Backsliding Philosopher

Antony Flew, the renown British philosopher and outspoken atheist, has publicly embraced deism. There are several things interesting about this. First, Flew is 81 years old which is pretty far along to be undergoing a world-view shift. Second, he has gone from atheism to deism which is the reverse of the normal flow of traffic, and third, he seems to have been influenced to change his mind by the overwhelming evidence of design in the universe and the difficulty of trying to imagine a naturalistic origin of life:

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, Has Science Discovered God?

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

Huh. No wonder secularists are fighting so hard to keep Intelligent Design out of public schools. Bad enough that an 81 year-old philosopher at the end of his career is astonished by the remarkable, awe-inspiring fine-tuning of the universe and the specified complexity of living cells. We certainly don't want to be exposing impressionable youngsters to the possibility that there's more at work here than just atoms spinning aimlessly in the void.

Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife.

Well, that's a relief to atheists, we assume, although one wonders what comfort they can take in one of their most prominent members rejecting their most fundamental conviction, i.e. that there is no God, minimal or otherwise.

The Python and the Rat

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail discusses the strategic importance of our military presence in Iraq> His key points:

Invading Iraq also accomplished another very important objective: establishing a beachhead in the Middle East. The significance of Iraq in the War on Terror is twofold. The establishment of democracy in the heart of the Middle East places political pressure on neighboring states to reform from within. Iraq can serve as a base of operations against terror sponsoring states of Syria and Iran if diplomatic and political options fail, as well a base of operations against Saudi Arabia if it is overtaken by an Islamist revolution or is complicit in another terrorist attack.

As mentioned yesterday in A New Containment, the occupation of Iraq has completed the encirclement of Saudi Arabia. A look at the map of the Middle East will show that an American presence in Iraq also has the same effect on Syria and Iran. With American forces in Iraq, the line of communications between Syria and Iran has been severed. Syria is now surrounded by nations with an American military presence, and none of them are particularly friendly; Turkey to the north, Israel to the south, Jordan and Iraq to the east, and the United States Navy's 6th Fleet to the West in the Mediterranean.

Iran faces a similar military problem, with Turkey, Iraq and Kuwait to the west, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, the Gulf states and the 3rd and 5th Fleets to the south. The north remains open via Turkmenistan and the Caucasus states, however neither of these nations is likely to be supportive of Iran in the event of an American led military action. Iraq, Afghanistan and the Caucasuses may also provide another level of unconventional containment against Iran, as there are plans to host ground based anti ballistic missile systems to defend against Iran's nuclear missile program in the event the program is not stopped.

It is no accident that Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia have been divided and surrounded in this manner. These nations have been ringed with a series of logistical bases, naval, air and special operations bases and prepositioned military equipment. These facilities provide the support and logistical chain needed in the event that military operations must be executed against these nations from the spearhead in Iraq. Without Iraq, threat of invasion into Iran was limited to amphibious assault from Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf. While not militarily impossible, an amphibious assault would require enormous resources and increase the risk to Naval assets and the assault force. The American ground presence in Iraq provides for increased flexibility and safety if future operations are required.

The American military is slowly and inexorably, like an encoiling python, wrapping itself around the chief Middle-East malefactors and will soon, perhaps, begin to squeeze the life out of the rats who foment hatred and subsidize terror in these savage lands. The squeeze will probably not be anything so noisy as overt military action, but rather a silent and subtle constriction of the ability of the thugs to brutalize their people. As the masses of Syria and Iran see the fruits of freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq they will ardently wish the same for themselves.

The presence of the American military so close to their borders will give pause to those tyrants who might otherwise counsel suppression of the people through armed force. They will find themselves between a rock and a hard place, unwilling to yield to the demands of the pro-democracy populace and unable to suppress their protests without risking a punishing blow from the American air force or a special ops surgical strike against their nuclear facilities. Let's hope that the Mullahs in Tehran and the Baathists in Damascus fall victim to the popular will before any serious application of American power is warranted.

Random Act of Kindness

Would you like to do something truly helpful and kind this Christmas season for the young men and women who've suffered wounds in the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq? Hugh Hewitt has a great suggestion:

The number ONE request at Walter Reed hospital is phone cards. The government doesn't pay long distance phone charges and these wounded soldiers are rationing their calls home. Many will be there throughout the holidays.

Walmart has good prices on AT&T cards, Sam's Club is even better, if you are a member. Send phone cards of any amount to:

Medical Family Assistance Center

Walter Reed Medical Center

6900 Georgia Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20307-5001

They say they need an "endless" supply of these -- any amount, even $5, is greatly appreciated.

We think this is a wonderful idea and we hope that our readers do, too.

More Troops, Please

Gregory Djerejian at The Belgravia Dispatch argues that we just don't have enough troops in Iraq to do the job we have to do as effectively as we could be doing it. Part of his argument is this:

Yes, we are busier reacting to the insurgents then proactively stamping them out via overwhelming force. Because we don't have enough resources on the ground to do so. Kerry would have, in all likelihood, drawn-down our force posture in Iraq. Bush, at least, has increased it. But extending tours is devastating to morale. And relying so heavily on relatively inexperienced Guard and Reserve units is far from ideal. Taking Fallujah but allowing insurgents to flee to parts south of Baghdad (because we didn't have enough troops to blanket both areas simultaneously) is evocative of what McCain is getting at when he says we are in something of a "reactive" posture.

