Ten Reasons for High Energy Costs

William Tate at the American Thinker offers his top ten reasons why we're suffering high gasoline prices and why the Democrats are largely to blame for each of them. Here are numbers ten through seven:

10) ANWR: If Bill Clinton had signed into law the Republican Congress's 1995 bill to allow drilling of ANWR instead of vetoing it, ANWR could be producing a million barrels of (non-Opec) oil a day--5% of the nation's consumption. Although speaking in another context, even Democrat Senator Charles Schumer, no proponent of ANWR drilling, admits that "one million barrels per day," would cause the price of gasoline to fall "50 cents a gallon almost immediately," according to a recent George Will column.

9) Coastal Drilling (i.e., not in my backyard) Democrats have consistently fought efforts to drill off the U.S. coast, as evidenced by Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz's preotestation against a failed 2005 bill: "Not only does this legislation dismantle the bi-partisan ban on offshore drilling, but it provides a financial incentive for states to do so."

A financial incentive? With [other countries] now slant drilling for oil just 50 miles off the Florida coast, wouldn't that have been a good thing?

8) Insistence on alternative fuels: One of the first acts of the new Democrat-controlled congress in 2007 was an energy bill that "calls for a huge increase in the use of ethanol as a motor fuel and requires new appliance efficiency standards." By focusing on alternative fuels such as ethanol, and not more drilling, Democrats have added to the cost of food, worsening starvation problems around the word and increasing inflationary pressures in the U.S., including prices at the pump.

7) Nuclear power: Even the French, who sometimes seem to lack the backbone to stand up for anything other than soft cheese, faced down their environmentalists over the need for nuclear power. France now generates 79% of its electricity from nuclear plants, mitigating the need for imported oil. The French have so much cheap energy that France has become the world's largest exporter of electric power. They have plans in place to build more reactors, including an experimental fusion reactor.

Read the other six at the link and every time you fill your tank or pay your home heating bill remind yourself that while these solutions remain unimplemented Congress spends much of its time and your tax dollars feverishly searching for a reason to impeach George Bush or to indict someone in his administration.

RLC

New Cancer Treatment

There's news from England of yet another encouraging treatment for some forms of cancer. This treatment involves selecting the few immune cells in the patient's body which fight cancer and cloning them so that billions of them can be injected back into the patient:

A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure. After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

Doctors took cells from the man's own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as "immunotherapy". After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

The work raises hopes that this approach could not only offer a more effective treatment for skin cancer, or melanoma, which kills around 2,000 people in Britain alone, but be applied to other cancers too.

It's wonderful to think that perhaps within the lifetimes of many who are reading this a death from cancer will be as unusual as a death from small pox or polio.

RLC

The Loser Letters #4

"Former Christian" Mary Eberstadt continues her efforts to get her new atheist friends to see that their tactics for converting Christians aren't working very well in this the fourth installment of her "Loser Letters." Why, she wonders, do the "Dulls" have all the great art.

Eberstadt's letters deserve to become classics.

RLC

Hard and Easy Problems

Michael Egnor treats us to a fine explanation of the problems conscious experience poses for a materialist view of the brain. How matter can give rise to the actual sensation of blueness, for example, is a mystery that baffles neuroscientists and which is an embarrassment to those who hold that all of our "mental" experience can be ultimately explained in terms of nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain (i.e. materialism).

Egnor closes his essay with this summary:

The origin of subjective experience is the fundamental question-the hard problem-in understanding the mind. Yet there is nothing in the material world that intrinsically refers to or explains subjective experience. There is nothing in third-person ontogeny from which one would infer first-person ontogeny. No theory in physics or chemistry invokes the emergence of first-person experience. A detailed scientific understanding of the physics and chemistry of the brain-from molecular structure to neurochemistry to electrophysiology to neuroanatomy-would not at any point provide a scientific explanation of why we are subjects and not just objects.

The hard problem of consciousness is the most important problem in understanding the mind, and thus far materialism has provided no insight. It is unclear how it even could provide insight. Nothing about the scientific characterization of matter-and nothing about materialism-explains the emergence of subjective experience. The principal materialist response to this catastrophe for materialist ideology has been to deny the relevance of subjective experience to our understanding of the mind. Yet the retreat to science and the denial of the relevance of philosophy is no refuge. Science is natural philosophy.

