Small Minds, Closed Minds

Why is it, if Darwinians are so confident that they have truth on their side, that they feel the need to censor, stifle, demote and fire anyone who disagrees with them? What are they so afraid of?

The movie Expelled documents how the spirit of free enquiry and free speech has been trampled by academic Darwinists, and there are numerous examples of it beyond those discussed in the film. Guillermo Gonzalez, a much published astronomer at the University of Idaho, was denied tenure a year or so ago, largely through the efforts of an atheist colleague, because he co-authored the book The Privileged Planet which argues that the earth is uniquely, and perhaps, deliberately situated for the study of the heavens. Richard Sternberg of the Smithsonian was punished because the journal he edited ran a paper that argued on behalf of intelligent design.

The most recent casualty of the Darwinian thought police is David Coppedge, a project leader at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Coppedge has been demoted for nothing more, apparently, than offering to share some intelligent design DVDs with co-workers.

Philosopher Jay Richards comments:

It's hard even to figure out what David Coppedge is supposed to have done wrong. There were no complaints against him by people to whom he had lent these documentaries. He wasn't proselytizing. He wasn't even, so far as I can tell, actually doing anything naughty that he had been told not to do. It's not like he had been told not to lend out copies of the documentaries and had continued to do so (even though such an order would itself have been outrageous). Can you imagine any other legal subject on which such an action would be treated as anything other than unjust discrimination?

To read more on this travesty go to Evolution News and Views and scroll down.

When people know that their side of an argument is persuasive they rely on their argument in open debate to win the hearts and minds of their audience. On the other hand, when they know that their case is weak and unpersuasive they often resort to just shutting up the other side whenever they can. It's interesting that so many Darwinians feel they have to follow the latter course.

RLC

The Piety Gene

Michael Shermer surveys the ubiquity of religious belief around the world and concludes that it must all be a result of evolution:

Of course, genes do not determine whether one chooses Judaism, Catholicism, Islam or any other religion. Rather, belief in supernatural agents (God, angels, demons) and commitment to certain religious practices (church attendance, prayer, rituals) appears to reflect genetically based cognitive processes (inferring the existence of invisible agents) and personality traits (respect for authority, traditionalism).

Why did we inherit this tendency? Long, long ago, in a Paleolithic environment far, far away from the modern world, humans evolved to find meaningful causal patterns in nature to make sense of the world, and infuse many of those patterns with intentional agency, some of which became animistic spirits and powerful gods. I call these two processes patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data) and agenticity (the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency).

Yes, well, the clunky neologisms aside, one wonders: If religious belief is the norm, and if it is the product of our genes, does that not imply that those who don't have a religious belief are genetic mutants and deviants? Just asking.

RLC

The Head of the Snake

Apparently, after years of false reports of the deaths of these two thugs, it seems the good guys finally caught up with them.

Here are some highlights from the report in The Long War Journal:

Iraq's Prime Minister and the US military confirmed that al Qaeda in Iraq's top two leaders have been killed during a raid in a remote region in the western province of Anbar.

"Abu Ayyub al Masri, Abu Omar al Baghdadi and a number of other al Qaeda leaders in Iraq were killed during a security operation in al Thar Thar region in Anbar," Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki told reporters at a press conference in Baghdad, according to Voices of Iraq.

"A series of Iraqi led joint operations conducted over the last week resulted in the Iraqi Forces with US support executing a nighttime raid on the AQI [al Qaeda in Iraq] leaders' safehouse," the press release stated. "The joint security team identified both AQI members, and the terrorists were killed after engaging the security team. Additionally, Masri's assistant along with the son of al-Baghdadi who were also involved in terrorist activities were killed."

During the operation, one US soldier was killed in a helicopter crash, and 16 al Qaeda associates were detained.

The deaths of al Masri and Baghdadi are a major blow to al Qaeda in Iraq, as the terror group has suffered major losses in its leadership network over the past four months. Since January, the US has picked apart the top leaders of al Qaeda's northern network. Among those killed or captured are the last two emirs, or leaders, of the northern Iraq network, the last two emirs of Mosul, the top facilitator operating in the Iraq-Syria border areas, and other senior members of the network.

The NYT reports that among the documents seized at the scene were communications from Osama bin Laden. That's a bit surprising given that we've been told over and over again by the left that al Qaeda is not really involved in Iraq and that we should get out of Iraq and hunt al Qaeda down elsewhere.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Pt. II)

Yesterday we took a look at the challenge posed by the Euthyphro dilemma to those who believe that God's existence is a necessary condition for any meaningful, non-subjective, non-arbitrary ethics. We began by considering the second horn of the dilemma which we stated as follows:

Is an act morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

In this post I'd like to reflect on the first of the two horns: Is good simply whatever God commands? Would cruelty be good if God commanded it?

If we stipulate that God is omnibenevolent and that good is that which conduces to human happiness then the latter question seems to me to be an incoherent act description.

The question of God commanding cruelty presupposes a state of affairs in which a being whose essence it is to always do that which ultimately conduces to human well-being and happiness nevertheless commands us to do something which produces gratuitous suffering and pain. There seems to be a logical conflict in that.

In other words, if goodness is as we've defined it, and if God is good, then it's logically impossible for cruelty to be part of his nature or for him to command cruelty or anything else which would conflict with ultimate human well-being and happiness. It would require of God that he issue a command that is in opposition to his own nature. It's like asking whether there is something which a being which knows everything doesn't know.

So, the answer to the question of whether God commands us to love because love is good or whether love is good because God commands it, seems to me to be "neither." God commands us to love because it is his desire to have the world conformed to his own essential nature which is love.

RLC

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Pt. I)

Many freshman philosophy students find themselves confronted with the Euthyphro dilemma, a question often posed to convince us that God's existence is superfluous for our moral lives. The dilemma gets its name from the fact that it first appears in Plato's dialogue titled The Euthyphro and has popped up frequently in the philosophical literature ever since.

I'd like to share some thoughts on it over the course of two posts with the caveat that much of what I say is not original with me and that whatever might be original I offer with the humble recognition that it could well be nonsense.

With that caution in mind let's look at the dilemma. It's often put in the form of the following question:

Is something morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

The question seeks to offer theists, at least those who hold to a divine command theory of ethics, two unpalatable choices. If the theist chooses the first option then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

I think, though, that the choices with which the dilemma confronts us are unable to carry the weight placed upon their shoulders. To see why let's start with a definition for "moral good."

Let's stipulate that moral good is that which conduces to human happiness and well-being.

It may be argued that we don't need God to know what conduces to human well-being and thus we can know what is good without having to believe in God. This may be true, but it misses the point.

First, our problem is not with recognizing good so much as it is explaining why God is still necessary for good to exist. Just because we can recognize good without believing in God doesn't mean that God is not necessary for there to be good. What is good is contingent upon the kind of beings we are, and the way we are is contingent upon God. We have the nature we do because God created us this way. Thus, what conduces to our well-being is a function of God's design.

We can no more say that God is irrelevant to our well-being than we could say that just because we know that clean oil is conducive to our car's well-being that therefore the engineers who designed the car are irrelevant to our knowing that we should change the oil periodically. Oil is "good" for the car because that's how the engineers made the car.

Secondly, even if belief in God is not necessary for one to know or recognize what conduces to well-being it is nevertheless necessary that there be a God in order for us to think we have a non-arbitrary duty to care about the well-being of others. If there is no God there is no moral obligation to concern ourselves with the good of others or to do anything else, for that matter. We may want to help others flourish, of course, but the belief that we should is completely arbitrary. If we didn't care about others, or even if we worked against the good of others, we wouldn't be committing some grievous moral offense. Just because something is good doesn't mean we ought to do it, at least not unless we are assuming that we ought always to do what conduces to other people's happiness and well-being. But why should we assume such a thing? Where does this premise come from? Why should I not just promote my own well-being and let others fend for themselves? Without God there's no real answer to these questions.

Thus, God's existence is crucial, not so that we can recognize good, perhaps, but rather as a ground for both the existence of good and for our duty to do good to others.

