God and Evil

In an earlier post entitled God and Time I mentioned that despite the serious liabilities entailed by the idea that God does not have complete knowledge of the future, that is, he doesn't know what choices free beings will make in their future, it is nevertheless an attractive idea because it provides the theist with an answer to a difficult apologetic question. That question arises in the course of attempts to give a reply to the problem of evil. Let's look at that problem first and then the problematic question that it raises.

No doubt the most troubling objection to the existence of a God as traditionally construed by theists is the existence of evil in the world. Whether people are persuaded by the presence of evil that the existence of a God is unlikely or whether they employ evil as an a posteriori rationalization for the disbelief they've already embraced, it is a difficult challenge for theists and has been since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.

One thing that needs to be said about the problem is that despite its power to instill and sustain doubt, the reality of evil does not constitute a proof against God's existence. Its philosophical strength, its advocates argue, is that it makes is that it makes the existence of God unlikely.

The traditional argument takes the form of a dilemma:

1.If God is perfectly good he would want to prevent evil.

2.If God is all-powerful he would be able to prevent evil.

3.However, evil exists.

4.Therefore, either God is not perfectly good or God is not all-powerful.

In either case, God is not the God of traditional theism.

This is not a proof that God doesn't exist or that he's not all-powerful or good because it's possible to slip between the horns of the dilemma and reply that God could be both able to prevent evil and wanting to prevent evil but for some reason he chooses to permit it to occur.

Most anti-theists grant this as a theoretical possibility but, they ask, what kind of God would allow evil to exist if he could prevent it? What loving father would stand by and do nothing as his child suffers, if he could do something to stop it? No reason the theist can come up with, the skeptic argues, can justify the suffering of an innocent child. Thus it is unlikely that the world is the product of the kind of God the theists believe in.

Before we consider the classical theistic response to this challenge we should lay a bit more groundwork. First, we need to understand that to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that he can do anything at all. Rather, it is to say that God can do anything that it is logically possible to do. This means that it is beyond God's power to do anything which entails a contradiction of some sort. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it, or, it is not within his power to bring it about that you and I, or God himself, never existed. These are contradictory states of affairs and therefore logical impossibilities.

A theist might say here that God is not constrained by the laws of logic, that God really can make a square circle if he wishes, but if one wants to argue this way he has to recuse himself from arguing at all and retreat into a private mysticism where nothing much can be said about God. To abandon the constraints of logic is to put God beyond the ability of men to reason about him, or to know anything about him, because anything that one could say about God could be both true and false at the same time, which is incoherent.

The second thing we should mention is that there are two basic kinds of evil. There is evil that emerges from human volition, and there is evil which results from natural causes like disasters, disease, famine, etc. The first we may call moral evil and the latter we'll call natural evil.

Having said this, let's look at why God might allow moral evil to exist, given that it is within his power to prevent it. We'll take up the question of natural evil in a future post.

The argument that many Christian theologians have put forward goes something like this:

Part of God's essence is that he is perfect love. Love desires an object, something to lavish itself upon, something to live in a relationship with. He could have made man so that man would have no choice but to love God, but this would be about as satisfying as programming the screen saver of your computer to say "I Love You." The most satisfying relationships are those between persons who are free to both receive and give love. Thus God created persons to live in a love relationship with him, and he endowed them with the quality of freedom so that they could genuinely choose to requite his love or to reject it. This freedom is what makes us human, it makes us more than brutes, it gives us dignity. Without freedom we're little more than sophisticated robots and there's no dignity in that. Freedom is part of the imago Dei. God gives us the freedom to choose as a marvelous gift, and to the extent that we misuse that gift, to the extent we use our freedom wrongly, moral evil enters the world.

So God could prevent moral evil and wants to eliminate it, but doing so would entail depriving us of the very thing that makes us human, our free will. This would not only reduce us to automatons and destroy our humanity, it would nullify the whole purpose for which we were created in the first place, which is to live in a freely chosen love relationship with God.

Some might deride the idea that this love between God and man is worth allowing men to inflict such terrible misery upon his fellows. Whether this is so is difficult to ascertain from our vantage. We have to look at the matter sub specie aeternitatis, or from the standpoint of eternity. Surely, if this life is all there is then all human suffering is meaningless and existence is a cruel hoax for hundreds of millions of people whose lives have been filled with it. On the other hand, if this life is a relatively brief interlude between nothingness and eternity, then our temporal suffering may ultimately seem a very small price to pay for having lived it.

So, the suggestion that moral evil exists because God gave man free-will as a means of enhancing and elevating our relationship to him strikes me as very plausible. It also seems plausible that the reason God does not prevent evil is because he considers it an even greater evil to strip us of our freedom and thus of our humanity.

However, this brings us to the difficulty we mentioned at the beginning. Let us assume that it is possible to know the future. Let's assume, therefore, that God knows the future and thus knows what would happen in any world, not just this one, that he could create. Among the worlds God could have created are worlds in which people are free to choose, but in which they always choose to do right.

