Blind Faith

Someone at Uncommon Descent poses this puzzler for our Tuesday morning meditation:

How did the term “skeptic” come to mean “people who believe in multiverses, space aliens, and random creation of meaningful information?”

How did the term “fundamentalist” come to mean “people who believe based only on evidence”?

Good questions. It's a source of wonderment, at least for me, that "skeptics" often deride theism and theists for believing in God, for which belief there is much evidence, while themselves believing in such things as an infinite number of worlds, the inevitability of the emergence of life by random chance, the reducibility of consciousness to chemical reactions, the possibility of non-subjective morality without God, the inherent goodness of man, and a host of other naturalistic dogmas for which there's scarcely a shred of evidence for and much evidence against.

Atheists are often wont to say that religious faith is belief despite the lack of evidence. That's not true, however. Belief without evidence is the definition of "blind" faith, and it describes belief in such things as other worlds and abiogenesis perfectly. The faith that religious people cling to is not belief despite the lack of evidence, it's belief despite the lack of proof. As such it's completely rational, indeed more rational than the belief of those who will accept any explanation, no matter how meager the evidence, as long as it doesn't violate their commitment to a non-theistic metaphysics.

Theirs to Lose

According to Peggy Noonan President Obama's only hope for reelection in 2012 is that the Republicans nominate a candidate that seems either "strange, extreme, or barely qualified". Otherwise, the incumbent is toast.

You can read her argument here. Meanwhile, here's an appetizer:

Let’s start with the immediate and go to the overarching. The president is immersed in another stressed and unsuccessful spring after a series of losing seasons. Internationally, he’s involved in a confused effort that involves bombing Libyan government troops and sometimes their rebel opponents, leaving the latter scattered and scurrying. Responsibility to protect is looking like tendency to deflect.

Domestically, the president’s opponents seized the high ground on the great issue of the day, spending and debt, and held it after the president’s speech this week. In last week’s budget duel, the president was outgunned by Republicans in the House and outclassed by Paul Ryan, who offered seriousness and substance as a unique approach to solving our fiscal problems.

In this week’s polls: An Ipsos survey says 69% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, up five points since March. Zogby has only 38% of national respondents saying Mr. Obama deserves re-election, with 55% wanting someone new. Mr. Obama carried Pennsylvania in 2008 by double digits; a poll there this week shows only 42% approving his leadership, with 52% disapproving.

Gallup had the president’s support slipping among blacks and Hispanics, with the latter’s numbers dramatic: 73% supported him when he was inaugurated, 54% do now. Support among whites on Inauguration Day was 60%. Now it is 39%.

The American people elected a virtual unknown to the presidency in 2008 because a) they were disenchanted with the GOP, b) Mr. Obama was hip, eloquent, mysterious, and had a winning smile, and c) his election would be historic and a lot of people, especially the young and minorities, wanted to make history happen.

Now the electorate is suffering buyer's remorse and is asking itself what in the world they were thinking when they swooned over a guy who had a résumé that would fit on one half of a post-it note. Noonan is probably right. The White House is the Republicans' to lose in 2012. Fortunately for Mr. Obama, the GOP has shown in the past a strange predilection for opposing young, charismatic Democrats with superannuated pols with one foot in the retirement home.

They may well do something of the sort again.

Bring Back the Good Old Days

It's very hard to take Jesse Jackson Jr. seriously. The Congressman from Illinois took to the House floor recently to blame our unemployment woes on, of all things, technological innovations like the iPad:

On Friday, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) addressed the United States's current unemployment crisis and claimed the iPad was "probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs."

Jackson, himself an iPad owner, expanded on his statement by pointing to the recent bankruptcy of Borders Books.

"Why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes and Noble? Just buy an iPad and download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine," the Congressman said.

He also cited Chicago State University's initiative to replace textbooks with iPads for freshman students. Jackson stated that the goal of the University was to create a "textbookless campus within four years."

"What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs?" Jackson asked the House. "What becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper? Well, in the not-too-distant future, such jobs simply won't exist."

He also took issue with the device's production overseas: "The iPad is produced in China. It's not produced here in the United States. [...] There is no protection for jobs here in America to ensure that the American people are being put to work."

Now I sympathize with everyone who loses a job for whatever reason, and I lament what appears to be a bleak future for paper and ink books, but really, does Mr. Jackson really believe technological progress is the enemy of workers? We can imagine Mr. Jackson a hundred years ago complaining that the automobile would put thousands of blacksmiths, wagon makers, and leather workers out of work because horses would now be obsolete.

We might also imagine him shaking his head dolefully at the number of candle makers and whalers who went out of business when the light bulb was invented, and there was no longer a demand for candles and whale oil.

Innovation means that some businesses will either evolve or they'll perish, and often many more jobs are created by the new businesses which supplant the old, as long as government stays out of the way.

Think of the millions of new jobs created by the automobile industry and industries which serve it: Car dealerships, the trucking industry, the oil industry, gas stations, road and bridge construction, concrete and steel manufacturers, tire, glass, and electronics industries, parts stores, building construction industries, junkyards and salvage yards, auto repair mechanics, and on and on. None of those jobs, and millions of others which automobile travel make possible, would have existed had the automobile not been invented. That's how things work when men and women are allowed the freedom to apply their genius to developing products that never existed before, but people like Mr. Jackson seem to think this is all regrettable because the blacksmith and cartwright trades were rendered obsolete.

I doubt that iPads will have the same impact as the automobile or the light bulb, but taken as a whole, the computer revolution has certainly created an enormous number of jobs that never existed before computers came on the scene. Of course, people lost jobs, too, if they did tasks that could be performed more cheaply and efficiently by a computer, but is that a bad thing overall?

Imagine that all of our food had to be produced and shipped without the aid of the internal combustion engine. No tractors, combines, trucks, etc. I'm sure we'd have full employment in this country, as almost everyone would be pressed into the task of growing their own food, but I doubt very much that life would be better.

I wonder if Rep. Jackson and Rep. Hank Johnson are good friends. They certainly think alike.

What's Our Policy, Mr. President?

I wish it were possible to make sense out our policy toward Middle Eastern thugs and autocrats, but it just seems incoherent.

For example, President Obama demanded Hosni Mubarak step down as soon as a protest movement rose up demanding his resignation from office. The President followed this by launching missile strikes against Col. Qaddafi's armored forces and anti-aircraft installations.

But he did nothing when Iran brutally suppressed similar uprisings in Tehran, and now Bashar Assad in Syria is murdering demonstrators by the hundreds in the streets of Damascus and Mr. Obama has neither called for his resignation nor taken any military action.

It would be reassuring if the President would employ his vaunted communication skills to articulate the principles that govern American responses to these different situations because it's becoming increasing difficult to discern any coherent policy. We appear to be flying by the seat of our pants, and no doubt our friends in the region, both in government and on the streets, are wondering whether it's wise to be too closely associated with such an unpredictable and undependable ally.

Death of Dignity

The notion that human beings have rights is often said to follow from the belief that human beings have dignity, but in our secular age the concept of human dignity has come in for increasing criticism. The problem is that there is only one reason to think that there's anything about us that gives us inherent value and that's that we believe ourselves to be created by God in His image and that He loves us.

Take God away, however, and the entire superstructure of human worth, dignity, and rights built upon Him collapses. This is what we see happening in Western society today and ironically enough it's people who would otherwise call themselves "humanists" who are promoting the collapse. Mary Ann Glendon has a fine piece on this in the current issue of First Things in which she offers a quick history of how Western intellectuals have gone from enthusiasm for the concept of dignity to antipathy toward it. Here are some highlights:

As the bioethicist Adam Schulman poses the question: “Is dignity a useful concept, or is it a mere slogan that camouflages unconvincing arguments and unarticulated biases?” The question has implications far beyond the field of bioethics. Indeed, it has haunted the entire modern human rights project ever since the drafters of the UN Charter chose to begin that historic document with a profession of the member nations’ “faith” in “freedom and human rights” and in “the dignity and worth of the human person.”

Today, controversies about the meaning and value of the concept are more intense than ever, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to evade the question of whether “dignity” can support the enormous weight it has been asked to carry in moral and political discourse.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote “I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand.”

