Obama on Iraq

Senator Barack Obama lays out his thinking on Iraq in a column in the New York Times, but I don't think he succeeds in clearing up the questions that surround his position. He writes that:

The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep....I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president.

What does this mean to people who read it? McCain would also end the war if he could. So would Bush. The question is what are the deep differences in how and when Obama would end it. If there really are significant differences then to end the war can only mean that he will quit fighting and start an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. If this is not what he's prepared to do then his plan is essentially the Bush/McCain policy of staying in Iraq until it's stable and able to fend for itself.

Obama assures us that, as president, he will have most of our troops out of Iraq in two years. Unless he can't. But what would prevent him? Conditions on the ground, says he, but then how is this any different than saying that he'll take as long as he needs to get the job done?

Obama is trying to pull off a bit of rhetorical legerdemain. He says he'll end the war, and the left hears him say that the shooting will stop as soon as he's president. Then he says he'll listen to the generals, and the moderates hear him say that he'll not surrender or retreat until Iraq is stable. So, while winking at his anti-war base he actually adopts, for all practical purposes, the Bush/McCain position.

Besides, as we noted before, to get the troops out in the 16 months he has promised they'll have to leave behind all their equipment. That's simply not going to happen.

Obama admits in his column that the surge has worked, but even so:

[T]he same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we've spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq's leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

None of these are good reasons to leave. They're reasons for ratcheting up the pressure on the Maliki government, perhaps, and for getting more international help in Afghanistan, but not for abandoning Iraq before it's capable of standing on its own.

The Senator thinks we could leave the Iraqis to their own devices and "protect their stability by diplomatic negotiations". Well, perhaps we could persuade Kuwait not to invade Iraq and seize their southern oil fields, but I doubt diplomatic negotiations with no threat of real force would do much to persuade Iran and Syria, not to mention al Qaeda. Obama is terribly naive if he thinks that people can just be talked into doing what he wants.

But here's the fine print. He admits that he's not going to end the war. He's only going to end the fighting in the Iraq theater:

Ending the war [in Iraq] is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won't have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.

So Barack is not going to end American involvement abroad. He's not going to end military operations. He's just going to end them in Iraq, for reasons hard to make sense of, and move those operations to Afghanistan. He's going to send at least two brigades (minus their equipment, remember)to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

So where are the "deep differences"? His difference with McCain is simply one of tactics. McCain wants to hang on in Iraq until the Iraqis can defend themselves and then move troops to Afghanistan. Obama wants to abandon Iraq and transfer the troops to Afghanistan now where they'll still be fighting Islamic extremists.

It all makes me wonder why anti-war people continue to support Obama. Do they not think he really means what he's saying? Are they hoping that he's lying about going to Afghanistan? Do they agree with him that there's some significant difference between fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan and fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq? What principles guide their opposition to the war, and where does Obama really stand on all this?

RLC

PA Turning Purple

Suddenly Pennsylvania, which had been a pretty solidly blue state, has been put in play and Barack Obama has no one else to thank for this blow to his campaign than his fellow Democrats in the Pennsylvania state legislature. Twelve of them are now under indictment, two high ranking elected officials and ten staffers, for using millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to pay for political work and personal benefits.

Among the most egregious of their offenses was the practice of rewarding staffers with bonuses for doing work in political campaigns. The bonuses were paid with public funds and some of the staffers, whose salaries were paid by the taxpayer, did nothing but political fundraising and other campaign work in their offices in Harrisburg.

The Philadelphia Inmquirer notes:

[The bonuses] helped trigger the investigation, which has centered on Democrats because of the sheer dollar amount of the bonuses.

At the end of 2006, after winning back control of the lower chamber, House Democrats gave nearly $1.9 million in bonuses to 717 aides - more than the other three caucuses combined.

House Democrats, according to the charges, had the bonuses down to a science. House aides, at the request of Veon and Manzo, created a grading system for rewarding staffers who had done political work. The grades: "OK," "good," and "rock star." Depending on the grade, aides got anywhere from $250 to $25,000.

By 2006, the system of bonuses for political work was so ingrained that finding aides for campaigns was a cinch, the charges state.

The investigation is continuing and perhaps hundreds more Democratic staffers and elected officials may be implicated before it's all over. The Democrats are almost sure to suffer a backlash in November from Pennsylvanians who are already outraged that the legislature voted themselves a pay raise two years ago in the dead of night. The only question is how severe the backlash will be. There is also the possibility that some Republicans might also be charged in the investigation, thus blunting voter anger against the Democrats.

If this turns out to be a purely, or mostly, Democratic scandal, however, Obama may well lose Pennsylvania in November.

RLC

Logistical Nightmare

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air writes that Senator Obama's plan as outlined on his website for a withdrawal from Iraq in 16 months is a logistical impossibility and that the Senator is telling us something important about his lack of understanding of matters military by proposing it. Citing this ABC News report Morrissey writes:

This is the kind of information that policy makers usually get before formulating policy. We can rotate troops out of Iraq on the kind of timetable Obama suggests, but we'd have to leave all of our heavy equipment in Iraq. Unless Obama plans some kind of nationwide garage sale, that would be a rather large loss for the American military in material as well as making our exit look more like Dunkirk.

