just old-line verificationism, which held that anything you can't prove with your five senses is a matter of personal taste. We live in a culture that remains deeply modernist.

Otherwise, how do we make sense of the popularity of the New Atheism? Dawkins and his ilk are indelibly modernist and even scientistic in their approach. On the postmodernist reading of contemporary culture, their books should have fallen like water on a stone. Instead, people lap them up eagerly, convinced that religious belief is folly.

Seen in this light, tailoring our gospel to a postmodern culture is self-defeating. By laying aside our best apologetic weapons of logic and evidence, we ensure modernism's triumph over us. If the church adopts this course of action, the consequences in the next generation will be catastrophic. Christianity will be reduced to but another voice in a cacophony of competing voices, each sharing its own narrative and none commending itself as the objective truth about reality. Meanwhile, scientific naturalism will continue to shape our culture's view of how the world really is.

A robust natural theology may well be necessary for the gospel to be effectively heard in Western society today. In general, Western culture is deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment, which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated Western society. While most of the original Enlightenment thinkers were themselves theists, the majority of Western intellectuals today no longer considers theological knowledge to be possible. The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.

Properly understanding our culture is important because the gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the current cultural milieu. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the gospel. But you may as well tell the secularist to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ!

Christians who depreciate natural theology because "no one comes to faith through intellectual arguments" are therefore tragically shortsighted. For the value of natural theology extends far beyond one's immediate evangelistic contacts. It is the broader task of Christian apologetics, including natural theology, to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women. It thereby gives people the intellectual permission to believe when their hearts are moved.

I appreciate Craig's idea of the myth of a post-modern culture. I think he's right that the anti-theists are attacking theism on modernist assumptions and that most people are still influenced to some degree by argument. Even so, I think it's also true that the most powerful appeals are those which are made to one's heart rather than one's head. One does not fall in love as a consequence of a syllogism or rational analysis.

The value of arguments such as Craig outlines in his article is that they help create a cultural milieu in which the idea of God is recognized as intellectually compelling. This is an important precondition because few will be charmed by the claims of the gospel in an environment in which it is presupposed that the traditional idea of a God is intellectually indefensible. Arguments themselves may not often actually result in conversion, but they create an environment in which personal narrative, fiction, music and art can more powerfully exert their tug on the heart and woo people toward a love affair with Christ.

Christian philosophers like Craig have since the late sixties been forcing atheists to play defense, but now a new generation of young intellectuals is needed to rise and fill the shoes of those who are moving on into retirement. It's a noble calling for a young man or woman of keen intellectual gifts, and I urge students who are unsure about the direction they want their life to to take to give it prayerful consideration.

Speaking of students interested in Christian apologetics, this article in the same issue of CT may be of interest to those who fit the description.

RLC

Super Glue

Geoffrey Simmons, author of Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can't Explain, is excerpting his book at Evolution News and Views. His latest excerpt is fascinating quite apart from its implications for the debate about the ability of purposeless processes to bring about any significant evolution:

The adhesive used by barnacles is among the strongest in the world. It is reported that a layer merely 3/10,000 of an inch thick can support a weight of 7000 pounds. This relative of the shrimp and crab glues its head down and keeps its feet up to catch the next meal. Its adhesive sets in water at any temperature and will not dissolve in most acids, bases, and solvents. Fossil records suggest it has been used by barnacles unchanged for 400 million years. Nothing seems to be known about its intermediates before that.

Mussels have a similar glue, which sets underwater and has enormous strength. It takes about five minutes for the mussel to create a "dab" of this glue beneath its foot on a piling or rock. Twenty dabs will do it, and the job can be completed overnight. Imagine the consternation of intermediate species when they secreted what they thought was glue, but kept being washed away by the waves. Or the species that couldn't store their glue and found their bivalves stuck together.

It never fails to astonish me that purposeless forces can produce such prodigies of engineering as a glue as strong as this just by accident, but brilliant chemists have trouble producing an adhesive that can keep the heat-resistant tiles from being shaken off the space shuttle during lift-off.

RLC

The Illusion of Consciousness

Denyse O'Leary takes us back a couple of years to a claim made by Nicholas Humphrey that what we call consciousness is not real, that the phenomena of conscious experience are just an illusion. Here's Humphrey's reasoning:

Our starting assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has to be an illusion. The reason is obvious: If nothing in the physical world can have the features that consciousness seems to have, then consciousness cannot exist as a thing in the physical world. So while we should concede that as conscious subjects we do have a valid experience of there being something in our minds that the rules of the physical universe doesn't apply to, this has to be all it is - the experience of something in our minds."

Since real consciousness would be non-physical, Humphreys concludes, it can't really exist because only physical entities exist. But why not draw the inference that since we have conscious experience, and since conscious experience is non-physical, therefore physical reality is not all there is?

In order to deny the existence of a non-physical level of reality Humphreys has to deny what seems obvious to everyone else, i.e. that we have genuine subjective experiences.

And what's he talking about when he says the denial of the reality of consciousness ought to be the starting assumption of science? Good heavens, how did science manage all these years without making that assumption at all, much less making it its fundamental assumption?

The starting assumption of science is, and should be, that our reason and our senses are generally reliable and that the world can be known through them.

The irony of Humphreys' remark is that it seems he has to make a conscious effort to deny the existence of consciousness. That is, he has an intention, based upon desires, based upon a belief, all of which cause him to will the statement that none of these things really exists except as chemical reactions in the brain. How, though, does a chemical reaction translate into an intention or a belief? What is the precise chemical formula which expresses a desire? Humphreys has no idea, of course. He just knows that there must be one.

RLC

Indecent Exposure

Rick Moran at American Thinker has a piece which illustrates why the liberal media are held in such low esteem by so many in this country:

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an exciting story about how the CIA broke 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaik Mohammed. The hero of the story was a nondescript CIA interrogator who astonished his CIA colleagues by eliciting enormous amounts of valuable information from KSM, all by using psychological ploys and developing a rapport with the terrorist rather than the tactics used by the "knuckledraggers" as the interrogator's colleagues called the CIA paramilitary types, who were using waterboarding and other methods of torture.

In the story, the Times saw fit to give the real name of the interrogator - despite pleas from him and the CIA that doing so would place he and his family in danger.

Moran goes on to give the Times' justification for using the interrogator's name and to explain why that justification holds no water.

