Fatal Tweet

Two stories circulating in the news illustrate the horrific oppression that exists in so much of the Islamic world, and neither of them have to do with the massacres taking place in Syria. Two men are about to lose their lives in state executions, the first because he's a Christian pastor who converted from Islam at the age of nineteen and is refusing to have his children indoctrinated in Islam, and the second is a young Saudi who was insufficiently reverential toward the Prophet.

Yousef Nadarkhani is a young pastor condemned to death in Iran on the charge of apostasy. It may seem odd, given the thousands of people condemned to die in Syria and elsewhere in the Islamic world every day, but Nadarkhani's case has attracted world-wide attention.

Here's a news summary of his case which provides a note of hope:

Hamza Kashgari's predicament is less well-known. The Washington Times brings us up to speed:

Hamza Kashgari is a 23-year-old journalist who wrote for the daily al-Bilad in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. On Feb. 4, the observance of Muhammad’s birthday, Mr. Kashgari sent out three tweets expressing what he would say if he met Islam’s founder.

“On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you,” the first read. “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more,” went the second. The third tweet said, “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”

In the West mixed expressions of praise and doubt are unremarkable, but in more enlightened climes like Saudi Arabia they can cost you your life.

The messages immediately caused controversy. Some welcomed and retweeted them, but thousands more angry Saudis called for Mr. Kashgari’s head for supposedly insulting Muhammad. He deleted the offending messages but soon lost his job. Last week, he attempted to flee to safety in New Zealand but was intercepted as he tried to pass through the Muslim country of Malaysia and whisked back to Saudi Arabia in a private jet. He is being held incommunicado in Jeddah while a prosecutor collects evidence to bring a case against him for “disrespecting God” and “insulting the prophet.” A conviction on either charge could bring the death penalty.

Freedom of thought is a capital crime in the Saudi kingdom. On Monday, Sheikh Saleh bin Fowzan Al Fowzan of the supreme committee of scholars in Saudi Arabia said, “We should first verify that this man did insult … Muhammad in his article on Twitter … if verified, then he must be killed.” There are reports that those who expressed public support for Mr. Kashgari’s message also could face the same charges; even a retweet could lead to the chopping block.

This is not merely a Saudi internal affair. When an Islamic theocracy may execute someone for a tweet, it’s an affront to humanity. “I view my actions as part of a process toward freedom,” Mr. Kashgari said shortly before his arrest. “I was demanding my right to practice the most basic human rights - the freedom of expression and thought - so nothing was done in vain.” These words may be his epitaph.

Those of us who value our right to freely express our opinion about whatever matters we choose without having to fear the state's wrath should thank God every day that we live in a time and in a country which places a high value on freedom of speech. Much of the world throughout much of the last fifteen hundred years has not. We should also keep in mind that those who want to execute Nadarkhani and Kashgari want to spread their theocracy around the globe and will use whatever means they can to accomplish it.

At the moment there are movements afoot to insinuate sharia law into the courts of Europe and even in the U.S. It's a step toward the imprisonment of our minds, toward holding them hostage to religious beliefs that seem alien, incomprehensible, and false. It's not at all a stretch to say that if we are apathetic or uninformed about that threat our children and grandchildren could well grow up in an America in which it is not merely impolite or vulgar to speak ill of religiously revered figures, but an act which could get one fined, imprisoned, or even killed.

Pale Blue Dot

Adam has passed along a video which illustrates a speech (heard in the audio) given by the late astronomer Carl Sagan over two decades ago. Sagan offers a great perspective on the smallness and meaninglessness of life on earth from the standpoint of a naturalistic metaphysics.

He once declared that the cosmos is "all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." If that's so, then, as this video illustrates, life on earth really is a pointless, insignificant, "tale told by an idiot."

In the speech, Sagan opines that a proper understanding of our place in the universe rids us of the pretension that we are somehow what it's all about. The universe is so old and vast, and life on earth is so recent, and earth is so tiny, just a pale, blue dot, that it's ludicrous to think that somehow we are at the center of it all, or so Sagan believed.

His argument was plausible thirty years ago, perhaps, but it's much less so now. There've been so many discoveries in the last couple of decades which point to a universe which seems to be exquisitely and intentionally designed to allow life to exist somewhere in it that it seems as if Sagan's pessimism is quite unwarranted. Moreover, the vast size and age of the universe appear to be precisely what must be the case in order for life to exist anywhere in it.

In order for all the elements needed for life to be formed stars must go through a cycle of birth and death, crushing protons together in the unimaginable heat and pressure of the stellar cores to form elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron and a hundred others. Then, when the star explodes at the end of its life, those elements are strewn across the vast stretches of space until they cool and form a planet like earth. These elements are crucial to life, but the life cycle of stars takes billions of years, and all during that time the universe is expanding. Thus, in order to form the elements needed for life to exist the universe has to be as old as it is and therefore as big as it is.

There's good reason to think, pace Sagan, that the universe, so far from being a fortuitous accident, is actually deliberately made for us and that we really do, in some sense, inhabit its ontological center.

When Race Hatred Doesn't Matter

A terrible hate crime occurred recently in Kansas City and surprisingly there's not much about it in the national media. It turns out two white teenagers set a black kid on fire causing him to have 1st degree burns to his face and possible eye and lung damage.

"They rushed him on the porch as he tried to get the door open," the boy's mother told a local news station. "(One of them) poured the gasoline, then flicked the Bic, and said, 'This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, black boy.'"

I would have thought that Al (Sharpton) and Jesse (Jackson) would have been all over this case, demanding justice for the injured boy and that the media would be conducting their usual meditation on the sick soul of racist, violent white America. But so far there's been nothing.

What? It was two black kids that set a white kid on fire? It was a white kid who was told he was getting what he deserved when the gasoline was lit?

Oh, okay, I guess that explains the silence from Al, Jesse, et al. Racial violence is horrifying only when the racists are white and the victims are black. When it's the other way around it's really no big deal. White victims are just "getting what they deserve."

Acceptable and Unacceptable Misogyny

Kirsten Powers, who is, it must be noted at the outset, a liberal Democrat at The Daily Beast, puts Rush Limbaugh's recent gender gaucheries into perspective. When such transgressions against decency occur on the right they're considered to be crimes against women everywhere, and the offender is all but committed to the flames. When they occur on the left, which they do with alarming frequency, the somnolent media slumbers contentedly.

Here's the heart of Powers' fine essay:

Let it be shouted from the rooftops that Rush Limbaugh should not have called Ms. Fluke a slut or, as he added later, a “prostitute” who should post her sex tapes. It’s unlikely that his apology will assuage the people on a warpath for his scalp, and after all, why should it? He spent days attacking a woman as a slut and prostitute and refused to relent. Now because he doesn’t want to lose advertisers, he apologizes. What’s in order is something more like groveling—and of course a phone call to Ms. Fluke—if you ask me.

But if Limbaugh’s actions demand a boycott—and they do—then what about the army of swine on the left?

During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a “bimbo alert.” He called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.” (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a “bimbo” for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.

Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.” He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his MSNBC show. His solution for dealing with Hillary Clinton, who he thought should drop out of the presidential race, was to find “somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.” Olbermann now works for über-leftist and former Democratic vice president Al Gore at Current TV.

Chris Matthews’s sickening misogyny was made famous in 2008, when he obsessively tore down Hillary Clinton for standing between Barack Obama and the presidency, something that Matthews could not abide. Over the years he has referred to the former first lady, senator and presidential candidate and current secretary of state as a “she-devil,” “Nurse Ratched,” and “Madame Defarge.” Matthews has also called Clinton “witchy,” “anti-male,” and “uppity” and once claimed she won her Senate seat only because her “husband messed around.” He asked a guest if “being surrounded by women” makes “a case for commander in chief—or does it make a case against it?” At some point Matthews was shamed into sort of half apologizing to Clinton, but then just picked up again with his sexist ramblings.

Matthews has wondered aloud whether Sarah Palin is even “capable of thinking” and has called Bachmann a “balloon head” and said she was “lucky we still don’t have literacy tests out there.” Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, who is the former president of the Women’s Media Center, told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly in 2011 that Matthews “is a bully, and his favorite target is women.” So why does he still have a show? What if his favorite target was Jews? Or African-Americans?

