Materialism and Iron Spikes

Michael Egnor employs the strange case of Phineas Gage to argue that materialism is self-refuting. He observes, for example, that:

Brain matter cannot be the complete cause for ideas because matter and ideas share no properties. Cause and effect can't be 'linked' between substances that have no properties in common.

I believe that materialism is incapable of providing an adequate explanation for the mind. Clearly ideas can influence the movement of matter (via the brain), and vice-versa, but materialism alone is inadequate to explain the link. The link between the mind and the brain must involve agency that has such non-material properties as purpose and judgment, and, as such, an adequate explanation for the mind must necessarily be open to immaterial causes.

Egnor makes an interesting argument for what philosophers call substance dualism, the belief that reality is comprised of two disparate essences, mind and matter. Materialists, of course, believe that matter is all there is. His essay can be read at the link.

RLC

Yielding to the Gentleman

In Alabama they still settle disputes in the state legislature with, uh, body language. When one senator took offense to the words of a colleague a third observed that, "It's certainly a black eye on the Legislature and the Senate in particular."

Yes, and to one of the senators most particularly, it appears.

You can watch the video here.

RLC

Killed Bill

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a post based on information he was given by a congressional aide on why the Immigration Reform Bill was killed. He says in his piece that:

I asked my source if his boss has been hearing from his constituents on this bill and what the for and against ratio was. He said that they have received thousands and thousands of calls and the ratio was something like 95%-98% against the bill.

I also asked my source why he thought so many Republicans had been supporting such an incredibly unpopular bill. He gave three reasons:

First off, there was what he referred to as the "Rovian School of thought," which says that passing this bill would capture the Hispanic vote for the GOP for decades to come.

Next up, there's the "Chamber of Commerce" vote. He says these Republicans were heavily influenced by business groups that want cheap labor no matter what the cost is for the rest of the country.

Then there was the last group, the smallest group in his opinion, who were willing to sign onto a terrible bill just so they could say they were part of a big reform that had bipartisan support.

Is there a noble reason in there anywhere? Makes one proud to be a Republican, doesn't it?

RLC

The Witch is Dead

The immigration reform bill that would have, in effect, provided amnesty to illegal aliens, cost American taxpayers literally trillions of dollars, and likely done next to nothing to stop the flow of illegals, is dead for now.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid tried to end debate last night and bring the bill to a vote, but his attempt to call cloture failed and the bill has been withdrawn from the floor.

Michelle Malkin has the details, including the roll call on the vote.

RLC

Horrific Beauty

We would not be surprised to learn that this is Mahmoud Amadinejad's favorite video. Indeed, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that he had it made. Who else would want to depict nuclear explosions in such beautiful scenes?

We might visualize him rubbing his hands together in rapturous glee as he watches and imagines American or Israeli cities under those mushroom clouds.

RLC

Senator Cheney?

Republican senator Craig Thomas died Monday night after a lengthy battle with leukemia. There's now talk around Washington that his replacement may be Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Apparently, Wyoming law prohibits the governor, who is a Democrat, from appointing someone from the opposite party of the man being replaced, so he has to appoint a Republican.

Ms Cheney would be an excellent choice, and we hope she is indeed selected.

RLC

Eurabia

The most popular name given to baby boys in England this year? Mohammed.

RLC

Betraying the Public Trust

It's hard to believe but a majority of the United States senators voted today to reject an amendment to the immigration reform bill now before Congress that would require that all current immigration laws, laws passed by these same senators, be enforced. The amendment failed 54-42. Most of those voting in favor of it were Republicans (11 Democrats), but here's the shocker: 16 Republicans joined 38 Democrats in voting against the call to enforce our laws protecting our border, and one, John McCain didn't vote.

Michelle Malkin has the vote tally and the provisions of the amendment here. What message are we sending by refusing to affirm and enforce our own laws? These people, Democrats and Republicans alike, really do have to go. They're betraying the public trust. I can see no other way to view this vote.

RLC

Women Drivers

For the next thing to time travel try this video. Watch it and you'll think you're back in 1920s America or maybe on a different planet altogether as a Lebanese man and woman debate whether Muslim women should be allowed to drive automobiles in Lebanon.