Some attempts to provide a moral basis for the concept of the dignity of human life proceed in Kantian fashion from the premise that human beings have dignity because they are autonomous beings capable of making rational choices, while others, following Rousseau, base the concept on the sense of empathy that most human beings feel for other sentient creatures. But the former understanding has ominous implications for persons of diminished capacity, while the latter places all morality on the fragile basis of a transient feeling. Christian and Jewish believers commonly say that the dignity of human life is grounded in the fact that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. But that proposition is hardly likely to convince a nonbeliever.

People can't be told over and over that they're just material beings, a collocation of atomic particles with no soul or any essential property that distinguishes them significantly from a baboon, without them soon beginning act as if they were baboons.

Men can't be told over and over that human beings have no fundamental worth, no value, nothing upon which to base human rights before those who have power begin to act consistently with that belief.

The secular, materialist view of man invariably, under the guise of exalting humanity, winds up dehumanizing him. Every state in the 20th century which was built upon materialist assumptions of humanity created holocausts of one sort or another as soon as their leaders had the power to do so. The irony of secular humanism is that by banishing God it seeks to deify man, but throughout the world it has consistently had the effect of reducing man to the status of a brute.

Check out Glendon's piece at the link.

Questions about the Budget Debate

Recent addresses by President Obama in which he shares his thoughts on Paul Ryan's budget proposal raise a few questions that I wish someone would ask him. The President insists that we must all share in the sacrifice necessary to put our fiscal house in order, and, he insists, the top income earners are not paying their "fair share".

Well, exactly what is the fair share for the wealthiest Americans? The top 1% of earners already pay 37% of the income taxes. Should they be expected to supply 50% of the tax revenue? 70%? 100%? Whatever number Mr. Obama has in mind does he also have in mind a rationale for that rate? if so, what is it?

If all Americans must share in the sacrifice does this mean that President Obama is going to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000 after having promised in the campaign that he wouldn't? Contrary to popular opinion, it's the middle class which, by virtue of their numbers, has all the money (see the following chart). It must be a huge temptation to plunder them:

Does everyone sharing the burden mean that the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax will be required to pay some?

If the President just wants to tax the wealthiest 1% how does he expect to raise enough revenue to make a dent in the deficit? If raising taxes on them will actually produce less revenue, which the following graph indicates, then why is the President insisting on it? Moreover, if every dollar of every millionaire and billionaire were confiscated by the government it would produce about 940 billion dollars. The Obama budget is about 4 trillion dollars. A 100% tax rate on the income of the wealthiest Americans' income would still only finance less than 25% of his spending.

If small businesses making more than $250,000 have their taxes raised what effect will this have on their ability to hire new employees? The more businesses have to pay the government the less they have left for payroll and benefits. Why does this administration think that raising business costs is a good idea?

Finally, if the president insists that the wealthy pay more in taxes why did he itemize his own returns this year so that instead of paying at the 35% rate his income puts him in, he paid at the 27% rate. If you want others to share in the sacrifice should you not include yourself among those participating in the sharing? To demand others pay more while avoiding doing so yourself is not only hypocritical but also very poor leadership.

I have no particular sympathy for the rich, but if taxing them serves no helpful purpose and actually depresses employment opportunities then the only reason for doing it is to punish them, in a Marxist kind of way, and that strikes me as being as indefensible as insisting others pay more tax while one takes all the deductions one is allowed on one's own return.

Easter and Modern Disbelief

The Christian world is preparing to celebrate what much of the rest of the Western world finds literally incredible, the revivification of a man 2000 years ago who had been dead for several days. Modernity finds such an account simply not believable. It would be a miracle if such a thing happened, moderns are wont to say, and in a scientific age we know that miracles don't happen.

If pressed to explain how, exactly, science has made belief in miracles obsolete and how the modern person knows that miracles don't happen, the skeptic will often fall back on an argument first articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (d.1776). Hume wrote that miracles are a violation of nature and as a firm and unalterable experience tells us that there has never been a violation of the laws of nature it follows that any report of a miracle is most likely to be false. Thus, since we should always believe what is most probable, and since any natural explanation of an alleged miracle is more probable than that a law of nature was broken, we are never justified in believing that a miracle occurred.

It has often been pointed out that Hume's argument suffers from the circularity of basing the claim that reports of miracles are not reliable upon the belief that there's never been a reliable report of one. We can only know there's never been a reliable report of one, though, if we know a priori that all reports are false, and we can only know that if we know that miracles don't happen. But we can only know they don't happen if we know that all reports of miracles are unreliable.

But set that aside. Set aside, too, the fact that one can say that miracles don't happen only if one can say with certainty that there is no God.

Let's look instead at the claim that miracles are prohibitively improbable because they violate the laws of nature.

A law of nature is simply a description of how nature operates whenever we observe it. The laws are often statistical. I.e. if molecules of hot water are added to a pot of molecules of cold water the molecules will tend to eventually distribute themselves homogenously throughout the container so that the water is a uniform temperature. It would be extraordinarily improbable, though not impossible nor a violation of any law, for the hot molecules on one occasion to segregate themselves all on one side of the pot.

Similarly, miracles may not violate the natural order at all. Rather they may be highly improbable phenomena that would never be expected to happen in the regular course of events except for the intervention of Divine will. Like the segregation of hot and cold water, the reversal of the process of bodily decomposition is statistically astronomical, but it's not impossible, and if it happened it wouldn't be a violation of any law.

The ironic thing about the skeptics' attitude toward the miracle of the resurrection of Christ is that they refuse to admit that there's good evidence for it because a miracle runs counter to their experience and understanding of the world. Yet they have no trouble believing other things that also run counter to their experience.

For example, modern atheists have no trouble believing that living things arose from non-living chemicals, that the information-rich properties of life emerged by random chaos and chance, or that our extraordinarily improbable, highly-precise universe exists. They ground their belief in these things on their conviction that there are an infinite number of different universes and in an infinite number of worlds the improbable becomes actual.

Richard Dawkins, for example, rules out miracles because they are highly improbable, and then in the very next breath tells us that the origin of life, which also seems just as highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time and space.

Extensive time and/or the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable, he and others argue. There's no evidence of other worlds, unfortunately, but part of the faith commitment of the modern atheist is to hold that they must exist. The atheist clings to this conviction because if these things aren't so then life and the universe must have a personal rather than a scientific explanation and that discovery would produce a metaphysical shock to his psyche that would be quite unendurable.

Nevertheless, if infinite time and infinite worlds can be invoked to explain life and the cosmos why can't they be invoked to explain miracles as well? If there are a near infinite series of universes, as has been proposed in order to avoid the problem posed by cosmic fine-tuning, then surely in all the zillions of universes of the multiverse landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens. Why should the multiverse hypotheisis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life but not a man rising from the dead?

No one who's willing to believe in a multiverse should be a skeptic about miracles. Indeed, no one who's willing to believe in the multiverse can think that anything at all is improbable. Given the multiverse everything that is not logically impossible must be inevitable.

For the person who relies on the multiverse explanation to account for the precision of the cosmic parameters and constants and for the abiogenic origin of life, the resurrection of a dead man should be no problem. Given enough worlds and enough time it's a cinch to happen.

Of course, the skeptic's real problem is not that a man rose from the dead. His real problem is with the claim that God deliberately raised this man from the dead. That's what they find repugnant, but they can't say that because in order to justify such a claim they'd have to be able to prove that there is no God, or that God's existence is improbable, and that they cannot do.

If, though, one is willing to blithely assume that there are an infinite number of universes out there in order to explain the properties of our universe, why would he have trouble accepting that there's a Mind out there that's responsible for raising Jesus from the dead? After all, there's a lot more evidence for the latter than there is for the former.

Criminal Aliens

Talk to people who incline toward liberal views on immigration and it's often not long before your interlocutor will admit to supporting an open border policy. Many folks on the Left, including Mr. Obama and most congressional Democrats, would happily let almost anyone into our country who wants to come in, particularly if they're likely to be Democratic voters.

Well, why not open our border and take in the world's refuse? It's the compassionate thing to do, isn't it?Here's one reason, among many that could be listed, why unchecked immigration is a terrible idea:

The number of criminal aliens incarcerated in California rose to 102,795 in 2009, a 17 percent increase since 2003, federal auditors reported Thursday.