But the grand pooh-bah of media misogyny is without a doubt Bill Maher—who also happens to be a favorite of liberals—who has given $1 million to President Obama’s super PAC.

Powers gives the specifics of Maher's comments as well as those of liberal commentator Matt Taibbi, but the remarks she quotes from them are too obscene to put on Viewpoint. It says something, I guess, when relatively modest standards of decency prevent one from quoting what some prominent liberals have said about women.

Nevertheless, just as a man who weighs 700 lbs. would do well to refrain from criticizing others for being fat, the left would do well to refrain from criticizing Rush Limbaugh for misogyny.

Here's an interview with Powers on her column:

It's worth noting that three of the men Powers talks about in the interview and in her column are current or former hosts on MSNBC's prime-time line up. That tells us a lot about MSNBC, I suppose.

It also says something that nine of Limbaugh's sponsors have dropped him, but none of Maher's or MSNBC's sponsors dropped any of these execrable gentlemen. Why not? Evidently some misogyny is acceptable and some is not. It all depends on your politics.

The President's Iran Policy

In principle it's hard to argue against the President's Iranian policy which grows out of his desire to make war a last resort. He wants Israel to postpone an attack on Iran until diplomacy and sanctions have had a chance to work. The problem is that it seems a case of too little too late. The severest sanctions don't kick in until June.

Meanwhile, the Iranians have invested billions of dollars, enormous prestige, and fifteen years in developing a nuclear weapon. They see themselves as just a few months away from achieving their goal. For them to say at this point that, okay, we'll stop building a bomb that will enable us to destroy Israel and intimidate the world would be like a marathon runner far ahead of the field in the Olympics deciding to quit ten yards short of the finish line. It's hard to believe that they're now going to back off just because the infidels impose a few inconveniences, especially when they can turn to the Russians and the Chinese for enough assistance to push them across the line.

The problem with the president's policy, other than it allows the Iranians to buy more time to make destroying their nuclear facilities both harder and costlier, is that it may have generated two unfortunate consequences.

First, some commentators have suggested that a deal has been struck with Iran to stay out of Syria. The Iranians have made it a precondition for negotiations, this theory goes, that we not interfere with Bashar Assad's systematic slaughter of his people. If so, it would explain our willingness to sit by and watch the citizens of Hom get blown to pieces by Syrian tanks even though we launched attacks against Libya with far, far less provocation.

Secondly, our dilatory approach toward Iran has, according to some sources, deeply angered the Saudis who loathe the Iranian regime and want us to end it. The Saudis, these sources say, are allowing oil prices to rise as a means of pressuring Mr. Obama who sees high fuel costs to be one of the gravest threats to his reelection. Attack Iran, the Saudis seem to be saying, or face $6.00 per gallon gas by November and almost certain defeat at the polls.

I'm not saying that either of these are true, but they do have a certain logic and the first seems to be an open secret in Western capitals.

At any rate, I think that, given what little we know, the president is so far probably doing the right thing in making sure that war comes only after all other options have been exhausted. At least I think he should be given the benefit of the doubt. I'm not at all optimistic, however, that sanctions will deter the Iranians, and as Tehran grows closer to developing a nuclear weapon, or to making their development facilities impregnable to attack, Mr. Obama is going to have to switch to other options or acquiesce in a nuclearized Iran and all the danger that entails.

If he does that he'll be seen as the Neville Chamberlain of our time.

Gooses and Ganders

There's an interesting development in the contretemps over Rush Limbaugh's recent intemperate and inexcusable name-calling. Recall that Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a "slut" after her testimony before Congress in which she bemoaned the fact that it's really hard for students to afford birth control while meeting all their other financial obligations and calling for insurance companies to essentially subsidize their social lives.

Limbaugh subsequently apologized to Fluke but now DNC Chair congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is criticizing Mitt Romney for not rebuking Rush Limbaugh. On Meet the Press Sunday morning Wasserman-Schultz said:

The bottom line is, the leading candidate on the Republican side for president couldn’t even bring himself to call Rush Limbaugh’s comments outrageous and call him out and ask him to apologize.

The irony - maybe irony isn't a strong enough word to describe this - is this: Last spring left-wing talk show host Ed Schultz (no relation to the congresswoman as far as I know), a big supporter of President Obama, twice gratuitously called another talk show host, Laura Ingraham, a slut.

Has Debbie Wasserman Schultz demanded that President Obama condemn Ed Schultz? Why, no, of course not. Why should he be expected to do that? Repudiating their supporters is only something Republicans should be required to do. Here's Mr. Schultz:

Ms Wasserman-Schultz would have a lot more credibility if she demanded of Mr. Obama what she's demanding of Mr. Romney. Don't hold your breath, though.

Mauling on Meet the Press

There seems to be a conscious effort in the media to portray the brouhaha over contraception as an attempt by Republicans to make birth control illegal. No one in the GOP is talking about banning contraception or preventing women from paying for it. The President injected it into the discussion by mandating that Catholic institutions would be required to violate their consciences and principles to see to it that it's covered in the health care plans they provide their employees.

Ever since then, the media has taken every opportunity to mislead their listeners by asking Republicans why they're opposed to women having birth control. The clear implication is that the GOP wants to take birth control away from women when in fact all they want is for the state to stay out of the church.

The media and the Democrats see their tactic as a double winner. Not only can they discredit Republicans in the eyes of women voters but they can also distract the nation from the very serious problems we're facing during the Obama presidency.

David Gregory sought to run the same play against Newt Gingrich during Sunday morning's Meet the Press show. Unfortunately for the hapless Mr. Gregory Newt Gingrich is not Mitt Romney. Here's a transcript of the resulting wreckage courtesy of Newsmax:

Gregory: I have to ask you about access to contraception. I realize it’s not at the core of your stump speech, but it is a debate that is certainly highly charged here in Washington and in Congress and on the airwaves. How much damage has this done?

Gingrich: I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the president’s apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion-dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression, and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of the week.

There’s no debate about access to contraception. There is a debate, which Cardinal George of Chicago has pointed out is a war against the Catholic Church. You do have this weird situation where President Obama apologizes to Islamic extremists while waging war against the Catholic Church. That’s the language, by the way, of the Catholic bishops. You have an issue here of whether the government can coerce the Catholic Church not just into contraception but into sterilization and abortion, something I don’t find any reporter wants to talk about.

You have a president who voted for infanticide as a state senator, who represents the most extreme, pro-abortion position in America, so if you want to have a dialogue about this, David, let’s set the record straight. Barack Obama as a state senator voted to allow doctors to kill babies if they survived the abortion. Barack Obama, as president, in the most radical, anti-religious move made by any president, is trying to coerce the Catholic Church at a time when he’s been told by the bishops . . . they would have to give up every single hospital, they would have to give up every single university and college associated with the church because he is asking them to violate their religious beliefs.

If you want a debate over whether or not the president of the United States should be able to impose his views on a religious institution, and whether America’s now a secular country, let’s have that debate.

Gregory: Can I just get to my question? Do you think it was harmful that Limbaugh, certainly an influential voice in the conservative grassroots, and you well know that, was it appropriate for him to apologize? Do you think he’s done damage to the debate that you’re now getting into?

Gingrich: I think it was appropriate for Rush to apologize. I am glad he apologized. Do you think the president owes an apology to all the men and women in uniform who he frankly abandoned when he apologized to religious fanatics in Afghanistan? What’s your opinion, David? Should the president have apologized to the men and women in uniform that he abandoned?

Gregory: Well, I’m going to continue with my questions, so . . .

Gingrich: Because if you want to get into a discussion about apologies, I’m happy to discuss it.

Gregory: So my question, though, is you want the other side to appreciate your view, which is that this is a religious liberty question at the heart of this access to contraception. Can you appreciate the view of those who disagree with you? That this is an attack on women’s rights? That’s their view. Reproductive rights? Access to contraception? And in the extreme, that it’s some sort of war on women? Do you appreciate that view at all?