The point is the Times didn't have to use the man's name, the public didn't have to know the man's name, and the Times was asked not to use the man's name, but they did anyway. Why? What purpose did it serve? And this from a paper whose editorial writers for the last three decades have made a living urging us to be more "sensitive" to the needs and feelings of others.

We drew some flak at Viewpoint for claiming in a post last month that too many in the mainstream media seem to feel it's their job to destroy lives, but what is this if not an example of exactly that? How much peace of mind will this interrogator have for the rest of his life knowing that every would-be jihadi in the U.S. knows who he is and where he and his family live?

The Times' editors are either incredibly obtuse, indifferent to the anxiety they cause others, or malicious. What other conclusion is left for us?

RLC

Ten Books Before You Die

AOL has a list of Ten Books to Read Before You Die. I don't know how they came up with the list but here it is:

1. Gone With the Wind
   
2. Lord of the Rings (that's actually three books)
   
3. Harry Potter (that's actually seven books)
   
4. The Stand (a 1978 Stephen King novel)
   
5. The DaVinci Code (!?)
   
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
   
7. Angels and Demons (!?)
   
8. Atlas Shrugged
   
9. Catcher in the Rye (Count me as one who never could see what all the swooning was about over this book)
   
10. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    

I never read The Stand nor The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy so I have no comment about them. I mostly enjoyed Dan Brown's two books (#5 and 7), despite having to swallow a character parachuting safely out of a plane with an umbrella or something, but I would hardly say they're books one should read before they die.

I do tell my students from time to time that there are three books they should read before they graduate, however:

1. Les Miserables (unabridged, of course)
   
2. The Brothers Karamazov
   
3. Tale of Two Cities
   

How any of these could be left off the above list is beyond me unless the authors of the list just think they're too hard for the average reader.

RLC

Cosmopolitans and Populists

Byron sends along a link to a talk by Michael Lindsey at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in which he explores contemporary evangelical Christianity and its discontents. It's a fascinating lecture and the response by David Kirkpatrick is equally interesting. There is also a panel of questioners comprised of some jounalistic heavyweights who ask some great questions. If you're interested in the sociology of modern protestant Christianity you'll find this transcript riveting. Here are some highlights from Lindsey's talk:

The difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists is how they respond to secular society. A fundamentalist comes into contact with secular society and his or her natural inclination is to pull back, to withdraw, to maintain the integrity of his or her faith. It's something that's borne out of religious conviction. Evangelicals, on the other hand, encounter secular society and their natural inclination is to engage it because they're wanting to win it over.

[T]he real divide, in my opinion, in evangelicalism is not between the left and the right; it's not between the young and the old. It is between a group that I call the "cosmopolitan" evangelicals and "populist" evangelicals. And these are very, very significant divisions.

You see, populist evangelicals are what we often think [of as] evangelicals. These are the folks who are culture warriors, who say that they want to take back the country for their faith. They see themselves as embattled against secular society. They are very much concerned that they are in a minority position, and they've got to somehow use very strong-arm tactics to win the day.

So populist evangelicalism is alive and strong, especially in the evangelical subculture: the music, the publishing, the entertainment segment of the evangelical subculture. But there is a whole other segment. The people who I interviewed, by and large, fit more this cosmopolitan outlook. They are less interested in taking back the country for their faith. They really are more interested in their faith being seen as authentic, reasonable, and winsome. So they still have an evangelistic impulse, but their whole modus operandi looks quite different. Because of that they have different ultimate goals of what they are actually trying to achieve. They want to have a seat at the table. They want to be seen as legitimate. They are concerned about what The New York Times or TIME magazine thinks about evangelicals because they [the cosmopolitan evangelicals] are concerned about cultural elites. They want legitimacy. Legitimacy is actually more important to them than necessarily taking back the country. And so that cosmopolitan-populist divide I find to be quite significant.

Here's an interesting tidbit: Twenty years ago, the Campus Crusade for Christ chapter at Yale University, one of the leading evangelical campus ministries, was 100 percent white. Today it's 90 percent Asian-American.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, is an outspoken theistic evolutionist. And that's significant because the close identification of evangelicals with either traditional creationism or intelligent design is actually going to be giving way, I think, to a whole new generation of theistic evolutionists.

Note: I think he's mistaken here as well. Theistic evolution is coming to be seen more and more as theologically and philosophically incoherent. The future of this issue, in my opinion, lies with a form of intelligent design known as "front-loading." (See The Design Matrix).

[I]n the United States, cultural capital is revealed by having an omnivorous approach to cultural artifacts. You have to be cultural omnivores. So you not only have to like the opera and the symphony; you also have to like jazz and hip hop. You have to be omnivorous in your cultural tastes. And you think about it; that's exactly the case for political figures. You have to be able to have a very interesting conversation with nuclear physicists at 12 o'clock and at 2 o'clock be bowling with the folks down the street. You have to be able to walk in these two arenas, and [Mike]Huckabee actually can do that. So in the very moment that he's talking about how he believes in creationism about science, he also says, the book I'm reading right now that's very interesting on religion and science is Francis Collins' book, The Language of God.

I think there are some issues that people assume will be huge elements that I think are going to go away: same-sex unions, for example. I think the train has left the station. I don't think evangelicals 20 years from now will be raising concerns about it. I think same-sex unions will be across the country in 20 years. And I don't think evangelicals will raise a very big stink because this is one of the issues where you do see very significant generational divides. Older evangelicals are very opposed to it; younger evangelicals are not. And in this way, it mirrors the rest of the country.

Note: I hope Lindsey's wrong about this. Marriage has for two thousand years been seen as a union of one man and one woman. If we decide that the gender of the individuals entering into marriage no longer matters then there will be no logical impediment to concluding that the number of individuals no longer matters either. Once we've crossed this Rubicon there will be no basis other than the arbitrary preference of judges and legislators for restricting marital rights on any grounds whatsoever. There will be no logical reason for imposing any restrictions on kinship, or even the species, of the participants and marriage and family will have ceased to be a sacred committment and will have collapsed into a farcical carnival.