You really should read the whole thing, but if you go to the link you should keep in mind that I think he accidentally transposes the words mind and brain in the first sentence. I believe he means to say that materialists hold that the mind is completely caused by the brain.

RLC

The Ryan Plan

Jason forwards us an article by Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute that restores, a little bit, one's hope that some members of Congress are at least thinking about the problems this country is facing and coming up with workable solutions. This program for Republicans is the brainchild of Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI). I say it's a program for Republicans because under their current leadership I can't imagine too many Democrats going along with it:

There are many reasons for the Republican Party's troubles, including an unpopular war, a sputtering economy, and a long string of corruption scandals. But perhaps most important, the party no longer seems to stand for its core commitment to limited government.

Enter Paul Ryan. Late last month, the five-term Wisconsin congressman introduced a comprehensive blueprint for reforming taxes, entitlements, retirement and health care. If Republicans are looking for a road out of the political wilderness, they should pay attention.

Health Care: Ryan would reform our employment-based insurance system by replacing the current tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance with a refundable tax credit of $2,500 for individuals, and $5,000 for families. This would encourage employers to take the money they currently spend providing health insurance and give it directly to workers, who could then use it to purchase competitive, personally owned insurance plans. That would be insurance that met their needs, not those of their bosses, and people wouldn't lose it if they lost their jobs.

Ryan would also allow workers to shop for insurance across state lines. That would mean residents of states like New Jersey and New York, where regulation has made insurance too expensive for many people, could buy their insurance in states where it costs less. And increased competition would help bring insurance costs down for all of us.

Medicare: Rep. Ryan recognizes that the skyrocketing cost of Medicare is threatening to bury our children and grandchildren under a mountain of debt. He would modernize the program, giving seniors more freedom to get the type of coverage that fits their needs, while bringing costs under control. He would give every senior an annual payment of up to $9,500 that they could use to purchase health insurance. The payments would be inflation protected and adjusted for income, with low-income seniors receiving greater support. Seniors would be able to save some of their funds in a Medical Savings Account.

Social Security: Like Medicare, Social Security is hurtling toward insolvency. Rep. Ryan would preserve the program unchanged for current recipients and workers older than age 55, but he would allow younger workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes privately through personal accounts. Unlike the present system, workers would own the funds in their accounts, and when they died, they could pass any remaining funds on to their heirs.

Taxes: Rep. Ryan would radically simplify today's hopelessly complex, cumbersome and bureaucratic tax code. He would give filers a choice: They could pay their taxes under existing law, or they could choose a new simplified code, with just two tax rates (10 percent on the first $100,000 for joint filers; $50,000 for individuals, and 25 percent above that).

His plan would offer virtually no deductions or exemptions, except for an increased standard personal deduction and exemption of up to $39,000 for a family of four. He would also replace our current anti-competitive corporate income tax - the world's second-highest, at 35 percent - with an 8.5 percent business consumption tax (essentially a value-added tax), and eliminate taxes on capital gains and dividends. Although not everyone agrees with this particular approach to business taxation, Rep. Ryan understands that we must bring our corporate taxes in line with those of our competitors if we want to increase economic growth and create more jobs.

Our current level of government spending is unsustainable. According to the Congressional Budget Office, unless we act now, government will consume 40 percent of our national Gross Domestic Product by 2050. That would require a doubling of the tax burden just to keep up.

If a conservative candidate for president were to promote something like Congressman Ryan's proposal he might win in November and drag along the rest of the Republican ticket with him. Sadly, there aren't any conservatives running in November.

RLC

Winter Light

Tobias Wolff at The New Yorker writes a good piece on the Ingmar Bergman film Winter Light in which Bergman tells the story of a Lutheran pastor whose faith is slipping away, largely because he has substituted the form of religion for its substance. Wolff expresses many of the thoughts I have every time I watch the movie. I recommend both the article and the film, especially as a caution to anyone considering the ministry for all the wrong reasons.