Gingrich: Nobody’s blocking anyone from having access to contraception. No one. The young lady who testified can get access to contraception. Nobody said she couldn’t. The question is should a Catholic institution, or for that matter, the Ohio Christian University, which is a Protestant institution, which is a very pro-life institution, which is now being told it will have to pay for abortion pills.

Now, should a Protestant fundamentalist institution be dictated to by Washington politicians over whether or not it can have its own religious beliefs, or have we become a country where it’s okay to go to church on Sunday morning for one hour, but let’s not actually express those beliefs the rest of the week.

This is the most fundamental assault on religious liberty in American history despite every effort by the elite media to distort what it’s not. It’s not about access to contraception. People who want to can get access to contraception every day. That young lady can get access to contraception. It is a question about whether or not a religiously affiliated institution should be coerced by the federal government.

Gregory: So it seems to me this — in your view — this is actually a pretty fundamental issue. You just don’t like the framing of it, but the fact that it gets raised is something that you think will certainly get you animated. You think it’s certainly going to energize a lot of voters on both sides of the aisle.

Gingrich: I don’t like the framing because I think the framing was false. That young lady has access to contraception every day. There’s no place in America where it’s illegal to go get contraception. What the question is, is should a religiously affiliated institution be required to provide abortion pills? Should they be required to provide sterilization?

Remember, the Obama rule was a lot more than just contraception, and by the way, Mitt Romney was on the wrong side of this issue in Massachusetts, where he instructed that Catholic hospitals would be required to issue abortion pills against their religious beliefs. This is a very serious fundamental fight about religious liberty.

The exchange between Gregory and Gingrich reminded me of a story last December about a street hoodlum who thought he'd mug a guy who turned out to be a mixed martial arts fighter. The thug wound up getting mauled. Gregory probably knows what the guy felt like.

Young, Jobless, and Deep in Debt

Patrice Hill at The Washington Times has an article to which many readers of Viewpoint will relate:

Nicholas Rastenis has been through the wringer. After getting a master’s degree in fine arts from Yale University in 2008, he expected to land a job at a top design firm. But nearly four years later, after many months of joblessness, austerity and anxiety, his ambitions in life have come down quite a bit.

Today, the Chicago resident toils at a photo lab at a major drugstore chain for $9 an hour and no benefits, using few of his creative design skills and earning only a fraction of what he once thought he could command. Still, he has had some designing gigs on the side, and he is glad to at least have a full-time job — any job — after years of doing without.

Mr. Rastenis, like many others of his generation, is a prime victim of the Great Recession. By most measures, he and his compatriots in their teens, 20s and early 30s bore the brunt of the worst job market in modern times. Even with slow economic improvement in the past two years, these so-called “Millennials” remain unemployed and underemployed at the highest rates of any group.

“It’s been a very hard road,” said Mr. Rastenis, who has taken jobs such as bike-cabbing and waiting tables to make ends meet while trying to land a full-time position in his profession.

“I’m doing things I never thought I’d be doing. I’m starting to question why I went to college. I could have done these jobs out of high school,” he said. “And not having an apartment or anything else … I’m miserable.”

Mr. Rastenis knows he’s not alone. It seems nearly everyone he knows in his age group is facing similar problems. “Nobody in the age range 20 to 35 are where they want to be right now,” he said.

Federal statistics as well as various opinion polls and studies bear him out. Joblessness among Americans ages 18 to 29, the Millennials, is at the highest levels since the U.S. Labor Department started keeping records.

The 15.8 percent unemployment rate for this group is nearly twice the national average. For those ages 16 to 19, the jobless rate is closer to 25 percent, and even for people 29 to 34, it’s closer to 10 percent — well above the 8.3 percent national unemployment rate.

The unemployment statistics represents only the tip of the iceberg. Millions of young people have delayed entering the workforce by staying in school, or they stopped looking for work so they aren’t included in the unemployment statistics. Millions of others have accepted short-term or seasonal work without benefits, and some are working without pay in hopes that it will land them a job.

The woes in the job market have fed an ocean of other heartaches and difficulties, including postponed marriages and childbearing, homelessness and having to live for years with parents who expected to be moving toward empty nests and retirement. A poll last year by Generation Opportunity, a Millennial group, found that 77 percent of Millennials are postponing major life changes, such as buying a home, getting married, starting a family and paying off student loans, because they can’t find good jobs.

There's much more on this at the link. The article doesn't mention it, but there seem to be two diametrically opposed sets of needs in play. In order to solve the social security problem we'll almost certainly have to raise the age of full retirement which means that older Americans will be holding onto their jobs longer at the very time when younger Americans need those jobs to open up so that they have a chance at them.

Also, in the past many employment opportunities were available in the public sector, but with state, local, and federal governments all cinching their belts, a lot of those have dried up and those there are are filled by people who aren't going to be willing to leave them in the current climate.

Our local school district, for example, is hiring only one new teacher for every two, or even three, retirees. The president, meanwhile, has proposed that the military cut troop levels by tens of thousands, which will make it tough for the young unemployed to use the service as a fallback as they often did in the past.

Add to these woes climbing gas prices and the prospect of much higher taxes when Obamacare kicks in, both of which dampen any enthusiasm businesses might have to expand their workforces, and, all in all, it's a tough time to be a young person.

Rush to Fluke: Sorry

Rush Limbaugh has apologized - sort of - to Georgetown Law Student Sandra Fluke for calling her a "slut" and a "prostitute" on his show the other day. He should have apologized sooner. It wasn't until several of his biggest sponsors withdrew their sponsorship that he realized he was in a no-win situation brought about largely by his own arrogance.

Fluke was testifying before an ad hoc congressional committee about the need to require insurance companies, or someone, to underwrite birth control for Georgetown's law students because they simply can't afford to finance their active sex lives themselves. This is, of course, absurd, and if Limbaugh had simply focused on the ridiculousness of students expecting to have their sex lives paid for by others he would have done a fine public service, but he chose to go further and make it personal, suggesting that the degrading epithets mentioned above applied to Fluke herself.

It needs be noted that Fluke made it clear that she wasn't talking about herself but was instead pleading for women with whom she was in contact in her role as a women's advocate. So, for Limbaugh to suggest that Fluke wanted to be paid to have sex was unfair, unkind, slanderous, and not a little sleazy.

It's a shame, too, because the expectation that others should compensate women for their recreational choices does indeed need to be publicly scrutinized, but it can be done without smearing people no matter how silly their arguments might be.

Anyway, here's the audio of Rush's remarks:

The report of Rush's apology can be found here, and here's video of the Fluke testimony which precipitated Limbaugh's contumely:

Rush will probably weather the storm but only if he avoids similar lapses of judgment in the future. If he doesn't he'll find it awfully hard to find sponsors to pay for advertising time and equally hard to keep affiliate stations who don't want to put up with the controversy.

What Is Consciousness?

Philosopher Colin McGinn of the University of Miami has some interesting things to say about consciousness in a column at New Statesman. He begins with a short summary of the philosophical problems consciousness poses:

The central defining property of the mind is consciousness, so philosophy of mind is concerned with the existence and nature of consciousness: what is consciousness, why does it exist, how is it related to the body and brain, and how did it come into existence?

These are big, difficult questions. Focus on your current state of consciousness - your experience of seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, willing, and so on - and ask yourself what kind of being this consciousness is, what its function might be, how it is related to the activity of cells in your brain, what could have brought it about in the course of evolution. Allow yourself to feel the attendant puzzlement, the sense of bafflement: now you are doing philosophy of mind.

We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, pan­psychist and mysterianist. The eliminativist position attempts to dissolve the problem of explaining consciousness simply by declaring that there isn't any: there is no such thing - no seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on. There is just blank matter; the impression that we are conscious is an illusion.

This view is clearly absurd, a form of madness even, and anyway refutes itself since even an illusion is the presence of an experience (it certainly seems to me that I am conscious). There are some who purport to hold this view but they are a tiny (and tinny) minority: they are sentient beings loudly claim­ing to be mindless zombies.