There are some theologically literate cosmopolitan evangelicals, people who are able to articulate how their faith matters and drives them to particular positions, but the interesting thing about that is that almost all of them come from the Reformed tradition. The rise of Presbyterian theology has been very interesting to observe. Abraham Kuyper has been one of the figures that is oftentimes cited among the people I interviewed. But on the whole, most of the evangelical leaders that I interviewed -- most of the folks who are in powerful positions who are evangelicals, they are like most of their fellow churchgoers. They are like most Americans: they don't know what they believe or why. They cannot articulate basic theological ideas. There have been a number of folks who have written books about how America is becoming a theocracy as evangelicals have come into powerful positions. One of the interesting notes they talk about is how evangelical ideas about the apocalypse or eschatology are driving American foreign policy. You know, that would be interesting, except most of the people I interviewed do not know the difference between premillenialist and postmillenialist theology. They can't articulate that.

There's much more from Lindsey and the other participants at the link. It's interesting stuff.

RLC

The Fat Lady's Singing

Marie Colvin of the Times Online writes that it's all but over for al Qaeda in Iraq:

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda's dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant "last stand" in the northern city of Mosul.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.

Operation Lion's Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans' 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects.

The group has been reduced to hit-and-run attacks, including one that killed two off-duty policemen yesterday, and sporadic bombings aimed at killing large numbers of officials and civilians.

Last Friday I joined the 2nd Iraqi Division as it supported local police in a house-to-house search for one such bomb after intelligence pointed to a large explosion today.

American and Iraqi leaders believe that while it would be premature to write off Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Sunni group has lost control of its last urban base in Mosul and its remnants have been largely driven into the countryside to the south.

Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, who has also led a crackdown on the Shi'ite Mahdi Army in Basra and Baghdad in recent months, claimed yesterday that his government had "defeated" terrorism.

If Iraq is off the table by November what issue will dominate the election? And why haven't we been hearing about this development in Iraq from our own media? Or is that a silly question?

HT: Eric Allie

RLC

<i>The God Delusion</i> Posts

My brother Bill, who handles all the technical duties here at Viewpoint, has collated the series on The God Delusion and put them in the Hall of Fame on the left of this page. That'll make the posts much more accessible for those who might want to refer to them in the future.

RLC

Re-enlisting

Here's a video of our troops, over a thousand of them, massing in one of Saddam's former palaces in Baghdad to re-enlist on the 4th of July:

Contrary to what the media have been telling us, they don't seem to be suffering overmuch from low morale nor do they appear particularly dispirited, but then perhaps the camera is too far removed to tell. Reports from the ceremony tell us that neither Alex nor his mommy made it to the event.

RLC

Jesse Helms

National Review Online has a couple of articles on former Senator Jesse Helms who passed away on Friday at the age of 86. Helms was much maligned by the left (even in death), and much misunderstood by them as well, but he was a powerful voice for freedom in the United States Senate.

This interview from a couple of years ago is helpful in illuminating the man's thought and personality, and John Fund writes a warts-and-all appraisal of Helms at Wall Street Journal.

RLC

Shifting Sand

Political context is important in understanding Senator Obama's position on Iraq. The speech (see video below) in September was delivered when he was in quest of the Democratic nomination for President and vying with Senator Clinton for the anti-war vote by declaring that he would end the war as soon as logistically possible. The impression he gave in this speech was that he would begin as soon as he was in office to bring the troops home. He later gave a deadline of 16 months to have all combat troops out of Iraq. His anti-war supporters clearly thought that Obama would end the war in Iraq regardless of the consequences for the Iraqi people and that's the main reason for his enthusiastic support from the left.

Now he has the nomination and he seems to have abandoned the idea that the troops will come home ASAP. Instead he will refine his position depending upon what the military commanders in Iraq tell him, i.e. if they think the troops should stay there for five more years well, then, they very well might stay there five more years.

Link: sevenload.com

I imagine that the anti-war left is feeling a certain degree of betrayal right now. Perhaps they'll continue to support the Senator because they assume he's just saying what he has to say in order to get elected. In other words, they'll support him if they think he's lying, which presumably they're willing to tolerate as long as he's lying to centrist voters and not to them.

Exit Question: What is the difference between Obama's "refined" position on Iraq and McCain's position? Will anyone in the media ask him?

HT: Hot Air.

RLC

Drill Here, Drill Now

If you think we should be extracting oil from domestic supplies to reduce dependence on foreign oil you might wish to sign a petition to that effect at Newt Gingrich's American Solutions.

Although I strongly favor increasing our domestic production there are some caveats and we need to consider and some concessions from the oil companies we need to demand:

• It will take some time to get the wells and rigs built to access the oil. The benefit from drilling will not necessarily be immediate.
• The amount of oil we can bring to market will still be limited by our refinery capacity.
• Part of the price the oil companies must be expected to pay is that domestic oil be sold on domestic markets. To open up ANWR so that Exxon can sell oil to India makes no sense.
• Domestic oil must be seen as a stopgap, not a long term solution.
• Oil companies should be required to purchase a negotiated number of square miles to our national park or wildlife refuge system for every square mile of public land they use for drilling.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 10

In the concluding chapter of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins ventures an explanation for how religions came to be. The short of it is that he thinks they may be an outgrowth of the childhood trait of having an invisible friend. He has no evidence of this to offer us, of course, so he moves on to other matters on which he can favor us with his silly speculations.

For example he castigates people who believe in eternal life for what he sees as the inconsistency of grieving at the death of a loved one. If religious people really believed in heaven why shouldn't they rejoice at the loved one's good fortune, he asks? Aside from the fact that grief is an emotion we feel because we are suffering a loss, not because our loved one is experiencing gain, Dawkins doesn't seem to realize that he has just spent pages deploring Islamists for acting completely consistently with their belief in eternal life when they sacrifice themselves in their suicide bombings. He is appalled that people believe in an eternal reward and act in accord with that belief and then we turn the page to find him scoffing at people who believe in an eternal reward and act in ways he thinks to be at odds with that belief. Dawkins' greatest consistency in TGD is his inconsistency.

He rules out miracles because they are so highly improbable, and then in the very next paragraph he tells us that evolution, which seems highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time. But if time and the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable why doesn't that work for miracles as well? To apply Dawkinsian reasoning, in all the zillions of universes of the Many Worlds landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the Many worlds Hypotheisis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

He argues that the fact that there is no afterlife should make this life all the more precious, but what it really does is make this life utterly meaningless. Death is the big eraser. It negates everything we've ever done. It renders everything pointless and absurd. Dawkins avers that his life is meaningful because he fills it with a "systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world," but for what end? When he dies whatever knowledge he has acquired will do him no good. He is like a man on his death bed trying to master a new language. It gives him something to do, like working crossword puzzles, but what does it really matter?