Obviously, Obama didn't have any awareness of logistics when he made this proposal - and that's the point. His lack of experience, combined with a hubris that he has consistently shown on the campaign trail, makes clear that he is in way over his head at this point of his career. He has no sense of military policy at all, and got the biggest call of the war - the surge - completely wrong. Yet he insists that he's ready to lead this nation's military during a time of war as Commander in Chief?

The troops in the field have strong feelings about premature withdrawal under any circumstances. As one soldier put it, pointing to his bulletproof vest, he doesn't want his children having to wear the same gear in Iraq in 30 years because we (once again) bugged out before the job was finished. When Obama visits Iraq this summer, he will undoubtedly hear plenty of that sentiment - but they will also include a primer on logistics that Obama should have requested long before he started making promises about the pace of withdrawal.

Here's a video of the ABC News reporter on Good Morning America:

Morrissey concludes by asking that if casualties in Iraq have dropped to effectively zero by the time Barack takes office what would be the hurry?

Good question. Here's mine: When the anti-war folks realize that many of the combat brigades that will leave Iraq are going to be redeployed to Afghanistan are they still going to insist that they should be pulled out of Iraq? Haven't many of those who have opposed the Iraq venture been saying all along that we should be in Afghanistan hunting down Osama bin Laden? It'll be interesting to see what they have to say once it appears that their words will be heeded.

RLC

Tony Snow (1955-2008)

Tony Snow was loved by millions who watched him work as a political commentator, and his struggle with cancer over the last three years, to the extent he spoke of it publicly, showed him to be a man of immense courage and an amazingly positive outlook on life.

Snow studied philosophy at Davidson college and philosophy and economics at the University of Chicago before moving into journalism and eventually replacing Scott McClellan as George Bush's Press Secretary in May of 2006. He battled a recurrence of colon cancer - he had his colon removed in 2005 - from almost the start of his tenure at the White House and finally succumbed to complications from the chemotherapy early today.

It's a shame that on the occassion of his death at the age of 53 his life has been tarnished by essays like that of Douglass K. Daniel at the AP who evidently found it difficult to write about Snow's death without taking a few cheap shots at him:

With a quick-from-the-lip repartee, broadcaster's good looks and a relentlessly bright outlook - if not always a command of the facts - he became a popular figure around the country to the delight of his White House bosses.

This is the sort of hit-and-run insult that causes many people to simply abhor so much of the media. If Daniel isn't going to explain what he means by lacking a command of the facts, why say it? Why, on the death of a good man and father, someone who tried his best to serve his country, take an unsubstantiated swipe at him? It's easy, I suppose, to impugn the professionalism of someone who's no longer around to defend himself, but it reflects poorly on the character of the one who does it.

In that year and a half at the White House, Snow brought partisan zeal and the skills of a seasoned performer to the task of explaining and defending the president's policies. During daily briefings, he challenged reporters, scolded them and questioned their motives as if he were starring in a TV show broadcast live from the West Wing.

In other words, he refused to roll over for the media as did his predecessor. In retaliation for this insufferable l�se majest� Daniel portrays Snow as a narcissistic harpy.

Critics suggested that Snow was turning the traditionally informational daily briefing into a personality-driven media event short on facts and long on confrontation. He was the first press secretary, by his own accounting, to travel the country raising money for Republican candidates.

Daniel seems resentful that Snow outshone the media stars in the White House press corps, and, like a jealous Middle Schooler, he seems to want to get back at the one who draws more attention than he does.

Although a star in conservative politics, as a commentator he had not always been on the president's side. He once called Bush "something of an embarrassment" in conservative circles and criticized what he called Bush's "lackluster" domestic policy.

Daniel seems to assume that if one is a conservative he should be expected to support President Bush one hundred percent. If he he's not assuming that here then why is Snow's dissatisfaction with some of Bush's policies worth mentioning? George Bush is not himself a thoroughgoing conservative, but even if he were, why does Daniel think that conservatives are ideologically monolithic?

Most of Snow's career in journalism involved expressing his conservative views.

No kidding. Imagine that. And what views does Daniel think a conservative writer should express?

How rigorous is the course work these days that journalists have to pass in order to get hired by the AP?

RLC

Low Entropy

Sean Carroll is a physicist at Cal Tech and a proponent of the idea of the multiverse, the notion that reality consists of an infinite number of "universes". He was interviewed recently by the LA Times and the first part of the Q&A provides us with a good explanation of what the multiverse hypothesis is.

The most interesting part of the interview for me, though, was the second part. Carroll is inclined toward belief in a multiverse because, among other things, it provides a possible naturalistic explanation for a very puzzling aspect of our universe. Our universe started out, according to the standard Big Bang model, in a state of exceedingly low entropy. This means that it was very highly ordered. It's like mixing hot and cold water and having all the hot molecules, just through their random motions, all collect on one side of the basin and the cold molecules all collect on the other. It's possible but highly improbable.