After discussing a few more problems with eliminativism McGinn offers his assessment of dualism, and here I think he's a bit off the mark:

The dualist, by contrast, freely admits that consciousness exists, as well as matter, holding that reality falls into two giant spheres. There is the physical brain, on the one hand, and the conscious mind, on the other: the twain may meet at some point but they remain distinct entities. Dualism may be of substances, properties, or even whole universes, but its thrust is that the conscious mind is a thing apart from, and irreducible to, anything that goes on in the body.

Dualism proposes to give the mind its ontological due but the problem is that it has difficulties organising a rendezvous between the two spheres: how does the mind affect the brain and the brain the mind? Whence the systematic correlation and interaction? And how did the mind come to exist, if not by dint of cerebral upsurges? Dualism makes the mind too separate, thereby precluding intelligible interaction and dependence.

Well, no, not really. Dualists look at the relation of the mind to the brain something like the relationship of the wi-fi signal to a computer. The image on the computer's screen (a downloaded movie, for example) depends upon both the computer and the signal. Neither by itself is able to generate the image on the screen, and just as any alteration in either produces an alteration in the image so, too, any alteration in either the mind or the brain produces an alteration in our mental experience. Dualism sees the two, mind and brain, as tightly integrated though ontologically distinct.

Moreover, the objection that it's difficult to see exactly how the mind and brain could interact is no impediment to believing that they do any more than the difficulty in seeing how gravitational force acts on an object to pull it down is also an impediment to believing that it does. Indeed, science cannot explain how any of the fundamental forces of nature - gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear or the weak nuclear - actually cause the effects they do, but that's not considered an impediment to accepting that they nevertheless do cause those effects.

I also think McGinn's critique of idealism falls a little short. He writes that:

At this point the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! There is no problem of interaction with matter because matter is mere illusion - we merely hallucinate brains. The universe is just one vast spirit, or perhaps a population of the same, consisting of nothing but free-floating consciousness, unencumbered and serene. Stars and planets are just perturbations in this cosmic sensorium.

As an imaginative fancy, idealism has its charms but taking it seriously requires an antipathy to matter bordering on the maniacal. Are we to suppose that material reality is just a dream, a baseless fantasy, and that the Big Bang was nothing but the cosmic spirit having a mental sneezing fit? Where did consciousness come from, if not from pre-existing matter? Did God just create centres of consciousness ab initio, with nothing material in the vicinity? Is my body just a figment of my imagination?

If being an idealist requires a "maniacal antipathy toward matter" then at least some modern physicists are maniacs. Physics is showing that matter is, at bottom, a kind of illusion. If you go to this site and scroll all the way to the very smallest sizes it turns out that all there is, all that matter consists in, is unbelievably tiny vibrating wisps of energy. Solid matter is simply an illusion that results from us perceiving the world on the scale of size we do.

If that's so then "matter" really is somehow a construct of our minds, or at least a construct of some mind. One of the most famous idealists, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (d.1753), thought the material world was pretty much an idea in the mind of God.

McGinn finishes with a discussion of both panpsychism and the view he prefers, what he calls mysterianism. It's all pretty interesting and you might want to take a couple of minutes to read it.

Familiar Road

Back in the 1960s it was argued that a developing child isn't really a person until it reaches viability and that a woman should be permitted to abort up to that point.

In the 70s personhood was deemed to arrive at the moment of birth, and then it was set at the moment at which the entire child is outside the mother's body. Any time before that moment the child could be killed.

Then in the 90s people like philosopher Peter Singer argued that the baby really isn't a person until it can anticipate the future and have wants and desires for the future. All others, in Singer's view, are non-persons.

Now Singer's argument has gone mainstream. Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue in the Journal of Medical Ethics that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. These academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

The journal’s editor, Julian Savulescu, said the article's authors had received death threats since publishing it and claimed that those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

I certainly don't condone death threats, but I have to say that Savulescu has an odd view of what constitutes a "liberal society." A liberal society is one which protects the rights of the weakest of its members. There's nothing liberal (in the classical sense) about seeking to justify infanticide and laying the philosophical groundwork for killing others who don't fit an arbitrary definition of personhood.

The report on all this is written by Stephen Adams for the Telegraph. Adams states that:

In the [Journal] article, entitled After-birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?, the authors argued that, “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Giubilini and Minerva define a person as “an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense.”

Since there's no significant difference between a newborn and a fetus, and since we feel free to kill a fetus if we so choose, we should also be free to kill a newborn, or so the argument goes.

I happen to think Giubilini and Minerva are right that there's no significant difference between a fetus and a newborn, but quite the opposite conclusion could be, and perhaps should be, drawn from this: Since it's illegal to kill a newborn and since there's no difference between a newborn and a fetus, it should also be illegal to kill a fetus.

Referring to the outraged mail and death threats Savulescu says:

This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” - a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive is to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.

This surely should win some sort of prize for irony. Isn't killing on the basis of their own moral certainty precisely what the authors of the article are advocating? They're presuming to have moral certainty concerning the personhood of the infant and on that basis they're advocating the right to kill it.

If we're going to adopt arbitrary definitions of "persons" perhaps we should define a person as someone who holds to a high view of human life and dignity. We could thereupon declare the authors of "After-birth Abortion" to be non-persons and thus subject to being the recipients themselves of an after-birth abortion. Would the Journal of Medical Ethics publish such an article, do you suppose?

Savulescu defends the writers by declaring that what they propose is not novel among ethicists:

What these young colleagues are spelling out is what would be the inevitable end point of a road that ethical philosophers in the States and Australia have all been treading for a long time and there is certainly nothing new.

He's certainly right about that. This isn't new. Progressives and fascists have been advocating infanticide for almost a century now, but he's wrong about this being the endpoint. History teaches us that it's in fact only the midpoint. Once we accept killing born children there's no place on the slippery slope we can stop. Next it will be mental and physical defectives, then the elderly, then criminals, the indigent, Republicans, anyone who is deemed undesirable.

We've been down this road before. It leads to the holocaust. Apparently people like the folks at the Journal of Medical Ethics don't much care.

The Statist Mentality

What happens when government knows best? Stuff like this:

I don't want to give the impression that I think government has no role to play in our polity. Nor do I pretend to know precisely where the line should be drawn to keep government from obtruding upon our personal lives and infringing upon our freedoms.

I do think, though, that if the government can inspect little girls' lunches in North Carolina, tell them that their mommies aren't preparing their lunches correctly, and make them pay the cost of a "proper meal," or if it can scare the bejabbers out of a family over a crayon drawing, as in the above case in Canada, then the government has stepped well over that line.

Andrew Breitbart (1969-2012)

Andrew Breitbart, an enormous presence on the web, died suddenly last night at the age of 43. He was behind a number of exposés of organizations like ACORN and Planned Parenthood and as such he earned the enmity of the left.

Sadly, it seems that when one earns the enmity of the left you can expect them to get pretty nasty, but when someone dies, even someone they don't much like, decent people look for the good to say about the person or they just keep quiet. Not the commenters at this site, however.

Breitbart was someone's son, husband, and father. To thank God that he's dead is cruel and disgusting. For people to be joyful at a political opponent's death is disgraceful, but I guess that's the point to which we have sunk. When people believe that character no longer matters there'll no longer be many people who have much character.

Beelzebub

Rick Santorum has given our secular elites a case of the vapors with his claim in a chapel address to a group of Catholic students at Ave Maria college in Florida four years ago that Satan is targeting America. Millions of Americans believe that Satan is a real being, but the good folks at MSNBC, CNN and other liberal precincts are scandalized that someone would actually be so gauche as to actually say it.

To listen to the huffing, sniffing, and tut-tutting going on one would think that Santorum was the first politician to give voice to a belief in Beelzebub in private speech, but he's surely not. He is, though, a Republican and that apparently makes a significant difference even if one is hard put to discern why, exactly, it should.

I'll bet Lucifer was a topic for discussion in Jimmy Carter's Sunday School classes in his church in Plains, Georgia over the years, and that President Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright preached on the devil in some of his fiery sermons, even if he does think that the devil is the white man. More recently, congresswoman Maxine Waters identified John Boehner and Eric Cantor, two more white men, as "demons" so presumably Ms Waters holds demonological opinions which she has doubtless gleaned from years of careful Bible study on the subject.

