Ben Who?

The following video was made at a recent Obama campaign rally at Ohio University. It's cause for despair. One would think that students and others who take the trouble to attend a campaign rally would be at least a little bit informed about the more prominent issues of the day, but perhaps not.

I found myself expecting one of these kids to ask the interviewer who Ben Ghazi is. One wonders what these voters think about the national debt or the state of the economy.

It all reminds me of a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "If a nation expects to remain ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be."

New Review of In the Absence of God

Byron Borger is the proprietor of what may well be the best known independent bookstore in the Middle Atlantic states. I say that not because he's a personal friend but because it's true. His establishment is named Hearts and Minds Bookstore, and it would be hard to come up with a more apt or more succinct description of his shop. I doubt that there are many bookshop owners who know the books and music they carry on their shelves as thoroughly as Byron does nor are there many, I bet, who work harder to please their customers.

Because Byron is so well-known among book lovers in the area and because he's so knowledgeable about books, I was thrilled when he wrote a review of my own book In the Absence of God for his store's website. I urge anyone thinking about purchasing Absence to read his evaluation.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from his review to whet your interest:

So, no, this isn't a quick bit of mindless entertainment, but - happily -- it is quite entertaining. There are colorful characters, true-to-life plot lines, drama, romance, sports (Cleary was a football coach, too, so the athletic scenes of locker-rooms and game films and bus-rides to away games and inter-racial comraderie and tensions on the teams are realistic and believable.) And there is violence. Did I mention this is a tensely wrought, suspenseful crime story? I don't think Dick was being intentionally commercial (he just isn't that kind of a schemer and has too much stubborn integrity to allow anything to alter his vision) but as a bookseller, I can say that, as popular novels go, this truly has something for everyone.

The plot of In the Absence of God is fairly simple to tell, but the long conversations and the numerous sub-plots are many, so I don't want to summarize it too briefly. In a nutshell, the plot revolves around several college professors and their generally friendly intellectual debates and a handful of students that are struggling to determine which basic philosophical starting points are true.

Cleary's thesis, comes up posed as a question over and over: Can we truly say anything is actually wrong/immoral if there is no God? At a garden party near the end of the book, some free thinkers take exception to what they've heard of Dr. Peterson's view, and attack him rudely for daring to believe that atheists cannot be moral. Of course, Peterson has never said this---even in a novel, that would be outrageously dumb. Peterson's position is not that atheists cannot be good, since they obviously can be, but that there is no intellectual basis for saying something is good, no coherent foundation for ethics or morals, no way to really say that something is right or wrong. That is, there cannot be, if there is no universal right or wrong that transcends personal taste or social convention, which there cannot be if there is no God.

In the Absence of God contains episodes that are quite believable for anyone who has worked in higher education: the Christian prof, a biologist that is generally liked in his department, comes to blows with his department chair. There is a debate sponsored by the political science department about U.S. foreign policy and the left-wing perspective gets much more voice in an imbalanced panel - what a show that was, and what a good conversation some of them had afterwards. There is a sub-plot about interracial dating, a sub-plot about middle-aged professors caring for their aging parents (which I found very, very moving.) And there are some exciting football games, described without too much detail, but offering enough sports coverage to qualify as a bit of a novel for sports fans.

You can order the book directly from Hearts and Minds by clicking on this link. I have to say that Absence would make a fine Christmas gift for any thoughtful reader, but especially for a young man, who might be wrestling with questions about God.

What Is Time?

The nature of time has been described as perhaps the universe's most baffling mystery. Immanuel Kant thought that time was a part of our mental structure that enabled us to experience an external world that would be incomprehensibly incoherent without that structure.

Many modern thinkers, on the other hand, think of time as an objective reality that exists statically and through which we somehow pass.

Somewhat between these two views is the theory that what we call time is a collection of states of affairs that we experience, but that time itself is an illusion.

Derek sends along a link to an article in Popular Science by astrophysicist Adam Frank who seems to adopt this latter view. Frank presents us with an excerpt from his book About Time in which he advances the interesting theory that time has no real existence and describes the thinking of physicist Julian Barbour in support of his theory:

Julian Barbour’s solution to the problem of time in physics and cosmology is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing as time.

“If you try to get your hands on time, it’s always slipping through your fingers,” says Barbour. “People are sure time is there, but they can’t get hold of it. My feeling is that they can’t get hold of it because it isn’t there at all.”

Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. Einstein changed this picture by unifying space and time into a single 4-Dimensional entity. But even Einstein failed to challenge the concept of time as a measure of change. In Barbour’s view, the question must be turned on its head. It is change that provides the illusion of time. Channeling the ghost of Parmenides, Barbour sees each individual moment as a whole, complete and existing in its own right. He calls these moments “Nows.”

“As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows,” says Barbour, “and the question is, what are they?” For Barbour each Now is an arrangement of everything in the universe. “We have the strong impression that things have definite positions relative to each other. I aim to abstract away everything we cannot see (directly or indirectly) and simply keep this idea of many different things coexisting at once. There are simply the Nows, nothing more, nothing less.”

Barbour’s Nows can be imagined as pages of a novel ripped from the book’s spine and tossed randomly onto the floor. Each page is a separate entity existing without time, existing outside of time. Arranging the pages in some special order and moving through them in a step-by-step fashion makes a story unfold. Still, no matter how we arrange the sheets, each page is complete and independent.

As Barbour says, “The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands.” The physics of reality for Barbour is the physics of these Nows taken together as a whole. There is no past moment that flows into a future moment. Instead all the different possible configurations of the universe, every possible location of every atom throughout all of creation, exist simultaneously. Barbour’s Nows all exist at once in a vast Platonic realm that stands completely and absolutely without time.

“What really intrigues me,” says Barbour, “is that the totality of all possible Nows has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now and I call the country Platonia, because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical rules.” The question of “before” the Big Bang never arises for Barbour because his cosmology has no time. All that exists is a landscape of configurations, the landscape of Nows.

“Platonia is the true arena of the universe,” he says, “and its structure has a deep influence on whatever physics, classical or quantum, is played out in it.” For Barbour, the Big Bang is not an explosion in the distant past. It’s just a special place in Platonia, his terrain of independent Nows.

There's more on this at the link. Take the time to read it, or perhaps I should say, enter the Now of reading the article.

No Warming in Sixteen Years

A report released quietly to the internet with no real publicity attached to it bears some surprising and controversial news. It seems that since 1997 global temperatures have not risen at all. Despite all the talk of global warming and the Greenhouse Effect, despite the fears provoked by Al Gore's books and movies, there has been no planetary warming in almost 16 years.

The following chart illustrates the data:

Indeed, since 1887 the mean global temperature has risen only .75 degrees Celsius. hardly enough to produce significant changes in ice cover or biogeography. These changes do appear to be happening, however, but perhaps we should be looking elsewhere than rising temperatures, man-caused or otherwise, for the cause.

Near Death Experience

Perhaps you've heard the story of neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who was in a coma for a week due to an attack of meningitis. Widely published, Dr. Alexander teaches at the University of Virginia Medical School and has been on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. The story of his Near Death Experience appeared in Newsweek magazine recently and it's a fascinating account, fraught with difficulties both for materialists and also, perhaps, for some religious believers.

Here's an excerpt of what he writes:

It took me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but -- more importantly -- the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky...

Higher than the clouds -- immeasurably higher -- flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them. Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher forms.

A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise -- that if the joy didn't come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn't get you wet...

It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us -- vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again...