RLC

An Ad Only Keith Olbermann Could Love

Move On.org, the same organization that brought us the General Betray Us ads, crosses new frontiers of political mendacity and shamelessness with this spot:

Let's count the ways in which this ad seeks to deceive the viewer:

1. Even if McCain is elected in November he can only serve for at most eight years which would make Alex about eight years old when McCain leaves office. Unless we are truly desperate for soldiers it's doubtful that his little self will be much in demand at that point.

2. McCain's 100 year statement is taken completely out of context. What he said was that it would be okay with him if we stayed in Iraq for 100 years as long as American troops were no longer at risk. In other words, he was talking about a deployment such as we have had in Japan and Germany since WWII. MoveOn knows this, but truth-telling is not high, sad to say, on their to-do list.

3. Even if Alex were to turn 18 in the next couple of years his mommy seems not to realize that there is no draft. MoveOn.org doesn't seem capable of grasping the fundamental difference between a volunteer army and a conscripted force, so let's make it as simple for them as we can: If Alex wants to go into the military when he turns 18 it'll be his choice.

This ad is so transparently disingenuous that intelligent and fair-minded voters should recoil from it in disgust. Unfortunately, MoveOn isn't pitching it to intelligent and fair-minded voters.

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 6

Author Richard Dawkins concerns himself in chapter 6 of The God Delusion (TGD) with an attempt to explain the relationship between God and morality and to argue that God is not necessary for good behavior. Richard Dawkins initiates the discussion with this question:

Isn't goodness incompatible with the theory of the selfish gene (the view that all of our behavior is determined by our genes to increase the chances that our genes will be perpetuated into the next generation)? The question could be asked more relevantly of atheism in general, but Dawkins replies to his query by claiming that evolution gives a much better explanation for morality than does the God Hypothesis.

Before we consider his answer we might pause for a moment to note something he says which I find intriguing. He argues that acts of altruism in animals are demonstrations of one individual's superiority over another:

The dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, "Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to give you food." Or "Look how superior I am, I can afford to make myself vulnerable top hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground." ....And when a subordinate [bird] attempts to offer food to a dominant individual, the apparent generosity is violently rebuffed.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I've long thought it an interesting quirk of human nature that many people resent favors done them by others. Rather than see the favor as a kindness people sometimes react to it as though it were a personal insult (Think of the ingratitude many Iraqis feel for American sacrifices on behalf of their freedom, for instance). Perhaps the ingratitude is due to the fact that at some subliminal level the beneficiary of the favor realizes that he is being implicitly told that he is inferior, and no one likes to be told that.

At any rate, Dawkins' point in chapter 6 is that we don't need God to be moral. The urge to be kind, for instance, is a product of our evolutionary history and we'd have that inclination whether God told us to be kind or not. There's much in his reasoning on this matter of which we can be critical.

The problem is not how to explain "moral" behavior. People can certainly do "good" things whether God exists or not. The problem is trying to account for moral obligation. How are we obligated to do something just because evolution has inclined us to do it? Why should we be kind if there's nothing in it for us or if cruelty will benefit us in some way? Why is it wrong to be cruel? What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" anyway? How do we justify the belief that moral good and bad have any non-arbitrary meaning apart from an objective transcendent moral authority?

Evolution has bestowed upon us other tendencies besides an inclination to kindness (which, by the way, not all humans appear to possess) which we do not consider good. How do we decide which of these tendencies are good and which are bad? Evolution has given us a tendency to be aggressive, to be selfish toward non-kin, to be sexually promiscuous, etc. Is yielding to these inclinations wrong? If so, why?

Dawkins comes very close here to committing the genetic fallacy, the error that says that because we are a certain way that therefore we should be that way. He also informs us that he is himself a consequentialist, one who bases rightness on the results of the act, but who do those results have to benefit in order to be right? Other people? Himself? How does he decide which it is to be, and why would it be wrong to just care about the benefits of one's actions for oneself?

Dawkins cites studies which show that there's little difference in the way atheists and believers make moral judgments and concludes from this that "we do not need God in order to be good." This is quite an unusual conclusion to draw from these studies. All they show, if they show anything at all, is that atheists have moral convictions that are completely unsupported by their deepest beliefs. Their atheism gives them no basis for thinking anything is right or wrong but they believe there is right and wrong anyway. What the studies Dawkins cites suggest is that most atheists inconsistent, since every atheist who makes a moral judgment is acting as if his atheism were not true.

