The Inadequacy of Darwinian Naturalism

Paul Nelson is a philosopher of biology who gave a talk at Saddleback Church in California the Sunday after Thanksgiving. His topic was on why unguided natural processes, particularly genetic mutation and natural selection, cannot by themselves account for the evolution of microbes to mammals.

As Nelson puts it natural selection is real, but it can only conserve, it cannot create. Nelson explains one of the gravest difficulties for Darwinian evolution as a creative force - the origin of different animal body plans. The difference between a worm and a fly is enormous, but the kinds of mutations in the genomes of any ancestral species that would be needed to create either worms or flies are invariably lethal to the organism.

The video of Nelson's presentation is forty minutes long, but for someone interested in his argument and the ramifications of the evolutionary inadequacy of purely natural processes it only seems like ten minutes. Give it a look here.

But What Happens to the Little People?

You might think that falling gasoline prices would be welcome news to the left. Cheaper gas brings down the cost of everything which is a special boon to the poor. It also reduces the cost burden of businesses which enables them to hire more people. Moreover, the reasons for the lower prices - the natural gas boom at home and the slowdown in petroleum demand worldwide because of cooling economies in India and China and difficulties in Europe - means that less carbon is being thrown into the atmosphere. All of this should be welcome news to the left, but it's apparently not.

The problem, as they see it, is that if gas is relatively cheap, then alternative fuels will not be competitive and there'll be little to no incentive to move toward developing them. Thus, lefties like those in the piece at the link believe we need to artificially make fossil fuel more expensive by imposing a hefty tax on carbon consumption.

The left doesn't seem to care much that such a tax will severely hurt the poor and middle class, stifle job creation, and smother any chance of an economic recovery. What they care about is making fossil fuels economically impractical and whoever has to be sacrificed to get to that goal is evidently expendable.

Cheap fuel is a blessing for everyone, but especially for the "little guy." If we really care about him we'd be a lot more reluctant to make his life harder than it already is.

Out of Whack

A post at the Daily Caller shows that something is very much out of whack with welfare spending. According to the article:

[T]he amount spent on federal means-tested welfare programs, if converted to cash payments and divided among households below the poverty line, would equal a daily income greater than the median household income in 2011.

The cash value of welfare spending, according to the analysis, is $167.65 daily per household in poverty. The median household income in 2011 was $50,054 or $137.13 per day, according to the analysis, released Friday.

When broken down into an hourly wage, welfare spending would be enough for $30.60 an hour for 40 hour weeks for each household in poverty. The median household hourly wage is $25.03, which drops to between $21.50 and $23.45 after federal taxes, depending on deductions and filing status, the minority side of the committee showed. The wage is further reduced with local and state taxes. Benefits from government assistance programs, they note, are not taxed federally.

No wonder people receiving government benefits are in no hurry to find gainful employment. Almost any job they take would result in a pay cut.

President Obama is not satisfied, however, that we're doing enough to subsidize poverty in this country. His budget would increase federal means-tested spending another 30% over the next four years. Heck, why not? Just tax the rich to make them pay their "fair share" and none of us would have to work.

Dare You to Cross That Line

I can remember seeing a cartoon when I was young in which one character drew a line in the dirt and dared an antagonist to cross the line. When the antagonist promptly stepped across the mark the character backed up and drew another line and again dared the foe to cross that one. Of course, he did and the character had to back up again and draw a third line making himself look both foolish and irresolute.

Barack Obama is making himself look like that character. According to an article in the NYT:

When President Obama first warned Syria’s leader, President Bashar al-Assad, that even making moves toward using chemical weapons would cross a “red line” that might force the United States to drop its reluctance to intervene in the country’s civil war, Mr. Obama took an expansive view of where he drew that boundary.

“We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” he said at an Aug. 20 news conference. He added: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

But in the past week, amid intelligence reports that some precursor chemicals have been mixed for possible use as weapons, Mr. Obama’s “red line” appears to have shifted. His warning against “moving” weapons has disappeared from his public pronouncements, as well as those of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The new warning is that if Mr. Assad makes use of those weapons, presumably against his own people or his neighbors, he will face unspecified consequences.

It is a veiled threat that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta repeated Thursday: “The president of the United States has made very clear that there will be consequences, there will be consequences if the Assad regime makes a terrible mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people.”

This sounds like playground threats. "You better not cross that line or else I'll...I'll do something, and you won't like it."

If the threat to do something if Assad uses the weapons sounds like playground rhetoric, the excuse for not having done anything yet sounds reminiscent of Bill Clinton's "It all depends on what the definition of 'is' is." Here's the Times:

The White House says the president has not changed his position at all — it is all in the definition of the word “moving.”

Tommy Vietor, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Thursday that “ ‘moving around’ means proliferation,” as in allowing extremist groups like Hezbollah, which has training camps near the weapons sites, to obtain the material.

So when the Assad regime finally decides to thumb its nose at Mr. Obama and use the weapons against the rebels perhaps we'll be told by the administration that actually what the president meant by "using" those weapons was "using them against us," and since the Syrians haven't used them against us we should not entangle ourselves in their domestic affairs, etcetera.

By the way, from whence did the Syrians get those biological and chemical weapons, and why isn't the media wondering about that? Remember when the search for precisely these kinds of munitions in Iraq came up empty, how much abuse George Bush took for having claimed in the first place that the Iraqis had them. "Bush lied, people died" and all that. Remember, too, that convoys of trucks were seen moving from Iraq toward Syria immediately prior to our invasion of Iraq. Maybe Bush was right after all. No wonder the media isn't curious where Syria got these weapons from. The last thing the media would want is to raise the prospect that Bush had been right all along.

Sleight-of-Hand

This guy is absolutely amazing. His name is Yann Frisch. See if you can figure out how he does this stuff:

There's more on Frisch and his act here.

By the way, I don't wish to be pedantic, but the term that describes Frisch's art is sleight-of-hand, not slight-of-hand as the people at the link spell it, although it is pronounced as if the word were "slight."

Meaningful Gift-Giving

Looking for a meaningful way to observe Christmas and to file a silent protest against the crass commercialization and consumerism which seems to have taken over the season in which we celebrate the birth of Christ?

Nicholas Kristof has some suggestions in a recent New York Times column:

Looking for an unusual holiday gift? How about a $60 trio of rabbits to a family in Haiti in the name of someone special? Bunnies raise a farming family’s income because they, well, reproduce like rabbits — six litters a year! Heifer International arranges the gift on its Web site.

Or for $52 you can buy your uncle something more meaningful than a necktie: send an Afghan girl to school for a year in his name.

Kristof adds a number of other suggestions along with accompanying links. These include Shining Hope for Communities a Kenyan girls' school and clinic started by Kennedy Odede, a slum-dweller in Nairobi, Kenya, who taught himself to read; a hospital, school and refugee camp in war-torn Somalia; The Polaris Project, a leader in the fight against human trafficking in the United States; Fair Girls a Washington-based organization also engaged in the fight against sex trafficking at home and abroad.

Kristoff gives details on all these in his column, and they all seem worthy of our attention and consideration this Christmas season.

Some of my own favorite charities include Kiva, a microfinance organization that provides loans to third world entrepreneurs; Logos Academy, a private school in York, PA for underprivileged children; and ASAPH ministries, the support organization for a friend of mine who's been a missionary in Haiti for twenty years and who has started a school there.

If you'd like to give this Christmas but aren't sure where your gift would do the most good, I can promise you that each of the above are doing great work on behalf of the poor.

Reflection on the Election

Contemplating the results of the last presidential election has become something of a pastime, I suppose, and there are lots of theories floating about as to why things turned out the way they did last November 6th.

For my part I think that the election revealed a deep fault line running through our culture. There appears to be a fundamental difference in how we understand the basic principles of freedom, justice, and compassion.