This isn't cheap. Nationwide, the Government Accountability Office reports, it costs well over $1.1 billion a year for states to imprison criminal aliens -- those who committed a crime after entering the United States illegally. California, moreover, is more expensive than other states. GAO auditors estimated California spends $34,000 to incarcerate a criminal alien for one year; in Texas, it's only $12,000.

The audit, requested by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, will provide ammunition for states' perennial effort to secure more federal reimbursement dollars.

More than one in four of the illegal immigrants imprisoned in California are behind bars for drug offenses. Many are also repeat offenders. GAO auditors say that, based on a survey, criminal alien inmates have been arrested an average of seven different times.

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but why, after the first arrest, were these criminals still in this country? Don't the American taxpayers have enough to pay for without having to pay to incarcerate people who shouldn't be here in the first place?

There is a silver lining to illegal immigration, though. In the past twenty years two cars that were insured in my name were involved in fender-bender accidents that were the fault of the driver of my cars. I fully expected my insurance premiums to skyrocket both times. In neither instance, however, did my rates go up. It turned out that the other party in these mishaps declined to report the accident because, I had reason to think, they were in the country illegally, and didn't want attention drawn to themselves.

So there is that. Of course, having illegal aliens driving around has its downside since if they hit you, you're out of luck because they usually have no insurance. They can turn our highways into demolition derbys, and law enforcement simply shrugs and says there's nothing much they can do because the poobahs in Washington won't let them.

It's enough to make smoke come out of your ears.

Gorecki's Symphony #3

Mood music for Good Friday and Easter Saturday. This is the 3rd movement of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. It's not specifically a Good Friday piece nor is it sectarian, but it is beautiful .... and sorrowful, and appropriate for the day - as are the other two movements:

For Tanya on Good Friday

Some time ago we did a post based on a remark made by a woman named Tanya at another blog. I thought that as we approach Good Friday it might be worth running the post again, slightly edited.

Tanya's comment was provoked by an atheist at the other blog who had issued a mild rebuke to his fellow non-believers for their attempts to use the occasion of Christmas to deride Christian belief. In so doing, he exemplified the sort of attitude toward those with whom he disagrees one might wish all people, atheists and Christians alike, would adopt. Unfortunately, Tanya spoiled the mellow, can't-we-all-just-get-along mood by displaying a petulant asperity toward, and an unfortunate ignorance of, the orthodox Christian understanding of the atonement.

She wrote:

I've lived my life in a more holy way than most Christians I know. If it turns out I'm wrong, and some pissy little whiner god wants to send me away just because I didn't worship him, even though I lived a clean, decent life, he can bite me. I wouldn't want to live in that kind of "heaven" anyway. So sorry.

Tanya evidently thinks that "heaven" is, or should be, all about living a "clean, decent life". Perhaps the following tale will illustrate the sophomoric callowness of her misconception:

Once upon a time there was a handsome prince who was deeply in love with a young woman. We'll call her Tanya. The prince wanted Tanya to come and live with him in the wonderful city his father, the king, had built, but Tanya wasn't interested in either the prince or the city. The city was beautiful and wondrous, to be sure, but the inhabitants weren't particularly fun to be around, and she wanted to stay out in the countryside where the wild things grow. Even though the prince wooed Tanya with every gift he could think of, it was to no avail. She wasn't smitten at all by the "pissy little whiner" prince. She obeyed the laws of the kingdom and paid her taxes and was convinced that that should be good enough.

Out beyond the countryside, however, dwelt dreadful, orc-like creatures who hated the king and wanted nothing more than to be rid of him and his heirs. One day they learned of the prince's love for Tanya and set upon a plan. They snuck into her village, kidnapped Tanya, and sent a note to the king telling him that they would be willing to exchange her for the prince, but if their offer was refused they would torture Tanya until she was dead.

The king, distraught beyond words, told the prince the horrible news.

Despite all the rejections the prince had experienced from Tanya, he still loved her deeply, and his heart broke at the thought of her peril. With tears he resolved to his father that he would do the exchange. The father wept bitterly because the prince was his only son, but he knew that his love for Tanya would not allow him to let her suffer the torment to which the ugly people would surely subject her. The prince asked only that the father try his best to persuade Tanya to live safely in the beautiful city once she was ransomed.

And so the day came for the exchange, and the prince rode bravely and proudly bestride his mount out of the beautiful city to meet the ugly creatures. As he crossed an expansive meadow toward the camp of his mortal enemy he stopped to make sure they released Tanya. He waited until she was out of the camp, fleeing toward the safety of the king's city, oblivious in her near-panic that it was the prince himself she was running past as she hurried to the safety of the city walls. He could easily turn back now that Tanya was safe, but he had given his word that he would do the exchange, and the ugly people knew he would never go back on his word.

The prince continued stoically and resolutely into their midst, giving himself for Tanya as he had promised. Surrounding his steed they set upon him, stripped him of his princely raiment, and tortured him for three days in the most excruciating manner. Not once did any sound louder than a moan pass his lips. His courage and determination to endure whatever agonies to which he was subjected were strengthened by the assurance that he was doing it for Tanya and that because of his sacrifice she was safe.

Finally, wearying of their sport, they cut off his head and threw his body onto a garbage heap.

Meanwhile, the grief-stricken king, his heart melting like ice within his breast, called Tanya into his court. He told her nothing of what his son had done, his pride in the prince not permitting him to use his son's heroic sacrifice as a bribe. Even so, he pleaded with Tanya, as he had promised the prince he would, to remain with him within the walls of the wondrous and beautiful city where she'd be safe forevermore.

Tanya considered the offer, but decided that she liked life on the outside far too much, even if it was risky, and she really didn't want to be in too close proximity to the prince, and, "By the way," she asked the king, "where is that pissy little whiner son of yours anyway?"

Have a meaningful Good Friday. You, too, Tanya.

Gravity Is an Illusion?

Erik Verlinde is a Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist. He recently was interviewed at Big Think on his theory that gravity is an illusion of some sort. When asked why he thinks this he replied that:

Gravity, of course, is something that many people have already thought about. It’s something that we see every day, and it’s not like it’s not existent in our ordinary life. But what I mean by [saying] that it’s an illusion is that one would eventually like to know where it comes from. [We'd like] an explanation.

Up to now we have, well, descriptions. Newton, of course, is the one famous for first writing down a theory of gravity and he described why apples fall and why the moon goes around the earth using the same basic equation for gravity, but he described it. He had to assume that gravity was there and then had to write down a law that described that when two masses are a certain distance [apart], how they attract each other.

But he was also not very happy with the fact that we should just, well, assume that these things, these objects, attract each other without anything in between. So if there are two masses and empty space, there’s nothing that really happens between them, but still, they’re attracting each other. And he thought that was kind of mysterious and that it was something he would have liked to explain in a better way.

In other words, we can describe how objects behave when they encounter a gravitational field and we can measure the strength of the field, but we don't know what gravity actually is, nor how it's produced, nor how it interacts with matter to cause the effects it does.

Verlinde goes on to discuss Einstein's view that material bodies bend space and time. This is very strange. One of the arguments materialists make against substance dualism is that interaction between two disparate "substances" like mind and matter is incomprehensible. It's therefore less complicated to suppose that there's only a single substance, usually assumed by scientists to be matter, which comprises reality. Mind is just a superfluous posit, the materialist believes, a word we use to describe what the matter in the brain does.

But if matter can bend time don't we face the same problem trying to account for that interaction? How can matter interact with time? How can time bend? What is it that's actually bending? If we accept that matter can curve time then why do we balk at thinking that matter, or brains, can interact with minds? Why do we have a problem thinking that an immaterial mind can cause an effect in a material brain?

Thanks to The Blaze.com for the tip.

The Gathering Economic Storm (Pt. II)

This is Part II of my brother Bill's analysis of the economic peril Washington and Wall Street have placed us in. Part I was posted yesterday:

The best way to protect one’s self from the scenario we described in yesterday's post was suggested a decade ago. I'm not encouraging you to run out and buy a truckload of food that'll probably spoil before you ever get the chance to eat it all (although prudence dictates one should have three to four weeks worth of food and drinking water on hand for any unexpected crisis event).