No wonder Muslims despise Western culture.

Be sure to listen to the man who speaks at the end.

RLC

ISU Hypocrisy

An acquaintance of mine at Messiah College, a historian of science by the name of Ted Davis, offers his opinion of Guillermo Gonzalez's ordeal at Iowa State. Davis is a theistic evolutionist who has little sympathy for Intelligent Design, but he's rightly outraged at the treatment Gonzalez has received at the hands of the Iowa State inquisition.

Read the letter he sent to ISU president Geoffrey here.

RLC

Hitchens vs. Hitchens

Well known anti-theist Christopher Hitchens has written a book titled God Is Not Great and now his brother Peter, a Christian, critiques the work. Given the relationship between the two men the review is interesting, made moreso because Peter considers the book deeply flawed.

One of the ironies of their fraternal relationship is that Christopher is in favor of the war in Iraq and opposed to belief in God. Peter is opposed to the war in Iraq and is devout. So there's something to like about both of them.

Read Peter's review at the link.

RLC

Survival Strategy

In this passionate editorial Caroline Glick outlines what she sees as a major cause of European self-destruction - multiculturalism. She has a good point, but I suspect there's more to the decline of Europe than just a commitment to "cultural diversity," as fatuous and insidious as that often turns out to be.

I think there is also a collective madness that seizes effete societies which have abandoned a belief in anything transcendent, and Europe is a confirming instance of that belief. How else to explain what Glick says here:

Wednesday's decision by Britain's University and College Union to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and colleges was not only hypocritical. It was suicidal. It is not simply that the British prefer to boycott Israeli universities than say, Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Jordanian universities where students are indoctrinated to seek the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of Christianity through the destruction of Western civilization.

It is not merely that they ignored the poor, brave Iranian students who just three weeks ago were brutally attacked by regime forces as they sought to hold elections for their pro-democracy campus organizations.

By calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Britain's academic establishment is turning its back not only on Israel, but on Britain. When Britain's professoriate rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish, democratic nation-state and glorifies Palestinian society which supports global jihad and the destruction of Western civilization, it is rejecting the British state.

Only those who are suffering some sort of psychological impairment which causes them to experience moral inversion can call for a boycott of Israeli academics while feting those from Muslim nations. I can come up with no other explanation.

Europe reminds me of a certain kind of schoolboy, a weakling himself, who always takes the side of the schoolyard bully in hopes of ingratiating himself to the tough so that he won't turn on him. This child is willing to sacrifice anyone else to the bully's abuse, and to abase himself in the process, but it's worth it to him if it avoids a beating. That's modern Europe, or at least much of the elite class in Europe.

They know they have nothing to fear from Israel but plenty to fear from the Palestinians and their allies, so they perversely play the role of protector and advocate of those who want to destroy them in hopes that the destroyers will change their mind and find the quavering Euros useful against Israel. It's cowardly and unprincipled but that's modern Europe.

RLC

Cut and Run

According to The Drudge Report there were 16,185 murders in the U.S. last year, 400 of them in Philadelphia alone. Since the onset of the Iraq war in 2003 there have been about 3500 Americans killed.

In absolute terms it seems safer to be an American in Iraq than to be a resident of our cities. Perhaps John Murtha will soon call for Americans to redeploy from the U.S. to Okinawa.

RLC

They're Coming For Us

Andrew McCarthy has a must-read piece up at NRO. Here's an excerpt:

We now learn that for radical Islamists, lovers of death, the heart is the jihad's most coveted prize. Tear it out, and you get to kill not once but twice. So says 63-year-old ringleader, Russell Defreitas, whose nom de guerre is, of course, Mohammed.

"Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to do to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow!... They love John F. Kennedy like he's the man.... If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It's like you can kill the man twice."

Defreitas, er, Mohammed is a naturalized United States citizen. He is another splash in that gorgeous mosaic of American Islam - the one over whose purportedly seamless assimilation the mainstream media was cooing just a few days ago, putting smiley-face spin on an alarming Rasmussen poll.