Americans, perhaps guided by their individual temperaments and personalities, have found themselves on opposing sides of an epistemological divide. This is why political liberals and political conservatives so often feel like they're talking past each other. It's because they are. It's not that some people think these principles should inform our votes and others don't. It's that many conservative and liberal Americans agree that our politics should be oriented toward maximizing freedom, justice and compassion, but they interpret these principles in very different ways.

Consider the principle of freedom, for instance.

Conservatives often frame their understanding of freedom in terms of economics - the free market, minimal government regulation, private property, the freedom to invest, hire, fire, and so on in whatever way the individual thinks best.

Liberals might also think of freedom in economic terms but for them it's freedom from the tyranny of financial want and worry.

Conservatives tend to see big government as a threat to their freedom and want government kept small and unobtrusive. Liberals tend to see government as the defender of their freedom, a source of security, and tend to want more of it.

Conservatives place freedom from government above personal security whereas liberals tend to place personal security above all. Thus conservatives lament the welfare state while liberals promote universal health care and social programs. Given these differences it's easy to see why conservatives, for instance, want to repeal the Affordable Care Act and liberals see it as a great advance.

Or consider justice.

Liberals see justice as a striving for economic equality. Large gaps between rich and poor are, in the liberal view, fundamentally, unjust and need to be narrowed through tax policy and entitlements. Conservatives tend to see justice as a matter of ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.

For conservatives inequality is not, by itself, an indicator of injustice, but confiscatory taxation - the seizure by government of one's property - is. For liberals, on the other hand, the disparity between the rich and the poor is a clear measure of systemic injustice in a society and those who possess the nation's wealth should be compelled to share it with those who don't.

Compassion, too, is seen differently by conservatives and liberals.

For conservatives government should provide a safety net for the poor, but compassionate outreach to the poor beyond the safety net should be extended through the mediating institutions of the society - neighborhood societies, private charities, churches, etc.

Liberals tend to be skeptical that such institutions are adequate to the task of caring for the poor or that people, if allowed to keep their wealth, will use it for the common good. It therefore falls upon government, they believe, to insure that the poor are provided not only an adequate portion of life's necessities, but also given enough that they can be reasonably comfortable.

Neither side along the divide understands the other because they don't share a common view of freedom, justice and compassion. And neither side particularly appreciates the other because both sides think the other is ignoring very important aspects of these principles.

Parenthetically, it's an irony, in my view, that our secular friends often bandy terms like freedom, justice, and compassion about, but they fail to see that unless there's a transcendent personal moral authority who obligates us to pursue these there really is no moral reason why anyone should care about the well-being of anyone but himself. Those secularists who admonish us about our "moral duty" to do justice and have compassion for the less fortunate are simply indulging an arbitrary personal preference similar in kind to their preference for Pepsi rather than Coke.

This is one of the themes I try to develop in my book In the Absence of God (about which you can read more by clicking on the link at the upper right of this page)

In any case, when a wealthy businessman - like Mr. Romney - who wants to maintain low taxes on other very wealthy people competes against someone - like Mr. Obama - who boasts a strong identification with the poor and who guarantees them that his primary concern is distributing wealth to more of them, liberals will find the redistributionist's message much more attractive than that of the guy who wants to help people hold on to what they've earned.

I don't know if we've ever not been a divided nation. We were divided over the Revolution when many colonists took the side of the British or were at best uninterested in supporting the quest for Independence. We were certainly divided during the antebellum years, the Civil War, and during Reconstruction, and we were divided during the turbulent 1960s, but through all of that we more or less shared a common understanding of what it meant to be free, to do justice, and to be compassionate, even if many people failed to hold to those ideals.

We no longer have that shared understanding, though, and I suspect that the election of 2012 stamped an exclamation point to that fact.

Materialism and Intentionality

Many people believe that human beings are a composite of both mental and material substance. This view is called substance dualism and among philosophers it seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence. Still, the currently dominant view among philosophers remains, at least for the time being, materialism. This is the view that everything, including us, is reducible to the constituents of material substance. Materialists deny that there's anything about us that's immaterial and affirm that electrochemical processes in the brain can account for all of our mental activity.

Philosopher Ed Feser argues that this view is simply false and he adduces something called intentionality as just one of several phenomena that cannot be explained as a function of matter or neurological processes:

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself.

Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general. Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc.

In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

The debate has fascinating implications. If there's more to us than just the chemicals that make us up, if there's something immaterial that's an essential element of our being, then is that immaterial mind (or soul) something that's not subject to death as physical matter is? Might there be something about us that continues to exist even after the body dies?

Materialists scoff at the idea, but materialism no longer commands the allegiance of philosophers like it did in the 19th and 20th centuries. There's too much it can't explain and intentionality is just one example.

In the Beginning

An article in New Scientist explores the question, "Has the cosmos existed forever, or did something bring it into existence?" The article points out that scientists believe that the universe started as a quantum fluctuation but then poses this additional question:

If the universe owes its origins to quantum theory, then quantum theory must have existed before the universe. So the next question is surely: where did the laws of quantum theory come from? "We do not know," admits [cosmologist Alex] Vilenkin. "I consider that an entirely different question." When it comes to the beginning of the universe, in many ways we're still at the beginning.

The consensus view is that the universe experienced a "Big Bang" but that this event was not the actual beginning. The beginning was in fact a hot, unimaginably dense state which produced the "Bang," but what then caused this state and why did it produce the universe when it did?

Vilenkin and others are coming to the conclusion that the universe is not eternal, that the original hot, dense state came into existence at some point, but how and why is still a mystery. There is at this stage of our knowledge no physical mechanism that's a plausible candidate for the initial cause.

Hmmm. I wonder, then, if there could be a non-physical cause that brought it all into being.

Religious Studies Today

I don't know if there was ever a time when a student could take a course in religious studies in an American university and actually learn something important about Christianity, but if ever there was, it's long past.

An article at The College Fix surveys 316 religious studies courses in a dozen major American universities and finds them pretty much devoid of any content that could be considered mainstream religious. Instead, what the researchers found were:

2 classes on witchcraft and shamanism;
2 classes on yoga and meditation;
3 classes on sex and religion;
3 classes on death and afterlife beliefs;
4 classes on religion and doubt/various conflicts;
5 classes on science and religion;
5 classes on mysticism;
12 classes on women/gender and religion; and
14 classes on religion and culture.

Some of the electives, the report says, are too difficult to even classify, such as: emergence, from biology to religion; suffering and transformation; anthropology of body and pain; religious dimensions in human experience; sport and spirituality; and a history of apocalyptic thought and movements.

University of Colorado at Denver’s 40-plus religious studies classes include “whores and saints,” “theories of the universe,” “Freudian and Jungian perspectives in dream analysis,” and “spirituality and the modern world.” No electives focused exclusively on Jesus, however.

Tne article goes on to describe the offerings at other schools similar to those at U. of Colorado. What the researchers didn't find in any of the schools surveyed were many courses that seriously addressed traditional Christianity, or the person of Jesus, who, despite the evident lack of academic interest in him, was easily the most influential individual to have ever lived.

It's a shame that universities have wandered so far from their original mission to teach the "best that has been thought and written" in Western civilization. It's equally lamentable that people pay money to have their kids take such courses that neither nourish their minds nor teach them much of anything useful.

Birth Rate Decline

The folks at the Pew Research Center have come up with some startling statistics about birth trends in the U.S. Here's a quick overview:

The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the Great Recession. The overall U.S. birth rate, which is the annual number of births per 1,000 women in the prime childbearing ages of 15 to 44, declined 8% from 2007 to 2010. The birth rate for U.S.-born women decreased 6% during these years, but the birth rate for foreign-born women plunged 14%—more than it had declined over the entire 1990-2007 period. The birth rate for Mexican immigrant women fell even more, by 23%.