Imagine God before the creation. He has an image of every world he could possibly make in his mind. Because he knows everything it is possible to know (assuming that it is possible for God to know the future) he knows every choice that every being would make in every one of those worlds if that world were to actually be created. At least one of those worlds, it would seem, would contain free beings who always chose to do the right thing. They could have chosen to do wrong, but they don't. Such a world is certainly possible, after all, since Christians believe that heaven will be such a world. So the question is, would not a perfectly good and loving God have created that world instead of the world he did create where people are free but choose to do evil far too often.

Why, in other words, didn't God create the best world he possibly could? For God to have done less is to have deliberately created a world in which some people would suffer terribly, and then, if the Christian view of hell is true, spend eternity in further torment, when he could have created a world in which no one would suffer from moral evil and no one would choose hell. People would be free to choose in this world and would always choose to love God and each other. So, if that world is a possible world, one which God could have created, why didn't he create that world instead of this one? The fact that he didn't, it is alleged, is powerful reason to conclude that God is not perfectly good.

Faced with this question the theist is put in a difficult spot. He can plead that at this point our ability to understand God's ways simply fades out, or he can resort to something like Alvin Plantinga's concept of trans-world depravity, a flaw that afflicts every human in any possible world in which humans exist, and thus makes it impossible for God to create a world in which free people always choose to do right, or he can say that perhaps one of the things that is beyond God's power is to know what free beings will choose in a future which does not yet exist.

In this latter view, the world God fashioned may well be the best possible world he could have created, consonant with the existence of human freedom. Given that God desired to create a world in which humans were free, he had to accept that although he knew all possible outcomes, he didn't know for sure how man would choose to use his gift of choice. Would man use it to love or to hate? In order to have creatures to love, God took a tremendous risk. He knew the stakes and deemed them worth it.

As was said earlier, despite the advantage of providing an answer to the question why God didn't create some other world than the one he did create, there are serious difficulties with this theory and for that reason many theologians and philosophers think it to be on balance not worth the cost of what has to be given up in order to embrace it. Some have even called proponents of the "Open Future" idea heretics. I myself am open to the argument but am sympathetic to the objections of the traditionalists. Perhaps, readers can shed some light here. I invite anyone who's interested in pursuing it to contact us through our Feedback option.

The argument that evil is a consequence of human freedom, to the extent that it is persuasive, only accounts for why there is moral evil. It doesn't explain the existence of natural evils such as accidents, famines, disease, etc. These will be discussed in another post.

Dr. Strangelove

Here's interesting news. Apparently deployment of our missile defense shield has begun. Perhaps this will cause the chuckleheads in Pyongyang and Beijing to think twice before they decide to launch offensive nuclear missiles.

Of course, there are those who are skeptical about whether the missile defense system can actually perform as it's supposed to, and for all I know their doubts may be warranted, but this particular argument strikes me as silly:

The interceptors have not proven their reliability, hitting targets only five times in eight tests, said Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon. He said they failed even when using advanced information "an enemy would never give us," including when they were launched.

Coyle's objection seems to be that since this first generation of missiles can only succeed against 60% of incoming ICBMs that therefore the system is useless. I don't think he would say that if North Korea launched a ten missile attack against the West Coast and Coyle happened to be living in one of the six target cities that was spared because of the deployment of a less than perfect defense system.

In fact, though, the system doesn't have to work perfectly to be useful. Merely the uncertainty it creates in the minds of the war planners on the other side is itself a deterrent, a deterrent that one cannot put a price tag upon.

Coyle goes on to pile another strange argument atop his previous effort:

"It's not something you want to depend on in real battle," said Coyle, now a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "It's also misleading to say we don't have any defense now." If U.S. troops saw a "country building a missile, they would blow it up on the ground. They would never wait to see if it was launched."

Is Coyle saying that we're better off depending solely upon a preemptive strike than we are by having a backup option? Furthermore, haven't North Korea and China already built several dozen missiles? Did Coyle call for us to bomb them when they were being built? Should we do it now?

Moreover, these missiles are not usually constructed out in the open with bullseyes painted on them. To preemptively destroy them, assuming that were politically feasible, would require inserting ground troops, which would doubtless precipitate an all-out war. Nice alternative. What think tank is this guy with?

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip on the story.

Sharing the News

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has some interesting thoughts on Christian evangelism. Reading it, I wondered how many people accept the Gospel because someone just walked up to them and invited them to give their life to Christ? I suppose it happens and I suppose some of those commitments are enduring, but I still wonder even so if, on balance, that approach is more often seen by the "target" as insulting and simple-minded.

I think Carter is exactly right when he says that:

Our evangelistic mission, therefore, is simply to share with others the "good news" that they too can know what we know. Sometimes this will require us "sharing our faith" by telling others about our own experiences. Other times it can mean removing the "worldview underbrush" that prevents them from seeing clearly what they, by disposition, can and should know. Most times, though, it will simply mean living as if we really believed that the gospel truly is good news for believers right here, right now, and not just in the hereafter.

His tongue-in-cheek conclusion also resonates:

While I believe some forms of evangelism are ineffective if not downright counterproductive, I don't want to presume to say how God can or cannot spread the "good news." It is quite possible that He could use such methods as prayer cards or religious tracts to bring the lost to salvation and redemption. In fact, I believe that it's even possible that he might be able to use evangelical Christians to further the work of his Kingdom. Not likely, perhaps, but possible. The Lord can, after all, work miracles.

