Does Morality Require God? (Pt. II)

Yesterday we undertook a consideration of a column by atheistic Darwinian Jerry Coyne who argues in USA Today that God is not necessary as a ground for morality. I'd like to continue that critique in this post.

Coyne's next move in the case he's trying to build is to place into evidence all the alleged misdeeds of the God of the Old Testament in order to show that the God of the Bible would be an inadequate ground for morality:

This isn't just philosophical rumination, because God — at least the God of Christians and Jews — repeatedly sanctioned or ordered immoral acts in the Old Testament. These include slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46), genocide (Deuteronomy 7:1-2; 20:16-18), the slaying of adulterers and homosexuals, and the stoning of non-virgin brides (Leviticus 20:10, 20:13, Deuteronomy 22:20-21).

Was God being moral when, after some children made fun of the prophet Elisha's bald head, he made bears rip 42 of them to pieces (2 Kings 2:23-24)? Even in the New Testament, Jesus preaches principles of questionable morality, barring heaven to the wealthy (Matthew 19:24), approving the beating of slaves (Luke 12:47-48), and damning sinners to the torments of hell (Mark 9:47-48). Similar sentiments appear in the Quran.

Now, few of us see genocide or stoning as moral, so Christians and Jews pass over those parts of the Bible with judicious silence. But that's just the point. There is something else — some other source of morality — that supersedes biblical commands. When religious people pick and choose their morality from Scripture, they clearly do so based on extrareligious notions of what's moral.

Further, the idea that morality is divinely inspired doesn't jibe with the fact that religiously based ethics have changed profoundly over time. Slavery was once defended by churches on scriptural grounds; now it's seen as grossly immoral. Mormons barred blacks from the priesthood, also on religious grounds, until church leaders had a convenient "revelation" to the contrary in 1978. Catholics once had a list of books considered immoral to read; they did away with that in 1966. Did these adjustments occur because God changed His mind? No, they came from secular improvements in morality that forced religion to clean up its act.

None of this, as distressing as it may be, is relevant to his initial claim that morality exists independently of God. Let's grant for the sake of discussion that the Bible portrays God as a moral monster (although many scholars would disagree). What follows? Nothing of any help to Coyne's case. What follows is that God as portrayed in the Old Testament seems, at least on a literal reading, to be a questionable source of moral instruction, but this gets Coyne nowhere. It could be that the Bible is mistaken about God's role in these events. It could be that we don't fully understand the events it describes.

The point is that without a transcendent, omniscient, objective ground for morality there really is, as Nietzsche taught us, no good or evil, no right or wrong. Whether or not the deity portrayed in the Bible actually is that transcendent ground is a completely separate question.

Moreover, Coyne's argument begs the question. He assumes that objective moral values exist without God and then employs these values to show that God doesn't exhibit them. But the independent, non-arbitrary existence of these values is precisely what's in contention. He can't assume they exist when their existence is what he has promised to demonstrate.

He goes on to ask:

So where does morality come from, if not from God? Two places: evolution and secular reasoning. Despite the notion that beasts behave bestially, scientists studying our primate relatives, such as chimpanzees, see evolutionary rudiments of morality: behaviors that look for all the world like altruism, sympathy, moral disapproval, sharing — even notions of fairness. This is exactly what we'd expect if human morality, like many other behaviors, is built partly on the genes of our ancestors.

Yes, but scientists also see unimaginable cruelty and greed. Indeed, these are far the more common behaviors on display in the animal kingdom. Coyne selects traits of which he approves to call moral and traits of which he disapproves to call immoral, but what criterion is he using for this judgment and from whence does he derive that criterion? Surely, he doesn't expect us to think that what he, or even a majority, approves is what should be deemed right. By that standard he would have to grant that human sacrifice would have been moral during much of our history.

Furthermore, he again begs the question by assuming that altruism, sympathy, etc. are morally good behaviors in order to show that rudimentary morality exists in chimps, but whether these things really are moral or amoral apart from divine will is what he needs to demonstrate. So far, he hasn't done it.

We'll finish up this discussion tomorrow.

Cyber War Heating Up

China is believed to have already launched, or tried to launch, cyber attacks against the U.S. According to Strategy Page it looks as though the U.S. is getting ready to respond in kind:

The U.S. Department of Defense has long advocated going on the offensive against criminal gangs and foreign governments that seek (and often succeed) to penetrate U.S. government and military Internet security, and steal information or sabotage operations. Without much fanfare the Department of Defense has made preparations to do just that.

Since the military cannot afford to pay enough to recruit qualified software and Internet engineers for this sort of work, it has turned to commercial firms. There are already some out there, firms that are technically network security companies, but will also carry out offensive missions (often of questionable legality, but that has always been an aspect of the corporate security business.)

Some of these firms have quietly withdrawn from the Internet security business, gone dark, and apparently turned their efforts to the more lucrative task of creating Cyber War weapons for the Pentagon. It may have been one of these firms that created, or helped create, the Stuxnet worm.

Most of the Internet combat so far has been done under peacetime conditions. In wartime it's possible (especially for the United States) to cut off enemy countries from the Internet. Thus potential American foes want to maintain an official peacetime status so the United States cannot use its ability to cut nations off (or nearly off) from the Internet and remove easy access to American (and Western) targets. Thus the need to make attacks discreetly so as to make it more difficult for an enemy to target stronger attacks against you, or threaten nuclear or conventional war.

The first Chinese target (and those in North Korea, Cuba, and elsewhere) that ought to come under attack are the computers that keep track of their political and religious dissidents.

Syrian Genocide

A Jerusalem Post article gives us a hint of the horrors taking place in Syria:

Ahmed Khalaf, a lieutenant in the Syrian army said that he was ordered to command his soldiers to shoot indiscriminately at everyone in Deraa, including women and children, London based Asharq Alawsat reported on Saturday.

"I, along with other officers, was ordered by our commanders to commit genocide in Deraa and was told not to spare women and children."

In an interview with Asharq Alawsat, Khalaf claimed that he told his commander that he followed orders while secretly telling his soldiers not to fire on anyone. However, when he was found out and put under house arrest he understood that he had to flee the country.

Khalaf explained that hundreds of Sunni officers are sitting in jails around Syria for refusing to obey orders to fire on civilians, and claims that "4,500 soldiers have defected in the Damascus area."

Lieutenant Khalaf managed to escape from Syria is currently hiding in an undisclosed location.

Wasn't the threat of genocide precisely the reason that President Obama deployed U.S. forces against Libya? Didn't he go on national television to tell us that we could not permit Qaddafi to just slaughter his own people?

It sure would be helpful and reassuring if he would explain what principles, if indeed there are any, govern his decision to order military intervention, or, failing that, at least get off the golf course long enough to condemn Assad every day for what he's doing to these people.

As it is, Mr. Obama is giving the impression of really not caring much about the plight of the Syrian people and of just making his foreign policy up as he goes along.

Does Morality Require God? (Pt.I)

Darwinian biologist (and atheist) Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago wanders out of his field to write a column for USA Today in which he argues that it's a mistake to think that morality depends upon God. Since I believe it does depend upon God, and have argued as much on Viewpoint on numerous occasions in the past, the article caught my attention. I wanted to see if Prof. Coyne made a compelling case for his assertion and was completely unsurprised to find that he didn't.

His argument begins to wobble with his opening paragraph and staggers and stumbles, like a drunk navigating a frozen pond, the rest of the way. He opens with this:

One cold Chicago day last February, I watched a Federal Express delivery man carry an armful of boxes to his truck. In the middle of the icy street, he slipped, scattering the boxes and exposing himself to traffic. Without thinking, I ran into the street, stopped cars, hoisted the man up and helped him recover his load. Pondering this afterward, I realized that my tiny act of altruism had been completely instinctive; there was no time for calculation.

This was kind of him, to be sure, but it's pretty much irrelevant to his point that God isn't necessary for morality. Here's why: If there is no God it wouldn't have been wrong for him to ignore the delivery man's plight. Kindness is something we appreciate, but that doesn't make it moral. It's only morally right if we have a duty to do it. If naturalism (i.e. atheism) is true, however, there are no duties to do anything. One has no more of an obligation to be kind as one does to be selfish. The one is, in the overall scheme of things, no better or worse than the other. The universe is indifferent to whichever choice we make. Prof. Coyne continues:

We see the instinctive nature of moral acts and judgments in many ways: in the automatic repugnance we feel when someone such as Bernie Madoff bilks the gullible and trusting, in our disapproval of the person who steals food from the office refrigerator, in our admiration for someone who risks his life to save a drowning child. And although some morality comes from reason and persuasion — we must learn, for example, to share our toys — much of it seems intuitive and inborn.