The Christian, on the other hand, views death from this side of it as a tragedy, a terrible evil, but from the other side as little more than an unpleasant interruption of one's ongoing life. All that we do in this life matters forever. There's a purpose in learning the language even late in one's life because it'll be something which will be useful and give one pleasure on the other side of death. There's a purpose in scientific study because what we learn here and now will be useful in eternity. But if death is the end then there's no purpose in anything and all that matters now is avoiding pain and experiencing pleasure.

The terrible irony is that Dawkins could be doing the science he loves and to which he is devoted, or something like it, forever. Tragically, though, he chooses to empty his love of real significance by despising the God which is the only ground of the truth and knowledge he longs to attain.

The God Delusion has been acclaimed by atheists around the world, but in fact they should be hoping to see the book pass quickly into oblivion. It will do more to set back their cause among intelligent readers than anything Christians could do. If this is the best that the atheist can muster as an argument against God, the seeker might rightly reason, then perhaps the case against God is not nearly as strong as he had thought. Indeed, TGD is a book which might be read and discussed by every Christian who wrestles with doubt. A thoughtful reading will allay the doubts and persuade the doubter that the case against God is, at bottom, pretty anemic.

RLC

Oops

Clarice Feldman at The American Thinker notes that a blogger has found a serious error in Anthony Kennedy's opinion in (Patrick) Kennedy vs. Louisiana. This was the decision handed down last week that negated a Louisiana law that made raping a child punishable by death. A 5-4 majority ruled that, in Justice Kennedy's words, capital punishment in cases where no one dies violates our society's "evolving standards."

This is factually and demonstrably incorrect, according to Feldman. In 2006 Congress, the voice of the people, voted to make rape of a child committed by military personnel a capital offense. Apparently no one on the Court was aware of this fact, and it completely undermines the rationale for Kennedy's opinion.

Feldman argues that there are now grounds for Louisiana to request that SCOTUS reconsider their decision. They have until July 21st to file for a rehearing.

Justice Kennedy is going to look pretty foolish if the decision is allowed to stand. How can he argue that capital punishment is in conflict with society's "evolving standards" when the body that is constitutionally established to reflect the will of the people declared just two years ago that the death penalty in child rape cases is appropriate?

RLC

Loser Letter #7

Mary Eberstadt's seventh Loser Letter offers some much needed advice to the Brights about how to deal with the issue of abortion, an issue they don't handle well at all.

RLC

Fourth of July Meditation

Today we celebrate our independence as a nation. Two hundred and thirty two years ago enough people in the leadership of the thirteen colonies believed that freedom to control one's own life and destiny was a sufficiently high value that it was worth risking their lives and patrimony to obtain. Not everyone agreed that we needed to be free from English oppression and one of the saddest stories of the American revolution is how it divided communities and turned family members against each other.

Today our freedom is still not secure. As in 1776 the challenge comes from both within our community and without our borders. The external threat, from totalitarian atheism and totalitarian Islamism, is perhaps more evident to some than the internal threat. Nevertheless the internal threat may be the most acute. From within our midst we face the challenge of those who believe that individual freedom is on balance a bad thing because people use freedom in ways that may be harmful to the purposes of the larger society.

The challenge of government has always been to find the proper balance between individual freedom and our wider obligation to our fellow citizens. Indeed it is this quest for balance that has sparked the political conflicts which rage in our daily newspapers and even from time to time on Viewpoint.

Some there are who say that individual freedom must be maximized as long as it harms no one else. These are the Libertarians. Others say that individual freedom must be eliminated in favor of our obligation to improve society. These are the left-wing totalitarian fascists. Most people are somewhere in between, but despite the fact that the majority does not lie at either extreme, there is a very real concern today that those who would hack away at personal liberty are in the ascendant.

There are those, for example, who wish to censor any criticism of any view which they themselves hold. One who is skeptical of global warming, Darwinian materialism, gay marriage, and the good will of resident Muslims may find himself out of work and/or in court not just in Europe or Canada but also in the United States of America. "Bad thought" can itself become criminal which is the basic premise behind "hate crime" legislation.

There are those, primarily on the left, who would take away the freedom to voice whatever opinions one wishes in public, they would take away the freedom to express and practice religious beliefs that have been extant in this country for two hundred years, they would take away the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to run your business the way you wish, to pay employees what you wish, to hire whom you please and fire whom you please and to require your employees to dress in ways you deem appropriate. The left holds that individuals should not be free to create their own business or industry but that these enterprises should be owned, or at least controlled, by the state.

The left believes that law and policy should be made by the courts, not the Congress, because Congress is beholden to the people and the people just don't know what's in their best interest. Thus lawmaking becomes an exercise in futility when the left is in power because a law which the people want but of which the left disapproves will be snuffed out by the courts which are frequently sympathetic to the leftist point of view. Congress in the hands of the left becomes little more than a tool for preventing the wrong people from getting on the bench and for making the lives of executive branch officials of whom they disapprove miserable. For the left the Bill of Rights is not a wonderful guarantor of our freedoms and a bulwark against an oppressive state, rather it's only value is as a tool to be used to undermine the traditions and will of the majority. Otherwise, it's an impediment to creating their vision of an ideal society.

To be sure, the right would curtail certain freedoms as well. In their view, the right of free speech should not give people a right to use obscenity in public and publish pornography. They think the right to do with one's body what one wishes ends where the welfare of others begins. They believe that the right to do in one's home what one pleases doesn't confer a right to let a dog bark all night or to play the stereo at full volume. They believe that a criminal's rights to due process do not outweigh the rights of citizens to be safe on their streets, and they don't believe freedom of religion applies to just anything someone wants to call his religion.

So where is the fulcrum along this spectrum of views? On this day when we celebrate the unique American experiment in liberty we might do well to reflect on what principles help guide us in deciding how we balance liberty and responsibility. Where do we place the pivot between individual freedom and our obligation to society, and why do we put it just there? Do we lean toward freedom or do we lean toward statism?

RLC

Obamisms

Ed Morrissey argues that Obama has abandoned the one position that is responsible for his having attained the Democratic nomination - his promise to pull out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office. Morrissey makes a good, if subtle, case that Obama has executed a deft switcheroo, but his argument isn't likely to resonate with many voters except those who are actually paying attention.