Dawkins goes on to allege that the Christian tries to be good only to seek God's favor. He concurs with Michael Shermer that "If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself to be an immoral person."

This misunderstands the Christian motivation for the moral life. It's not fear of punishment and hope of reward that motivates Christians to do good deeds, when they do them, but rather love and gratitude to the God who has done so much for us. We do not seek God's love by being good. We are good, to the extent we are, because God loves us.

To say that anyone who rapes or murders is immoral, as Shermer and Dawkins do, begs the question. It assumes that the word "immorality" actually means something significant. For Dawkins an immoral act is merely an act which he doesn't like. If there is no God it can't be any more than this. To say that something is immoral is to say nothing more than that he wishes people wouldn't do it. Notwithstanding his wishes, the person who does do such things is no more "wrong" than a cat is wrong to torment a mouse.

In a classic illustration of the fallacy called Division Dawkins makes the ridiculous claim that rioters in Montreal during a police strike in the 1960s were mostly religious people because most Canadians are religious people. Perhaps we can forgive Dawkins this bit of asininity if it weren't that he comes right back on the next page and makes the same sophomoric argument again, this time by quoting a section from a book by fellow atheist Sam Harris.

Harris seeks to disprove the belief that religion leads to better behavior by observing that most of the crime in the U.S. occurs in our cities and most of the cities with the highest crime rates are in states which tend to vote Republican and are therefore most likely to be populated by Christian conservatives. I am not making this up. This is Harris' argument, and Dawkins signs on to it. What Harris and Dawkins are apparently unaware of is that even in Republican states the cities are overwhelmingly Democratic and secular. Instead of employing such a juvenile argument perhaps Harris should have just visited a prison and taken a poll of the inmates and asked them how many were devout, church-going believers who prayed daily at the time they committed their crimes. I wonder what the results would show.

It's hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people would make such embarrassingly dumb arguments, but when your task is to try to give a defense of morality without God you have to go with the best you can even if that means taking a chance on an argument that would be laughed at by middle schoolers.

The fundamental moral problem for the atheist, a problem which Dawkins never really addresses, is this: What is there which obligates us to behave in one way rather than another? What makes kindness better than cruelty? Why should I not just live for myself? Why should I care about others? What's wrong with selfishness? It's really no surprise that Dawkins doesn't address these questions. Indeed, the surprise would have been if he had, because for the atheist there just is no answer to them.

It's fitting to close with a quote from Dawkins' hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin writes in his Autobiography these words:

"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best."

In the absence of God, all we have to guide us are our feelings and no one's feelings are any more authoritative than anyone else's. Unfortunately, the fact that for the atheist one's own subjective feelings are no more morally superior than anyone else's doesn't prevent Mr. Dawkins from repeatedly making moral judgments of others throughout his book and especially in the next chapter.

RLC

Bush Didn't Lie

James Kirchick, an assistant editor at the liberal New Republic, writes in the liberal LA Times that those who continue to push the meme that Bush lied us into Iraq are themselves being dishonest. Viewpoint has been saying much the same thing since 2003. It's simply disreputable to accuse Bush of having lied to precipitate a war with Iraq. It was disreputable in 2003 because there was insufficient evidence of a lie, and it's even more disreputable now because there's a lot of evidence that he did not lie.

Moreover, by discrediting the President his critics have succeeded in ratcheting up the threshold of provocation necessary to compel us to use military force to the point where it would be almost impossible, politically or psychologically, to employ force today on some new front. More timorous presidents than George Bush will be very reluctant to resort to military means even when it's clear that terrorist nations like Iran are implacably determined to produce nuclear weapons which they all but promise to use, either themselves or through terrorist surrogates.

Those who have so bitterly defamed the President's integrity over the last five years have made the future far less safe for our children and they've done it by despoiling the reputation of the one man who acted to prevent that from happening. To the extent that they slandered George Bush out of malice as well as a thirst for political power they deserve historical ignominy. If there is justice in the world their names will forever be uttered with contempt.