Final 2011 data are not available, but according to preliminary data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the overall birth rate in 2011 was 63.2 per 1,000 women of childbearing age. That rate is the lowest since at least 1920, the earliest year for which there are reliable numbers. The overall U.S. birth rate peaked most recently in the Baby Boom years, reaching 122.7 in 1957, nearly double today’s rate. The birth rate sagged through the mid-1970s but stabilized at 65-70 births per 1,000 women for most years after that before falling again after 2007, the beginning of the Great Recession.

There's much more at the link along with lots of charts.

The population replacement rate is about 2.1 children per couple. We fell below that for the first time in the U.S. in 2008. If birth rates are continuing to decline that'll have serious consequences for the future of the country. Fewer people means fewer consumers and fewer taxpayers which means a poorer nation. It also means that entitlement programs for the poor are going to be hard pressed to find the wherewithal to sustain them. It also means that there'll be less revenue coming in to the Treasury to support programs like Social Security and Medicare.

There's much talk in the news about the impending "fiscal cliff," but there's a population cliff looming off in the middle distance, which, if it remains unaddressed, will guarantee that people in their twenties today will be much worse off financially when they hit their forties than were their parents and grandparents.

Rubio's Reply

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an op-ed by Dr. Josh Swamidass, a professor in the Laboratory and Genomic Medicine Division at Washington University in St. Louis, on the response given by Senator Marco Rubio to a question asked of him by an interviewer from GQ magazine. Rubio was asked how old he thinks the earth is, a strange question to ask of a politician to be sure, especially since Democrats rarely get asked these sorts of questions, at least not by journalists. Rubio was taken aback and gave a rather desultory reply which offended Dr. Swamidass and a host of other commentators as well. He writes:

Sen. Marco Rubio recently touched a land mine in America's culture wars: evolution, creation and the age of the Earth. When GQ magazine asked him how old the planet is, Mr. Rubio's winding response never directly answered the question. Instead, he noted his lack of scientific qualifications ("I'm not a scientist, man"), posited a need to teach the "multiple theories out there on how the universe was created," and settled into the platitude that the Earth's age is an unsolvable "mystery."

Mr. Rubio's answer enabled his critics to cast one of the Republicans' fastest rising stars as an ignorant religious nut. It also provided an opportunity for those hostile to Christians to lampoon them for trusting their sacred text more than science.

I'm sure this is indeed how the Democrats would like to portray every conservative, but they can only get away with it by making sure their media allies don't ask them the same sorts of questions routinely employed to flummox Republicans. How, for example, would Senator Harry Reid, a Mormon, have answered that question? Or Nancy Pelosi? Or Vice President Biden? Does anyone think these pols have any idea at all what the scientific consensus is on the age of the earth or the age of the universe? Why should a politician be expected to know this anyway? What difference does it make whether someone believes the earth is thousands, millions, or billions of years old? What else should they know? The Gravitational Constant and the Planck Time? The GQ question is absurd and so has been the reaction to Rubio's reply.

The number that journalists should be asking our politicians is the size of the national budget deficit and the national debt. As it turns out, Mr. Obama was asked this very question and he didn't know the answer (start at the 2:00 minute mark):

That the president couldn't even give an approximate answer to the question - he's being paid, after all, to get this number under control - should have generated howls of outrage from the media, but it scarcely mustered a yawn.

Coincidentally, Mr. Obama was also asked, as a U.S. Senator, the same question that Marco Rubio was asked, though presumably not by a journalist. In a 2008 forum at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, Senator Obama was served this version of it:

Senator, if one of your daughters asked you...“Daddy, did God really create the world in 6 days?,” what would you say?

His answer is scarcely different than Senator Rubio's. Senator Obama replied:

What I've said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it … it may not be 24-hour days, and that's what I believe. I know there's always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don't, and I think it's a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I'm a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don't presume to know.

Here's Rubio, in his interview for the December 2012 issue of GQ:

Q: How old do you think the Earth is?

A: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

Why is it that Senator Rubio's reply elicits howls of derision and Senator Obama's reply creates nary a ripple? The only thing I can figure is that it has something to do with whether there's an R or a D after their names.

Now He Tells Us

Pastor Rick Warren has had a political Damascus Road experience of sorts:

Saddleback Church founder and author Rick Warren, who once praised President Barack Obama's "courage" for inviting the conservative pastor to give the invocation at his inauguration and hailed his "commitment to model civility," has drastically changed his tone on the man who helped make him a familiar name to many Americans.

Obama is "absolutely" unfriendly to religion and his administration's policies have "intentionally infringed upon religious liberties," Warren said in an interview Wednesday.

Well, yes, but we've pretty much known this for about a year now. It may have been helpful had Pastor Warren declared his disenchantment with Mr. Obama in, say, September. Maybe he did and I just missed it.

Colleges and Tyranny

Michael Barone surveys two new books at NRO both of which expose how ideological liberalism at our colleges and universities both harms and tyrannizes students. Barone writes:

In recent weeks, two books have appeared about another of America’s gleaming institutions, our colleges and universities. Either of them could be subtitled “The Shame of the Universities.”

In Mismatch, law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor expose, in the words of their subtitle, How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. In Unlearning Liberty, Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), describes how university speech codes create, as his subtitle puts it, Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.

Mismatch is a story of good intentions gone terribly awry.

Sander and Taylor document beyond disagreement how university admissions offices’ racial quotas and preferences systematically put black and Hispanic students in schools where they are far less well prepared than others.

As a result, they tend to get low grades, withdraw from science and math courses, and drop out without graduating. The effect is particularly notable in law schools, where large numbers of blacks and Hispanics either drop out or fail to pass the bar exam.

University admissions officers nevertheless maintain what Taylor calls “an enormous, pervasive and carefully concealed system of racial preferences,” even while claiming they aren’t actually doing so. The willingness to lie systematically seems to be a requirement for such jobs.

It might be pointed out that affirmative action is insidious in another way. It tacitly diminishes the achievement of those minorities who do succeed in college. They're stigmatized both in school and beyond graduation by the suspicion that the only reason they succeeded is because they were given preferential treatment. This stigma is an extremely painful insult to have to bear throughout one's life, and the fact that colleges nevertheless continue to perpetuate it by continuing the practice of affirmative action in their admissions is an example of how liberal good intentions actually result in acts that are basically cruel to the people the liberal thinks he's helping.

Barone goes on to discuss campus speech codes:

The willingness to lie systematically is also a requirement for administrators who profess a love of free speech while imposing speech codes and penalizing students for violations.

All of which provides plenty of business for Lukianoff’s FIRE, which opposes speech codes and brings lawsuits on behalf of students — usually, but not always, conservatives — who are penalized.

Those who graduated from college before the late 1980s may not realize that speech codes have become, in Lukianoff’s words, “the rule rather than the exception” on American campuses.

They are typically vague and all-encompassing. One school prohibits “actions or attitudes that threaten the welfare” of others. Another bans e-mails that “harass, annoy or otherwise inconvenience others.” Others ban “insensitive” communication, “inappropriate jokes,” and “patronizing remarks.”

“Speech codes can only survive,” Lukianoff writes, “through selective enforcement.” Conservatives and religious students are typically targeted. But so are critics of administrators, like the student expelled for a Facebook posting critical of a proposed $30 million parking garage.

There's much more at the link. When liberals have authority they tend to use it to control other people's lives in order, they think, to bring about a just world. They want to control what people say as well as what they do, but the more they try to control individual speech the more oppressive they become and the less freedom people have. Barone cites a survey that shows that only 30% of university seniors feel they're free to voice opinions at variance with the university orthodoxy.

Liberalism's insistence on conformity is the greatest threat to freedom in the Western world today, but unfortunately too many students have grown up thinking that the way things are is the way they should be. They lack the time horizon to see how much their freedom is eroding, and, like the frog in the pot of boiling water, too many of them are unaware, or unconcerned, that it's happening.

Is ID Science?