Good stuff.

Rule Britannia

While the big mucky mucks of the rest of the world's countries sit in their air conditioned offices sipping dry martinis and lamenting the abominable behavior of the hated Anglo-Saxons in Iraq, tens of thousands of people are being systematically slaughtered, starved, and tortured to death in the Sudan.

Which of the self-righteous nations so happy to scorn the despicable rube George Bush and his lacky Tony Blair is taking the lead to do something about it? Is it a Muslim nation? The French, perhaps? The Russians? The Chinese?

Has the United Nations done much more than wring their collective hands over the African unpleasantness? Has Kofi Annan given the Sudanese government an ultimatum to stop the killing or face the terrible swift sword of U.N. intervention?

If you thought that any of these answers had even a chance of being correct you suffer from terminal naivete.

The only world leaders who appear prepared to do what's necessary to save the poor wretches in Darfur are, well, guess.

Rule Britannia

While the big mucky mucks of the rest of the world's countries sit in their air conditioned offices sipping dry martinis and lamenting the abominable behavior of the hated Anglo-Saxons in Iraq, tens of thousands of people are being systematically slaughtered, starved, and tortured to death in the Sudan.

Which of the self-righteous nations so happy to scorn the despicable rube George Bush and his lacky Tony Blair is taking the lead to do something about it? Is it a Muslim nation? The French, perhaps? The Russians? The Chinese?

Has the United Nations done much more than wring their collective hands over the African unpleasantness? Has Kofi Annan given the Sudanese government an ultimatum to stop the killing or face the terrible swift sword of U.N. intervention?

If you thought that any of these answers had even a chance of being correct you suffer from terminal naivete.

The only world leaders who appear prepared to do what's necessary to save the poor wretches in Darfur are, well...guess.

The Media as Wil E. Coyote

Despite a heavy barrage of media criticism of President Bush's claim that there were connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, the president and Vice-President Cheney have remained adamant in their defense of their claims. The president seemed to back off a little but not much and the vice-president has insisted that the media criticism has been unfair on this as well as other matters.

When the preliminary 9/11 Comission staff report was released last month the media jumped all over the statement that there had been no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaida and accused the president of misleading the nation into thinking there was. Bush, however had only claimed that there were ties between the two, not that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11 or any other terrorist act against the U.S. Now the full report is out and the media has egg on their faces yet again. Like the coyote trying to snare the road runner, every stratagem they employ to discredit Bush simply backfires.

Byron York has done the pick and shovel work, digging through the voluminous product of the Commission's efforts to bring us their findings regarding Iraq's links to al Qaida. A couple of excerpts:

Now, with the release of the commission's final report, it is clear what Hamilton and Cheney were talking about. The final report details a much more extensive set of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda than the earlier staff statement. It also modifies the original "no collaborative relationship" description, now saying there was "no collaborative operational relationship" (emphasis added) between Iraq and Al Qaeda. And it suggests a significant amount of contact and communication between the regime of Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden.

The details found in the report - which in footnotes are attributed to a variety of secret U.S government intelligence documents - suggest a new way of thinking about Iraq and al Qaeda. Bin Laden had been forced out of Sudan and into Afghanistan. When it appeared he might have trouble with the Taliban, he looked to Iraq as a possible source of assistance. Iraq, at the time interested in closer ties with the Saudis, said no. Later, as his troubles with the United States grew, Saddam reconsidered, and offered bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq. This time, bin Laden turned Saddam down, not because of any conflicts with Iraq but because he thought he had a better deal in Afghanistan.

With that background in mind, the reasoning employed by American policymakers in early 2002 as they planned the next step in the war on terrorism, comes into clearer focus. The U.S. had toppled the Taliban but had not caught bin Laden and some of his top aides. Without a friendly regime in Afghanistan to protect al Qaeda, where might bin Laden and his band of terrorists go next? One possibility - a quite reasonable possibility - would be a place that had offered them haven in the past: Iraq.

For the details behind this summary, and the evidence of the connection between bin Laden and Hussein, read the whole column. No one interested in Bush's justifications for OIF should miss it.

Viewpoint is thinking of taking up a pool, the proceeds to go to the reader who correctly guesses how long it will take for the media to apologize for treating the president as if he had the integrity of a Kerry foreign policy advisor.

The Company We Keep

Go here for an outstanding piece in the New York Sun on Sandy Berger's role in the Clinton White House and national security. Some excerpts:

In other words, according to the commission report, Mr. Berger was presented with plans to take action against the threat of Al Qaeda four separate times - Spring 1998, June 1999, December 1999, and August 2000. Each time, Mr. Berger was an obstacle to action. Had he been a little less reluctant to act, a little more open to taking pre-emptive action, maybe the 2,973 killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks would be alive today.

That Senator Kerry had Mr. Berger as a campaign foreign policy adviser even before the archives scandal is enough to raise doubts about the senator's judgment.