The fact that people may instinctively disapprove of a particular behavior doesn't make it wrong. Many people disapprove of Prof. Coyne's atheism, but he would certainly not think it morally wrong. Many others instinctively disapprove of the notion of loving their enemies or treating women as equals, but Coyne wouldn't say that these behaviors are wrong. Disapproval and admiration have nothing to do with whether an act is right or wrong.

Moreover, if morality is indeed instinctive, i.e. if our genes program us to behave in certain ways, then how can those ways be right or wrong? The homosexual community makes the case that homosexuality is genetic and no one chooses to be gay. They're born that way and thus it is inappropriate to consider homosexuality to be immoral. But if being born gay removes homosexuality from the realm of the moral then every disposition we're born with, including the disposition to help the fed-ex delivery man or to refuse to share with others, is also removed from the realm of the moral. We do what we're predisposed by our genes to do and that's the end of the matter.

As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."

So while morality supposedly comes from God, immorality is laid at the door of Charles Darwin, who has been blamed for everything from Nazism to the shootings in Columbine.

Coyne frames this a bit awkwardly. What he should have said is that many who are skeptical of Darwinism argue that naturalistic evolution could never make feelings of kindness and altruism morally right. After all, many people harbor feelings of meanness and selfishness. If evolution produced the former it must also have produced the latter. On what grounds does Coyne judge the former to be right and the latter to be wrong?

Evidently, what's right are behaviors he appreciates and what's wrong are behaviors of which he disapproves, but not only is it backward to declare behaviors of which we disapprove to be wrong, we might also wonder why anyone else should accept Prof. Coyne's likes and dislikes as normative. Even if the vast majority shared Coyne's approbation and disapprobation it still wouldn't make the behaviors right or wrong. Throughout history the vast majority of people approved of slavery and disapproved of miscegnation, but is Coyne prepared to acknowledge that slavery was therefore morally right and miscegnation morally wrong?

Next the professor trots out Plato's Euthyphro dilemma to show that God cannot be the ground for morality:

[M]orality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.

Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one. Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK.

Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.

What Coyne neglects to mention, though, is that most philosophers of religion believe that Plato's argument simply doesn't do the work Coyne thinks it does. See here for my humble opinion on why it doesn't work.

So far, Prof. Coyne has failed to provide any persuasive reasons to accept his claim that God is unnecessary for morality. I'll examine the balance of his argument tomorrow.

Who Designed the Designer?

Perhaps you've heard materialists retort, when confronted with the argument that the universe and life show overwhelming evidence of having been designed for life, that if that is so then who designed the designer? Implicit in the objection is that if you can't describe the designer or say how, exactly, it designed things then your argument is refuted. It's a philosophically naive reply, but a common one for all that.

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent offers a simple three step rejoinder to it:

Step 1: Assume that Craig Venter (a biologist working on developing artificial life) succeeds in developing an artificial life form and releases it into the wild.
Step 2: Assume that a researcher - let’s call him John - later finds one of Venter’s life forms, examines it, and concludes that it was designed by an intelligent designer.
Step 3: John’s design inference is obviously correct. Note that John’s design inference is not any less correct if he (a) does not know who Craig Venter is; and (b) is unable to say who designed Craig Venter.

Arrington goes on to ask, "Does it say anything about the paucity and/or weakness of our opponents’ arguments that they think the 'Who designed the designer' argument is one of their best?"

It's the fundamental claim of intelligent design proponents that certain aspects of the world, specifically cosmic fine-tuning and complex specified information in living things, are evidence of a cosmic intelligence. Despite what some of their philosophically unsophisticated critics may think, their argument is not the least discredited because they can't say how the engineer came to be or who the engineer was (or is).

Progressive Civility

The following is a quote from Froma Harrop a syndicated columnist who heads the National Conference of Editorial Writers, a group that runs a project called Restoring Civility which is dedicated to the improvement of the tone of our public discourse. Given Ms Harrop's involvement in Restoring Civility this passage will cause you to shake your head:

Make no mistake: The tea party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the United States–threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional: the dream of restoring some fantasy caliphate. . . . Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that’s what Obama has been doing. . . . That the Republican leadership couldn’t control a small group of ignoramuses in its ranks has brought disgrace on their party. But oddly, Obama’s passivity made it hard for responsible Republicans to control their destructive children. The GOP extremists would ask Obama for his firstborn, and he’d say, ‘OK.’ So they think, why not ask for his second-born, to which he responds, ‘Let’s talk.’

Well, a lot of people have noted the disconnect between Ms Harrop's role in Restoring Civility and her incendiary language in this passage and have called her on it. Her attempts to explain herself are pretty funny. For instance, she said this:

I see incivility as not letting other people speak their piece. It’s not about offering strong opinions. If someone’s opinion is fact-based, then it is permissible in civil discourse. Of course, there are matters of delicacy, and I dispensed with all sweet talk in this particular column. And I did stoop to some ad hominem remarks, I’ll admit.

This elicited so much derision on her website that she flouted even her own self-serving definition of civility by shutting down the comments and denying others the ability to "speak their piece." You can read about Ms Harrop and her peculiar notions of civility at Hot Air.

The lesson here, apparently, is that when secular liberal/progressives talk of civility what they have in mind is a conversation between two or more progressives in full agreement on the topic under discussion. As for courteous, respectful discourse between them and, say, a tea partier, well, in that case name-calling and other forms of abuse are amply justified. After all, it's not as if these are reasonable people with whom Ms Harrop and her progressive friends have to deal. They're tea-partiers, for heaven's sake.

Syria

Syrian president Bashar Assad has already murdered several thousand Syrian protestors and the slaughter continues apace:

Horrifying images of bodies and limbs floating in the Orontes River in Hama were aired by Syrian state television early Thursday, Aug. 4. Contrary to official claims that they belonged to Syrian soldiers torn to pieces by protesters, debkafile reports they are the victims of Syrian tank fire and ZU-23 automatic anti-aircraft artillery trained on residential buildings and streets in the last 48 hours as the dead pile up in the streets. Citizens cowering in their homes are throwing the dead out of windows and off roofs into the river.

They are reliving the terrors of the massacre President Bashar Assad's father inflicted on this city of half-a-million in 1982 which left 30,000 dead. The Syrian ruler decided to take advantage of three events for unleashing an all-out assault against rebellious Hama:

1. World attention was riveted on the deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's trial which opened in Cairo Wednesday.
2. The crisis between Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and the army after the entire top command resigned in a body has immobilized Turkey.
3. The UN Security Council convening Wednesday night routinely condemned the killing of civilians in Syria and human rights abuses but stopped at approving sanctions or any concrete penalties for the delinquent Assad regime.

The Syrian ruler has therefore concluded he can safely ignore international opinion. In the face of US and Western indifference, he can continue to mercilessly slaughter his people without fear of the sort of intervention they undertook in Libya or UN sanctions.

Well, he can safely ignore Barack Obama's opinion, that seems certain. Mr. Obama appears to be too busy defending the Libyan people from Qaddafi's genocidal urges to worry about a few thousand Syrians being slaughtered by Mr. Assad.

No one thinks we should intervene militarily in Syria (although the reasons given by Mr. Obama for doing so in Libya certainly apply a hundred-fold to Syria), but why is there no interest in pressing for sanctions against this regime? Why is our administration not every day condemning the atrocities Assad is committing against defenseless civilians in the same city in which his father once slaughtered 30,000 people? Why are we daily spending millions of dollars bombing Libyan soldiers, but all we can muster against Syria are meaningless pronouncements in the U.N.? Is it because Libya has oil and Syria doesn't? Where is President Obama?

A Parable

An obese young man, weighing over 700 lbs., decided to see his doctor. The doctor inquired about his eating habits. The young man told him that he consumed 5000 calories every day and that he's actually increasing that figure by 500 calories a month so that in ten months he expects to be consuming 10,000 calories a day.

The doctor advised him that he was on a path to a stroke, heart attack, and/or diabetes and that the only way to improve his quality of life was to cut back on his calorie consumption. If he didn't he would surely die young.

The man was addicted to food, however, and very reluctant to give it up so he proposed a compromise. "How about if I just increase my intake at a rate of 450 calories a month instead of 500," he suggested, "so that ten months from now I'll only be eating 9500 calories every day."

The doctor replied that that was foolishly inadequate, that he had to do more than cut the rate of increase, he had to cut his base consumption back to about 1500 calories a day.