We took the fight to the enemy in Fallujah, yes. But not having enough troops to keep the bad guys who escaped from getting to new sanctuaries has mitigated the success of the Fallujah offensive. It was an important victory, to be sure. But not an overwhelming one. Put differently, it's not that we are losing so much as we aren't decisively winning. If such a situation is allowed to fester for too long, of course, there will be a tipping point. We aren't there yet. But it's clear that, going into a period of heightened violence with elections looming, it wouldn't hurt (to say the least) if we could have more non-Guard, non-Reserve troops on the ground. Grown-ups like Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, and John McCain get this. We must hope the President does too.

But I'm concerned. The lack of accountability at the Pentagon is a somewhat worrisome sign. But the Kerry alternative was even bleaker. So here we are. Who will have the courage to say what is so obvious and act on it? Our military is too small for the tasks it currently confronts. We are simply too stretched.

The mystery to us is why there is so much resistance in the White House to sending more troops to Iraq. The opinion that there are too few seems almost universal. Everyone seems to share it except Don Rumsfeld and George Bush, the only two who matter. Why can't the troops stationed in Germany, or South Korea, or Okinawa, or wherever be sent to Iraq? We never seem to get any answer to this question except a vague demurral that they're not needed. Isn't it better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them?

American Natalism

David Brooks offers a fascinating account of natalism in the U.S.A. By this he means the trend among many families to actually wish to produce and cherish children. It is, to be sure, an odd sociological development in our narcissistic times, but evidently there are substantial numbers of folk out there, mostly in red states, who actually embrace this way of life. Here's how Brooks describes them:

They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.

You can see surprising political correlations. As Steve Sailer pointed out in The American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

In The New Republic Online, Joel Kotkin and William Frey observe, "Democrats swept the largely childless cities - true blue locales like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston and Manhattan have the lowest percentages of children in the nation - but generally had poor showings in those places where families are settling down, notably the Sun Belt cities, exurbs and outer suburbs of older metropolitan areas."

Natalists are associated with red America, but they're not launching a jihad. The differences between them and people on the other side of the cultural or political divide are differences of degree, not kind. Like most Americans, but perhaps more anxiously, they try to shepherd their kids through supermarket checkouts lined with screaming Cosmo or Maxim cover lines. Like most Americans, but maybe more so, they suspect that we won't solve our social problems or see improvements in our schools as long as many kids are growing up in barely functioning families.

Like most Americans, and maybe more so because they tend to marry earlier, they find themselves confronting the consequences of divorce. Like most Americans, they wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat.

What they cherish, like most Americans, is the self-sacrificial love shown by parents. People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war.

There's much more about this strange and exotic species of American in Brooks' essay. Although Brooks doesn't mention it, there is implicit in his column a real danger that if this trend catches on, all of the good work of the radical feminists over the last thirty years in persuading women that children are an encumbrance will unravel. Perhaps it is time to send out the call to once again, uh, man the barricades.

Imposing Our Values

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has catalogued reaction by Arabs throughout the Middle East to the Global Antisemitism Review Act of 2004 signed by President Bush in October. Under this act, the U.S. will "continue to strongly support efforts to combat antisemitism worldwide through bilateral relationships and interaction with international organizations such as the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union, and the United Nations." In addition, the State Department is directed to appoint a special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism around the world.

MEMRI notes that the preface to the law states that it has been observed that "acts of antisemitism in countries throughout the world, including some of the world's strongest democracies, have increased significantly in frequency and scope over the last several years, and the sharp rise in antisemitic violence has caused international organizations ... to elevate and bring renewed focus to the issue." So the act is not singling out Arab nations for censure.

The MEMRI summary goes on to explain that:

According to the act, by mid-November 2004 a one-time report on acts of antisemitism around the world, and on the actions taken by the respective governments to counter these acts, is to be submitted to the Senate and to the House of Representatives. Further, a section on antisemitism is henceforth to be added to the annual U.S. State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices and annual reports on International Religious Freedom; this section is to include "a description of the nature and extent of acts of antisemitism and antisemitic incitement that occurred during the preceding year, including descriptions of a) acts of physical violence against or acts of harassment against Jewish people, and acts of violence against or vandalism of Jewish community institutions, including schools, synagogues, and cemeteries; b) instances of propaganda in government and non-government media that attempt to justify or promote racial hatred or incite acts of violence against Jewish people; c) the actions, if any, taken by the government of the country to respond to such violence and attacks or to eliminate such propaganda or incitement; d) the actions taken by such government to enact and enforce laws relating to the protection of the right to religious freedom of Jewish people; and e) the efforts of such government to promote anti-bias and tolerance education."