Neither Mr.Berger nor any other American is to blame for the deaths of Americans on September 11, 2001. The moral fault lies only with the terrorists, not with the victims.With the war still on, one can't help but to ponder who might best defend the country going forward, and how.

The last sentence reminds me of Machiavelli's caution that a Prince should be judged by the quality of the people with which he surrounds himself. Three of John Kerry's foreign policy advisors, Joe Wilson, Richard Clarke, and Sandy Berger have all been shown in recent weeks to be either dishonest or lacking sound judgment, or both. As the Sun asks, what does that tell us about Kerry?

Nuclear Iran

Charles Krauthammer gives us a glimpse into what will almost certainly be one of the first matters the Bush administration will have to address if it is reelected in November: What to do about Iran.

A question Viewpoint wishes someone would ask John Kerry is what, exactly, he proposes be done about a state which supports terrorism, is exceptionally hostile to the United States and Israel, and which is, by its own admission, soon to be in possession of nuclear weapons. Kerry can't fall back on some vague mumblings about a multilateral approach and involving the U.N. since that's what the Bush administration is trying now with notable lack of success.

Kerry's realistic choices seem limited to attempting to ignite a revolution, military preemption against Iran's nuclear facilities, or doing nothing. The first doesn't seem as likely to succeed as we had hoped last spring, the second is pretty much what Kerry has been criticizing Bush for over the past two years, and the third puts the world at a risk that we simply can't accept.

Krauthammer's analysis of the problem is very good. Some excerpts:

The fact is that the war critics have nothing to offer on the single most urgent issue of our time - rogue states in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Iran instead of Iraq? The Iraq critics would have done nothing about either country. There would today be two major Islamic countries sitting on an ocean of oil, supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction - instead of one.

Two years ago there were five countries supporting terror and pursuing WMDs -- two junior-leaguers, Libya and Syria, and the axis-of-evil varsity: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The Bush administration has just eliminated two: Iraq, by direct military means, and Libya, by example and intimidation.

There may be no deus ex machina. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of the ``Great Satan'' will have both nuclear weapons and the terrorists and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive strike. Both of which, by the way, are far more likely to succeed with 146,000 American troops and highly sophisticated aircraft standing by just a few miles away - in Iraq.

Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons. If people like John Kerry had had their way in the spring of 2003 we would be in a far weaker position today to do whatever it is that needs to be done to prevent it, and if John Kerry has his way in November what needs to be done probably won't be.

God and Time

One of the questions that arises among people who enjoy talking about the philosophy of religion concerns the relationship between God and time. Does God exist in our time? If not, is He outside time altogether or does He exist in his own, supernatural, temporality? I thought of this as I read an excerpt from a book by Kitty Ferguson entitled The Fire In The Equations: Science, Religion and the Search For God. at Belief Net.

Since our time is part of the creation and coterminous with it, and since God transcends the creation, it seems likely that although God may enter our time, He is not restricted to it or constrained by it. We may deduce that our time, cosmic time, is part of creation, i.e. the cosmos, by asking this: If there were no motion and no matter to move, if there were no thing at all, could cosmic time exist? If so, what, exactly, would it be that is existing? How would its existence be discerned? Since it's difficult to imagine time apart from matter in motion, or some sort of change, it seems reasonable to suppose, although it can't be proven, that our time came into being when space, matter, and energy did. Thus scientists talk about the "space-time" universe.

If we assume, then, that God is outside our time then we might ask further whether God is cognizant of our past, present, and most intriguingly, our future. Many theists hold that the concept of omniscience imputed to God entails that God must know the future, but if so, can humans have free will if God knows what they will choose?

We can frame the question in the form of an argument:

1.God knows today that I will do X tomorrow.

2.God is omniscient and therefore cannot be mistaken.

3.Therefore, I must do X tomorrow. I am not free to do Y.

When put this way it certainly seems as if God's knowledge of the future determines my choice, since I cannot be free to do Y if God knows I am going to do X. But there is something odd about this. Certainly, if God knows I will do X then I will do X , but it doesn't follow that God's knowledge determines my choice. Might it not be that my choice determines God's knowledge?

Consider the following propositions:

1. I am free to choose X or Y tomorrow.

2. God knows today which choice I will make tomorrow.

Let's stipulate that I freely choose X tomorrow.

This set of propositions is logically coherent, that is none of them is logically incompatible with any of the others, as far as I can tell. The conclusion which follows from them is simply that:

3. God knew today that I would freely choose X tomorrow.

Put this way there's no contradiction between my free choice and God's foreknowledge. In fact, God's foreknowledge may be seen as a consequence of my choice rather than my choice being an inevitable consequence of God's foreknowledge. Since it's possible to frame the argument this way it's at least possible that there is no contradiction between God's omniscience and human free will.

This does not satisfy some who can't shake the notion that if God knows X will happen, then X has to happen. It is certainly true that if God knows X will happen then, of course, X will happen, but confusion settles in because we tend to think of God as existing within our temporal frame of reference, but because God is outside our time it could be, as I've said above, that the event X causes God's knowledge, not the other way around.