If you've ever heard the criticism of Intelligent Design that it's not a scientific theory and should therefore not be taught in public schools you might be interested in perusing the information at Evolution News and Views.

Casey Luskin amasses a formidable array of resources which collectively make the case that ID is every bit as much a scientific theory as is anything else.

Along the way Luskin mentions the demarcation problem which, to my mind, makes the whole question of the status of ID moot. The demarcation problem is the challenge of trying to determine what it is about science that separates it from non-science. Most philosophers of science agree that there really is no clear boundary or demarcation and that the best way to define science is to say that it's simply whatever it is that scientists do.

If that's the case then it seems a bit futile to insist that ID is not science.

Not Over Yet

It looks like there'll be yet another challenge to the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) before the law is fully implemented:

President Obama’s national health care law will be back at the U.S. Supreme Court by next fall, according to a lawyer for Liberty University, which is challenging the constitutionality of the law on different grounds from the recent major health care suit.

Earlier on Monday, the Supreme Court ordered the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia to rehear a suit brought by Liberty University challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare.

“We’ll probably be back before the Supreme Court in fall of 2013, about a year from now,” Mathew Staver, the lawyer representing Liberty University, predicted in a phone interview with the Washington Examiner.

When the Supreme Court upheld the law’s individual mandate this past June, it did not address other issues raised by the suit brought by the Christian college.

In addition to challenging the individual mandate, Liberty has argued that the additional mandate forcing employers to offer their workers federally-approved health insurance or pay a penalty violated the Constitution. Should judges reject the argument that the employer mandate is broadly unconstitutional, Staver emphasized that the university is also making the narrower argument that the individual and employer mandates are unconstitutional “as applied” to religious institutions, because the law forces them to pay for abortions. This, Staver said, “collide(s) with the free exercise of religion.”

There's more at the link. "Fundamentally transforming" the country is a messy and difficult business, of course, and lots of obstacles stand in the way of seizing power and control over people's lives.

It's an interesting historical footnote that it seems that it's always religious institutions and individuals motivated by religious principles that get in the way of those who wish to aggrandize more power to themselves and to the state. It's doubtless one reason why there are, and will probably continue to be, so many martyrs.

A Couple of Rarities

The winter season often brings rare birds to my part of the country and this year has not disappointed. Two of the unusual species to be spotted in Pennsylvania so far this season are shown below.

The little fella pictured below is a Pacific-slope flycatcher. They're normally found in the Pacific coast states but recently one turned up in Cumberland county in Pennsylvania almost three thousand miles out of its usual range. The Pennsylvania bird was only the second confirmed sighting of this species in the state.

Another rare bird found to be visiting Pennsylvania recently was a Calliope hummingbird, the smallest North American bird and the smallest long-distance migrant bird in the world. The Calliope is only about three inches long and is normally only found in the western mountain states. The first picture shows an adult male Calliope, the second shows a juvenile, which is what turned up in Chester county a couple of weeks ago.

Great Review of Absence

Emails like this one from a reader named T.J. just make my day:

I finished reading In the Absence of God yesterday, which isn't anything to marvel at other than the fact that I also started reading In the Absence of God yesterday. I don't think I've ever read an entire book in one sitting before, and I certainly wasn't planning on reading this book in one day, but I simply couldn't put it down. Also, I don't think a book has ever affected me so deeply as this one has. I cannot stop thinking about the ideas that were presented throughout In the Absence of God.

I was nervous when I started reading the book that I would be bored by an abundance of philosophical ideas, but the conversations in the book were engaging and masterfully weaved throughout the action and plot. The speech at the end by "Smerk" gave me chills as I was reading it, and I was deeply disturbed by how true it was that this was the logical conclusion of a materialist worldview.

I identified with Professor Weyland in that I have been through some very difficult struggles with my faith because it seems as though the more "intellectual" and "logical" way to look at the world is through the lens of materialism. This book answered many questions that I've been asking for a long time, and I feel stronger in my faith because of it.

One quote in particular stuck with me as I finished the book, "For so much of his life Weyland simply took for granted that atheism made so much more sense, was so much more reasonable, so much more intelligent, than theism, but he could no longer think that. He'd never again be able to think his rejection of God, if that was the choice he ultimately made, was because atheism was so much more appealing or satisfying. What appeal is there in a worldview that has no answer to life's most important questions?" This describes where my mind was before reading this book.

Thank you for writing this book and reminding me of the truth I should have known all along.

If you'd like to read more about In the Absence of God click on the link at the upper right of this page. It'd make a fine Christmas gift.

Finding Out What's in It

Bethany Mandel at Commentary points out one way that the Affordable Care Act is harming the very people it was intended to help, especially those workers in the restaurant business:

Since the president’s reelection earlier this month, four large restaurant chains, Papa Johns, Applebee’s, Denny’s and Darden Restaurants (the company that owns the Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and LongHorn Steakhouse chains) have all recently released statements about their companies’ plans to respond to the increased costs of complying with Obamacare regulations.

According to the healthcare law, every full-time employee must be provided with comprehensive medical coverage if the company employs more than 50 full-time workers. If a company refuses to comply, they will be faced with fines of $2,000 per year, per employee, as of January 1, 2014.

According to Mandel, it's coming as a bit of a shock to the left that Obamacare has severe economic consequences for lowly employees, but, of course, it does:

Appearing on Fox News Business early last week, Applebee’s CEO Zane Tankel explained the steps his business would have to take in order to stay in operation:

The costs of fines or healthcare for dozens of employees per restaurant have the potential to bankrupt individually owned chains across the country. The Applebee’s in New York City would face fines of $600,000 per year if insurance isn’t provided for full-time staff, and estimates for offering federally approved insurance would cost “some millions” across the Applebee’s system.

The restaurant industry, already operating with razor thin margins, doesn’t have the ability to absorb tens of thousands more in healthcare expenditures without a considerable increase in sales. It’s a basic realty of economics: more has to be coming in than going out.

The only solution for restaurants that want to stay open and maintain competitive pricing would be to cut employee hours to part-time status. This is the conclusion already reached by several large chains–companies that provide jobs to tens of thousands of working class Americans.

This would be devastating to many of those workers, however:

If workers are moved to part-time status, the onus for paying for insurance would then be placed on employees who have suddenly seen their incomes reduced drastically. Another provision of Obamacare is the requirement for Americans to purchase insurance or face a financial penalty, a tax as defined by the Supreme Court.

Some of these employees may qualify for Medicaid and would be exempt from the tax specifically designed to compel Americans to purchase insurance, regardless of their desire to do so. Cash-strapped states would then be on the hook for expanding Medicaid in order to fulfill the needs of the estimated 11-17 million Americans newly enrolled on Medicaid thanks to Obamacare.

These workers, directly pushed further into poverty by Obamacare via reduced hours would then be enrolled in a system with the worst healthcare outcomes in the country, including the ranks of the uninsured. The costs of providing millions more with insurance would then be passed on by states unable to afford the Medicaid loads they already have. As a result, residents should expect fewer services from their states or higher taxes, if not both.

Nancy Pelosi said that we had to pass Obamacare in order to find out what's in it, and she rammed it through the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote. Now it's the law and we're starting to discover what's in it. Inter alia, the very people the Democrats claim to care so much about - young, poor, single moms struggling to make ends meet for their children - are going to get clobbered. They shouldn't feel too bad though. They can take comfort in knowing that liberals care about them.

Why Does Homosexuality Exist?

The Supreme Court decides this week whether to hear an appeal of the California Supreme Court's ruling that Proposition 8, the 2008 voter initiative that limited marriage to a man and a woman, is unconstitutional.

In addition to the constitutional questions surrounding gay marriage, there are some interesting biological questions to be asked about homosexuality as well. For instance, given the assumption that homosexuality is genetically based and the further evolutionary assumption that traits that confer no reproductive advantage eventually die out in a population, why does homosexuality exist in the first place?