Alas, Defreitas/Mohammed turns out to be the part of the story the press dutifully buried in paragraph 19: He is that nettlesome one of every four American Muslim males who thinks mass-homicide strikes against civilians, like the one he and his cell were scheming, are a perfectly sensible way to settle grievances.

Does this mean he never really assimilated during his long journey from Guyana to treason against the adopted country he so abhors? Not hardly. For that one in four Muslim males turns out to be in pretty much the same place as one of every two members of the United States Congress - already tacking toward two of every three as we look ahead to September. All are content to let Islamist savagery carry the day.

Militant Islam, you see, is mustered in Iraq, where al Qaeda - the inspiration for Defreitas and his cohorts - has called America out. Like Defreitas & Co., Osama bin Laden and his ranks see themselves in a world war between the United States and a vision of Islam shared by tens of millions. (Think one-in-four, writ large). Iraq, they have decided, is their frontline, though very far from their only line. Everywhere, America is their target. Everywhere, terror - the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women, and children - is their weapon of choice.

For the new Democratic Congress and its growing wake of jittery Republicans, that turns out to be a choice worth living with. Oh yes, they'll sputter about how barbaric and unsavory it all is. But, like those one in four Muslim males, they're prepared to let terror rule the day. That's the plan: Al Qaeda blows up things and people; we leave, grumbling all the way home about civil wars and intractable hatreds between the Religion of Peace's murderous sects; and al Qaeda triumphs ... with bin Laden reminding his acolytes: See, I told you, they're a paper tiger - make it bloody for them and we win.

Naturally, we'll tell ourselves they're not winning at all. They want Iraq? Let 'em have it. Just like - when they killed enough of us - we let 'em have Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. Who, after all, needs these hellholes?

Except ... militant Islam doesn't just want the hellholes. It wants everything. It will take the hellholes. For now. But don't think for a second they'll be appeased.

The appetite grows as it feeds. Jihadists won't stop until they break our will. Give them Somalia and they want the World Trade Center. Give them Iraq and they want JFK ... and Fort Dix. They're coming for us, they're only too delighted to tell us they're coming for us, and still we're stunned when their insatiable hatred draws a bead smack in the middle of our shrinking comfort zone - this time, where a thousand flights move 125,000 people every single day.

They were stopped this time, but they will keep on trying until either they are dead or we are. That's the nature of the conflict we're in. Unfortunately for us, most Americans, including some Democratic presidential candidates, either don't believe it, don't care, or don't realize it.

Read the whole thing.

RLC

The Edge of Evolution

This link takes you to a video that shows transport proteins moving along a cilium (It's called a flagellum at the site) in an alga called Chlamydamonas. Michael Behe talks about this system of proteins in his new book The Edge of Evolution, and it's astonishingly complex. Imagine small railroad cars carrying building supplies moving along a track that runs up and down an under-construction skyscraper.

The whole system would consist of hundreds of parts whose movements must be coordinated and timed with the availability and need for different supplies. The supplies would need to be loaded onto the cars and off-loaded at the site, and so on.

These proteins carry the materials necessary for the construction of a cilium and no one, evidently, has a clue as to how this system got set up or what keeps it organized, synchronized and functioning.

Behe describes the system in some detail, and it's fascinating reading. I'm about half-way through his book and if the second half is as interesting as the first it's going to be extremely hard to put down.

RLC

The Iranian Gambit

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to be trying to provoke Israel into an attack upon Iran as this NewsMax story suggests:

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday said the world would witness the destruction of Israel soon, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Ahmadinejad said last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah showed for the first time that the "hegemony of the occupier regime [Israel] had collapsed, and the Lebanese nation pushed the button to begin counting the days until the destruction of the Zionist regime," IRNA quoted him as saying.

By threatening Israel's destruction Ahamdinejad seems to be hoping that Israel will launch a preemptive strike that will justify Iran's retaliation, or at least earn Israel further international contempt.

The Iranian leader is playing his hand cleverly. If Israel doesn't rise to his bait Iran will just grow stronger until it is able to destroy Israel on some other pretext. Israel will be damned if it does attack and damned if it doesn't.

The danger for Iran is that Israel will decide that if it's going to be damned either way it might as well be damned for doing something rather than for doing nothing. And it might decide to hit Iran much harder than they anticipate.