I do suggest, though, that you join a shopping club like BJ’s or Costco where you can buy in bulk and get great value, specifically on non-perishable consumer goods. It’s a 2-fer. You save on your purchases and you avoid spending exorbitant amounts later when the inflation tsunami comes ashore. By this time next year, or the year after, the cost of the products mentioned below could very well have doubled or tripled (not a bad return on one’s investment ... that’s if some of these products are even available at all). Further, and importantly, none of these items will spoil, they need no special storage considerations, and you will always be able to use them. In other words, it’s a zero-risk investment!

The strategy is simple: Acquire your inventory and store it away. Don't use it when you've run out of an item, rather continue to purchase what you need until you determine the item in question has become too expensive. That’s the time to begin dipping into your inventory. How much and which items you should acquire are personal decisions that only you can make, but I would suggest that any supply lasting less than three to six months is probably not worth your effort.

Consider toothpaste for example. If an individual consumes a tube of toothpaste per month, then twelve tubes of toothpaste would last for a year. Given the state of the US fiscal dilemma, one year's worth of inventory is probably a conservative assessment. You're going to use all of these items anyway so why not buy them now? Here are some suggestions.

Laundry items (detergent, fabric softener, bleach, etc.)

Bathroom necessities (toothpaste and brushes, floss, soap, shampoo, deodorant, toilet paper, swabs, air freshener, kleenex, sanitary napkins, etc.)

Over the counter first-aid and meds (aspirin, antibiotic ointment, isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, band aids, bandages, etc.)

General household cleaners (mildew remover, lysol, pine sol, windex, etc.)

Kitchen necessities (dish/dishwasher soap, paper towels, aluminum foil, glad wrap, trash bags, sandwich baggies, sponges/wipes)

Miscellaneous (salt, sugar, coffee, light bulbs, spices and seasonings (may have an expiration date), bottled water, flashlights, batteries, motor oil, etc.)

Bill's advice will perhaps have little resonance with the grasshoppers among us, but the ants out there will undoubtedly see the wisdom of it.

We're tempted to think, and hope, that an economic depression can't happen here, but that's what folks thought in the 1920s. The depression that began in the late 20s lasted for over a decade and it took a world war to get us out of it.

Once our creditors are convinced that our deficit is so high we'll never be able to repay our loans our credit will dry up. When that happens we'll have no money to finance our enormous spending on social programs like medicare, medicaid and social security, nor money to spend on our military, nor on infrastructure. The government will have to either severely cut spending, raise taxes to confiscatory levels, or print more money, all of which will throw millions out of work, and the last two of which will only exacerbate the problem.

The only way to avoid this future is to cut our deficit now which means cutting the amount of money the government spends on entitlements. Yet consider how hard it was just to inveigle a $385 million cut from the Democrats two weeks ago, and we need to start today to cut trillions in order to avoid the calamity that awaits us if we delay.

Inexplicably there's no appetite in the White House to cut entitlements, only to raise taxes, which will not raise nearly enough money to stave off the grim reaper, and will probably actually produce more joblessness and less revenue in the long run.

If you think this is all Chicken Little stuff ask yourself, as gasoline heads for $6.00 a gallon this summer, what effect the price of gas will have on the price of goods, services, and family spending. If the former become more expensive and the latter is sharply curtailed what effect will this have on unemployment?

Yet the administration refuses to make it easier for oil companies to drill into our own reserves, which would certainly keep oil prices down in the mid-term. But that's a topic for another post.

The Appeal of ID for Agnostics

David Klinghoffer writes about the growing appeal intelligent design holds for agnostics and other seekers of a meaning to human existence. It shouldn't be surprising that agnostics would be drawn to ID, but perhaps it is.

After citing a couple of examples of this trend Klinghoffer argues, correctly, that ID is not inherently religious because it doesn't make any claims about who the designer is or how or when the designer did its work.

He then writes:

If ID were religious in nature, then with what theology or with what faith exactly is it congruent? ID is as much a religious idea as is the cosmology of the Big Bang. Sure, it's more readily reconciled with Judaism or Christianity than you can say of Darwinism or materialism, but that's something different. It also has as much to offer to the unbeliever or the unorthodox searcher as to the confirmed traditional believer. It might even have more.

He says this because many people in the contemporary world are experiencing what might be called an existential crisis. They're looking for something beyond themselves to fill the void in their empty lives. Materialism has been tried and found to be utterly inadequate:

It's far from the case that only orthodox religionists have perceived what Alfred Russel Wallace, evolutionary theory's co-founder, called in 1889 the "crushing mental burden" that materialism imposes on modern man. He continued:

"As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual being capable of indefinite life and perfectibility."

Another British socialist and freethinker of a slightly later generation, George Bernard Shaw, recognized what Darwinism boils down to. Shaw, who held no particular religious beliefs and left instructions at his death that no one should try to erect a cross over his grave, wrote in 1921:

"[Darwinism] seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration."

Yes, the heart sinks. That easily could have been written not in 1921 but today. Even in troubled economic times, we are a vastly wealthy society -- yet one plagued by a hideous, gnawing, wasting sense of unease and dissatisfaction.

Modern man is in despair because he realizes that a world that has been purged of the transcendent is spiritually sterile, purposeless, and pointless:

Every real solution to this problem of despair assumes a reality beyond our mundane, one-dimensional and material one. How could it not? We are in despair, or fear falling into it -- whether we're religious or otherwise -- over the limitations of our own lives.

The ultimate limit is imposed by death, which we fear as no generation in memory seems to have done despite the overwhelming safety of our existence. In the meantime, while we are still alive, the lack of a sense of ultimate purpose and meaning that goes with the culture of materialism feeds the anxiety that underlies so much of that culture.

Materialism corrodes the confidence we might otherwise have that any search for meaning that we undertake is not necessarily in vain. Intelligent design offers the hope, by the refutation of materialist science, that "something is out there," whatever it might be, capable of granting genuine purpose to our existence.

If there is a designer of some sort "out there" it must be highly intelligent, very powerful, personal, and sufficiently concerned with us to have designed us to be the kind of beings who can experience love and a yearning for transcendence.

In other words, if there's a designer it would seem that it must be the very sort of being that could fill the emptiness in the vacant hearts of modern men. No wonder then that ID appeals to those who are still searching for something to make their lives meaningful.

The Libyan Fiasco

Despite all the presidential huffing and puffing, the feckless launch of a hundred or so cruise missiles, and the expenditure of several billion dollars, Col. Qaddafi is still alive and his people increasingly are not. Mr. Obama sent our military to Libya on a humanitarian mission to protect the Libyan people from genocide, but was inexplicably punctilious in assuring the chief genocider that he was immune to attack. We had few qualms about killing off his military minions, and even some civilians, but the man who was pulling the strings and giving the orders was, for reasons not clear to anyone outside the White House, safe from our bombs.

Mr. Obama heeded the advice of the "chick hawks" in his administration (Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power), gave the order to lob a few munitions at Libya, and promptly traipsed off to Rio to vacation.

Upon his return, however, the Libyan leaders were still not truckling to Mr. Obama's demands that they relinquish power. After a week or so of playing Commander-In-Chief with nothing to show for it except a couple hundred dead Libyans, President Obama was anxious to get back to his golf game, so he decided to turn the whole mess over to NATO, and pretty much walk away from it.

Ever since, the insolent Col. Qaddafi, in defiance of Mr. Obama's clear and unambiguous order to say "uncle" and step down from his office, has been revivified. His troops are everywhere on the offensive, the rebels are in disarray, the genocide that Qaddafi promised seems to be occurring unabated, and with the abdication of American leadership, the NATO coalition is falling apart.

The President hasn't had much to say about all this of late, preoccupied as he's been with calling Paul Ryan a coward for coming up with a plan to rescue the U.S. from bankruptcy, but one wonders if it all couldn't have been averted had he had the common sense to realize that if you're going to go to war, the best strategy is to end it quickly by decapitating the leadership. Had we done this at the outset Mr. Obama would be free to play an entire round without having to be interrupted by those pesky calls from Robert Gates at the Pentagon.