Then comes word via Drudge that Obama has renounced one of the most important precepts in the pro-choice catechism, the right to an abortion on the basis of a risk to the mental health of the mother. No one has hewn to all the pro-choice tenets more reliably than has Senator Obama over the short course of his career, but that was then and this is now:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says "mental distress" should not qualify as a health exception for late term-abortions, a key distinction not embraced by many supporters of abortion rights.

In an interview this week with "Relevant," a Christian magazine, Obama said prohibitions on late-term abortions must contain "a strict, well defined exception for the health of the mother."

Obama then added: "Now, I don't think that 'mental distress' qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term."

Can this man be trusted to stand by any position he took before he was a candidate for the presidency? Can he be counted upon to mean anything he says or are we back to the days of the Clintons after all? Perhaps we were premature to think that Clintonian confabulation and obfuscation were behind us once Hillary was out of the race.

Perhaps others have made the suggestion, but, if not, Viewpoint suggests that henceforth a political flip-flop, prevarication, or taking two mutually exclusive positions at the same time be called after the man who seems to do it all so effortlessly. We shall call it an Obamism.

RLC

What's Clark Doing?

By now everyone has probably heard of Wesley Clark's dismissal of John McCain's war record as a qualification for the presidency. In case you missed it, however, here's what the retired general and military advisor to Barack Obama said on Sunday's Face the Nation:

"[McCain] has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility," Clark said.

When asked by host Bob Schieffer how he came to describe McCain as "untested and untried," Clark said it was "because in the matters of national security policy-making, it's a matter of understanding risk. It's a matter of gauging your opponents and it's a matter of being held accountable. John McCain's never done any of that in his official positions," adding, "He hasn't made the calls."

When Schieffer noted that Obama has not had wartime experiences, Clark said: "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president."

Of course, Clark knows McCain's appeal is not that he was a fighter pilot but that he courageously withstood Vietnamese torture and refused to accept their offer of release unless all the other prisoners had been released as well. Clark knows that Obama has nothing comparable in his biography, so he utters a shameless inanity about how being shot down isn't a qualification for the presidency.

Others have pointed out that even though Obama has called the remarks "inartful" (a term that has found frequent employment of late in his campaign) he doesn't actually repudiate them. It's also been pointed out that people representing any campaign are thoroughly briefed by high-ranking staff before appearing on the Sunday shows so it would be surprising if Clark's remarks came as a surprise to the Obama camp. The campaign at least appears to be trying to discredit McCain on the one point on which he has a huge advantage over Obama, but they can't afford to have Obama do it himself.

All this has been much discussed in the last couple of days, but I think there's something else here that I haven't heard mentioned. Clark knows that his comments make no sense if he's comparing McCain to Obama who has no experience of any kind that qualifies him for the presidency. Even if he's right that being a pilot does not qualify one for the oval office (although he thought John Kerry's service as a swift boat pilot qualified him), this was not really about McCain and Obama. This was about Wesley Clark and his qualifications to be president. Clark was trying, in not so subtle accents, to plant in the minds of the CBS audience that, compared to his own military accomplishments, McCain's are minimal. Clark, I suspect, was trying to shine the spotlight on his own experience as head of NATO which he believes makes him eminently suited to serve, if not as president, then as Obama's running mate.

It was clumsy and distasteful, and it blew up in his face, but that's the only explanation that makes sense to me of what he said on Sunday.

Consider his comments last March when he was still backing Hillary:

"Everybody admires John McCain's service as a fighter pilot, his courage as a prisoner of war. There's no issue there. He's a great man and an honorable man. But having served as a fighter pilot - and I know my experience as a company commander in Vietnam - that doesn't prepare you to be commander in chief in terms of dealing with the national strategic issues that are involved. It may give you a feeling for what the troops are going through in the process, but it doesn't give you the experience first hand of the national strategic issues."

But being a commander in Vietnam and of NATO forces in Europe does, or at least that's the between-the-lines message Clark wants to drive home.

Sadly, the more Clark tries to promote himself the more he makes himself look self-serving and small.

RLC

Taking a Bite Out of Crime

A customer at a Miami area Subway Sandwich Shop shot and killed an armed thug and shot his accomplice in the chest as they tried to push him into a restroom while robbing the store. The wounded thug's grandmother (no mention of any parents) said that the man was wrong to have shot her grandson and that he had no business taking the law into his own hands.

Well, I don't want to be hard on a grandmother, but really. Does she think that the young men (ages 22 and 21) were pushing the customer into a restroom at gunpoint because he looked to them like he needed to relieve himself? Does she think the man should have requested timeout while he called the police?

The fact is that it's tragic that a boy lost his life and that his friend may die also, but if you're going to rob a store at gunpoint you have to be willing to assume a certain amount of risk.

The man's name is John Lovell, he's a 71 year-old retired U.S. Marine, and we need more like him.

RLC

Co-opting the Religious Right

One of the many efforts for which President Bush received a lot of criticism from his opponents was his faith-based initiative which was set up to provide the same funding to religious groups involved in social work as was available to secular organizations. Bush's effort drew a lot of flak from the left and a lot of indifference from the right, including people in the White House, according to several of the Christians who were originally involved in the implementation of the program.

Now Jason sends me an article that is going to place both conservative supporters of federal funding for faith-based organizations and liberal opponents in a quandary. It turns out that Barack Obama wants to expand the program and elevate it to a position of prominence that it never achieved under the current administration:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans that would expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and - in a move sure to cause controversy - support their ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday at Eastside Community Ministry in Zanesville, Ohio. The arm of Central Presbyterian Church operates a food bank, provides clothes, has a youth ministry and provides other services in its impoverished community.

"The challenges we face today, from putting people back to work to improving our schools, from saving our planet to combating HIV/AIDS to ending genocide, are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama was to say, according to a prepared text of his remarks obtained by The Associated Press. "We need all hands on deck."

How sincere an Obama administration, loaded down with lefty secularists, would be in implementing his vision is open to question, but think of all the problems Obama's plan causes for many of his supporters who will be very reluctant to criticize him for it even as they grind their teeth in dismay. Think, too, of how this throws sand in the shorts of Evangelicals who oppose Obama for a host of reasons but who now sounds as much like one of them as they do:

"In time, I came to see faith as being both a personal commitment to Christ and a commitment to my community; that while I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work," Obama says in a speech to be given this week.

