For Want of a Birth Certificate...

There's an item that's been simmering on the back-burner of our politics for a while and which every now and then boils up so that the public catches a glimpse. I don't know what to make of it, but I think we'll be hearing more about it as time goes on, and despite the fact that it sounds a bit crack-pottish it could turn out to be very significant.

This is the matter of Barack Obama's birth certificate. There have been a number of attempts to get the President-elect to produce his birth certificate to prove that he was really born in the U.S. as the constitution requires of all serving presidents. The allegation is that Obama was actually born in Kenya and that his claim to have been born in Hawaii is false. His campaign has produced a certificate on the internet they claim to be legitimate, but a number of lawsuits have been initiated claiming that it's not.

The Philadelphia Bulletin notes that problems with this certificate are too many to ignore:

The short list is first that the document is not signed. Secondly, it has no seal. Third, is that the security border doesn't match similar documents from the same time period. Other objections are that the race of Mr. Obama's father is listed as African. In the early '60s the State of Hawaii listed African- Americans as Negroes.

What is missing from the document is the doctor's signature and physical characteristics at birth that every original birth certificate reveals.

Some interested parties have submitted the internet document to the scrutiny of Adobe and graphic experts who all agree the document is highly questionable or a complete fraud. Is it? Who knows at this point? What is far more intriguing is the resistance being thrown at uncovering the true vault document. This is what is spawning suspicion and doubt.

Now one of the lawsuits that has been filed to force him to present a paper copy is going to the Supreme Court on Friday. Despite the fact that this sounds nutty, there are several reasons it's significant.

First, if it turns out that Mr. Obama was not born in the U.S. then he's disqualified from serving as president according to Article 2, section 1 of the constitution. He'll soon (December 15th) be certified as the president-elect by the members of the electoral college, and there's no enforcement mechanism for removing a president who has been duly certified except the impeachment process. Since impeachment certainly won't happen with a Democratic congress the constitutional provision requiring the president to be a natural-born citizen will have been effectively ignored.

This means that in 2012 there would be very little standing in the way of, say, an Arnold Schwarzenegger throwing his hat into the ring. And if the provision against non-native born presidents is to be disregarded why not dispense with the provision that requires a president to be 35 years of age and/or to have been a resident for fourteen years?

Secondly, there are questions whether anything Obama signs as president - legislation, treaties, directives - would have any legitimacy since he, himself, would be serving illegitimately. Everything would be open to challenge, and the courts would be working through the mess for years.

In other words, President-elect Obama's birth certificate could trigger a constitutional crisis of unprecedented proportions. As the Bulletin points out, he could end the controversy today and spare everyone a lot of trouble and expense by simply producing the original or by requesting that Hawaii do so. Why doesn't he?

CORRECTION: This post originally stated incorrectly that the electoral college has already officially elected Barack Obama to be our next president. It has been corrected to show that this will not occur until December 15th.

RLC

Public Education and ID (Pt. IV)

This post will conclude our examination (see previous posts in this series) of philosopher Thomas Nagel's arguement that the objections to ID are religious/theological rather than scientific and that to exclude it from public school classrooms on religious grounds is indefensible. Nagel is an atheist and a Darwinian, as we have previously pointed out, so his paper in Philosophy and Public Affairs is all the more noteworthy. He writes that:

The consequence of all this for public education is that both the inclusion of some mention of ID in a biology class and its exclusion would seem to depend on religious assumptions. Either divine intervention is ruled out in advance or it is not. If it is, ID can be disregarded. If it is not, evidence for ID can be considered. Yet both are clearly assumptions of a religious nature. Public schools in the United States may not teach atheism or deism any more than they may teach Christianity, so how can it be all right to teach scientific theories whose empirical confirmation depends on the assumption of one range of these views while it is impermissible to discuss the implications of alternative views on the same question?

The question is even more difficult for the ID critic if we keep in mind that IDers take no formal position on who the designer is. Nagel assumes it's God, but ID is officially agnostic on the point. For all anyone knows the designer might be the result of a science project conducted by a precocious student inhabiting one of the universes posited by multiverse theorists. The point of ID is not to prove that God exists but to show that this world shows evidence of having been intelligently planned and engineered and any metaphysics or science which rules out intention and purpose as an explanation is inadequate.

Nagel goes on to ask:

What would a biology course teach if it wanted to remain neutral on the question whether divine intervention in the process of life's development was a possibility, while acknowledging that people disagree about whether it should be regarded as a possibility at all, or what probability should be assigned to it, and that there is at present no way to settle that disagreement scientifically? So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct...

This is precisely how all controversial issues would be addressed in a healthy educational system, but the Darwinians are repelled by Nagel's sensible suggestion. They act as if they're terrified by the prospect that students exposed to the possibility that the biosphere reveals intention would quickly believe it and then a century of indoctrination in materialism would be undone.

Nagel again:

Judge Jones (in the Dover ID trial) cited as a decisive reason for denying ID the status of science that Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for the defense, acknowledged that the theory would be more plausible to someone who believed in God than to someone who did not. This is just common sense, however, and the opposite is just as true: evolutionary theory as a complete explanation of the development of life is more plausible to someone who does not believe in God than to someone who does.

Many who followed the Dover trial were mystified by the fact that the plaintiffs and Judge Jones made such a big deal about Behe's statement because, as Nagel points out, it's simply common sense. Theists are going to be less resistant to the notion that the world was intentionally designed than would non-theists. This is hardly the gaffe it was portrayed as, but Judge Jones was so shocked by Behe's remark that he thought it all the proof he needed to rule that ID didn't qualify as science.

Either both of them are science or neither of them is. If both of them are scientific hypotheses, the ground for exclusion must be that ID is hopelessly bad science, or dead science, in Kitcher's phrase. That would be true if ID, like young earth creationism, can be refuted by the empirical evidence even if one starts by assuming that the possibility of a god who could intervene cannot be ruled out in advance.

So far as I can tell, however, no such refutation has even been offered, let alone established. What have been offered instead are necessarily speculative proposals about how the problems posed by Behe might be handled by evolutionary theory, declarations that no hypothesis involving divine intervention counts as science, and assurances that evolutionary theory is not inconsistent with the existence of God. It is also emphasized that even if evolutionary theory were false, that would not mean that ID was true. That is so, but it is still not a sufficient reason to exclude it from discussion.

If reasons to doubt the adequacy of evolutionary theory can be legitimately admitted to the curriculum, it is hard to see why they cannot legitimately be described as reasons in support of design, for those who believe in God, and reasons to believe that some as yet undiscovered, purely naturalistic theory must account for the evidence, for those who do not. That, after all, is the real epistemological situation.

Nagel's paper is altogether reasonable and fair-minded, which probably insures that it will receive little attention from those in whose hands these virtues rest awkwardly.

RLC

Why They're Not Competitive

Ramirez tells an important truth in this cartoon, but it might be more accurate if he had hooked two more trailers onto the first. One of them should be labelled government regulations and the other labelled executive mismanagement.

RLC

The Bush Legacy (Pt. II)

Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times has written an excellent overview of the ideological legacy of the Bush presidency. We began a consideration of it in a previous post by looking at his fiscal and economic record, and we'll conclude today with a summary of where his social (domestic) and foreign policy place him on the ideological spectrum.

From a conservative point of view President Bush's domestic record has been mixed. His Supreme Court appointments (Roberts and Alito) were excellent - save the stumble with the abortive Harriet Miers nomination - but his refusal to do anything much about our porous borders and his willingness to grant amnesty to 20 million illegal aliens put him once again outside the conservative mainstream. So, taken as a whole, his record on the economy, spending, reducing the size of government, illegal immigration, etc. is one that liberals should laud him for but in which conservatives find little to like. Indeed, Kuhner believes Mr. Bush has almost single-handedly driven a stake through the heart of the conservative movement that had been ascendent since 1980:

Mr. Bush's enduring political legacy is the death of the conservative movement. He was not a small-government individualist in the mold of Ronald Reagan. In fact, he was the very embodiment of the "Third Way" fusing cultural conservatism and social liberalism that was espoused but never really implemented by the likes of former President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair: an activist big government combined with a defense of traditional values.

It is on foreign policy, however, that George Bush has secured the gratitude of those on the right and, indeed, should have won the gratitude of the entire nation. Conservatives generally (but not universally) supported the war in Afghanistan and, because, like everyone else in the world, they feared Saddam Hussein's WMD program and despised Saddam's tyranny, they supported the invasion of Iraq. There was disagreement among conservatives on this war, but I think it fair to say that most of them saw both Afghanistan and Iraq, unlike Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as theaters of national interest. But the real source of conservative support for Bush throughout his tenure was his prosecution of the overall war on terrorism. It was because he had such a clear-eyed vision of the threat Islamism poses, coupled with the lack of a credible liberal alternative policy, that led conservatives to ignore Bush's other shortcomings, particularly his inability or unwillingness to rally the country to his side. Once more to Kuhner's essay:

Conservatives did not mount a frontal assault on the Bush administration for one simple reason: the war on terror. Most on the right supported Mr. Bush's foreign policy - and, therefore, they overlooked many of his flaws. Mostly, he was an ineffective communicator. It is not just that he mangled words, displayed a poor vocabulary, and uttered silly phrases such as "strategery" or "misunderestimated." He presided over the most rhetorically inept administration in recent memory - a public diplomacy failure that enabled his opponents to misrepresent his national security strategy and fill the vacuum with lies and half-truths, especially about the Iraq war. It eventually cost Mr. Bush his popular standing at home and abroad, thereby reducing his presidency to rubble.

Mr. Bush, however, was farsighted in foreign policy. He toppled two dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq, liberating more than 50 million Muslims from totalitarian regimes. His actions broke the back of al Qaeda, disrupted countless terrorist cells, and exposed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's corruption of the United Nations through the massive Oil-for-Food scandal.

There's an irony here. There was a time when it was liberals who championed the oppressed and tyrannized of the world. There was a time when liberals could say, as John Kennedy did in his much-quoted inaugural address, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Nowadays when a president takes those words seriously liberals execrate him. I suspect that no one was more surprised than George Bush when, after liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from horrific oppression, the left in this country gave him nothing more than the back of their hand.

But there's more for which the President deserves credit:

Also, his administration dismantled A.Q. Khan's international black market nuclear network. It convinced Libya to abandon its weapons of mass destruction program. It managed to contain rogue states, such as Syria, North Korea and Iran. It forged a path toward an independent Palestine - providing it embraces democracy and renounces terror. Most importantly, it achieved its primary goal: preventing another attack on American soil. Mr. Bush kept the American people safe. And he did this in the face of ferocious Democratic opposition and a hostile mainstream media.

Mr. Bush's central insight is that the key to defeating Islamic fascism is to bring democracy to the Middle East. Arab autocracies have fostered the conditions for a culture of jihadism to take root. Political and economic reform will drain the swamps of Islamist terror at its source. This is why the Iraq war is pivotal to winning the larger war on terrorism: A stable, democratic Iraq will serve as a strategic linchpin for transforming the wider region. The Bush Doctrine is similar to President Harry Truman's containment policy in one crucial respect: Mr. Bush has laid down the foundations for eventual victory - but only if his initiatives are sustained.

Just like Truman, Mr. Bush is a reviled leader. In fact, Truman's popular approval ratings were even lower when he left office than Mr. Bush's. Both men oversaw protracted, unpopular wars (Truman in Korea; Mr. Bush in Iraq). Both men ushered in transformative foreign policies opposed by media elites. Both men alienated key aspects of their base (Truman with economic liberals and Southern Democrats; Mr. Bush with fiscal conservatives and border security Republicans). And both men saw their respective political parties decline under withering partisan attacks (Truman from McCarthyism; Mr. Bush from the netroots, loony left).

Yet Truman is now viewed as a courageous, successful president. His staunch opposition to Soviet communism was vindicated. Mr. Bush's principled stand against Islamofascism will be vindicated as well.

So, what will Mr. Bush's legacy be? Two years ago I thought he had a chance to be one of the great presidents of the last 100 years, but I'm no longer so sure. I think that in too many ways he has acted unwisely and has not even attempted to explain his policies to the people, assuming, apparently, that we would all just understand why he was doing what he was doing with immigration, the surge in Iraq, the bailout and the budgetary deficits. Nevertheless, on perhaps the most important issue of our time, the threat of global terror, he has, despite vicious opposition from his political opponents, acted wisely and heroically. It will be for his farsighted determination to prevail in the most critical conflict of our time - despite ferocious opposition from the media and the Democrats - that he will be most remembered.

RLC

Contemporary Hero

Once upon a time one could find on almost every street corner someone proclaiming the words attributed to Voltaire that he might "hate what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it". It sounded good and won the admiration of all who heard the speaker's vow to defend with his life the right of others to say even those things he despised. But then came Islamic fascism and the very real possibility that one might actually be required to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend free speech and suddenly the street corners were empty and silent. To paraphrase Machiavelli, when times are peaceful there are plenty of people who can be found to swear their undying loyalty to the First Amendment, but when the savages are howling at the gates free speech will find but few defenders. And so it has been since 9/11.

One such heroic defender of the right to speak the truth, however, is a man by the name of Geert Wilders. Wilders was a member of the Dutch Parliament who has put his life and career on the line to warn of the threat to the Netherlands posed by the growing Islamic population in his country. The Wall Street Journal has recently run an excellent warts-and-all column about Wilders that everyone should take the time to read.

Here's an excerpt that gives a sense of Wilders' blunt outspokenness that certainly won't endear him to the multicultural PC crowd:

As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

Wilders acknowledges that "the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people." But he says "it really doesn't matter that much, because if you don't define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change -- all the freedoms we have will change."

The article mentions the short film Wilders produced last spring titled Fitna. If you missed it when it came out last April you can view it here.

Despite his frank, and doubtlessly accurate, assessment of the problem created by the massive influx of Arab Muslims into Europe, Wilder's solution is troubling. He says that the problem is the Koran and that "You have to give up this stupid, fascist book" -- the Quran. This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book."

As the writer of the WSJ column notes:

Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.

Quite so if Wilders is actually saying that Muslims should be legally required to renounce their scriptures, but perhaps he is merely saying that they need to be challenged and urged to reconsider their interpretations of the Koran and indeed the validity of its claim to divine authority. If so, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with engaging Muslims theologically and exposing them to the problematic nature of those beliefs which ill-suit them for life in a pluralistic, civilized world. Such engagement should occur, though, in the arena of ideas, not in legislatures. If Europeans were to compel Muslims by legislative fiat to renounce the Koran then Christians would have very little ground to stand upon should some future tyrant demand they give up their Bibles.

Even so, Mr Wilders is a modern hero who is placing his life at risk to save European culture and the principles of freedom. Read the whole article.

RLC

Public Education and ID (Pt. III)

Thomas Nagel's paper in Philosophy and Public Policy makes the case that Intelligent Design has the same philosophical or theoretical status as the Darwinian view it challenges. Nagel's argument is all the more provocative given that he is himself an atheist and a Darwinian. We've looked at the first part of his paper in earlier posts and consider more of it here. Nagel asserts that the critic of ID often bases his opposition on philosophical, rather than scientific, grounds. He writes that:

Those who would not take any amount of evidence against evolutionary theory as evidence for ID ... seem to be assuming that ID is not a possibility. What is the status of that assumption? Is it scientifically grounded? It may not be a matter of faith or ecclesiastical authority, but it does seem to be a basic, ungrounded assumption about how the world works, essentially a kind of naturalism.

In other words, the rejection of ID is grounded not on scientific reasons, but on reasons which are best described as theological. Either there is no God, the critic maintains, in which case ID is impossible, or, if there is, we can be assured that He doesn't work the way the IDers think He does. Nagel explains:

The denier that ID is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.

I think there are only two possible justifications for this asymmetry. Either there is strong scientific evidence against the existence of God; or there is a scientific default presumption that the prior probability of a designer is low, and the only possible basis for assigning it a higher probability - high enough to make it eligible as an explanation of what is empirically observed-is faith, revelation, or ecclesiastical authority. Is either of those things true, however?

The claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend, almost as much as the claim that it is not science, on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. That is not a scientific belief but a belief about a religious question: it amounts to the assumption that either there is no god, or if there is, he certainly does not intervene in the natural order to guide the world in certain directions.

This is a point similar to that made by Cornelius Hunter in Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. The irony is that Darwinians base their argument on particular theological suppositions about God whereas IDers maintain theological neutrality and say nothing about God. Yet the Darwinians wrap themselves in the mantle of science while calling the IDers religious zealots. Pretty amusing.

More on Nagel's paper anon.

RLC

Fish in a Barrel

News reports tell us that officials in our major cities are looking at how they would respond to a Mumbai-style terror attack. One hopes they realize that whatever measures they take to prevent such an attack their measures may fail, and they need to ask themselves, what then? One lesson to take from Mumbai is this: The carnage was high because the victims were completely defenseless. Had at least some of the guests in those hotels had access to firearms the casualty toll may have been limited to dozens instead of hundreds.

An unarmed population is a gift-wrapped present to terrorists. An armed citizenry, licensed and trained, presents a much more difficult challenge for those bent on mass murder. If terrorist planners knew that they would be likely to encounter armed resistance in Mumbai they may have considered the chance of success too low to be worth the effort. As it was they knew that, once they attacked the police station, killing civilians would be like shooting fish in a barrel. And it was.

Here's video of the capture of the one terrorist who was taken alive. Good thing they don't have an ACLU in India. Some of these guys would be in a spot of trouble. Also watch the Sky News segment on the "Snapper who captured the carnage on film". As you watch imagine that someone in those crowds of victims had been in a position to return fire:

One wonders how many of these horrors it will take before "moderate" Muslims, if such there be, become so embarrassed at what's being done in the name of their religion that they start screaming from the top of their lungs for their co-religionists to stop besmirching Islam. It's hard to imagine that these terrorists can undergo months or years of training without other Muslims catching wind of what's going on. Their silence makes them complicit even more than those German citizens who stood silent during the holocaust were complicit. The average German citizen had no recourse to authorities who would stop the genocide. There was nothing the citizens could do to stop the killing. That's not the case with Muslims who overhear talk in the mosques of preparations for a terrorist attack by people they know.

RLC

The Loss of Transcendence

Perhaps there's a tragic symbolism in Friday's trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee by a mob of Christmas shoppers. The mob broke down the doors, knocking the employee to the ground where he was kicked and stomped by the crowd as they rushed headlong into the store to lay their hands on some trinket.

When the holiday becomes a celebration of consumption, an orgy of spending, rather than the birth of the Son of God people no longer think much about good will and all that pious nonsense. All they want is the latest technological googaw to put a little significance in their otherwise empty lives, and heaven help whoever gets in their way.

Paramedics try to save the life of the Wal-Mart employee who was trampeled by shoppers last Friday.

The votaries of secularism have largely succeeded in draining the public observance of Christmas of any real meaning. They've emptied it of transcendence, mystery, and awe and every reason it once gave us to feel warmth and love toward our fellow human beings. They've left us instead with a day the meaning of which is to join the desperate throng stampeding like cattle to grab the latest gadget. The malls, our post-Christian cathedrals, do their part by supplanting the timeless, sublime beauty of Silent Night with tawdry assaults on the spirit of Christmas like Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer - a tragically apposite piece of inane seasonal flotsam.

We've been told for so long that, just as there's nothing transcendent about Christmas, there's nothing transcendent about us. We have no soul. There's no imago Dei. We're just naked apes, the accidental product of chance, chemistry and physics, so no one should be shocked when we act like the herds of dumb brutes that our intelligentsia insists we are.

Once upon a time the symbol of Christmas was a child, our Redeemer, lying peacefully in a manger, shrouded in peace, wonder and gentleness. After last Friday the symbol may well be a frenzied mass of mindless people crushing a man to death in their meaningless lust for material junk.

RLC

The Bush Legacy (Pt. I)

There are three spheres of life and politics in which the differences between conservatives and liberals are often expressed. These are social and domestic matters, fiscal management, and foreign policy. Socially, conservatives generally support traditional values, especially as they relate to the cluster of issues concerning family and sexual behavior, and they also favor localized control and decision making with regard to schools, etc. They tend to feel strongly, moreover, that judges should rule according to the original intent of the constitution and should leave law-making to legislators.

Fiscally, conservatives endorse low taxes, balanced budgets, low debt loads, and free markets.

On matters of foreign policy, conservatives are loath to embark on overseas adventures unless our national interest is clearly at stake, but once we are committed to an endeavor beyond our shores conservatives believe we should do all we can to prevail. They believe that a strong national defense is the best deterrent to war and that no negotiation with foreign powers will ever bring a resolution to disputes unless there lies behind those talks the credible threat of decisive force.

Liberalism pretty much holds the opposite views. Liberals tend to be progressive with respect to social issues. They're not reluctant to supplant traditional values with innovation, nor do they feel constrained by the original intent of the framers of the constitution, preferring to view that document as a "living guide" which must be interpreted in light of current social and philosophical fashion.

Fiscally liberals are fond of the idea of omni-competent government as the solution to all our most pressing national problems and they accordingly favor high tax rates, high spending, and centralized control of education and the marketplace.

In the arena of foreign policy liberals are, as a rule, much more inclined than conservatives to plunge us into conflict abroad. The progressive Woodrow Wilson took us to war in 1917, and, even without Pearl Harbor, FDR probably would have gotten us into war with Germany a quarter century later. The wars in Korea and Vietnam were both initiated by liberal Democratic presidents (Truman and JFK/LBJ) and it was another liberal president (Clinton) who got us involved in the Bosnian conflict.

So given this overview of the distinctions between the two ideological camps how might we evaluate the legacy of George W. Bush now that his presidency is coming to a close?

Observers of Mr. Bush's presidency are pretty much in agreement that he was neither a conservative nor a liberal, and Jeffrey Kuhner at the Washington Times gives us an excellent explanation why this is so. Kuhner writes:

For the past eight years, liberal conventional wisdom has held that Mr. Bush is a rigid right-winger, a Christian cowboy obsessed with an anti-government ideology and imposing an American world empire. Mr. Bush, however, is not a conservative imperialist; rather, he is a big-government nationalist, who has presided over the greatest expansion of the state since the Great Society.

Conservatives made a mistake in believing Mr. Bush was one of their own. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he erected a domestic bureaucratic monstrosity, the Homeland Security Department. He implemented the Medicare prescription drug plan - a massive, new entitlement program. He pushed for the No Child Left Behind Act, carving out an unprecedented role for the federal government in education. He refused to take on the big spending, corrupt, pork-laden ways of the congressional Republicans. Under Mr. Bush's watch, domestic spending exploded. Budget deficits have soared. The GOP is no longer the party of fiscal restraint and competence. The result: The party has become relegated to political minority status.

So, if we add to Kuhner's litany the huge financial bailouts being undertaken by the Bush administration it seems pretty clear that President Bush is clearly as fiscally liberal as any president we've ever had, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's only his tax cuts that offer conservatives any solace in the realm of domestic economic policy.

We'll consider the rest of Mr. Bush's legacy tomorrow.

RLC

The Materialist Superstition

Michael Egnor discusses six aspects of our mental experience that make a dualist explanation of that experience more plausible than a materialist explanation. The six he describes are: Intentionality, Qualia, Persistence of Self-Identity, Restricted Access, Incorrigibility, and Free Will.

Egnor gives a good summary of each of these and concludes that materialism, the view that the material brain is the sole locus and cause of our mental life, can't explain any of them. It's worth the read especially for philosophy students. For example, here's what he says about free will:

If the mind is entirely caused by matter, it is difficult to understand how free will can exist. Matter is governed by fixed laws, and if our thoughts are entirely the product of brain chemistry, then our thoughts are determined by brain chemistry. But chemistry doesn't have "truth" or "falsehood," or any other values for that matter. It just is. Enzymatic catalysis isn't true or false, it just is. In fact, the view that "materialism is true" is meaningless...if materialism is true. If materialism is true, then the thought "materialism is true" is just a chemical reaction, neither true nor false. While there are some philosophers who assert that free will can exist in a deterministic materialistic world (they're called "compatibilists"), and some have argued that quantum indeterminacy may leave room for free will, the most parsimonious explanation for free will is that there is an immaterial component of the mind that is undetermined by matter.

Egnor is correct, of course. If a belief, say, is just a particular chemical reaction that occurs in my brain what sense does it make to talk of beliefs being true? Chemical reactions aren't the sorts of things that are true or false. Furthermore, how do mere chemical reactions produce something like an understanding or a doubt? To say that matter is the ultimate source of all our mental experience really does seem to fly in the face of our deepest intuitions about that experience.

Check out what Egnor says about the other five elements of our mental lives for which materialism seems ill-equipped to offer a plausible explanation.

RLC

More Bus Ads

You may have seen the story last week about the ads placed on buses in Washington D.C. by the American Humanist Association asking, "Why believe in a god?" and then urging us to "Just be good for goodness' sake." The ads will run through December. Last month the British Humanist Association ran a similar campaign on London buses with the message: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The ads cost the AHA $40,000 so one might wonder why they'd spend so much money to try to convince people that God is not necessary. Spokesman for the Association Fred Edwords explains, sort of:

"We are trying to reach our audience, and sometimes in order to reach an audience, everybody has to hear you. Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of nontheists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion."

Anyone who thinks Christmas and Thanksgiving in the U.S. have anything to do with religion hasn't been in either a public school or a shopping mall lately, but, be that as it may, Edwords claims that the purpose of the ads isn't to argue that God doesn't exist or change minds about a deity, although "we are trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people's minds."

Well, they've been successful, at least with me. They've planted one question in my mind, which is: What on earth does it mean to be good for goodness' sake?

The article notes that Humanism offers itself as "a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism, affirms our responsibility to lead ethical lives of value to self and humanity."

Well. Where does this responsibility come from? In what sense am I responsible to humanity? What is the nature of this responsibility if I am not morally accountable to anyone but myself for my actions? If I choose to shirk this responsibility in what sense am I doing something morally wrong? I wonder if the people who designed the Humanist ad would be so good as to design more such ads with answers to those questions.

Unfortunately, I don't think answers will be forthcoming. The bus ad is simply making one of those vapid statements like "We are the world" or "Have you hugged a green plant today?" It sounds clever and meaningful until you think about it, which, contrary to what the Humanists say about their ad, you're not really supposed to do.

The article closes by observing that there was no debate at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority over whether to accept the ad. Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said the agency accepts any ads that aren't obscene or pornographic. Too bad they don't expand the criteria to include "vacuous".

RLC

Two Questions about Mumbai

Bill Roggio reports that captured terrorists in Mumbai have admitted to having connections to Pakistan. This raises two troubling questions: First, if these connections are confirmed will we see a deterioration in the uneasy peace between India and Pakistan? There are indications that some in the Indian military have been eager to go to war with their nuclear neighbor for some time, but have been restrained by the Bush administration. Now that the administration is a lame duck will the Indian hawks prevail?

Second, how did the Indians manage to get the terrorists to talk so quickly? Whatever methods they used I hope they share them with the American intelligence services so that the CIA knuckle-draggers who resort to brutish interrogation techniques will learn that compassionate persuasion works just as well, if not better. One lesson to take from the Indian methods, which were doubtless gentle and sensitive to the terrorists' needs and comfort, is that places like Guantanamo Bay where prisoners are manacled and sometimes even looked at funny are barbaric anachronisms in a civilized society.

RLC

Post on <i>Most</i>

The story has it that a railway traversed a drawbridge and that commuter trains regularly crossed the span. One day the drawbridge operator brought his young son with him to work. A train was approaching and the bridge needed to be lowered to allow the train to cross. Tragically, the man realized as the bridge was lowering that his son was caught in the mechanism of the bridge. If he stopped the descent of the bridge to rescue his son the train would derail and tumble into the waterway below killing dozens of passengers. If he allowed the bridge to lower so that the train could pass safely his son would be crushed by the weight of the bridge.

I mentioned this story in class during a discussion of ethics and one of my students told me that it had recently been made into a short film, so I ordered it and watched it the other night. It's only thirty three minutes long, but it's a beautiful parable of heart-wrenching sacrifice, love, and redemption. The film is titled Most (Czech for "Bridge"), and the trailer can be viewed here.

Given the theme it might have been more appropriate to mention this film closer to Easter because the parable is really all about Good Friday, but it might be viewed with profit over the Christmas holidays as well. I couldn't find it on Netflix so those who would like to watch it might have to purchase it ($10) at the website.

RLC

Public Education and ID (Pt. II)

Atheistic philosopher Thomas Nagle has written a paper for the journal Philosophy and Public Policy in which he argues that the case for the exclusion of Intelligent Design from science curricula doesn't withstand scrutiny. We examined the first part of his essay last Monday. We'll continue our look at this noteworthy paper today.

Nagle writes that, contrary to what some critics have argued, we don't have to know how something was accomplished in order to recognize that it is purposefully designed. What the designer was thinking when it engineered a particular biological structure is not subject to scientific investigation, but the question whether the structure was purposefully designed is:

[T]he purposes and intentions of God, if there is a god, and the nature of his will, are not possible subjects of a scientific theory or scientific explanation. But that does not imply that there cannot be scientific evidence for or against the intervention of such a non-law-governed cause in the natural order. The fact that there could be no scientific theory of the internal operation of the divine mind is consistent with its being in large part a scientific question whether divine intervention provides a more likely explanation of the empirical data than an explanation in terms of physical law alone. To ask whether there are limits to what can credibly be explained by a given type of scientific theory, or any theory relying only on universal physical laws, is itself a scientific question.

This claim entails that questions like, "If God designed life why didn't he do it differently or better?" are irrelevant to the question of whether the claim that life is intelligently designed is scientific.

In other words, how and why the designer did what it did are different kinds of questions than whether some biological structure is, in fact, intentionally designed. The former are metaphysical matters whereas the latter is a scientific query and we need not be able to answer the former before we can scientifically investigate the latter.

Nagle observes that critics of ID assume that science cannot provide evidence for the existence of the designer (Which Nagle assumes to be God) and that therefore talk of designers is unscientific. He states flatly, however, that there's no reason to accept this assumption:

I suspect that the assumption that science can never provide evidence for the occurrence of something that cannot be scientifically explained is the principal reason for the belief that ID cannot be science; but so far as I can see, that assumption is without merit.

Indeed, many of the claims ID makes are certainly scientific claims. For instance, Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box and Edge of Evolution) offers empirical arguments in Edge that random mutation is not sufficient by itself to explain the enormous diversity of living things. Nagle observes:

This seems on the face of it to be a scientific claim, about what the evidence suggests, and one that is not self-evidently absurd. I cannot evaluate it; I merely want to stress its importance for the current debate. Skepticism about the standard evolutionary model is not limited to defenders of ID. The skeptics may be right or they may be wrong. But even if one merely regards the randomness of the sources of variation as an open question, it seems to call for the consideration of alternatives.

There is in the evolutionary community a great deal of dissent from the standard Darwinian model, but none of that dissent causes much of a stir because most of it does not get to the heart of the Darwinians' deepest commitments. The fundamental objection to ID, the implication that arouses such passionate protest, is not scientific, it's metaphysical. ID poses no greater challenge to the science that undergirds evolutionary theory than do its materialist competitors. The unique challenge of ID, the reason it provokes so much opposition, is that it calls into question the metaphysical materialism and naturalism that many opponents of ID embrace.

This bears emphasizing. ID is not scorned because it's not science. There's not much argument about the scientific facts of the matter. Both sides employ the same data, but they draw from it widely disparate metaphysical conclusions. The rejection of ID is primarily philosophical, one might even say religious. Opponents' arguments against the concept of intentional, purposeful design in the world distill to a desire that our children be taught only the belief that matter is the ultimate reality and that everything in the universe derives from, and is contingent upon, material substance. ID, on the other hand, promotes the possibility that the ultimate reality upon which all else is dependent is mind, and this many critics find philosophically and theologically intolerable.

Almost all other remonstrances against ID are either decoy and diversion or they are secondary theological objections. The value of Nagle's paper is that it helps us to see that more clearly. We'll continue with our reading of it in later posts.

RLC

Thanksgiving Proclamation

In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation, a practice that presidents have repeated every year since then. Lincoln's wasn't the first such statement - Washington, John Adams, and Madison had all done likewise - but it was the first in the current unbroken string of such proclamations from our nation's leaders. Here's what Lincoln wrote:

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore if, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October A.D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

I wonder how many people objected back then to Lincoln's overt references to God as the source of the blessings he enumerated.

Have a Wonderful Thanksgiving.

Dick and Bill Cleary

The War Against Civilization

With today's horrific attack in Mumbai, India, radical Muslims ramped up their on-going assault on civilization. There are several lessons we might take from the terrible news coming out of Mumbai. First, as long as there are Muslim extremists there will be savage brutalities like today's. The jihadis are convinced that history and Allah are on their side and no matter how often they are beaten down, as soon as they're able they'll strike again.

Secondly, this is not a war for territory or wealth. It's a war to spread a religion and the Islamists will not stop until every man, woman, and child has either bowed to the Koran or has been killed. In other words, this is a war that will last for generations, indeed, it has been ongoing since the middle ages, and Americans need to face up to that fact and prepare ourselves for a long struggle.

Thirdly, because Islam is a world wide faith, the war is world-wide. No democracy is immune and no non-Islamic or moderate Islamic country is safe. Democracy is antithetical to the beliefs of the imams who teach their young in many madrassas and mosques and any nation which values free people, free markets and moderation in religion is a target.

Fourth, it's remarkable that for seven years we have not had a terrorist attack on our soil. As hard as it must be for those who have derided George Bush throughout that span of time our security is a testament to his vigilance and effectiveness; and not just to him but to all those who work tirelessly to keep us safe.

On this Thanksgiving eve we should thank God that we have had a president and a security apparatus who have been so effective and successful in keeping us and our children safe.

RLC

Do the Right Thing

President Bush still has two months left before his term in office expires, two months to do the right thing, but I'm beginning to wonder whether he'll do it.

For the last two years two former Border Patrol agents, Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos, have been languishing in prison because they shot a notorious Mexican drug smuggler in the buttocks as he fled apprehension and they then allegedly tried to cover up the shooting. For refusing to confess that they were guilty of anything more than a couple of procedural infractions they received eleven and twelve years in prison. They have been severely beaten by other inmates and have served in solitary confinement for their offense. Murderers often serve less time than they will if they serve their full term.

In any event, President Bush should pardon these men, but although he pardoned fourteen and commuted the sentences of two others just the other day, Ramos and Compean weren't among them. The men who were pardoned included drug dealers, welfare cheats, embezzlers, and thieves, but the two men who were trying to protect us from the predators who cross our borders to sell our children drugs he has as yet shown no sign of pardoning.

President Bush has eight weeks left to do for Ramos and Compean what he did for Scooter Libby. I dearly hope he does because if he doesn't it will forever diminish him in the eyes of those who have been his most constant supporters. And here's an irony: If Bush doesn't do the right thing there's a very good chance that President Obama will. His chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, co-sponsored a resolution calling for clemency for the two former agents last December when he was a member of congress. Obama could go a long way toward winning over many of those who opposed him in November by using his executive authority to pardon Ramos and Compean. It would be a shame if Bush squandered the good will he has among conservatives by failing to do this, but if Obama stepped up where Bush failed to tread it would be not only the right thing to do, it would be a stroke of political genius.

RLC

Too Busy

I taught in a public high school for 35 years and am a little sensitive to criticism of public school teachers. I've worked with so many good ones over the years, people who exhaust themselves in doing the best job they can for their students, people whose motto it was that it was better to burn out than rust out, that I find criticism of them often uninformed and unfair.

And yet sometimes I have to marvel at some of my erstwhile colleagues.

My daughter is a senior going through the college application process which means she needs letters of recommendation from her teachers. So, she asked a teacher she thought she had a good relationship with if he would write one for her. I was stunned when my daughter gave me his reply. This guy, who, as far as I know, does nothing else at school but teach, told her that he was too busy. Too busy?!

He's getting paid in the neighborhood of $70,000 for 187 days of work and he's "too busy" to do the job for which he's being paid? Writing letters of recommendation for one's students is part of the job. Assisting one's students as they seek to move on to college is part of one's job. If a teacher is "too busy" to do this maybe he should be in another line of work.

Tell the athletic and forensics coaches who teach all day and then give up their evenings and weekends for their kids - these are people, mind you, whose remuneration comes to pennies per hour - that a colleague who doesn't have any extra-curricular responsibilities is too busy to write a letter for one of his students.

Tell the teachers running science fairs, student council, the yearbook and a host of other activities that require endless hours of work in addition to their labors in the classroom that someone who doesn't do any of this is too busy to give a student a few minutes of his time.

Tell it to the teachers who bring their students in early and on weekends to give them additional instruction to prep them for their AP tests, etc. that someone who's making even more money than are some of them just can't find the time to do everything his job entails.

I don't want to be too hard on this guy because maybe he has something going on in his personal life that I don't know about, but if not, his response to the request for a letter of recommendation is very disappointing. Frankly, for me, as a former teacher, it's embarrassing that a member of my profession would ever be too busy to help a student.

RLC

Spreading the GPA

A student sent me this amusing story which puts President-elect Obama's economic aspirations in some perspective:

"In a local restaurant my server had on an "Obama 08" tie. I laughed as he had given away his political preference - just imagine the coincidence. When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept.

He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need--the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed away.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.

At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away money he did earn even though the actual recipient needed the money more.

I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application."

President-elect Obama's desire to spread the wealth has inspired in me a wonderful idea. I wonder if those of my students who voted for Obama and who are doing well in class would mind if I took some of the points they've earned and gave them to those students who are doing less well so that everyone gets a decent grade. If they do mind I could point out to them that according to Vice-president elect Joe Biden they're just being selfish. What do they need with all those points anyway? They have more than enough points to pass the course whereas some of their fellow students are struggling below the academic "poverty line" and need help.

We'll call it "spreading the GPA". I'm sure anyone who voted for Senator Obama will see the fairness in taking from the haves and giving to the have nots.

RLC

Fighting the Orcs

The war for civilization continues in Afghanistan. Here's a report of the fighting that ensued when 250 insurgents ambushed a 30-man Marine patrol. The Marines were outnumbered 8 to 1, but it still wasn't a fair fight - sort of like the Fellowship of the Ring versus the orcs.

Thanks to Hot Air for the link.

RLC

Yes, He Could

We noted a while ago that since it became clear that Barack Obama was going to be the next president the stock market has lost about 30% of its value. Investors are clearly assuming that Obama is going to make life difficult for business and they're getting out of the market while they still can. People are asking, "Where's Obama?" Why isn't he stepping forward to calm the markets with his soothing mellifluence?

We suggested that Obama could give the markets a jolt and reverse the downward plunge simply by promising that he has rethought his previous position and that in light of the current crisis he will not impose any further burdens on business and may even reduce them. We wondered further why he doesn't do this. One reason, of course, is that he really does want to raise the minimum wage, tax businesses more heavily, and pile more regulations upon their faltering backs.

Suppose, though, his advisors have prevailed upon him to dampen his enthusiasm for sophomoric socialism and to do the prudent thing to help turn around the economic nosedive. If so, would he announce his willingness to forego the imposition of onerous taxes and regulations now? Perhaps the Machiavelli in him reasons this way: "If I promise to create a business friendly environment now, the markets may respond enthusiastically and by the inauguration everything will be hunky-dory. Bush will get the credit for the recovery and I won't. On the other hand, if I wait until after the inauguration to goose the markets, it'll look like I have the Midas touch, when, in fact, all I did was promise not to do something I should never have promised I would do in the first place."

So, I might be completely wrong about this, but look for Obama to either wait until after he's in the White House or perhaps at least until after the holidays to announce that he's going to refrain from crushing business with any new taxes, etc. If he can make this sound credible, investors will start buying back in and the market will regain some of its former luster. Unfortunately for Obama, he'll lose a lot of luster in the eyes of his devotees on the left who'll be wondering what happened to the change that they believed in.

RLC

Public Education and Intelligent Design (Pt. I)

Bradford over at Telic Thoughts puts us on to a paper by atheistic philosopher Thomas Nagle in the journal Philosophy and Public Policy. Nagle, a Darwinian evolutionist, joins Richard Dawkins (See Ch. 2 of The God Delusion) in defending the proposition that ID, contrary to what we are so often told, actually is a scientific hypothesis. In light of his argument Judge Jones, the ACLU and much of the reasoning behind the Kitzmiller decision are all looking increasingly unenlightened.

This post will be the first of a series on Nagel's paper. He begins by pointing out that it would be intellectually irresponsible to avoid significant questions that lie at the interface of evolution and religion:

[T]he campaign of the scientific establishment to rule out intelligent design as beyond discussion because it is not science results in the avoidance of significant questions about the relation between evolutionary theory and religious belief, questions that must be faced in order to understand the theory and evaluate the scientific evidence for it. It would be unfortunate if the Establishment Clause made it unconstitutional to allude to these questions in a public school biology class, for that would mean that evolutionary theory cannot be taught in an intellectually responsible way.

This is so for a couple of reasons. First, Darwin originally advanced evolution as an argument against purposeful design in nature. To allow evolution to be taught without allowing the design hypothesis to defend itself is simply irresponsible. Second, to shelter a theory from criticism, to disallow the discussion of any counterevidence, as the defenders of Darwinism wish to do, is also intellectually inexcusable.

Nagle goes on to make an observation that we have made here at Viewpoint on numerous occasions. The fundamental claims of Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design are contraries. If it is scientific to assert that life is solely the product of unintentional processes then the denial of the claim must also be scientific:

[Evolution's]defining element is the claim that all [life] happened as the result of the appearance of random and purposeless mutations in the genetic material followed by natural selection due to the resulting heritable variations in reproductive fitness. It displaces design by proposing an alternative. No one suggests that the theory is not science, even though the historical process it describes cannot be directly observed, but must be inferred from currently available data. It is therefore puzzling that the denial of this inference, i.e., the claim that the evidence offered for the theory does not support the kind of explanation it proposes, and that the purposive alternative has not been displaced, should be dismissed as not science. The contention seems to be that, although science can demonstrate the falsehood of the design hypothesis, no evidence against that demonstration can be regarded as scientific support for the hypothesis. Only the falsehood, and not the truth, of ID can count as a scientific claim.

Nagle is right on the mark here and has much else of interest to say on the matter of whether ID should be considered science and taught in science classes. We'll discuss more of his paper in the days ahead.

RLC

Good Riddance

Long War Journal reports that yet another al Qaeda leader has been killed in Pakistan by the U.S. military using missiles fired from a Predator drone aircraft. The latest casualty was one Rashid Rauf, the man who planned the attempt a couple of years ago to bomb a dozen trans-Atlantic flights using liquid bombs.

This makes the fifth senior al Qaeda operative in Pakistan to have been sent to the throne of Allah this year. Imagine what it must be like to be one of these psychopaths never knowing when you go to bed if a hellfire missile will disturb your dreams. There must also be a lot of paranoia developing among the cadres since it's obvious that the Americans are getting a lot of actionable intelligence from somewhere inside the inner circles of these killers. Who's providing it? Are the Americans paying off underlings for information on their superiors? The big rats must be suspicious of the mice, and it's likely that there's going to be a lot of finger-pointing, purges, executions and other ugly episodes that will foster resentments among the formerly faithful. This sort of thing will only lead to a breakdown in loyalty and produce even more intelligence.

Al Qaeda must be reeling. Perhaps they're hope is that President Obama will scale back operations against them and give them a chance to catch their breath. Let's hope he's smarter than that.

RLC

Hillary at State

Some historians say that Rome began its decline when it instituted a co-emperorship. With two men sharing rule there were two poles around which loyalties and power revolved. It seems that Barack Obama has chosen to do something similar by appointing Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. She will have her own staff and doubtless her own foreign policy. It will be very hard for Obama to control her and the State Department may well morph into a co-White House.

I'm not sure why Ms Clinton would accept this post if she plans on running for president in 2012 since it'll be hard to quit after two years to run against the man who gave her the job. On the other hand, if she's seen as the author of a successful foreign policy she may eclipse Obama in the public eye. If he tires of her machinations and lets her go her devotees may be so upset that he'll have trouble in the primaries if she chooses to run against him.

The other question is why Obama named her to the post. Forgive me for being cynical, but I don't believe he thought she was the best qualified person available for the job. It could be that he felt that as a cabinet secretary she'd be too preoccupied to spend the next three years campaigning against him.

At any rate, having Hillary and, perforce, her husband at Foggy Bottom promises to offer a lot of drama for the media and a lot of headaches for Obama. Stay tuned.

RLC

Feedback

There are a couple of interesting responses to some recent posts on our Feedback page. Please check it out.

A number of readers replied to the post What's Love Got to Do With it? and many of them expressed frustration with the opposite sex. This is not new, of course, but I suspect that the erosion of traditional moral constraints on male/female relationships has made what was always a tense situation much worse. I didn't find in the replies I received to this post much disagreement with this.

RLC

Gimme Money

All the talk about bailouts reminds me of a song first done by Barrett Strong in 1959 and later reissued by a dozen other groups including The Beatles. It was called Gimme Money and went like this:

The best things in life are free, but you can give 'em to the birds and bees. Now gimme money (That's what I want), that's what I want (That's what I want), that's what I want, yeah, that's what I want.

Money don't get everything it's true, but what it don't get I can't use. So gimme money (That's what I want), a little money (That's what I want), that's what I want, yeah, that's what I want.

Yeah, gimme money (That's what I want). A little money (That's what I want), that's what I want (That's what I want). So gimme money (That's what I want), that's what I want, yeah, that's what I want.

And so forth.

I thought of this catchy little tune while watching the automaker execs go before Congress hat in hand asking for a couple of billion dollars of taxpayer money to compensate them for doing such a lousy job of running their industry.

We've heard that the auto industry cannot be allowed to fail, that it's "too big to fail", that millions of people will be out of work if it fails. Well, maybe, but into this maelstrom of claims and counterclaims strides Dan Weil of NewsMax with a refreshingly lucid column titled Ten Reasons Why the Auto Bailout Is a Bad Idea. Here are the first three:

1. A bailout would provide money only for short-term survival. It wouldn't alter car makers' flawed business models. GM is running through cash at the rate of $2 billion a month. So $10 billion from the government would give it only five months' breathing room. Can they turn over their business practices in that period? Please. The temptation would be simply to come back to taxpayers for more.

2. A government handout would allow the Big Three to avoid necessary cost cutting. Because of a strong union, the average GM employee received $70 an hour in combined pay and benefits last year. And it's not just line workers who are making too much. GM chief executive Richard Wagoner garnered about $24 million a year in 2006 and 2007, while leading his company toward oblivion.

3. Bankruptcy isn't all bad. It doesn't mean liquidation. It means taking the painful steps the companies have been unwilling to contemplate to date. The real losers in such a deal are car makers, equity shareholders and creditors. Bankruptcy would give the automakers the chance to throw out existing employee contracts with their onerous health and pension systems. The unions would be forced to temper their demands if they want the car companies to survive. In the case of GM, it could also dump some of its uncompetitive product lines such as Pontiac and Saturn. Discontinuing five of GM's eight domestic brands would save the company $5 billion annually.

You can read the remaining seven reasons at the link. Weil and a lot of others are saying that the auto execs can sing Gimme Money all they want, but it doesn't make it a prudent thing to do. Why should the beleaguered public subsidize poor leadership and exorbitant worker salaries and benefits when the average taxpayer makes less than any of these guys? Management and labor have a right to make whatever they can get on the market or in contract negotiations, of course, but they don't have a right to expect us to open our wallets to compensate them for their avarice and incompetence.

Let them file for bankruptcy, reorganize, and get competitive.

RLC

Re: Atheist Charities

Some readers thought that it was a bit of an exaggeration to suggest in Atheist Charities that atheists are not as compassionate as Christians. They also thought that any implication that Christian compassion arises out of sense of duty makes it seem as Christian charity is simply a hoop that must be jumped through in order to get to heaven.

These are misapprehensions. The difference between atheists and Christians is not that atheists don't have the capacity for compassion and Christians do; it's that atheists, if their belief about God is true, have no reason to exercise that capacity. There simply is no reason to be compassionate in a Godless world except the inclinations urged upon one by her own personality. If she weren't compassionate, if she lacked kindness, she wouldn't be morally wrong or defective. She'd just be different than others who are compassionate.

Compassion is a duty for the Christian, to be sure. Indeed, it's commanded, but the motive for fulfilling that obligation is not the hope of heaven. The Christian already has that. The motive is love for God and gratitude for what He's done. We love others, or should, because God loves them and we love and are grateful to Him. To love Him is to love what He loves. If God does not exist there's no reason whatsoever why anyone should treat others, especially people he doesn't know (like poor Africans, for instance), with kindness.

That's why there are so few atheist charities, if indeed there are any at all. The atheist has no real reason to sacrifice his own resources for the benefit of complete strangers, but the Christian has several: The Christian believes his resources are not his but God's, to be employed in the service of God's kingdom and to help God's children. The Christian also believes that we are our brother's keeper and are responsible for doing what we can to help him. The Christian believes that each life is precious because it is valued by God and that each life has the potential to exist for eternity. The help we give a person today could shape and influence him not just for a few more years, but forever. The Christian believes that others have dignity which can only derive from their being made in the image of God and loved by Him and they are therefore worth our sacrifice.

The atheist, of course, believes none of this. The atheist may value other people but, if so, her decision to do so is completely arbitrary and subjective. It's not based on anything more substantial than her own feelings and the decision to value others, if atheism is true, is neither right nor wrong, good nor bad. It's qualitatively similar to the decision to buy a Toyota rather than a Honda.

This being the case, as society grows increasingly secular it's reasonable to expect that acts of charity, including charitable giving, will decline.

This post (which is based on this one) compares charitable giving among conservatives and liberals and, since Christians tend to be conservative and atheists tend to be liberals, these posts might offer some insight into the relative benevolence of atheists and Christians.

RLC

Post-Racial?

After the election we observed that its results exploded a couple of myths about Americans and America. One myth we didn't mention that wilted away during the campaign is the belief, common among the young, that their generation is much less "hung-up" on race than are older generations. Shelby Steele, the author of White Guilt, perhaps the best book written on race in the last decade, points out in an interview with Peter Robinson that, on the contrary, this election shows that much of this country, especially the young, is actually obsessed with race. Watch the video of the interview and note the conversation beginning at about the 3:45 minute mark.

Earlier in the discussion Steele makes another interesting observation about how the Obama candidacy meant different things to whites and blacks. For many whites, voting for Obama was a way of gaining absolution, of proving their non-racist bona fides, of clearing their conscience of the guilt of being a member of the racist, white ruling class. For blacks, on the other hand, it was a way of putting behind them their fears of their own racial inadequacy.

I think there's a lot to this. It's remarkable that many whites were enthusiastic about Obama, notwithstanding their complete lack of knowledge of his past or of his views (See, for example, the Zogby poll linked to here). On the other hand, it's also remarkable that among black Obama supporters criticism of him often seems to be taken personally. It's never said that way, exactly, but one gets the feeling that blacks think whites have no business criticizing Obama, and if they do it's reason to think that the critic is motivated by racial animus. This makes sense, of course, if blacks see the attempt to defeat Obama as more fundamentally an attempt to thwart their own struggle to expunge a perhaps self-imposed stigma of racial inferiority.

The Steele interview packs a lot into six minutes and is worth a look. In fact, the whole series with Steele is worth watching. You can find the other segments here.

RLC

Iran's Woes

Not all economic news is bad these days. There's always a silver lining. Apparently the current economic unpleasantness is hitting Iran pretty hard and that could be a good thing:

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where much of Iran's foreign trade is handled, local banks are refusing to do business with the 10,000 Iranian trading firms based there. This has caused delays and cancellations of Iranian imports (over $9 billion worth from the UAE last year) and exports. This is being felt by the ruling elite in Iran. There, the large extended families of the clerical leadership live the good life, and the goodies come in via the UAE. The sudden shortages of iPods, flat screen TVs, automobiles and bling in general, has been noticed in Iran, and is not appreciated.

The falling price of oil is producing another problem, national bankruptcy. The government admits that if the price of oil falls below $60 a barrel (which it has) and stays there (which it may, at least until the current recession is over), the nation will not be able to finance foreign trade (which is already having problems with increasingly effective U.S. moves to deny Iran access to the international banking system), or even the Iranian economy itself. The latter problem is largely self-inflicted, as president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad desperately borrows money to placate his few (heavily armed and fanatical) followers (about 20 percent of the population). The rest of the population has been in recession for years, and is getting increasingly angry over Ahmadinejad's mismanagement. Some 80 percent of Iran's exports are oil.

Maybe a restive Iranian populace will solve the problem of what to do about Tehran's nuclear ambitions so that military options become unnecessary. If that were a result of the current economic doldrums it would make the present financial pain worthwhile and would certainly be a wonderful turn of events.

RLC

The Memo

A friend passes along a "memo" sent out recently to employees of an unnamed business enterprise:

As the CFO of this business that employees 140 people, I have resigned myself to the fact that Barack Obama will be our next President, and that our taxes and government fees will increase in a BIG way.

To compensate for these increases, I figure that the clients will have to bear an increase in our fees to them of about 8%, but since we cannot increase our fees right now due to the dismal state of our economy, we will have to lay off six of our employees instead. This has really been eating at me for a while, as we believe we are family here, and I didn't know how to choose whom to let go.

So, this is what I did. I strolled thru our parking lot and found six Obama bumper stickers on our employees' cars and have decided these folks will be the first to be laid off. I can't think of a more fair way to approach this problem. These folks wanted change; I gave it to them. If you have a better idea, let me know.

This is a joke, of course, but it touches upon an uncomfortable truth. If and when President Obama raises income taxes, capital gains taxes, insurance contributions, and the minimum wage, and allows the Bush tax cuts to expire, businesses will have to start shedding costs, i.e. workers. I wonder how long it'll be then before Obama supporters start removing their bumper stickers from their vehicles as a precaution against incurring the wrath of their laid-off co-workers.

RLC

Orwell's Oceania Comes to Ohio

Employees of no less than six state agencies in Ohio assiduously set about digging up dirt on Joe Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber, just as soon as he had displayed the breathtaking cheek to inquire of the Democratic candidate about his business tax plans.

So, where are all those Democrats who rent their garments a few months ago at revelations that the nefarious Bush administration was eavesdropping on terrorists' phone calls?

Evidently, the lesson we can take from the left's disparate reactions to these two situations is that spying on terrorists is evil, but spying on private citizens who happen to be potential GOP voters is understandable.

I'm reminded of the aphorism that he who travels the high road of principle in public life won't have to worry much about traffic. That's especially true, one might be excused for thinking, if he's driving in the left lane.

RLC

Leap of Faith

This video and the Zogby poll which accompanies it have created a bit of a stir in the blogosphere, but I'm not sure why. Anyway, the vid is both depressing and enlightening. It'll surely disturb those who believe that the health of a democracy is directly proportional to how well-informed the electorate is. It's interesting that the people polled know so little about Barack Obama and Joe Biden but so much (true or not) about Sarah Palin. Why do you suppose that is? The answers to the question at the end perhaps provide us with a clue.

The video by itself signifies little, but taken in conjunction with the poll, which can be viewed here, it suggests something disturbing about the American voter. Be sure to read both the criticism of the poll and Zogby's defense of it which are linked to at the site.

RLC

What's Love Got to Do With it?

This article by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal touts itself as "A report from the chaotic post-feminist dating scene, where only the strong survive." It might also be thought of as a disturbing examination of what the sexual revolution has wrought.

If you're young and single, or even if you're not, you might want to read Hymowitz's piece. It's depressing and distressing, and it'll cause you to worry about your prospects of ever finding an acceptable spouse, but I think she says some important things about love and romance in a secular, Darwinian, post-sexual revolution age.

The essay is R-rated and a bit long so here's a quick summary: Guys are jerks and women have no one to blame but themselves.

RLC

Paradigm Shift

It's beginning to look like everything you learned in high school about the gene and biological inheritance is quickly becoming obsolete.

A recent article in the New York Times explains why.

According to the Times the snippet of DNA which had once been thought to program for a particular trait is now known to be only part of the story. There are whole complexes of molecules that program for traits and a particular snippet (or exon) may code for as many as six or seven different proteins or no protein at all. In other words, the complexity of life keeps increasing the more we learn about it. The complexity, like some biological fractal, runs all the way down. Here are just a couple of excerpts from the article which suggest the enormous complexity of the mechanisms involved in inheritance:

A single so-called gene, for example, can make more than one protein (transcript). In a process known as alternative splicing, a cell can select different combinations of exons (segments of DNA) to make different transcripts. Scientists identified the first cases of alternative splicing almost 30 years ago, but they were not sure how common it was. Several studies now show that almost all genes are being spliced. The Encode team estimates that the average protein-coding region produces 5.7 different transcripts. Different kinds of cells appear to produce different transcripts from the same gene.

Even weirder, cells often toss exons into transcripts from other genes. Those exons may come from distant locations, even from different chromosomes.

But it turns out that the genome is also organized in another way, one that brings into question how important genes are in heredity. Our DNA is studded with millions of proteins and other molecules, which determine which genes can produce transcripts and which cannot. New cells inherit those molecules along with DNA. In other words, heredity can flow through a second channel.

One of the most striking examples of this second channel is a common flower called toadflax. Most toadflax plants grow white petals arranged in a mirror-like symmetry. But some have yellow five-pointed stars. These two forms of toadflax pass down their flower to their offspring. Yet the difference between their flowers does not come down to a difference in their DNA.

Instead, the difference comes down to the pattern of caps that are attached to their DNA. These caps, made of carbon and hydrogen, are known as methyl groups. The star-shaped toadflax have a distinct pattern of caps on one gene involved in the development of flowers.

DNA is not just capped with methyl groups; it is also wrapped around spool-like proteins called histones that can wind up a stretch of DNA so that the cell cannot make transcripts from it. All of the molecules that hang onto DNA, collectively known as epigenetic marks, are essential for cells to take their final form in the body. As an embryo matures, epigenetic marks in different cells are altered, and as a result they develop into different tissues. Once the final pattern of epigenetic marks is laid down, it clings stubbornly to cells. When cells divide, their descendants carry the same set of marks. "They help cells remember what genes to keep on, and what genes can never be turned on," said Bradley Bernstein of Harvard University.

It's just astonishing, is it not, the miracles of engineering that can be wrought by mere chance and chemistry. If I hadn't read my Richard Dawkins I might be tempted to think there was some merit in the observation by physicist Fred Hoyle that the odds of a living cell arising purely by chance are about the same as a tornado sweeping through a junk yard leaving in its wake a fully-assembled, fully-functional 747 jet airplane.

No snickering please.

RLC

Back to Basics

Much post-election political commentary has focused on the alleged need for the Republican party to "broaden its appeal" to attract the young and minorities and that it needs to abandon stances on issues, like abortion and immigration, that alienate these groups. It also needs to shed its reputation for penny-pinching and loosen up the public purse-strings in order to woo the poor into the party.

All of these recommendations are silly. They amount to saying that if Republicans want to compete with Democrats why, then, they should become Democrats. It amounts to selling their soul for a mess of political pottage, and it wouldn't work anyway. The Republicans have not fallen into disfavor because they hold to the wrong principles. They've fallen from grace because they don't appear to stand for any principles at all.

What Republicans need to do to regain the public's confidence is three things: First, they need to stop running old men for president. Beginning in 1992 with George H.W. Bush Republicans three times run seemingly out-of-touch, superannuated candidates against younger, more charismatic opponents and they've lost every time. The two elections in which they prevailed (2000, 2004) the GOP candidate was the same age as the Democratic candidate. If the Republicans want to get the under 30 vote they're going to have to bend to a sociological reality: Young people love and admire their grandfathers, but they prefer their presidents to be youthful, intelligent, articulate, and energetic.

Secondly, Republicans need to return to their principles. George W. Bush has spent money as though nothing was more abundant and what has it gotten him? He has a popularity rating that can only be measured with sonar and an economy which will probably ruin his presidential legacy.

Republicans need to stand firmly for spending discipline, they need to go cold-turkey on their addiction to earmarks, and they need to stop sounding an uncertain trumpet on social issues. Voters rightly wonder, if their choice is between a genuine liberal Democrat and a GOP knock-off of a liberal Democrat, why not just vote for the real thing? Meanwhile, conservatives stay home in disgust. McCain got five million fewer votes than Bush did in 2004 largely because McCain's record in the Senate failed to inspire confidence among conservatives that he was the genuine article.

Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, Republicans need to see themselves as educators. George Bush's biggest failing, aside from his economic profligacy and border apathy, was his failure to educate the American people as to why his other policies were right. Whatever the quality of his leadership in the White House may have been, he was often AWOL on the public airwaves when the people needed to be inspired, assured and instructed as to why they should follow him on the course he was setting.

A Republican leadership made up of the same anonymous mystery men who guided the campaigns of Bush the elder, Bob Dole, and John McCain will almost certainly guarantee the party an extended vacation in political Siberia. The reason why so many people were drawn to Sarah Palin and willing to forgive her her short-comings was that she was such a breath of fresh air in her declarations of her convictions. The cavils of a derisory media notwithstanding, those convictions are almost exactly those of the vast majority who comprise the GOP base and, indeed, many Democrats as well. Palin was a resonant trumpet to McCain's dubious kazoo and many people were grateful to her for that.

By all means Republicans should seek to attract those outside the party, but they should do it by promoting conservative principles, not abandoning them, and by selecting younger, attractive advocates for those principles. They need to make the case for their principles with such power and clarity that not even a media fully committed to doing wahtever it takes to neutralize their voices will be unable to prevent the message from eroding popular support from the Democratic ranks.

Just as I was finishing this post up I came across this article by Karl Rove which says much the same things only he says more and says it better.

RLC

Re: Add Congo

My friend Matt writes in response to our post on the Congo titled Add Congo to the List:

Thanks for your recent Congo post, Dick. I had just watched a documentary called The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. A student had bought the rights to show it for her high school culminating project and then let me borrow the DVD. It was unimaginable. Unimaginable. Hundreds of thousands of women and girls and small children gang-raped. Hundreds of thousands!! And their SVU (special victims unit) for the entire country consists of ONE woman with no budget.

The men gang-rape with impunity. And they don't just gang-rape, they then destroy the women's genitalia with rods and poles. It's demonic. Purely demonic. And the few people who can stand to work for justice there have the aura of Christ. I don't know how they do it. The film is also somewhat helpful in explaining the situation in the Congo and how hopeless it is. That's crushing. I'd like to turn to lighter news, but would feel flippant if I did.

Matt also recommends the documentary WarDance which he describes as "the most impressively and artistically crafted of all the films I've seen on Africa, and the most honestly crushing and uplifting film. The others rarely give you stories of hope amidst the horror. I have to believe that's partly because there is no hope, but as Christians we have to believe there is. Wardance leaves room for that."

He goes on to commend another documentary that we've talked about on Viewpoint in the past titled As We Forgive which is an amazing story of forgiveness and reconciliation in Rwanda in the wake of the savage genocide that occurred there in the '90s. Matt notes that it won the academy award for best documentary by a student filmmaker.

I hope that Viewpoint readers will take the time to watch at least one of these films. They're all eye-openers which will doubtless shatter our naive complacency about the world in which we live. I've added them to my Netflix queue.

RLC

Scientific Consensus

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views reminds us of a quote from the science fiction writer Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, et al.) who passed away just recently. Crichton gave a speech in which he was very critical of the tendency to cite the "scientific consensus" in order to clinch some debating point:

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

"Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period....

"I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way."

(Michael Crichton, "Aliens Cause Global Warming," reprinted in Wall Street Journal, November 7, 2008.)

The context of Crichton's remarks was the use of "scientific consensus" in the global warming debate, about which he was a skeptic, but his point applies equally well to the debate surrounding the origin of the cosmos and the origin of life. Dissenters from the consensus are often brow-beaten by the assertion that all "real" scientists believe life evolved by Darwinian processes when in fact that claim is not true and would be beside the point even if it were true.

"Darwinian processes" means that only physical mechanisms have been at work in the creation of the diversity of structures, functions, and operations found in living things. In other words, Darwinian processes (e.g. natural selection and random mutation) exclude any role for mind and intention, and it's simply untrue that all real scientists embrace the exclusion.

Even were it true, however, Crichton's point was that it doesn't mean much. Many if not most great advances in science came about because people who stood outside the mainstream refused to be cowed by the dominant view. This was certainly true of the work of Copernicus and Galileo and even of Darwin himself. It was true of Dalton, Einstein and Le Maitre. The fact that a majority of experts believe something should cause us to respect their theory, but it does not follow that what they believe is correct.

Crichton trenchantly notes in his speech that the club of consensus is usually brandished only when there is a lack of confidence in one's theory. It's a bit like the oft-heard claim that evolution is as well-established as the theory of gravity. This is simply false, and is shown to be false by the fact that one never hears a physicist say that the theory of gravity is as well-established as the theory of evolution. Physicists would never think to make such a claim because it's so obviously laughable.

RLC