RLC

The Atheist's Con

Johann Hari, an anti-theist leftist, is in a quandary about Tony Blair's successor as British prime minister, Gordon Brown. Apparently Brown is a devout Christian heavily influenced by Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine. Hari sees this as both good and bad.

The irony of Hari's post on Brown is that he sees no irony in statements like this:

All this puts left-wing atheists like me in a quandry [sic]. I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking - it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up.

[But] If religion drives Brown's best instincts and whittles down his worst, should we still condemn it?

The "best instincts" Hari refers to are Brown's concern for the poor, the worst are what Hari assumes, because of Wallis' influence, would be Brown's opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and a preference for non-secular schools.

So what's the irony? Hari, as an atheist, is making a moral judgment about Brown's instincts. It is, he implies, more moral to be in favor of the poor and less so to be against gay marriage, but where does Hari get this from? Why, on his assumption that there is no moral standard beyond ourselves, would it be wrong to despise the poor? What is the source from which he draws his moral valuations? In actual fact, having denied any transcendent ground for moral value, he's left with no ground at all. He simply draws upon his own preferences and tastes and seeks to gain for those subjective inclinations some sort of privileged standing. When an atheist employs moral language it's really nothing more than a con game that they are fond of pulling on everyone else, even though most of them don't even realize what they're doing.

RLC

Gonzalez Appeal Rejected

Iowa State astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez has had his appeal of the decision to deny him tenure rejected by university president Gregory Geoffroy. Why did this happen? ISU will not open up the records of their deliberations despite being legally required to do so thus we're left to draw our own conclusions. Most of the rationales we've heard sound pretty flimsy. Gonzalez has led his department in authoring scholarly papers and textbooks (See also here) and consistently receives good reviews for his teaching.

We're left to conclude that the ISU authorities succumbed, like the 17th century town sages in Salem, Massachusetts, to the hysterics of a few of Gonzalez's faculty colleagues who wanted to get him fired because, of all things, Gonzalez is not a naturalistic materialist.

Gonzalez believes the order and fine-tuning of the cosmos point to an intelligence behind it and for that, it appears, he is being led to the academic equivalent of the stake. Meanwhile, professional frauds like Ward Churchill are still drawing paychecks at the University of Colorado for telling students that the people who died on 9/11 deserved it.

Who says universities are about diversity and tolerance and the marketplace of ideas? Schools like ISU are in the business of regimentation, indoctrination, and conformity. If you're doubtful perhaps the accounts of the Gonzalez affair at the above links and elsewhere on the web will change your mind.

Thanks to Evolution News Network for the picture.

RLC

Tyranny vs. Free Speech

Like tyrants and tyrant-wannabes everywhere, whether on American college campuses, North Korea or the old Soviet Union, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela will do whatever he can to eliminate free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

His latest move, however, closing down a popular television station, may prove to be the catalyst that leads to his downfall among the Venezuelan people.

RLC

Divisive Issue

The editors of National Review Online have challenged the editors of the Wall Street Journal to a public debate on the merits of the pending immigration legislation. As of this writing there has been no response from the WSJ. Apparently they're not so sure they can defend their support for this bill and their hostility to its opponents. I'm not surprised. It's pretty much indefensible.

Speaking of hostility, immigration reform is ripping the conservative movement apart. There are some things being said by those who favor the current bill put together by Ted Kennedy and John McCain that are creating wounds that may never heal. The otherwise estimable Linda Chavez has joined President Bush, Michael Chertoff, Ken Mehlman, and others in completely disparaging the motives of her opponents and misrepresenting their position.

I have to say that I have yet to hear an actual argument from supporters of the Kennedy bill on either the left or right as to why illegal aliens are good for America. President Bush and his spokespersons say they are, but they never really tell us why except to offer platitudes about doing jobs Americans won't do. Nor do they ever tell us why it is wrong to want to secure our borders, nor tell us why it is wrong to want to control who comes into this country.

Our country is our home. I'll be more impressed with the President's reluctance to build a fence to keep people from breaking into our home when he has the barriers around the White House removed and orders the secret service to stop shooting people who try to get in without permission.

RLC