As for me, even if this is not just a political ploy to make Obama more attractive to the religious right(and given his penchant for saying whatever his audience wants to hear, who knows?), I'm a little skeptical that he'll be able to bring those Democrats who vigorously opposed Bush's plan on board. I think David Kuo, a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003 and later became a critic of Bush's commitment to the cause, has it right:

"It would be a very, very, very interesting thing," said Kuo, who is not an Obama adviser or supporter but was contacted by the campaign to review the new plan. Kuo called Obama's approach smart, impressive and well thought-out but took a wait-and-see attitude about whether it would deliver.

"When it comes to promises to help the poor, promises are easy," said Kuo, who wrote a 2006 book describing his frustration at what he called Bush's lackluster enthusiasm for the program. "The question is commitment."

How committed will be the Democrats, who tenaciously fought Bush on faith-based funding, to making it succeed under Obama? Even so, it's a brilliant political move for the Senator to endorse such program, and also one that, if he's not just blowing smoke in their faces, Christians should welcome.

RLC

Learning Language

The study of language acquisition, how we learn languages, must be a fascinating pursuit. Among the many questions researchers are probing are questions about bilingual acquisition: How do babies realize they're in a bilingual environment? What clues aid them in discovering this? How is discrimination between languages produced in infants?

If you're interested in this topic you might go to this article at Science Daily where you'll find a number of links to stories that address research in language acquisition and how children in bilingual homes recognize that they're hearing two different languages.

Whatever researchers eventually discover about these questions it's important to remember that it's all a result of random mutations in our DNA that somehow produced this astonishing capability in our brains. Having read my Dawkins I am assured that if I put on a blindfold and randomly struck keys on the keyboard in front of me I could, if I did it long enough, wind up converting these very words you're reading into Longfellow's Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

It's logically possible, no matter how improbable, that a series of accidental gene mutations just by chance produced the ability to learn multiple languages simultaneously. And since it's possible, the Darwinian logic goes, therefore it happened.

Now recite that to yourself as long as it takes to get yourself to believe it.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 9

To fully appreciate the ironies of chapter 9 of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion one has to understand that Dawkins reaches back to 1858 to find a story of how Church authorities in Italy seized an 8 year old child, Edgardo Mortara, from his Jewish parents and raised him as a Roman Catholic. The boy had been baptized by an illiterate house girl when he was gravely ill and for the Italian Inquisition that was good enough to make him a Catholic.

It is a very sad story, but Dawkins concludes, bizarrely, that such tragedies could easily happen in today's religious climate. In a sense he's right but not in the way he intends. If this tragedy could be so easily repeated today why does he have to go back 150 years to find an example of it?

But never mind. He's trying to discredit the Church by showing how it perpetrated terrible injustices on families in the 19th century. He neglects to tell his readers that the state atheisms of the 20th century did far worse and inflicted their horrors on millions of families throughout the world. There have been a myriad of tragic accounts of Communist authorities in the 20th century taking children from "unfit" parents, particularly Christian parents, and raising them in state schools, but Dawkins is blind to the crimes committed in the name of atheism. Or maybe he doesn't think taking children from Christian parents is all that bad an idea.

He calls such abductions as happened to the Jewish boy in 19th century Italy a form of child abuse and deplores it, but then he likens that abduction to teaching children about God and instilling in them the precepts of the parents' Christianity. He says:

I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.

So, teaching children traditional Christian doctrine is a form of child abuse, and what do humane societies do to parents who are abusing their children? They take them from them, of course, just like Edgardo Mortara was taken away from his parents by the Church. In other words, the logic of Dawkins' belief that religious instruction is a form of child abuse puts him squarely in the company of the Italian Inquisition of the 19th century. Oddly, Dawkins fails to see the irony.

I said above that Dawkins was right that children today could easily be taken from their parents, but not by Church authorities. The contemporary fascists who seek to control what children are taught are the Richard Dawkins' of the world. Consider these words of a colleague of Dawkins which he quotes with approval:

Children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Yes, this is a revolting passage, redolent of the totalitarian mindset of the Nazi and Communist fascisms of the 1930s. If you teach your children that Jesus loves them you are just as cruel as if you knocked their teeth out. Both the man who wrote this and Dawkins who quotes it are beyond parody.

Who decides what constitutes "nonsense"? No doubt this will be the task of the secular, liberal Darwinians in the academy. Who better qualified to recognize nonsense than people who write books like The God Delusion and who implicitly endorse inflicting the same cruelties on families for which they had just condemned the Italian Church?

Where does Dawkins' kind of thinking end? If parents are to be prohibited from passing on religious beliefs to their children what about moral beliefs which the cogniscenti deem substandard? What about political beliefs or any metaphysical beliefs such as opposition to Darwinism that offend the refined intellects of the arbiters of truth and reason? Who would enforce these contemptible rules in Dawkins' Brave New World? The God Delusion, amongst its many shortcomings, has this singular virtue: It gives the reader a pellucid glimpse into the workings and aspirations of the liberal mind. Their dream is to have total control over all that people think and do. People like Richard Dawkins are a genuine threat to human freedom. In Jonah Goldberg's felicitous image, they constitute smiley face fascism.

Then there is this bit of silliness:

Our society ... has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them ....Please, please raise your consciousness about this and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening....

Richard needs to stay on his meds when he writes. To call a child a "Christian child" is simply an economical way of saying that the child is born to Christian parents and has been baptized in a Christian church. It doesn't mean that the child has made a conscious decision to be a Christian, but even if it did, so what? Most people reassess their religious beliefs as they mature and decide whether they want to retain them or not. It's hard to understand why Dawkins gets himself in such a swivet over it.

He wants parents to refrain from exerting any religious influence on a child, but I wonder if he was punctilious in not allowing his materialist beliefs to influence his own daughter. I doubt it. I also wonder what he would have done had his daughter one day told him that she wanted to be baptized and that she thought her old man's Darwinism was as daft as his atheism. I wouldn't be surprised if Dawkins "raised the roof" but not for the reason he urges us to do it.

There is one more chapter to The God Delusion. We'll examine it in a day or so. Meanwhile, don't let your children out of your sight around these people.

RLC

The Liberal Mind

San Francisco is a sanctuary city. This means it does not cooperate with federal authorities when processing illegals caught committing crimes. This is especially true with juveniles. So what do they do with the influx of Honduran "juveniles" who are caught selling heroin and cocaine?

Read it sitting down:

Rather than have the drug offenders deported, [juvenile probation officials] have recommended that Juvenile Court judges and commissioners approve city-paid flights home to Honduras for the offenders with the aim of reuniting them with their families.

The practice ... does nothing to prevent offenders from coming back, while federal deportation legally bars them from ever returning. Federal officials say U.S. law prohibits helping an illegal immigrant to cross the border, even if it is to return home.

Those who are arrested routinely say they are minors, but police suspect that many are actually adults, living communally in Oakland and other cities at the behest of drug traffickers who claim to be their relatives.

Nonetheless, city authorities have typically accepted the suspects' stories and handled the cases in Juvenile Court, where proceedings are often shielded from public scrutiny.

"Some of them have been arrested four or five times," Capt. Tim Hettrich, until recently the head of the narcotics unit, said. "That is one of the big problems with being a city of sanctuary."

He scoffed at San Francisco's strategy of returning the offenders to their home country. "They probably get the round trip and the next day, they will be right back here," Hettrich said.

Joseph Russoniello, the U.S. attorney in charge of the San Francisco area, said he was "flabbergasted that the taxpayers' money was being spent for the purpose of ferrying detainees home. You have to have a perfect storm of dumb moves to have it happen."

William Siffermann, chief of San Francisco's Juvenile Probation Department, said .... the city's stance is that it does not have to report illegal immigrant minors to the federal government, even if they are found in Juvenile Court to have committed a crime.

Siffermann stressed that the city ships out juvenile offenders to their home countries only after all other rehabilitative efforts have failed, including probation, foster care and juvenile detention.

The strategy is appropriate, Siffermann said, because deporting young offenders would doom them from ever becoming productive residents of the United States. "It might prevent them from obtaining citizenship," he said, denying them a chance to "take a different course."

A recent count showed 22 of the 125 minors in custody at juvenile hall were immigrants and had no legal guardians in the United States, Siffermann said.

So the people of San Francisco pay for the arrest, processing, detention, probation, and flights back to Honduras for criminals who may not even be juveniles, so that nothing goes on their record that would keep them from someday becoming citizens of the U.S.

Isn't this precisely who we want as citizens of this country, people who came here illegally to sell crack cocaine to destroy the lives of those who use their merchandise?

Here's an idea. Let's deport Sifferman to Honduras.

RLC

Richard Dawkins, Call Your Office

The LA Times has a story about how Christianity in China is growing by leaps and bounds. Here are some excerpts:

Christianity -- repressed, marginalized and, in many cases, illegal in China for more than half a century -- is sweeping the country, swamping churches and posing a sensitive challenge to the officially atheist ruling Communist Party.

By some estimates, Christian churches in China, most of them underground, have roughly 70 million members, about as many as the party itself. A growing number of those Christians are in fact party members.

Christianity is thriving in part because it offers a moral framework to citizens adrift in an age of Wild West capitalism that has not only exacted a heavy toll in corruption and pollution but also harmed the global image of products labeled "Made in China."

Some Chinese Christians say their faith is actually a boon for the party, because it shores up the economic foundation that is central to sustaining communist rule.

For decades, most of China's Christians worshiped in secret churches, known as "house churches," that shunned attention for fear of arrest on charges such as "disturbing public order."

But in a sign of Christianity's growing prominence, in scores of interviews for a joint project of the Tribune and PBS' "Frontline/World," clerical leaders and worshipers from coastal boomtowns to inland villages publicly detailed their religious lives for the first time. They voiced the belief that the time has come to proclaim their place in Chinese society as the world focuses on China and its hosting of the 2008 Olympics in August.

The growing popularity of the religion is being led not by missionaries but by evangelical citizens at home. Where Christianity once was confined largely to poor villages, it's now spreading into urban centers, often with tacit approval from the regime. It reaches into the most influential corners of Chinese life: Intellectuals disillusioned by the 1989 crackdown on dissidents at Tiananmen Square are placing their loyalty in faith, not politics; tycoons fed up with corruption are seeking an ethical code; and party members are daring to argue that their religion does not put them at odds with the government.

This rise, driven by evangelical Protestants, reflects a wider spiritual awakening in China. As communism fades into today's free-market reality, many Chinese describe a "crisis of faith" and seek solace from mystical Taoist sects, Bahai temples and Christian megachurches.

Today, the government counts 21 million Catholics and Protestants -- a 50% increase in less than 10 years -- though the underground population is far larger. The World Christian Database's estimate of 70 million Christians amounts to 5% of the population, second only to Buddhists.

At a time when Christianity in Western Europe is dwindling, China's believers are redrawing the world's religious map with a growing community that already exceeds all the Christians in Italy.

Let's not dwell on the Times' squeamishness about saying exactly what it is the Chinese Christians are placing their trust in (it's not "faith" or "megachurches" - it's Christ). What is happening in China is truly remarkable, and it's not just China. There are reports from all over the world, especially the southern hemisphere, of a resurgent Christianity. People are realizing that the tenets of secular atheism are like dust in the mouth of those who need to slake their spiritual thirst, and they're turning by the millions, apparently, to the one source of water that can wash the dust away. How long will it be before the northern hemisphere takes notice?

RLC

Kafkanada

Imagine that you could be brought to trial by an anonymous accuser who claims he was offended by something you said or wrote. In Canada you can be. If one person complains to the Canadian Human Rights Commission that your speech was offensive you can be tried for "hate crime."

David Warren writes in The Ottawa Citizen about this Kafkaesque system he says has been foisted upon slumbering Canadians by left-wing ideologues. Here's part of his column:

Truth is no defence, the absence of harm is no defence, there are no rules of evidence -- due process is entirely subverted. The inquisitors of these kangaroo courts may ultimately reach any "judgement" they please, after months or years of playing cat-and-mouse with their selected victim.

A Protestant minister in Alberta was, for instance, recently ordered to publicly renounce his Christian beliefs, as well as pay a big lump sum to the anti-Christian activist who had prosecuted him, in a case I mentioned in a previous column, and which I am pleased to see is getting wide publicity in the United States even if not up here. "Re-education" programmes are frequently assigned, for which the victim must also pay.

All of the complainant's expenses are paid by the taxpayer, as well as all of the overheads and expenses of the jet-setting "human rights" bureaucrats, who do all the prosecutorial work, as well as providing both judge and jury. The system is, in principle, indistinguishable from that in place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It was perpetrated by leftwing activists on the Canadian people while they were sleeping. It is a system of the activists, by the activists, and for the activists.