As expected Arab reaction was largely, but not entirely, unfavorable. Typical of the critics is Egyptian journalist Hassan Abu Taleb, editor of the Arab Strategic Report, who criticized the act in the Saudi daily Al-Watan, claiming that the U.S. is trying to force its values upon the world:

"This is not the first time that the American legislative authority has set itself up as the legislative authority of the entire world. It is forcing its patronage on the world, and showing particular perceptions that stem from the distinct American experience, which it is trying to force on the rest of the countries....It is acting to oblige national governments to accept [these perceptions] as if national sovereignty were meaningless, and treats these national governments as if they are only local governments in an American state."

"We have seen this behavior in the past, in the American law on religious freedom in the world. This law assumes that the situation of religions across the world is like the American model, where anyone can establish a religion as he pleases...without addressing the fact that there are sacred monotheistic religions that must not be harmed in any way, and anyone who is not a member of them and does not believe in them is forbidden from expressing an opinion on them...."

There you have it. America passes a law that calls for monitoring and publicizing acts of antisemitic violence and hatred, and some Muslims interpret this as an assault on Islam. Islam, the esteemed editor of the Arab Strategic Report suggests, should be immune from criticism when it announces its fatwahs and imprecations upon the Jews, when it proclaims that the Jews must be killed wherever they are found, and that they must ultimately be driven out of Palestine.

Abu Taleb complains that America is seeking to force its values upon the rest of the world. Let's hope he's right.

Iraq the Vote

How do Iraqi Shi'a feel about the pending election? The Washington Post has this report on how Shi'a leaders are trying to educate and mobilize the vote. Here are a few excerpts:

As Iraq's first nationwide elections in more than a generation near, Hamra and other Shiite clergy, perhaps the country's most powerful institution, have led an unprecedented mobilization of the Shiite majority population through a vast array of mosques, community centers, foundations and networks of hundreds of prayer leaders, students and allied laypeople. The campaign has become so pitched that many Iraqis may have a better idea of Sistani's view of the election than what the election itself will decide.

The clergy are advocating elections 100 percent," said Sami Shamousi, the prayer leader of a Shiite community center in downtown Baghdad. "It has become a religious responsibility for us to encourage participation in the elections." At his worship hall, he has distributed about 200 leaflets printed by the Ghadir Foundation, a community organization that is based in the sprawling slum of Sadr City and is loosely supervised by Sistani and other senior ayatollahs. Stacks of posters with Sistani's portrait were piled in dimly lit rooms, darkened by an electrical outage. On shelves were bundles of leaflets and pamphlets that present questions and answers about the vote: "What are we electing?" and "What does proportional representation mean?"

In a second-floor office sat Sayyid Hashem Awadi, 38, a gaunt cleric in black turban and gray gown who directs the foundation's staff of 30. For 65 days, he said he had been too busy to return to his home in Najaf. "This stage is too critical," he said. "We're afraid of failure."

On his desk was an Arabic-language pamphlet on civil society, a phrase that usually describes a vibrant give-and-take between citizens and their government. The pamphlet, printed by his foundation and emblazoned with a map of Iraq, notes the term was imported from the West. But it adds, "In reality, the crises sweeping our societies force us to seek help though other people's experiences."

Awadi, whose speech shifts effortlessly from Western thought to Islamic principle, nodded his head in agreement. Iraq, he said, was long a militarized society, where in Hussein's days "you either obeyed orders or you are killed." Awadi's vision was a society in which opinions were respected and disputes were "not a reason for killing each other." The way to create that society was through the elections in January, he said, a process in which people's opinions would be respected.

"It's a matter of the people's choice," he said. "What do the people want?"

"Our job and our task is to explain these things," the young cleric went on, raising his voice over the cascading sound of the traffic jam that poured through his window. "There are many questions in the minds of the people."

The Shi'a, of course, are a majority in Iraq and will probably dominate the new parliament, so their enthusiasm is understandable. It'll be interesting to see how they handle the power they will acquire after having been oppressed for so long by the Sunni minority.

Constitutional Hand-Me-Down

A wit suggests that we can save the Iraqis a lot of trouble as they embark upon the task of drafting a constitution. He asks, "Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore."

A friend e-mails to tell us that the real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse is that you cannot post "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not bear false witness" in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.

Lose, Lose For Vlad

According to a recent article in The Weekly Standard Putin loses no matter who wins in the Ukraine. Interesting analysis.

Regrets

Our apologies to those readers who tried without success to access Viewpoint this afternoon. We regret the world-wide panic which doubtless ensued when millions found themselves unable to receive their daily dose of wit and wisdom. An electrical storm in North Carolina knocked out our server until Bill was able to administer first aid.

The Power of the Dollar

Those who might be looking for charitable organizations to which they might contribute this Christmas season, or places to do their Christmas shopping, might find this article at Religious News Service helpful. Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, has eliminated the United Way from his gift list and Target stores from his shopping spots. He explains that his decision to stop giving to United Way is due to the charity's refusal to fund the Boy Scouts of America while openly supporting numerous pro-homosexual groups with its money. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"I don't know why people still give to United Way," Knight says. He contends that people are already giving to government bureaucrats by paying taxes, so he asks, "why would you give to a group of private bureaucrats who have decided as a group that the Boy Scouts are worthy of being kicked out of various chapters across the country."