So, let's return to the dilemma. Consider again the second horn. Does God command, say, kindness because kindness is good? Is the good of kindness independent of God? Does it exist apart from God?

I don't think so. Goodness is an essential element of God's being. Goodness is no more separable from God than a triangle is separable from the property of having just three angles. Goodness is ontologically dependent upon God's existence much as sunlight is ontologically dependent upon the sun. If there were no sun, sunlight would not exist. If there were no God then moral goodness as a quality of our actions would not exist. Actions which lead to human well-being would have no moral value any more than a cat nursing her young has moral value even though her act conduces to their well-being. We would not consider the cat evil if it refused to nurse its young, nor, if there is no God, would we be able to judge a man objectively evil if he practiced cruelty.

God commands love because he has made us to be the sort of beings which flourish, generally, when nurtured in love, and he has made us this way because it is his essential nature to be loving. Love is not one thing and God another. God is love.

But what of the first horn of the dilemma? What if instead of loving God were hateful and cruel? Would hate and cruelty then be good? We'll consider those questions next time.

RLC

Racist Tea-Partiers

If you read the New York Times or watch MSNBC you're probably quite convinced that the tea-party folks are total racists. Well, this video confirms it, if any further confirmation were needed. It features interviews with a number of tea-partiers holding forth on racial matters, and if you don't see and hear the bigotry dripping from their snarling redneck lips then you need to tune into Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC or read Frank Rich at the New York Times to get a racial sensitivity tune-up:

Oops, wrong video.

RLC

Nerdiness

Bradford passes along a link to one of the best, most insightful essays on middle and high school social hierarchies I've come across. It's very much worth taking the time to read, especially if you're young or have children who are approaching their middle school years.

Written by a self-described nerd it first appeared in 2003 and is titled Why Nerds Are Unpopular. The author, Paul Graham, is funny and dead-on in his analysis of both the society that young people create in their schools as well as the problems in the schools themselves. Here's his lede:

When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the popularity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

Graham goes on to claim, inter many alia, that too many schools exist simply as a place to put kids so that adults can be about their daily work, and that educating those kids is not much of a priority. I think he's right. I taught in a pretty good high school for thirty five years, and even in that institution education was near the bottom of the priority list.

No administrator would ever dream of actually admitting this to anyone, of course, but it was implicitly obvious in the fact that any and every other activity a student was involved in took precedence over what the student did in class. Whenever there was a conflict between some extra-curricular activity and the classroom, the student was dismissed from the classroom to participate in the other activity. Sports, student council, pointless field trips, play rehearsals - the list was almost endless - all trumped education. The tacit message the school sent students was that learning was what they were to do only when there wasn't anything that was more fun available for them.

As I was reading Graham's lament about how nerds just aren't interested in the popularity struggles which consume so many adolescents I was reminded of a girl I overheard a number of years ago who insisted that it was "very important to be popular because if you're not people won't like you." Maybe that's the sort of inanity nerds just want no part of.

But enough. Go to the link and read Graham. Savor the whole essay. If you consider yourself a nerd you'll love it, and if you don't you'll learn something.

RLC

No Plan B

This revelation in the New York Times should be a shocker, but it's not:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran's steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama's national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo's contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

I doubt anyone is surprised that this administration has no plan in the event that Iran develops nuclear weapons. The fact that both Bush and Obama have been unwilling to do anything serious to prevent the Iranians from achieving a nuclear arsenal plainly suggests that the United States is prepared to accept a nuclear Iran as a fait accompli.

Once Iran gets such weapons it will be only a matter of time before Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia insist on having their own nukes. It will also be only a matter of time until Iran slips a weapon or two into the hands of Islamic terrorists for use in either Israel or the U.S.

If President Obama fails to do anything efficacious to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable Islamic nations, it could be, perhaps, the most catastrophic foreign policy failure in history.

RLC

Rage Against the Machine

Leftist terrorist groups are evidently experiencing a rebirth of sorts in Europe. Most of the terror organizations of the 1970s had died out, but lately, fueled by poor job prospects in socialist economies, the number of disaffected and radicalized young people has been increasing.

Paradoxically, these malcontents often insist on creating a more thoroughly socialist economic structure - socialism is the problem so the cure must be more of it - and an arrant secularization of society. The latter is also odd since European leftists are often allied with radical Islamists who are intent on bringing the whole world under the banner of Islam, and who, if they ever succeed, would immediately kill atheists like those lefties who champion the Islamists' various causes.

Strategy Page tells us that:

The widespread use of violence by Islamic terrorists has masked the revival of leftist terrorist groups in the West. Some of them are older groups trying to make a comeback. Three years ago, Italian police arrested fifteen members of the 1970s era "Red Brigades," and charged them with plotting the murder of people who did not agree with their revolutionary goals. The Red Brigades were part of an wave of small, violent, leftist revolutionary groups that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, and were largely gone by the 1990s. Actually, the groups never died out completely, but, except in Greece and Latin America, they were much less violent after the Cold War ended.

The Soviet Union had provided some support for these groups, but mostly they were sustained by disaffected middle class kids out to change the world. A new generation of disaffected, politically motivated murderers are now signing up. Many Western leftists still see the United States as the enemy of the people, and capitalism as something that must be destroyed at all costs. In an odd confluence, many of these leftists are marching (literally) shoulder to shoulder with Islamic radicals. This despite the fact that the two groups (one anti-religious, and the other very pro one religion) are natural enemies.

More enthusiastic adoption of socialist, and anti-capitalist policies in Western Europe over the last century has led to a high unemployment rate for people coming out of school, and this has made radical politics a more attractive proposition to some. But compared to the poverty and desperation in the Islamic world, the Western terrorists have a far smaller recruiting pool. But like the Islamic terrorists, the Western groups share the same basic myth. That is, if the world would only unite under a benevolent despotism, everything would be better. Like the Islamic radicals, the Western terrorists find it more comfortable to blame foreigners for their trouble. In this case, the big bad is the United States....

It is a noteworthy fact about our existential situation that there are millions of people around the globe whose lives are so empty that they are reduced to a nihilistic desire to just tear down everything, kill everyone who opposes them, and establish ..... what? An Islamic or Marxist paradise? When in history has such a paradise ever existed? When has a state founded on the blood of its predecessors ever been more just or prosperous than the polity it succeeded?

RLC

Reclaiming the Culture

In 1951 H. Richard Niebuhr wrote his classic Christ and Culture in which he argued that the faithful have throughout history adopted five different answers to the question of how Christians should stand in relation to the larger culture. These he discusses under the headings of Christ against culture, Christ in culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture, and Christ transforming culture.

Andrew Klavan,in a brief essay titled Celebrating the Good Stuff at City Journal, raises somewhat similar questions with regard to conservative attitudes to culture. Klavan argues that conservatives need to set aside their objections to so much of the anomic, progressivist, anti-family, anti-American, anti-Christian themes that pollute the popular culture and set about the task of transforming it into a more accurate reflection of what life in America really is.

Here's Klavan:

For years now, some of us conservatives have been struggling to take back American popular culture. Sick of movies, television shows, music, and literature disfigured by a lockstep conformity to leftist ideology, we've sought to wrestle the arts out of the grip of an alienated and small-minded elite and give it back to artists in moral synch with most Americans. The idea, as far as I'm concerned, is not to reshape the pop-culture landscape into one of sentimental patriotism and faith or limit artists to the creation of squeaky-clean family entertainment.

I merely want to see more art that represents the moral universe as it is: that shows a world, for instance, in which freedom is better than slavery and therefore America is better than, say, Saudi Arabia; a world in which military courage in defense of what's right is worthy of honor, and therefore a U.S. soldier fighting an Islamofascist is a hero, not an abuser; a world in which faith can be uplifting and not corrupting; in which women and men are different and therefore might be justly treated differently; in which ideas and behaviors can be judged on their own merits whether the people involved with them are white or brown or black.

For the past 40 years, too much of our culture has been dedicated to propagandizing us, to normalizing and elevating moral relativism, atheism, and brainless multiculturalism. The deep philosophical corruption that now permeates our government and the Obama administration's assault on American traditions and values could never have happened if we hadn't lost the culture first; they will never fully end until we take the culture back.