Maybe, though, that's just not the sort of thing one learns to do in the faculty lounge at Harvard Law School where Mr. Obama prepped for being President and where such extreme tactics are deemed warranted only if they're to be employed against Republicans.

The Gathering Economic Storm (Pt. I)

My brother Bill has for years been studying the fiscal insults our politicians have inflicted upon our nation's economy and has concluded that we've come to a point where all the evidence points to a very serious economic and social crisis looming in our near future. This is a prognosis shared as well by a lot of professional economists and others who have an interest in fiscal policy, so Bill's is not a fringe opinion. Recently he shared the reasons for this gloomy assessment with me, and what he said, discouraging as it is, makes a lot of sense. I've split it into two parts. Part I is below. Part II, in which he makes some practical suggestions as to how to prepare, will be up tomorrow:

Ten years ago I thought it good to begin suggesting that people who wanted to preserve their wealth consider purchasing gold and silver because the US dollar was going to eventually depreciate in value. At that time gold was selling for $265 per ounce and silver for $4.00 an ounce, and those that acted have been handsomely rewarded. Yet today, given the fundamentals of the US economy and the dynamics of current events, both metals are still relatively “cheap”.

For those who are either well-positioned in the metals or simply not interested, I suggest below another way to protect against the price inflation that is here today and destined to get far, far worse regardless of whatever political party is in the White House.

Several years ago I explained how to identify the “canary in the coal mine” which would signal the beginning of the end of our economy and our country, as we know it. It would be when the Federal Reserve begins to purchase US Treasury bills in an outright monetization of the national debt. When governments spend more than they take in, they must make up the shortfall by selling bonds (debt). If the marketplace is not willing to purchase said debt, the government prints their currency, bringing it into existence out of thin air, to finance the gap.

Unfortunately, the canary started to chirp its warning when the US Federal Reserve initiated what it refers to as Quantitative Easing, a euphemism for monetizing the debt, or simply the printing of money with which to purchase US Treasury bonds that the Treasury then uses to finance the debt incurred by Congress. Understand that each new dollar printed devalues each dollar already in existence.

In the beginning, it was called QE 1, under the guise of needing to stimulate the economy after the 2008 financial crisis. Once QE 1 ended it was apparent that there was no improvement in the economy so we began QE 2 for a period of six-months until this coming June, but QE 2 is open-ended, meaning it could go on indefinitely. So QE beyond June should be considered QE 3.

Today the risk of purchasing the US debt is so high and the interest paid on it is so low that no entity, national or private, is interested in such an investment.

We are truly at a fork in the road. If the Federal Reserve discontinues their policy of printing money there's hope for the US although the consequences of doing so would plummet the US into a severe recession, if not outright depression. However, we would ultimately emerge better, stronger, and healthier as all of the mal-investment that has been allowed to persist would finally be purged from the system. All it would take is political will and strong leadership from our administration. Lacking that, should the Federal Reserve, for whatever reason, introduce QE3, it’s game over ... time to hunker down. The average individual, will be decimated. This will be the ultimate event to watch for.

The issue is simple. The US spends more money than it takes in via taxes and so the difference is made up by selling bonds (loans). As an aside, note that even with the historically low interest rates today, the US pays $500 billion in interest on its debt annually. Should the interest rate increase by only one or two percent, the interest burden of the US debt would double to $1 trillion per year.

China and Japan were the two largest purchasers of US debt. They have been financing our profligate life-style spending for years. China has become concerned about the ability of the US to pay, not only the interest, but also the principal of its debt and has scaled back to where they are purchasing little if any more of our debt, and Japan is currently in no position to be making further investments in US debt.

The only thing worse for the US than these two countries not continuing to finance our debt would be if either of them (or both) begin to sell the US Treasuries they currently hold. While China is sitting on the fence regarding the issue, Japan will almost certainly be compelled to sell their US Treasuries in order to raise Yen to finance their reconstruction given the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters they've recently experienced. Should Japan begin to do so, it will cause the value of the US Treasuries to plummet and China will most certainly begin to sell as they won’t want to be holding US Treasuries that are dropping in value due to the Japanese sale. It will be a race for the exits for all holders of US Treasuries.

This comes at the worst possible time for the US and rather than a conclusion of QE 2, it is more likely we will be seeing QE far beyond June as the Federal Reserve will be forced to print ever more dollars to finance the gap in US debt purchases. It’s known as a debt trap and it eventually goes exponential, inevitably leading to hyperinflation.

During an inflationary period, the velocity of money accelerates. That is to say that when one gets a unit of currency, they rush to convert it to a good or service because the purchasing power of the currency will be less in the short-term future. As the crisis intensifies the decrease in the purchasing power accelerates to where nobody wants to hold on to the currency for any length of time.

I’m reminded of a passage about an interview with a German lady who was asked how she could possibly have supported someone like Adolph Hitler. The German Weimer Republic had just gone through a hyperinflation and she responded: “when you’re reduced to eating rats that you might catch, you’ll vote for anyone who promises anything better”. Understand that we‘re at the beginning of such an event.

Bill offers some advice in Part II about how the average person can prepare for this debacle.

Meanwhile, check out these links to other articles here and here that elaborate on the problems Bill describes above.

Have a nice day and stay away from high bridges and razor blades.

Follow the Money

Despite his expressed desire to raise taxes on "millionaires and billionaires" it's not likely that President Obama is as concerned about taxing the rich as he is about taxing the middle class. He won't say this, of course, because he promised during his campaign never to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000, but taxing the middle class is the necessary consequence of his refusal to cut spending. If we're going to pay our bills we have to get the money from the people who have it, and that's the middle class, as this graph from an article at the Wall Street Journal shows.

The Journal editorial explains why taxing the rich will not produce the revenue needed to close the deficit. Here's the core of their argument:

A dominant theme of President Obama's budget speech last Wednesday was that our fiscal problems would vanish if only the wealthiest Americans were asked "to pay a little more." Since he's asking, imagine that instead of proposing to raise the top income tax rate well north of 40%, the President decided to go all the way to 100%.

Let's stipulate that this is a thought experiment, because Democrats don't need any more ideas. But it's still a useful experiment because it exposes the fiscal futility of raising rates on the top 2%, or even the top 5% or 10%, of taxpayers to close the deficit. The mathematical reality is that in the absence of entitlement reform on the Paul Ryan model, Washington will need to soak the middle class—because that's where the big money is.

Consider the Internal Revenue Service's income tax statistics for 2008, the latest year for which data are available. The top 1% of taxpayers—those with salaries, dividends and capital gains roughly above about $380,000—paid 38% of taxes. But assume that tax policy confiscated all the taxable income of all the "millionaires and billionaires" Mr. Obama singled out. That yields merely about $938 billion, which is sand on the beach amid the $4 trillion White House budget, a $1.65 trillion deficit, and spending at 25% as a share of the economy, a post-World War II record.

Say we take it up to the top 10%, or everyone with income over $114,000, including joint filers. That's five times Mr. Obama's 2% promise. The IRS data are broken down at $100,000, yet taxing all income above that level throws up only $3.4 trillion. And remember, the top 10% already pay 69% of all total income taxes, while the top 5% pay more than all of the other 95%.

So who else is there to tax? Well, in 2008, there was about $5.65 trillion in total taxable income from all individual taxpayers, and most of that came from middle income earners. The above chart shows the distribution, and the big hump in the center is where Democrats are inevitably headed for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks.

Mr. Obama is turning as he did last week to limiting tax deductions and other "loopholes," such as for mortgage interest payments. We support doing away with these distortions too, and so does Mr. Ryan, but in return for lower tax rates. Mr. Obama just wants the extra money, which he says will reduce the deficit but in practice will merely enable more spending.

Mr. Ryan isn't proposing controversial entitlement reforms because he likes pointless political risk, or because he likes being berated to his face from a front row seat, as he was on Wednesday. Medicare and Medicaid spending are consistently growing two to three times faster than the rest of the economy, while Medicare's cash-in-cash-out financing model means that seniors collect far more in benefits than they paid in taxes over their working lifetime. The entitlement state was designed for another era.