The Scouts had been a long-time beneficiary of United Way funding, until pressure from the homosexual community led to the BSA groups nationwide being cut out because their national organization promotes faith and moral values and prohibits homosexuals from serving as scoutmasters. Since then, at least 50 United Way chapters across the U.S. have excluded the Boy Scouts from a share of their fund-raising drives, claiming the BSA's Christian values are discriminatory.

But it is the apparent discrimination against the Scouts by the United Way that has angered Knight. Although not all the nation's United Way chapters have severed ties with the BSA, he points out that "the national headquarters has done nothing to stop the trend." Meanwhile, a major portion of the money the charity collects is being given to pro-homosexual groups.

[T]he United Way is not the only major U.S. organization that is drawing the pro-family leader's ire. In a recent interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he mentioned the recent announcement by Target that the retailer would not be allowing non-profit groups to solicit outside its stores this year. This means the familiar Salvation Army bell ringers will not be able to set up their kettles and collect donations at Target locations this shopping season.

Knight feels people of faith should be outraged over the retailer's actions. "Millions of Christians give Target millions of dollars," he says, "and what have they gotten from Target in return? A lump of coal. I think they ought to be ashamed of themselves, and I think consumers ought to take this into account when they do their Christmas shopping."

"One Salvation Army officer said to me that the Target money that's raised in his community represents 75 percent of the income that he has in that community," said Major George Hood, a spokesman for Salvation Army. "When you begin to strip budgets of 75 percent of a revenue stream, it means that some very difficult decisions will have to be made in those local communities about what they will be able to do during the holidays with families, and what they will be able to do all year long once the Christmas season is over."

Knight is certainly correct in assuming that if people are going to effect change in our society we have to do more than bemoan the cultural deterioration we are witnessing and actually use what tools we have to bring pressure to bear on those who would hasten the slide. One of those tools, perhaps the most effective, is how we spend our money.

Maybe it would be instructive, not only for United Way and Target, but also for those other charities and businesses which are looking on, to see how much of an impact popular dissatisfaction makes at Target's cash registers and United Way's mailbox. If Target takes a hit this year, you can bet that the Salvation Army will be welcome at their competitor's stores and will probably be back at Target next year. As for the United Way, who needs them? It's as easy, and more efficient, to write a check directly to the recipient as it is to go through the middle man.

Update on the Fight Against Cancer

Here's some good news from the front of the war on cancer, specifically Leukemia. Leukemia occurs as a result of blood cells, usually white blood cells, mutating and reproducing out of control and crowding other cells to the point that they can't function properly. Treatment often consists of using a drug called Gleevec which binds with an enzyme in cancerous cells thereby interfering with their growth and proliferation. Unfortunately, some of the cancerous leukocytes mutate so fast that the Gleevec can't wipe them out.

Now a new drug has been developed which is able to attach to many of the cells that Gleevec misses:

The new drug is being tested in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia, which affects about 4,400 Americans a year and 10,000 people around the world. The drug is known by its experimental name BMS-354825. During the trial, also financed by Bristol-Myers, 31 of 36 patients with advanced CML who had not been helped by Gleevec had a complete hematologic response, meaning their bodies stopped producing leukemia cells.

This is a good illustration of why government must not take the profit out of drug R&D by imposing onerous regulations and unreasonable caps. Companies like Bristol-Myers have to have the economic incentive to create these products or else they'll simply stop working on them. It would be nice if we lived in a world where everyone was motivated by love and research had no cost associated with it, but we don't. So perhaps we can live in a world where lawyers can't sue drug manufacturers out of business or cause the manufacturer's insurance premiums to go so high that the average person can't buy the drugs or can't buy their own insurance to pay for the drugs.

Can God Do Anything At All?

Evangelical Outpost points us to a blog called Prosthesis where the question whether God can do the logically impossible is entertained. The answer, apparently, is yes and no.

Dooyeweerdians answer the question "Can God do the illogical?" with "Yes and No." It depends on what is meant by the question. If the question means, "Is it logically possible for God to do the illogical?" then we could just say that that sentence has no meaning. It is like asking if God could create a circle that was so blue that it becomes a square. The Dooyeweerdian says that God created the laws of logic for His creation.

[B]ecause the laws of logic set the limits for what we can conceive, even if God did do the logically impossible, we would not be able to conceive of it. Because God is accommodating to us and because doing the logically impossible would have absolutely no meaning to us....the answer is "No."

However....the question "Can God do the illogical?" might also [be phrased] "might God have made the laws of possibility other than what they are?" The answer to this is "Yes." Since the laws of logic were created for this creation, there isn't any reason to believe that God "could" not have created differently.

All this is based upon the assumption that God created the laws of logic which are therefore contingent upon Him and which He can therefore transcend. However, were He to do so, we could not discern what was happening since we cannot conceptualize outside the framework provided by those laws and would be unaware of any phenomena occurring extra-logically. So God can transcend logic, but we couldn't know He was doing it.