Evolutionary biologist David Barash tackles this question at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He writes:

If evolution is true then homosexuals, who of course reproduce at far lower rates than do heterosexuals, should not exist, but of course they do.

This is a vexing enigma for evolutionary theorists and Barash surveys the various speculations scientists have advanced to explain the existence of a phenomenon which, evolutionarily speaking, should not exist. The speculations he adduces sound unconvincingly feeble, but they're evidently the best that the theorists have been able to come up with.

Barash admits that the solution to the mystery of the existence of a trait that confers no reproductive benefit has eluded our best scientific minds:

The sine qua non for any trait to have evolved is for it to correlate positively with reproductive success, or, more precisely, with success in projecting genes relevant to that trait into the future. So, if homosexuality is in any sense a product of evolution — and it clearly is, for reasons to be explained — then genetic factors associated with same-sex preference must enjoy some sort of reproductive advantage. The problem should be obvious: If homosexuals reproduce less than heterosexuals — and they do — then why has natural selection not operated against it?

Anything that diminishes, even slightly, the reproductive performance of any gene should (in evolutionary terms) be vigorously selected against. And homosexuality certainly seems like one of those things. Gay men, for example, have children at about 20 percent of the rate of heterosexual men. I haven't seen reliable data for lesbians, but it seems likely that a similar pattern exists. And it seems more than likely that someone who is bisexual would have a lower reproductive output than someone whose romantic time and effort were devoted exclusively to the opposite sex.

Across cultures, the proportion of the population who are homosexual is roughly the same. What maintains the genetic propensity for the trait?

Nor can we solve the mystery by arguing that homosexuality is a "learned" behavior. That ship has sailed, and the consensus among scientists is that same-sex preference is rooted in our biology.

The author continues at some length to try to explain the inexplicable fact of homosexuality. He's adamant that homosexuality is a product of evolution, but despite his promise to explain why he offers no substantive evidence to support the claim. He also insists that it's a genetically based phenomenon but offers scant evidence to support that view.

Maybe someone ought to call the departed ship back to port and give it another look.

Book Signing

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be doing a book signing/meet and greet on behalf of my book In the Absence of God at Hearts and Minds bookstore in Dallastown, PA on the evening of December 14th starting at 7:00pm.

My friend Byron Borger, the proprietor of Hearts and Minds, has graciously offered to host this event at his bookshop, and I hope many of you can make it, especially if you live close-by. It'll be an evening of good conversation, light refreshments, an opportunity to make new acquaintances, and an opportunity to browse the shelves of perhaps the most charming bookstore you'll ever visit.

It's also a great place to do some Christmas shopping, and In the Absence of God may make the perfect gift for someone who prefers novels to non-fiction and who's interested in questions about God. For more information on the book click on the link at the upper right of this page.

The address of Hearts and Minds is 234 East Main Main Street, Dallastown, PA. I hope to see you there.

Why the Israelis Stopped

Debkafile has a fascinating piece on what precipitated Israel's agreement to commence a cease-fire in the recent hostilities with Hamas. Here's the lede:

Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire for halting the eight-day Israeli Gaza operation Wednesday night, Nov. 21, after President Barack Obama personally pledged to start deploying US troops in Egyptian Sinai next week, debkafile reports. The conversation, which finally tipped the scales for a ceasefire, took place on a secure line Wednesday morning, just hours before it was announced in Cairo. The US and Israeli leaders spoke at around the time that a terrorist was blowing up a Tel Aviv bus, injuring 27 people.

Obama’s pledge addressed Israel’s most pressing demand in every negotiating forum on Gaza: Operation Pillar of Cloud’s main goal was a total stoppage of the flow of Iranian arms and missiles to the Gaza Strip. They were smuggled in from Sudan and Libya through southern Egypt and Sinai. Hostilities would continue, said the prime minister, until this object was achieved.

Earlier, US officials tried unsuccessfully to persuade Israel to accept Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s personal guarantee to start launching effective operations against the smugglers before the end of the month. The trio running Israel’s Gaza campaign, Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, were willing to take Morsi at his word, except that Israeli security and intelligence chiefs assured them that Egypt has nothing near the security and intelligence capabilities necessary for conducting such operations.

There's much more to this development at the link. Debkafile notes three significant consequences of the American deployment:

1. A US special forces operation against the Sinai segment of the Iranian smuggling route would count as the first overt American military strike against an Iranian military interest.

2. The US force also insures Israel against Cairo revoking or failing to honor the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.

3. It essentially makes the U.S. a partner in the blockade of Gaza.

The debkafile article doesn't mention it but the deployment to the Sinai also puts American troops in harm's way on behalf of Israel. Until now we've managed to keep out of Israel's neighborhood but will now be seen as intervening directly on their behalf. This is not a reason not to do it, but rather a significant change in what has been the United States' position heretofore and a very significant change in the Obama administration's attitude toward the conflict in the Middle East. At the very least it sends a message to Iran that Mr. Obama is not unwilling to use force against their interests, a consideration that should make their pursuit of nuclear weapons a bit more problematic.

Lincoln

Last Wednesday my wife and I went to see the movie Lincoln and came away impressed once again with Steven Spielberg's ability as a story-teller and filmmaker. To my untutored eye everything about the film seemed genuine, from the sets, to the costumes, to the dialogue, to the corrupt way politics was done in the 19th century (and in the 21st century).

I was a bit concerned at the outset when it looked as if the film was going to wallow in political correctness and white guilt, but it didn't, or if it did, it didn't seem to detract at all from the story of how Abraham Lincoln and his supporters in Congress managed to get the 13th amendment to the Constitution passed.

The movie captures dramatically the enormous pressures Lincoln (played magnificently by Daniel Day-Lewis) was under not only because of the carnage of the Civil War, and not only because of the uphill political battle he was fighting, but also because of his marriage to the emotionally troubled Mary Todd (also played magnificently by Sally Field). Despite these pressures he was able somehow to keep himself calm and focused on the tasks set before him - preserving the union and freeing the slaves.

Historians may find this or that detail to quibble about, but one comes away from the theater with a renewed appreciation for Lincoln as a man and a leader. If there was one thing that I'd caution potential viewers about it's that it might be difficult to follow the story unless one has a little background knowledge of who some of the key players are. Spielberg sets a fast pace that doesn't suffer a wandering mind.

Another thing that struck me and made me wonder if it was intentional was that Spielberg seemed insistent on impressing upon the viewer that the opponents to the 13th amendment were almost all Democrats. He seemed at times to go out of his way to point this out. It was a bit odd since Spielberg is himself a Democrat, but it's an interesting historical tidbit that the party that African-Americans are so loyal to today is historically the party which, had they had their way, would have kept blacks in slavery and would have kept them as second class citizens once they were freed.

Anyway, Lincoln is an outstanding film and I encourage you to see it.

Happy Thanksgiving

I'd like to wish all our readers a very meaningful Thanksgiving. I can think of no better way to observe the day on VP than to repeat our annual post of the Thanksgiving proclamation of one of the greatest Americans who ever lived:

THANKSGIVING DAY PROCLAMATION OF 1789 BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor - and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me "to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness."

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be - That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks - for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation - for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war - for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed - for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions - to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually - to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed - to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord - To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and Us - and generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

George Washington

No doubt those who like to believe that this country was not founded by religious men nor upon Judeo-Christian presuppositions would rather you not read this, but there you have it.

I encourage each of us to take time this day to reflect upon all that we have to be grateful for, having been born in this country or having come to reside here, and to reflect, too, upon the nature of our relationship to the God from whom all our blessings flow.

I urge each of us to take a moment to pray for those of our acquaintances who find themselves grieving a loss or suffering in pain that God may hold them especially close to His bosom and give them consolation and comfort.