Here's what I consider the punchline of his piece:

But we can't win back the arts unless we love them. Too many conservatives boast of their philistinism. "I haven't seen a movie in years," they brag, as if that were some sort of achievement. Too many others seek to clip the wings of artistic imagination, demanding that artists turn away from anything disturbing or violent or sexual, which is to say from much of life itself.

Klavan is right. Whether one is a Christian or a conservative (or both), it is simply a self-defeating tactic to shun the popular culture on the grounds that it's too sordid. It is sordid, of course, but that's the milieu in which our fellow citizens live and move and have their being, and unless we are conversant with its major lineaments we make ourselves irrelevant to our fellows. We may as well be invisible ghosts for all that people will heed our concerns if we cannot relate to them in terms they understand. That means standing with them in the midst of the media in which they form their beliefs and opinions.

Of course, not everyone can be so immersed in pop culture that they can discuss knowledgably every musical group, tv show, movie, novel, piece of art, etc. but we can all know more than we do, and to ignore the cultural environment in which we live our daily lives is to cede it to those who would use it for purposes we might find distressing. It is to forfeit to the "other side" perhaps the most powerful tool available to society for shaping the hearts and minds of our successors.

The other side, liberals and/or secularists, have been pretty much dictating the cultural climate and norms for at least three generations. Why should we be content to let that continue?

RLC

Everything

I'm told this video has been around for a while, but a student just passed it on to me this week. It packs a lot of meaning into five minutes.

The group is called Lifehouse.

RLC

Sudden Conversion

Robin is a psychotherapist in Berkeley, California who is a converted leftist. In this piece she describes the suddenness of her awakening:

There are moments when life crashes down on you like a thunderbolt. And ready or not, you change.

There's a before and an after. One moment, you're one way. And then, in the blink of an eye, you're different.

An instant before my parents died, I still felt like a child, though I was knee-deep in middle age. But when they passed, three weeks apart, suddenly I grew up...just like that.

While that experience was seismic, it doesn't compare to my sea change upon Obama's ascension. One minute I was a leftist, despising this country and all it stood for.

And then, abruptly and astonishingly, I became a conservative.

Read the rest at the link.

RLC

Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution

Those looking for a concise discussion of the differences between Theistic Evolution (TE) and Intelligent Design (ID) will find a post by Thomas Cudworth at Uncommon Descent helpful. Cudworth expands upon a piece by Karl Giberson at Biologos (a TE website) which calls upon both sides to explore the things they have in common and to use these as a way of turning down the heat of the rhetoric between them.

Cudworth picks up on Giberson's suggestion and pens a helpful exploration of those commonalities. He writes, for instance that:

TE is the belief that God guided or at least planned evolution; ID is the belief that design in nature is detectable. TE as such says nothing either way about the detectability of design, and ID as such says nothing either way about the occurrence or non-occurrence of evolution. Therefore, neither group needs, on definitional grounds, to deny the core belief of the other. It is only those ID people who insist on rejecting evolution on principle, and only those TE people who insist that God's design must not be detectable, that have no common ground. But in between, there is an overlap zone, which I think that neither TEs nor ID people have fully explored, because of reckless past charges on both sides which have generated great mutual distrust. I think we should be exploring this overlap zone, and I therefore welcome Dr. Giberson's non-dogmatic approach.

The whole piece is worth a read by anyone interested in this issue. The same is true of Giberson's post at Biologos.

RLC

Double Whammy

Shawn Tulley, a senior editor at Fortune magazine, narrates the following tale:

A week ago, a good friend -- let's call him Anthony -- related a remarkable story about shopping for health insurance in two states, New York and Arizona.

For Anthony and millions of other consumers, New York represents the ultimate nightmare for finding affordable coverage, pairing outrageously high prices with a tiny roster of offerings. By contrast, Anthony found fabulous bargains and a rich variety of policies in Arizona's desert sun.

So it would be wonderful for folks like Anthony if the historic health-care reform law scuttled the rules that created the disaster in New York, and made America's insurance markets a lot more like Arizona's. But amazingly, the bill imposes a New York-style regime on the rest of the nation, then makes a gigantic bet that the results won't mimic those of the Empire State.

What's wrong with New York's system, you ask, that Obamacare will be imposing on the rest of the nation in 2014? Tulley explains:

Two regulations enormously inflate prices in New York (and, incidentally, rates aren't much lower in Albany or Syracuse than in Manhattan), especially for young, healthy folks such as Anthony -- just the kind of people who must buy in for the insurance pools to succeed.

The first regulation is Guaranteed Issue. In New York, and several other states including Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, carriers must accept all customers regardless of their medical condition. It would be illegal in New York to offer the deal Anthony got in Arizona -- a lower rate in exchange for lowering your cholesterol.

The second premium-swelling rule is Community Rating. In New York, all customers pay the same rate regardless of either their age or medical status. As a result, someone Anthony's age or younger pays an identical premium for the same policy as a 64-year-old customer, although they actually cost a fraction as much in medical claims. So older patients effectively get a big subsidy, and the young pay far more then their actual cost.

It gets worse. Because of guaranteed issue, patients know they can enroll in a plan anytime they get cancer or diabetes, so they have little incentive to sign up when they're healthy. Community rating assures that they can re-enroll at premiums far lower than the actual costs of the tests and procedures they require. Hence, the pools of the insured in states like New York and Vermont consist of an extremely high proportion of sick people.

The article goes on to explain why these kinds of regulations are distorting the economic incentives for both the buyer and the seller of insurance. Let us rejoice in the fact that this is the system we'll all be living under now that Obamacare is the law of the land.

RLC

Badgering Barney

Via Hot Air, Jason Mattera goes after Massachussetts congressman Barney Frank. Mattera, who has written a book titled Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation, really is irrepressible, but as Hot Air notes, at least Frank kept the conversation going, even if he did distort some of the facts.

A little background before you watch: About twenty years ago Frank's romantic partner was arrested for running a homosexual prostitution ring out of the apartment he shared with Frank. Frank claimed to have no knowledge of his partner's activities and was exonerated. Subsequently he developed a relationship with an employee of Fannie Mae, the agency Frank's committee was tasked with overseeing. Mattera alludes to these relationships in his "interview" with Frank.

The fist bump was a nice touch.

RLC

Co-Option

Well, I'm not sure, given the etymology of "tea-bagger" (this is a family blog so don't ask me if you don't know) that I agree with the tactic portrayed in the video, but I guess one way to defuse an insult is to co-opt the term. This is what police back in the sixties did with the pejorative "pig," and what homosexuals have done with "gay" and "queer," so I guess the thinking is that it's one way to blunt some of the derision directed at the tea-party movement:

Personally, I'd rather they not go this route. The more their opponents refer to them as "tea-baggers" the sleazier their opponents appear in the public eye. The epithet does more to diminish and discredit the people who use it than it does the people at whom it's directed.

HT: Hot Air

RLC

Antony Flew (1923-2010)

Philosopher Antony Flew was perhaps the most prominent and accomplished atheistic thinker of the latter half of the twentieth century. He subsequently went on to roil the academic world when in 2004 it became public that he had renounced atheism and embraced a sort of non-Christian theism. His 2007 book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind attributed his journey from atheism to theism to his being convinced that there was no naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. Throughout his career he insisted that one should always go where ever the evidence leads and it had led him to the existence of a Creator. His former colleagues among the atheist community reacted to his conversion with a mixture of astonishment and opprobrium, but Flew was not deterred.

In an interview given in October of 2007 he explained his move this way:

There were two factors in particular that were decisive. One was my growing empathy with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself - which is far more complex than the physical Universe - can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source. I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code. The difference between life and non-life, it became apparent to me, was ontological and not chemical. The best confirmation of this radical gulf is Richard Dawkins' comical effort to argue in The God Delusion that the origin of life can be attributed to a "lucky chance." If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over. No, I did not hear a Voice. It was the evidence itself that led me to this conclusion...

Antony Flew died April 8th at the age of 87. The Telegraph UK has an informative obituary, and Denise O'Leary at Uncommon Descent lists a number of links to pieces she's written on Flew over the last couple of years.