What if the laws of logic are not discretionary, however, but rather are ingrained, like Love and Goodness, into the very nature of God? What if logical laws, like the moral law, are infused into the created order such that any world God creates would be governed by the same logical principles? If God suffuses the creation with his own nature then the laws of logic could not be other than what they are, nor can God violate them without somehow transcending His own nature. It might, then, be quite impossible for God to create a square circle or to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it.

Theologians who maintain that logic is a contingent set of rules created by God generally wish to hold on to a very high view of omnipotence. They wish to be able to say that there are no limits of any kind constraining what God can do. This may be the case, but if God is the sort of Being who can do anything at all theology would seem to be pointless. After all, how can one talk about whether God exists when one of His attributes would be that He can both be and not be at the same time?

Freedom is on the March

William Kristol writes in The Weekly Standard that American success in Iraq is and will continue to ramify all across the Middle East and the Arab world:

The sounds one hears emanating from the Arab Middle East are the sounds, faint but unmistakable, of the ice cracking. Though long suppressed and successfully repressed, demands for liberal reform and claims of the right to self-government seem to be on the verge of breaking through in that difficult region.

The key to turning these random sounds of discontent into the beginnings of a symphony of self-government is, of course, success in Iraq. Here, the last month's news--the mainstream media to the contrary notwithstanding--is promising. Bush's reelection victory; the successful offensive in Falluja and the failure of the "Sunni street" to rise up in outrage; the inability of both the terrorists and antidemocratic political forces to deter the Iraqi and American governments from moving ahead with the January 30 elections; the president's willingness to increase U.S. troop levels, and his commitment to victory--all of this enables one to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects in Iraq.

And if Iraq goes well, the allegedly "utopian" and "Wilsonian" dreams of fundamental change in the broader Middle East won't look so far-fetched. Failure in Iraq, it's widely recognized, would be an utter disaster. What's less widely recognized is that the rewards of victory could be considerable. The most obvious and tangible benefits would of course be for the Iraqi people, and secondarily for American geopolitical credibility. But the indirect effects in the Middle East should not be underestimated.

If the Iraqi experiment with democracy is successful what will be the consequences in Iran? Iran is a Shi'a nation living under the cruel dictatorship of the Shi'a mullahs. What will the Iranian masses think and do if and when they see their next door Shi'a brethren breathing in the bracing air of freedom? The very prospect gives the mullahs anxiety attacks. This is why we are witnessing the paradox of Iranian Shi'a assisting the Sunni and Baathist insurgents, who were instrumental in killing a million Iranians in the 1980s, fight against Shi'a Iraqis. The Iranian oppressors are already nervous that there is a free Afghanistan on one border. Place a free Iraq on the other and the chances that they would be able to sustain their crushing theocracy would diminish to almost zero.

Moreover, if Iran liberalizes, Syria will be politically and militarily isolated, and the Baathists there would doubtless be overthrown by a people sick of their cruelty and corruption. A more liberal Saudi Arabia and Egypt would then follow almost inevitably. Freedom, as the President likes to say, is on the march. The despots, tyrants, and other losers know this, and that's why they're fighting with all they have to stop it.

It all hinges on American will in Iraq, but if we are successful, and we will be if we stick with it, the world will be transformed.

A Milestone

Today Viewpoint passed the 10,000 hit mark on our traffic counter. This is a very gratifying milestone for us, and Bill and I wish to thank all of our readers for visiting with us and for linking us to your friends. We started this blog last May having no idea how it would fare and have been both surprised and gratified in equal measure with the response.

We know that some of the big blogs get 10,000 hits in a day so we have plenty of room for growth, and we're going to keep working to make our site worth visiting. It's our ambition to post something worth reading every day and we're delighted that so many of you apparently feel that we're succeeding.

Your support means a lot to us and so we extend our sincere thanks to each of you.

Bill and Dick

'Tis the Season

" 'Tis the season," Richard Neuhaus writes in First Things (subscription required), "to once again complain about the season," and so it is. Neuhaus has in mind specifically complaints about the consumerization and secularization of Christmas which are indeed at once both tedious and moronic. But there's another aspect of the Christmas season which has become as wearisome as it is dependable - the debunking of the Christmas story. It is fashionable in certain quarters to point out this or that difficulty with the Biblical record in order to justify the sneers of urban sophisticates and to discredit the celebrations of those dopey Christians. Rather than focus on the significance of the incarnation of a transcendent God, why He did it and what it means for us today, we're treated instead every Christmas to the semi-scholarly pontifications of journalists and academics who are convinced that it didn't really happen.

Sometimes efforts to cast a shadow over a particular Christian tradition like Christmas are more subtle than others. John Meacham of Newsweek authors an account of the debate over the historicity of the events surrounding Christ's birth which is more respectful of the tradition than some others, but he still seems to make assumptions that irritate.

He seems to assume, for example, that if an event, like the virgin birth, is an article of faith then that excludes it from being historical fact. Meacham states that:

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the virginal conception is not a fact but an article of faith, there are other explanations for Matthew's and Luke's Nativity accounts.