Mr. Obama's speech was disgraceful for its demagoguery but also because it contained nothing remotely commensurate to the scale of the problem. If the President had come out for a large tax on the middle class, like a VAT, then at least the country could have debated the choice of paying for the government we have or modernizing it a la Mr. Ryan so it is affordable.

Instead the President will continue targeting the middle class for tax increases to pay for an entitlement state on autopilot, while claiming he only wants to tax the rich.

And another campaign promise will be flushed down the memory hole.

Waiting for Superman

Last month when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was being raked over the coals because his budget reform plan would weaken public employees unions, including teachers' unions, Democrats in the state legislature and in the media were firmly on the side of the unions. They couldn't say enough good things about the job that teachers' unions were doing for the children of Wisconsin and how reprehensible Walker was for wanting to limit their ability to extort the Wisconsin taxpayers.

It was jarring, then, to say the least, when over the weekend I watched Waiting for Superman, a documentary on how awful our public schools are, particularly our urban schools. As I recall, WFS was highly acclaimed on all sides when it was released last year, but everything that the film showed to be wrong with our schools and everything that it recommended as a means to fix them is opposed tooth and nail by liberals in Congress and the media.

According to WFS, a film which every prospective teacher and parent really should watch, our schools went from the best in the world fifty or sixty years ago to among the worst in the developed world today. Why?

There are a number of reasons, of course, more, in fact, than what WFS talked about, but the chief reasons the film brought out are certainly at the top of the list. Schools today are failing our kids not because we're not spending enough money on them but primarily because teachers' unions, and the Democrat politicians they have bought and paid for, have made reform almost impossible.

They've made it incredibly difficult, for example, to remove an underperforming teacher from the classroom, and they oppose the one hope that many poor kids have of escaping the abysmal schools they're forced to attend - school choice. Private and charter schools are succeeding, according to the film, because they can fire poor teachers, extend the length of both the school day and the school year, and demand more from their students in terms of discipline and study. None of this is ever likely to happen in the regular public school. The film didn't mention it, but another thing private schools can do is remove discipline problems from the school environment, a measure which is necessary to creating a positive learning environment, but one which regular public schools either can't take or won't take.

A remarkable irony of the film is that some of the people arguing for reform, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and Bill Gates of Microsoft, support a party and a president adamantly opposed to any meaningful reform. Together they refuse to provide these kids with the means to escape bad schools, refuse to act to allow districts to get rid of poor teachers, and who believe the solution to failing schools is to simply throw yet more money and more bureaucrats at the problems.

At the end of the film we get to sit in on several lotteries taking place around the country in which children are selected to attend charter and private schools. Often there are hundreds of applicants for just a few dozen openings. The looks of desperation on the faces of both the kids and their parents is heart-breaking. Watching them get passed over is like watching them being given a death sentence, which, in a sense, it is.

President Obama, however, is unmoved by their plight, captive as he is to the teachers' unions. Early in his administration he canceled a scholarship program which gave District of Columbia kids the wherewithal to attend private schools like the one to which the Obamas send their own daughters (the Republicans are going to try to restore this program now that they're in the majority in the House), and later his Elementary and Secondary Education Act eliminated school choice options that were in President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act.

It became very clear, as I watched Waiting For Superman, that the biggest impediment to meaningful school reform, the biggest obstacle to giving these poor kids a chance at a decent life, is the alliance between the President, congressional Democrats, and the leadership of the teachers' unions.

In fact, if the film weren't an hour and forty minutes long it'd be a great campaign commercial for the Republicans in 2012. Watch it and ask yourself whether you think the people who make it so hard for these children to get a decent education really are the champions of the poor or whether they're just the champions of the status quo.

Budget Battle Irony

There are a number of ironies attending to the budget debates that are swirling around Washington these days. One that I find particularly piquant is that many of the people who are most vociferous in condemning Congressional Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's 2012 proposal as being insufficiently compassionate toward the poor and the elderly are themselves Darwinian materialists.

Now they may not think of themselves in those terms, but that's essentially what they are, at least some of them, particularly those who write for the lefty journals and blogs.

So what's the irony, you ask? Well, on what grounds does a Darwinian materialist criticize anyone for being uncaring toward the poor and the elderly? What reason would a Darwinian give for caring about how these folks get by? Why would a Darwinian think we should not see the poor and the elderly as mere extraneous biological burdens who should be left to fend for themselves in the universal struggle for survival?

Indeed, good liberal progressives of a century ago thought exactly this, which is why they were so fond of eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia. Abortion was seen by the progressives who founded Planned Parenthood as a way to cull out the feeble and inferior, particularly among the minority races. Eugenics was popular among progressives until Hitler gave it a bad name in the forties and forced its votaries to mute their enthusiasm for it.

The next time those who wish to change the way we help the less fortunate are criticized for their "lack of compassion toward the poor" perhaps we might ask the critic to explain the reasons why he/she thinks we should be helping the "unfit" survive in the first place. Unless the person is a theist, their awkwardness in honestly answering the question should be amusing.

Who Pays Taxes

Economist Stephen Moore edifies those of us interested in the raging budget debate by offering some facts about taxes:

The latest data show that a big portion of the federal income tax burden is shoul­dered by a small group of the very richest Americans. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 per­cent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent — those below the median income level — now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the taxes. These are proportions of the income tax alone and don’t include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

This is interesting because we're constantly told that we need to tax the rich as if the wealthy aren't paying any taxes.

What income demarcates the top 1%, 5%, etc.? It turns out that to be in the top 1% you needed to make $380,000 in 2008. The top 5% earned $160,000 or more and $114,000 put you in the top 10%.

If you made less than $33,000 you were in the bottom 50% and paid almost no income taxes. In other words, only half the wage earners in this country are paying taxes.

The President wants the top 2% to pay their "fair share", but what is their fair share? They already provide over 40% of the income tax revenue to the treasury. How much more should they have to pay? Here's another question Mr. Obama should answer: How much could taxes go up before no more revenue would flow into the treasury? Raising the top rates does not increase revenue and often depresses it, so what's the point?

The problem, as the Republicans repeat like a mantra, is not that we need more taxation. Raising taxes stifles job creation and generates very little revenue. What we need is less government spending, but cutting spending will hurt social programs, we're told.

So what's the implicit assumption in this claim? Is it not that 5% of the people in this country should have to carry the other 95%? Is that just? And what's going to happen to those social programs anyway when the wagon gets so heavy that the top 5% can no longer pull it? The attempt to sustain these programs at current levels while taxing the top earners even more will guarantee that the programs will collapse under their own weight.

Raising taxes is a myopic pseudo-solution that should disqualify anyone who proposes it from being taken seriously.

Craig vs. Harris

Last weekend William Lane Craig debated Sam Harris, one of the leading lights of the New Atheist movement, on the question whether there can be ethics without God. Harris' position is interesting in that, though he's an atheist, he's not a relativist or subjectivist. In fact, he spends much of his first address in the debate pressing his considerable rhetorical skills into the service of criticizing relativism. Nevertheless, Harris' reluctance to embrace subjectivism comes under Craig's scrutiny and during the course of the nine-part video of the debate Harris' position just unravels.

In fact, by his second address Harris was left with no response to Craig's challenge to explain the ground upon which he based his ethical views so he retreated to more familiar terrain, launching a philippic against religion in general and Christianity in particular. He spent much time on the ethical shortcomings of the Bible and expatiated on the problem of evil, all of which were, unfortunately for him, irrelevant to the debate. Harris, in effect, switched the topic from whether God is necessary for moral good and evil to the question whether the Biblical concept of God is morally tenable - an interesting question, to be sure, but not germane to the topic of the evening.

Even so, Craig did a good job of holding Harris' feet to the fire. It's an enlightening debate and one from which much can be learned about the problem that moral obligation poses for the thoughtful atheist who wishes to avoid nihilism.

Gay History

Their state teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, many of their most productive citizens and businesses are fleeing in search of economically friendlier climes, and the California state senate is darn serious about the crisis they find themselves in. To show just how serious they are and how well-ordered are their priorities they've just passed a measure requiring public schools to teach gay history:

Gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people would be added to the lengthy list of social and ethnic groups that public schools must include in social studies lessons under a landmark bill passed Thursday by the California Senate.

If the bill is adopted by the state Assembly and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, California would become the first state to require the teaching of gay history.

Supporters say the move is needed to counter anti-gay stereotypes and beliefs that make children in those groups vulnerable to bullying and suicide.

Opponents counter that such instruction would further burden an already crowded curriculum and expose students to a subject that some parents find objectionable.

The legislation, sponsored by Democratic Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco, passed on a 23-14 party line vote. It also would add disabled people to the curriculum.

California law already requires schools to cover the contributions to the state and nation of women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians and labor.

In California one must always offer proper obeisance to the gods of political correctness, I suppose. It's an interesting exercise, though, to wonder what would happen if a lawmaker proposed teaching, say, Christian history and/or Christian contributions to Western civilization. Surely such a bill is needed to counter anti-Christian stereotypes and beliefs that make children in those groups "vulnerable to bullying and ridicule".

I doubt that argument would have much purchase in that context, though. Perhaps if it was a course on Gay Christianity it'd have a chance.

Classless Act

Victor Davis Hanson marvels at how anyone, let alone a president, can say one thing one day and the opposite thing the next with as much ease as does Mr. Obama. Speaking of yesterday's dressing down Mr. Obama gave to his political opposition in the GOP Hanson notes that:

The president gave the sort of scare speech he not long ago warned against, and blasted the income-tax rates he not long ago agreed were necessary — in a context in which he has just presented a budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit of the sort he now says is unsustainable, and has warned about recklessly voting against raising the debt ceiling in a fashion that he himself had once done, in a larger landscape in which he had once damned attacking Middle East countries in optional wars, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, intercepts, wiretaps, Predators, and leaving troops in Iraq, and then embraced or expanded all that and more (this list is infinite and includes everything from drilling to campaign financing to earmarks).

Hanson offers five alternative explanations for Mr. Obama's detachment from his previous firmly-held positions and declarations. Any or all of the five may be true, but there are other possibilities as well, none of them pleasant to consider, implying as they do that the president has a tenuous acquaintance with the importance of truth, and a moral character sufficiently protean that it can adapt itself to every exigency.

Anyway, check it out at the link.

Meanwhile, the esteemed Charles Krauthammer declares that the President's speech was "a disgrace".

Krauthammer has a point in more ways than he articulates in the brief segment at the link. The President invited Paul Ryan, the architect of the GOP budget proposal, to attend the speech and sit in the front row. Then Mr. Obama pretty much imputed the basest of motives to Mr. Ryan in front of a national audience, accusing him (though not by name - at least he observed that decency) of, among other things, wanting to throw grandparents into the street and abandoning autistic children. This ugly display, as short on honesty as it was on class, besmirched both himself and the office Mr. Obama occupies.

Mika Brzezinski liked it, though, which is not surprising, even if her rationale is:

There's much more commentary on Mr. Obama's speech and the disconcerting direction in which he seems to be determined to take this country at National Review Online.

Morally Stunted

Dennis Prager over at National Review Online shares some thoughts on the media silence about the Muslim murders of United Nations workers in Afghanistan ostensibly motivated by the burning of the Koran by Pastor Terry Jones. Prager goes on to point out the absurdity of some of the liberal-left reaction to this crime, taking Time magazine's Joe Klein as a typical example:

Joe Klein, political commentator for Time magazine, morally equated Terry Jones and the Afghan murderers: “There should be no confusion about this: Jones’s act was as murderous as any suicide bomber’s.”

Anyone with common sense knows that there is no moral equivalence between destroying a book, no matter how holy, and destroying a human life. So how does one explain Joe Klein’s statement?

Klein is a leftist, and his comment embodies two aspects of the contemporary Left.

One is the Left’s hard time identifying and confronting real evil.

Instead of focusing on Islamism, the Left focuses on small evils like alleged pay gaps between men and women working at the same job, or on non-evils such as carbon-dioxide emissions. Or they engage in moral equivalence: The Muslim murderers are no worse than Terry Jones.

The other characteristic of the Left embodied in Klein’s statement is what George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It is clear that Klein has contempt for Muslims. If Christians had slaughtered innocents because of Piss Christ, it would never have occurred to Klein to write “There should be no confusion about this: Serrano’s act was as murderous as any slaughtering Christian’s.”

With Islamism dominating major parts of the Muslim world, and leftism dominating much of the non-Muslim world, these are not the best of times.

The inability or unwillingness to hold everyone to the same moral standard is a trait of those who don't think seriously about moral justice. They use moral judgments as an ideological club with which to beat their opponents over the head but are not really interested in an equitable distribution of those judgments.

Anyone who draws an equivalence between what Terry Jones did and what those Afghan Muslims did is morally stunted. The same might be said of anyone who condemns Jones but is silent about "art" that desecrates that which Christians hold sacred.

Both of these kinds of people suffer, perhaps, from what might be called moral Stockholm syndrome. Fearful of their intimidators they supinely seek to ingratiate themselves into their good graces by rationalizing their behavior and despising that which their intimidators despise. It's as ugly as it is cowardly.

Atheism and Nihilism

Ethan links us to this video in which the narrator makes the case that an intellectually honest atheist should be a nihilist. He is, of course, correct:

Here's the problem for the atheist:

If there is no God then there are no moral duties. Most atheists, however, believe there are moral duties and objective moral values. But they can't have it both ways. Either they should give up their belief in moral duties and objective moral values (and with it any grounds for making moral judgments of any behavior other than their own) or they should give up their atheism and acknowledge that there must be a personal, transcendent moral authority which grounds all moral duties and values.

To continue in their atheism while making moral judgments - such as oppression is evil, capitalism is bad, war is immoral, or child abuse is morally abhorrent - is to abandon their commitment to the life of reason. It's surely an odd choice for people who pride themselves on being more rational than those gullible, superstitious theists.

An Atheist Defends Himself, Sort Of (Pt. II)

Yesterday I reviewed a post by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss in which he sought to bolster the case he had made against William Lane Craig in a debate last week on the topic Is There Evidence for the Existence of God? I'd like to finish this critique today.

The fourth argument Craig offered as evidence that God exists was based on the fine-tuning of the universe. The fact that many of the constants, forces, and parameters of the universe are set with a precision so exact that they point to a purposeful architecture woven into the structure of the world. Had any of these values deviated by the most unimaginably tiny amount a universe capable of sustaining life would never have existed.

Krauss' response is to point out that not everything is fine-tuned and that even if it were maybe the universe evolved by a kind of natural selection (how such an extraordinary process could have applied to the universe he leaves for us to figure out) or maybe there's an infinite number of worlds (a multiverse) in which at least one world would have to have the properties ours does no matter how improbable that may seem. He offers lots of mights and maybes, but none of this is a rebuttal of Craig's claim that cosmic fine-tuning counts as evidence for the existence of God. The fact that there are other possible explanations for cosmic fine-tuning does not nullify the claim that such mathematical exactitude is an indicator, though not a proof, of intelligent agency.

Moreover, what we know of the universe suggests that it's the only one around, there's no significant empirical evidence that there are other universes, and our universe certainly seems to be engineered to harbor intelligent beings such as ourselves. Thus, Krauss's response is irrelevant. What he must show is that either there is no fine-tuning or that, if there is, it does not constitute evidence of intelligence. He does neither.

Craig's final argument was based on miracles, specifically the miracle of Jesus' resurrection. Krauss calls this argument "so sloppy and fatuous that in an effort to demonstrate some margin of respect for Craig I tried to avoid it for as long as I could." Perhaps, but when he does finally address it he never explains to us exactly why it's "sloppy and fatuous".

All he does is observe that lots of people don't believe it happened, and that it's more probable that it didn't happen than that it did. How he knows this is beyond me, but evidently he does. Craig, on the other hand, argued that one of the reasons accounts of the Resurrection are credible is that people who were in a position to know the facts were willing to die rather than recant their claim that it happened. Krauss scoffs at this argument:

[T]he remarkable, and completely trite claim that the fact the Christians were willing to die for their beliefs demonstrates the validity of these beliefs would be laughable, if it weren't so pitiful. Especially, as I indicated during the event, in light of the fact that people were recently willing to fly planes into skyscrapers because of their beliefs in a religious framework that I know Craig has openly disavowed.