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real -- was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial. The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I'd say they ran something like this:

"You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever."
"You have nothing to fear."
"There is nothing you can do wrong."

What happened to me demands explanation.

What to make of this? First, some materialists, i.e. those who believe that physical matter is all there is, are scoffing at the report, claiming that Dr. Alexander simply dreamt the tale, but if he was in a genuine coma then he didn't dream it. Dreams are impossible in a coma.

Second, if he's accurately recounting what happened to him then materialism is clearly false.

But there's a problem here for some religious people as well. Alexander says in the article that:

Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.

Many Christians believe that a nominal believer like Alexander does not go to heaven when he dies, but, again, if Alexander is correct then it would appear that that may not be the case.

He closes with this:

Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.

But I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

I admit that when I've read stories of NDEs in the past I was skeptical of their reliability, but when a man who's only a nominal believer, a neurosurgeon who works with brains everyday and has no religious axe to grind, relates such a narrative, it has a lot more credibility, at least for me.

Modern Exodus

Once upon a time much of the Middle East and the entire northern tier of African countries was Christian. Then came the repeated and brutal Muslim invasions of the 7th through the 14th centuries and Christians were slaughtered, dispersed, or converted to Islam. Today it's hard to find Christian communities anywhere in North Africa. One place they have existed for two thousand years is Egypt, but the Arab "Spring" is putting an end to that presence as well. Islam is the least tolerant religion in the world, even less tolerant than atheistic communism, and it brooks no competition.

Samuel Tadros of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom writes a poignant article in the Wall Street Journal in which he describes the plight of Egypt's Coptic Christians. Here's part of his column:

Visit any Coptic church in the United States and you immediately recognize the newcomers. You see it in their eyes, hear it in their broken English, sense it in how they cling to the church in search of the familiar. They have come here escaping a place they used to call home, where their ancestors had lived for centuries.

Waves of Copts have come here from Egypt before, to escape Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalizations or the growing Islamist tide. Their country's transformation wasn't sudden, but every year brought more public Islamization. As the veil spread, Coptic women felt increasingly different, alien and marked. Verbal abuse came from schoolteachers, bystanders in the bus station who noticed the cross on a wrist, or commentators on state television.

But life was generally bearable. Hosni Mubarak crushed the Islamist insurgency of the 1980s and '90s. He was no friend to the Copts, but neither was he foe. His police often turned a blind eye when Coptic homes and shops were attacked by mobs, and the courts never punished the perpetrators—but the president wasn't an Islamist. He even interfered sometimes to give permission to build a church, or to make Christmas a national holiday.

To be sure, Copts were excluded from high government positions. There were no Coptic governors, intelligence officers, deans of schools, or CEOs of government companies. Until 2005, Copts needed presidential approval to build a new church or even build a bathroom in an existing one. Even with approval, state security often blocked construction, citing security concerns.

Those concerns were often real. Mobs could mobilize against Copts with the slightest incitement—rumor of a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman, a church being built, reports of a Christian having insulted Islam. The details varied but the results didn't: homes burned, shops destroyed, Christians leaving villages, sometimes dead bodies. The police would arrive late and force a reconciliation session between perpetrators and victims during which everything would be forgiven and no one punished. What pained the Copts most was that the attackers were neighbors, co-workers and childhood friends.

Then came last year's revolution. Copts were never enthusiastic about it, perhaps because centuries of persecution taught that the persecuting dictator was preferable to the mob. He could be bought off, persuaded to hold back or pressured by outside forces. With the mob you stood no chance. Some younger Copts were lured by the promise of a liberal Egypt, but the older generation knew better.

Read the rest at the link. Like those younger Copts Tadros mentions, our own political leadership was seduced by the promise of a liberal Egypt, but a lot of other Americans knew better. They knew that the young Egyptians dying in Tahrir Square were simply pawns being used by the Islamists. They knew that when their usefulness was exhausted they would simply be shoved aside and that the radicals would establish themselves in the seat of power. It wasn't hard to predict because it's always been this way, particularly in the Arab world.

What lies in store for Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and everywhere else where Muslim Arabs dominate is less freedom, more oppression, and greater religious rigidity. At best this process has been slowed by the influence of Western nations like the U.S. At worst, though, the West acquiesces in, or even facilitates - as it did in Egypt - the deepening Islamization of these countries and the tyrannical oppression of their people, particularly religious and ethnic minorities.

No Win Situation

A report out of Florida illustrates one difficult situation that educators in districts across the country find themselves in. Here are the highlights:

The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.

The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.

“To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base,” Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.

“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.”

Others in the community agreed with Lopez’s assessment. But the Florida Department of Education said the goals recognize that not every group is starting from the same point and are meant to be ambitious but realistic.

As an example, the percentage of white students scoring at or above grade level (as measured by whether they scored a 3 or higher on the reading FCAT) was 69 percent in 2011-2012, according to the state. For black students, it was 38 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 53 percent.

Palm Beach County School Board vice-chairwoman Debra Robinson isn’t buying the rationale.

“I’m somewhere between complete and utter disgust and anger and disappointment with humanity,” Robinson told the Post. She said she has been receiving complaints from upset black and Hispanic parents since the state board took its action this week.

Robinson called the state board’s actions essentially “proclaiming racism” and said she wants Palm Beach County to continue to educate every child with the same expectations, regardless of race.

The Florida Board of Education is between a rock and a hard place. They can hold all students to the same uniform standards of educational achievement and thereby set a large share of minority students up for almost certain failure as they find themselves generally unable to compete academically with members of other groups. Or they can recognize that not all groups, as groups, have the same academic potential, establish accomodations for that fact, and be branded racists for their trouble.

Either course will lead to stratified schools and an equally stratified society for years to come as academically accomplished whites and Asians continue to rise to the top and academically challenged minorities sink toward the bottom.

Although I sympathize with those who wish to help minority kids succeed by facing up to the realities of racial disparities, I think such policies will only lead us back to some form of segregation. Better to hold all kids to the same expectations so that those who can meet those challenges will have the same opportunities to succeed in their life's work as members of other groups. Academic race-norming will only stigmatize the achievements of those who are genuinely capable and reinforce the reluctance of employers to hire minorities for jobs that they'll be afraid the applicant hasn't been prepared to handle.

Stratification may be an insoluble problem but at least we should keep the standards high for those who have the wherewithal to transcend it.

Class Clown

The first video below counts the number of times in last Wednesday's debate that Vice-President Biden interrupted Paul Ryan as Ryan tried to speak. The second video shows Mr. Biden appearing to be auditioning for the role of the Joker in the next Batman movie.

So far from being mortified by their candidate's embarrassing behavior the Democrats have launched a devastating video of their own. In their vid they count the number of times Congressman Ryan ... takes a drink of water. That should win them a couple of votes.

Actually, the utter triviality of the Democrats' video is of a piece with their response to the spanking Mr. Obama took from Mitt Romney in their earlier debate. The country is in dire fiscal peril. Diplomats are being murdered in Libya and Yemen. The biggest terrorist state in the world, Iran, is on the threshold of having a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Obama seeks to persuade people not to vote for Romney on the grounds that he'll kill Big Bird.

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Imagine that it was Paul Ryan who acted like Joe Biden did last Wednesday and that Biden acted as calmly and professionally as did Ryan. What would the media be saying about the comparative suitability of the two men to be first in the line of succession to the presidency?

Ryan would've almost certainly been declared non compos mentis by the pundits before the hall even cleared and the election would've been pronounced over. America would never, and should never, we would be told every minute of every day from now until November 6th, elect such a buffoon to serve in such high office. Instead, since it was Biden who played the clown, the left is actually reveling in his gaucheries, and the mainstream liberal media is pretty much pretending they didn't notice.

The polls, however, are showing that the American people did notice.

Belief, Disbelief, and Will

One of the claims I make in my book In the Absence of God (see link above right) is that belief and disbelief are for most people, believers and unbelievers alike, matters of the will and not matters of evidence or reason.

It's common to hear "New Atheists," for example, accuse Christians of Freudian wish fulfillment, of believing what they fervently want to be true. Perhaps they're right. I certainly think it's true of many Christians that they believe the Gospel because the Christian story is so compellingly beautiful and they just want that story to be true, but it's also true of most atheists.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel says in his book The Last Word that he is curious

"whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God - anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn't particularly want either one of the answers to be correct ..."

He himself openly admits in the book that his disbelief is not a matter of reasoned thinking about the matter:

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

I think that were most atheists as honest with themselves as is Nagel they'd say the same thing. Nobel Prize-winning biologist George Wald presents us with another example of what we might call atheistic wish-fulfillment. Back in 1954 he wrote:

There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility....I will not accept [a supernatural creative act of God] philosophically because I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to Evolution.

I confess that though I certainly think that many atheists disbelieve simply because they don't want there to be a God, I have difficulty understanding this desire. Why would someone not want the universe to be the sort of place where there's a ground for moral duties, where life has genuine meaning, where one has good reason to hope that death is not final and that this life is not all there is, where there's good reason to think that ultimately justice will prevail, where human beings have genuine dignity and worth, and where the Platonic ideals of the Good, the Beautiful and the True are actually instantiated in a Being who deeply loves us?

I don't understand why anyone would want the world to be the sort of place where none of these are possible and indeed where life is meaningless, moral obligation is non-existent, where there's no hope of anything transcendent, where human beings are nothing more than transient collocations of atoms, where life is nothing more than a cruel joke and nihilism and despair are perfectly rational responses to the human predicament.

Those are the two worlds each of us must choose between. To want God to exist is to opt for the first, to want him to not exist is to prefer the second.

Shameful Behavior

It's entirely understandable if viewers who tuned into last night's vice-presidential debate promptly switched to the baseball or football games. Watching the debate was a disappointingly unedifying experience. Although not entirely. If, for example, we want the man who stands only a heartbeat away from the presidency to be a rude, ill-mannered, boorish buffoon then we certainly learned last evening that Joe Biden is our man.

Taking a page from the debate tactics of Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity - never let your opponent complete a sentence, talk over him so he can't be heard, and mock him at every turn - Mr. Biden was successful beyond the hopes of even the most partisan Democrat at preventing the viewer from actually learning much of anything about how Republicans would address the grave problems facing the country.

If one were to read the transcript of the debate one might come to the conclusion that both men did reasonably well, but watching it on split-screen television, Mr. Biden's arguments, whatever their merits, were rendered moot by his obnoxious discourtesies directed at his opponent. Focussing on what Ryan was saying was extremely difficult with Biden guffawing on camera at almost every argument and claim Ryan made.

It's really too bad. The American people want to cast an informed vote, but the Democratic candidate made sure that few people who tuned in to last night's "debate" would be more informed when it ended than they were when it started.

Obamanomics

Ed Morrisey at Hot Air claims that the economic policies of the current administration have been a complete and miserable failure, a claim that receives considerable support from this video:

Another Administration Scandal

ABC reports the story of what happened in Benghazi the night that our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered. There are two very troubling aspects of this story that reflect poorly on the Obama administration and on Mr. Obama himself.

The first is that for two weeks after this attack the administration, including Mr. Obama, made a concerted effort to conceal the actual nature of the attack, misleading the American public into thinking that it was a spontaneous raid by an enraged mob which was protesting an anti-Muslim video.

Why the administration repeatedly tried to establish this narrative is unclear, but perhaps they realized that if the attack were seen as a terrorist assault it would show Mr. Obama's foreign policy of rapprochement with Muslims abroad to be pretty much a futile, failed effort. Whatever the case, the administration knew within 24 hours what had happened and that it wasn't the work of an offended mob. It was a planned terrorist atrocity. The administration knew this and continued nevertheless to mislead the American people about it.

The second scandalous aspect of this awful episode is that the ambassador and others in Libya had several times requested more security for themselves and other diplomatic personnel. They had intelligence that their lives were in serious danger but each request for more protection was refused by a State Department official named Charlene Lamb who testified to Congress that she thought the ambassador had sufficient security.

This whole tragic debacle has about it the odor of incompetence, poor judgment, and cynical political calculation for which both the President and his Secretary of State should be held accountable.

More Praise for In the Absence of God

My brother Bill just finished reading In the Absence of God and writes this:

Congratulations on a great story. I realized I was in for a Clancy-esque experience when the narrative in the first chapter describing Jesse chasing the ball carrier was suspended and another thread introducing Weyland and Peterson was developed. That technique contributes to the page-turning quality of the story.

Before the book arrived I suspected I would see some familiar ideas similar to what you post on Viewpoint. It was nice to find them in a single, consolidated presentation.

In The Absence Of God will make for a meaningful gift idea for family and friends. Thanks for taking the time to write Absence, we're all better off for it!

I agree (with humility, of course) that the book would make a fine Christmas gift, especially for intelligent young adults (especially young men) who might be wrestling with questions about God and who are willing to spend some time thinking about those questions.

If you'd like to read more, Bill has added a feature to Viewpoint that links to more information on what the book's about and where you can purchase a copy. Just click on In the Absence of God in the upper right side of this page.

What Is Reality?

New Scientist has a short article (available for another day without subscription) by British philosopher Jan Westerhoff on the nature of reality. The article is accompanied by this video:

Westerhoff opens his essay with this:

What do we actually mean by reality? A straightforward answer is that it means everything that appears to our five senses - everything that we can see, smell, touch and so forth. Yet this answer ignores such problematic entities as electrons, the recession and the number 5, which we cannot sense but which are very real. It also ignores phantom limbs and illusory smells. Both can appear vividly real, but we would like to say that these are not part of reality.

Later in the piece Westerhoff adds:

There are two definitions of reality that are much more successful. The first equates reality with a world without us, a world untouched by human desires and intentions. By this definition, a lot of things we usually regard as real - languages, wars, the financial crisis - are nothing of the sort. Still, it is the most solid one so far because it removes human subjectivity from the picture.

The second equates reality with the most fundamental things that everything else depends on. In the material world, molecules depend on their constituent atoms, atoms on electrons and a nucleus, which in turn depends on protons and neutrons, and so on. In this hierarchy, every level depends on the one below it, so we might define reality as made up of whatever entities stand at the bottom of the chain of dependence, and thus depend on nothing else.

Well, this is interesting. In the paragraph op cit. Westerhoff suggests that human subjectivity shouldn't be part of our picture of reality, but what if what stands at the "bottom of the chain of dependence" is mind rather than anything material? What if, as physicist Sir James Jeans once observed, the universe is more like a grand idea than a grand machine? What if mind is the fundamental reality and matter is just an illusion we experience because we're the size and sort of beings we are?

I'm not saying that matter is just an illusion, but when we reduce matter down to the "entities that stand at the bottom of the chain of dependence" we find that they themselves are immaterial. They're simply energy (whatever that is). If atoms, the basis of all material stuff, are reducible to just energy then in what sense are atoms real, and, a forteriori, in what sense is matter real?