This sounds as if Meacham believes that the virgin birth can only be one or the other, fact or article of faith, but there's no obvious reason why Christians cannot believe something occurred which did, in fact, occur. Faith which is not a belief in facts is delusion.

He also writes throughout the piece as if what Matthew and Luke were doing in writing their accounts of Jesus' life was composing a good story rather than compiling accurate history. They were concerned, he implies, with presenting a narrative that would make Jesus appear divine in order to persuade people to embrace the new religion begun by his followers. Here are a few examples:

By asserting Mary's virginity, Matthew and Luke are taking the device of the miraculous conception farther than any other Jewish writer had before.

Matthew portrays Mary and Joseph as residents of Bethlehem who were later forced to move north to Nazareth. With a keen dramatic sense, he also adds two stories evoking the memory of God's deliverance ....

Luke's conundrum is just the opposite of Matthew's: how to get Mary and Joseph, who in his Gospel were living in Nazareth in the north, down to Bethlehem in the south.

Setting Jesus' birth at a moment when the princes of this world are exerting temporal power over the people is a deft device....

This is a dangerous way to look at the Gospels for if it is true that the writers were more concerned with salesmanship than historical accuracy then nothing in the Gospels is reliable, and if that's the case Christianity is worthless. There is, however, no reason to accept the view that the Evangelists weren't trying to faithfully record history except the a priori assumption by some scholars that the events they chronicle never really happened.

Meacham also offers arguments from some scholars which are embarrassingly fallacious. An example is this:

Where did the details-of miraculous conception, of birth in Bethlehem, of stars in the sky, shepherds in the night and wise men on a journey-come from? Apparently not from Jesus. John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and professor at Notre Dame, the author of a monumental series, "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus," points out that there is no convincing evidence Jesus himself ever spoke of his birth, and neither Mary nor Joseph (who is not a figure in the years of Jesus' public life) appears to have been a direct source.

Meier's dismissal of Jesus as a source is a fallacy logicians call an argument from silence. Because the Gospels don't mention Jesus talking about the circumstances surrounding his birth, the reasoning goes, it's therefore safe to assume that he's not the source of this information. This is silly.

Moreover, how Meier can conclude that Mary is unlikely to have been a direct source is not explained, but one would certainly like to know why she should be ruled out. She was probably in her late teens when Jesus was born and thus in her late forties when he died. She may well have lived another thirty years or more after his death and would have had ample opportunity to discuss with others her memories of Jesus' conception, birth, and childhood. Why discount her?

Meacham finds it strange that there's not more made of the virgin birth in the New Testament:

If the virginal conception were a historical fact...it is somewhat odd that there is no memory of it recorded in the Gospel accounts of Jesus' ministry or in the Acts of the Apostles or in the rest of the New Testament.

Yet it's mentioned by both Matthew and Luke and the latter is the author of the book of Acts. Luke doesn't mention Mary's virginity there, perhaps, because that book was a history of the early church, not a biography of Christ. Why the Gospel writers should have emphasized the unique circumstances of Jesus' conception more than they did is left unexplained. How often does Meacham think it should have been mentioned, anyway? How many mentions would have been sufficient to satisfy him? He goes on to say that:

It is also striking that in parts of the Gospels Mary herself appears unaware of her son's provenance and destiny....If Mary had received Gabriel's message, then she should have known her son was not mad, but the Messiah. And even if she were not around in this story in Mark, had Jesus been born in such extraordinary circumstances, it is logical to assume that those closest to him would have known at least something of it....

Contrary to the interpretation Meacham puts on the apparent surprise Mary and the disciples continually experienced at Jesus' words and deeds, these stories strike our ear as profoundly true to human nature and experience. It's often the case that even though we know something is true we're surprised when we encounter evidence of it, and the evidence is often not even recognized as such until well after the event.

It may be that when the angel announced to Mary that she had been chosen by God to bear a son that she neither recognized this being as an angel at the time nor understood at the time the full significance of what she was being told. She may have thought in her youthful naivete that she'd been visited by a prophet and never really grasped the astonishing import of his words until much later, if at all. Even when she found herself inexplicably pregnant she might have never realized that the child she was carrying was the Son of God. It would've been easy to push all these things to the back of her mind as the years went by and the daily issues of life pressed upon her, especially if subsequent events never gave her any reason to recall them.

Meacham also seems to accept the unfortunate opinion of skeptics that:

[A]lmost nothing in Luke's story stands up to close historical scrutiny; Brown finds it "dubious on almost every score." Augustus conducted no global census, and no more local one makes sense in Luke's time frame.

We don't profess to be Biblical archeologists, but we have to wonder how Meacham and Brown handle the scholarship which suggests that there was indeed a census about 6 or 7 B.C., the time period when most conservative scholars place Jesus' birth. To say, moreover, that Augustine conducted no global census is a bit of a red herring. The wording in the gospels would have referred to the Roman empire, not the globe, and it is known from Josephus, the ancient Jewish/Roman historian, that such a census was indeed conducted around 6 or 7 A.D. and that these counts occurred about every fourteen years. That would have placed an earlier enumeration at around 6 or 7 B.C. or just about the time that Luke suggests.