If this is difficult to grasp think about it this way: Each of us knows what other people did yesterday, but we don't think our knowledge determined their behavior. Their behavior was chosen by them yesterday and the choice was unaffected by the fact that we know about it today. So knowledge of a choice doesn't necessarily determine the choice. The problem is that knowledge of a choice prior to its occurrence is different in kind than knowledge of a choice after it has occurred. This is true of us, embedded as we are in cosmic time, but if God is outside of cosmic time, it may not be true of Him.

If God is outside of our time, past and future are all in His present. Our past and future may well be temporally the same to God. Whether He is looking "back" at the past or "forward" into the future, it's all "present" to Him. Thus, if looking "back" doesn't determine what people chose in the past, looking "forward" may not determine choices either. In other words, It's possible that the choices God sees us make determine the content of His knowledge, His knowledge doesn't determine our choices.

For some theologians, however, the whole question of God's foreknowledge is moot. They argue that to say that God is omnipotent is to say that God can do everything that it is logically possible to do, but one thing that may not be logically possible is to know with certainty today what a free agent will do tomorrow.

This view is not very popular among orthodox theists, especially evangelical Christians, among which group I count myself, because it seems to diminish to too great an extent the sovereignty of God, and it is also difficult to reconcile with Scriptural passages which manifestly foretell choices which people will make centuries later. Few Christian thinkers, particularly evangelical thinkers, wish to sacrifice their belief in the Divine inspiration of the Bible on the altar of a philosophical speculation.

Advocates of the "Open Future" hypothesis reply to these concerns by asking how God can possibly know what someone will choose to do in the future unless their behavior is somehow determined? How can God know an indeterminate future that has yet to occur? If God knows the future doesn't that imply that the future somehow exists? If so, where, exactly, does it exist?

I confess I have read no fully satisfying answer to these questions. I also confess that, although I tend to hope that God does know the future, I find a certain allure in the notion that He does not. The reason for the attractiveness of this view for me is that it offers a possible answer to one of the most vexing of apologetic questions. The troubling question arises out of attempts to reconcile God's goodness and power with the existence of evil in the world, but a discussion of that topic will have to wait a couple of days.

Kofi Fiddles, Sudanese Burn

How many have to die before the U.N. acts? The Sudan is Rwanda all over again and, as then, Kofi Annan dithers. Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to do something to stop the killing of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, but the usual suspects are thwarting our efforts once more. From the article:

One problem is strong lobbying by the Arab League and others against any kind of sanctions or military intervention. The United States has had difficulty getting a resolution adopted that would threaten a travel and arms ban within a month if Sudan did not comply.

Of course, the United States could act "unilaterally", but the domestic secular left, which cares little about the suffering of black Christians in Africa but cares enormously about rendering America militarily impotent in the world, would doubtless make this very difficult politically. Add to the political difficulties the U.N.'s hurt feelings over Iraq which evidently trump the moral imperative to do something to bring relief to the suffering in the Sudan, and you have a recipe for inaction.

"We are still dealing with Iraq. We are not out of Iraq yet," Annan said.

So there the delegates sit, arms folded, a scowl on their faces, adamantly refusing to protect tens of thousands, even millions, of starving, disease-ridden women and children because the United States grew weary of their failure to do something about the horrors occurring in Iraq (and Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda) and finally did it ourselves.

"Any discussion of intervention in Sudan would be looked at very carefully by governments and I am not sure how quickly and how enthusiastically one would get support for that initiative. We have to be very clear on that," Annan said.

In other words, not enough Christians have died yet for the secularists and Muslims in the General Assembly to regard this as worth getting serious about. In a response to a question about the possibility of military intervention to stop the butchery of thousands of African Christians by a Muslim militia called Janjaweed, Annan displays in a single sentence the complete irrelevance of the United Nations, the absurdity of the Democrat criticism that George Bush failed to get U.N. permission to depose Saddam Hussein, and his own nincompoopery:

Annan said Sudan had been warned not to [use Janjaweed members as policemen]. "It is a 'no-no' for them to induct Janjaweed into the police force,"

A "no-no"?! I guess that will make the thugs in Khartoum think twice about helping the militias commit their genocide. Next Kofi will make them sit in a corner for a time-out. No wonder Saddam was so contemptuous of U.N. resolutions. And this is the body to which the Democrats want the United States to subordinate its national sovereignty and interests?

Intelligent Design

Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost has an interesting debate going about Intelligent Design and Methodological Naturalism for those Viewpoint readers with a philosophical turn of mind who are interested in the question of how life arose. Warning: Some of the comments are pretty technical but Joe's arguments are relatively brief and easy enough to understand by a non-specialist who has read a little bit on the topic.

A Force For Evil?

According to this Fox News report 40% of Canadian youth think the U.S. is a force for evil in the world. Youth can be forgiven their stupidity, but the Canadian media and educators who instill this nonsense into callow minds cannot.

If Canada's youth wish to see real evil in action they might simply read this news report. The United Nations, determined to show the U.S. why it should withdraw from this tawdry organization forthwith, voted 156 to 6 with ten abstentions to approve a resolution calling upon Israel to heed an International Court of Justice ruling that called upon them to tear down the barrier that has reduced terrorist attacks by 90% and saved the lives of countless Israeli women and children.