Finally, we should also keep in mind those who languish in poverty, either physical, psychological, or spiritual and ask God that He show us what He would have us do to bring relief where we can.

Have a great Thanksgiving.

Why I'm Not Neutral

With the onset again of open warfare in the Middle East I've been told that the moral position is to remain neutral between the Palestinians and the Israelis and have been challenged to explain my reasons for thinking that neutrality is neither wise nor moral. Here are ten reasons why I think that anyone who believes morality matters and that we should support those who strive to do the right thing should support the Israelis:

The Israelis

• Did not initiate hostilities.
• Do not vow to exterminate the Palestinians.
• Do not teach their children in school to hate the Palestinians.
• Do not deliberately target civilians with their munitions.
• Do not send rockets on a daily basis into Palestine.
• Do not try to cross the border to murder Palestinian children.
• Do not act like savages toward those who support and abet Hamas.
• Do not use their civilians as human shields behind which they hide themselves and their weapons.
• Do not strap bombs to their children and send them off to blow themselves and other children to bits.
• Would never say something as perverse as "they [the Israelis]love life, we love death."

The Palestinians, mutatis mutandis, have done all these things.

Israel is a nation founded on principles of freedom and democracy. It's a tiny life raft of human achievement fighting for survival in a sea of frothing hatreds, savagery, and dysfunction.

But what of the Israeli blockades, the wall, the closed borders? Don't the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance because of the hardships these place on the people? Perhaps, but why have the Israelis adopted these measures? Is it realistic to think that the Israelis would undertake this expense and be willing to suffer the censure of the world just to punish the Palestinians for the sake of punishing them? Is it not more plausible to think that such measures are the only way to stop the importation of weapons and to prevent suicide bombers from committing mayhem among the civilian population of Israel? None of these impositions would exist were it not for the fact that they've been made necessary by the fanatical hatred of the Palestinian Arabs who will exploit any opportunity to kill Israelis.

The Israelis have been criticized because their response to Palestinian terror seems "disproportionate." Far more Palestinians are killed by Israeli bombs, people say, than Israelis are killed by Palestinian rockets. As much as I admire the principles of Just War theory, the principle of proportionality in Jus in Bello, at least as some interpret it, is an anachronism.

It entails that if your enemy fires at you with a pistol you must return fire only with a weapon of comparable firepower. According to the interpretation some give the concept, the use of anything more powerful, like an automatic rifle, would be immoral. In the present case the fact that over a hundred Palestinians have died but "only" three Israelis have been killed is cited as proof that the Israelis have responded "disproportionately."

This is nonsense. If followed to its logical conclusion it would mean that the victor in every war has acted immorally, even if he was acting in self-defense, since his success is disproportionate to that of the loser, since he has probably killed more of the enemy than he has lost to the enemy, and since he has employed superior manpower, firepower, and/or tactics.

What the proportionality criterion should mean is that no more damage be inflicted upon the foe than is necessary to subdue him and to gain his defeat. Gratuitous killing and destruction is to be condemned. It's not at all clear, however, that anything the Israelis have done is in any way gratuitous. They have the right to live in peace and if the Palestinians refuse to let them, if the Palestinians persist in trying to kill them, then the Israelis have the right, the duty even, to do what's necessary to stop them and the Palestinians must bear the consequences of their hatreds and of the leadership they have elected.

I feel deeply sorry for those among the Palestinian people who do want peace and who have suffered grievously because those to whom they have handed power are filled with so much hatred. But while I sympathize with and pray for those people I do not wish to see Hamas prevail. It would be a catastrophe for the people of Israel and for civilization in general.

Down the Drain

A friend told me I should watch this video but not, he cautioned, if I was having a good day. The video would be certain to ruin it. He was right, the video does induce a certain angst for the future of our nation, but I couldn't help laughing at it anyway.

It's titled "Why Our Country Is Going Down the Drain," and if the young man who appears before Judge Judy is in any way typical of the rising generation of Americans then the title is hard to dispute. He seems to be completely unaware that when he's given taxpayer money to use for a specific purpose that he then has an obligation, both legal and moral, to use it for that purpose:

I don't know if the country's going down the drain, but the $70,000 spent on this fellow's education certainly seems to be going for nought.

Reagan's Vindication

In the last ten years thousands of rockets have been launched at Israel from Gaza. In the four days leading up to yesterday 846 rockets were fired into the country out of which 302 were intercepted by the Iron Dome antimissile system. The system is able to calibrate which incoming missiles pose a threat to populated areas and which will fall where they're unlikely to cause harm. The system then launches an interceptor missile at the dangerous rockets and ignores the others. Israeli officials say that 90 percent of the attempted interceptions have worked, thus providing life-saving protection for population centers like Tel Aviv.

Those of a certain age might remember the ridicule President Reagan took for advocating an antimissile system to protect us against Soviet ICBMs. Scoffers derided the idea that such a system would ever work, they mockingly labelled it Reagan's "Star Wars" program, but Reagan was convinced it was a way to protect human life that we could ill-afford not to develop. He was confident that the nay-sayers would be proven wrong and they were. Today "Star Wars" is a term of approbation and its understandably hard to get those who lampooned the idea in the 1980s to admit to their poor judgment.

Anyway, the Israelis are certainly glad Reagan went ahead with the R&D because the technology developed to intercept ICBMs is today being used to save lives throughout the tiny nation of Israel.

I, Pencil

Most of us take the products we use everyday for granted. We never give a moment's thought to how they came to be or how many people were involved in their production. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has taken a story by Leonard Read about the simple lead pencil and turned it into an excellent video illustrating how complex and intricate free markets are.

They're like ecosystems, and, like ecosystems, they're vulnerable to human interference, particularly to interference by a government which thinks it can somehow control some aspect of the process without disrupting the whole system.

Thanks to Mary Katherine Ham at Hot Air for posting the video.

Open Borders

A student sends along a humorous piece by Joey Vento on the plight of illegal immigrants in this country. Vento observes that:

If you cross the North Korean border illegally, you get 12 years of hard labor. If you cross the Iranian border illegally, you're detained indefinitely. Cross the Afghan boarder illegally, you get shot. Cross the border illegally in Venezuela, you're considered a spy and thrown in jail to rot.

NOW, you cross the border illegally in America, you get a job, drivers license, social security card, welfare, food stamps, credit card, subsidized rent or a loan to buy a house, free education, a lobbyist in Washington, and the right to carry your country’s flag while you protest that you don’t get enough respect.

It's funny because it's true. There's no other country in the world whose borders are as porous as ours, no other country which entitles those who cross their borders illegally such astonishing access to its citizens' wallets, and no other country which takes it more to heart than does ours when people complain that we don't do enough for the illegal aliens in our midst.

Quantum Entanglement

From time to time I've mentioned my fascination with the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement (QE) in which two particles which start out in contact with one another but are then sped at the speed of light to opposite ends of the universe, remain somehow mysteriously connected. Even though there's no conceivable way the particles can be in contact with each other nevertheless a change in one particle instantly "causes" a corresponding change in the other, as if they were somehow still joined together.

When I tell my students this I often get the feeling that they think I'm pulling their collective leg, but this phenomenon is well-known among physicists. Here's physicist Brian Greene discussing it:

All I can do when I see a video like this is paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet: There are more things in heaven and on earth than we could ever dream of. QE certainly lends credence to the view of physicist Sir James Jeans that the world looks more like a grand idea than a grand machine. In fact, it looks very much as though, at bottom, it's an idea in the mind of God. At least that might explain how one particle "knows" what's happening to the other.