RLC

Against All Odds

Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views has a video of Roger Penrose, one of the most accomplished theoretical physicists of our time giving a lecture on the initial conditions of the universe. Luskin notes that Penrose is not, as far as he knows, sympathetic to intelligent design, but when you hear what he says about the initial entropy of the universe you have to wonder why not.

Penrose says that the entropy just after the Big Bang was calibrated to a tolerance of 10000000000 to the 123rd power. Entropy is a measure of how ordered the initial explosion was, and if the value had deviated from the value it actually had by one part in 10000000000^123rd the universe would never have formed. This is, as Penrose notes, incredible precision.

To give you an idea of the size of that number consider that in the entire universe there are approximately 10^80 atoms.

I once read somewhere that scientists usually reject something as having occurred by chance if the odds of it happening randomly are 1 in 10^17. Evidently, though, if the alternative to believing in chance is the existence of an intelligent architect of the universe then it doesn't matter to a lot of people what the odds are against chance explanations, they'll be clung to with all the tenacity of a man gripping a cliff face with his fingertips lest he be plunged into the abyss.

RLC

Whatever Happened to Truth?

Some years ago a book about the post-modern subjectivization of truth titled Whatever Happened to Truth? was published. I thought of that title when I read an article at Breitbart recently about how opponents of the tea party hope to smear and discredit it, not by countering their arguments, not by offering a better way forward, but by infiltrating their rallies and shouting bigoted remarks that an otiose media can be depended upon to impute to conservative bigotry.

The Breitbart article notes that the group's website states that:

"whenever possible we will act on behalf of the tea-party in ways that exaggerate their least appealing qualities (Misspelled protest signs, wild claims in tv interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public's opinion of them. We will also use the inside information we have gained in order to disrupt and derail their plans."

The Breitbart piece adds this:

Opponents of the fiscally conservative tea party movement say they plan to infiltrate and dismantle the political group by trying to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic and moronic.

Jason Levin, creator of crashtheteaparty.org, said Monday the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country who are trying to recruit members to infiltrate tea party events for April 15-tax filing day, when tea party groups across the country are planning to gather and protest high taxes.

"Do I think every member of the tea party is a homophobe, racist or a moron? No, absolutely not," Levin said. "Do I think most of them are homophobes, racists or morons? Absolutely."

Levin has quite artfully shot himself and his movement in the foot by inadvertently managing to cast suspicion on every allegation of tea-party misbehavior both past and future. Why, given the tactics that this group is embracing, should we believe that the insults and threats that congresspersons alleged they heard during the health care fracas actually came from opponents of the bill? Why should we think that any such excesses that occur in the future should be imputed to tea-partiers and not to lefty imposters? The left has Levin to thank for disarming them of one of their more potent propaganda weapons.

In any event, Levin's behavior is rather typical of the secular left. Sensing that they have no arguments with which to counter the tea-party's fiscal conservatism they plan to resort, essentially, to lying about it. Let's see who on the left is willing to condemn Levin and his group for their despicable contempt for the truth and their appalling willingness to defame and libel their opponents. Perhaps the condemnations will start rolling in shortly, but if they don't it'll imply that a lot of liberals don't see anything wrong with what Levin is proposing. If that's the case then we'll have learned (or confirmed) something very important about the character of people on the left, i.e. too many of them need more than what they have.

RLC

Winners and Losers

In the brave new world of the coming decade things look bright for the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax. Like candidate Obama said, everybody's better off if we spread the wealth around.

Well, maybe not quite everybody, but life is certainly going to get better for the people lounging in the wagon and a lot harder for the people pulling it:

It's only fair.

RLC

The Art of Compromise

From time to time the complaint is aired that conservatives have been too unwilling to compromise with the Obama administration on policy, most recently health care reform. Republicans, at least to the extent that they're conservatives, are labeled intransigent and unwilling to bend in order to reach a modus vivendi to help the American people.

What's usually elided or not understood is that compromise between liberal progressives and conservatives is not a compromise at all. A compromise occurs when both sides give up something in order to gain a little, but in any "compromise" between left and right all that happens is that the country moves further to the left than they were before.

Political compromise is an instance of the Hegelian dialectic in which thesis and antithesis fuse to result in a new synthesis which moves the whole system further away from the old status quo, even as a new status quo is established.

The move leftward may be slow, but it's inexorable. This is because progressives, no matter how much change they have achieved, are always promoting more. There's no point at which they can say that we have arrived or that they are satisfied. If there were they would then no longer be progressives, instead they would morph into reactionaries.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are simply trying to hold on to whatever they can. They've bought the notion, at least Republicans have, that we can not roll back any of the "progress" we've made in the last century. Thus the arrow of change flies ineluctably in only one direction. As long as conservatives are persuaded that compromise is politically necessary the country will continue it's long march leftward.

Any compromise between conservative and liberal can only benefit the liberal. The dialectic ensures that compromise is always a victory for the liberal and always a defeat for the conservative. It's as if a man, let's say a Republican, has a hundred dollars in his wallet and wants to keep it. A Democrat approaches him, however, and asks that the Republican donate the hundred dollars to the Democrat. The Republican refuses so the Democrat, not wishing to appear unreasonable, says "Okay, let's compromise. You give me $50, and I'll be satisfied." The Republican refuses that demand as well, but neither does he wish to seem unreasonable, so he agrees to give his colleague $20. The Democrat, in the spirit of bipartisanship, accepts the compromise.

A deal is struck and everyone basks in the eudemonia that flows from the harmonious resolution of the disagreement. The Republican feels good that his negotiation prevented him from losing his entire $100. He fails to notice that he has gained nothing and is in fact poorer than he was. Months later the Democrat returns and asks that the Republican donate the $80 remaining in his wallet. The Republican, not wishing to appear niggardly and unreasonable, and caught up in the exuberant spirit of bipartisan compromise, refuses to give the $80 but gladly parts with another $20.

And so it goes until one day the Republican realizes that he has nothing left. He's "compromised" it all away. Conservatives realize that compromise is just a strategy liberals employ to incrementally nudge the country leftward. Unfortunately, a lot of Republicans, eager for the public to see them as wise and moderate, don't see that they're being played for suckers at all.

RLC

Does God Torment the Innocent?

Philosopher of religion Alexander Pruss constructs an imaginary dialogue at Prosblogion between "Ari" and "Cal" on the question whether, given the truth of Calvinism, God can still be just. Here's the opening exchange:

Ari: Consider this horrific theology: God forces Sally to sin, in a way that takes away her responsibility, and then he intentionally causes eternal torment to her.

Cal: I thought you were smarter than that. That isn't Calvinist theology! Calvinism holds that God intentionally causes people to sin in a way that retains their responsibility, and then punishes some of them.

Ari: I didn't say it was a Calvinist theology. You agree that this is a horrific theology, I take it?

Cal: Yes, of course.

Ari: Why?

Cal: Because God is punishing an innocent.

Ari: I said nothing about punishment. I said God intentionally caused eternal torment. I didn't say that the torment was a punishment.

Cal: How does that make it not be horrific?

Ari: I agree it's horrific. I just want to get clear on why. It's horrific because eternal torment is intentionally imposed on an innocent, right?

Read the rest at the link, but Calvinists are forewarned that they will not like the way it goes. Be sure to check the comments as well.

RLC

Metaethics

In the course of a critique of the Sam Harris TED video about which we posted the other day, atheist philosopher Massimo Pigliucci of the City University of New York makes the following claim:

So, how do we ground moral reasoning? This is the province of a whole area of inquiry known as metaethics, and I suggest that Harris would benefit from reading about it....Just as we don't need a good answer to the question of where mathematics comes from to engage in mathematical reasoning, so it is not very productive to keep asking philosophers for "the ultimate foundations" of what they do (if this sounds like an easy way out to you, remember that neither math nor science itself have self-justifiable foundations).

Well, yes, but this sounds as if Pigliucci seems to realize that as an atheist he has no grounds for making moral judgments, especially those which involve anyone but himself, and doesn't want anyone taking the trouble to point this out.

He's also confusing apples and oranges in comparing the grounds for one's ethical judgments with the grounds for mathematics. We don't keep asking for an explanation for the ultimate foundations of mathematics because the assertions in mathematics are self-evident or derived from self-evident axioms. It is these that form the ultimate foundation of the discipline, and, unlike the ultimate foundation of many ethical theories, they're neither arbitrary nor subjective preferences. They're objective and universally accepted. There's no dispute about them, but it's not so with the grounds for our ethical claims.

It's silly to ask someone who has just pointed out that 1 + 1 = 2 to explain why he believes that, but it's not at all silly to ask someone who insists, for instance, that families should limit themselves to two children to give an account of what he's basing this moral adjuration upon.

No general ethical claim is self-evident. There are some, of course, that have powerful intuitive appeal, like the assertion that it's always wrong to torture children, but intuitive appeal doesn't make the claim self-evident in the sense that 1 + 1 = 2 is. To see this, consider that in any possible world 1 + 1 would still equal 2, but there are possible worlds, as unpleasant as they may be to imagine, in which torturing children would not be wrong. For example, such behavior would not be wrong in a world in which there are no moral duties, which is precisely the sort of world this world would be were there no God.

To request that a person making a moral judgment explain the foundations upon which the judgment rests is to safeguard against having them bind the rest of us to their own arbitrary, personal preferences. It's also a guard against allowing them to persuade us that they're really saying something meaningful about the world - as opposed to merely telling us something about their own subjective tastes - when they declare a particular behavior right or wrong.

Perhaps Pigliucci wants to be able to make moral judgments without having to defend the fact that his judgments are either hanging in mid-air or piggy-backing upon a theistic understanding of morality, but, if so, he really shouldn't be permitted to get away with it.

RLC

Feedback

There are some thoughtful reader responses to recent posts on our Feedback Page. Please check them out.

RLC

How You Can Tell If You're an RBH

Jim Wallis at God's Politics blog grieves the regrettable nastiness of our current political rhetoric and offers readers a chance to sign a "Covenant for Civility" which I encourage our readers to check out.

Wallis writes:

Just a few months ago, a deeply concerned, veteran member of Congress called me to express real despair about the alarming level of disrespect, personal attacks, and even hateful rhetoric that was occurring among her colleagues - reflecting a degeneration of public debate in our national culture. This month, another member of Congress called to express real fear about threats of violence he and other elected officials had experienced against themselves and their family members. Political debate, even vigorous debate, is a healthy thing for a democracy; but to question the integrity, patriotism, and even faith of those with whom we disagree is destructive to democratic discourse, and to threaten or even imply the possibility of violence toward those whose politics or worldview differs from ours is a sign of moral danger, and indeed, a sign of democracy's unraveling.

I join with Wallis in lamenting the deplorable ugliness of much of our politics, but if we're going to change it we have to recognize what has engendered it. In my opinion, much of the ugliness is due to the refusal of many on the left to accurately characterize their conservative opposition. The attempt to distort in the public mind exactly what it is that conservatives believe goes back at least to the Robert Bork confirmation hearings in the 1990s and continues through contemporary depictions of the tea-partiers. Those who disagree with liberal philosophy and policy are often disparaged as "extremists" or, worse, "right-wing" extremists. And it goes without saying, of course, that extremists are ipso facto racists, bigots, and homophobes. After a couple of decades of listening to this sort of slander it begins to grow tedious.

One can only endure being called a lout for so long before one realizes that he is conversing with people who are either dishonest or who think only in stereotypes, and at that point dialogue just breaks down. Anyway, here's a little test to see if you fit the description, widely circulated on the left, of a right-wing, racist, bigot, homophobe (RBH) extremist.

You know you are such a creature if:

You believe that the Constitution matters and that it means what it says, not what creative jurists think it should say.

You think that people who come to this country should do so through proper legal channels, that we should control who comes in, and that we should give preference to those who have skills to contribute.

You believe that we should value life and that laws should err on the side of protecting it.

You think it is reckless and foolish to spend excessively more than we have - even if what we spend it on is a good thing - and to burden our children with a mountain of crushing debt.

You want the 47% of the households in this country which don't pay any income taxes to get out of the wagon every now and then and help push.

You believe that the best way to create jobs is to make it easier for businesses to make money and that the worst way is to shackle businesses with high taxes and onerous regulations.

You believe that everyone should be treated equally under the law. There should be no favoritism shown to anyone on the basis of race and that all people in any field of endeavor should be held to the same standard to which we hold those of the majority race.

You believe that the science regarding climate change has been politicized and is far from conclusive, particularly as it concerns both the causes and effects of global warming.

You believe that after thousands of years of settled opinion about marriage we don't need to tinker with it now.

You believe that much of the major media slants toward the political left and that this bias causes them to give a distorted, often unfair, view of politics and policy.

You hold religious convictions which you take seriously and which inform your views on everything else in your life.

You believe that terrorists are not criminals but deadly enemies who should not be accorded the same rights we give American citizens.

You believe that the problems in education are generally exacerbated rather than ameliorated by government bureaucracy.

You believe that the United States has been a force for good in the world, that we should continue to be, and that a necessary condition for remaining so is maintaining a powerful military.

You believe that big, bloated government is like a millstone around a society's neck, and that that government is best which is loath to extend its power unless a clear consensus exists that it is in the common interest to do so.

You believe that people of sound mind and body who are made dependent upon government for their needs and wants are generally hurt more than they are helped.

You take seriously your rights and obligations as a citizen to be involved in the affairs of your government and to hold your representatives accountable for the quality of service they render.

To the extent that you agree with these seventeen characteristics of "right-wing extremists," I'm afraid you are, in the eyes of many in our media and on the political left, a raging, hateful RBH and should be embarrassed to show your face in public.

RLC

Rod Dreher on Bruce Waltke

Rod Dreher at BeliefNet has an interesting post on the case of Bruce Waltke a theologian at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando who has recently resigned his position due to controversial statements he made in a video on BioLogos, a blog started by Francis Collins to promote theistic evolution.

Dreher writes:

Shocking news from the world of Protestant theology: Bruce Waltke, arguably the pre-eminent Old Testament scholar in the field, has resigned from the Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando. Why? It's not clear, but this comes right after he was excoriated by other conservative Protestant figures for statements made in a video posted to the BioLogos website.... According to an eyebrow-raising statement on the BioLogos site, Waltke stated in a video commentary that had been posted to the site that the church needed to come to terms with the fact of evolution, explaining that "if the data is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution, to deny that reality will make us a cult...some odd group that is not really interacting with the world.

And rightly so, because we are not using our gifts and trusting God's Providence that brought us to this point of our awareness." He said that refusing to deal with science as it is will marginalize Christians.

Everything Waltke is quoted as saying here seems true enough, but it raises the question whether the data really is "overwhelmingly in favor of evolution" and the even deeper question of what Waltke means by the term "evolution." There's much empirical data to support belief in common descent, but common descent is not what most people mean by evolution. The word is usually used to refer to the progression from simpler to more complex forms of life driven by purely mechanical processes with no input at any point along the way by an intelligent agent.

This is more accurately called Darwinian evolution and it's very hard to see how this view could be compatible with a Christian worldview.

Moreover, for this claim there is actually no empirical evidence, nor can there be. It's impossible to demonstrate or test the assertion that no intelligent agent was involved in calibrating the values of physics or in generating the information upon which life is based. Yet Darwinism assumes the truth of that assertion. It is therefore not a scientific claim, it's simply a religious affirmation of a faith commitment.

Dreher adds the following comments:

[E]ven though I would agree that Waltke's controversial remarks were overstated, it is all but incomprehensible that in 2010, any American scholar, particularly one of his academic distinction, could be so harshly bullied for stating an opinion consonant with current scientific orthodoxy. Doesn't Waltke at least have the right to be wrong about something like this? Don't mistake me, I believe that any and every religion, and religious institution, has the right, and indeed the obligation, to set standards and to enforce them. But is this really the hill these Reformed folks want to die on?