Unfortunately, the spared lives are evidently of no moment to the august delegates in Manhatten, who voted, in effect, to have the murders resume. Their rationale was that the wall is working a hardship on Palestinian landowners in some regions, but one would think that if that were really their concern the U.N. could bring other resources to bear to mitigate the hardship. Instead, the U.N. prefers to salve the suffering of the Palestinians by adopting measures that can only insure that more Israelis will die.

Only Israel, the U.S., Australia, Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands voted against this odious resolution. Where was Canada? Canada was too busy teaching its youth that the U.S. is a force for evil in the world to vote against a resolution which would deprive Israel of any means of protecting its citizens from the savages who wish to blow them to bits. In a display of moral courage they abstained.

Isn't it past time that the United States washed its hands of this absurd institution? America should join together with those nations which pledge themselves to the values of equality under the law, freedom of religion, press, and speech, representative government, free and open elections, and establish an alternative to the United Nations. The U.N. is little more than a bunch of thugs masquerading as statesmen and we should no longer be party to the charade.

Wilson, Berger, and Chirac

Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief at The New Republic has some thoughts on a variety of matters including the Joe Wilson and Sandy Berger affairs as well as the attitude of the French toward their own Jewish population. About the Wilson episode he says this:

[I]n a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.

Regarding Sandy Berger he asks:

So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn't know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really.

Perhaps another question Mr. Kerry might wonder about is this: Evidently Bill Clinton knew that Berger, an important advisor to Kerry, was under investigation, so why didn't he tell Kerry about it?

On the French, Peretz notes this troubling anecdote:

[Chirac} demonstrated in an off-hand remark that, for him, neither Jews nor Muslims, for that matter, are really genuinely French: "we are witnessing racial events involving our Jewish and Muslim compatriots. ... Sometimes just simple Frenchmen are attacked." This is an ugly dichotomy. But it is not new. After the terrorist bombing of the rue Copernic synagogue on October 3, 1980, Raymond Barre, the French prime minister, alluded to this "odious act which intended to strike Jews [and] struck innocent Frenchmen." Of course, Chirac and Barre are from the center-right and right where anti-Semitism has always nested. But such views are now a staple of the oh, so enlightened left, as well. French hatred of Jews now goes wall-to-wall. And French hatred of Israel, too. A few days ago, France went into a frenzy to mobilize the countries of the European Union at the UN to vote "yes" on the General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to take down the security barrier it is building against Palestinian terror. Many fatuous reasons were mustered to support this demand. But the real reason that France and some others oppose the fence is that it works.

There's more at TNR Online.

Nukes Found in Iraq?

I don't know if this UPI story is true, but if it is it could change the entire course of the presidential campaign. It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats and the media handle this report if it is confirmed.

Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves

Several weeks ago Viewpoint suggested that the array of individuals supporting John Kerry should give others leaning in his direction pause. We wrote that:

Undecided voters who might be considering a vote for John Kerry in November should ask themselves what it is about the Massachusetts senator that has won him the support of pornographers like Howard Stern and Larry Flynt, Hollywood ditzes like Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore, raving wild men like Al Gore and Howard Dean, the Communist Chinese, North Korea, Vietnam (Hanoi), and the French. What do they all know that maybe the rest of us should?

Now we can add to this list of disreputable characters the names of Joe Wilson, a Kerry advisor, and arrant slanderer, Whoopi Goldberg, whose sleazy put downs of the president were so offensive and vile that her corporate sponsor, Slim-Fast, dropped her from its celebrity endorser list, and most recently Sandy Berger, former National Security Advisor under President Clinton and, until last night, current advisor to Senator Kerry, who purloined documents dealing with matters of national security by concealing them in his pants and socks.

Berger calls his behavior an honest mistake. He inadvertently left the archives, he claims, with documents stuffed in his socks and down his drawers. The Dems want to laugh all this off, but they would be howling in outrage had it been a Bush administration official who stole the papers. Not only does their reaction to this incident, or rather their lack of reaction, evince a deep hypocrisy in the Democrat party, it also suggests that we may infer that this sort of behavior falls within the bounds of the Democrat standards for honesty. Berger is like a shoplifter with merchandise stuffed in his socks, trying to convince the police that he inadvertently left the store with the items, that he certainly didn't intend to steal them, and the Democrats seem to be okay with that.

Rather than expressing dismay that so many of their friends and political allies seem grossly deficient in either taste or integrity, they respond to this last incident by fretting instead about the "timing" of the revelation about Berger's conduct, as if that somehow is more nefarious than the conduct itself. It's no wonder the Democrats insist that character doesn't matter for public servants. If it did, a sizable number of them would be rendered ineligible.

George Bush can take comfort that people like these hate and oppose him, because people have always despised those who are morally superior to themselves. He can take comfort that so many feel impelled to lie about him, to utter the most mean-spirited and vile slanders about him. People do this because they know that they can't merely tell the truth about the man since the truth is not going to alienate voters from him.

People often feel indicted by another man's strength of character, by his integrity. His virtue is a mirror that constantly reminds them of their own inferiority, and they detest not themselves for being less, but they detest him for being better. Their jealousy doesn't motivate them to rise to his level, but rather it motivates them to drag him down, to discredit him, ruin him.