The people are still sleeping, but some "blowback" has finally begun to occur. Given its very eccentric inquisitorial practices, which have been documented and publicized on the Internet, the CHRC is now under an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation, and there is a Parliamentary investigation pending. (As a public relations exercise, the CHRC has also hand-picked its own "independent" investigator to do what we can only assume will be a defensive whitewash, as usual at taxpayer expense.)

Unwanted attention and publicity has been drawn to these Star chambers by the case of Mark Steyn who had been charged with hate speech by a Muslim who didn't like what Steyn wrote in his best-seller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it.

It is against this background the CHRC decided that the better part of valour is discretion, and that it truly did not need to be prosecuting such high-profile targets as the bestselling author, Mark Steyn, and the mainstream newsweekly, Maclean's, at the present time. The CHRC can retrench, and return to its bread-and-butter business of destroying little people who command no publicity -- biding their time until circumstances are propitious to "extend their mandate" again.

Vigilance is the price of liberty, and it is crucially important that we not take the heat off Canada's HRCs when they retreat. Canadians need to know the whole truth about what these vile "human rights" investigators have been doing, and in due course, their past victims should be exonerated.

Given what has already occurred, it is not enough to simply fire the people responsible for specific abuses. The Human Rights Code must be rewritten to eliminate future challenges to free speech and press, and the HRCs themselves taken down. The very notion that "your freedom ends when I begin to feel offended" must be shown for what it is: totalitarian flotsam in the foetid swamp of "politically correct thought."

Steyn's case was dismissed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission perhaps because they didn't want the ridicule they'd be inviting if they pursued it any further, but to give an idea of the sort of people who run this inquisition Warren cites an outrageous statement from its chief commissioner, Barbara Hall, to the effect that Maclean's (The magazine which published excerpt's of Steyn's work) was guilty of publishing "hate," nonetheless. She regretted that her commission had no mandate to try the case, but looked forward to a time when this mandate would be extended.

Free speech is endangered in the United States but it seems an almost totally alien concept in Canada, and indeed in many European countries where liberal fascism has been able to impose its will.

RLC

Biomachines

Pink Floyd accompanies us on a tour of some of the marvels of the molecular machines that purely purposeless forces like blind chance and natural selection have teamed up to, er, engineer. Two of the prominent simulations are the production of messenger RNA from DNA, ATP synthesis, and the construction of a bacterial flagellum:

HT: Guts at Telic Thoughts

RLC

Hell on Earth

Zimbabwe used to be called Rhodesia. When it was Rhodesia it was the object of global outrage because it was a mostly black nation ruled by a minority white regime. The country was prosperous and largely well-governed, but blacks were second class citizens and the global community insisted that white rule was therefore unjust. Rhodesia became an international pariah, civil war broke out, and the government eventually succumbed, amidst the violence of the war, to international pressure and ushered in open elections. That was in 1980.

Since then Robert Mugabe has ruled the country. He has taken farms that whites had owned for generations, killed the whites if they resisted, and gave the land to his cronies thereby despoiling agriculture in this formerly highly productive land. He has driven the country to bankruptcy, inflation is currently around 100,580%, and the people live in fear, oppression, and squalor. The life expectancy for males has dropped from the mid-sixties to 37. For women it's 34. Sixty percent of the nation's wildlife has died off since 2000. White farmers who remain in the country have been told to leave or face jail, or worse. It's perhaps the most hellish place on a continent full of hellish places.

Nicholas Kristoff writes in the New York Times:

When I grew up in the 1970s, a central truth was that Ian Smith [Rhodesia's white president]was evil and Mugabe heroic. So it was jolting on my last visit to Zimbabwe, in 2005, to see how many Zimbabweans looked back on oppressive white rule with nostalgia. They offered a refrain: "Back then, at least parents could feed their children."

Recently, opposition to Mugabe mobilized and sought to unseat him in an election last week which the whole world has judged to be bogus. The opposition candidate dropped out of the race because the violence against him and his supporters made it impossible to continue.

FrontPage Mag has a good summary of conditions in the country, and this news item gives a sense of the day to day horror the people of Zimbabwe are living with under Mugabe and his thugs.

The Smith regime was oppressive and unjust, but justice involves much more than making sure that the tyrant is from the majority race. One hopes that those who campaigned so vigorously for the end of white rule in Rhodesia have learned at least that lesson from the catastrophe they've helped unleash.

RLC

Pounding Mookie's Mahdi Army

You'll remember back a month or so ago the Iraqi army attacked the Mahdi army of Muqtada (Mookie) al Sadr in Basra in southern Iraq. You'll also remember that the attack got off to a slow start prompting media critics of the war to pronounce the IA a bunch of complete incompetents. You might be aware, too, how the fighting spread throughout Iraq, especially to Sadr City, a district of Baghdad.

What you are probably not aware of if you get your news from the MSM is the following:

The Mahdi Army suffered a significant blow during fighting against Iraqi and Coalition forces this year, according to an Iraq intelligence report. The heavy casualties suffered by the Mahdi Army have forced Muqtada al Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist political movement, to change his tactics and disband the Mahdi Army in favor of a small, secretive fighting force.

"More than 2,000 cadres from the Mahdi Army leaders were killed recently," an Iraqi intelligence official told Gulf News. "This led to the almost complete collapse of the army," the official said. An estimated 1,300 Mahdi Army fighters "escaped to safe houses in Iran." Muqtada al Sadr currently resides in Qom, Iran, under the protection of Iran's Qods Force.

The Mahdi Army took heavy casualties while opposing the Iraqi security forces in Basrah and the South and against US and Iraqi forces in Sadr City during operations to secure the areas in March, April, and May. More than 1,000 Mahdi Army fighters were killed in Sadr City alone, according to a Mahdi Army commander in Baghdad. Another 415 were killed in Basrah. More than 400 were killed during fighting in the southern cities of Najaf, Karbala, Hillah, Diwaniyah, Amarah, Samawah, and Nasiriyah in late March and early April, according to numbers compiled by The Long War Journal. Thousands more have been wounded our captured.

The setbacks in Baghdad, Basrah, and the South have forced Sadr to turn the Mahdi Army into "a secret military organization," the Iraqi report stated. "The number of members doesn't exceed 150-200, hugely down from the total estimated number of 50,000 in the past two years."

There's much more bad news for the Mookster in this article, but you'll have to go to the link for it. If you have any anti-Bush friends who are feeling a little glum these days share this post with them. It'll cheer them up.

RLC