As Viewpoint has discussed in earlier posts (see here for example), the problem that scholars have with the virgin birth is really a problem that they have with miracles in general. They just can't bring themselves to believe either that God works that way or that there even is a God to perform a miracle in the first place.

If the latter belief is true, of course, then there is no point in talking about Christmas at all, and if the former position is true, that God doesn't intervene in human history, then not only was there no virgin birth, but there was also no Resurrection. If neither of these events actually occurred then the Bible is completely untrustworthy, and we have no particular reason to think that God cares how we live nor any reason to think that there is life after death.

The significance of Christmas, and of the Virgin birth, is that if these momentous events really did happen then there is a basis for a wonderful hope that life has meaning and that we are not all alone in the cosmos. There is reason to believe that love is better than hate, that altruism is better than egoism, that might does not make right, and that each of us is cherished beyond measure. Christmas means that God cared enough to join us in our existential predicament so that we may ultimately enjoy Him forever. This means that we are not just dust in the wind but rather that we are truly important, that we have dignity and value in the eyes of God.

We don't wish to sound as though we're critical of the entire Newsweek article. There are sections where Meacham is to be applauded. His conclusion, for instance, is excellent:

A man with no human father, a king who died a criminal's death, a God who assures us of everlasting life in a world to come while the world he made is consumed by war and strife: Christianity is a religion of perplexing contradictions. To live an examined faith believers have to acknowledge those complexities and engage them, however frustrating it may be. "We are in a world of mystery, with one bright Light before us, sufficient for our proceeding forward through all difficulties," wrote John Henry Newman, the great Victorian cleric whose intellectual journey led him from the Anglican priesthood to the Roman Curia. "Take away this Light and we are utterly wretched-we know not where we are, how we are sustained, what will become of us, and of all that is dear to us, what we are to believe, and why we are in being." The Christmas star is just one such light; there are others. Whatever our backgrounds, whatever our creeds, many of us are in search of the kind of faith that will lead us through the darkness, toward home. In Luke, the angelic host hails the Lord and then says: "on earth peace, good will toward men"-a promise whose fulfillment is worth our prayers not only in this season, but always.

Just so, but the only faith which will lead us through the darkness is one based upon truth and upon something beyond ourselves and our world. Take away the truth of the Gospel accounts of Jesus' birth and death and all that is left is darkness...forever.

Diversoids

Much has been written about the intellectual and ideological monoculture of today's universities. Academia is eager to celebrate diversity in all things save political opinion. University faculties are overwhelmingly liberal and the professoriat sees it as their professional responsibility to do all they can to proselytize their students.

A recent article in The Economist has some interesting things to say about this state of affairs.

Tom Wolfe's new novel about a young student, I am Charlotte Simmons, is a depressing read for any parent. Four years at an Ivy League university costs as much as a house in parts of the heartland - about $120,000 for tuition alone. But what do you get for your money? A ticket to "Animal House".

In Mr Wolfe's fictional university the pleasures of the body take absolute precedence over the life of the mind. Students "hook up" (i.e. sleep around) with indiscriminate zeal. Brainless jocks rule the roost, while impoverished nerds are reduced to ghost-writing their essays for them. The university administration is utterly indifferent to anything except the dogmas of political correctness (men and women are forced to share the same bathrooms in the name of gender equality). The Bacchanalia takes place to the soundtrack of hate-fuelled gangsta rap.

Mr Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect (that's kinda, like, what satirists do, as one of his students might have explained). But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. He fires off a few predictable arrows at "diversoids" - students who are chosen on the basis of their race or gender. But he fails to expose the full absurdity of the diversity industry.

Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of "diversity officers". Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.

The likelihood of much changing in universities in the near future is slim. The Republican business elite doesn't give a fig about silly academic fads in the humanities so long as American universities remain on the cutting edge of science and technology. As for the university establishment, leftists are hardly likely to relinquish their grip on one of the few bits of America where they remain in the ascendant. And that is a tragedy not just for America's universities but also for liberal thought.

It's worth reading the entire piece.

Manipulating the Election With Oil?

PowerLine casts a suspicious eye at the recent fluctuation of oil prices and asks cui bono. Their suspicions are understandable. Prior to the election the price of oil rose steadily from $35 a barrel last spring to over $55 a barrel at just around the time of the election. Since the election the price rise has reversed course and is now at about $43. What's causing this fluctuation which seems to be timed so closely to our election? Power Line considers two suspects:

There have been rumors that speculators, including George Soros, tried to drive up the price of oil in hopes of helping John Kerry. I know of no evidence to support that suspicion. But apart from Mr. Soros, what about the Arab states? Is there any doubt that the Saudi royal family would have preferred to see Kerry in the White House, and an end to President Bush's campaign to bring democracy to the Middle East? The bare minimum one can say is that the Saudis failed to follow through on their pledge to keep oil prices down.

How much of a conspiracy theorist does one have to be to wonder whether some combination of forces, inside or outside of the Arab world, tried to influence our Presidential election by allowing or forcing prices to rise during the fall? And has anyone in the mainstream media, with its alleged investigatory resources, shown any interest in finding out why oil prices seem to have risen and fallen in synchrony with the American campaign season?