Materialism and Electrical Bacteria

Rabbi Moshe Averick reports on the discovery of an amazing phenomenon that occurs at the bottom of the oceans. It turns out that certain filamentous bacteria have the ability to conduct electricity through their cells for distances of up to a centimeter. Averick comments:

In layman’s terms it means that living bacteria at the bottom of the ocean act as a network of electrical cables complete with insulation that transmit electricity over a distance of one centimeter. If these “marvelous microbes” were the size of human beings the signals would be transmitted for 12 miles. Several years ago researchers had detected electrical currents on the ocean floor but until now had no idea of their source. Science Daily reports that “they make up a kind of live electric cable that no one had ever imagined existed.” One researcher described it as “unreal and fantastic.”

A single teaspoon of mud contains at least a half mile of these living cables. The electrical currents generated by these bacteria seem to play an important role in the nutrient cycles of sea life.

Averick uses this discovery as a springboard for poking a little fun at Darwinian materialists:

When the Supreme Court of Tennessee reviewed the guilty verdict of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” (1925), Justice Chambliss noted the following statement by Dr. E.N. Reinke, Professor of Biology at Vanderbilt University, which was repeatedly referred to in the briefs of counsel for the defense:

“The theory of evolution is altogether essential to the teaching of biology....To deny the teacher of biology the use of [evolution] would make his teaching as chaotic as an attempt to teach...physics without assuming the existence of the ether.”

In hindsight, Dr. Reinke’s remarks are nothing short of comical. The theory of the luminiferous ether was abandoned by science long ago and even today physicists and historians of science get slightly red-faced when the subject comes up.

Just as the theory of an ether died a slow death among scientists and was eventually buried, so, too, Averick claims is materialism dying a slow death among philosophers. He quotes no less an authority than philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book Mind and Cosmos: Why Neo-Darwinian Materialism Is Almost Certainly Wrong:

“For a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms come to exist hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes...It seems to me that...the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported and that it flies in the face of common sense.”

When even atheists like Nagel begin to see materialism as a dead end then you know the theory is in trouble.

More War in the Middle East

The Palestinians have been goading the Israelis into war for a long time. Hundreds of rockets have been launched at Israeli civilians from sites in Gaza, and finally Israel has responded to the provocation.

First came the attack on Hamas' long-range missiles in storage in Sudan a couple of weeks ago and then came the targeted assassination of Hamas terrorist leader Ahmed Jabari on Wednesday. Jabari was responsible for numerous murders of Israeli citizens. Here's video of the attack on his vehicle:

The Israelis followed this up with precision attacks on sites where Hamas has stored missiles capable of covering distances up to 75 km. which brings most of Israel's major cities and towns within range.

The Palestinians responded with yet another missile barrage aimed at civilians, but the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted most of those missiles which posed a threat and let the rest fall harmlessly in the countryside. Nevertheless, several Israeli civilians were killed.

Whether Israel will now send ground troops into Gaza is unclear, but they're massing men and tanks on the border.

Debkafile has a story on how different the state of the Israeli military's preparation has been this time compared to their war on Hezbollah in Lebanon and operation Cast Lead in Gaza a couple of years ago. Hot Air has some good insights into this as well.

It'll be interesting to see how the U.S. and indeed the rest of the world responds. If the past is an indication there'll be calls for Israel to show "moderation" and condemnations of Israel when the Palestinian casualties start to mount. There have been no calls, however, for Hamas to stop the rocket attacks against Israeli towns and there'll probably be no condemnation of the Palestinians either.

This leads one to suspect that there's a great deal of bigotry afoot. Either the world community, including a large segment of the American media, is anti-Israel or they just don't think that the Palestinians can be held to the same standards of civilized behavior to which the Israelis are held. Or maybe it's both. It's funny how bigotry on the left is acceptable as long as it's the proper sort of bigotry.

Wish I'd Been Wrong

In a post last week I listed a number of things that I'm afraid we can expect in a second Obama term. I took criticism from some readers who thought I was unduly negative and pessimistic. It gives me no satisfaction to point out that a couple of those predictions are already starting to be fulfilled. For example:

Obamacare, according to this report, is forcing dozens of companies to lay off employees:

With 20 or so new or higher taxes set to be implemented, ranging from a $123 billion surtax on investment income, through the $20 billion medical device tax, all the way down to the $600 million executive compensation limit, Obamacare will be a nearly unbearable tax burden on the economy.

Who will pay? The middle-class workforce, of course.

The report goes on to list dozens of companies that are each laying off dozens, or even hundreds, of workers because the employers simply can't afford to carry them now that Obamacare will not be repealed.

At least the laid off employees will still have health care coverage under Obamacare. There's that to brighten their day, I suppose.

Here's a chart that illustrates what the Obama administration has in store for employers over the next ten years. It'll be amazing if after that time anyone at all has a job:



I also expressed fears in the earlier post that the president would continue his assault on our constitutional protections, particularly the first and second amendments to the Bill of Rights. I've been joined in my concerns by no less an authority on the subject than Nat Hentoff, perhaps the most famous leftist civil libertarian in the country. Hentoff is especially concerned, indeed he's obviously angry, in this article about the threat Mr. Obama's policies pose for the fifth amendment. Here's his lede:

President Barack Obama went far beyond his predecessor’s administration to become the most destructive uprooter of our Constitution in our nation’s history....

But never did I even imagine that an American president, without insuring due process in a court of law, would – as Obama does – use a kill list to target suspected terrorists for assassination. So far this list has also included three American citizens.

The secrecy with which Obama discards the Constitution to rule over us is evident in his dictatorial use of the “state secrets” privilege, which actually prevents judges from even hearing cases brought by citizens who claim their fundamental constitutional rights have been expunged by the president’s censors.

There's much in the rest of Hentoff's piece that's worth reading.

Vegetative States and Consciousness

There's a fascinating story at the BBC website about new research being done on persons in a "vegetative" state due to severe brain injury that shows that not only are some of them conscious they can even respond to questions:

It's the first time an uncommunicative, severely brain-injured patient has been able to give answers clinically relevant to their care.

Scott Routley, 39, was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine.

Vegetative patients emerge from a coma into a condition where they have periods awake, with their eyes open, but have no perception of themselves or the outside world.

Mr. Routley was injured in an automobile accident 12 years ago, and none of his physical assessments since then have shown any sign of awareness, or ability to communicate.

But the British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Owen - who led the team at the Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario - said Mr Routley was clearly not vegetative.

"Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind. We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is."

One of the questions that Owen's patients "answered" was whether they were in pain. Their MRI scans indicated that they were not. Owen was able to get some level of response from one in five severely brain-damaged patients that he tested.

It's hard to imagine what it must be like to be conscious in a body but not be able to make the body function in any way that would allow for communication with the outside world. One would think that such individuals would go insane.

On the other hand, perhaps their level of consciousness is similar to that of someone under an anesthetic like sodium pentathol. They can respond to questions but they're not aware that they're doing it.

In any case, it certainly raises a host of ethical questions about terminating someone's life when they're in a vegetative state. Was Terri Schiavo, for instance, aware of what was being done to her as she was slowly dehydrated and starved to death?

There are more interesting details on this research at the link.

Modernist's Prayer

A recent issue of First Things (subscription required) contains this prayer by Ronald Knox which pretty well sums up the conviction, or lack of it, of at least a few modern churchmen and theologians:

O God, forasmuch as without Thee
We are not enabled to doubt Thee,
Help us all by Thy grace
To convince the whole race
It knows nothing about Thee.

The prayer also seems to inadvertently give an elbow to the ribs of theistic evolutionists who affirm that God is behind the creation but who deny, despite the testimony of Romans 1:20 and Psalm 19:1, that there's any empirical evidence of this.

Sam Harris on Free Will

Atheist thinker Sam Harris has a new book out on the topic of free will in which he ostensibly chooses freely to aver that there isn't any. The logic of atheistic materialism forces one to the conclusion that if there's nothing more to us than the chemical processes that go on in our bodies, especially in our brains, then there's no room for anything which would act independently of the laws of physics and thus there's no room in the human machine for any kind of genuine freedom. Harris says in his book that:

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

Martin Cothran at Evolution News and Views directs our attention to the irony in the claim of those who hold to Harris' metaphysical persuasion:

[They insist that] their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic)....But their very stated position is that any mental state -- including their position on this issue -- is the effect of a physical, not a logical, cause.

