Rejoice and Be Glad

A Pew Survey of "Generation Nexters" (18-25 yr. olds) reveals that 81% of them believe that getting rich is either the highest or second highest priority of their generation. Fifty one percent rated getting famous as the highest or second highest goal.

The good news in this otherwise depressing result is that if the Nexters are successful in achieving their goals us aging boomers won't have to worry about social security running out. With Democrats in power taxes on the rich are bound to go up, especially those taxes designed to underwrite entitlements like SS and Medicare.

Some reports of distressing shallowness among the young can indeed be cause for rejoicing.

RLC

Myths About Atheism (Pt. VIII)

We've been offering our thoughts on an article by anti-theist Sam Harris at Edge in which he seeks to persuade us that most of what people believe about atheists and atheism isn't true. He discusses in the piece ten "myths" about atheism that he wants to debunk. In this post we'll respond to what he says about myth number 8:

Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

When people state that atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding they are not talking about belief in extraterrestrials. This is a rather droll way to construe the claim. They mean, of course, that atheists believe that there is no existence beyond this one and that there is no reality beyond the material world in which we live. This is the only way to interpret the "myth" that makes any sense, and there is surely no atheist who would deny these assertions.

But the irrelevance of what Harris says aside, how does he know that brilliant extraterrestrials would find the contents of the Bible unimpressive? How could Harris know such a thing unless he knows the Bible is completely false in its claims about God, and how could he, or anyone, know that? It takes surpassing arrogance to claim to know that there is no God and, having insisted earlier in his essay that atheists aren't arrogant, he probably should think better of implying that he's in possession of such knowledge.

Finally, we're left to wonder how, or in what way, Christianity trivializes the beauty and immensity of the universe. Harris enjoys making remarkable claims like this which are apropos of nothing in particular and which he leaves hang in mid-air, unsupported by any evidence or argument. He gives the back of his hand to believers for accepting religious claims on insufficient evidence, but he apparently expects his readers to accept his own claims without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever.

RLC

Flatland, the Movie

Suppose that reality actually consists of more dimensions than just the three (four, counting time) that our minds are structured to experience. If so, then the world is, in fact, totally different than it appears to us since we are only perceiving a fraction of a multi-dimensional reality.

In the novel Flatland, written in 1884, Edwin Abbott explored what a two dimensional world would look like to its inhabitants and what three dimensional objects would look like if they invaded a two dimensional world.

The novel helps stretch our imaginations and became a classic. Now it's being made into a movie, the trailer for which can be viewed here.

Woody Allen depicted something similar in Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a character (Jeff Daniels) in the two dimensional world of a film on the movie screen suddenly steps out of the screen and into the three dimensional world of a woman (Mia Farrow) viewing the movie all alone in the theater.

Maybe our existence is like that of the characters on the screen. We think that what we perceive is all there is, while all around us there is a wider world of additional dimensions in which people live, and move, and have their being, and we're totally unaware of it because our minds are unable to apprehend those dimensions.

Perhaps at death we, like Jeff Daniels in the Purple Rose of Cairo, step off the three dimensional screen of this world and into a multidimensional reality that we could no more imagine before we experienced it than a child in the womb could imagine the world that it would be entering when it's born.

Perhaps we are surrounded by, and embedded in, a reality which is so much richer than that which we can experience, but we are totally oblivious to it until we take on a "body" with the senses to perceive it.

As Hamlet says to his companion: "There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps so.

RLC

The Attack at Karbala

Bill Roggio surmises that the attack on American soldiers at Karbala in Iraq was carried out by Iranian commandos. If he's right then the new directive giving American troops the green light to kill or capture any Iranians found in Iraq makes even more sense:

On January 20th, a team of twelve men disguised as U.S. soldiers entered the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, where U.S. soldiers conducted a meeting with local officials, and attacked and killed five soldiers, and wounded another three. The initial reports indicated the five were killed in the Karbala JCC, however the U.S. military has reported that four of those killed were actually removed from the center, handcuffed, and murdered.

The American Forces Information Service provides the details of the attack in Karbala. Based on the sophisticated nature of the raid, as well as the response, or cryptic non-responses, from multiple military and intelligence sources, this raid appears to have been directed and executed by the Qods Force branch of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps.

Read the rest of the details that have been made public about this attack at the link.

RLC

Important Work of Science

Michael Shermer, in reviewing Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in the journal Science Magazine, closes his review with these surprising words:

"Dawkins' latest book deserves multiple readings, not just as an important work of science, but as a great work of literature."

What a very odd thing to say of a book which is devoted completely to debunking theism. In what sense is this a book of science? And why is a journal devoted to science publishing a review of what is essentially a book on religion?

Mike Gene at wonders:

Isn't it odd how a popular anti-religious book, which reports no new experiments or data, and was not peer-reviewed, has become an Important Work of Science?

Gene sees in Shermer's essay the germ of a trend to expand the definition of science to include anti-religious efforts. The irony of this, of course, is that some of the same people who blanched at allowing Intelligent Design to be taught in public schools because "it's religion, not science" are now calling books on atheism "important works of science."

As Gene says:

Now, science apparently CAN address supernatural causes. Now, science and evolution apparently DO lead to atheism. Now, there is apparently NO difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.

I'm sure that the next time the ACLU goes to court to smack down some school's effort to teach students that not every scholar is convinced that mechanical processes are sufficient to explain the complexity of life, Shermer's essay will be presented as evidence by the defense. When the ACLU witnesses testify that ID is not science they'll have a hard time explaining why a book which seeks to promote atheism is considered science by reputable science magazines.

See here for yet another example of a journal ostensibly devoted to genes and chromosomes publishing an article in which the author indulges in amateurish theologizing. Apparently religious articles are suitable for publication in scientific magazines and journals when they argue against the existence of a cosmic designer. If they argue for the existence of a designer then they are completely out of bounds. The Important Work of Science seems now to consist of trying to prove that there is no God.

RLC

The Hitchens Plan

Christopher Hitchens at City Journal reviews and builds upon the fine work of Mark Steyn in his book America Alone and concludes his column by offering an eight point plan of his own for dealing with Islamo-fascism. His eight points are these:

1. An end to one-way multiculturalism and to the cultural masochism that goes with it. The Koran does not mandate the wearing of veils or genital mutilation, and until recently only those who apostasized from Islam faced the threat of punishment by death. Now, though, all manner of antisocial practices find themselves validated in the name of religion, and mullahs have begun to issue threats even against non-Muslims for criticism of Islam. This creeping Islamism must cease at once, and those responsible must feel the full weight of the law. Meanwhile, we should insist on reciprocity at all times. We should not allow a single Saudi dollar to pay for propaganda within the U.S., for example, until Saudi Arabia also permits Jewish and Christian and secular practices. No Wahhabi-printed Korans anywhere in our prison system. No Salafist imams in our armed forces.

2. A strong, open alliance with India on all fronts, from the military to the political and economic, backed by an extensive cultural exchange program, to demonstrate solidarity with the other great multiethnic democracy under attack from Muslim fascism. A hugely enlarged quota for qualified Indian immigrants and a reduction in quotas from Pakistan and other nations where fundamentalism dominates.

3. A similarly forward approach to Nigeria, S�o Tom� and Pr�ncipe, and the other countries of Western Africa that are under attack by jihadists and are also the location of vast potential oil reserves, whose proper development could help emancipate the local populations from poverty and ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

4. A declaration at the UN of our solidarity with the right of the Kurdish people of Iraq and elsewhere to self-determination as well as a further declaration by Congress that in no circumstance will Muslim forces who have fought on our side, from the Kurds to the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, find themselves friendless, unarmed, or abandoned. Partition in Iraq would be defeat under another name (and as with past partitions, would lead to yet further partitions and micro-wars over these very subdivisions). But if it has to come, we cannot even consider abandoning the one part of the country that did seize the opportunity of modernization, development, and democracy.

5. Energetic support for all the opposition forces in Iran and in the Iranian diaspora. A public offer from the United States, disseminated widely in the Persian language, of help for a reformed Iran on all matters, including peaceful nuclear energy, and of assistance in protecting Iran from the catastrophic earthquake that seismologists predict in its immediate future. Millions of lives might be lost in a few moments, and we would also have to worry about the fate of secret underground nuclear facilities. When a quake leveled the Iranian city of Bam three years ago, the performance of American rescue teams was so impressive that their popularity embarrassed the regime. Iran's neighbors would need to pay attention, too: a crisis in Iran's nuclear underground facilities-an Iranian Chernobyl-would not be an internal affair. These concerns might help shift the currently ossified terms of the argument and put us again on the side of an internal reform movement within Iran and its large and talented diaspora.