Kirchick's LA Times column is a fine piece of writing and a fresh breeze of honesty coming from a man who normally stands in political opposition to Republican policies.

RLC

Avoid the Argument from Good Works

Mary Eberstadt's third in her series of "Loser Letters," written to her atheist friends advising them as to how best to discredit Christians, is perhaps her best so far. In it she urges them, as it is their wont to do, not to make a big deal about how atheism is at least as serviceable as Christianity in providing grounds for good works. By all means, she enjoins, they should continue to hammer away at the various crimes committed 700 years ago by the Inquisition, but whatever they do, they should not tout atheism's own record of human kindness.

You'll find it hard to stifle a smile and an occasional chuckle as you read it. That is, unless you're an atheist.

RLC

Gays in the Military

Andrew writes to share some thoughts on the issue of gays serving in the military. I've posted his letter on the Feedback page and invite comment.

RLC

Like, You Know?

Taylor Mali, whom I'd never heard of before, does an amusing riff on the most "aggressively inarticulate generation" since whenever:

HT: Evangelical Outpost

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 5

Having shown to his satisfaction, if to no one else's, that there's almost certainly no Deity, Professor Dawkins next assays to consider where the whole business of religion came from anyway. He concludes in chapter 5 that religion is an evolutionary misfiring, or by-product, of something else. By way of explanation he invites us to consider the self-destructive behavior of moths which spiral into a flame. Why do they do this? Well, over the eons they have evolved light sensors that enable them to navigate by the moon and the stars. These luminous objects are very far away and seem to the moths like stationary beacons in the night sky, but when artificial light was introduced into the moths' environment the lights were so close that they appear to shift as the moth moves, requiring any moth that's fixing on them to also deviate from a straight-line path to keep the light at a fixed point. The result was that the confused moth takes a spiral path toward the light, or something like that.

Professor Dawkins doesn't trouble himself to explain why moths need to navigate by celestial objects in the first place since they don't migrate and spend much of their adult lives confined to a localized area. When they do travel it's along chemical trails of pheromones produced by females. So why would they have evolved these light sensors? But this is a digression. His point is that the spiraling behavior of moths is really a by-product of something else and that likewise religious behavior in humans is a by-product of some other behavior which evolved because it conferred a selective advantage.

Dawkins avoids the simpler explanation that religion itself confers a selective advantage and thus humans evolved it. This is an unacceptable explanation, even if it has the merit of being less cumbersome, because if it were the case Dawkins would have to admit that atheism is a maladaptive mutation, and he certainly doesn't want to have to make the case that atheists are genetic mutants.

So what is religion a by-product of? It turns out that all we have are guesses, but one guess is that natural selection produced in children the tendency to believe whatever their parents and other elders tell them, a bit of news that'll surprise most parents. This aids the children in survival. Parents tell kids about God so kids grow up believing in God.

It's not clear whether children lose this gullibility as adults, but if they do why do they retain belief in God when they don't retain other childhood beliefs like belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Why, too, do so many people come to belief as adults? Why isn't Dawkins himself religious since he received a lot of exposure to it when he was a child? If one's belief about God is a result of psychological misfires in the brain then isn't atheism also a result of such a misfire and thus can't we conclude that atheists don't believe in God because of evidence but because of some psychological quirk? Professor Dawkins doesn't help us with these questions. He's in too much of a hurry to rush on to his next grievance against the religious - their irritating tendency to be dualists - which he also sees as a holdover from childhood.

There are other guesses as to what religion is a by-product of, of course, - love, projection, wishful thinking - but the general idea Dawkins wants to advance is that it's a by-product of something advantageous for survival.

Another reason why religion has survived and diversified has to do with memes. A meme is like a mental gene. It embodies an idea or set of ideas (called a memeplex) that spreads through a culture. For example, the belief in human rights is a meme, as is any belief. Natural selection acts to weed out unsatisafactory memes in the same way it culls unfit genes. Religious beliefs are also memes which have spread, not because they are true, but because they afforded those who held them some survival advantage.