It's not likely. If the otherwise supine MSM is going to put their nose to the trail they'll have to first suspect that somehow George Bush is implicated in some hanky-panky here. Otherwise, they're not interested. If there were even a whiff of suspicion of Bush, however, the media would be thrown into a frenzy, elbowing each other in the ribs in their rush to "get to the bottom of the story". Even old Dan Rather would be mustered back into the lists and soon be hot on the scent. That is, just as soon as he could get back from Texas where he's been busy proving that those National Guard memos were true in what they allege even if they were complete fabrications.

Eurabia

The collapse of European multiculturalism is proceeding apace. This article from Times Online in the United Kingdom makes it clear that all the old verities of liberal tolerance and the need to celebrate ethnic and religious diversity are crumbling like dry mud under the pressures of an unassimilated Islamic population which bids fair to transform once Christian Europe into Eurabia within a generation.

Richard John Neuhaus in the current edition of First Things (subscription required) quotes Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis as saying that by the end of this century, if not before, Europe will be part of the Arab West. Former European Union commissioner Frits Bolkstein of the Netherlands states that if Lewis is right "the liberation of Vienna in 1683 (from invading Turks) will have been in vain". Within a decade several major European cities will be majority Muslim, and if they are still democratic they will doubtless be governed by Muslims. What Islam couldn't accomplish in 1683 by the sword it will succeed in accomplishing through immigration and fecundity.

One might be a little less distressed by the prospect of an Islamic Europe if one could find some evidence somewhere in history that Islamic rule would be good for Europeans, and that an Islamic Europe would be good for America. Unfortunately, Muslims have a run up a pretty dismal record of governance over the centuries, and one is inclined to think that the future under a Muslim caliphate in Europe would be an unmitigated disaster for the world.

There are perhaps several ironies in all of this, but surely one is that in its eagerness to repudiate the fervent Christianity of an earlier age and to embrace the sophisticated secularism of modernity, Europeans are falling like overripe fruit into the hands of the most fanatical religionists on the face of earth. The world, it appears, abhors a religious vacuum. Sweep one set of dogmas out of the house and another will immediately rush in to fill the void. The last one hundred years have seen this process repeated several times. First, Christianity died of spiritual inanition and was replaced by communism and fascism. These were defeated in WW II and were replaced by an already effete secular materialism which lacks the moral will to withstand the contemporary onslaughts of a vigorous Islamism that believes itself to be in the ascendent.

Perhaps the entire future of Europe will be determined by how it reacts to this challenge in the next few years.

Whither the Democrats

Peter Beinart, writing for The New Republic Online, offers us what may be one of the most important post-election analyses of the Democrat Party's future. His essay is a rich pastiche of history, prescription, and prognostication. Distilled to its essence, Beinart's argument is that Michael Moore and MoveOn.org not only do not represent the Democratic Party but have exerted a powerfully dysgenic influence upon it and need to be marginalized. Following are just a few excerpts from part I of a two-part article:

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country ... it is the right--the very extreme right--which is most likely to gain victory."

American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s--a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative--against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11 liberalism has produced leaders and institutions--most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn--that do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947. The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most liberals naively consider Moore a useful ally, a bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be torched. What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first. When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he makes it harder for liberals to claim that their belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished vigilance against Al Qaeda.

Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian either.

After the defeats of 1994, 2000, 2002, and 2004 it may be appropriate to wonder whether the Democratic Party is headed the way of the passenger pigeon. A lot of people are asking what the party has to do to recover. Beinart's article is a good place to begin coming up with an answer. He closes with this:

[D]espite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism--like Soviet totalitarianism before it--threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star....If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does the struggle to protect the United States by spreading freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn.

The problem for the Democrats is that much of their energy and funding flow from their anti-war base. If the Democrats follow Beinart's advice they'll alienate a large segment of the people who give the party its distinctiveness. It would be as if Republicans suddenly became a pro-choice party.

Moreover, if the Democrats dress up like Republicans what incentive would there be for voters to elect them rather than Republicans? This is the root of the debate that's beginning in the Democratic party in the wake of November 2nd. Should they move further to the left and emphasize their differences with Republicans so that the voters have a clear choice, or should they move toward the right and blurr their differences so that elections become little more than popularity or beauty contests, like campaigns for student council president or Homecoming Queen?

The Democrats are in a tough spot, but so are conservative voters. If the Democrats move leftward that would be good for the Republican party since it would marginalize the Democrats with the American electorate, but it would be bad for conservatives because a Democrat shift to the nether regions of the left would create a vacuum in the center that Republicans would rush to fill in order to seize the political territory being abandoned by their opponents. Republicans would not only secure their hold on power for the next two generations, much like the Democrats did from FDR to LBJ, but the party would inevitably become more liberal.

Indeed, a pro-military, pro-choice, big government Republican party would be pretty much indistinguishable from the Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson, John Kennedy Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s. If the Democrats continue to make love with Michael Moore, George Soros, and MoveOn.org look for Rudy Giuliani, or someone like him, to be the Republican nominee in 2008.