6. Unconditional solidarity, backed with force and the relevant UN resolutions, with an independent and multi-confessional Lebanon.

7. A commitment to buy Afghanistan's opium crop and to keep the profits out of the hands of the warlords and Talibanists, until such time as the country's agriculture- especially its once-famous vines-has been replanted and restored. We can use the product in the interim for the manufacture of much-needed analgesics for our own market and apply the profits to the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

8. We should, of course, be scrupulous on principle about stirring up interethnic tensions. But we should remind those states that are less scrupulous-Iran, Pakistan, and Syria swiftly come to mind-that we know that they, too, have restless minorities and that they should not make trouble in Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Iraq without bearing this in mind. Some years ago, the Pakistani government announced that it would break the international embargo on the unrecognized and illegal Turkish separatist state in Cyprus and would appoint an ambassador to it, out of "Islamic solidarity." Cyprus is a small democracy with no armed forces to speak of, but its then-foreign minister told me the following story. He sought a meeting with the Pakistani authorities and told them privately that if they recognized the breakaway Turkish colony, his government would immediately supply funds and arms to one of the secessionist movements-such as the Baluchis-within Pakistan itself. Pakistan never appointed an ambassador to Turkish Cyprus.

Good ideas all. Let's hope that people in the White House and State Department have also thought of them or are at least reading Hitchens and Steyn.

RLC

Harris vs. Sullivan

Anti-theist Sam Harris, whose Ten Myths About Atheism we have been weighing in the balance here at Viewpoint, and Andrew Sullivan, have been having a debate about religion at BeliefNet. I wish Harris were debating someone a little less hostile to traditional forms of Christianity than Sullivan, but their exchange is interesting nonetheless.

RLC

The Cost of an Education

Parents and their student children know that college isn't getting any cheaper, but at many private schools the tuition alone is more than many parents' annual income. Here are some highlights from an article at Forbes.com which discusses the reasons for the high costs:

Experts cite strong competition for faculty, student demand for state-of-the-art classrooms and facilities, and a decline in federal support for research facilities as the big cost drivers. Basically, classrooms are nicer, registration no longer means standing in line and professors make more money. But there's no real evidence that students are learning more, even as their parents fork over more money.

George Washington University leads the nation with tuition costs of $37,820. This is 82% of the entire median annual family income of $46,326. And that's just tuition.

Nationwide, the median tuition at a four-year school was $7,490 for the 2006-07 academic year, a 2.3% increase over a year ago, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. But that includes many state-run universities, where in-state residents are charged a pittance. The median tuition at private schools was more than twice that amount, weighing in at $15,900, up 3.4% over a year ago. And that figure doesn't come close to the nation's most expensive colleges--121 of them charged more than $30,000 this past year. Add room and board and other assorted fees, and the bill climbs beyond $40,000.

The most expensive public school for in-state residents is Miami University in Ohio, which charged local residents $22,997 apiece this past year. The heftiest bill for out-of-staters comes from the University of Michigan, which hits up non-Wolverines for $29,131 to come to Ann Arbor.

The cheapest four-year school in America? That distinction goes to Northern New Mexico College, which charges only $1,030 a year to in-state residents (outsiders pay $2,206). Still, even that rate is up from $771 at the beginning of the decade, a 34% increase.

See here for a listing of the ten most expensive schools.

RLC

Iraq Strategy

Cox and Forkum wonder what the Democrats' strategy for winning in Iraq might be:

This isn't quite fair. They actually do have a strategy which is to bash Bush's strategy every chance they get.

RLC

The Mystery of Consciousness

Steven Pinker has written an interesting, if rather lengthy, essay on the nature of consciousness and the problems researchers in the field are seeking to solve. Pinker is a substance monist, a materialist, who believes that consciousness is explicable purely in terms of brain function. I think he's probably wrong about that but his article is worth reading for the insight it gives into the controversy. Here are a few early paragraphs:

What remains is not one problem about consciousness but two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.

What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.

The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

Toward the end he lays his materialist cards on the table:

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."

Having written six pages he apparently gets a little giddy, and allows himself to make the ludicrous suggestion that recognizing that other people have brains like ours makes for a better basis for morality than does belief in eternal life.

We'll have more to say about the last page of Pinker's article tomorrow.

RLC

On Christian Ethics

One of the books listed by George Weigel as among the five best books for understanding Christianity was The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers, O.P. (Catholic University of America, 1995). Weigel says this about Pinckaers' book:

Christianity--classic Christian morality in particular--is frequently pilloried as dour and nay-saying. Father Servais Pinckaers offers a different, more humane and more accurate perspective: the Christian moral life as a process of growing in "freedom for excellence," the freedom to choose the good as a matter of habit.

Weigel is, of course, correct about the perception of Christian ethics as dour and negative, but I think this is a stereotype due largely to the fact that too many people have not really thought about Christian ethics beyond a simple perusal of the Ten Commandments.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 22 that the whole ethical teaching of Scripture is summed up in two positive imperatives: We are to love God (Commandments 1-4) and love our fellow man (Commandments 5-10). What can be more affirmative, liberating, and upbeat than that?

Some people object that the Biblical emphasis on sin is negative and oppressive, but this opinion is, I think, based on a faulty view of what sin is. Because we are enjoined by Christ to love, to fail to do so is a moral fault. Any act which is harmful to oneself or another is wrong, or "sin," because it violates the command to love. The Biblical text simply elaborates on all the ways that people do harm and enjoins us to avoid those. It also gives us the "Golden Rule" as a guideline for knowing whether a particular act is just or compassionate.

Thus, so far from being dour and negative, the moral teaching of the Bible is extremely positive. The command to love others expresses itself in at least two ways: The Old Testament emphasizes the need to love by doing justice to others, and the New Testament emphasizes the need to love by showing compassion to others.

Of course, it's not always easy to know the right thing to do in a given situation, and even when we know what's right, it's often not easy to do it. Christian ethics, as laid out in the Bible, is not a strait jacket or a code of law. It's a simple guideline, and it's our responsibility to try to apply that guideline in our existential circumstance as honestly as we can.

It's also often difficult to discern how we can best balance the need for justice with the imperative to be compassionate. Sometimes it seems as if the two conflict and one of the moral responsibilities of the Christians community is to work out how best to resolve that conflict in a particular case. Even so, despite the difficulties, together these two imperatives form an ethical system unsurpassed for its simplicity and beauty.

RLC

Transitioning to the White House

Could this be the portrait of our next president?

RLC

Political Complexion

College freshman are becoming slightly more ideological according to this study which finds that conservatism, while still not the majority stance among college undergrads, is embraced by more freshmen today than at any time in the history of the survey:

When asked to characterize their political views, 43.3 percent of college freshmen identified as "middle-of-the-road," dropping 1.7 percentage points from 2005 to the lowest value since this was first measured by the CIRP in 1970. Both "liberal" (28.4 percent) and "conservative" (23.9 percent) each increased by 1.3 percentage points from 2005 (an increase of 16,900 students nationally). Not only is the percentage of students identifying as "liberal" at the highest level since 1975 (30.7 percent), but the percentage identifying as "conservative" is at the highest point in the history of the Freshman Survey. This indicates that freshmen are moving away from a moderate position in their political viewpoints.

For the students' answers to specific questions see the study at the link.

RLC

The Second Holocaust

Benny Morris tells us what he believes the intermediate future will be for Jews in Israel:

The second Holocaust will not be like the first. The Nazis, of course, industrialized mass murder. But still, the perpetrators had one-on-one contact with the victims. They may have dehumanized them, over months and years of appalling debasement and in their minds, before the actual killing. But, still, they were in eye- and ear-contact, sometimes in tactile contact, with their victims.

The second Holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convoke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go ahead.

The orders will go out, and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half-dozen air and alleged nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Guard units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel, an elongated 8,000 square miles, probably four or five hits will suffice: no more Israel. A million or more Israelis, in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem areas, will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about 7 million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.

Read the rest of Morris' piece at the link.