To be sure, the intolerance goes both ways, as Dr. Richard Sternberg can attest. Still, Waltke was not questioning basic Christian dogmas, only asserting the importance of religion reconciling itself with science. As 2010 Templeton laureate and eminent scientist Francisco Ayala recently said, he's had university students who, when they learn about evolutionary science, come to believe quite wrongly that they have to choose between science and their faith. However well meaning, the people who have apparently pushed Waltke out of the seminary over this are not protecting the integrity of the faith; they're badly compromising it.

I share Dreher's concern about bullying as well as his concern about picking our fights carefully, but I also wonder about his characterization that this was not a matter of "questioning basic Christian dogmas, only asserting the importance of religion reconciling itself with science." Is it really a question of reconciling religion with science or is it a question of capitulating to a pervasive naturalistic zeitgeist? Is it the empirical facts about the history of life that the people at Reformed Theological Seminary are resisting or is it the interpretative framework into which those facts are placed that raises their concern? I think these are relevant and important questions.

Dreher concludes with this:

I spoke with an ex-Evangelical friend about this today, telling her how mysterious Waltke's bullying was to me. She said it's not the least bit surprising to her. "You didn't grow up with it, so you have no idea how central Biblical literalism on this stuff is," she said. "It's all about Biblical inerrancy. If Genesis is not literally true in every respect, in their minds the whole thing falls apart. They can't give an inch on this."

Maybe so. The concern his friend expresses reminded me of the words of Augustine commenting on the difficulties of interpreting Genesis:

"In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines our position, we too fall with it."

In the end, though, I think Dreher is a bit too hard on Reformed Theological Seminary. After all, if the seminary has a statement of faith, and if Waltke has wandered beyond its limits and refuses to conform himself to it, whether the statement is reasonable or not, whether it contains hills they'd be better off not fighting over or not, it's probably appropriate that they part company.

RLC

Intellectual Hares and Tortoises

Have you ever been in the presence of someone really smart whose mental agility and power were so impressive that it made you feel, well, hopelessly slow? Have you known people so quick in their ability to analyze and solve problems that you felt like an intellectual tortoise by comparison? Well, if you're a tortoise don't despair. Research is suggesting that the cause of slower thinking is also a cause of greater creativity. Here's the nub of the New Scientist report:

As far as the internet or phone networks go, bad connections are bad news. Not so in the brain, where slower connections may make people more creative.

Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues had found that creativity correlates with low levels of the chemical N-acetylaspartate, which is found in neurons and seems to promote neural health and metabolism.

But neurons make up the brain's grey matter - the tissue traditionally associated with thinking power, rather than creativity. So Jung is now focusing his creativity studies on white matter, which is largely made of the fatty myelin sheaths that wrap around neurons. Less myelin means the white matter has a lower "integrity" and transmits information more slowly.

Several recent studies have suggested that white matter of high integrity in the cortex, which is associated with higher mental function, means increased intelligence. But when Jung looked at the link between white matter and creativity, he found something quite different.

Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers.

Jung suggests that slower communication between some areas may actually make people more creative. "This might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity," he says.

The results are surprising, given that high white-matter integrity is normally considered a good thing, says Paul Thompson at the University of California in Los Angeles. He acknowledges that speedy information transfer may not be vital for creative thought. "Sheer mental speed might be good for playing chess or doing a Rubik's cube, but you don't necessarily think of writing novels or creating art as being something that requires sheer mental speed," he says.

So, next time you're in the presence of a really outstanding thinker, don't be jealous. Console yourself with the thought that you're quite possibly more creative than he is.

RLC

Coal vs. Nukes

The West Virginia coal mine accident is a terrible tragedy, but for those of us not directly touched by the loss of life it might not be insensitive to reflect on a statistic:

The number of workers known to have died in the West Virginia coal mine tragedy is now at 25.

The average number of coal mine deaths per year since 2000 is 30.

The number of people known to have died in the U.S. as a result of accidents in the 40 year history of electricity generated by nuclear power is 0.

And yet we refuse to build more nuclear power plants because we're afraid that nuclear power will pose a hazard to people, both the plants themselves and the storage of the waste. Yet we continue to mine coal even though we know that coal poses a hazard, both to those who mine it and to the environment into which the combustion products are dumped.

As if this weren't inscrutable enough, President Obama wants to solve the problems coal poses to human safety and the environment by simply eliminating both coal and nuclear power as a source of energy. How we will light our homes once he has ushered in the golden age of a nuclear-free and fossil fuel-free world he hasn't yet explained to us, but we can be sure that he knows what he's doing.

RLC

Transcending Race

The New York Times confirms that Barack Obama is indeed the nation's first black president, having inexplicably checked "Black" to identify his race on his census form. I say "inexplicably" because the man who was going to bring us together and end all of that ugly divisiveness that plagues our politics, the man who was going to transcend race, could have checked "Other." Instead, he chose to identify with the black father he never knew, and spurn the white family that raised him.

Doesn't that seem faintly racist, if I may be forgiven for asking? If someone had one white parent and one black wouldn't it be inaccurate and arbitrary to call oneself white?

A student once asked, if every president until Mr. Obama had been black would everyone be calling President Obama the first white president?

Nah.

RLC

Re: The Most Insidious Drug

Kyle suggests (Re: The Most Insidious Drug) that we treat pornography like we treat tobacco and alcohol - tax it. We might also mount the same sort of campaign against pornography that's been mounted against smoking:

[T]he issue of pornography reminds me of the issue of tobacco smoking. Through anti-smoking ads and taxation, smoking has significantly decreased in America. So my plan is to begin by taxing pornography. With a 97 billion dollar a year industry, a tax is going to provide some significant income. With that money, let's start doing some meaningful and powerful research on the subject. Conclusively get the pros and cons of pornography and show the world our results. I think we're all pretty confident that it is harmful. After that, begin to use the money to target sex offenders, provide recover programs for those addicted to pornography and sexual addiction...

Interesting idea.

RLC

Harris on Morality

Neo-atheist Sam Harris delivers a lecture on morality in which he argues, sometimes sensibly, against moral relativism. Unfortunately, he seeks to ground his argument in the belief that somehow science can tell us what is objectively right and what is objectively wrong. He sets human flourishing as his summum bonum and then argues that whatever promotes that flourishing is right and whatever impedes it is wrong.

But why should we think that human flourishing is the summum bonum? His answer seems to be because we just feel that it is, and anyone who doesn't feel this way is wrong. Not only is this unpersuasive, it also leaves unanswered the question of why, if flourishing is indeed the greatest good we can pursue, I shouldn't pursue it just for myself or why our nation shouldn't pursue it at the expense of other nations. Why should anyone care about the flourishing of others? Why is it wrong to subordinate other people's flourishing to my own? And if death is the end what does it matter how we live anyway? Why not maximize whatever pleasures are to be found in life and let other people take care of themselves?

Harris, unfortunately, doesn't address those questions, but they really are at the heart of the metaethical debate between theists and atheists. Atheism has no answer to questions like why I should care for the poor, or why we should conserve the earth's resources, or why I should contribute to Haitian earthquake relief. The fact is that there's simply no reason why one should sacrifice anything for others unless it's in his own self-interest somehow to do so.

Here's Harris' lecture:

It's a peculiarity among science-oriented atheists like Harris that they so often argue that we should all behave in certain ways because, well, it feels to them like we should. The oddest thing about the lecture, though, is that he was given a standing ovation at its conclusion. Having listened to nothing significant for twenty five minutes or so the audience jumped to their feet to express their approval. Pretty funny.

RLC

The Looming Tsunami

A crowd of people lolling about on a beach in mid-morning takes no notice of the modest swell far off on the horizon. The weather's a little cloudy, but the forecasts in the newspapers and talking heads on tv are chattering on about how everything is soon going to be beautiful on this bright summer day, how the weather is improving, and how beach-goers will soon be basking in the glorious light of the summer sun.