So why do Santorum's views, views which he shares with both Pope John Paul, Pope Benedict, Mother Teresa, many theologians, and the very founders of the world's great monotheistic religions, make him derisory? Why is Republican Santorum a fanatic for believing that there is a literal Satan, but Democrat Jimmy Carter was not?

Okay, I guess I just answered my own question.

Hairless Apes

Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent poses a question to Darwinian materialists, i.e. those who say that human beings are really nothing more than naked apes:

I have a question for our materialist friends. Let’s imagine a group of chimpanzees. Say one of the male chimps approaches one of the female chimps and makes chimp signals that he wants to have sexual relations with her, but for whatever reason she’s not interested and refuses. Is it morally wrong for the male chimp to force the female chimp to have sex with him against her will?

If you answer “no it is not morally wrong,” imagine further a group of humans. On the materialist view, a human is just a jumped up hairless ape. Is it morally wrong for a human male to force a human female to have sex with him against her will? If you answer “yes, it is morally wrong,” I certainly agree with you. But please explain why on the materialist view it is not wrong for a hairy ape to force a female to have sex with him, but it is wrong for a hairless ape to force a female to have sex with him.

Recall that Darwinians claim that ethics (or morality) are simply "illusions fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate" (Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson). If that's so then the Darwinian pretty much has to say that what the hairless ape does is not significantly different from what the hairy ape does. The materialist (or naturalist) has no grounds, in other words, for saying that rape is wrong, but will insist nevertheless that it is. Just don't ask him to explain why.

Actually, not all of them will insist that it's wrong. Some of the more thoughtful naturalistic materialists will admit they can't really say that. They acknowledge that, on materialism, there simply is no right or wrong, good or bad.

Thus, biologist Richard Dawkins: "What's to prevent us from saying that Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question."

Or philosopher Joel Marks: "There is no morality....Even though words like 'sinful' and 'evil' come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God."

And philosopher Richard Rorty: "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?'"

Even serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer saw clearly the implications of naturalistic materialism: "If a person doesn't think there's a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges?"

We could go on, but the point is clear. Materialism, or naturalism (atheism), leads to moral nihilism. Imagine living in the materialist's dream society, a society that has extinguished belief in God. It's a society in which the hairless ape's rape is no different than the hairy ape's rape. It's a Hobbesian society of war of every man against every man in which life is nasty, brutish and short.

We can deny God's existence and authority or we can cling to the notion that rape really is objectively wrong, but we can't do both. Ideas have consequences.

Higher Taxes, Lower Revenues

Conservatives have been arguing since, well, forever that the best way to increase revenues to the treasury is to lower tax rates and the best way to reduce revenues is to raise taxes. This may seem counterintuitive, but not only has it happened every time it's been tried there are good reasons why it happens. When people, especially rich people, see their taxes exceed a certain point they simply find ways to avoid paying them.

This is exactly what has recently happened in England. The government raised the tax rates on the rich to 50% a year ago expecting that they'd reap greater revenues, but the opposite happened. Rather than realize the additional £1billion they anticipated they actually lost about £500 million. The Telegraph reports that:

The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period.

Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.

The self-assessment returns from January, when most income tax is paid by the better-off, have been eagerly awaited by the Treasury and government ministers as they provide the first evidence of the success, or failure, of the 50 percent rate. It is the first year following the introduction of the 50 percent rate which had been expected to boost tax revenues from self-assessment by more than £1 billion.

This is why it's simplistic to just talk about taxing the rich. The rich will always find ways to avoid paying and we wind up with less revenue in the bank than if we had not raised taxes.

President Obama has indicated that this is of no concern to him. He wants to raise taxes, not because he thinks it'll help pay for what government needs but because he wants the wealthy to pay more regardless of the results. For him it's a matter of fairness, but this is an absurd exercise in cutting off our fiscal noses just to spite the rich. Even if it produces less income, even if it raises the debt and the deficit, he's determined to make the wealthy pay more because it's "fair."

Thus his recent budget proposal calls for an increase in the dividend tax rate (on families making over $250,000) from 15% to 39.6% and income on capital gains would be taxed at 20% rather than the current 15%.

In April of 2008 in a debate with Hillary Clinton Senator Obama was asked about his wish to double the capital gains rate. The moderator, Charles Gibson, questioned the wisdom of this since raising taxes on the wealthy generates less revenue, to which Mr. Obama replied:

Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness. We saw an article today which showed that the top 50 hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year — $29 billion for 50 individuals. And part of what has happened is that those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That’s not fair.

The relevant exchange is in the first 100 seconds of this clip:

The rich must be forced to pay their "fair share," whatever that is (It's never defined). If that means the Treasury winds up with even less revenue, so be it. At least it's fair. Somewhere Karl Marx is applauding.

Correlation and Causation

I haven't read geologist Bill McGuire's book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes so I don't want to be unfairly critical, but I do have a couple of questions.

According to an article in New Scientist McGuire cites evidence that "catastrophic outbursts of geological activity accompanied past periods of rapid climate change, for instance, when we shifted in and out of ice ages."

But he concludes from this (again, according to the New Scientist article) that:

The stresses and strains of rising and falling sea levels and the creation and loss of ice sheets triggered these outbursts. Climate change, he says, may already be shaking up the Earth anew.

My question is that if we accept the claim that climate change and geological activity are historically correlated, how does that justify the conclusion that climate change caused the geological activity? What evidence precludes the possibility that the reverse was the case, that increased geological disturbances like vulcanism, which spews massive amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, caused climate change?

The article continues with this:

During the last ice age, the weight of ice suppressed volcanic eruptions. When the ice melted the land surface lifted, sometimes by hundreds of metres, reducing pressure below and turning solid rock to liquid magma. The pent-up rage of the Earth was released. As the ice age faded, the number of volcanic eruptions grew 50-fold. Global warming threatens a reprise.

That's a plausible account of what could have happened, but no more plausible to my untutored mind than the possibility that increased volcanic activity produced the climatic changes that melted the glaciers.

New Scientist closes this unfortunate piece with a bit of unscientific nonsense:

It could be that something is afoot. Six years ago, McGuire suggested shrinking glaciers in New Zealand's Southern Alps might trigger an earthquake. Cue Christchurch [earthquake]last year.

In logic this is called the post hoc fallacy: Just because one event follows another it's assumed that the second event was caused by the other. It's the same sort of reasoning resorted to by astrologers: Ten years ago there was a conjunction of Mars and Jupiter and today Jeremy Lin is an NBA sensation, ergo the conjunction must have caused Lin's emergence as a superstar.

The final sentence is this:

The climate, we know, has been unusually stable in the past 10,000 years. That meant the world was more geologically stable as well. Now, as we face future climate chaos, we may also face geological mayhem.

Or, of course, we may not, who knows, but being scientifically accurate, sticking to the evidence, and being responsible wouldn't be as much fun as throwing a gratuitous scare onto the table.

Two and a Half Men Nation

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum has been criticized for emphasizing social issues in his campaign, allegedly to the exclusion of pressing economic issues facing the country. I don't think the criticism is accurate, but even if it were, he'd be justified for doing so.

Our economic problems are largely a consequence of the social disintegration that has been occurring in this country ever since the 1960s. Our biggest economic problem is our national debt which results from deficit spending year after year, and we spend more than we take in because we've decided that as a nation will absorb the consequences of the breakdown of the family.

When families unravel children often wind up being raised by one parent which almost always makes them poorer. Society compensates with welfare programs and medicaid. Society also bears the increased cost burden that accrues to schools, prisons, and remediation and rehabilitation facilities as more and more children, having never been effectively taught the disciplines and values needed for a successful life, become more difficult to handle and more of a burden on society's resources.

Moreover, in a society in which the family as an institution is disintegrating there are fewer families which can or do care for their elderly so the cost of this care also gets shifted to the taxpayer in the form of medicare and social security.

Why is the family less strong today? Because our sexual ethic has changed from one where sex was seen as appropriate and moral only within the context of deep commitment and marriage to where it has become a form of casual recreation expected of people almost as soon as they reach puberty. The entire culture has become sexualized, and the idea of a lifetime union with, and sexual fidelity to, one person has become a droll anachronism. Love is no longer seen as a commitment for life but rather as a burst of passion which, like a spring thunderstorm, is over almost as soon as it arrives.

Women are often viewed by young men as little more than baubles, receptacles for male yearning, and the male, having satisfied himself, quickly exits the woman's life leaving her and the taxpayer responsible for whatever issues from his touch-and-go landing. Indeed, women often, in a multitude of ways both implicit and explicit, encourage young men to think of them as ornaments and the object of their fantasies, and then they're embittered when the man abandons them to raise their children by herself (with taxpayer assistance) as soon as an even more desirable fantasy presents itself.

Our sexual ethic has morphed from My Three Sons to Two and a Half Men in the space of a generation, and the social costs have exploded apace.

Santorum is right. We'll never get a grip on our economic problems until we address the moral issues that underlie their source. Even some atheists agree.

The Size of Things

Here's something to play with if you have a few minutes to spend being fascinated. It's an interactive animation that gives you a sense of how big the universe is and how small the smallest things are. Check it out here.

Thanks to First Things for the link.

Who's the Doofus?

So last October an atheist marched in a Halloween parade dressed as "Zombie Mohammad." This insult to the Prophet so incensed a Muslim onlooker that the man leaped upon the hapless infidel and began to strangle him until removed by the police. The assault landed both the Muslim and the atheist in court where the judge dismissed the assault charges against the attacker and proceeded to insult and lecture the victim, calling him a "doofus," of all things.

It turns out that under sharia law, which the judge invoked, the Muslim man was justified in trying to kill the wretched blasphemer, but of course the parade wasn't in Iran or Saudi Arabia, it was in Pennsylvania. Who would have thought that Pennsylvanians are now subject to sharia law?

Andrew McCarthy has the story at National Review along with the transcript of the judge's lecture. It reads as if the judge may have been a couple of martinis over his limit. Let's hope so. The alternative is that the judge is pretty much of a doofus himself.

Machiavelli's Advice on Iran

Iran has consistently denied that it's pursuing its nuclear program for the purpose of building weapons, but nobody believes them, or at least, one hopes that nobody believes them. Jamie Weinstein's column at The Daily Caller leaves room for doubt:

Many foreign policy elites, perhaps epitomized by CNN host Fareed Zakaria, confidently assert that Israel specifically, and the West generally, can live with a nuclear Iran. The Iranian leadership isn’t suicidal, they tell us. Ignore Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, or Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s statement that Israel is a “cancerous tumor of a state” that “should be removed from the region,” or the supposed moderate former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani’s casual remark that the “application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.”

They’re just posturing or joking or have been misinterpreted, we’re told. Israel and the West can live with a nuclear Iran, foreign policy intellectuals in New York, London and Berlin proclaim.

Other nations have nukes, of course, and it might be wondered why we should be especially concerned that Iran has them.

The answer is that no other nation supports terrorism around the globe to the extent that Iran does. No other nation is led by people who believe that they can effect the return of their messiah by launching a nuclear holocaust, and no other nation has sworn to wipe another nation off the map as soon as they have the capability to do it. Iran has done all three.

Weinstein quotes the widow of a physicist who had been working on Iran's nuclear weapons until he was killed in Tehran by unknown assassins:

Mostafa’s ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel,” Fatemeh Bolouri Kashani told the Fars News Agency this week. She was referring to the wishes of her late husband, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, an Iranian nuclear scientist assassinated on the streets of Tehran in January.

Maybe Mostafa was just joking, although it must be said that Muslims aren't particular noted for their wonderful sense of humor.

Recently we wrote about the statement by a top Iranian official who declared that Iran must launch a preemptive strike against Israel, a declaration that all but forces Israel to attack first to avoid being preemptively obliterated.

Weinstein closes with this:

But while Western policy elites exude confidence in the rationality of the Iranian regime, we see from Kashani’s comment about her late husband that those intimately involved in making a nuclear Iran a reality believe it is their mission — likely the very reason they got involved in the nuclear project to begin with — to eliminate the Jewish state. And we aren’t talking about some uneducated bumpkin. This was a highly-educated nuclear scientist.

Machiavelli wrote that when war can not be avoided it can only be postponed to the advantage of the other side. It seems that war is coming once again to Israel one way or another, and the longer it is deferred the harder it will be for Israel to prevail and certainly the higher the cost they will pay. War with Iran will be a horrific thing, as we've said on numerous occasions on this site, but a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran would be even worse despite whatever the naifs among our elites tell us.

Perhaps the biggest question for American citizens is, what will the United States do if Israel decides it doesn't want to wait until it's too late to find out whether the Iranians are just joshing about reducing them and their children to ashes?

February's Unemployment

Hopes for an improving economy may be dampened when the February jobless numbers come out in a week or so. The Bureau of Labor Statistics bases it's unemployment number at the end of the month on the situation which obtains in the middle of the month. Gallup is reporting that as of February 15th unemployment stood at 9.0%, up from 8.3% in January.

Underemployment is also up according to Gallup:

Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of workers who are unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 19.0% in mid-February. This ... is up significantly compared with January's mid-month reading of 18.1%.

Perhaps much of this is due to rising gas prices which are being attributed to "instability" in the Middle East and Libya. If so, it underscores the need to become energy independent, which further underscores the need to exploit petroleum resources close to home and to increase our refinery capacity. The Obama administration, however, despite their rhetoric, is reluctant to proceed in this direction because the longer fossil fuels remain cheap the harder it will be to convince the American people to switch to "green" energy.

Despite his apparent over rising gas prices last week the president is, in fact, not at all averse to higher energy costs, and he and his energy secretary have both said as much (see below).

Mr. Obama's not opposed to having us pay more at the pump. He just doesn't want prices to go up too quickly or to go up now so close to the election when unhappy consumers and the desperate unemployed will be wondering why they should reelect him.

Inner Life of the Cell

I never get tired of watching this computer animation put out by Harvard of a few of the molecular processes occurring inside our cells. The video opens with blood cells streaming through a capillary and then a single leucocyte (white blood cell) is picked out and explored.

The question that comes to mind as I watch it is where are the instructions which tell all those proteins where to go and when to do it? What is it that coordinates all this activity so that everything happens at the right time and at the right place? Evidently, it's not DNA because DNA is one of the molecules whose activities need to be regulated and coordinated. The information is currently thought to be hard-wired into the architecture of the cell, the epigenome, but how it works and how such an arrangement could have evolved by unguided forces is still a mystery.

If you haven't seen it before I think you'll find it all pretty amazing, especially the motor protein kinesin which carries vacuoles around the cell along the microtubule superhighway. It requires numerous proteins interacting with the kinesin to cause it to move its "foot" forward and to release the trailing foot, and it manages twenty such steps every second.

It's even more astonishing to consider that the complexity, coordination, choreography, and timing depicted in the video is a tiny fraction of what actually occurs every second of every day of the life of each of the trillions of cells that make up our bodies.

Glenn Beck and John Fea

This post may be a little too much "inside baseball" for readers who don't listen to talk radio, but I have to get it off my chest. The other day I was listening to Glenn Beck on the car radio and almost drove off the road. I usually agree with Beck and often admire the stands he takes in solidarity with those he sees as being threatened either by foreign enemies (Israel) or government policy (the Catholic Church in the U.S. and minorities in Muslim countries). What made me almost lose control of my vehicle, however, was a mean and thoughtless riff he and his colleagues did on the chairman of the Messiah College history department, John Fea.

Fea committed the unforgiveable sin of stating something which is perhaps arguable but by no means blatantly false. He opined that Barack Obama is the most explicitly Christian president in the history of the United States. To listen to Beck's reaction you'd have thought that Fea was Adolf Eichmann. One of Beck's team declared that Fea should be fired (which is ironic given that the Beck staff was justifiably outraged that ESPN fired their headline writer for naively using the expression "chink in the armor" in reference to Jeremy Lin). Beck himself reminded his listeners in conspiratorial tones that Messiah College had hosted a speech last Fall by the radical leftist Francis Fox Piven, as if there was some connection between Fea and the Piven speech.