Dawkins is obviously pleased with this explanation for the widespread occurrence of religion even though the theory is completely speculative and even self-defeating. After all, if all our beliefs are merely memes then so is atheism a meme, so is Darwinian evolution a meme, and, indeed, so is belief in memes a meme.

He closes the chapter with a rambling discussion of cargo cults, religions that spring up among primitive people when they encounter for the first time the "magic" of modern technological society. He notes that ignorant people often regard the radios and machines of visiting Europeans as being supernaturally produced because they never see them being made or repaired. None of this, like much else in the remainder of the book, has anything at all to do with whether God exists.

Dawkins is apparently convinced that the existence of God and the manner in which some people express their homage to that God are one and the same thing. He seems to think that if he can discredit religious beliefs then he can discredit belief in God. Perhaps this is the strangest "God delusion" of all.

Critiques of previous chapters in The God Delusion can be found here:

Chapter 4 (part III)

Chapter 4 (part II)

Chapter 4 (part I)

Chapter 3

Chapter 2

Chapter 1

RLC

Left or Right

No doubt you've heard people speak of the difference between being left or right "brained," but perhaps you were unsure what it meant or which of the two describes you. If so, you might want to read this interesting little self-assessment which AOL featured recently:

Are you a genius at certain jobs but feel like a half-wit when trying to complete other types of work? The two sides of the brain each have distinct preferences and capabilities, and your strong suits and weaknesses are frequently based upon the side of your brain that is dominant. Take this quiz to find out whether or not you are a right or left brain thinker and check out the career choices that might be best for you.

1. Are you better at math and science than art and literature?

YES - People who are left-brain thinkers are often better at and enjoy math and science over art and literature, making them perfect candidates for a career in engineering.

NO - People who are right-brain thinkers are often better at and enjoy art and literature over math and science, making them perfect candidates for a career in grant writing.

2. Do you love playing sports outdoors over reading indoors?

YES - The great outdoors and athletics are favorites of people who are right-brain thinkers, and a career that can combine the two, like one as a recreation director, is perfect.

NO - Staying indoors and reading are favorites of people who are left-brain thinkers, and a career that can combine the two, like one as a librarian, is perfect.

3. Do you prefer verbal communication over physical communication?

YES - Left-brain thinkers love to work things out by talking, enjoying jobs like career counseling, where they are very effective.

NO - Right-brain thinkers are more likely to think that actions speak louder than words and prefer showing their worth without words. A career path of yoga instructor would fit their preferences.

4. Would you rather draw pictures freehand instead of putting together a model airplane?

YES - People who are right-brain thinkers aren't fans of tremendous structure and prefer having some creativity at work, which makes marketing a perfect career for them.

NO - People who are left-brain thinkers are in need of structure and prefer having specific guidelines at work, which makes computer programming a perfect career path for them.

5. Do you like being in groups more than being alone?

YES - Group-oriented people are usually right-brain thinkers, making a job in retail a good fit for their lifestyle preference.

NO - Loners are usually left-brain thinkers, making a job in accounting a good fit for their lifestyle preference.

6. When given instructions, are lots of pictures easier to understand than lots of text?

YES - Right-brain thinkers love picture explanations over textual explanations, and this visual preference usually lends well to a career in interior design.

NO - Left-brain thinkers love textual explanations over pictorial explanations, and this preference usually lends well to a clerical career.

Most people are doubtless a blend so I suppose the question is in each case do we tend to have more of one of these traits than another.

RLC

Damning with Faint Praise

DaveScot at Uncommon Descent shares this pithy thought with us:

We often hear from Darwinists that "the theory of evolution is as well tested as the theory of gravity". Strangely though, we never hear physicists saying that the theory of gravity is as well tested as the theory of evolution.

Anyhow, I was just reading yet another Darwinian Narrative on the genetic similarities and differences between man and chimp but how we don't really know which differences are the important ones. In point of fact, we don't really know if the DNA differences are even significant. The only thing we really know is that a chimp is a chimp because its mother was a chimp. Beyond that, it's nothing but guesswork.

Then I thought about how this compares to the theory of gravity. We know enough about gravity so that we routinely spend billions of dollars launching interplanetary unmanned exploratory spacecraft that, with exquisite precision predicted long before the craft is launched, it moves about the solar system, arriving at known points within meters and seconds years after it is launched and after having traveled circuitous routes for billions of miles.

Contrast that with how well we can predict what it takes to turn a chimp into a human. That, my friends, is a true example of how well the theory of evolution has been tested. It hasn't been tested at all. It's nothing but WAGs and hand waving. Gravity, on the other hand, is indeed well tested. And that's why you'll never hear a physicist saying the theory of gravity is as well tested as the theory of evolution.

To compare evolutionary theory to gravity, as many Darwinians do, is to damn with faint praise. We know almost nothing about gravity. We don't know what it is, how it "pulls" on objects, how matter produces it, how it can seem to travel at infinite speed, or how it can warp space. All we know is that it can be described in mathematical formulas and, as DaveScot points out, the mathematics can be employed to impressive effect, but no such mathematical precision inheres in evolutionary theory.

About the most we can say about the similarities between evolution and gravity is that they share in common the fact that they're both believed to exist.

RLC

A Good Man is Gone

HT: Gary Varvel

RLC

Shocker Stat

This statistic just shocks the socks off us:

A city Health Department study finds that more than a fourth of adult New Yorkers are infected with the virus that causes genital herpes. The study, released Monday, says about 26 percent of New York City adults have genital herpes, compared to about 19 percent nationwide. The department says genital herpes can double a person's risk for contracting HIV.

This is in ultra-liberal New York, no less - where children receive condoms as a baptismal gift and are taught the virtues of safe sex from the time they're potty trained - one in four adults has herpes. How can that be?

RLC

The God Delusion, Ch. 4 (part III)

Although supremely confident that he has just demolished any rationale for believing in God with his argument based on God's alleged improbability, professor Dawkins loads another round into the chamber just in case theism is still twitching.

Recall that his argument is a reply to the theist's claim that the complexity of the universe, its finely-tuned forces and parameters, are so extraordinarily improbable as to make an intelligent cause the only plausible explanation for them. Dawkins has argued, incorrectly, that this cause would itself have to be even more extraordinarily improbable and therefore not a plausible explanation at all. The theist cannot explain God and therefore has no reason to believe he exists, or so Dawkins implies.

Now he imagines himself to be applying the coup de grace to theism by presenting what he fancies to be a more plausible explanation for the universe's existence. Since we should always believe that which is more plausible instead of that which is less plausible we should accept his explanation he's about to offer rather than the God Hypothesis. His argument combines what has come to be called the Anthropic Principle (actually Dawkins employs what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle, WAP) with the Many-Worlds Hypothesis MWH).

Suppose you purchase a lottery ticket and learn that you are the only person who did so. Nevertheless, on the day of the drawing your five-digit ticket number, as highly improbable as it may be, comes up. You've won. The odds against it are extraordinary, but there's no point in objecting that it's almost impossible that your number could have been randomly drawn since you obviously won and the only way that could have happened is if your number was the one selected.

The universe is something like that. It's admittedly incredible that the forces and structural parameters are what they are, but we shouldn't be too surprised, the argument goes, since if they weren't exactly as they are the universe, if it existed all, would not have been able to produce life, and we wouldn't be here to notice the fact. Thus, the universe has to be the way it is for us to be here at all. That's the WAP and, Dawkins believes, it's all the explanation that's needed or which can be given for how the world happens to be so exquisitely calibrated for life.

This, of course, sounds like sophistry to most people who don't think like atheists. Consider a prisoner placed in a room with a dozen card tables each of which has on it ten complete packs of thoroughly shuffled playing cards. The man is told that from each of the decks on each of the tables he is to draw four cards at random. The first time he draws something other than an ace a poison gas will be released and he will die instantly. The man begins his task, despairing of making it past even the first card. Yet to his astonishment he completes the first table having drawn all aces, then the second, and finally the last. Unable to comprehend his good fortune, he wonders aloud how it could possibly have happened that he drew all aces, purely by chance, and is still alive. He's convinced, quite reasonably, that someone must have tinkered with the cards. A voice comes over the intercom, the voice of Richard Dawkins, say, and intones that he shouldn't conclude that there was any tinkering. Would it not be even more astonishing that an invisible man of some sort had somehow influenced the card selection? No, it was all just coincidence, and the prisoner shouldn't marvel that he drew 120 aces because if it had been otherwise he wouldn't be alive to notice. That's essentially Dawkins' explanation for the way the world is.

Needless to say, many people find this less than persuasive, so Dawkins imports another idea to buttress it. This is the theory that our universe or at least our region of the universe is just one of a near infinite number of such regions (called domains) all having different physical properties. Dawkins seizes upon this idea, the Many Worlds Hypothesis, and argues that given so many possibilities it's highly likely that there's at least one domain which has the particular set of properties necessary to sustain advanced life forms, and it just happens that we're in it. In other words, if enough lottery tickets are sold one of them just has to have the winning number.

The MWH serves as a deus ex machina for Dawkins and by combining it with the argument from God's improbability Dawkins has atheist hearts palpitating the world over. You, however, may be asking yourself several questions:

1. Is a near infinite number of worlds likely to exist? Dawkins replies that no, it's very unlikely, but it's even less likely that God exists so it makes more sense to believe the MWH than to believe in God.

2. You may also wonder where all those universes came from and how they came to have the properties they do. If you do you're wondering about more than Dawkins does. There is no conceivable mechanism for generating these universes, nor for producing the laws which would govern them. How do physical laws get created anyway?

3. You may also be asking whether this has anything to do with science. After all, Dawkins tells us several times in the book that he bases his beliefs on evidence. What's the evidence for other worlds? There is none. The MWH violates the principle that the preferred explanation be one for which we have evidence or which can be inferred from what we already know. We have reason to believe that information and fine-tuning can be produced by minds. We have no evidence, nor can have, of other universes. We have evidence that minds can create beauty, elegance, harmony, etc. but no evidence that chance can.

Yet Dawkins is prepared to believe, despite the lack of any empirical evidence, there are an infinite number of universes before he'll believe that there's a mind behind it all. It reminds me of something I read about Michael Shermer, another prominent atheist. Shermer once said that even if we were to discover a planet with the words "Yahweh Made Me" inscribed in letters so large as to be visible from a vast distance he'd still believe that it was an amazing accident.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga observes that Dawkins seems to be arguing that because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:

It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like:

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p; Therefore, p is true.

Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.

Dawkins rests his entire case on the arguments of chapter 4, but those arguments come nowhere near demonstrating what he thinks they do. Indeed, they're an exceedingly flimsy platform upon which to rest a conclusion so weighty as that God does not exist. Perhaps aware of the logical mire into which he has stepped, he subtly changes the subject, diverting our attention from his attack on God to his attack on creationism, organized religion, and anything else religious that crosses his field of vision. Whatever may be the merits of these criticisms, they're irrelevant to the question of the existence of God. Indeed, belief in God is left completely unscathed by The God Delusion.

RLC

Black Gold

Gary Varvel shows us why we're paying $4.00 a gallon at the pump:

RLC

Gas Prices

Four dollars a gallon got you down? Pity our poor congresspersons heavy-laden with the burden of finding a solution to this intractable and economically distressing problem, a problem which is doing real harm to millions of people. Surely with all their resources congress will come up with a creative, innovative, and wise solution:

On the other hand, perhaps some problems just have no solution. If Nancy Pelosi's best and brightest can't find one maybe a solution just doesn't exist ...

HT: Ramirez

Newt Gingrich suggests three things we can and should do to reduce the price of oil and in so doing demonstrates the intellectual fertility of conservatism. One measure would have an immediate effect, one would have an effect in the mid-term, and one is a long-term solution:

Now if only we could persuade the Democrats that windfall profits taxes are simply a feel-good measure designed to punish oil companies and which won't produce a single drop more oil, nor lower the price of oil a single cent.

Gingrich suggested on television last night that Sen. McCain ought to invite Sen. Obama to join with him in pushing Congress to enact these measures with all deliberate speed, and if Obama declines, which he probably would, to point out that Obama's energy policies are actually punishing the working poor. The problem is that on energy in general, and drilling for domestic oil in particular, McCain's not much better than Obama.

HT: Hot Air.

RLC