Destroying a man is one way to exert power over him and the exercise of power is the only way some people know to compensate for the character they themselves lack. If a man is better than they, they wish to destroy him. They can't tolerate a man whose very existence condemns them. They will project their own pathologies onto him in an attempt to prove that he's not really as virtuous as he seems. Thus they accuse Bush of lying to the world about Iraq when, in fact, the only evidence that people have lied points back to them. This is a sickness, a depravity which seems to reside deep in the human heart, and it's the root of so many of our social and political ills.

Terror and Liberalism

One of the silver linings of vacationing in a Central American country during the rainy season is that there is ample time to read. Having spent the last ten days in Costa Rica where it rained fairly often I had the good fortune to have along a copy of Paul Berman's best-seller Terror and Liberalism which does an outstanding job of helping the reader understand the nature of the battle with the forces of radical Islamism in which we are currently engaged. Berman's book is interesting, easy to read, and all the more compelling because Berman himself is a man of the left who is dismayed by the reaction of most leftists, both here and in Europe, to the war against terror. He notes in his preface the irony of millions of leftists marching in the largest mass demonstrations in history two years ago in an effort to prevent the overthrow of one of the worst tyrannies of the modern age. Even more incongruous, he adds, is that deterring the U.S. from deposing Saddam Hussein was seen as "the correct stance for every true friend of the downtrodden."

Berman himself is, in his words, one of maybe fifteen or twenty people in the country who are both pro-war and left-wing, and much of his book is given to explaining how the bulk of the ideological left, which began as a champion of the poor and oppressed, came to so passionately defend the most brutal of tyrannies, not just in Iraq, but in earlier times, also in the Soviet Union and even in Nazi Germany.

Berman's argument is complex and I will scarcely be able to do it justice, but it distills to this: There is in the human heart an impulse to rebel, to rebel against God, to rebel against authority. That impulse led millions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into mass movements of rebellion, such as communism and fascism, which evolved into totalitarian tyrannies and ultimately into cults of death. He argues that this sociopathological pattern is universal and expresses itself in cultures other than the European. What we're seeing in the Muslim world is an Islamic version of the European model.

Berman traces the evolution of the Baathi and the radical Islamists, two separate but parallel expressions of the totalitarian impulse, to the writings of Muslim scholars like Sayyed Qutb in the 1950s. He shows how both of these versions of Muslim totalitarianism have followed the logic of Qutb's thinking to become mindless, irrational mass movements drenched in blood and terror, and implacably hostile to the liberal values of the West. Following the trajectory of the earlier European movements, contemporary Islam, or at least a major portion of it, has become obsessed with killing and death.

In a chapter titled Wishful Thinking Berman explains why liberalism has been so blind to the threat these murderous totalitarianisms have posed in both the past and the present. He suggests several reasons. One is that liberals simply cannot believe that millions of people could possibly choose such an irrational path. Perhaps, they convinced themselves in the 1930s, the media was lying about Hitler, or the Bolsheviks. Perhaps today the media is being duped by corporate interests, and the jihadis are really not the threat that they are being made out to be. Perhaps if we could talk with them, understand their grievances, aid them in overcoming their suffering instead of threatening them, they would gladly lay down their arms. Surely, these people don't really despise the values we cherish: individual freedom, equality under the law, tolerance, separation of church and state. Surely they are not so unreasonable as to wish to kill us just for the pleasure of killing us. And so on.

In other words, although Berman doesn't put it quite this way, the left is convinced of the truth of the secularist assumption that man does indeed live by bread alone and that if only material conditions were optimal people would behave rationally. Put another way, the left has for at least eighty years been in denial about the low appeal for most of the world's peoples of the liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and rationality. They have been in denial about the true nature of the human heart and the power of the non-rational compulsions, convictions, and obsessions which drive men all over the globe to commit genocide. Liberals, having long ago abandoned religion, cannot bring themselves to believe that evil actually exists, except perhaps in the Republican party, and cannot understand the hold that religious beliefs and motivations have on millions of Muslims.

What is worse, in my view, is that liberals tend to see the real enemy as anyone who possesses a realistic understanding of the nature of those who wish to do us harm and who are willing to fight to prevent it. This behavior horrifies the left because they are like the fellow in school who lives in fear of the tougher kids and who resents, even hates, any of his peers whom he thinks might provoke the bullies to start throwing their weight around. Like herd animals resigned to having the wolves now and then take a few of their number from the margins of the flock, they hope that by making themselves inconspicuous the predators will leave them alone.

If that doesn't work perhaps the wolves can be appeased somehow. Maybe if we disarmed and showed them we mean them no harm their hatred for us would be mollified. The left, in its naivet�, is completely oblivious to the utter contempt this response engenders in the mind of the wolf. The wolf simply sees all of it for what it is, an acknowledgement of weakness and a confirmation of the rightness of their cause and their strategy.