At this the young man grew angry. He called the doctor's proposal "extremist" and a fringe view in the medical community. He complained that the doctor was needlessly trying to deprive him of everything that made his life pleasurable. He insisted that the doctor's advice would kill him. He stomped out of the office declaring as he left that the doctor was "a lunatic."

And so the young man continued gorging himself until one day a year or so later he dropped over dead.

Drone Warfare

Christianity Today features a piece in which Paul Zahl, Daniel Bell, and Brian Stiltner consider the question whether it's moral to use Predator drone strikes to kill terrorists.

Zahl's contribution is puzzling, to put it charitably. He makes two points, both of which are hard to take seriously.

First, it's wrong, he claims, to conduct war when one side in the fight doesn't see the effects of their actions. The United States Air Force and the CIA operate predator drones thousands of miles away from the intended targets. There's no possibility of making eye contact with the enemy and fully realizing the human cost of the attack. If we could see the carnage we caused we'd be much more judicious in our use of force.

Be all that as it may, where does it say in just war theory, or anywhere else, that a conflict is waged morally only if the consequences are visible? Zahl acknowledges that his criterion would rule out aerial bombing and artillery strikes, and believes these are also wrong. Apparently, for him the only acceptable warfare is hand to hand combat.

His second reason for thinking that the use of drone aircraft is wrong is that unmanned predator drones prevent war from being "a fair fight". Here's why:

They emasculate the enemy. I use emasculate intentionally, because our victims live in societies where male humiliation is a fate almost worse than death. This method of fighting reduces people on the ground to a condition of absolute helplessness, because they cannot fight back against unmanned drones.

This reduction of the enemy to absolute helplessness is good for us, you may say. It means we can't lose! But it also creates resentment in the people we are fighting.

Well, yes, but war does that. People resent it when they're being shot at, even if accidentally. It's a little odd of Zahl to take the position that we'd be better off sending troops into Pakistan to fight and die than to use missiles. Wouldn't the presence of U.S. troops cause at least as much resentment as do drone strikes? What guarantee is there that combat troops would cause fewer inadvertent casualties than missiles do?

It's also strange that Zahl thinks war has to be a "fair fight" in order to be moral. How could there ever be a completely fair fight? One side will always have an advantage over the other and if they didn't the conflict would result only in a standoff. Is it unfair that our troops are better trained and equipped than the enemy? Is it unfair that our military uses satellites and aircraft for reconnaissance?

The other contributions in the column seem more reasonable than Dr. Zahl's. Indeed, Bell makes the point that it's not the technology of war that is at issue in determining the morality of its execution, but the virtue of the combatants.

I'm with him.

New Tone

I was going to do a post on the utter hypocrisy of the liberal left in the wake of the debt-ceiling debate - you know, all the name-calling directed at the Tea Party "terrorists", "hostage-takers", and "traitors" and how they wanted to "end life on earth as we know it". I had planned to write about how, in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, the left-leaning media exploded at alleged incivility on the right and how conservatives were poisoning our national discourse and how Sarah Palin was to blame for the lunatic in Arizona who shot Ms Giffords, and how liberals all demanded a new, more respectful tone in our politics, but how they're in fact blind to their own sordid, incendiary, and fatuous rhetoric.

I was going to write about all this, but then I read Jonah Goldberg's column at National Review, and I knew I couldn't say it as well as he does.

Here's his opening:

Look, I am past exhausted talking about liberal media bias. It’s real, we all know it, and people who deny it aren’t even fooling themselves. But some things just have to be pointed out. This morning I watched the first 15 minutes of the Today Show. I don’t particularly love or even like the program, but I find it useful to see what the producers think is the big news of the day. And sometimes Chuck Todd is on, and I like him. If I sound defensive about watching the show it’s only because I am.

Anyway, the first ten minutes was about Gabby Giffords’ return to the House yesterday. I’m not sure it merited the full ten minutes or trumped the hard news that later followed, but it’s a great story and everyone is rooting for the lady, so I’m fine with it.

But think about this for a second. The Giffords shooting sent the media elite in this country into a bout of St. Vitus’s dance that would have warranted an army of exorcists in previous ages. Sarah Palin’s Facebook map was an evil totem that forced some guy to go on a shooting spree. The New York Times, the Washington Post, all three broadcast networks — particularly NBC whose senior foreign-affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, devotes, by my rough reckoning, ten times as much air time to whining about Sarah Palin as she does about anything having to do with foreign affairs — flooded the zone with “Have you no shame” finger wagging. A memo went forth demanding that everyone at MSNBC get their dresses over their heads about the evil “tone” from the right. Media Matters went into overdrive working the interns 24/7 to “prove” that Republicans deliberately foment violence with their evil targets on their evil congressional maps.

Everyone “knew” the shooter was a tea partier. Except he wasn’t. He wasn’t even a conservative. He was a sick, demented, nutball. And it still didn’t matter! More bleating and caterwauling about the “tone” followed. More chin stroking and tut-tutting from Meet the Press roundtables and “very special segments” on the Today Show. More pizzas were ordered for the Media Matters galley slaves.

The rest of Goldberg's column is very much worth reading and I urge you to give it the two minutes it'll take to finish it.

It's sad that people whose economic policies are making day to day life in America purgatorial for millions, whose refusal to drill for domestic energy has delayed, directly or indirectly, the employment of tens of thousands, whose adamantine support for an industry that slaughters over a million babies a year is non-negotiable, and whose policies enable unions to hold taxpayers hostage all across the country, would have the chutzpah to stigmatize as "terrorists" and "hostage-takers" the very people who oppose all of this.

Maybe it's not chutzpah, maybe they just lack elementary thinking skills.

The Beauty of Mathematics

Australian Geneticist Michael Denton talks about the strange beauty of mathematics and how that beauty militates against the hypothesis that mathematics is something that we invent. Denton argues instead that mathematical truth exists independently of us and that we discover rather than create it. This raises, of course, the intriguing question of how it came to be in the first place:

Michael Denton - Mathematical Truths Are Transcendent And Beautiful -

An explanation of Pascal's Triangle can be found here. While you're at it you might also want to check out the Fibonacci sequence and its myriad occurrences in nature. It's fascinating.

The Corrosive Effects of Liberalism

People sometimes think that the only differences between conservatives and liberals are political. They may differ on how to address our economic problems but which one chooses is pretty much a matter of taste. This is, however, not true. The differences extend far beyond how we should manage the nation's finances. Dennis Prager argues that liberalism is corrosive of a nation's moral character.

He gives ten ways in which liberalism corrodes our character both nationally and individually. This is not to say that individual liberals are not fine people, but rather that the policies they support have a pernicious effect that they doubtless don't intend.

Here's a summary of his argument:

1. The bigger the government, the less the citizens do for one another. If the state will take care of me and my neighbors, why should I? This is why Western Europeans, people who have lived in welfare states far longer than Americans have, give less to charity and volunteer less time to others than do Americans of the same socioeconomic status.

2. The welfare state, though often well intended, is nevertheless a Ponzi scheme. Conservatives have known this for generations. But now, any honest person must acknowledge it. The welfare state is predicated on collecting money from today's workers in order to pay for those who paid in before them.

3. Citizens of liberal welfare states become increasingly narcissistic. The great preoccupations of vast numbers of Brits, Frenchmen, Germans and other Western Europeans are how much vacation time they will have and how early they can retire and be supported by the state.

4. The liberal welfare state makes people disdain work.

5. Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality.

6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption. As the famous truism goes, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

7. The welfare state corrupts family life. Even many Democrats have acknowledged the destructive consequences of the welfare state on the underclass. It has rendered vast numbers of males unnecessary to females, who have looked to the state to support them and their children (and the more children, the more state support) rather than to husbands.

8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into responsible adults....The loudest and most sustained applause I ever heard was that of college students responding to a speech by President Barack Obama informing them that they would now be covered by their parents' health insurance policies until age 26.

9. As a result of the left's sympathetic views of pacifism and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the world's evils and even to defend them.

10. The leftist weltanschauung sees society's and the world's great battle as between rich and poor rather than between good and evil. Equality therefore trumps morality. This is what produces the morally confused liberal elites that can venerate a Cuban tyranny with its egalitarian society over a free and decent America that has greater inequality.

Prager opines that progressives don't try to refute these charges, rather they simply invoke emotionally charged terms like "social justice" and "compassion," and smear their opponents as "selfish" or "racist".

He closes his piece by saying that if you want to feel good, liberalism is awesome. If you want to do good, it is largely awful.

Flying Squirrel

If you're a collegiate wrestling fan you'll appreciate this takedown by Ellis Coleman of Northern Michigan at the Junior World Championships. Coleman was competing against an Iranian wrestler named Mehdi Chooli Zeidvand who can probably look forward to being shot for embarrassing his country when he returns home.

The move is called "the Flying Squirrel."

Coleman went on to win the match, and eventually earned third place in his weight class.

Thanks to HuffPo for the tip.

That's Our Joe

Politico reports that Vice President Joe Biden compared the Tea Party Republicans to terrorists in the recent debt ceiling negotiations:

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room.

This is pretty funny coming from an administration that's reluctant to call actual terrorists terrorists.

In the Orwellian world of Mr. Biden and his associates, apparently, people who maim and kill for political reasons are not terrorists, but people who insist we stop spending money we don't have are.

Speaking of Mr. Biden, we were very disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that he's charging the Secret Service rent for living in a house he owns so that they can better protect him. What this means is that we the taxpayers are actually paying Mr. Biden for the privilege of protecting his life. Perhaps this is what the administration has in mind when they say that everyone should pay their fair share.

I wonder if people demanded an end to this scam if Mr. Biden would consider us terrorists.

Getting bin Laden

The New Yorker has an account by Nicholas Schmidle of what happened in Abottabad the night Osama bin Laden's luck finally ran out. Schmidle's piece has some fascinating details about the raid on bin Laden's compound and is a fascinating read. Here's how he begins:

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU.

A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

One of the details Schmidle discusses is why the president opted for a raid rather than a missile attack. He also points out that this mission was just a night's work for most of the men involved. Most of them had been on dozens if not hundreds of such missions not only in Pakistan but also Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Give it a read.

The Incredible Design of Chemistry

Scientist Michael Denton discusses the amazing fitness of the laws and properties of chemistry, particularly the properties of water and carbon dioxide, for the production of life on earth. Denton is an agnostic but he finds this fitness astonishing and inexplicable apart from a superintelligent designer:

Michael Denton - We Are Stardust - Fine Tuning Of The Elements - Fred Hoyle Atheist to Theist -

Denton's book Nature's Destiny goes into these matters in much more detail. It's an excellent read for anyone interested in learning more about the fine-tuning argument. A brief discussion of Hoyle's prediction can be found here.

Al Qaeda on the Brink

There seems to be a growing consensus in the intelligence community that al Qaeda is on life support. According to a report in the Washington Post:

U.S. counterterrorism officials are increasingly convinced that the killing of Osama bin Laden and the toll of seven years of CIA drone strikes have pushed al­ Qaeda to the brink of collapse.

The assessment reflects a widespread view at the CIA and other agencies that a relatively small number of additional blows could effectively extinguish the Pakistan-based organization that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — an outcome that was seen as a distant prospect for much of the past decade.

Unfortunately, Islamic terrorism is hydra-headed. When al Qaeda is no longer viable other nihilistic savages will step up to fill their role. We are in a generational war with people who want to destroy everything about the Western way of life and everyone in the Islamic world who disagrees with them on any point of doctrine. This war won't end until one side or the other is exhausted either economically, emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually.

Honest Politicians

A lot of people seem to be of the opinion that the debt ceiling impasse has shown that our system of governance is broken. We're too divided and unable to get anything done any longer, the argument goes, and it's all the fault of the Tea Party wing of the Republican party. The Tea Party congressmen and women are nutty obstructionists, a scourge on our politics, and we need to vote them out in order to save our democracy.

I think this is all exactly wrong. I think our system is working fine. Americans are learning the difference between contrasting visions of what government should be and learning, too, that their votes matter, that they have the power to elect people who will truly represent them. So far from being the end of democracy, as some are saying, I believe we're seeing it's reinvigoration.

We're also seeing politicians model what we've always said we wanted political leaders to be.

For years we've heard that the problem with Washington is that the people we send there can't be trusted to do what they said they would do, they're too easily bought off, all they care about is their next election, they have no principles, they lie, etc.

Now for the first time in my memory a significant fraction of the House and Senate is comprised of people who are doing exactly what they said they'd do, who can't be bought with earmarks or promises of campaign funding, who don't care about being re-elected, whose only ambition is to see their principles upheld, who are genuinely putting the country's future ahead of their own political careers, and a lot of people, mostly on the left but also in the GOP (Senator John McCain, for example), are beside themselves with frustration and even anger.

To watch the fulminations of some of the commentators at MSNBC you'd think that people who refuse to be complicit in burdening our children with crushing debt are going to be the end of the Republic. Some are calling them "terrorists" and "anarchists". A casual viewer would gain the impression that these evil people were deliberately trying to destroy the country rather than save it.

What we're now hearing is that all that talk about the need for principled leadership is no longer "operative". What we really need are people who can compromise, who'll shrug off their principles, who'll renege on the campaign promises they made their constituents. In other words, what we need, we're now being told, are precisely the kind of politicians that everyone has for decades held in contempt.

It seems that what some folks mean when they say they want politicians with integrity is that they want honest politicians as long as those politicians are reliably liberal. Otherwise, they want them to be as weak and unprincipled as they can be.

Cosmogenesis

The journal New Scientist has an article that seeks to explain how something could come from nothing as it must have in the creation of the universe ex nihilo. I'm not sure how well they succeed.

Here's an excerpt from the article's lede followed by a video clip on the topic:

Around 13.7 billion years ago time and space spontaneously sprang from the void. How did that happen? Or to put it another way: why does anything exist at all? It's a big question, perhaps the biggest. The idea that the universe simply appeared out of nothing is difficult enough; trying to conceive of nothingness is perhaps even harder.

The question this all raises, I guess, is where did the quantum energy and the force of gravity come from that made the universe possible? If the universe sprung from the quantum flux then how do we explain that?

After all, if there was a preexisting quantum vaccum such that the universe didn't really emerge from nothing, then that vaccum is in fact the embryo of the universe and we're still left with the question of where it came from. Did it always exist? Where did the laws which govern the quantum world come from? Are we to just consider this level of explanation the terminus, and say that the quantum vacuum just is a brute fact with no need of explanation? Is that not a science-stopper?

Bad Day for the AGW Community

Yesterday was a bad day for the global warming community. First there was an article by James Taylor at Forbes in which Taylor notes that more heat escapes the earth's atmosphere than the climatologists' computer models had predicted:

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.

Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much"). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds.

Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted.

Then there was the revelation that the initial warnings of polar bear peril that served as the symbol of global climate change have been called into question and the research scientist responsible for them suspended from his duties for suspected fraud.

All in all, not the sort of news one would hope for when one is trying to rebuild public trust and mobilize the world to radically alter our way of life.

Tipping Point

I don't know what to make of this article in Science Daily. It raises a lot of questions, but whether it's correct or not it's certainly interesting.

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

What I don't understand is why, if this is true, there are so many issues in which the country appears to be evenly split. For example, more than 10% of Americans believe fervently in either the pro-life or pro-choice position on abortion. Yet the country seems to be evenly divided on the question. Likewise with Darwinian evolution. It seems certain that 10% of the population is strongly committed to Darwinism, but the majority of people in the country is not.

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

This all seems counterintuitive, but perhaps not. Perhaps there's a kind of cultural critical mass at which point a new idea explodes through the society. The article offers some examples, none of which seems convincing, but perhaps readers can think of some historical examples which confirm this research.

Flight of the Millenials

Michael Barone cites some polling statistics that show a general abandonment of the Democratic party by white voters, but the flight of younger white voters, the so-called millenials, is stunning:

The most noteworthy movement among whites has been among voters under 30, the so-called Millennial generation. Millennials voted 66 to 32 percent for Barack Obama in 2008 and identified as Democrats rather than Republicans by a 60 to 32 percent margin.

But white Millennials have been moving away from the Democrats. The Democratic edge in party identification among white Millennials dropped from 7 points in 2008 to 3 points in 2009 to a 1-point Republican edge in 2010 and an 11-point Republican lead in 2011.

Barone's column attributes the disenchantment with the Democrats, particularly the president, to disillusionment over the economy after candidate Obama had held out such high hopes for young people. The reality has been dispiriting. Many young people are graduating from college in debt up to their ears and unable to find work that will enable them to pay off their loans.

Nothing like the prospect of fruitless job searches and endless loan payments to disabuse one of the romantic seductions of the euphoric rhetoric of hope and change.

Why Are They So Vile?

Andrew Klavan at City Journal comments on the increasing hate and vulgarity directed by liberal personalities like Bill Maher at attractive conservative women.

Comedian-commentator Bill Maher has been getting a lot of attention lately for trying to get a lot of attention. He generally goes about this by using sexist hate speech against attractive, powerful, and intelligent conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, calling them female vulgarisms, for instance, or, as most recently, hosting comedians who fantasize aloud about sexually abusing them.

Maher has been particularly bad, but he's far from the only one. Neither have Keith Olberman, John Stewart, and others been shy in displaying their misogynism.

But...there does seem to me to be one thing worth saying about Maher and the others. Their ugliness seems to be escalating day by day, and with it the dishonesty, distortions, and bullying anger of their mainstream-media fellow travelers. There’s a reason for this, I think. It’s the increasingly apparent failure of Barack Obama. With the notable exception of Osama bin Laden’s execution, the Obama presidency has resembled nothing so much as an episode of Mr. Bean, one slapstick misadventure after another. The stagnant economy, the rising unemployment, the staggering, soon-to-be-crippling debt—hiked more under Obama than under every president from Washington to Reagan combined—these can no longer be blamed on his predecessor but are his to own.

This has to be fantastically humiliating for our left-wing media. If you’ve forgotten what they were like during Obama’s 2008 candidacy—the weirdly sexual thrills up their legs, the unreasoning comparison of Obama with America’s greatest men, the pseudo-religious idolatry—you have only to turn to August’s edition of Esquire to find a representative reminder that has to be read to be believed. It’s a column from Canadian writer Stephen Marche hilariously titled “How Can We Not Love Obama?” and subtitled “Because like it or not, he is all of us.” At one point, Marche writes: “‘I am large, I contain multitudes,’ Walt Whitman wrote, and Obama lives that lyrical prophecy.” And later—and I swear I’m not making this up: “Barack Obama is developing into what Hegel called a ‘world-historical soul,’ an embodiment of the spirit of the times. He is what we hope we can be.”

Klavan might have included Evan Thomas swooning on MSNBC that Mr. Obama is "sort of God" bestriding the world.

At any rate, the left was so emotionally invested in the apotheosis of Obama that when they began to realize that conservatives were right all along that the man was an unqualified poseur, they found the truth so galling that in their humiliation and resentment they cast aside their ersatz liberal facades and lashed out against those whose judgment of Mr. Obama had been vindicated with as much venom and ugliness as they could get away with.

What many observers have wondered is where the feminist groups have been on this. There've been a few expressions of censure for Maher's sleaziness, to be sure, but there's been no sustained media demand for these people to be fired of the sort we'd certainly see had the offenders been conservatives insulting liberal women.

Was Breivik a Christian?

Perhaps you've heard that the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik was a Christian fundamentalist. Perhaps you were disheartened that a Christian would do such a horrific thing, or perhaps you felt a bit of schadenfreude in thinking that Christians are just as bad as anyone else, or perhaps you thought that the New Atheists are right in alleging that religion is the source of most of the world's evil.

Well, as a lot of people suspected when the media first put it out that this evil man was a Christian, the meme didn't survive a careful reading of his own manifesto.

John West at Evolution News and Views has done the leg work in uncovering Breivik's beliefs, and it turns out that he's in fact an atheistic Social Darwinist who used Christianity as cultural camouflage.

If you're one of the folks mentioned above you really should read West's essay. Here's a sample:

[I]t now turns out Breivik really isn't a Christian fundamentalist after all. According to his 1518-page manifesto "A European Declaration of Independence," he may not even believe in God. Instead of Christianity, his views are largely based on what might be described as a virulent mixture of scientific fundamentalism and Social Darwinism.

To be sure, Breivik identifies himself as "100% Christian" in his manifesto (p. 1403), and he certainly talks incessantly about defending "Christian" civilization. But he also makes clear that his Christianity is simply a pose adopted for political reasons.

Answering why he chose to align himself with a group supposedly espousing "Christian values," he states: "My choice was based purely [on] pragmatism." (p. 1380) He goes on to explain that "Christianity" has far more "mass appeal" than nationalism, white supremacy, or a revival of paganism, and so it is a more effective "banner" under which to build his movement. (p. 1381) In sum, Breivik views religion like Machiavelli viewed religion--as a political tool. It's worth noting that Machiavelli's The Prince is listed by Breivik as one of his favorite books. (p. 1407)

As for his own religious beliefs and practices, Breivik frankly admits: "I'm not going to pretend I'm a very religious person as that would be a lie. I've always been very pragmatic and influenced by my secular surroundings and environment." (p. 1344, emphasis added) Indeed, Breivik acknowledges that he used to believe that "Religion is a crutch for weak people. What is the point in believing in a higher power if you have confidence in yourself!? Pathetic."

[Breivik] continues: "Perhaps this is true for many cases. Religion is a crutch for many weak people and many embrace religion for self serving reasons as a source for drawing mental strength (to feed their weak emotional state f[or] example during illness, death, poverty etc.). Since I am not a hypocrite, I'll say directly that this is my agenda as well." (p. 1344, emphasis added)

Breivik's claim to be a Christian was a cynical attempt to appear socially innocuous. In fact, he was a Christian in the same sense that Hitler was a Christian.

Breivik was a Social Darwinist and an atheist, which, I think, is significant. Ask yourself this question, If both atheism and Darwinism are true in what sense did Breivik do anything wrong? What objective ground does an atheistic Darwinian have for believing that it's wrong for the strong to kill the weak?

Richard Dawkins, who is both a Darwinist and an atheist, makes this very point when he asks, "What's to prevent us from saying that Hitler was right? I mean, that's a genuinely difficult question."

He's right, it is a difficult question, at least it is for a man who accepts no transcendent moral law or authority. Were Anders Breivik actually a Christian he would have acted in utter violation of all that Christ taught. On atheism, however, his massacre of those young people violated no objective moral law and thus incurs no moral, only legal, guilt.

Freedom or Statism

Tony Blankley of the Washington Times explains why the current debate in Washington over how best to handle the debt ceiling is really an exercise in niggling around the margins. Spending needs to be cut and needs to be cut much more drastically than either party is proposing. What's at stake is nothing less than our liberty. Here's the crux of his essay:

Until a couple of years ago, I never actually expected to see a constitutional restoration. I assumed that America was on a slow, irreversible trek to the statist side. But the sheer incompetence and, in some cases, mendacity, of the current crop of statist politicians in both the legislative and executive branches seem likely to bring on an economic crisis that will actually force Americans to decide between a constitutional restoration and a full embrace of statism.

When the current, failing effort to fund our medical and retirement benefits programs creates an American bond crisis (Greece today, Spain, Portugal, Ireland tomorrow, America probably soon) that will lead to actually running out of money to pay the promised benefits. When that avoidable crisis hits, I'm pretty sure the American people will overthrow statism for restored constitutionally limited government. If we flop on the statist side, then the great American freedom experiment will be over.

The Washington power holders could and should avoid that stark choice if they would actually try to get our fiscal condition under control. But they have drifted into fantasyland. It is hard not to suspect that even the recent "big solution," a $4 trillion alleged reduction-in-deficit plan (rumored to be $1.3 trillion in taxes and $2.7 trillion in spending cuts) is inadequate to the challenge.

First, it is too small a reduction — we need to reduce deficits by at least $10 trillion over 10 years. Second, President Obama talks about attaining that $4 trillion in the 12th out-year. That is another way of saying that such proposed spending cuts will mostly be backloaded to the years 2023 and 2024 — three presidential administrations and six Congresses from now. That would constitute the world's longest can-kick.

Meanwhile, the proposed tax increases that are described beguilingly by their advocates as responsible, sensible and necessary are both excessive and inadequate - and misrepresented. Not only is raising tax revenues during an economic slowdown a violation of even Keynesian principles, which recommend both deficit spending and tax cuts during economic contractions, but if the George W. Bush tax cuts were repealed for all couples with incomes of more than $250,000, it would yield just $700 billion over 10 years, while the entitlement shortfalls will be about $10 trillion. That would include severely limiting mortgage interest deductions and charitable deductions.

It is representative of the dysfunctions that arise when symbolism replaces policy calculation that the president has recently taken to calling for raising the taxes on corporate jets — a provision of the tax code that the Democratic Congress passed in 2009 and the president signed into law — reasonably justified at the time as an effort to protect more than 11,000 workers on corporate-jet construction who were losing their jobs. Now, with unemployment again going up, that same policy, which once symbolized helping workers, is characterized as needed punishment for the plutocrats.

If the federal government really went after all those billionaires the Democrats snarl about and confiscated all the property of the country's 400 billionaires (down to their last set of cuff links and children's baseball mitts) it would yield only $1.3 trillion — about five months of federal spending.

We're headed for a cliff and the only party in Washington that seems to be serious about averting catastrophe are the Republicans. They keep putting forward proposals to at least limit the rate of increase in spending, but the Democrats keep shooting them down. The problem is that we spend far more than we have. Conservatives want to roll back projected spending increases, liberals want to raise taxes, but as Blankley and others have pointed out, even if the government confiscated everything that the "millionaires and billionaires" owned it would only solve the problem for a few months.

Any long term solution to the problem, any restoration of fiscal stability, is going to require that we severely curtail how much we spend and borrow. It'll be painful, to be sure, but if we don't do it our children and grandchildren will find themselves living in a third world country.

Making it in America

Mona Charen tells us a wonderful story with a couple of valuable lessons for a lot of Americans who complain they can't get ahead because the deck is stacked against them or the playing field isn't level. Her column is based on a memoir written by a Chinese immigrant named Ying Ma who overcame enormous hardship and obstacles to graduate from Cornell and then Stanford Law school. Here's Charen's lede:

It's impossible to read Ying Ma's fascinating memoir, "Chinese Girl in the Ghetto," without wincing. She was born in Guangzhou, China's third largest city. Throughout her mostly carefree early childhood years, she kept her family's secret: that her parents repeatedly sought permission to emigrate to the United States.

Her family was not poor, at least not by Chinese standards of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet her daily life would be considered squalid by first world standards. Her family lived in a two-bedroom apartment. She, her brother and her parents shared one bedroom (and two plank beds). Her paternal grandparents and an uncle shared the other. At times, another uncle slept in the living room. They shared the kitchen and bathroom (such as it was) with the family next door. There was no running hot water, and the toilet was a hole in the floor. The elderly had a particularly hard time crouching.

Ying Ma's childhood was nonetheless relatively carefree. She longed for more possessions and eagerly consumed whatever Western products — like nail polish and candy — her relatives brought from nearby Hong Kong. But she excelled in school, was surrounded by friends, was doted upon by her grandfather and looked forward (here's the wince) to a fantastic new life in America.

As a child, Ying could not comprehend the more menacing aspects of totalitarian rule. Her third grade teacher, for example, announced one day that instead of doing math, "You are all going to spend the hour confessing." When the pupils expressed confusion, teacher Fu explained, "The school knows that each of you, or someone you know, has behaved wrongly....Now start writing."

Ying recalls, "I always believed my teachers. Now I was genuinely worried. Did the school already know I had relatives from Hong Kong who brought me toys and clothing from the world of the capitalist running dogs? Did it know I really, really liked American movies...?"

The rest of the narrative is fascinating, especially the glimpse Charen gives us of what Ying had to endure when she arrived in the States as a child unable to speak English. Her experience in U.S. public schools reminds me of the story of the Vietnamese family portrayed in the movie Journey from the Fall.

There are a couple of take-away lessons in Ying Ma's story. One is that the belief, evidently widespread in the minority community, that racism is a sin that only whites are guilty of is risible.

The second, also prevalent among those in the minority community who wish to rationalize their own failure to achieve, is that the reason minorities can't get ahead is because they're so disadvantaged due to poverty and racial discrimination that they simply can't compete with the more fortunate. Ying Ma's accomplishment shows what a cop out this is.

Ying succeeded in the same way anyone can succeed in this country - through hard work, tenacity, good choices, and a determination to rise above her circumstances.

SETI

Astronomers have for decades now been searching for evidence of life elsewhere in the galaxy, and for those eager to prove that life is the product of natural processes and that wherever conditions are suitable life will emerge, a lot is at stake. If it can be shown to exist elsewhere in the universe it would, the thinking goes, make it harder to believe that God created life specially here on earth.

Thus news like that contained in this article is decidedly uncongenial to many who would like nothing more than to show that life is not only not exclusive to earth, but is actually common in the galaxy and the universe.

Here's part of it:

Scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) work under the assumption that there is, in fact, intelligent life out there to be found. A new analysis may crush their optimism.

To calculate the likelihood that they'll make radio contact with extraterrestrials, SETI scientists use what's known as the Drake Equation. Formulated in the 1960s by Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in California, it approximates the number of radio-transmitting civilizations in our galaxy at any one time by multiplying a string of factors: the number of stars, the fraction that have planets, the fraction of those that are habitable, the probability of life arising on such planets, its likelihood of becoming intelligent and so on.

The values of almost all these factors are highly speculative. Nonetheless, Drake and others have plugged in their best guesses, and estimate that there are about 10,000 tech-savvy civilizations in the galaxy currently sending signals our way — a number that has led some scientists to predict that we'll detect alien signals within two decades.

Their optimism relies on one factor in particular: In the equation, the probability of life arising on suitably habitable planets (ones with water, rocky surfaces and atmospheres) is almost always taken to be 100 percent. As the reasoning goes, the same fundamental laws apply to the entire universe, and because those laws engendered the genesis of life on Earth — and relatively early in its history at that — they must readily spawn life elsewhere, too. As the Russian astrobiologist Andrei Finkelstein put it at a recent SETI press conference, "the genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms."

But in a new paper published on arXiv.org, astrophysicist David Spiegel at Princeton University and physicist Edwin Turner at the University of Tokyo argue that this thinking is dead wrong. Using a statistical method called Bayesian reasoning, they argue that the life here on Earth could be common, or it could be extremely rare — there's no reason to prefer one conclusion over the other. With their new analysis, Spiegel and Turner say they have erased the one Drake factor scientists felt confident about and replaced it with a question mark.

While it's true that life arose quickly on Earth (within the planet's first few hundred million years), the researchers point out that if it hadn't done so, there wouldn't have been enough time for intelligent life — humans — to have evolved. So, in effect, we're biased. It took at least 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on Earth, and the only reason we're able to contemplate the likelihood of life today is that its evolution happened to get started early. This requisite good luck is entirely independent of the actual probability of life emerging on a habitable planet.

"Although life began on this planet fairly soon after the Earth became habitable, this fact is consistent with … life being arbitrarily rare in the Universe," the authors state. In the paper, they prove this statement mathematically.

In other words, the position of those who have been saying for fifty years that naturalistic abiogenesis is extraordinarily improbable has been strengthened by the Spiegel and Turner paper, and the argument of those who have argued that life elsewhere in the galaxy is inevitable has been severely weakened. The view that intelligent human life is special and that earth may well be the only place in the universe where intelligent life, or life of any kind, exists seemingly grows more difficult to gainsay with every development of modern science.

All Whites Are Racist

The Blaze featues a video of a Los Angeles man who holds a dim, and uninformed, view of the Tea Party, at whose rally he was protesting:

Consider some of what the first gentleman interviewed in the video said:

“You hate the president because he is black, and you think the white race is superior.”

“As far as the black sell-outs who wish they were white and are part of the Tea Party, these sell-out Negroes have no business speaking for and joining with racists who want to kick them back into slavery.”

“No, they’re not talking, they’re too dumb to talk. All they’re talking about is Tea Party, or white supremacy, blacks should go back to Africa, America was better 400 years ago.”

Perhaps he is unaware that there was no America 400 years ago.

"All the Tea Party cares about is “hating black people.”

What evidence does he have of this? Look at the people in the background of the video. Do they look like the caricature this man has of Tea Party whites?

Racism is “a genetic trait of whites.”

“You can’t find that kind of hatred in anybody but white people."

Maybe he should look in the mirror. He might find that no raced has a monopoly on racism.

“This is hatred. This is racism....And it’s only [something] white people are capable of. Only white people.”

In other words, whites are inherently immoral and thus inherently inferior (morally) to non-whites. Isn't that itself racist a statement?

Forgive me for making a politically incorrect observation, but if this man's cognitive abilities are typical of members of non-white groups in general it's understandable why whites would feel superior.

By the way, what Michele Bachman actually said was that,

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born in to slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African- American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

Whether the statement is true or false it's certainly not an unreasonable claim, and it certainly wasn't racist.

How to Reverse Our Economic Malaise

There's one thing the Obama administration could do, according to Jack Gerard, the head of the American Petroleum Industry, that would almost overnight create hundreds of thousands of jobs, help close the deficit, and make us independent of foreign sources of energy, but Mr. Obama won't do it.

Despite his pledge to cut red tape for job-creating industries, regulations and other delays are holding up billions of dollars in investments and thousands of jobs for oil and gas producers, Mr. Gerard alleges. Why Mr. Obama won't do it certainly is a mystery, at least to people like Mr. Gerard:

“Why would you take away from the very industry that’s creating hundreds of thousands of jobs?” “Why would you punish one of the … industries that is creating more revenue for the federal government today than perhaps any industry? Why would you penalize them?”

Oil and natural gas companies could create millions more jobs if allowed to drill domestically, Mr. Gerard said, adding that it also would help wean Americans away from oppressive foreign governments and companies responsible for high gas prices. Another plus would be the generation of billions of tax dollars.

Overbearing regulators, however, are keeping that from happening, he said.

“We’re still very troubled by not only the number of regulations, but the extreme nature of them,” Mr. Gerard said. “The president called on his people to review the regulatory processes. But we can point to a number of regulatory processes that have been initiated or continue to go forward that discourage the development of oil and natural gas in this country.”

In one instance, three agencies are reviewing the same process, even though it has been safely used for 65 years, he said. The Environmental Protection Agency — despite its early study that found the practice safe — along with the Interior and Energy departments are investigating the process.

Mr. Gerard emphasizes that domestic drilling is extremely safe but that regulations and taxes discourage oil companies from pursuing it:

The industry pays an effective tax rate of about 41 percent and contributes $86 million a day to the Treasury Department, but that hasn’t stopped calls for higher taxes to punish the companies.

[I]f the government opened America to domestic drilling, it would solve the country’s most pressing problems, he argued. The industry, which employs 9.2 million Americans and represents 7.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, could create another 190,000 jobs by 2013. By 2025, it could generate another $194 billion in tax revenue. By 2030, American could produce 92 percent of its liquid fuels in the U.S. and Canada.

The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that the U.S. trade deficit is the largest since the height of the recession in October 2008, and it blamed oil imports for the problem. Mr. Gerard said the potential exists to produce another 5 million barrels a day in the U.S. and Canada.

“If we produce more at home, we import less,” he said. “We can really produce the oil and natural gas the country needs for many, many years to come.”

The solution to so many of our problems is right at hand for the president. Unleashing our petroleum industry would put us on the road to economic recovery and restore us to a position of world prominence. As long as Mr. Obama refuses to support domestic oil and gas production nothing he says about his desire to reverse joblessness and get the economy humming again sounds sincere. He has a lot to answer for to the millions of unemployed when putting many of them back to work would be so easy.

Pressure

Paul Krugman of the New York Times, an economist for whom the U.S. cannot embrace socialism soon enough to suit, is growing disenchanted with Mr. Obama. Unfortunately, his disenchantment arises from reasons opposite those which consternate conservatives about Mr. Obama.

Krugman writes:

I am among those in a state of suppressed rage and panic over the president’s negotiating strategy.

I’d like to believe that it’s all 11-dimensional political chess; but at this point — after the midterm debacle, after the big concession on taxes without even getting a raise in the debt limit — what evidence do we have that Obama knows what he’s doing?

It’s very hard to avoid the impression that three things are going on:

1. Obama really just isn’t that into Democratic priorities. He really doesn’t much care about preserving Medicare for all seniors, keeping Social Security intact, and so on.

2. What he is into is his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend the partisan divide. He imagines that he can be the one who brings about a big transformation that settles disputes for decades to come — and has been unwilling to drop that vision no matter how many times the GOP shows itself utterly uninterested in anything except gaining the upper hand.

3. As a result, he can’t or won’t see what’s obvious to everyone else: that any Grand Bargain will last precisely as long as Democrats control the Senate and the White House, and will be torn up in favor of privatization and big tax cuts for the wealthy as soon as the GOP has the chance.

I hope I’m wrong about all this. But when has Obama given progressives any reason to believe they can trust him?

The President finds himself caught between the rock of conservative opposition and the hard place of outraged progressives who want a Marxist utopia yesterday. I know he enjoys the vacations and the golf and flying around on Air Force One, but one wonders, if he keeps getting the heat that he's beginning to get from a heretofore adoring media, why he would ever want a second term.

America's View of the Bible

A recently released Gallup poll on Americans attitudes toward the Bible offered some interesting, if unsurprising, numbers. Respondents were asked if they thought the Bible was 1) the actual word of God, 2) the inspired word of God, or 3) a collection of myths and fables:

Three in 10 Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual word of God. That is similar to what Gallup has measured over the last two decades, but down from the 1970s and 1980s. A 49% plurality of Americans say the Bible is the inspired word of God but that it should not be taken literally, consistently the most common view in Gallup's nearly 40-year history of this question. Another 17% consider the Bible an ancient book of stories recorded by man.

None of these views has changed much since 1977 according to the charts accompanying the article at the link. The high point in the percentage of Americans favoring a literal interpretation of the Bible was 40%, recorded in 1980 and 1984. The low point was 27% in 2001.

The data are charted according to church attendance, educational attainment, income level, whether the respondent was protestant, Catholic, or none, and whether the respondent was Republican or Democrat, politically conservative or liberal.

As one might expect, those with low church attendance, high education, high income, no religious preference, and liberal Democrat tended to view the Bible as a collection of legends and myths. Those with high church attendance, less education, lower income, and who are protestant, conservative Republicans tended to see the Bible as either the actual word of God or as inspired by God. The latter group, however, those who see the Bible as in some sense the word of God, comprises 79% of those polled.

The report concludes with this summary:

In general, the dominant view of Americans is that the Bible is the word of God, be it inspired or actual, as opposed to a collection of stories recorded by man. That is consistent with the findings that the United States is a predominantly Christian nation and that Americans overwhelmingly believe in God.

Be that as it may, perhaps the really important question is how relevant that belief is to how people live their lives.

Philosophical Spanking

Aquinas scholar Edward Feser administers a condign thrashing to those among the New Atheists who misrepresent what is known as the Cosmological argument (CA) for the existence of God and who should know better than to say about it what they do.

The CA comes in many forms but basically it goes something like this:

All contingent beings (i.e. beings which could possibly not exist, like trees and planets) require a necessary being (a being which cannot not exist and which is not contingent upon anything else) as their ultimate cause.
There are some contingent beings.
Thus there must exist a necessary being that is the ultimate cause of their existence.

Feser examines nine common objections to, or misconceptions about, this argument and shows each of them to be ineffectual. It's simply incorrect, for example, to assert, as many do, that the argument rests on the premise that “Everything has a cause,” or to think that “What caused God?” is a serious objection to the argument. Neither do challenges like,“Why assume that the universe had a beginning?” or “No one has given any reason to think that the First Cause is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, etc.” make even a dent in the CA.

It's a very good essay for those interested in philosophy of religion, not just for what Feser says about the CA but also for the quotes he lists from several of his atheist colleagues about the weakness of the case for naturalism.

Here's one well-known example from Quentin Smith who is an atheist philosopher of religion who writes that, "The great majority of naturalist philosophers have an unjustified belief that naturalism is true and an unjustified belief that theism (or supernaturalism) is false.” Their naturalism typically rests on nothing more than an ill-informed “hand waving dismissal of theism” which ignores “the erudite brilliance of theistic philosophizing today."

Smith continues:

If each naturalist who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion, the naturalist referee could at most hope the outcome would be that “no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the rationality of faith,” although I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.

Due to the typical attitude of the contemporary naturalist...the vast majority of naturalist philosophers have come to hold (since the late 1960s) an unjustified belief in naturalism. Their justifications have been defeated by arguments developed by theistic philosophers, and now naturalist philosophers, for the most part, live in darkness about the justification for naturalism. They may have a true belief in naturalism, but they have no knowledge that naturalism is true since they do not have an undefeated justification for their belief. If naturalism is true, then their belief in naturalism is accidentally true. [“The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy (Fall-Winter 2001)]

This and similar quotes are found toward the end of the post on Feser's blog.

I admire Smith's intellectual humility and honesty. There are few things more risible in academia than the pompous pronouncements and condescending derision of atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens who presume to lecture professional philosophers on the validity of arguments for the existence of God. It is as one observer put it, like someone whose only knowledge of biology was a familiarity with the Handbook of British Birds lecturing Dawkins on cell biology.

No Clue in Libya

Joel sends along a piece featured at CBS News by The New Republic's David Reiff which exposes the utter incoherence of Obama's war in Libya.

Writes Reiff:

Less than a month before he left office, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates estimated the U.S. would spend $750 million on the Libyan operation, while a Department of Defense document published in May revealed the American contribution to Operation Unified Protector involved 75 aircraft (including drones), flying 70 percent of the reconnaissance missions, 75% of refueling missions, and more than one-quarter of all air sorties.

And yet, from March 28, when President Obama announced Operation United Protector’s predecessor, Operation Odyssey Dawn, until now, the fog of incoherent justification for the war has been at least as thick of the proverbial fog of war itself.

Have we gone to war? Well, no, not exactly. We were, Obama said in that first speech, “[committing] resources to stop the killings” of innocent Libyan civilians by Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. If the United States has initiated combat operations, this really amounted not to war-fighting, but to taking “all necessary measures to protect the Libyan people” and to “save lives.” And did our actions mean that the goal of the mission was regime change, Iraq- or Afghanistan-style? Not at all, the president insisted.