And of course it's not just Israel which is at grave risk. Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now threatening to destroy the U.S. and he's working on the nuclear weapons that will give him the capability to do it. If the belief that Saddam had WMD was sufficient reason for the Democrats to vote to topple the leadership in Iraq, how much more convinced must they be that Iran must be dealt with similarly?

RLC

On Love

Gideon Strauss has a lovely little meditation on love at Comment. For those who enjoy reading love stories will also enjoy reading Anne Dayton's essay on stories she loves.

RLC

Hillary and Hardball on SNL

Saturday Night Live spoofs Hillary Clinton and Hardball's Chris Matthews. It's a funny and revealing bit since it captures so well the idiosyncracies and personalities of both of them. It's a bit surprising, though, that SNL would poke fun at Hillary, who is something of a liberal icon, but maybe the parody is indicative of the displeasure of the left-wing base with Hillary's persistant refusal to disavow her vote for the Iraq war.

At any rate, be advised that the SNL skit does not elide or ignore Hillary's (alleged) legendary temper or uninhibited use of vulgarity.

RLC

Ten Myths About Atheism (Pt. VII)

Sam Harris' seventh of what he considers to be myths about atheism is the belief that:

Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

Harris explains, sort of, that:

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely - because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

Of all of Harris' alleged myths this is perhaps the strangest.

First, he apparently confuses emotional experience with spiritual experience. Spiritual experience is based upon an encounter with the transcendent, not upon our biochemistry. Atheists deny any transcendent reality beyond nature and therefore ab defino deny the possibility of spiritual experience.

Second, I don't know anyone who has given the matter any thought who believes that a transformed life proves that Jesus is the "sole savior of humanity." There are many who believe that their experience confirms Jesus' reality and his love for them as individuals. There are many for whom their encounter with Christ has been convincing evidence that they are saved from spiritual death, but His status as the unique savior of humanity is information most Christians glean only from Biblical revelation, not from spiritual experience.

Third, of course no one can be logically certain that Jesus rose from the dead. Indeed, no one can be certain of much of anything other than the Cartesian certainty of their own existence. Spiritual experience, however, may give the individual a kind of psychological assurance that Jesus still, in some sense, lives and that assurance exists in a state of mutual reinforcement with the historical testimony concerning the events surrounding Jesus' death and subsequent resurrection.

But, more to the point, what does any of what Harris writes have to do with refuting the claim that atheists are closed to spiritual experience? Harris seems to simply deny the myth and then spend his time criticizing unrelated Christian beliefs.

For our previous posts on Harris' "myths" see part I, II, III, IV, and V and VI.

RLC

Sandy Berger, Secret Agent Man

This'll make you laugh. PowerLine has the winner of Bill Bennett's "Sandy Berger Lies" song parody contest. Go here, scroll to the bottom and click on the audio. It's pretty funny.

RLC

Trashing Dawkins

H. Allen Orr has a lengthy and very thorough review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion in the New York Review of Books. Like every reviewer of this book that I've read, Orr pretty much trashes Dawkins' effort:

Despite my admiration for much of Dawkins's work, I'm afraid that I'm among those scientists who must part company with him here. Indeed, The God Delusion seems to me badly flawed. Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist, I'm forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he's actually more an amateur. I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case.

Orr explains his particular objections in the review. Check it out if Dawkins' ideas are of interest to you.

RLC

Whatever Works

Philosopher Philip Quinn of Notre Dame argues that it's morally permissable to lie to defeat the creationists as long as one feels a twinge of conscience while doing it. I know, you're skeptical that a philosopher would actually promote such a morally dubious strategy. Well, read what he says for yourself at Telic Thoughts and tell me if there is any other plausible interpretation of his words.

The link to Stephen Jones that you'll find at Telic Thoughts is also revealing. Jones argues that several prominent scientists deliberately misled the court in the Dover Intelligent Design trial when they testified that ID is not science. It is common knowledge among scientists and philosophers that what constitutes science, i.e. the demarcation question, is an unresolved, and probably unresolvable, problem. Thus, to testify that ID is not science, or not even good science, was to do precisely what Quinn condones.

It seems that the Darwinian strategy for combating ID is to do whatever it takes to win. If their arguments aren't persuasive enough to carry the day then just make stuff up.

RLC