Bush and Blair have refused to go along with this politics of fear, instead they have swatted the Islamist hornets' nest with a stick, and the left at home and abroad loathes them for it. "Look what you've done!" they protest, "Now the wolves will really hate us!" In a strange, neurotic twist of an old aphorism, the left declares the enemy of my enemy to be my enemy. Thus it despises anyone who actively opposes the Islamist cult of death. It despises anyone who would seek to liberate millions of people from savage oppression if by doing so we risk offending those whose sole ambition in this life is to destroy America.

The Jews, the Americans, and anyone else they think the Islamists hate, the left also hates in the hope of ingratiating themselves with those who are eager to slaughter them. The left, Berman writes, has undergone a strange transformation. "They had begun [In the 19th century] as defenders of liberal values and human rights and they evolved into defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition and mass murder." They started as liberal democrats and themselves became allies and de facto sympathizers with fascists.

Berman gives many examples of this phenomenon, but one in particular stands out. He describes an episode at the 2002 Socialist Scholars Conference in New York where a substantial crowd listened to an Egyptian novelist defend a female Palestinian suicide bomber who had recently committed mass murder by blowing herself up in a crowd. When the novelist was finished praising the young woman the audience burst into applause. Applause for such a horrible crime is a symptom of a deep-seated sickness of the soul, but as Berman, citing Camus, points out, the left has always had a strange fascination with, and attraction for, violence, at least as long as it is not directed at them.

Berman's book is a powerful indictment of the modern left's hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy as well as a lucid presentation of the historical evolution of radical Islam. I urge anyone who is interested in trying to gain a better grasp of either of these to read the book in its entirety. Every page is enlightening, although his gratuitous plinking at George Bush at the end of the book is an unfortunate and transparent attempt to reaffirm his leftist bona fides. Nevertheless, both conservatives and liberals will profit from reading this work. You can obtain a copy of Terror and Liberalism by contacting our good friends at Hearts and Minds Bookstore here.

The Good News Continues

Anyone who would like an update on the progress the new Iraq is making on its road to viable nationhood should check out the very comprehensive research done by Chrenkoff, an Australian blogger who has been posting updates on the good news from Iraq every two weeks for several months now. Chrenkoff's labors, he tells us, are motivated mostly by frustration with a press that seems to find only bad news to be newsworthy. His reporting is yet another example of the kind of analysis that the mainstream press should be providing but chooses not to, evidently preferring to continue its slide into irrelevancy.

NorthWest Flight 327 Update

Annie Jacobsen has an update on her report Viewpoint recommended to its readers two days ago. Apparently the national media are on to the story, but nothing has come out yet.

For those who might have missed it, Jacobsen was on a NorthWest Airlines flight that was also occupied by fourteen Syrian men whose behavior onboard raised very deep concerns and considerable fear. Jacobsen's description is riveting and if you haven't read it, you should. You can find it here.

Some commentators have dismissed Jacobsen's experience as nothing to worry about, but, as Jacobsen reports in the current update, a number of airline officials and pilots say that there is a strong likelihood that the Syrian passengers were making a terrorist practice run.

Read both columns for yourself and let us know what you think.

Liar, liar...

Yesterday Viewpoint carried a piece based on a Fox News story supporting the veracity of president Bush's claims that Iraq had been seeking uranium ore from Niger for use in nuclear weapons production and suggesting that Joe Wilson, who had been vociferously accusing Bush of lying about this, had himself been lying.

Mark Steyn has a fine piece on Wilson's prevarications in the Chicago Sun Times, and Jonah Goldberg at National Review refutes a couple of Wilson's lame attempts to defend himself in the Washington Post.

The important question is how Kerry will respond to this development. Kerry's campaign sponsers Wilson's web site and Wilson has been campaigning with Kerry, calling Bush a liar at Kerry campaign events. Doesn't Kerry owe Bush an apology?

Steyn writes that this isn't going to happen. Wilson was useful in discrediting Bush, whether his allegations were truthful or not, and now that his usefulness has expired he will be quietly allowed to fade into the oblivion of media amnesia.

Steyn puts it this way:

It would be nice to hear his media boosters howling en masse, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" But Joe Wilson's already slipping down the old media memory hole. He served his purpose - he damaged Bush, he tainted the liberation of Iraq - and yes, by the time you read this the Kerry campaign may well have pulled the plug on his Web site, and Salon magazine's luxury cruise will probably have to find another headline speaker, and he won't be doing Tim Russert again any time soon. But what matters to the media and to Senator Kerry is that he helped the cause of (to quote his book title) The Politics Of Truth, and if it takes a serial liar to do that, so be it.

Read the whole piece. It's worth it.

Nukes

NewsMax.Com has a couple of sobering reports today. The first claims that it is a widely shared opinion in Washington that an Israeli airstrike/ special operations effort is in the works for Iran's nuclear facilities. The only question seems to be whether it will be timed to take place before or after the November election. The article offers some speculation as to how Iran might retaliate should such an attack occur.

The second piece is even more disturbing. Apparently there is some evidence that al Qaida has obtained as many as ten suitcase-type nuclear weapons each powerful enough to level half of Manhatten. There is concern that at least some of these may have been smuggled into the U.S. with the intention of detonating them in either Boston or New York during the political conventions soon to be held in those cities.

Let us pray to God that our Homeland Security Department is better than its critics have been telling us.