A note of concern ripples through the crowd, however, when some notice that the surf appears to be draining out to sea, as if someone pulled the plug. Even so, the vacationers go on about their business applying tanning lotion, building sand castles, reading a pulp novel, listening to music, eating and drinking. But soon the surf line is a hundred yards or more further out than it was just a few minutes ago, and the crowd grows puzzled. Something is happening. They look around and see a few people hurriedly leaving the beach. Suddenly, someone yells to look out toward the ocean and to their horror a huge mountain of water, a 100 foot tsunami, is rising up and rushing headlong toward the beach. The people panic and try to scramble inland to safety, but it's too late. The tsunami crashes down upon them with unimaginable force crushing and sweeping away everything.

This is a parable of what is in store for us as a result of the incomprehensible fiscal recklessness of the last year and a half. But don't take my word for it, instead take about ten minutes to read this speech given by Rep. Paul Ryan on March 31st. Ryan is like one of those tsunami detectors that have been placed out in the ocean to alert coastal populations to the threat of an imminent tsunami. His speech is the equivalent of a three-credit college course and his warning is more valuable than any course any college offers.

If you care about your future and that of your children you should read it. You can find it here.

RLC

Flat Tax

For at least fifty years conservatives have been supporting reform of our tax structure. One of the most popular ideas that has been around for a while is to switch from the current labyrinthine complexity to a simple flat tax. The flat tax has so many advantages that it's hard to understand why we don't adopt it, other than that too many powerful people make too much money off the current system. The flat tax would replace all the confusing forms, deductions, regulations, exceptions, etc. with one simple post card size form. Instead of pages and pages of tax tables everyone would simply pay 17% of their gross income in taxes. The guy who makes 100 times what you make would pay 100 times more than you pay.

The Cato Institute has put together this video with Dan Mitchell to briefly explain how a flat tax works and what its advantages are:

Not the least of the advantages would be that the bloated IRS would be reduced in size to a fraction of its current bulk.

Another option that has excited a lot of people is something called the Fair Tax. It, too, would be a great improvement over the current system, but it might require repeal of the 16th amendment. In any event, the current system is nothing more than a full-employment mechanism for the IRS and tax lawyers. There are better, more just ways, of doing raising revenue, and we should implement them.

RLC

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Smear 'Em

I have from time to time confessed that I have a very difficult time listening to radio talker Sean Hannity. His reliance upon rhetorical tics that have the same cumulative effect as Chinese water torture, the way his voice goes into unmodulated screed mode as soon as his show opens and continues for three hours, his ersatz humility, the unctuous piety with which he lectures callers about moral issues, and his rude, arrogant treatment of callers who fail to kiss his ring often have me reaching for the radio's off button after about five minutes of being subjected to his assault on my sensibilities. Even so, a lot of people like him, and that has made him a target for the Left. Unfortunately, when the Left selects a target, truth isn't allowed to get in their way.

A week or so ago MSNBC was breathlessly reporting irregularities in Hannity's charitable work, but their allegations were soon shown to be absurd. Unabashed, they've now latched on to an even more ludicrous allegation - that Hannity expressed sympathy on his show for Timothy McVeigh. This charge is so laughable, given the context in which Hannity made his allegedly inculpatory remark, that you have to conclude that his critics, specifically a couple of lefty radio talkers named Mike Malloy and Ed Schultz, are either incredibly dumb or maliciously dishonest, or both (Schultz avowed last January that he'd be willing to cheat to keep Scott Brown from being elected in Massachussetts, so we're not dealing here with a man known for scrupulosity. This video will give you further insight into what sort of person Ed Schultz is).

Anyway, what Malloy and Schultz want you to believe to be so breathtakingly scandalous was something Hannity said to a bunch of tea-party types at a rally recently. Here's the quote:

"When you think of the vast majorities that they [the Democrats] have in Congress, and they had to bribe, backroom deals, corruption [to pass health care]. That's all because the tea party movement, the people, all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here, as they say."

The audience applauded.

Hannity was clearly using sarcasm - a weapon he admittedly wields with an unfortunate lack of dexterity - to make fun of the Left's portrayal of tea-partiers as violent extremists. His jab was, however, either too subtle for Malloy and Schultz to grasp or else they're so desperate to find something they can twist and distort that they're willing to seize any reed, no matter how slender, that might be pressed into service to discredit him.

Whatever one thinks of Hannity, the behavior of Malloy and Schultz reported at the link has the distinction of being mean, oafish and farcical all at once.

Speaking of farcical, consider MSNBC's Chris Matthews who's all beside himself because Rush Limbaugh has taken to referring to the Obama administration as a "regime." Matthews was so irate about Limbaugh's use of the pejorative that he recently felt driven to name-calling. Byron York of the Washington Examiner recounts the details of Matthews' tirade:

"I've never seen language like this in the American press," [Matthews] said, "referring to an elected representative government, elected in a totally fair, democratic, American election -- we will have another one in November, we'll have another one for president in a couple years -- fair, free, and wonderful democracy we have in this country.... We know that word, 'regime.' It was used by George Bush, 'regime change.' You go to war with regimes. Regimes are tyrannies. They're juntas. They're military coups. The use of the word 'regime' in American political parlance is unacceptable, and someone should tell the walrus [Limbaugh] to stop using it."

Matthews didn't stop there. "I never heard the word 'regime,' before, have you?" he said to NBC's Chuck Todd. "I don't even think Joe McCarthy ever called this government a 'regime.'"

Well, as Mr. York reminds the forgetful Mr. Matthews, during the Bush administration the term saw the light of day over 6,700 times. It was used dozens of times in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and on Matthew's own network, MSNBC, in reference to Mr. Bush's presidency. In fact, it was used several times on Matthews' own show and, amusingly enough, at least once by Matthews himself.

I leave it to the reader to decide how best to describe Mr. Matthews' chastisement of Mr. Limbaugh for invoking a term that Matthews himself has chosen to employ.

RLC

Just Give 'Em That Old Time Religion

Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, an atheist and co-author of What Darwin Got Wrong, has a piece at Spiked Review of Books that claims that Darwinism is a secular religion whose devotees brook no questioning or challenges. As a prelude to his argument he recounts this story:

Some months ago an American philosopher explained to a highly sophisticated audience in Britain what, in his opinion, was wrong, indeed fatally wrong, with the standard neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution. He made it crystal clear that his criticism was not inspired by creationism, intelligent design or any remotely religious motivation. A senior gentleman in the audience erupted, in indignation: 'You should not say such things, you should not write such things! The creationists will treasure them and use them against science.' The lecturer politely asked: 'Even if they are true?' To which the instant and vibrant retort was: 'Especially if they are true!' with emphasis on the 'especially'.

For at least this gentleman, who sounds like no one so much as Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, truth is not as important as is maintaining the viability of the materialist dogma. The dogma must not be questioned lest faith in materialism wane among the masses. The dogma's weaknesses must not be publicized lest its opponents be encouraged thereby.

John Stuart Mill, perhaps the paradigmatic classical liberal, wrote in his great essay On Liberty that:

[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: If wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit; the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Mill goes on to say that when a belief is insulated from criticism, suffering no fresh and living conviction to challenge it, it does nothing for the mind or heart except stand sentinel over them to keep them vacant. Mill was thinking here of theistic religion but the admonition applies just as much to modern naturalistic religion as well. Maybe moreso.

HT: Telic Thoughts

RLC

When Is Profiling Not Profiling?

The answer to the question in the title is, "Whenever Democrats do it."

When it was thought that the Bush administration was engaged in profiling terrorist suspects, or whenever it was suggested that we should profile (which, of course, we should), the left-leaning media got all in a swivet about infringements of civil rights and other such pretensions. Now the Obama administration is actually going to profile airline travelers, though they won't call it that, and you probably haven't heard much more than subdued tsk tsking from the Left:

While trying hard to avoid admitting to "profiling," the Obama administration has introduced new measures for screening US-bound air travelers based on how closely their personal characteristics match intelligence on potential terrorists. Nationality, age, certain physical characteristics, recently visited countries and partial (Muslim-sounding) names will be used alongside the no-fly list to step up flight security.

Here's a rule of thumb for understanding how the Left interprets any security policy enacted by an administration: If Republicans do it it's ipso facto an outrageous threat to our civil rights. If Democrats do it it's ipso facto a perfectly reasonable effort to guarantee our safety.