Taking a predictable swipe at the Bush administration, he said dismissively that we had already gone “down that road in Iraq.” It was an apt metaphor, if, perhaps, unconsciously so, since regime change would have required just that: sending troops down the road, on the ground in Libya. And that, the president argued, would be far more dangerous than what he was ordering the military to do.

This may have sounded like the prudent thing, but what it was — what it is, for nothing has changed at all in this regard over the course of the past four months, even though we have officially recognized the Libyan rebels — is the incoherent, internally self-contradictory thing. We believe Qaddafi must go, and we will not let him make significant advances on the ground, but we refuse to take responsibility for his overthrow. So, to use a military term of art, we have an end state — Qaddafi’s ouster —but we are not willing to do what is needed to attain that goal expeditiously, which, of course, is why there is at least, for the moment, still a stalemate on the ground in Libya.

The stark fact is that the outcome Obama wants and the means he is willing to use to secure it are hopelessly mismatched. And this is leaving aside the fact that this...intervention flies in the face of the sense of the War Powers Act and represents one more ornament in the crown of the imperial executive.

Machiavelli warns in The Prince that if you undertake to depose a ruler you can't just wound him, you must kill him. Our Commander in Chief seems not to have learned the lesson and thus the war drags on and hundreds, probably thousands, of innocent lives continue to be lost and tens of thousands more continue to suffer - mostly because our president seems totally confused about what he's doing.

Machiavelli also cautioned that the worst thing for a Prince is not to be hated but rather to become contemptible, to become a joke among the people he rules as well as among his enemies. This loss of respect creeps subtly over the people when they realize that their Prince has no idea what he's doing.

Our experience in Libya, as with our economy, suggests Mr. Obama has not learned this lesson either.

Shared Sacrifice

A group of religious notables went to the White House recently to urge President Obama to be sure that whatever solution to our deficit crisis is ultimately decided upon it not worsen the situation of the poor. One of the attendees, Jim Wallis, writes about the visit on his blog God's Politics.

Several times in his column Wallis says things like this:

We reminded ourselves that people of faith must evaluate big decisions on issues like a budget by how they impact the most vulnerable.

We urged the president to protect programs for low-income people in the ongoing budget and deficit debate, and in any deal concerning the debt ceiling and default crisis. In an engaging back and forth conversation, the president and faith leaders discussed how we can get our fiscal house in order without doing so on the backs of those who are most vulnerable. We shared the concern that the deficit must be cut in a way that protects the safety net, and struggling families and children, and maintains our national investments in the future of all of us.

[P]rograms serving poor and hungry people should be protected and exempted from any budget cuts.

We agreed that we need both fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice. Those already hurting should not be made to hurt more, and those doing well should do their part in sacrificing.

Our goal is simply this: Whenever a new budget or deficit reduction proposal is put forth, somebody should ask how it will impact the poorest and most vulnerable. This is a biblical question, a fair question, and a question of justice.

Well, yes, but there are other questions of justice which are also "fair and biblical" which need to be answered as well. Until they are statements like Wallis' are pretty much meaningless. Here are some examples:

What exactly is a "fair share" from those who are doing well? What percentage of one's income is a just contribution to the welfare of the poor? Ten percent? Twenty percent? The highest income tax bracket in this country is 35% on those making more than $379,000. Is that a just figure? Should it be higher? If so, why?

How much of the burden should the wealthy be justly expected to bear? The top 1% of income earners (those who earn $410,000 or more) currently pay over 40% of the federal income taxes in this country. Is that a "fair share"? If not, would it be more fair for them to bear a greater percentage of the burden? Why? And what effect would it have on the working poor if small businesses making over $250,000 had their taxes raised?

What, specifically, is our government's obligation to the poor? How much of our income should we be compelled to allocate toward helping them? Should the poor be subsidized to the point where they have as much of the world's goods as everyone else?

Are there really any poor in America, anyway? Should people who have electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, heated houses, indoor plumbing, cars, televisions, cell phones, computers, and access to food, shelter, schools, medical care etc. be considered poor just because they don't have as many of these things as others do? How much more do we owe them, especially given that poverty in America is largely a function of personal choices that people make (e.g. the choice to drop out of school, to use drugs and alcohol, to not get married before one has children, to not develop a disciplined work ethic, etc.).

These are questions that always seemed to be glossed over when people like Wallis wax eloquent about our moral duties to the poor. Everyone agrees that there should be "shared sacrifice" and that we need to "help the poor", but what exactly these words mean is left very, very fuzzy, and Wallis doesn't do anything, at least in this recent essay, to help clear things up.

Bible Phobia

The phobic reaction to the Bible of those who call themselves scholars is not infrequently a source of genuine amusement. It's understandable, perhaps, that cosmologists or biologists might disregard clues that the Bible gives to where truth may lie in those disciplines, but for historians or archeologists to do so seems quite irrational.

Uncommon Descent directs us to an article in the journal Biblical Archeology in which archeologist Hershel Shanks relates a story about two friends and colleagues that reflects the absurd lengths to which people who reject the religious pronouncements of the Bible will go to demonstrate their utter contempt for any information whatsoever that's found in the book.

An archeologist named Eilat Mazar deduced from the Biblical evidence that the ancient palace of King David might be found by digging at a particular location. This apparently scandalized another colleague named Ronny Reich who accused Mazar of breaching professional ethics for basing her hunch on the Biblical record.

Here's Shanks' account:

One of Eilat’s crimes, according to Ronny, is using the Bible as a guide to where to excavate. Let me unpack this: As Eilat read the Bible, it seemed to indicate just where King David’s palace might be buried in the City of David—at least, it did to her. On this basis, she decided to dig there.

This was highly improper and unscientific, according to Ronny. When he heard that Eilat was using reasoning like this to find King David’s palace, he knew immediately that, proceeding in this way, “she would certainly find that building” (emphasis in original).

According to Ronny, that is the wrong way to proceed. Ronny refers to “minimalists,” who do it properly, “correlat[ing] their teachings first and foremost to the archaeological findings” and only then looking at the Bible. Ronny counts himself as one of these “minimalists,” who permit the use of the Biblical text “only if it is supported by another historical source (for example, Assyrian documents) or clearly supported by appropriate, unambiguously dated archaeological data (for example, an inscription found on a site).”

I would have thought that Eilat would have been praised for proceeding quite scientifically—according to the vaunted scientific method that has produced so much for our civilization. As I understand it, you formulate a hypothesis and then you proceed to test it, either proving or disproving it. Eilat had a hypothesis and she wanted to test it by digging.

But you can’t do that in the case of the Bible, according to Ronny. The reason appears to be that you can’t trust the archaeologist to test his or her hypothesis in an unbiased way once he or she formulates a hypothesis based on the Bible. If the archaeologist proceeds in this way, he or she will “certainly” find what was hypothesized....Ronny, of course, is not the only archaeologist to espouse these views. Indeed, in many archaeological circles, it is the prevailing view. It is OK, they say, to bring in the Bible after you have your archaeological results, but you can’t use the Bible to formulate a hypothesis or decide where to dig.

Why not? If the Bible were to tell us where to look for Mose's stone tablets or Jesus' tomb why would it be professionally offensive to look there without waiting until some other corroborating historical document was found which provided the same information?

Shanks enjoys a little sport with this bizarre principle:

I wonder if this rule would apply to other ancient Near Eastern texts. If, for example, an archaeologist working in ancient Babylon thought a cuneiform text indicated that a city extended beyond the limits hitherto accepted and decided to test this hypothesis by digging outside what was then thought to be the city wall, would anyone question proceeding in this way?

And I wonder what poor Eilat should have done when it occurred to her on reading her Bible that the text seemed to indicate the very spot in this small 12-acre site where David’s palace was located. Drive it from her mind? Perish the thought! Or perhaps she should formulate the hypothesis and then enlist some other archaeologist, untainted by her bias, to excavate the site.

Reich is apparently a materialist who seems nervous about people making archeological predictions based on Biblical data that may turn out to be confirmed. It's better to hold one's colleagues to an asinine rule, even if it means that great discoveries will not be made, than to risk confirming that perhaps the Bible is historically correct. This sort of perverse reasoning is a symptom that the materialist worldview is entering the latter stages of philosophical dementia.

The episode reminds me of a wonderful quote from William James: “A rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth, if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.” Indeed, and irrational rules are one indication that people are struggling to cling to an intellectually unsustainable metaphysics.