By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if it's not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order.

And this is not only a mortal consequence for Harris, it is also problematic from the reader's perspective: If we are convinced by Harris's logic, we would have to consider this conviction as something determined not by the rational strength of his logic, but by the entirely irrational arrangement of the chemicals in our brains. They might, as Harris would have to say, coincide, but their relation would be completely arbitrary. If prior physical states are all that determine our beliefs, any one physical state is no more rational than any other. It isn't rational or irrational, it just is.

If what Harris says is true, then our assent to what we view as the rational strength of his position may appear to us to involve our choice to assent or not to assent to his ostensibly rational argument, but (again, if it is true) it cannot be any such thing, since we do not have that choice -- or any other.

I haven't read the book but I wonder if these problems have occurred to Harris. They should've because they're common objections to the position he holds, but if they have I wonder how he would choose, er, be determined to respond to them.

Why Stay?

Victor Davis Hanson, in a piece for City Journal, looks at what's become of California and asks why anyone who could leave doesn't. Most of his article is an elaboration on the reasons why many people, including himself, choose to stay - reasons that include the natural beauty of the state, family heritage, climate, and so on, but how much longer those allurements will continue to work their charm is an open question given all that's wrong:

California’s multidimensional decline — fiscal, commercial, social, and political — sometimes seems endless. The state’s fiscal problems were especially evident this past May, when Governor Jerry Brown announced an “unexpected” $16 billion annual budget shortfall. Two months later, he signed a $92 billion budget that appears balanced only if voters approve an $8.5 billion tax increase in November. According to a study published by a public policy group at Stanford University, California’s various retirement systems have amassed $500 billion in unfunded liabilities. To honor the pension and benefit contracts of current and retired public employees, state and local governments have already started to lay off workers and slash services.

Not just in its finances but almost wherever you look, the state’s vital signs are dipping. The average unemployment rate hovers above 10 percent. In the reading and math tests administered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, California students rank near the bottom of the country, though their teachers earn far more than the average American teacher does. California’s penal system is the largest in the United States, with more than 165,000 inmates. Some studies estimate that the state prisons and county jails house more than 30,000 illegal aliens at a cost of $1 billion or more each year. Speaking of which: California has the nation’s largest population of illegal aliens, on whom it spends an estimated $10 billion annually in entitlements. The illegals also deprive the Golden State’s economy of billions of dollars every year by sending remittances to Latin America.

Meanwhile, business surveys perennially rank California among the most hostile states to private enterprise, largely because of overregulation, stifling coastal zoning laws, inflated housing costs, and high tax rates. Environmental extremism has cost the state dearly: oil production has plunged 45 percent over the last 25 years, even though California’s Monterey Shale formation has an estimated 15.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Geologists estimate that 3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas sit untapped as well. Those numbers could soar with revolutionary new methods of exploration.

Between the mid-1980s and 2005, the state’s aggregate population increased by 10 million Californians, including immigrants. But that isn’t the good economic news that you might think. For one thing, 7 million of the new Californians were low-income Medicaid recipients. Further, as economist Arthur Laffer recently noted in Investor’s Business Daily, between 1992 and 2008, the number of tax-paying Californians entering California was smaller than the number leaving — 3.5 million versus 4.4 million, for a net loss of 869,000 tax filers. Those who left were wealthier than those who arrived, with average adjusted gross incomes of $44,700, versus $38,600. Losing those 869,000 filers cost California $44 billion in tax revenue over two decades, Laffer calculated.

Worst of all is that neither the legislature nor the governor has offered a serious plan to address any of these problems. Soaring public-employee costs, unfunded pensions, foundering schools, millions of illegal aliens, regulations that prevent wealth creation, an onerous tax code: the story of all the ways in which today’s Californians have squandered a rich natural and human inheritance is infuriating.

You can read Hanson's reasons for sticking it out despite these manifold dysfunctions at the link. He closes with this:

The four-part solution for California is clear: don’t raise the state’s crushing taxes any higher; reform public-employee compensation; make use of ample natural resources; and stop the flow of illegal aliens. Just focus on those four areas—as California did so well in the past—and in time, the state will return to its bounty of a few decades ago. Many of us intend to stay and see that it does.

Unfortunately, last Tuesday Californians chose to disdain Hanson's advice and voted to raise taxes on the wealthy yet again.

One reason this is important for non-Californians is that many of the policies that have plunged what used to be an economic mecca into economic and social decrepitude are similar to what Mr. Obama wishes to foist upon the rest of the nation. Higher taxes, unrestricted immigration, restricted use of natural resources, and more onerous regulations on business are all on the menu for the next four years, and unrealistic public-employee compensation is an integral part of the Democrats' plans in many other states besides California.

We can't afford it any more than California can, and if we continue to tax and spend like we have for the last 4-6 years we'll wind up like California writ large and asking ourselves why anyone who can afford to leave the U.S. doesn't.

Andrew Wilkow and Peter Schiff offer some thoughts on the unintended consequences of taxing the rich in this video:

Cashmore and Pastore on Free Will

Biologist Anthony R. Cashmore, wrote a paper a couple of years ago on the topic of free will and determinism that I think is instructive. It illustrates how determinism, materialism and naturalism entail each other. A person who holds one of these views generally (though not necessarily) holds all three. Cashmore, who is himself a naturalist, writes:

Many discussions about human behavior center around the relative importance of genes and environment, a topic often discussed in terms of nature versus nurture. In concentrating on this question of the relative importance of genes and environment, a crucial component of the debate is often missed: an individual cannot be held responsible for either his genes or his environment.

From this simple analysis, surely it follows that individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior. Yet a basic tenet of the judicial system and the way that we govern society is that we hold individuals accountable (we consider them at fault) on the assumption that people can make choices that do not simply reflect a summation of their genetic and environmental history. As de Duve has written, “If . . . neuronal events in the brain determine behavior, irrespective of whether they are conscious or unconscious, it is hard to find room for free will. But if free will does not exist, there can be no responsibility, and the structure of human societies must be revised.”

It is my belief that, as more attention is given to the mechanisms that govern human behavior, it will increasingly be seen that the concept of free will is an illusion, and the fallacy of a basic premise of the judicial system will become more apparent. Certainly, the determination of the sequence of the human genome and the assignment of function to these genes is having a dramatic effect on our understanding of the role of genetics in human behavior.

The rest of the article can be summarized in a simple syllogism: Material objects are subject to the deterministic laws of physics. There's nothing about us that's non-material. Thus, there's nothing about us that's not subject to the deterministic laws of physics.

If that much is correct then a further conclusion can be drawn: There's no such thing as a free, undetermined choice for which we could be held responsible. Our choices are simply the product of electro-chemical phenomena occurring in our brains and these are the product of our genes or our past experiences.

There's no room in the world of the materialist for a mind or soul and thus no room for free will. But, if we're determined (pardon the pun) to discard libertarian freedom, we must also discard moral responsibility and any notion that reward or punishment are ever deserved.

If we're not really in some sense free to decide between alternative courses of action, if the choice we make is determined by factors over which we have no control, then no one deserves any blame or punishment, no one deserves any praise or reward, and no one is ever morally guilty of doing anything that violates the behavioral codes of the consensus.

If, on the other hand, one does believe himself to be free then, as is argued in the following video, one may also believe that there's more to us than just the physical stuff that makes us up. Belief in metaphysical freedom entails a belief in something like a non-physical mind or soul that serves as the seat of our freedom.

Frank Pastore, a former major league pitcher who studied philosophy after his retirement from baseball and who now hosts a radio talk show, discusses the problem materialism poses for a belief in free will and vice-versa: