Big Announcement

A recurring theme throughout our eight years here at Viewpoint is that naturalism affords little or no basis for neither moral obligation nor ultimate meaning and renders a host of other human needs and yearnings absurd. It's an existential dead-end for unless there is a God, or something very much like God, then life really is, as Shakespeare put it, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

A few years ago I began working on a novel that would incorporate some of these arguments, and I'm pleased to announce that the book is now available for purchase. It's titled In the Absence of God and is available at the usual outlets (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) and also from my favorite bookseller Hearts and Minds Bookstore, the proprietor of which is offering a 20% discount on the cover price ($25).

In the Absence of God is set in a mid-size university campus in New England at the beginning of the fall semester sometime in the early years of the last decade.

The main plot line involves a professor named Joseph Weyland who's forced by the events swirling around him, as well as the challenge presented by a young nihilist, to come to grips with the implications of his materialistic worldview. As he wrestles with the issues his materialism raises he's engaged in an ongoing series of dialogues with a colleague and friend named Malcolm Peterson, and also with the pastor of his father's church, Loren Holt.

Meanwhile, the campus has been terrorized by an apparent serial rapist, and several young student-athletes find themselves thrust into the role of both victim and pursuer of the person who's perpetrating these crimes.

Over the course of three weeks in late August and early September the lives of these students become intertwined with those of Weyland and Peterson in ways that none of them could have foreseen on the first day of classes.

In the Forward to the book I write this:

This is not a book about football, though it may at first seem to be. Neither is it a crime novel, though it ends that way. Nor is it just a book about people sitting around talking, although I'm sure some readers will think so.

In the Absence of God is a novel about ideas concerning the things that matter most in life. It's a tale of three different worldviews, three different ways of seeing the world and of living our lives in it. It's the story of how for a few short weeks in September these three views come into conflict on a college campus in New England and how that clash of ideas forces people on campus to think seriously about the implications of their deepest convictions.

It has been said that ideas have consequences and nowhere is this more true than in one's personal philosophy of life - one's beliefs about God.

It's my hope that in reading this book you'll be stretched to think about things you perhaps hadn't thought about before, or that you'll at least think about your own beliefs in new and different ways. I hope that whatever your convictions about the matters taken up in this book may be, by the time you close its covers you'll agree that those convictions matter, and matter more profoundly than any other opinions you hold.

I'd be delighted to hear from anyone who reads the book and wishes to share his or her thoughts on it.

The Fundamental Nature of Reality (Pt. II)

A few days ago we talked about Andrew Briggs' essay on the ultimate basis of reality at Big Questions Online. In the course of this piece Briggs says this:

One of the biggest questions anyone can ask is what happens after I die? Answers range from annihilation to reincarnation or some nirvana-like state. For those who have confidence in the evidence of the resurrection, the concept of information may offer insights into how the self endures. It will not be in the same body, which decays following death, but neither will it be disembodied. In some way information may give continuity to the reality of a person after death.

If we assume theism is true Briggs could be on to something. Could it be that a person's soul is not some ethereal substance within us, nor is it identical to our minds as many philosophers have thought, but could it rather be information? Seen this way the soul is a complete description of who we are. It's not a substance at all but rather it's every true proposition about us. It's an exhaustive description of our personality, our character, our personal history, our hopes and dreams, virtues and vices. If so, then it's data and just as data is stored in a database perhaps the data that describes us is stored in the database that is the mind of God.

In other words, our soul is our essence in the form of information, and since it's stored in the mind of the Creator it's eternal and indestructible (unless God presses the "delete button").

Perhaps, too, when this body falls victim to physical death the information which describes us is "downloaded" into another body of some sort in another dimension or another world. Just as the information contained in computer software cannot function apart from the hardware of the computer perhaps our soul needs the physical hardware of a body to enable it to express itself.

At any rate, if the fundamental "substance" of the world is information then the ultimate reality is very likely mind, and if that's so then the universe could well be infused with purpose, design, and personality. This seems to be looking more and more probable, and materialism appears to be looking less and less likely, with every passing year.

That Promise Didn't Last Long

At the Democratic nominating convention last week President Obama promised, to the cheers of the delegates, that he would never do what Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan has proposed to do and turn Medicare into a voucher program:

But no sooner was the convention adjourned than the president seems to have done exactly what he said he wouldn't do. His Department of Health and Human Services launched a pilot program that would force seniors eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid into Medicaid and put them on a voucher program. Here are some highlights from the National Journal article on HHS program:

In his convention speech in Charlotte, President Obama vowed to block the Republican Medicare reform plan because “no American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies.”

But back in Washington, his Health and Human Services Department is launching a pilot program that would shift up to 2 million of the poorest and most-vulnerable seniors out of the federal Medicare program and into private health insurance plans overseen by the states.

About 40 percent of Medicaid’s costs go toward patients who are also eligible for Medicare. Advocates of the pilot program also say it could lead to better coordination of care for patients who often struggle to navigate the two different programs.

Still, there is powerful opposition to the pilots among doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, patient groups, and key lawmakers, including Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., who wrote the provision in the health law that created the office in charge of the pilot program.

“I urge you to take immediate steps to halt this initiative as currently structured and to take the time necessary to develop a well-designed and thoroughly evaluated care coordination model for dual eligibles that meets the standards outlined in the law,” Rockefeller wrote in a letter to HHS.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a group of experts who advise Congress on Medicare policy, has also weighed in with an 11-page letter to HHS, warning that the speed and scope of the program raised questions about whether patients would receive the care they need.

Scott Gottlieb, a former health official in President George W. Bush’s administration, called the program “immoral.”

“Why are we taking the duals, who are entitled to Medicare benefits, and moving them into Medicaid?” asked Gottlieb, now a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. The Medicare reform plan championed by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would encourage more seniors to move into managed-care plans by giving them vouchers to purchase insurance. The idea is to create a marketplace that would compete with traditional Medicare for customers.

Obama has repeatedly warned that this approach would lead to the demise of traditional Medicare, one of the most popular government programs. He has also attacked Romney’s proposal to give states fixed sums to care for Medicaid patients, a change from the current system in which the federal government matches a portion of state spending.

Like a master magician, President Obama leads us to think that he's determined to do one thing while he's in fact doing the opposite. Meanwhile, a servile media does nothing to call him to account for the deception and much of the electorate is bamboozled by it.

Animal Consciousness

Discovery Magazine tells us that a group of scientists have issued a declaration announcing that animals possess consciousness:

An international group of prominent scientists has signed The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in which they are proclaiming their support for the idea that animals are conscious and aware to the degree that humans are -- a list of animals that includes all mammals, birds, and even the octopus.

While it might not sound like much for scientists to declare that many nonhuman animals possess conscious states, it's the open acknowledgement that's the big news here. The body of scientific evidence is increasingly showing that most animals are conscious in the same way that we are, and it's no longer something we can ignore.

What's also very interesting about the declaration is the group's acknowledgement that consciousness can emerge in those animals that are very much unlike humans, including those that evolved along different evolutionary tracks, namely birds and some encephalopods.

"The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states," they write. "Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."

Consequently, say the signatories, the scientific evidence is increasingly indicating that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.

That animals have conscious states is not a new hypothesis. What's new - and surprising - is the claim that they're conscious to the same degree humans are. I say it's a surprising claim because nothing in the article really supports it.

How do these scientists know that animals don't experience the world in a manner similar to that of humans who are sleepwalking or under anesthesia? Humans in this state are aware of their environment and interact with it, but they're not fully conscious of it. Perhaps animal consciousness is similar.

Or how do we know that animals aren't conscious in the same way that a zombie is conscious? A zombie could have all the sensory inputs that a normal person has and display all the same behavioral outputs but still not be self-aware, or understand, or doubt, or believe, or have any of the first person experiences that humans have. They're simply flesh and blood robots. Nothing in the story explains why these scientists have ruled this possibility out.

In any case, consciousness continues to be a fascinating impediment to materialists who wish to reduce the world to nothing but matter and energy. Consciousness, whether human or animal, vigorously resists these kinds of reductionistic explanations, which suggests, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our science.

It Could've Been Worse

The Daily Show has put together a couple of political ads, one for each candidate, which are pretty creative. The first, a satire on Mitt Romney's flip-flopping, gets good toward the end where he's depicted "rebuilding" himself in order to appeal to conservatives.

The second ad uses Mr. Obama's own words to illustrate his campaign theme and the entire basis he's offering to voters for re-electing him - as bad as things are they could've been worse. Enjoy:

The Daily Show
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Junk DNA

An article in New Scientist (subscription required) describes what researchers are discovering about the human genome and how it works. It's turning out that our cellular machinery is far more complex than anyone imagined just a couple of decades ago.

It's also turning out that one of the widely-accepted assumptions - the assumption that vast amounts of DNA were little more than vestigial junk (an assumption that intelligent design people have been predicting for fifteen years would turn out to be false) - is turning out to be false. Researchers are finding that as much as 80% of our genetic material has a function in the cell and that number appears to be a lower limit.

All of which is to say that however the cellular machinery came about it's becoming increasingly unlikely with every passing year that it came about by purely purposeless, mechanistic processes.

Here's an excerpt from the New Scientist article:

After the genome was sequenced, another major project was launched to try to understand which bits of the genome do what. The results, released this week, reveal that our genome is far more complex and mysterious than biologists imagined just a decade ago.

Back in the 1960s, a beautifully simple picture emerged. Our DNA consisted of recipes for proteins. The double helix could be unzipped to allow RNA copies of these recipes to be made and sent to the protein-making factories in cells. But by the 1970s, it had become clear that only a tiny proportion of our DNA codes for proteins - just 1.2 per cent, we now know. What about all the rest? Some assumed it must do something, others suggested it was mostly junk. "At least 90 of our genomic DNA is 'junk' or 'garbage' of various sorts," the geneticist Susumu Ohno wrote in 1972.

Ohno knew, though, that some of the DNA that didn't code for proteins still played a vital role. For instance, the process of making RNA copies of genes - transcription - involves clusters of proteins binding to specific sequences near the genes. These proteins - called transcription factors - control the activity of genes by either boosting or blocking transcription, so the sequences to which they bind are known as regulatory DNA or switches.

So how much DNA acts a switch, or has some other function? To provide an overall picture of which parts of the genome do what, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project was set up in 2003. It involves many teams around the world using a variety of techniques. The results of a pilot study looking at just 1 per cent of the genome were released in 2007. This week, the results of its study of the entire genome were released, with the publication of more than 30 papers in Nature and other journals.

Among other things, ENCODE looked for switches that control gene activity. The researchers did this by taking known transcription factors and seeing which bits of DNA these proteins bound to. So far, they have found 4 million sites, covering 8.5 per cent of the genome - far more than anyone expected.

Even this is likely to be a gross underestimate of the true number, because ENCODE hasn't yet looked at every cell type, or every known transcription factor. "When we extrapolate up, it's more like 18 or 19 per cent," says Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, UK, who is coordinating the data analysis for ENCODE. "We see way more switches than we were expecting, and nearly every part of the genome is close to a switch."

You can read the entire article at the link for free for the next four days.

It used to be that anyone who believed that living things were the product of intentional, intelligent engineering were thought to be benighted, hopelessly superstitious, credulous simpletons. It seems that that description is currently shifting toward those who insist that this breathtaking complexity could just happen by mindless accident.

Why He's Still Ahead

John Hinderaker at Powerline wonders why it is, given the state of the economy and the failure of the President to articulate any plan for getting us out of the morass we're in, that Mr. Obama is still leading in the polls:

On paper, given Obama’s record, this election should be a cakewalk for the Republicans. Why isn’t it? I am afraid the answer may be that the country is closer to the point of no return than most of us believed. With over 100 million Americans receiving federal welfare benefits, millions more going on Social Security disability, and many millions on top of that living on entitlement programs–not to mention enormous numbers of public employees–we may have gotten to the point where the government economy is more important, in the short term, than the real economy. My father, the least cynical of men, used to quote a political philosopher to the effect that democracy will work until people figure out they can vote themselves money. I fear that time may have come.

If Mr. Obama wins in November it will be another historical milestone to add to his achievement as the first black president. It'll be the first time a president was ever reelected with unemployment this high. Hinderaker is surely correct that when so many people are dependent upon government, attempts to reduce its size and power fall on deaf ears, but I think there's also another dynamic at play.

I can't prove it, but I suspect that another part of the reason Mr. Obama is still afloat is that there are a lot of people who would vote for him no matter how bad the economy is simply because he's black, he's pro-choice, and he's "cool."

The people hardest hit by unemployment are African Americans, but, unlike years past when the choice was between two white candidates, a large number of African Americans will vote for Mr. Obama whether they have a job or not. The same is true of many women who care more than anything else about keeping abortion legal. Mr. Obama could be found to be giving state secrets to the Russians and many people will still vote for him for these two reasons alone.

Nor should we underestimate the "cool" factor. There are perhaps millions of people who will vote in November who have no grasp whatsoever of the issues that are being debated, but they know whether a candidate is cool or not, and they'll vote for cool over competence every time. They voted for JFK over Nixon largely on that basis, they voted for Bill Clinton over George H. W. Bush largely for the same reason and reelected him over Bob Dole again because he was cool and Dole was not. George W. Bush ran against Al Gore and John Kerry, elections in which the coolness factor was a wash, but in 2008 it reemerged with unfortunate consequences for the hapless and decidedly uncool Senator McCain. And in 2012 cool is once again pretty much on the side of President Obama.

The notion that the state of the economy will make a difference is, in my opinion, simply mistaken. It only matters if the candidates are both the same race and of approximately equal "coolness."

I know this is not a very flattering picture of those who would vote for someone largely on the basis of superficialities, and I repeat that I can't prove it, but there you have it. I'd bet that many if not most people who'll vote in November couldn't even name five Supreme Court Justices or their own U.S. Senators. They don't know much about the national debt and deficits, and they don't much care. What they do care about is that Mr. Obama is black, he's pro-choice, and he's cool.

Obamacare in One Sentence

Dr. Barbara Bellar is a physician running for the Illinois State Senate. At a recent event she summed up Obamacare in one single, very long, but very incisive sentence:

It's interesting that scarcely anyone among the Democrats touts the Affordable Care Act as a reason to reelect the President. If they do, they stick to glowing generalities and don't talk much about the details. Little wonder.

The Fundamental Nature of Reality

At Big Questions Online Andrew Briggs ponders the ultimate nature of reality and wonders whether, at bottom, everything is information. It's an intriguing question. What is the fundamental reality that makes up our world and ourselves?

Generations of scientists have assumed it was matter made of atoms, but as we learn more about the atom it seems that the appearance of materiality that the world presents to our senses is in fact something of an illusion, a trick played on our senses by something even more fundamental than matter. After all, when we dissect an atom down to its tiniest constituents we find that they're really just ghostly manifestations of energy (whatever that is). They seem to be nothing more substantial than a mathematical abstraction.

We find that these subatomic particles don't play by the same rules that macroscopic material objects play by. Subatomic particles can be in two different places simultaneously, a phenomenon called superposition, and they can also affect each other even though they're at opposite ends of the universe moving away from each other at the speed of light, a bizarre phenomenon called quantum entanglement.

If matter turns out not to be the fundamental reality what would be? If, as Briggs suggests, it's information then that suggests an even more basic reality, i.e. mind, that underlies everything. That would really upset the metaphysical applecart because if mind is the fundamental reality then we're but a few short steps, philosophically speaking, from the conclusion that God, or something very much like God, exists.

The Benediction

One of the most incongruous events of the recent Democratic convention was the closing prayer offered by Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Dolan's prayer was a gentle rebuke of practically everything that was said in the first two days of the gathering. During the early speeches speaker after speaker affirmed the necessity of preserving a mother's right to choose to terminate her pregnancy, even at taxpayer expense, and the need for taxpayers to pay for other people's birth control.

Dolan's prayer essentially called on God to confute all those demands, using phrases like, “Grant us the courage to defend life…waiting to be born, welcomed and protected.”

He also prayed for “life, without which no other rights are secured,” and that God would grant us "the right to life so we can choose liberty and happiness."

He added this: "We praise You for the gift of life, grant us the courage to defend it.”

These petitions to the Almighty on behalf of innocent children won him the contumely of hundreds of liberal/progressives who showered the twitter-sphere with ugly imprecations and foul exhortations to the Cardinal to commit acts which, let us just say, the Church deems sinful. It's funny that liberals call for civility and decency in our political discourse but often feel no obligation to behave with civility and decency themselves.

Anyway, here's the video of Dolan's closing prayer. It's really quite remarkable, given the venue and the convictions of the people gathered there.

Pastor Freed from Iranian Death Row

Long time readers of Viewpoint may recall our posts a year ago on Yousef Nadarkhani a Christian pastor, condemned to death in Iran for apostasy. Details are still sketchy, but it seems that Nadarkhani has, after three years in prison, been released. Evidently, the prayers and outcry from around the globe convinced the Iranians that executing him would be a public relations disaster:

Iranian Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, who was originally sentenced to death in his native country for his Christian faith, was acquitted of apostasy charges and released from custody.

Nadarkhani, 32, was imprisoned for three years and waiting execution for refusing to renounce his Christian faith. His charges were lowered to evangelizing to Muslims, which carried a three-year sentence. He was released with time served, according to the American Center for Law and Justice, a Washington-based watchdog group that had been campaigning for the pastor's release.

Yousef Nadarkhani

You can read more on his release here.

Noonan on the DNC

Peggy Noonan's take on the Democratic National Convention is insightful and interesting. She seems sad that the party has devolved into something far different than the party of Harry Truman and JFK, but her analysis confirms my own thoughts as I watched the proceedings, and she expresses those thoughts far more eloquently than I could.

Here's part of her column in which she employs the adjective "extreme" in its proper context, doubtless as a satire on the promiscuous use of the word as a description of Republicans whose views are anything but extreme:

Was it a good convention?

Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.

There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values.

Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem — that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis — extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.

The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.

"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is.

She really does think — and her party apparently thinks — that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.

And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.

In the early paragraphs of her piece Noonan delivers one of the most masterfully crafted insults (directed at Vice-President Biden) I think I've ever read. It employs language a bit stronger than one might wish, even if one thinks it merited, but it'll probably go down in the annals of journalism as a classic. Check it out at the link.

Compromise and the Ratchet Effect

Politics is all about compromising, we're often told, and when one side refuses to cooperate there's gridlock and nothing gets done. The liberal media tell us that the reason the Obama administration has failed to solve our nation's economic problems is that the conservatives in congress simply refuse to compromise.

Actually, there are two good reasons why conservatives don't, and shouldn't, compromise with liberals. One is that compromise is based on trust, and conservatives simply don't believe that Democrats can be trusted. Back in the early '90s George H.W. Bush campaigned on a pledge not to raise taxes. The Democrat leadership, however, managed to convince him that if he would ignore his pledge and raise taxes they would agree to cut spending. Both sides would anger their base, to be sure, but we'd achieve a lower deficit and maintain fiscal sanity (those were the days), and the country would be better for it.

Well, Bush agreed to raise taxes, breaking his "no new taxes" promise and all but ruining his chance of reelection, but the Democrats never reduced spending. In fact, with the increased tax revenue they decided to increase spending. The memory of being bamboozled by the Democrats makes todays conservative Republicans very leery of liberal promises.

The second reason is that conservatives believe that compromising with liberals is a losing proposition even when they don't immediately get swindled. This is because of the ratchet effect inherent in any compromise between one party which wants to maintain the status quo and another which wants radical change.

Here's how the ratchet works: Consider a series of numbers from 1 to 10 representing the various positions on any issue. The national consensus is, let's say, at 4 on some issue, but liberals want to take it to 10. So they propose a compromise that would move the issue to 6. As soon as conservatives agree to this "compromise" they've already lost the battle and will soon lose the war because we, as a society, are now moving in the direction the liberals wanted to take us all along.

Some years later, the Democrats propose another compromise. They propose that we move to 8. If the conservatives agree then we've moved almost completely to the liberal goal. Conservatives have gotten nothing and liberals are almost home, and of course there's no going back to 4. Anybody who suggests a return to the status quo ante is labelled a reactionary. The process continues over time until the nation is finally at a 10. If conservatives refuse to go along they're called obstructionists and do-nothings.

Here's something else: Even when society has been moved to 10 on a given issue liberal/progressives cannot be satisfied. The 10 is now the new status quo, and if progressives are satisfied with the status quo they're no longer progressive. They must, in order to be a progressive in good standing, continue to push the envelope ever further to the left. Because of the ratchet what was unimaginable yesterday, becomes a fringe view today and a mainstream view tomorrow. Meanwhile, those who think we never should have moved away from 4 in the first place are called "extremists."

Take gay marriage as an example. When the gay rights movement first got under way it was a movement that asked only for tolerance of an "alternative lifestyle." Americans agreed, but then the request for tolerance morphed into a demand for acceptance and then into a demand for approval. Once that was largely achieved we were confronted with further demands that gays be allowed to marry. If the ratchet ever crosses that threshhold, which seems inevitable, what'll be left for a good progressive to fight for?

Right now campaigns to make polyamory legal seem way out on the fringe, but once gay marriage is codified polyamory will probably move much closer to the mainstream. Even further out on the fringe are those who wish to remove barriers to consensual sex between men and boys, but once polyamory has been ratcheted into place pedophilia will not seem so bizarre.

What's bizarre, after all, is simply what we're not used to. As Alexander Pope wrote:

Evil is a monster of such frightful mein,
that to be hated needs but to be seen.
But seen too oft, familiar with her face,
First we endure, then we pity, then we embrace.

When one believes his position is correct, whether on any moral, social, or economic issue, compromise is an abandonment of his principles. If politicians are willing to betray their principles just to appear "reasonable" to the media then they've also betrayed the trust the people have placed in them and should be voted out of office.

God and the Democrats

The Democrat delegates to their convention had earlier this week quietly removed language from their party platform that recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and also voted to expunge the phrase "God-given potential" from their document, presumably because a lot of delegates don't want to give the impression that they might think God is in some way relevant to our public life.

Their seeming willingness to stick their thumb in the eye of both Jewish and Christian voters won them considerable opprobrium so on Wednesday the leadership, apparently at the urging of President Obama who foresaw a needless disaster in the making, moved to have the language restored. The voice vote on restoring the language was inconclusive (it required a 2/3 vote) so on the third attempt the motion was declared passed despite the fact that the nays seemed to actually outnumber the yays, and the delegates erupted in a chorus of boos at the undemocratic manner in which the change was rammed through despite the wishes of the delegates.

This presented the nation with the charming spectacle of a substantial number of liberal Democrats voting "no" on both our Israeli allies' right to decide where they will have their own capital and on a tacit recognition in their platform of the existence of God. I'm sure it's not the picture that the Democrats wanted, but it shows the extent to which the party has become the party of secularism and the party of indifference to Jewish concerns.

Here's a video of the debacle:

Incidentally, President Obama has in the past declared that the question of the Israeli capital should be a matter of negotiations with the Palestinians. It's not his position, at least not his public position, that Jerusalem is, or should be, recognized as the Israeli capital.

Yahoo has the story here.

Having spent much of the first two days demanding that women have the right to a tax-payer funded abortion at any stage of a pregnancy and demanding, too, that the Republicans help them raise taxes, it seems that the Democrats are happy now to present themselves to the nation as the party of death, taxes, and secularism.

Sounds like an electoral trifecta.

The Vacuity of Evolutionary Ethics

The recent edition of the journal Science (subscription required) has a review by Rudolph Griss of a new book by atheistic biologist E.O. Wilson titled The Social Conquest of Earth. At one point Griss says this:

As intriguing as self-understanding may be from an intellectual point of view, Wilson sees it as a means to an end: something that must be achieved if humans are to bring their unsustainable and destructive lifestyle to a halt. He laments, "We are needlessly turning the gold we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be despised by our descendants." We are not only polluting our planet beyond recognition, we are also bidding good-bye forever to species after species. Wilson tells us to grow up, to stop making excuses and shuffling off responsibility onto deities. We alone are responsible for the future of our planet. The sooner we understand who we are and where we come from, the sooner we will know where we need to go.

I thought this was interesting because Wilson seems to assume that we have some sort of moral obligation to future generations not to despoil and deplete the planet, but where does such an obligation come from? Who imposes it? Why is it wrong to exploit the earth's resources to make our lives as comfortable as we can and let future generations fend for themselves? Our descendants may despise us for acting this way but why should we care? What's wrong with selfishness?

It may seem obvious to some readers that of course we have a duty to care about the planet and our descendants, but it's not obvious to me at all that we do, or at least it's not obvious to me that an atheist has any grounds for believing that we do.

Indeed, I don't think Wilson, who is a Darwinian materialist, can cogently answer any of the above questions, because for the atheist there simply is no answer. To paraphrase philosopher Richard Rorty*, for the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be selfish. Or to paraphrase Richard Dawkins*, what's to prevent us from saying that selfishness is right? That's a genuinely difficult question.

If we're simply the product of blind, purposeless Darwinian processes which enabled us to succeed in the struggle for survival then to suggest that we should not be selfish, that we should suppress our instincts and deny ourselves the benefits of the earth's largesse for the sake of generations yet to come, is absurd.

The only basis for thinking that we have a duty to conserve the earth's resources is the belief that a transcendent moral authority, a God, has imposed upon us the obligation to be stewards of the earth and to care about the well-being of others. Take away the divine source of that obligation, as Wilson does, and the obligation itself disappears.

Atheists delight in calling theists irrational, but what's more irrational, believing that we have a duty to care for the planet because the creator of the universe imposes that duty upon us, or believing that we have a duty to care for the planet even though there's nothing at all that could possibly impose such a duty upon us?

If Wilson thinks we do have such a duty then maybe he should reassess his commitment to atheism.

You can read more about Griss' review of Wilson's book at Evolution News and Notes.

* I substituted the word "selfish" for Rorty's original word "cruelty," and I substituted "selfishness" for Dawkin's original word "Hitler."

Diet, Dementia, and Insulin

New Scientist has a fascinating article on recent research showing that Alzheimer's disease is connected to insulin which is connected to a high fat/sugar diet. Here's the lede:

Suzanne De La Monte's rats were disoriented and confused. Navigating their way around a circular water maze - a common memory test for rodents - they quickly forgot where they were, and couldn't figure out how to locate the hidden, submerged safety platform. Instead, they splashed around aimlessly. "They were demented. They couldn't learn or remember," says de la Monte, a neuropathologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

A closer look at her rats' brains uncovered devastating damage. Areas associated with memory were studded with bright pink plaques, like rocks in a climbing wall, while many neurons, full to bursting point with a toxic protein, were collapsing and crumbling. As they disintegrated, they lost their shape and their connections with other neurons, teetering on the brink of death.

Such changes are the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, and yet they arose in surprising circumstances. De la Monte had interfered with the way the rats' brains respond to insulin. The hormone is most famous for controlling blood sugar levels, but it also plays a key role in brain signalling. When de la Monte disrupted its path to the rats' neurons, the result was dementia.

Poor sensitivity to insulin is typically associated with type 2 diabetes, in which liver, fat and muscle cells fail to respond to the hormone. But results such as de la Monte's have led some researchers to wonder whether Alzheimer's may sometimes be another version of diabetes - one that hits the brain. Some have even renamed it "type 3 diabetes".

If they are right - and a growing body of evidence suggests they might be - the implications are deeply troubling. Since calorific foods are known to impair our body's response to insulin, we may be unwittingly poisoning our brains every time we chow down on burgers and fries. People with type 2 diabetes, who have already developed insulin resistance, may be particularly at risk. "The epidemic of type 2 diabetes, if it continues on its current trajectory, is likely to be followed by an epidemic of dementia," says Ewan McNay of the University at Albany in New York. "That's going to be a huge challenge to the medical and care systems."

All of which highlights the importance of eating healthier foods and taking exercise to reduce your risk of dementia. It may even be possible to reverse - or at least decelerate - some of the cognitive decline in people who already have Alzheimer's, by targeting the underlying insulin resistance. If so, that would suggest new treatments for the disease, which has so far evaded any attempt to treat it.

There's much more at the link. The story suggests dietary supplements that, if this research is correct, can help stave off or decelerate dementia.

Extremists

Whenever someone in politics calls someone else "extreme" or "extremist" it's safe to assume that all they mean is that the person to whom they are referring disagrees with them. The word has, like the word "racist," been used so much it has lost its meaning and its punch.

The latest target to be vilified by the term is Paul Ryan, the GOP candidate for vice-president. Ryan, and others for that matter, have been labelled "extreme" because they hold the following views:

• They believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.
• They believe that the second amendment grants the right to own and carry a firearm.
• They believe that abortion kills an innocent life and should be reserved for the most dire of circumstances.
• They believe that a nation should control its borders and that people who are here illegally should not be granted the same rights as are granted to citizens.
• They believe that terrorists should be treated as threats to society and to innocent people and that taxpayers should not be required to subsidize a comfortable existence for them in prison.
• They believe that we can't continue to spend money we don't have and that if we're going to save entitlements from going bankrupt we have to fundamentally change the way we do them.

If you believe any of these things then you, too, are an "extremist" and as such your views deserve to be dismissed, disregarded, and even suppressed by those who deem you to be so odious as to hold opinions as reprehensible as these.

Ironically, those who hold the opposite views are never called extremists. For example, those who want to change two thousand years of tradition by allowing gays to marry, those who wish to ban firearms in the hands of private citizens, those who would extend "abortion" even to living infants, those who advocate open borders and unrestricted immigration, and those who believe that we can continue to borrow and spend and hang an anchor of debt around the necks of our children are never called extremists.

Yet if anything in our current political landscape is extreme those positions surely are.

The Faith of a Darwinian

Once upon a time a boy went for a walk with his uncle along a country road. As they walked along the boy happened to notice that atop a thirty foot high telephone pole a rock, which appeared to weigh at least twenty pounds, was perched.

"How did that get there?" the boy inquired of his uncle.

"Well, lad," the uncle replied, "a strong wind once blew and picked up the rock and dropped it atop that pole."

This seemed very improbable to the boy, but who was he to question his wise uncle?

They walked a little further and the boy began to notice that on the top of each fence post they passed there was a turtle. "How did those get there?" the boy asked his uncle, "Did someone put them there?"

"No, my good boy," the uncle replied. "Apparently there were long boards that leaned against the poles to form ramps which enabled the turtles to wander to the top."

This also seemed unlikely to the child and he took on a puzzled expression. "Are you sure somebody didn't put the turtles there, uncle?"

"Of course," the man replied confidently. People used to think that turtles were placed atop posts deliberately, but we've come to see that that's all superstitious nonsense that simply requires too much faith to believe. We know better today. The turtles used ramps."

"But there aren't any ramps anywhere around. What happened to them?" the child asked disingenuously.

"They obviously must have blown away," replied his sagacious uncle.

The boy was perplexed. He thought that it took an awfully strong dose of credulity to think that turtles climbed ramps to get to the tops of the fence posts.

"What's the matter?" his uncle asked perceiving his consternation.

"Well, I just have one more question," the youngster answered. "How did the ramps get there in the first place?"

The moral of the story is that when one encounters something as improbable as turtles on posts or stones atop a pole, it's safe to assume they didn't get there by accident.

Out of Touch Republicans

There's one criticism that Democrats often make of Republicans that I think is inarguably accurate. Democrats accuse Republican politicians of being out of touch, and they certainly seem to be, but the people they're most out of touch with are their own supporters.

Two recent episodes illustrate the point. The first was Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's claim that raped women don't often conceive and that even if they do they shouldn't abort the baby. Republicans from Romney on down were incensed. Rather than pointing out the obvious that - setting aside Mr. Akin's questionable biological understandings - his views on abortion are those of most of the world's Catholics and Evangelicals and are certainly more defensible and less extreme than the view of Mr. Obama that a live-born infant should be allowed to die if the mother had tried to have it aborted, they instead unanimously called for Mr. Akin to disappear.

Yet, among Missouri voters Mr. Akin is still a popular alternative to incumbent Claire McCaskill, especially among Republicans, and polls show him recovering from the initial burst of bad publicity suffered for his unwise remark about how the female body responds to emotional trauma.

A second example was the reaction of the Republican elites to Clint Eastwood's presentation at the Republican convention last Thursday night. The party mucky-mucks were aghast at what seemed to be a rambling, somewhat off-color skewering of President Obama, but the folks on the floor and watching on television apparently loved it. You can watch it here if you wish.

Mike Huckabee has a particularly hard-hitting piece on the Akin affair here, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review has some interesting reflections on Clint Eastwood's boffo performance at the convention.

I wonder if we'll not soon see a lot of the party's big-wigs start moon-walking away from their earlier disavowals and condemnation of both Akin and Eastwood. The man who should be leading the backtrack pack is, as Huckabee points out, Karl Rove who has managed to become as unpopular among conservatives as he is among liberal Democrats.

President or King?

Over the last four years it has not been uncommon to hear people ask why it is that President Obama is not more popular. After all, he's genial, witty, boasts a charming smile and a lovely family. What's not to like? The answer offers itself that those who remain unseduced by Mr. Obama's personal charisms surely must disdain him for his skin color. From here it's but a short step to the conclusion that to oppose Mr. Obama is prima facie evidence of racism.

This is, of course, ludicrous, but it's a popular meme in places like MSNBC where it has been frequently alleged that joking about the birther controversy, or Mr. Obama's penchant for golf, or citing his connections to Chicago are all code-speak for racial animosity toward the President. Don't ask how that might be because trying to explain the reasoning behind what's said on MSNBC often has the same damaging effect on one's brain cells as does alcohol.

At any rate, the obvious reason why much of the country is disenchanted with Mr. Obama is that they're very concerned about his policies. His spending has so burdened us with debt that it's probably fair to say that very few of today's young people will enjoy the same standard of living as did their parents and grandparents. His hostility toward business has perpetuated an unfavorable business climate and a high unemployment rate that have lasted longer than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But one of the deepest concerns that many Americans have about Mr. Obama is how he views the office of the presidency itself. Increasingly, he appears to be taking on the role of an autocrat rather than a president. Here's what I mean: We live in a democratic republic in which the people govern themselves through their elected representatives. The laws that are promulgated by the legislature ideally reflect the will of the people. When they don't the legislators find themselves out of work, as many of them did in 2010.

A president should respect the people's will. He's there to serve them, not to rule them. He's there to execute the laws enacted by our representatives. Thus, when Mr. Obama takes it upon himself to unilaterally decide which laws he will enforce and which he won't, when he takes it upon himself to change, by fiat, the laws as they were debated and voted upon, he's acting more like a sovereign than a president. We decided early in our history that we would not be ruled by a sovereign, but Mr. Obama doesn't seem to understand that, and this has many Americans very troubled.

In what ways has the president disregarded the will of the people? I'll mention three:

• He has issued an executive order that substantively alters the welfare reforms of the 1990s.
• He has decreed that young people in the country illegally will be granted legal immunity.
• He has essentially waived provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act that he thought too burdensome.

Understand, that the merits of each of these steps are not what is in dispute. They may be good or they may not, but in our system of government if a law should be changed it's to be changed by the people's representatives, not by a president acting as if he were a king. If an administration can simply choose not to enforce laws the president doesn't like then which law is next? And if he can pick and choose which laws to enforce, what's to stop him from deciding that his government will no longer recognize the rights granted in the 1st or 2nd amendments to the Constitution?

At the moment, of course, the president is still subject to the courts, but if he wins a second term and can add one more liberal jurist to the Supreme Court who will, like the four already there, simply rubber-stamp whatever he wants to do, then this country will have become a very different place than it was even ten years ago.

Some might say that this is all baseless paranoia. Maybe so, but perhaps it's the case that those who say that are themselves deluded and naive. In any case, why take the chance? We don't need as president someone who acts as though he sees himself as a benevolent dictator.

For Political Wonks

The liberal side of the media spectrum has been trying hard to tarnish Paul Ryan's speech at the Republican National Convention the other night by accusing the vice-presidential candidate of having lied about a number of claims he made in his acceptance speech.

Perhaps their foremost complaint was Ryan's assertion that despite candidate Obama's 2008 promise to keep a GM plant in his home town open for "a hundred years" the plant closed down the following year.

Obama's votaries among the pundits have been insisting that the plant closed before Obama came to office and therefore Ryan was distorting the facts to make Obama look bad in his speech.

Jim Geraghty at National Review sets the matter straight. It turns out that Ryan wasn't lying after all.

The liberal website ThinkProgress raised several additional objections to Ryan's speech, all of which are equally misplaced according to Avik Roy at Forbes. Among the accusations made by ThinkProgress are these:

Charge #1: Paul Ryan accused Obama of cutting Medicare by $716 billion, but Ryan’s own budget preserved those cuts.

Charge #2: Paul Ryan criticized Obama for ignoring the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. But Ryan voted against those recommendations himself.

Charge #3: Paul Ryan blamed Obama for Standard & Poor’s downgrade of American government debt from AAA to AA+, but Paul Ryan is actually to blame because he resisted tax increases that would have closed the deficit.

Charge #4: Paul Ryan opposed the stimulus, but he lobbied for stimulus grants that went to his district.

Roy makes the case that none of these allegations are nearly as incriminating as those who make them would have us believe. They're either wildly overstated, they tell only part of the story, or they're otherwise misleading.

Those wonkish types who don't mind wading through the political tall grass should go to the link and check out Roy's essay.

When a Calorie Is Not a Calorie

So you're on a diet and counting calories and wondering why you're still not losing (or gaining) weight? The reason may be that the calorie content of the food listed on the package is not really what your body is taking from that food.

Rob Dunn explains why in an illuminating essay at Scientific American. He writes that:

Fat, it has been estimated, has nine calories per gram, whereas carbohydrates and proteins have just four; fiber is sometimes counted separately and gets awarded a piddling two. Every box of every food you have ever bought is labeled based on these estimates; too bad then that they are so often wrong.

Estimates of the number of calories in different kinds of foods measure the average number of calories we could get from those foods based only on the proportions of fat, carbohydrates, protein and sometimes fiber they contain (In essence, calories ingested minus calories egested). A variety of standard systems exist, all of which derive from the original developed by Wilbur Atwater more than a hundred years ago. They are all systems of averages. No food is average.

Differences exist even within a given kind of food. Take, for example, cooked vegetables. Cell walls in some plants are tougher to break down than those in others; nature, of course, varies in everything. If the plant material we eat has more of its cell walls broken down we can get more of the calories from the goodies inside. In some plants, cooking ruptures most cell walls; in others, such as cassava, cell walls hold strong and hoard their precious calories in such a way that many of them pass through our bodies intact.

It is not just cooked vegetables though. Nuts flagrantly do their own thing, which might be expected given that nuts are really seeds whose mothers are invested in having them escape digestion. Peanuts, pistachios and almonds all seem to be less completely digested than their levels of protein, fat, carbohydrates and fiber would suggest. How much? Just this month, a new study by Janet Novotny and colleagues at the USDA found that when the “average” person eats almonds she receives just 128 calories per serving rather than the 170 calories “on the label.”

According to Dunn there are lots of other factors involved in determining how many calories we derive from a portion of food. Everything from the length of our intestines to the kind of microbes we have in our intestines to whether we're lactose intolerant to how long we cook and grind up our food all determine how many calories we harvest from it. Dunn's article is interesting, especially so for those concerned about diet and nutrition.

Does "Truth" Exist?

We find ourselves living in an age in which a lot of people have come to believe that the very notion of a truth that is true for everyone, independently of each person's personal subjective feelings, is obsolete. The belief that there is no objective truth is one of the hallmarks of what is sometimes referred to as the post-modern era.

Philosopher William Lane Craig takes a question on his website from a reader who has embraced the skeptical view that objective truth doesn't exist.

The reader puts his question this way (slightly edited for clarity):

Dr. Craig, life has become absurd to me. Conversations with several individuals in my school years have taught me that most do not think that there is such a thing as truth, rather the word is only a matter of opinion and therefore has no absolute meaning. At the end of my conversations it has been revealed to me that anything that is not a scientific fact is false, and that this thing truth is only a coping mechanism that human beings have created to make it appear that life has meaning, but in reality it has none. How do you as a Philosopher/Theologian deal with this? I am anxious for your response!

The first thing to note about this claim that there is no truth, indeed it's the first thing Craig says in his reply, is that the claim is self-refuting. If there really is no truth then the claim that there is no truth must be false.

And if the claim that there is no truth is true then, again, the claim is false because there is at least one truth, i.e. that there is no truth.

There's much more that can be said about this, and Craig subjects the denial of truth to a deeper analysis at the link. Given the skepticism about truth that exists in some quarters, his response is important.

Should We Intervene in Syria?

There are terrible atrocities occurring in Syria perpetrated by Assad regime. Should we intervene to stop them? A Lehigh University professor of international relations named Henri Barkey offers several reasons in a Washington Post essay why intervention, at least overt intervention, is a bad idea. He writes:

Calls for a U.S. military intervention in Syria have dominated the conversation in conventional and social media. Two simple and effective arguments are being advanced. The first, and most compelling, is that the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe befalling the Syrian people mandates international action. The second is based on realpolitik: Supporting the just and winning cause of the Syrian rebels will put the United States in good standing with the regime that emerges from the conflict.

Both arguments are unfortunately wrong.

Barkey goes on to point out that:

Any U.S. military engagement in Syria would have two important ramifications. First, it would cause casualties, including civilian ones. One should not underestimate how much bombing would be required just to suppress anti-aircraft installations so that the U.S. Air Force could operate in support of the rebels. Furthermore, suppression is not a one-off campaign. It has to be continuous, and the regime is likely to hide many of its air defenses in populated areas, provoking more civilian casualties.

Second, U.S. participation in another war in a Muslim country will serve only to deepen the perception that Washington is trigger-happy about dropping bombs on Muslim populations and regimes. Two years after the conclusion of any U.S. intervention in Syria, what people will remember is that women and children died under American bombardments. Unless a vital national interest of ours is involved, it is time that the United States resist the temptation to bomb another Muslim country, however noble the endeavor may appear.

Barkey elaborates on these themes in his column. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan and probably Iran (and like Libya) there's really no compelling national interest at stake in Syria. Nor is it clear that our help would win us the affection of the world's Muslims. Muslims may be the least grateful people on the planet. After liberating 25 million tyrannized Muslims in Iraq and another 25 million more in Afghanistan, after having rescued millions more from genocide in Bosnia, and after supporting the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt and helping to overthrow Qaddafi in Libya, we're still resented and despised by many of the world's Muslims.

Helping free the beleaguered Syrians from their murderous government would probably do little to change that in the long run.

Moreover, the people we'd be helping are currently being assisted by al Qaeda. We'd essentially be supplying al Qaeda with weapons and combat support in Syria while we're killing them with predator drones in Yemen, Africa, and Pakistan. That doesn't seem to make much sense.

2016 Obama's America

Yesterday I went to see Dinesh D'Souza's documentary on Barack Obama titled 2016: Obama's America. I went to the 12:45 pm showing which might partly explain why my fellow patrons were almost all retirees although I was mildly surprised to see a few adolescents sprinkled amongst the gray-beards and their ladies.

I was also mildly surprised to find the theater about half-full at that hour. When I saw The Dark Knight Rises during the same time slot there were only three or four other people in the audience.

Anyway, when Mr. Obama ran for the presidency in 2008 many people voted for him because he was charismatic and youthful. Many others voted for him because they wanted to make history, helping to elect the first black president. Still others voted for him because they desperately wanted to believe his message of hope and change. I think it's fair to say, though, that few people who voted for him really knew very much about who he was, who the strongest influences on his life were, and what his deepest convictions are.

Now, four years later, his past has been at least partly pieced together and many of those who believe that each of us is shaped by those with whom we surround ourselves, especially in our formative years, are alarmed by the very close associations Mr. Obama has had with an assortment of communists and America-haters. It's as if one were to learn that Mitt Romney's parents were Nazi sympathizers and that he surrounded himself in his teenage years and into his forties with Klansmen and white supremicists. It would certainly make one suspicious, at the very least, of his intentions for the nation.

D'Souza is at pains to be sympathetic to Mr. Obama who, in some respects, had a background similar to his own, and he does very little speculating in this movie. All the information he presents was taken from the President's own book Dreams From My Father or from public records.

According to these sources Mr. Obama's mother, father, friends and his most intimate mentors were, or are, all radical Marxist communists and despisers of America and its history. Most of them worked toward, and talked frequently of, the destruction of the American system, a denouement which they all devoutly wished for and anticipated.

Toward the end of the film the question is posed as to what Mr. Obama would do with a second term unfettered by concerns about reelection. In other words, what would the country look like in 2016 given four more years of the trajectory we're currently on? It's not a comforting picture.

The documentary is never boring, the production quality is good, and it's very informative. Did you know, for instance, that both the President's half-brother, George, as well as his step-father, Lolo Soetero, are/were what would be considered conservatives in the U.S.? In fact, Lolo's conservatism was the reason Obama's mother left him.

D'Souza claims at the outset that however you feel about Barack Obama as a man and as a president one thing is probably true - you don't know him. This documentary goes a long way to correct that lacuna in our understanding of the individual we've chosen to lead our country for the last four years. Anyone who wishes to cast an informed vote this November should see it.

Zombies

David Chalmers is one of the most prominent of the contemporary philosophers of mind and is noted for his rejection of the materialist view that all that's needed to understand what goes on when we think and experience sensation is better knowledge of how the brain works.

Chalmers holds that materialism does not, and cannot, explain the fundamental phenomena of consciousness. To explain that we need to posit the existence of something other than the matter that comprises our bodies and brains.

In this interview he explains that consciousness is not something that can be accounted for in terms of Darwinian evolution since there was no pressing need for it. We could have much more easily evolved to be like computer-driven robots or zombies - creatures able to perform all the tasks that humans perform but without having any awareness of our own selves and without experiencing sensations at all.

That consciousness somehow exists seems completely gratuitous and absolutely marvelous.

From Catholicism to Atheism and Back Again

Philosopher Edward Feser, an authority on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, discusses his journey from Catholicism to atheism and back again in an essay at his blog. It's a little long and it helps if the reader has some familiarity with several key figures in philosophy, but his story's interesting in any case.

Feser begins it this way:

As most of my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the 1990s, give or take. Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism. I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition. A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14. Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good. Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.

Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that. Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends.

But I was still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad years. Kierkegaard was my first real philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly appealed to me. But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close second. (I still confess an affection for Kaufmann. Nietzsche, not so much.)

Analytic philosophy would, before long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth. For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand, civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a grand individual like himself. For the skeptical analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments, something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before getting on to the really interesting stuff. And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school.

Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth -- something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

But it takes some reading and thinking to get to that point.

It also takes some additional reading and thinking to see the poverty of that point. I'm reminded of Bacon's dictum that "A little philosophy inclineth a man toward atheism, but depth in philosophy turneth him toward God."

Christian = Hater

Timothy Dalrymple confesses that being an evangelical Christian makes him a hater. I think he's exactly right. Here's how he begins his mea culpa:

Being an evangelical Christian, of course, I grew up with vicious hatreds implanted deep within my heart. Hatred (I refuse to use “hate” when the proper word is “hatred”) for women who obtain abortions. Hatred for gays. Hatred for criminals and illegal aliens. Hatred for people of other faiths. Hatred, basically, for anyone unlike myself and my cru.

I am a Christian, therefore I must be a hater. I eat hatred for breakfast — and yes, it takes like hate. So, at least, I’m told.

For a long time, I resisted this argument. I spent time with people who had abortions, and with friends who were openly gay, and with people whose faiths were diametrically opposed to my own — but I never felt hatred toward any of them. Love, yes. Compassion, to be sure. Concern, sometimes. But not hatred. Someone must have spiked my haterade, because I couldn’t seem to find within myself all these hatreds that, I was told, seethed and festered deep within me.

The curious thing was, I didn’t find this burning hatred in the evangelical Christians around me, either. They were good-hearted people. They took women in crisis into their homes. They worked with troubled youth and delivered food to the homeless. They started tutoring programs for children in East Palo Alto. Many (though not all) of them supported Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2 and John McCain — which, I guess, means that they hated science, rationality, the environment, and evolution.

But if they were filled with hatred for actual people groups, it must have been buried down deep. Most of these men and women in the churches I attended felt, as I do, that abortion is wrong and that marriage was ordained by God for the joining of male and female. Many of them were strongly opposed to illegal immigration. Still, try though I might, I couldn’t peel back all the layers of kindness and sincere conviction to find the trembling, bigoted, hate-filled hater underneath it all.

Now, I no longer resist the argument. I’m willing to confess. I am a Christian — a conservative evangelical Christian to boot — and there are many things I hate. I am hate-filled.

Dalrymple elaborates on his hatreds at the link. What he says offers an excellent portrait, in my opinion, of the average Christian and the tensions with which he or she lives.

The Age of the Earth

Scientists use the rate of nuclear decay in atoms to measure the ages of very old things like archeological artifacts and even the age of the earth. Using these "radiometric dating" techniques gives an age of the earth, for example, of about 4.5 billion years. The reliability of the method depends on the assumption that the rate of nuclear decay we see today is the same as it has always been throughout earth history. If the rate has changed then the method is going to give an age that's either too high or too low.

A recent study has shown that the rate of decay can be effected by tiny particles called neutrinos produced in enormous quantities by the sun, especially in solar storms. If that's so, then it's possible that the earth is not as old as radiometric dating techniques suggest.

The article is not really about radiometric dating so much as it is about using fluctuations in decay rates to predict solar storms, but if decay rates do fluctuate then we have to wonder how reliable they are in determining very old ages.

Here's the essay's lede:

Radioactive materials decay at a predictable rate — so predictable, in fact, that scientists widely use them to date artifacts and geological objects. That, at least, is the received wisdom, which Jere Jenkins and Ephraim Fischbach, from Purdue University in Indiana, think may need revising. In 2006 Dr Jenkins noticed that the decay rate of the radioactive isotope manganese-54 dipped 39 hours before a solar flare came crashing into Earth's protective magnetic field. Now it seems that the sun might affect other types of decay, too.

As the researchers report in Astroparticle Physics, the decay rate of chlorine-36 increases as Earth approaches the sun. The difference is tiny: the rate fluctuates by less than 1% between the aphelion and perihelion, the points on Earth's orbit when it is farthest and closest to the sun, respectively. But it is discernible and persistent. As-yet-unpublished data for manganese-54 suggest that isotope follows a similar pattern. If confirmed, the insight might, among other things form the basis of a system for forecasting dangerous cosmic storms.

If - and it's a big if - the techniques that've been used to determine the age of the planet turn out to be unreliable then there are some interesting implications for science and philosophy. If the earth is considerably younger than radiometric techniques indicate then Darwinian evolution could lose its most crucial support - vast stretches of time to allow extraordinarily improbable combinations of genetic changes to become probable. If earth is of relatively recent origin then unguided, purposeless processes simply don't have enough time, even under the most optimistic scenarios, to have brought forth human beings from primordial sludge.

How Obamacare Harms the Poor

Those folks who support President Obama's affordable care act because they believe it will help the poor get more and better medical care are, in the opinion of Avik Roy, in for yet another Obama-inspired disillusionment.

Obamacare is going to actually make it more difficult for the poor to get medical care. One should read Roy's entire piece to see why this is so, but the short version is that by reducing benefits to doctors in order to save costs, fewer physicians will be accepting Medicaid patients. It's the same problem, in fact, which looms over Medicare.

Here's Roy's intro:

The story of Deamonte Driver illustrates how our health-care the system leaves millions of Americans behind. Deamonte lived on wrong side of the tracks, in Prince George’s County, Md. He was raised by a single mother. He spent his childhood in and out of homeless shelters. He was an African-American kid on welfare. Deamonte died at age twelve — not, however, in a drive-by shooting, or in a drug deal gone bad. He died of a toothache.

In January 2007, Deamonte told his mother, Alyce, that he had a headache. She took him to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a severe dental abscess and given some medication. But the next day, his condition worsened. It turned out that the infection from his tooth had spread to his brain. He was taken to the hospital again and underwent emergency surgery. After a second surgery, he got better for a while, but then began to have seizures. Several weeks later, Deamonte was dead.

According to [columnist] Ezra Klein, Deamonte Driver’s story shows us why it would be immoral to repeal Obamacare. “To repeal the bill without another solution for the Deamonte Drivers of the world? And to do it while barely mentioning them? We’re a better country than that. Or so I like to think.”

But Deamonte Driver died not because he was uninsured. Indeed, Deamonte Driver died because he was insured — by the government. Deamonte, it turns out, was on Medicaid.

Although Deamonte was insured, he never received routine dental care. It turns out that only 16 percent of Maryland dentists accept Medicaid patients. Fewer than one-sixth of Maryland kids on Medicaid have ever had a cavity filled. Deamonte’s younger brother, DaShawn, had six rotted teeth, but it took dozens of calls before DaShawn could find one dentist who would see him. When the dentist concluded that DaShawn’s teeth were beyond repair, and required extraction, it took another several months to find an oral surgeon who would see him.

Obamacare does not offer better health care to the Deamonte and DaShawn Drivers of the world. Under Obamacare, if Deamonte were alive today, he would still be stuck with the dysfunctional Medicaid coverage that he was stuck with before. In fact, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Obamacare will shove 17 million more Americans into Medicaid, the developed world’s worst health-care system.

There are many problems with Obamacare. But the law’s cruelest feature is what it will do to low-income Americans who are already struggling. Study after study shows that patients on Medicaid have far worse health outcomes than those with private insurance. The largest study of this type, conducted by the University of Virginia on nearly 1 million patients, found that surgical patients on Medicaid were 97 percent more likely to die in the hospital than those with private insurance, and 13 percent more likely to die than those with no insurance at all.

These results are not surprising. Medicaid pays doctors and hospitals, on average, about half of what private insurers pay. Most often, Medicaid pays less than what the care actually costs. As a result, doctors face the choice of caring for Medicaid patients — and going bankrupt — or shutting their doors to the poor and focusing instead on those with private insurance.

Read the rest at National Review Online.

Of course, the government could demand that physicians take indigent patients, but making medical practice less lucrative would only result in fewer people going into medicine and more doctors leaving it. Nancy Pelosi said we have to pass Obamacare in order to see what's in it. Well, what's in it is trillions of dollars in costs and taxes for a system that will provide less quality and less care than the one we already have. What a deal.

How Liberals View Conservatives

Carol Brown describes how she, as a young liberal, once viewed conservatives - that is, until she became one:

Bill Whittle has nailed it. He has spoken the truth about how liberals view conservatives (skip to the 1:55 mark for this part). Liberals think that conservatives are:

• Old
• Stupid
• Evil
• Some of the above
• All of the above

Indeed.

When I was a liberal, this was exactly the way I saw conservatives.

Let's start with Evil.

I would have a knee jerk reaction to any conservative assuming - knowing - they were rich, greedy, uncaring, selfish, and arrogant. Oh, and they liked to go to war just for the hell of it. In a word: Evil. I would not listen to conservatives talk on any issue because of my rock solid belief that they were horrible human beings who cared not a whit for others.

In this way, a feedback loop was created such that when a conservative would speak, I knew they were evil and felt no desire to listen. (Why get aggravated, right?) Or, if for some reason I was compelled to listen for a few minutes, every word that came out of their mouth was tainted with the awful truth that I knew. Yes, they were evil.

Follow the link to read the rest of how liberals view conservatives, or at least how Brown did. She has a follow-up piece here.

For my part, I have to agree with "Some of the above." Conservatives do tend to be older because wisdom is a gift rarely bestowed on the young, and, given the universal opprobrium heaped on Missouri senate candidate Todd Akin by conservatives in the wake of his infelicitous remarks about female physiology, I have to say that their reaction was certainly stupid.

How the Liberal Justices May Cost Obama the Election

Naomi Emery at The Washington Examiner makes a compelling case that John Roberts' decision to uphold Obamacare may cost the Democrats the election in November. Here's her opening:

Any year now, Democrats may start to ask themselves if it might have been better had John Roberts not changed his mind. If they would be better off with Obamacare out of its and our misery, a bone of contention now safely buried, and not as a bone in their throats.

For one thing, they still have the issue upon them -- the historic triumph they don't dare mention but which Republicans happily do.

Second, were Obamacare no longer the law, we might be seeing an uptick in hiring right now. Instead, that will be deferred until after November (and then possibly only if Romney's elected), and unemployment is rising in 44 states. Unemployment rising in 44 states is not what you want when just ten or so states will decide the election and unemployment has been 8 percent or higher for 41 months.

Third, had Roberts done otherwise, they might still have the issue of Medicare, which at this point they do not. When Paul Ryan was chosen to run with Mitt Romney, liberals planned to rip him to pieces over plans to trim Medicare. Somehow, they forgot that their own health care plan did much the same thing, covering 30 million new clients by draining millions from providers of Medicare. Although these cuts will not directly lead Medicare clients to pay more or lose coverage, they will end with many doctors and hospitals refusing to treat them at all.

Read the rest at the link. Wouldn't it be supremely ironic if the decision by John Roberts to contort himself into a jurisprudential pretzel in order to uphold Obamacare - a decision in which he was joined by the four liberal justices, a decision praised by Democrats and reviled by Republicans - actually wins the election for Mitt Romney?

Pernicious Influences

After I posted the critique of Cynthia Tucker's rather silly column on Paul Ryan in which she tried to wed him to the worst aspects Ayn Rand's philosophy I came across a piece by S.E. Cupp who made a very trenchant observation about the people who influence our politicians and which influences the media care about and which they don't.

She wrote that it's important to know whose ideas have shaped the thinking of candidates for high office, but only, you must understand, if the candidates are Republicans. Queries about who has influenced Democrat candidates, particularly if the candidate is Mr. Obama, are considered not at all germane to his fitness for office.

Here's part of Cupp's piece:

But because Obama’s campaign, his two memoirs not withstanding, was so cagey about all of that information, and the liberal media was happy to leave those gaps unanswered, voters had to fill in the blanks themselves. And it turns out, it wasn’t that hard.

They found out about Obama’s father, Barack Sr., a socialist activist the President devotes a book to, “Dreams From My Father.” They found out about Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules For Radicals,” who influenced young Barack into community organizing. They found out about Frank Marshall Davis, a labor activist and communist in Hawaii that Obama wrote highly of. They also found out about Roberto Unger, Obama’s Harvard law professor who is sick and tired of American hegemony.

There are plenty of others — notably Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — people who, unlike Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand, Obama actually knew, and has himself cited in various places, before mounting a presidential run, as having influenced his political philosophy.

But conservatives were told over and over again in 2008 — scolded, really — that they were racist, small-minded, fanatical extremists if they tried to make any connections, tenuous or otherwise, between Obama and his self-proclaimed mentors and influences.

Questions about his father, his professors, his friends, his pastor…all off-limits.

Well, let's pose some questions. Who is the more pernicious influence, Ayn Rand or the motley collection of communists, far-left radicals, and America-haters who've shaped Mr. Obama's thinking over the years? Why is Ms Tucker deeply concerned about Rand's influence on Ryan but blithely indifferent to the people with whom Mr. Obama has surrounded himself? Can't we safely assume that Mr. Obama was drawn to these people because he shares their views? Can't we assume that Mr. Obama is himself just as much of a radical leftist as are the people who molded his worldview?

If we're to be worried about Rand's influence on Ryan why should we not worry about the influence of all of these Marxist-Leninists on Obama?

We might ask one more question. Have there been any strong influences on Mr. Obama at any point up until he assumed the presidency who were not socialist/communist leftists?

Just Make Stuff Up

Cynthia Tucker is a syndicated columnist who was awarded a Pulitzer in 2007 for first-rate commentary. It's probably good that she won her prize before her most recent column came out because otherwise it'd surely have disqualified her. She writes about how Paul Ryan was influenced by Ayn Rand and manages to get almost everything wrong.

Here are a couple of lowlights:

Rep. Paul Ryan, now the GOP vice presidential nominee, is an Ayn Rand acolyte, a loyal adherent to the philosophies of a woman whose views have enthralled fringe segments of the conservative movement for more than half a century. He is famous for giving her novels to staffers in his office.

He has even called her works the inspiration for his government career, according to an August profile by New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza, who quoted from a 2005 speech the congressman gave to the Atlas Society, an Ayn Rand fan club.

It's hard to imagine why Tucker thinks that it's just the fringes of the conservative movement who have found elements of Rand's message appealing. Her most popular books, Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, still sell tens of thousands of copies 50 - 60 years after their release and Atlas is often said to be the second most influential book, after the Bible, ever written.

She goes on to quote Ryan:

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism,” Ryan told the group.

That helps to explain Ryan’s ideas about the federal budget, which he would radically downsize to shrink the programs that help the elderly, the poor, the unemployed, and just about everybody else who needs the occasional helping hand. In Rand’s philosophy, the brilliant, the well-born and the lucky have no obligation to the struggling stiffs whose jobs don’t guarantee riches. Indeed, she believed altruism was foolish.

Of course Tucker shamelessly misrepresents Ryan here. So far from wanting to cut off programs that help those who need an "occasional helping hand," he's arguing that unless costs are reined in these programs will not survive. This is a fact of economic life which seems to have completely eluded Ms. Tucker. She evidently thinks that doing nothing to save entitlement programs is the noble option for the poor and doing what's necessary to save the programs is somehow selfish.

But nothing explains how the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged came to captivate so many economic gurus of the modern conservative movement, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

A paragraph or so ago it was only the "fringes" who were captivated by Rand. Now the fringe includes Alan Greenspan. Later in the column she states that "Rand has been elevated to a central figure in conservatism." Ms. Tucker apparently has difficulty remembering what she's written from one paragraph to the next.

[Rand's] “objectivism” is nothing more than rank selfishness promoted to a grand economic and cultural philosophy. (Among her works is one titled “The Virtue of Selfishness.”)

Yes, and Ryan has specifically said he finds Rand's egoistic philosophy of objectivism unpalatable. It's not her selfishness or her atheism that attracts conservative readers. It's her championing of those who produce and the perennial latch on like lampreys to the producers and job creators by government which wants to take everything they can from those who create wealth in order to sustain a bloated welfare state.

What’s more, Rand was an atheist and libertine whose private life was testament to her fierce belief that individuals should be free to do whatever they please, no matter the consequences to others. Though married, she conducted a long-running affair with one of her young disciples, in view of their spouses. She mocked Christianity, proclaiming it anathema to reason. She once told an interviewer that faith “is a sign of a psychological weakness. … I regard it as evil to place your emotions, your desire, above the evidence of what your mind knows. That’s what you’re doing with the idea of God.” She’s a strange role model for members of a political party that claims to represent religious conviction and personal probity.

This is a very odd paragraph for a liberal progressive to write. In almost every place where Tucker refers to Rand one could substitute the name Marx and the paragraph would be unchanged, and yet progressives find much in Marx to admire.

Every thinker has baggage. Liberals resonate with Marx's analysis of the economic class struggle, but if someone were to try to tie liberals to Marx's views on the family, or violent revolution, or communism, or tie them to Marx's sordid personal life, the progressive would plead that we need to separate the gold from the dross. Ryan does the same thing with Rand.

Still, Ryan’s indifference to the plight of weaker members of society shows how the modern conservative movement has tortured and refashioned traditional Christian beliefs. There is very little of the teachings of Jesus — who told a rich man to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor — in a right-wing religious nationalism that holds the poor in contempt.

This is a slander for which Tucker has no justification, but evidently she doesn't feel the need to support such ugly charges. Ryan is personally steeped in Catholic social teaching which is itself steeped in the Gospel message. Anyone who's unaware of this hasn't listened to Ryan and should not be writing columns making such irresponsible allegations. No fair-minded person can read Ryan's letter to Archbishop Timothy Dolan, for example, and still say that Ryan is "torturing" or "refashioning" traditional Christian beliefs.

Last year, liberal activist James Salt confronted Ryan with a Bible and demanded that he read the Gospel of Luke. It was a cheap political stunt, but Ryan’s reaction was telling. He rushed to a waiting vehicle but refused to accept the Bible he was offered.

This is a nice touch - mindlessly wrapping a cheap political shot in a story about a cheap political stunt. It's commentary like Tucker's that makes people so weary of the liberal media. They seem to think that if you can't argue on the facts then just make stuff up, no matter how badly it misrepresents the target.