Throughout history people have been willing to die for their beliefs, and it is often the beliefs one is willing to die for that are most suspect. Did Roman soldiers believe in Romulus and Remus. Did Viking warriers [sic] believe in Thor. Did Nazi soldiers believe in the superiority of the Aryan race. I found and still find Craig's statement not only facile, and not even worthy of a high school debater, but I find the claim offensive.

The awkward syntax aside, I think what Krauss writes is kind of embarrassing, actually. Craig's point is not that the early believers were prepared to die for a conviction that they believed to be true, but rather that if the Resurrection didn't happen they would have known that it didn't happen and yet they were prepared to die for a belief they would have known to be false. Many people will die for what they falsely believe to be true, but who would die for what one truly knows to be false? The examples Krauss adduces don't address this question at all.

Finally, a word about Krauss' tone. His post at Pharyngula was laced with potshots at Craig's integrity, ability, and sincerity. Here's a montage of his insults and condescensions:

Craig is aware, from his superficial reading of cosmology, of fine tuning problems in Cosmology.... All of these are subtle and interesting issues worthy of discussion by knowledgeable and honest intellects. I found Craig to be lacking in both of the qualities during his discussion of this issue....Once again this is simple minded....As I tried to explain to Craig....Craig doesn't understand the physics.... including a typically disingenuous email from Wiliam Lane Craig to his followers regarding a debate I had with him in North Carolina last week....I believe that if I erred at all, it was in an effort to consider the sensibilities of the 1200 smiling young faces in the audience, who earnestly came out, mostly to hear Craig, and to whom I decided to show undue respect....I also wanted to demonstrate the need for nuance, to explain how these issues are far more complex than Craig, in his simplistic view of the world, makes them out to be....Unfortunately any effort I made to show nuance and actually explain facts was systematically distorted in Craig's continual effort to demonstrate how high school syllogisms apparently demonstrated definitive evidence for God....Let me now comment, with the gloves off, on the disingenuous distortions, simplifications, and outright lies that I regard Craig as having spouted....What I hoped I could convey to the truly open minded intellects in the audience, of which of course Craig was not one....Craig's rather monotonous repetition of his syllogisms, is indeed intellectually lazy.

Why do people choose to insult, patronize and demean those with whom they disagree? Perhaps it's a compensatory mechanism, employed particularly by those who realize that their arguments are not very persuasive and that the other fellow's are. They realize that they're looking bad to the audience, and their wounded ego causes them to lash out at the person responsible. If one's opponent can't be beaten intellectually then perhaps tearing him down personally with innuendo, scorn, and aspersions will diminish him in the eyes of those within earshot. Maybe that's what motivated Krauss but I hope not. It's a pretty sophomoric motivation.

If ad hominem is what wins arguments then Krauss certainly won. If it's organization, articulate presentation, preparation, strength of argument, and logic which prevails in a debate then he lost big. And I think he knows it.

Atlas Shrugged

Coming April 15th.

I don't know what it's rated, or if it's well-made, or whether the producers will seek to glamorize Ayn Rand's insufferable egoism, militant anti-Christian atheism, or sexual libertinism, but if they stick to the political message of the novel it could be a blockbuster.

Thanks to Jason for the link.

An Atheist Defends Himself, Sort Of (Pt. I)

Sensing, perhaps, that his performance in his debate against William Lane Craig last week left his fans and other atheists a bit dispirited Lawrence Krauss has posted a retrospective piece on the atheist/evolution blog Pharyngula in which he spends a lot of time insulting his opponent and some time saying what he wishes he had said during the debate. Having read his further ruminations I have to say I don't think they would have helped him against Craig. For all his accomplishments as a cosmologist Krauss just seems unable to understand the arguments Craig proffered in defense of the debate topic Is There Evidence for the Existence of God?

I'll consider a few examples today and tomorrow of how his clarification falls as flat as his original presentation. Craig presented five propositions which, he argued, constituted evidence (not proof) that God existed. Given the debate topic, Craig technically didn't even have to offer good evidence, although his five examples were, I thought, pretty good.

Craig's first argument was that the universe had a beginning and that whatever comes into being has a cause. Krauss' rejoinder is that, well, there are lots of mights and maybes that the universe didn't actually have a beginning. It could be eternal. That's possible, of course, though there's a lot of evidence that it did come into being in a primal explosion called the Big Bang in which case there's a lot of evidence that the universe has a cause of its existence, and evidence for a cause of the universe, it's reasonable to think, is evidence for the claim that God exists.

The second argument is that contingent entities like the universe require a necessary entity for their existence. Contingent entities are those, like you and me and your computer and your car, whose existence depends in some way upon something else. Ultimately, whatever is responsible for the existence of the entire series of contingent things must itself depend upon nothing else for its existence. Thus ultimately the universe, which it is reasonable to believe is contingent, must depend upon something which itself depends upon nothing else for its existence, i.e. something very like God.

Krauss' response is to aver that earthquakes and snowflakes can be explained without introducing God, so perhaps the same applies to the universe. This completely misses the point. The fact that some contingent things are the cause of other contingent things doesn't mean that an ultimate explanation of the totality of contingent things need not be a necessary being. The existence of contingent things is evidence for the existence of a necessary thing or being, which is how God is, in part, defined.

Craig's third argument is that the existence of objective moral duties requires a transcendent moral authority. Krauss replies by iterating a version of the Euthyphro dilemma (ED) as a rebuttal. However, the ED, despite its long pedigree, fails as an argument against the point Craig is making. It would take up too much space to go into here, but the interested reader can check here for more on the dilemma.

Krauss then adds this:

Lastly, if there is evidence that God provides absolute morality, it is missing from the world of our experience, where different religious groups, all of whom claim divine inspiration, have incompatible moral views, often leading to horrendous and violent acts against women and children, for example. Indeed, the Old Testament is full of such acts.

None of this is relevant. The point is not that if God exists everyone who believes in Him will know and do what's right. Rather the point is that unless there's a God there's simply nothing that is moral or immoral. There are just things that people do. As Craig would say, Krauss is confusing moral epistemology (i.e. knowledge of what's right) with moral ontology (the existence of moral right). Craig's argument is that since atheists do believe there are some things, like child abuse, that are absolutely and objectively wrong, they're either being irrational in denying God or tacitly conceding that there is a God.

More tomorrow.

Evolving Doubts about Evolution

The number of biologists who are beginning to think that Darwin got it at least partly wrong continues to swell. Lyn Margulis is a prominent scientist who has had doubts for some time and expresses them in a recent piece in Discover Magazine which Jonathan M. discusses at Uncommon Descent.

In the interview Margulis says the following:

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred...The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution?...This is the problem I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection....Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create....I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change — led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence....There is no gradualism in the fossil record....‘Punctuated equilibrium’ was invented to describe the discontinuity....The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or ‘God did it.’ They have no alternatives that are scientific....The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern is a tree. It’s not. The evolutionary pattern is a web....

Prof. Margulis is correct that ID advocates can't explain how an intelligent agent might have engineered life, but I don't see why that should be an impediment to believing that one did. There are lots of things, after all, that scientists believe even if they can't explain how those phenomena came to be. For example, no one can explain how an electron can be in two places at the same time when it's not being observed, or how the universe came into being out of nothing, or how the material brain produces the sensations of color and flavor, etc., or how matter generates gravity, or how magnets repel, or how radioactive decay occurs, and on and on. Nevertheless, despite our inability to explain how these phenomena happen, scientists all believe they do.

The same is true with the origin and diversity of life. It may be that we'll never know exactly how life was originally created, but that's no reason to doubt that it somehow required intelligent input.

Put another way, if the first astronauts to land on the moon had found an American flag already there, they may have had no idea how it could have happened, but that doesn't mean they would doubt that it was placed there by an intelligent agent. They wouldn't think that it was the product of a chance accident of some sort.

It'd be foolish to resist believing that an intelligent agent was responsible for the flag being there just because we cannot explain how the agent did it. Likewise, so much of life points beyond chance to intelligent agency that it's foolish to rule this possibility out simply because no one knows how the agent would, or could, have acted.

I'm reminded of the wise words of William James who wrote that "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if these kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule."

So it would.