The whole thing was absurd and asinine. Beck thinks that Obama's many public and overt acknowledgements of the importance of his faith, probably more than any other president has ever made, don't count for anything. Beck apparently regards Obama's explicit affirmations of his Christian faith as insincere and, in any event, he doesn't think they don't make him "the most explicitly Christian president." All that matters for Beck is that Obama was a member of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's congregation for twenty years so he can't be a real Christian no matter what he says to the contrary.

What makes this so ridiculous and ironic is that Beck counts himself a Christian, and he's a Mormon. I dare say that there's a bigger gap between standard Mormon theology and traditional Christianity than there is between Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation theology and traditional Christianity.

Mormons believe, or at least their founders believed, that God was at one time a human and that he gradually became God but still retains a human form and that he has a harem of heavenly wives. The founders believed that a white woman who marries a black man should be executed and that slavery is God's will for blacks. They believed that Jesus was the literal offspring of a physical copulation of God the Father and Mary and that Jesus himself had at least three wives and children.

I'm not saying Mormons still believe these things, or that Beck does, but Joseph Smith and Brigham Young did. Before Beck launches a witless jeremiad against a good man (John Fea) and before he challenges the Christian bona fides of another (Barack Obama) he should at least explain how he himself reconciles some peculiar Mormon doctrines with traditional Christianity.

Professor Fea writes about this whole unpleasant episode here and talks about the hate mail he's received from Beck's listeners. Given the nature of the calumny and vituperation he's endured his irenic tone is remarkable. Glenn Beck owes him an apology on behalf of both himself and those of his listeners who disgraced themselves by attacking Fea.

Over-Regulation

Economists have often made the point that a government determined to regulate every aspect of American life is actually stifling American prosperity. The Economist explains both the ludicrous nature of some of these regulations as well as the oppressive effect they have on the economic activity of American business. Here's their lede:

Americans love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licenses. The list goes hilariously on.

But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.

Consider the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. Its aim was noble: to prevent another financial crisis. Its strategy was sensible, too: improve transparency, stop banks from taking excessive risks, prevent abusive financial practices and end “too big to fail” by authorizing regulators to seize any big, tottering financial firm and wind it down. This newspaper supported these goals at the time, and we still do.

But Dodd-Frank is far too complex, and becoming more so. At 848 pages, it is 23 times longer than Glass-Steagall, the reform that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. Worse, every other page demands that regulators fill in further detail. Some of these clarifications are hundreds of pages long. Just one bit, the “Volcker rule”, which aims to curb risky proprietary trading by banks, includes 383 questions that break down into 1,420 subquestions.

Hardly anyone has actually read Dodd-Frank, besides the Chinese government and our correspondent in New York. Those who have struggle to make sense of it, not least because so much detail has yet to be filled in: of the 400 rules it mandates, only 93 have been finalized. So financial firms in America must prepare to comply with a law that is partly unintelligible and partly unknowable.

Dodd-Frank is part of a wider trend. Governments of both parties keep adding stacks of rules, few of which are ever rescinded. Republicans write rules to thwart terrorists, which make flying in America an ordeal and prompt legions of brainy migrants to move to Canada instead. Democrats write rules to expand the welfare state.

Barack Obama’s health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system’s staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis.

There's much more at the link. If ever you wonder what it is that motivates those who favor small government all you need do is read this article.

Who Designed the Designer?

One of the questions skeptics like to put to theists who cite the Argument from Design as a good case for the existence of a designer is "Who designed the designer"? The objection is a variant of that posed to the First Cause (Cosmological) Argument when it's asked that "if everything has a cause then what caused God"?

Perhaps there are serious objections to some versions of both the Argument from Design and the First Cause argument, but surely this question is not one of them, notwithstanding that such luminaries as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have both trotted it out in their books and lectures.

Rabbi Moshe Averick takes a look at some of the problems with the objection in a post at Algemeiner.com. He writes:

Most people are unaware that many, if not most, prominent atheist thinkers reject the idea of a creator, not because of a scientific alternative (there is none) but because they feel this approach is philosophically untenable. To their understanding, the question of “Who Created the Creator?” presents us with a philosophical barrier so formidable that it cannot be breached. Ergo, we are left with only one viable alternative: some unknown naturalistic process. The late Christopher Hitchens, who was an atheist himself, put it this way:

“[I was asked] where is the first cause…how can you do without a first cause? [My answer is] because it only gives you a sterile infinite regression. Where did the first cause of the first cause come from? The argument from design gives you the same problem; who designed the designer?

In other words, the question is supposed to baffle the theist by confronting him with an infinite regress of causes (or designers) which, the skeptic argues, reduces his belief in a First Cause to an absurdity. Averick goes on to say that:

Atheistic mathematician Jason Rosenhouse poses the question in the following manner:

Proponents of Intelligent Design [assert] that living organisms exhibit a certain kind of complexity…that is most plausibly explained as the result of intelligent design…the complexity of [the simplest living bacterium] is used as the evidence that a certain sort of designer exists.

Rosenhouse points out what seems to be the inherent problem in proposing such a solution:

This leads to a problem. The existence of complex entities was precisely the phenomenon in need of explanation. Hypothesizing the existence of something more complex than the thing to be explained only replaces one problem with a far greater one. If [the first living bacterium] can only be explained as the product of design, then any designer capable of crafting the [first living bacterium] must also be so explained. The result is an infinite regress of designers, each invoked to explain the existence of the one before.

In fact, the High Priest of modern “militant” atheism – Professor Richard Dawkins himself – uses this same idea as his trump card to justify his rejection of God the Creator and Intelligent Design:

Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin…any entity capable of designing something as improbable as [the first living bacterium] would have to be even more improbable than [the bacterium itself.] (The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins)

When the question is posed properly three points immediately become clear; three points which bring us very close to the solution to our problem.

(A) “Who Designed the Designer?” is a question that applies to physical matter.

(B) If astronomers received a detailed message in Morse code from a distant galaxy they would conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the result of intelligent extra-terrestrial life, even though they could not know who designed the designer. To state that a 747 and a laptop computer are the result of unguided processes because we cannot answer “Who designed the designer?” would be absurd. Just as it is obvious that the 747, the computer, and the Morse code signals are designed – whether or not I can answer “Who designed the designer?” – so too it is obvious that the bacterium is designed whether or not I can answer that question.

(C) The dilemma that emerges from “Who Designed the Designer?” does not lead us to conclude that the bacterium is the result of an unguided process, it tells us one thing only: That there cannot be an infinite regression of physical creators.

The significance of (A) and (C) is this: The premise of the objection, i.e. that the cause of complex things must be even more complex, and thus more improbable, than the things it causes, is simply false when applied to non-physical beings such as God is assumed to be. Only physical beings can be complex because only physical, material beings have parts. God, being pure mind, would have no parts. Minds are non-physical and simple. Thus the entire objection based on God's complexity is rendered useless.

Averick might also have noted that beings which are caused to exist are contingent, but God, if he exists, is not contingent - he's the necessary being upon which the existence of all contingent beings ultimately depends. God is by definition uncaused and self-existent. He has what philosophers of religion refer to as aseity and needs, nor has, any explanation outside himself.

Perhaps Dawkins, Rosenhouse, and Hitchens, not being philosophers, don't understand all this, but if not they shouldn't be writing books pontificating on matters about which they're so uninformed.

To Frack Or Not to Frack, That Is the Question

Bill McKibben is an environmental activist who's very skeptical of the claims of the gas drilling industry concerning the safety of fracking. He has an interesting, if lengthy, piece in the New York Review of Books in which he lays out his concerns on the subject.

Yet, on the other hand, Peter Aldhous of New Scientist is reporting on a study that suggests that fracking poses no more risk to the environment, or at least to groundwater, than conventional drilling methods. He writes:

Don't blame fracking for environmental problems associated with extracting gas from shale. That's the message of a new report from the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, released on the opening day of the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

The US is riding the wave of a shale gas boom driven by fracking, or hydraulic fracturing - in which the rock is injected with water, sand and chemical additives at high pressure to release trapped methane.