There are stirrings in both physics and philosophy that suggest that at least some of the practitioners in each of these fields are growing increasingly disenchanted with the 19th century view that reality is fundamentally material. Indeed, I suspect that the only reason that more of them are not abandoning materialism altogether is that the view that the world is at bottom a product of mind has too many disconcerting theological implications.

Tough Ad

If a picture is worth a thousand words how much are 30 seconds of picture worth?

Did You Know?

Here are a few facts about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) gleaned from a Wall Street Journal article written by Heather Higgins and Hadley Heath:

• Americans know that ObamaCare requires insurance companies to allow families to keep adult children up to age 26 on their parents' policy. They are less likely to know that the provision increased the average family premium—even for families that didn't add adult dependents—by $150-$450 in 2011.
• The average family's health-insurance premiums are already up $1,300.
• Young workers who buy their own insurance will see a 19%-30% increase in premiums as a result of ObamaCare.
• Remember the 700,000 people whom the Congressional Budget Office predicted would make use of ObamaCare's federal high-risk program? Just 78,000 people have enrolled. As a result, each person in the program costs taxpayers millions of allocated dollars. Americans, when they hear this, know instinctively that there must be a better way to address the problem.
• ObamaCare was sold as the solution to covering the 47 million uninsured in America, but 10 years after the law is implemented, 30 million Americans will still be uninsured. What problem, exactly, is ObamaCare solving again?
• Americans are also generally familiar with Medicaid's problems, among them the refusal by many doctors to accept Medicaid patients. What most people don't know is that approximately 10 million of those who gain insurance under ObamaCare will just be dumped into the already cash-strapped Medicaid system.

There's a lot more information on the Health Reform law at this site. You read this stuff and you can understand why the GOP wants to rescind much of it. It looks like there was no more preparation put into it than was put into Mr. Obama's debate appearance Wednesday night.

Child Abuse

Good teachers across the country are deeply concerned that their standing in the public's esteem has been declining for several decades. This is unfortunate because there are so many outstanding people working with our kids in their schools, but what the public often sees are the ones who have no business being in the classroom. Like this woman at Philadelphia's Charles Carroll High School who apparently missed the in-service program on teaching tolerance and respect for young people:

A Philadelphia high school that normally requires students to wear uniforms initiated a casual dress day on Wednesday. But for one student at Charles Carroll High School, the opportunity to dress down was accompanied by a public dressing down, station KSDK reports.

Samantha Pawlucy, a sophomore, came to school clad in a Romney-Ryan T-shirt. The day passed without incident until she arrived at her geometry class. Her teacher, who is black, became so exercised at the sight of the shirt that she ordered the 16-year-old out of her classroom. When Samantha refused to leave, the teacher told her to remove the shirt, demanding to know whether her parents were (cover your ears) “R*p*blican.” She explained that Carroll High is a “Democratic school” and that wearing a Republican shirt is in her view akin to wearing a KKK shirt.

Still not satisfied that this important lesson had taken, the teacher marched Samantha out into the hallway, where she urged other teachers and students to mock her for her impertinence.

“I was really embarrassed and shocked,” the teen is quoted as saying. “I didn’t think she’d go in the hallway and scream to everyone.”

Samantha told reporters that she had decided to wear the shirt after researching the two major party candidates for president and concluding that she liked Romney’s message better. Her father, Richard Pawlucy, said she was especially interested in Romney’s opposition to partial-birth abortion.

When teachers lament that their communities are losing respect for them, when they complain that they're not being treated like professionals, maybe they should ask themselves why their unions protect numbskulls who think that a publicly funded school is a "Democratic" school, who seek to impose their beliefs by bullying and humiliating their students, and who extol diversity in race, gender and sexual orientation, but not in political opinions.

Unless there's a lot more to this story than what's at the link, this woman should be fired. Whatever she is she's not a teacher.

The article reminds us that neither is this woman an isolated example. There was, for instance, the teacher in North Carolina last spring who demanded that her students stop speaking ill of Mr. Obama and threatened them with arrest if they didn't.

Schools used to have standards that prospective teachers had to meet before they were placed in a classroom. Apparently, nowadays they let almost anyone do the job. With so many young, qualified people with IQs well above normal looking in vain for teaching positions, why do we inflict people like these on our kids? It's a form of child abuse.

Why Is Anyone Surprised?

I was mildly amused by the reaction of liberal pundits to the carnage Mitt Romney inflicted during Wednesday night's presidential debate. The left has been almost uniformly shocked at the president's poor showing and uniformly astonished at Mitt Romney's impressario performance.

I think both reactions show how out of touch the left is with reality and how much they've been gulled by their own mythologizing.

Ever since Barack Obama first strode onto the national stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, liberals have apotheosized the man, creating a myth and an aura that was out of all proportion to his actual accomplishments and record. Adducing no evidence to support their claims, Mr. Obama's media acolytes nevertheless insisted that he was the most brilliant human being ever to campaign for high office. He was an eloquent policy expert who mastered the minutiae of every issue, and who would bring peace, tranquility and renewed respect for the U.S. to a troubled land. His administration would banish lobbyists and achieve historic levels of transparency, racial comity, and bipartisanship. Nor would any taint of corruption ever attach to the administration led by the man who was sending tingles up the legs of television pundits and inducing fainting spells among young women at his rallies.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, was a stiff, wooden, doofus or, alternatively, a cunningly malevolent Darth Vadar. A rich white guy who was not only a felon, a tax cheat, a murderer of men's wives, but, perhaps worse, inarticulate and geeky.

The prospect of these two meeting on stage in mortal combat caused liberal hearts to pound and mouths to water. They couldn't wait to see their god-like gladiator fell the evil, insipid, goofball Romney with a mere word from his divine lips. Their anticipation of the impending rout and their scorn for Mr. Obama's adversary approximated, perhaps, how the Philistines must have felt when the Israelites sent out an unarmed David to face their great Goliath. And likewise was their utter mortification at the result. The debacle was completely unanticipated because the left had come to believe their own caricatures of both men. They created an image of both Obama and Romney that the former could never live up to and which completely misrepresented the latter.

Now they're bitter, and, as Matthew Continetti writes in a scintillating column at Free Beacon, they're turning on their own like a bunch of cannibals. Yet the liberal punditocracy is as much to blame as is their humiliated champion. Nothing in Mr. Obama's past could have given anyone who wasn't blinded by his superficial charm the idea that he was really anything more than a very lucky community organizer who rose to the highest office in the land in much the same fashion that Chauncy Gardner rose to prominence in the movie Being There.

Mr. Obama's votaries are now reaching for even the most risible excuses. Al Gore blamed it on Denver's altitude. Bob Woodward suspects Obama had something weighing heavily upon his mind. But the fact is that Mr. Obama was forced into the unfortunate position of having to defend an indefensible record without the benefit of a prepared speech or a complaisant media to run interference for him. He had to rely solely on his true abilities and so did Mr. Romney. The results and the contrast were pretty stark.

Get to the Bottom of Benghazi

The editors of National Review are calling on the president to deliver on his promise in 2008 to run a transparent administration and come clean on the murders of our diplomats in Benghazi. Here's an excerpt:

Less than a week later, four Americans were dead in Libya and al-Qaeda flags flew over our diplomatic missions in Benghazi and Cairo on the anniversary of 9/11. The juxtaposition of the campaign brag with the video of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens’s body being dragged through the streets was politically unfortunate for the president — especially given his earlier boast that anti-Americanism would wane under his administration.

This perhaps explains, though can never justify, what is now clear about the administration’s persistent denial that the attack was preplanned. Namely, that the White House either was deliberately less than truthful, was cataclysmically incompetent, or both.

From a handful of investigative reports and a few intrepid whistleblowers who came forward to Representative Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee, we now know that before Benghazi — before Charlotte — the U.S. intelligence community was well aware that al-Qaeda was in an “expansion phase” in Libya.

Indeed, anti-Western attacks, including RPG and IED attacks on the Benghazi consulate, had been ramping up since as early as April, and by June Libyan militants were openly discussing targeting Ambassador Stevens on social networks. We also know that despite all this, repeated requests for additional security from U.S. mission staff in Libya were denied.

Within 24 hours of the Benghazi attack that killed Stevens and three others, U.S. intelligence had “very good information” that the strike was preplanned and perpetrated by al-Qaeda-connected militants. And yet on September 13, Jay Carney was saying they were “not directly in reaction to . . . the government of the United States or the people of the United States.” And as late as September 16, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was flooding the Sunday chat shows with the same message: “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

It wasn’t until more than a week later that administration officials admitted Benghazi was a terrorist hit, and it wasn’t until nearly two weeks later that the president yielded as much. This long after the intelligence community — not to mention the Libyan government, Senator John McCain, House Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Mike Rogers, a number of reporters and pundits, and anyone with a handful of functioning neurons and an Internet connection — had reached the same conclusion.

In the interim, the yawning gap between the administration’s official line and the dictates of common sense raised the critical question: Was the White House wishfully guessing because it actually didn’t know or care about the conditions on the ground in a state in which it had intervened with precision-guided munitions to create, or was it telling tales as part of a shortsighted political calculation to keep the first assassination of a U.S. ambassador in 30 years from becoming a campaign issue down the home stretch?

If it’s the former, it suggests a startling and dangerous disconnect between the administration’s diplomatic, intelligence, and political chains of command in a region critical to the national security of the United States. If it’s the latter, it reveals something just as dangerous: an administration willing to suppress the truth about the murder of Americans to protect its short-term political interests.

What's unconscionable in the reports about this terrible incident is that the ambassador had for some weeks feared for his life, requested that the State Department give him more protection, and was ignored or refused. How can the paper-pushers at the State Department live with themselves knowing that when this man was in jeopardy they did nothing to help him? How can they keep their jobs?

Read the rest of NR's editorial at the link. The whole thing has about it the odor of a cover-up, a tactic which this most "transparent" of administrations is getting a lot of practice at lately.

What Is Knowledge?

Philosopher Paul Pardi gives an easy-to-understand overview of some of the problems of epistemology in an essay at Philosophy News. He begins with this:

Studying knowledge is something philosophers have been doing for as long as philosophy has been around. It’s one of those perennial topics—like the nature of matter in the hard sciences--that philosophy has been refining since before the time of Plato.

The discipline is known as epistemology which comes from two Greek words episteme which means knowledge and logos which means a word or reason. Epistemology literally means to reason about knowledge. Epistemologists study what makes up knowledge, what kinds of things can we know, what are the limits to what we can know, and even if it’s possible to actually know anything at all.

At first this might seem like one of those topics that gives philosophy a bad name. After all, it seems kind of silly to ask whether we can know anything since is obvious we do. It's even more silly when you consider that to even ask the question, you must assume you know something! So why have some of the greatest minds the world has ever produced spent such a great deal of time on the subject?

In order to answer that question, you probably have to have some idea what the term “know” means. If I asked, “Have you seen the flibbertijibbet at the fair today?” I’d guess you wouldn’t know how to answer. You’d probably ask me what a flibbertijibbet is. But most adults tend not to ask what knowledge is before they can evaluate whether they have it or not. We just claim to know stuff and most of us, I suspect, are pretty comfortable with that. There are lots of reasons for this but the most likely is that we have picked up a definition over time and have a general sense of what the term means. Many of us would probably say knowledge that something is true involves:

• Certainty – it's hard if not impossible to deny
• Evidence – it has to based on something
• Practicality – it has to actually work in the real world
• Broad agreement – lots of people have to agree it's true

But if you think about it, each of these has problems. For example, what would you claim to know that you would also say you are certain of? Let’s suppose you’re not intoxicated, high, or in some other way in your “right” mind and conclude that you know there is a computer in front of you. You might go further and claim that denying it would be crazy, but isn’t it at least possible that you’re dreaming or that you’re in something like the Matrix and everything you see is an illusion?

Before you say such a thing is absurd and only those who were unable to make the varsity football team would even consider such questions, can you be sure you’re not being tricked? After all, if you are in the Matrix, the robots that created the Matrix would be making you believe you are not in the Matrix and that you’re certain you aren’t.

Pardi has many more interesting things to say about the questions addressed by epistemologists in his article at the link. Check it out.

Extreme Deep Field

The pic below was featured at the Hubble Space Telescope website. Here's what the Hubble folks said about it:

Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon.

The XDF contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

Each of these galaxies contains billions of stars. If we could see them more closely many of them would look like this:

Photos like the Extreme Deep Field pic sometimes raise theological questions. For example, if God created the universe why was he so extravagant? Why so many galaxies? Why is the universe so big? Why is it so old?

No one knows the answers for sure, of course, but I think we can take a pretty good guess.

If God created the universe in order for us to inhabit it, and if he chose to bring it into being the way cosmologists believe it came into being - in a huge explosion ex nihilo(the Big Bang) - then it has to be as old as it is and as big as it is for us to be here. Here's why:

Following the initial explosion the universe would have been nothing but energy. As it cooled the energy formed hydrogen which gradually coalesced into stars which produced heavier elements in their cores in the process of nuclear fusion. Eventually these stars exploded and spewed these heavy elements into space. These elements were later captured around stars like the sun and coagulated into spheres (planets).

This whole process by which the universe got to the point where the elements necessary for life could form and where life could be supported took billions of years all during which the universe was rapidly expanding. Thus, given that God may have chosen to create the universe in this way, the universe has to be as old as it is and therefore as big as it is.

It could well be the case that all of it, in its incomprehensible immensity, exists simply so that we can. If so, then the universe really would be anthropocentric. We really would be the point, or center, of the whole thing.

Slaughtering Teens with America's Help

Imagine the outrage were it learned that a Republican president's policies both violated the law and facilitated the massacre of fourteen teenagers at the hands of murderous thugs. That's just one outcome of the Obama administration's gun-walking operation dubbed Fast and Furious. The Department of Justice made it possible for Mexican drug cartels to purchase almost two thousand weapons in the U.S. and transport them across the border where they were used in the murders of thousands of Mexicans.

The Spanish language station Univision has the story that American networks have been reluctant to air, although perhaps that's changing. This story was co-produced with ABC:

On January 30, 2010, a commando (cohort) of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez.

Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News. It identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre.

The killers thought their victims were members of a rival cartel, but they weren't as their leader admits on the video of the Univision documentary. The video goes into a lot of detail on the devastation Fast and Furious has caused in Mexico and is 45 minutes long. The massacre described above, however, is covered in the first ten minutes.

That our government would conduct such an operation is reprehensible. It's only slightly less reprehensible that our national liberal media seems almost entirely disinterested in holding the people responsible for it accountable for the innocent blood that's on their hands.

Human Origins and OOL

A recent Gallup survey found that almost 80% of Americans believe that God was involved somehow in the origin of human beings:

Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God's guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

Be that as it may, we have frequently noted on Viewpoint that most people who reject God as an explanation for the origin of things do so not on the basis of evidence but because there's no room for God in their materialistic, naturalistic worldview. In other words, they reject the God hypothesis because they simply don't want it to be true. This comes across pretty clearly in a post by Rabbi Moshe Averick at Algemeiner.com

Averick has collected almost two dozen quotes from prominent scientists remarking on the mystery of the origin of life (OOL), how it seems to be nothing short of miraculous, and how there's really no plausible naturalistic explanation for how it could have happened. Even so, these scientists are committed to finding a naturalistic explanation, not because science can only admit of such explanations, but because, at least for some of them, they simply don't want to think that there's a God. Here are a few of the quotes Averick lists:

• I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago. Dr. Ernst Chain, Nobel Prize Medicine, 1945.
• There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility.... I will not accept that [a supernatural creative act of God] philosophically because I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to Evolution. Dr. George Wald, Nobel Laureate 1954.
• The first assumption was that non-living things gave rise to living material. This is still just an assumption...There is, however, little evidence in favor of abiogenesis (the origin of life from non-living matter) and as yet we have no indication that it can be performed...it is therefore a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that abiogenesis did occur and he can choose whatever method…happens to suit him personally; the evidence for what did happen is not available. Dr. Gerald Kerkut, Profesor Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of Southampton, 1960.
• All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did. Dr. Harold C. Urey, Nobel Prize Chemistry, 1962.
• Indeed, such a theory (intelligent design) is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific....From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brain-washed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it; it is just not possible that life could have originated from a chemical accident. Sir Fred Hoyle, 1984.
• We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. Dr. Richard Lewontin, Geneticist, 1997.
• I should like to say that the scientific attempt to explain the origin of life proceeds from the assumption that whatever it was that happened was a natural process: no miracles, no supernatural intervention. It was by ordinary atoms doing extraordinary things that life was brought into existence. Scientists have to start with that assumption. Dr. Paul Davies, Physicist, 2002.
• Dennis Overbye just wrote a status report for the New York Times on research into life’s origin, based on a conference on the topic at Arizona State University. Geologists, chemists, astronomers, and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life. John Horgan, Senior Writer Scientific American, 2011.
• Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life...these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle. Dr. Eugene Koonin, Molecular Biologist, 2011.

Almost like a miracle indeed.

Whatever Works

There is a view among ethicists known as Pragmatism which holds, roughly speaking, that whatever works is right. Many politicians, unless they're governed by some higher moral principle, are pragmatists who believe that if something, no matter how nefarious it might seem to some, helps them hold onto power then it's ethically right and proper.

This is why so many politicians feel no qualms about lying about both themselves and their opponents. In their eyes lying is morally justified if it results in electoral success.

President Obama has amassed a rather impressive record in this regard, churning out half-truths and untruths on an almost daily basis.

Karl Rove summarizes some recent examples of Mr. Obama's faltering commitment to honesty in a piece at the Wall Street Journal:

To get a sense of how comprehensive the president's assault on the truth has been, consider some of his false claims in recent speeches and ads.

One Obama spot says, "To pay for huge, new tax breaks for millionaires like him, Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class: $2,000 for a family with children."

That claim has been thoroughly discredited, including by PolitiFact Virginia and editorials in this newspaper. Mr. Romney, unlike the president, is committed to cutting taxes for everyone, including the middle class.

Another ad says, "As a corporate raider, [Mr. Romney] shipped jobs to China and Mexico." In response, the Washington Post editorialized, "On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue."

As recently as Sept. 17, Mr. Obama claimed in Ohio that Mr. Romney's "experience has been owning companies that were called 'pioneers' in the business of outsourcing jobs to countries like China." But that claim, too, is a fabrication.

There is more. An Obama ad aimed at northern Virginia women intones, "Mitt Romney opposes requiring coverage for contraception." In fact, Mr. Romney opposes the president's unprecedented assault on religious liberties—in this case, the federal government forcing religious institutions (like church-sponsored hospitals, schools and charities) to provide insurance coverage for contraception in violation of their fundamental moral values and, incidentally, the First Amendment.

Rove goes on to accuse the president of having trouble being forthright about his own record as well:

Mr. Obama said at a Univision Town Hall on Sept. 20 that his biggest failure "is we haven't gotten comprehensive immigration reform done." The president then did what is second nature to him: He pinned the blame on Republicans. The problem with this excuse is that the Democrats controlled Congress by huge margins in the first two years of his presidency — and Mr. Obama never introduced an immigration bill or even provided the framework for one.

In the same interview, Mr. Obama claimed that his Justice Department's botched "Fast and Furious" gunrunning program was "begun under the previous administration." This time it was ABC's Jake Tapper correcting the record, pointing out, "it was started in October 2009, nine months into the Obama presidency."

The most troubling recent example of Mr. Obama's serial dishonesty is his administration's effort to deny that the attack on our consulate in Benghazi was a premeditated terrorist assault, as if the truth would somehow tarnish Mr. Obama's foreign-policy credentials.

Unfortunately, many voters only pay lip service to their alleged disdain for dishonesty among politicians. When given the chance to show the door to someone who has blatantly tried to deceive the electorate both about his opponent and about himself, they'll vote for him anyway as long as he's more charming than the other guy. They did it with President Clinton and, sadly, many of them will do it again with Mr. Obama.

It makes one wonder who is more dishonest, the politicians or the people who vote for them even as they profess their contempt for the lack of integrity among the political class. Maybe voters only despise dishonesty when it's the other party's guy who's engaging in it.

Why the President May be in Electoral Trouble

Although recent polls have been showing Mr. Obama maintaining a substantial lead over Mr. Romney in the race for the White House there are several reasons to be skeptical that Mr. Obama is enjoying the cushion the media has been claiming for him. Here are four:

• Support and/or enthusiasm is down in every subgroup that carried Obama to victory last time. Jews, businessmen, youth, even blacks and Hispanics are all less enthusiastic than in 2008. Those blacks and Hispanics who vote will undoubtedly vote overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama, but it doesn't appear that as many will vote this time around as last.
• Democratic registration is down sharply in most swing states. John Hinderaker at Powerline cites these numbers from Ohio and elsewhere:

  Voter registration in the Buckeye State is down by 490,000 people from four years ago. Of that reduction, 44 percent is in Cleveland and surrounding Cuyahoga County, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.
  
  Ohio is not alone. An August study by the left-leaning think tank Third Way showed that the Democratic voter registration decline in eight key swing states outnumbered the Republican decline by a 10-to-one ratio. In Florida, Democratic registration is down 4.9 percent, in Iowa it's down 9.5 percent. And in New Hampshire, it’s down 19.7 percent.
  
  The Third Way study, which was conducted in August, indicates the Democrats’ drop in registered voters coincides with a gain in independent voters.

• Admittedly, this one is anecdotal but perhaps significant nonetheless: I've heard a lot of people say that they voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 but will not vote for him in 2012, but I've yet to hear someone say they voted for John McCain in 2008 but will vote for Barack Obama this year.
• Finally, almost every poll that shows President Obama ahead assumes that Democrats will turn out in the same proportion over Republicans as they did in 2008. Many pollsters survey respondents based on the 2008 numbers so if Democrat voters were 8% more numerous than Republicans in 2008 then pollsters ask 8% more Democrats than Republicans who they'll vote for this year.
  
  This, of course, results in higher percentages of voters who say they'll vote for Mr. Obama, but given the heavy GOP turnout in the 2010 election and the much higher voter enthusiasm among Republicans this year, it seems unrealistic to rely on the 2008 numbers for this year's electorate.

Obama Phones

One time-honored way to win elections, I guess, is to bribe people by just giving them stuff. They'll apparently love you for it. It certainly seems that that's what the president is thinking with his cell phone give-away:

I don't know whether the people who got "Obama phones" are all going to vote, but, well, heaven help us.

The Key to Happiness

Robert Emmons, writing at Big Questions, discerns the key to Happiness in the Queen of the Virtues - Gratitude.

In modern times gratitude has become untethered from its moral moorings and collectively, we are worse off because of this. When the Roman philosopher Cicero stated that gratitude was the queen of the virtues, he most assuredly did not mean that gratitude was merely a stepping-stone toward personal happiness. Gratitude is a morally complex disposition, and reducing this virtue to a technique or strategy to improve one’s mood is to do it an injustice.

Even restricting gratitude to an inner feeling is insufficient. In the history of ideas, gratitude is considered an action (returning a favor) that is not only virtuous in and of itself, but valuable to society. To reciprocate is the right thing to do. “There is no duty more indispensable that that of returning a kindness” wrote Cicero in a book whose title translates “On Duties.”

Cicero’s contemporary, Seneca, maintained that “He who receives a benefit with gratitude repays the first installment on his debt.” Neither believed that the emotion felt in a person returning a favor was particularly crucial. Conversely, across time, ingratitude has been treated as a serious vice, a greater vice than gratitude is a virtue. Ingratitude is the “essence of vileness,” wrote the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant while David Hume opined that ingratitude is “the most horrible and unnatural crime that a person is capable of committing.”

Emmons goes on to discuss the myriad benefits of a spirit of gratitude for both the individual and society:

To give a flavor of these research findings, dispositional gratitude has been found to be positively associated with qualities such as empathy, forgiveness, and the willingness to help others. For example, people who rated themselves as having a grateful disposition perceived themselves as having more prosocial characteristics, expressed by their empathetic behavior, and emotional support for friends within the last month.

When people report feeling grateful, thankful, and appreciative in studies of daily experience, they also feel more loving, forgiving, joyful, and enthusiastic. Notably, the family, friends, partners and others that surround them consistently report that people who practice gratitude are viewed as more helpful, more outgoing, more optimistic, and more trustworthy.

One of the most important passages in the essay, at least in my opinion, was when Emmons says this:

A spirit of ingratitude corrodes human relationships and becomes epidemic within a culture when entitlements and rights are prioritized over duties and obligations, laments Senior Fellow Roger Scruton of the American Enterprise Institute. Is it any wonder then, that the biggest fear that parents now have for their children is a sense of entitlement and the resentment produced when life fails to deliver what their children think they are entitled to?

When people come to see themselves as entitled their sense of gratitude withers. That's one of the corrosive effects of the modern welfare state - people feel they're owed something from others and consequently their sense of thankfulness is often attenuated. Moreover, when people are granted help from a nebulous, impersonal government it's much more difficult to be thankful for it than when it comes from concrete individual persons.

At any rate, I urge those readers who are searching for happiness in their lives to do a little introspection and ask themselves how grateful they are for what others do, and have done, for them. I also urge readers to read the rest of Emmons' article. There's a lot of wisdom in it.

What's the Most Likely Explanation?

Here's a five minute video showing just a few of the basic details of how a bacterial flagellum works and how it is constructed. Keep in mind that what you're watching is an animation that barely scratches the surface of the complexity of these microscopic organelles. Also keep in mind that the basic philosophical/scientific controversy today is over whether such structures - and the myriad of other structures in the cell - developed as a consequence of blind, impersonal forces and processes or, alternatively, whether they are the product of an intelligent, purposeful agent:

Suppose you were completely neutral on the question of what could have produced this. Suppose that you had no metaphysical inclinations either for or against theism or naturalism. Which of the two would you think to be the most likely explanation for such a structure? Would you think that such functional complexity is more or less likely to have arisen by chance mutations and natural selection or as a result of intelligent engineering by a mind?

Is Romney Really Ahead?

Political strategist Dick Morris explains why Romney is actually in a better position than Obama despite what both the pundits and the polls say. After a review of some of the problems that a number of the polls have he writes this:

Finally, with Obama below 50% of the vote in most swing states, he is hitting up against a glass ceiling in the high 40s. He can’t get past it except in heavily Democratic states like New York or California. The first time Obama breaks 50 will not be on Election Day. Either he consistently polls above 50% of the vote or he won’t ever get there in the actual vote.

So here’s where the race really stands today based on Rasmussen’s polling:

• Romney leads decisively in all states McCain carried (173 electoral votes).
• Romney is more than ten points ahead in Indiana – which Obama carried. (11 electoral votes).
• Romney leads Obama in the following states the president carried in 2008: Iowa (44-47) North Carolina (45-51), Colorado (45-47), and New Hampshire (45-48). He’ll probably win them all. (34 electoral votes).

This comes to 218 of the 270 Romney needs. But…

• Obama is below 50% of the vote in a handful of key swing states and leads Romney by razor thin margins in each one. All these states will go for Romney unless and until Obama can show polling support of 50% of the vote.
• Obama leads in Ohio (47-46) and Virginia (49-48) by only 1 point (31 electoral votes).
• Obama leads in Florida (48-460) and Nevada (47-45) by only 2 points (35 electoral votes).
If Romney carries Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, he wins. And other states are in play.
• Obama leads in Wisconsin (49-46) by only 3 points (10 electoral votes).
• Obama’s lead in Michigan is down to four points according to a recent statewide poll.
• Obama is only getting 51% of the vote in Pennsylvania and 53% in New Jersey. And don’t count out New Mexico.

It would be accurate to describe the race now as tied. But Romney has the edge because:

• The incumbent is under 50% in key states and nationally. He will probably lose any state where he is below 50% of the vote.
• The Republican enthusiasm and likelihood of voting is higher.
• The GOP field organization is better.

Perhaps this is all just a matter of putting the best face on things or perhaps Romney really is doing better than what we're hearing from the media.

David Brooks' Conservatism

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times who considers himself a conservative. Perhaps relative to his colleagues at the Times he is, but his conservatism is hard to discern in most of his columns. He recently wrote a piece in which he laments how, in his mind, one branch of conservatism in the Republican party, what might be called traditional values conservatism, has been squeezed out by economic, or free market, conservatism. He begins with this:

When I joined the staff of National Review as a lowly associate in 1984, the magazine, and the conservative movement itself, was a fusion of two different mentalities.

On the one side, there were the economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.

But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

Perhaps Brooks thinks this sort of conservative is less familiar because he's not really looking for them. If he were he'd see exactly this sort of conservative in Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin. He'd see it in the leaders of most of the conservative grass roots organizations like the Tea Party.

What's happened, however, is that anyone who promotes "traditional values" conservatism is attacked by the liberal media and the message gets diffused as conservatives seek to defend a host of countercultural social positions.

Conservatives have implicitly decided, I think, that for the sake of defeating Barack Obama in November they will train all their fire on his economic failures and put the traditional social issues on the back-burner so as not to be side-tracked by interminable disputes over intractable questions.

Later in his column Brooks says this:

It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists. There are few people on the conservative side who’d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels.

The results have been unfortunate. Since they no longer speak in the language of social order, Republicans have very little to offer the less educated half of this country. Republicans have very little to say to Hispanic voters, who often come from cultures that place high value on communal solidarity.

This is just silly. Brooks is faulting conservatives for not being liberals. The fact is that conservatives realized long ago that money is not the solution to the problems of the working class and chaotic neighborhoods. You don't change people's character by giving them money. Indeed, throwing money at problems only exacerbates those problems. Since LBJ's Great Society of the 1960s we have spent over six trillion dollars on the sorts of programs that Brooks talks about, and the problems of the poor as deep as ever.

What the denizens of those chaotic neighborhoods need is not more government programs. What they need is economic opportunity which is created by a powerful economy, they need to learn the importance of marriage, and they need strong father figures who can teach them the importance of moral character. None of that can be provided by government, it can only be provided by the mediating institutions of church and civic organizations. Nor is any of it likely to emerge in the cultural cesspool that is modern entertainment. It will only flourish in an environment where the culture promotes messages which reinforce the value of monogamous marriage and family.

I would think someone of Brooks' acumen would see this much more clearly than he evidently does.

Oil and the Economy

Jeff Rubin at Bloomberg.com has a very informative piece titled How High Oil Prices Will Permanently Cap Economic Growth. Here's his intro:

For most of the last century, cheap oil powered global economic growth. But in the last decade, the price of oil has quadrupled, and that shift will permanently shackle the growth potential of the world’s economies.

The countries guzzling the most oil are taking the biggest hits to potential economic growth. That’s sobering news for the U.S., which consumes almost a fifth of the oil used in the world every day. Not long ago, when oil was $20 a barrel, the U.S. was the locomotive of global economic growth; the federal government was running budget surpluses; the jobless rate at the beginning of the last decade was at a 40-year low. Now, growth is stalled, the deficit is more than $1 trillion and almost 13 million Americans are unemployed.

And the U.S. isn’t the only country getting squeezed. From Europe to Japan, governments are struggling to restore growth. But the economic remedies being used are doing more harm than good, based as they are on a fundamental belief that economic growth can return to its former strength. Central bankers and policy makers have failed to fully recognize the suffocating impact of $100-a-barrel oil.

Running huge budget deficits and keeping borrowing costs at record lows are only compounding current problems. These policies cannot be long-term substitutes for cheap oil because an economy can’t grow if it can no longer afford to burn the fuel on which it runs. The end of growth means governments will need to radically change how economies are managed. Fiscal and monetary policies need to be recalibrated to account for slower potential growth rates.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration drags its feet on issuing permits to drill for the ocean of oil we have resting beneath the continental shelf. No doubt this is because Mr. Obama wants to limit oil availability so that the price of it stays high so that we'll use less of it. He said as much when he was campaigning for office the first time around.

What this seems to ignore, however, is the effect on the poor and the middle class of high oil prices. As oil prices rise everything becomes more expensive. It becomes harder for those trying to provide for their families on tight budgets to make ends meet. The upper middle class have a bit of a cushion, perhaps, but the poor have none. Moreover, the upper middle class may forego eating out as often, or going to the movies, or buying a new car or home entertainment system, but what effect does that reluctance to spend have on single moms who are trying to feed their own families by waitressing or working behind the counter at Sheetz?

As gas prices go up everyone gets poorer, and for some it's calamitous. We could avoid this by increasing the supply. We could approve the Keystone pipeline and drill offshore, but we won't as long as Mr. Obama is in office. The policies of the man who wants to be seen as the champion of the poor do nothing but insure that there'll be plenty of poor. It's a puzzlement.

Anyway, read the rest of Rubin's article at the link. It's good.

Bumps in the Road

All I can say about President Obama's comment comparing the deaths of four Americans, including an ambassador, the razing of the Egyptian embassy, and sundry other insults to our sovereignty around the Arab world to mere "bumps in the road" is that it's a good thing it was Mr. Obama who said it and not Mitt Romney.

If it had been Romney who invoked this trivializing metaphor there'd be a firestorm in the media right now that no amount of backing and filling and apologizing could quench. As it is, though, the mainstream media has pretty much ignored it and contented themselves instead with assuming a posture of outrage over Mr. Romney's relatively benign assertion that the 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes aren't going to vote for someone who'll insist that that percentage be reduced.

I wonder if the Israelis are wondering right now whether Mr. Obama would look at a nuclear attack by Iran as just a "bump in the road" in our Middle East policy.

Are We Getting Smarter?

James Flynn writes in the Wall Street Journal about the steady rise in IQ over the last century and what's responsible for it. It's a fascinating article. Here's part of it:

IQ tests aren't perfect, but they can be useful. If a boy doing badly in class does really well on one, it is worth investigating whether he is being bullied at school or having problems at home. The tests also roughly predict who will succeed at college, though factors like motivation and self-control are at least as important.

Advanced nations like the U.S. have experienced massive IQ gains over time (a phenomenon that I first noted in a 1984 study and is now known as the "Flynn Effect").

In 1910, scored against today's norms, our ancestors would have had an average IQ of 70 (or 50 if we tested with Raven's). By comparison, our mean IQ today is 130 to 150, depending on the test. Are we geniuses or were they just dense?

These alternatives sparked a wave of skepticism about IQ. How could we claim that the tests were valid when they implied such nonsense? Our ancestors weren't dumb compared with us, of course. They had the same practical intelligence and ability to deal with the everyday world that we do. Where we differ from them is more fundamental: Rising IQ scores show how the modern world, particularly education, has changed the human mind itself and set us apart from our ancestors. They lived in a much simpler world, and most had no formal schooling beyond the sixth grade.

A century ago, people mostly used their minds to manipulate the concrete world for advantage. They wore what I call "utilitarian spectacles." Our minds now tend toward logical analysis of abstract symbols—what I call "scientific spectacles." Today we tend to classify things rather than to be obsessed with their differences. We take the hypothetical seriously and easily discern symbolic relationships.

Flynn offers several examples of the difference in the way people tended to think a century ago compared to how they think now:

The mind-set of the past can be seen in interviews between the great psychologist Alexander Luria and residents of rural Russia during the 1920s—people who, like ourselves in 1910, had little formal education.

Luria: What do a fish and crow have in common?
Reply: A fish it lives in water, a crow flies.
Luria: Could you use one word for them both?
Reply: If you called them "animals" that wouldn't be right. A fish isn't an animal, and a crow isn't either. A person can eat a fish but not a crow.

The prescientific person is fixated on differences between things that give them different uses. My father was born in 1885. If you asked him what dogs and rabbits had in common, he would have said, "You use dogs to hunt rabbits." Today a schoolboy would say, "They are both mammals." The latter is the right answer on an IQ test. Today we find it quite natural to classify the world as a prerequisite to understanding it.

Flynn offers more discussion in the article of the difference between our contemporaries and our forebears. Flynn maintains that our brains have evolved to make us smarter, but I think this is unlikely. Evolution doesn't occur with such rapidity. I think it's more probable that our world is so much different from the world of 1910 that our brains utilize abilities that have been latent in the brains of human beings for millenia but which few people before the present era would ever have had need to utilize. Anyway, the rest of the article is worth reading.

In the Absence of God

A friend writes to say:

Thanks for telling me about your book, In the Absence of God. I bought it last Tuesday for my Kindle and finished it in two evenings, although the last evening lasted until 3:05 a.m.. I could not put it down. Thought provoking, good story lines and characters, entertaining reading, and very educational. Absolutely loved the book and have been talking about it to my kids, family and friends.

Good job, my friend.

Reading In the Absence of God in two nights is impressive as the book is close to 500 pages. You can get your copy, and one for a friend, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at my favorite bookstore, Hearts and Minds.