If these people ever need to supplement their income maybe they should consider stand-up comedy. They're good at it.

RLC

Resurrection Day

This post originally appeared on Viewpoint on Easter 2005:

Jon Meacham of Newsweek, perhaps chastened by the criticism he received following his foray into Christian theology over Christmas, pens a much less offensive column about the Resurrection of Jesus in the current issue. He notes that the tomb of Christ was almost certainly empty that first Easter morning. If it were not, he observes, the opponents of Christ had only to produce the body to abort the religious turmoil that the sect of Christians was beginning to arouse. This they did not do, a startling historical fact, really, which leads us to the obvious conclusion that they couldn't do it. This leads us in turn to ask why not.

No naturalistic explanation of the empty tomb makes sense. The most common of these is that the disciples stole the corpse, but this hypothesis is plausible only if one assumes a priori that non-natural explanations are impossible. To believe that the disciples stole the body one must believe that a band of terrified fishermen overpowered an armed military guard, a crime for which they were never arrested or charged, stole the cadaver, and eventually underwent torture and martyrdom for preaching around the world what they knew to be a lie. People will die for a lie they believe to be true, but only men suffering from some form of dementia would die for a lie they knew to be a lie, and there's no reason to think these men were demented.

Surely, if the authorities believed the disciples had stolen the body they would have brought irresistibly persuasive techniques to bear to coerce them into divulging its whereabouts. Yet there's no indication whatsoever in the historical record that this was even attempted.

The skeptic says, as was noted above, that no matter how implausible a given naturalistic explanation may be it's still more believable than the claim that a man rose from the dead. This objection, however, rests on the assumption that there is no God, an assumption that is much easier to make than to defend. If, contrary to the skeptical view, it is possible that God exists then miracles are indeed also possible, and if they are possible, we have to examine the evidence for an alleged instance of one, especially one as significant as the resurrection of Jesus, to determine whether it is, in fact, credible. The evidence for the historical, physical revivification of Christ, many scholars have concluded, is at least as powerful as that for any other event in antiquity.

Other attempts to avoid the conclusion that a miracle actually occurred are equally unimpressive. Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code adopts a version of the swoon theory, that after some thirty six hours without medical care, Jesus somehow recovered from his wounds, including the spear thrust, with sufficient vigor to roll away the heavy stone blocking the tomb. He accomplished this astonishing feat without being detected by the Roman guard, and subsequently appeared to the disciples and dozens, even hundreds, of others, looking so hale and hearty that they believed that he had conquered death and was the very Son of God.

Even if something like this could have happened, the disciples would have known that Jesus had not "risen from the dead" in any theologically significant sense. He would have eventually died (or, as Brown has it, absconded to France with his beloved Mary Magdalene), and his dead body would be proof that he was not the Messiah. This, then, brings us back to the question above: Why would people have been willing to be tortured and martyred for a man they would have realized was a false messiah?

Skeptics scoff at miracles, but the most important miracle in the history of Christendom is one which defies any attempt to explain away. The most plausible explanation for the empty tomb, unless one holds an a priori commitment to atheism, is that God actually did raise Jesus from the dead just as we are promised that we will be. Because death did not result in the annihilation of His being we have the hope that neither will it result in ours.

This is the wonderful significance of the event Christians celebrate every Easter. Have a wonderful Resurrection Day.

Dick and Bill

Thoughts on Mean Girls

The story of Phoebe Prince, the Massachussetts 15 year-old immigrant from Ireland who was bullied and harassed to the extent that she took her life is heart-breakingly sad. The girls who drove her to suicide exhibited a phenomenon common enough to have been given a name, "mean girls," apparently after a movie by that title which was also about girls who behave abominably.

There's been a lot of talk about the culpability of the school officials in Prince's death, but the question we might better ponder is why girls behave like this in the first place? What kind of human beings would hound a girl to her death and then continue to mock her on Facebook afterward? Are packs of girl's pushing other girls to total desperation now a normal part of an already fetid and effete culture? Why were these girls so cruel, why did they have so little empathy, so little compassion or kindness in their hearts?

Of course it's human nature to be cruel and resentful of outsiders. Compassion and acceptance of others have to be taught. These virtues have to be instilled in our children as a duty, and a culture that has abandoned the basis for moral duty, i.e. a Christian understanding of the world, is generally going to do a poor job of teaching that we have any such obligations to others.

Courtesy, forgiveness, selflessness, generosity and magnanimity in giving the benefit of the doubt all require a conviction that this is the proper way to conduct oneself, but if someone asks the question why one should comport oneself this way our post-Christian culture can give them no answer other than to say that it's nice to do so. In other words, we should be nice, we try to convince our children, because it's nice. That's going to fail to persuade a lot of young people, but it's the best we can do without invoking socially proscribed religious sanctions.

Consequently, our young people absorb their ethics from their cultural role models, and these are often, though not always, foul-mouthed, slutty, selfish, materialistic and petty. Many young girls learn at an early age that the most important thing in life is to look good and be popular and the best way to be popular is to be hard, loose, and hot. Failing that, the best way to consolidate one's status in the social hierarchy is to display power over another, and the best way to do that is by showing that you can hurt them. Young women weaned on this Darwinian view of what life's all about have little warmth in their hearts and little room for compassion in their souls.

As tragic and disgusting as the behavior of the culprits in Massachussetts was, no one should be surprised by it. Simply look at how too many of their role models behave, look at who and what the entertainment media incessantly promote, consider that many kids grow up with no real moral instruction and no foundation for whatever instruction they do get, and the wonder is that more girls aren't as cruel and repellent as the South Hadley High School nine.

RLC

Clark Pinnock

Those readers with an interest in theology will be saddened by this news. Thomas Oord writes at his blog that:

Clark Pinnock is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Clark sent John Sanders and me the following note:

Dear Tom and John:

I want to inform you that I am now middle stage Alzheimer's. I will not be able to do my writing etc. I am 73 years now, and I've enjoyed my biblical three score and ten. I am not bitter. I have had a good life. I'll meet you over Jordan if not before.

You are free to make this news known.

With love,

Clark

Clark Pinnock was an extremely influential theologian during the latter half of the twentieth century, especially among Evangelicals. He was most well-known, and most controversial, as a champion of the view called Open Theism or Open Theology.

Oord pens a splendid summary of Pinnock's view on this issue on the same page that he features his email. Those interested in the subject will find Oord's treatment very helpful.

RLC

Killing the American Dream

The Weekly Standard discerns a distinct hostility in the Obama administration toward business, wealth and achievement:

This animus toward accomplishment is producing significant political consequences. The February issue of Trends Magazine included an article titled, "The War on Achievement and its Building Backlash."

"For 250 years, America has been known throughout the world as the place where anyone could work hard, scrape together a little money and invest in a great idea," the Trends writers observe. "But a creeping kind of governmental interference has seriously threatened this ideal," they argue. In other words, the Trends writers continue, "the very bedrock concept underlying what's typically called 'the American Dream' is threatened by these measures."

Some specific pillars in the anti-achievement platform appear popular when polled - like raising taxes on the wealthy. Yet that's because higher taxes on the wealthy is never linked with any costs for the middle class in these surveys. Once voters understand there is a point at which taxing the rich or other perks produces negative economic consequences, the poll numbers would shift dramatically. Just ask the cocktail waitress in Vegas how Obama's tax and bonus rhetoric affects her economic prospects.

Rather than protecting the middle class, Obama's policies threaten their long-term ambitions through piling up unprecedented levels of debt justified by scorekeeping gimmicks. The president and his staff argued the health bill would reduce the deficit over the first ten years. But that's only because it includes ten years of taxes and spending cuts but only six years of benefits. Has Bernie Madoff become the Democrats' bookkeeper?

There's more at the link. Thanks to Jason for passing it along.

Actually the situation is even more dire than this article suggests. Keep checking back for more articles on the coming day of fiscal reckoning with which our government has put us on a collison course. We have to wonder why they're doing this. What is their justification for burying our children under mountains of debt?

All we get from the President are assurances that we've "turned the corner" on the recession even as his policies virtually guarantee that any recovery is going to be very short-lived. It's all very troubling.

RLC