[L]ead author Charles "Chip" Groat hopes the report will help regulators worldwide separate "fact from fiction". Reviewing existing studies, Groat's team could find no evidence linking groundwater contamination to fracking operations many hundreds of metres below.

A recent New Scientist analysis came to a similar conclusion. But this doesn't mean that shale gas extraction is benign, as the Texas team's review of the industry's track record revealed.

Groat's team studied instances of violations of environmental regulations in four states and found that in 21 out of 72 such cases there were "substantial" environmental consequences, but here is the key point in the report:

The problems were not caused by the process of fracking itself, but instead related to issues like ruptured well casings that also affect conventional gas production, or surface spills of chemicals or wastewater. "We found no direct evidence that hydraulic fracturing itself had contaminated groundwater," says Groat. "We found that most of the violations were at or near the surface."

As with the controversy surrounding climate change there seem to be competent, sincere people on both sides of the issue. Perhaps we won't know who's right until we've been fracking for a while longer, but it's certain that we'll never know who's right if we declare a moratorium on the process. Meanwhile, with so many benefits to be gained, and so much uncertainty about the nature and extent of the risks, it seems unwise to argue that we shouldn't proceed with extraction, accompanied by reasonable safeguards, just because there's some risk that some harm might befall the environment.

It seems, at least to me, that the proper course is to demand that drillers take all reasonable precautions and then reap the benefits of the fuel that's there for us. If it turns out that fracking is found to pose a serious hazard then let's address those hazards as they arise, just as we do with any other activity in life (e.g. automobile transportation) where the benefits are considered too great to forego.

Eugenics and the Left

Novelist Jonathan Freedland pens an essay in The Guardian about what he calls "one of the grisliest skeletons in the cupboard of the British intellectual elite, a skeleton that rattles especially loudly inside the closet of the left." The skeleton to which he alludes is the infatuation many prominent leftist intellectuals have historically had with eugenics and the lengths to which they were willing to go to purge undesirables from the human race.

Writes Freedland of the British intellectuals of the early 20th century:

[Eugenics is] the belief that society's fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and "moral worth" to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts.

Such talk repels us now, but in the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man", even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a "lethal chamber".

Such thinking was not alien to the great Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge, who argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood".

Indeed, a desire to limit the numbers of the inferior was written into modern notions of birth control from the start. That great pioneer of contraception, Marie Stopes – honoured with a postage stamp in 2008 – was a hardline eugenicist, determined that the "hordes of defectives" be reduced in number, thereby placing less of a burden on "the fit". Stopes later disinherited her son because he had married a short-sighted woman, thereby risking a less-than-perfect grandchild.

Yet what looks kooky or sinister in 2012 struck the prewar British left as solid and sensible. Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: "The time is surely coming ... when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself." Meanwhile, J.B.S. Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: "Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of 'undermen'." That's Untermenschen in German.

I'm afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". If it's any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

Freedland is writing of the climate of opinion among leftist/progressive elites in Britain, but the same ideas were rampant on this side of the pond as well. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood largely as an organization to control the propagation of undesirables which especially included, in her mind, blacks.

Other like-minded American eugenicists included Alexander Graham Bell and most of the early Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Davenport, H.G. Wells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Woodrow Wilson, and a boatload of lesser lights. At the Nuremberg War Crimes trials the Nazis testified that they took their inspiration for the genocide of the Jews from American eugenicists.

Freedland goes on to say that,

The Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb and their ilk, were not attracted to eugenics because they briefly forgot their left-wing principles. The harder truth is that they were drawn to eugenics for what were then good, left-wing reasons.

They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies? The aim was to do what was best for society, and society would clearly be better off if there were more of the strong to carry fewer of the weak.

What was missing was any value placed on individual freedom, even the most basic freedom of a human being to have a child. The middle class and privileged felt quite ready to remove that right from those they deemed unworthy of it.

Progressives face a particular challenge, to cast off a mentality that can too easily regard people as means rather than ends. For in this respect a movement is just like a person: it never entirely escapes its roots.

This is a frightening thought given the power and influence progressives have in the American corridors of power today. The Nazis put the eugenic impulse in bad odor and drove it underground after WWII, but the desire to cull and regulate the human herd has not died out. It just doesn't get talked about much. How long that reticence will last in a progressive era like ours remains to be seen.

Anyone interested in reading the history of the flow of ideas from Darwin in the latter half of the 19th century through the progressive eugenicists of the first four decades of the 20th century, to the Nazis in the 30s and 40s might pick up a copy of Richard Weikert's book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany or Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg.

Randomness and Fitness

Darwinian evolution depends on the concept of biological fitness, but, to the degree that the notion avoids being a tautology, it's pretty much meaningless. There's no way to determine whether an organism is fit other than by seeing if it survives. But if survival is the measure by which we assess fitness then survival of the fittest equates to the vacuous claim that those organisms are fittest which survive and those which survive are fittest.

Stephen Talbot at The New Atlantis has a fine essay on the conceptual problems involved with the notion of Darwinian fitness. He starts out talking about the claim that evolutionary history is driven by random purposeless processes, a claim he finds untenable. He cites biologist Richard Dawkins and philosopher Daniel Dennett to make his point:

Dennett, in one of his characteristic remarks, assures us that “through the microscope of molecular biology, we get to witness the birth of agency, in the first macromolecules that have enough complexity to ‘do things.’ ... There is something alien and vaguely repellent about the quasi-agency we discover at this level — all that purposive hustle and bustle, and yet there’s nobody home.”

Then, after describing a marvelous bit of highly organized and seemingly meaningful biological activity, he concludes: "Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe."

And we read this in Dawkins:

Wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it.” And: “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all.

In other words, both Dawkins and Dennett hold that at bottom life is mindless, meaningless, and purposeless. Any indications to the contrary are illusions. Talbot, however, has serious problems with this view. If all the purposes and meanings in living things are just illusions, as Dawkins insists, then:

[W]hat is the difference between merely illusory purpose and the real thing? If Dawkins means that there is only illusion, then, if there is nothing for the illusion to be a convincing illusion of, it hardly makes sense to say it is an illusion at all, as opposed to being just what it seems to be.

On the other hand, if Dawkins admits that meaning and purpose actually exist as realities and are therefore available to be mimicked in an illusory way, what grounds does he have for claiming meaninglessness and purposelessness as fundamental to the world’s character?

Indeed. Talbot then goes on to reflect on the emptiness of the concept of survival of the fittest:

[F]irst, evolution can be explained by the fact that, on the whole, only the fitter organisms survive and achieve reproductive success; and second, what makes an organism fit is the fact that it survives and successfully reproduces. This is the long-running and much-debated claim that natural selection, as an explanation of the evolutionary origin of species, is tautological — it cannot be falsified because it attempts no real explanation. It tells us: the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce are the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce.

Stephen Jay Gould pointed out back in 1976, however, that Darwin and his successors hypothesized independent conditions — “engineering criteria,” as biologists like to say — for the assessment of fitness. These conditions may facilitate and explain reproductive success, but do not merely equate to it. In other words, the concept of fitness need not rely only on the concept of survival (or reproductive success).

The problem, though, is that there's no way to test these "engineering criteria." Talbot again:

To make the problem worse, evolutionary biologists are driven to arrive at scalar values for fitness — values enabling reasonable comparison of traits and organisms, so that we can determine which is the fittest. But how do you take all the infinitely wide-ranging and interwoven considerations that might bear on fitness and reduce them to a scalar value? It is a practical impossibility.

As a pair of philosophers put it in a 2002 article, “Suppose a certain species undertakes parental care, is resistant to malaria, and is somewhat weak but very quick. How do these fitness factors add up? We have no idea at all.”

His conclusion is that the claim that meaning and purpose are illusions, a claim which I would argue is certainly entailed by naturalism, is simply wrong and that the concept of survival of the fittest is hopelessly muddled. Of course, if a claim entailed by naturalism is wrong then naturalism must be wrong, but Talbot chooses not to explore this aspect of the argument.

At any rate, those with an interest in the biological sciences and/or the philosophy of biology will find his essay a rewarding and challenging read.