Carroll compares it to opening a new pack of cards and finding the cards arranged in sequence by suit. We're not surprised by that when we buy a new deck of cards because we know that the cards were put into order at the factory. Since the universe was highly ordered when it was brand new, which is an extraordinarily improbable state, there must have been some other universe, or factory, from which it came because for it to have started out this way by chance is breathtakingly improbable.

Let's read the interview:

So what's the problem?

If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that's a very difficult fact to explain. . . .

There's no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.

So you think the way the universe began is unnatural?

Low-entropy configurations are rare.

If you take a deck of cards and you open it up, it's true that they're in order. But if you randomly chose a configuration of a deck of cards it would be very, very unlikely that they would be in perfect order.

That's exactly low entropy versus high entropy.

The universe is more than what we see?

The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and it's in perfect order is not because it's just easy and natural to find it in perfect order, it's because the deck of cards is not a closed system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory somewhere that arranged it. So I think there is a previous universe somewhere that made us and we came out.

We're part of a bigger structure.

Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?

Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don't observe. Our universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.

I'm not saying this is true; I'm saying this is an idea worth thinking about.

Indeed it is, so let's think about it. What Carroll doesn't mention is that the low entropy of the playing cards is due to the fact that there was an intelligently designed system at the factory which was intentionally constructed to place the cards in an orderly sequence. If there was a "factory" which produced a low entropy Big Bang then, following Carroll's deck of cards analogy, the factory should consist of an intentional, intelligent agent.

Carroll is asked by the interviewer about whether God has a role in his physics, and he pretty much answers no, but everything he has said in the interview up to that point leads to the conclusion that whatever produced the universe, it very likely was intelligent.

Carroll thinks that our universe was somehow spawned by another world in the multiverse, but this just sets the problem back a step. It doesn't really explain why or how our universe had such low entropy at it's beginning. It's as if his deck of cards was packed in perfect sequence just by coincidence. He's left clinging to the very unscientific belief that there are an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of initial conditions and that one of them just has to have had the initial conditions ours did.

The problem is that we know intelligent agents can produce low entropy states, but we don't have any evidence that there are an infinite number of other worlds, or if there are, that there were an infinite number of initial conditions. Each of the infinite worlds could have the exact same initial conditions for all we know. Postulation of the multiverse is an act of metaphysical desperation that enables those who are disinclined to believe in a purposeful creation to avoid having to draw the conclusion that it sure looks like it was intentionally designed.

It's funny that the multiverse hypothesis is an acceptable topic for discussion among scientists and would be a fascinating topic for a high school physics class, even though there's not a shred of empirical evidence for it. Yet our students must at all costs be protected from exposure to the toxic implications of believing that our universe is the only one that exists. They must not, on pain of litigation, have it suggested to them that a low entropy Big Bang entails the possibility of a purposeful origin to the universe.

RLC

The Roots of Civilization

George Will maintains that Western civilization owes its very existence to beer, of all things. Here's part of his interesting column:

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

Back in my college days there were a number of people I knew whose appetite for this beverage seemed extraordinary. Now, thanks to Mr. Will's column, I see that their excesses were in fact a heroic and altruistic attempt to improve the genetic stock of the species, and that they deserve the gratitude of humanity.

HT: Jason

RLC

Merci Beaucoup

Senator Obama believes it's more important for Americans to learn Spanish than to have a law making English the national language:

Powerline believes the Senator is out of touch with the mainstream of American opinion on this matter:

Attending to the news of the day, Scott Rasmussen polled the comparative importance to Americans of immigrants learning English versus Americans learning a foreign language. Rasmussen reports, in English, that Americans reject Obama's call for bilingualism, with 83 percent of respondents placing a higher priority on encouraging immigrants to speak English as their primary language. Just 13 percent took the opposite view saying it is more important for Americans to learn other languages. Rasmussen does not report how many respondents associated the latter view with Obama.

Rasmussen also found that only 26 percent believe that every American should be able to speak at least two languages. Breaking the results down along party lines, Rasmussen found that 79 percent of Republicans and 59 percent of Democrats reject the idea that all Americans should know multiple languages. Sixty-eight percent of independent voters rejected the importance of American bilingualism.

The question I have for Senator Obama is, if all the rest of the world can speak our language, why do we need to learn theirs?

Anyway, if Senator Obama wins in November maybe we would all do well to learn Arabic.

RLC

Guillermo Gonzalez Update

Readers with good memories will recall that Guillermo Gonzalez is a distinguished astronomer and author of The Privileged Planet who was denied tenure at Iowa State University ostensibly because he believes that planet earth is uniquely situated to permit the development of life forms (us) capable of doing astronomical research. In other words, it looks to professor Gonzalez as though earth was intentionally placed precisely where it is in the cosmos so that we could learn about the universe. Almost any other location would have stifled man's ability to study the heavens and science probably would never have progressed beyond the most rudimentary stages. It's a fascinating thesis and in his book he makes a powerful case for it, a case for which his materialist colleagues at Iowa state have made him pay dearly.

At any rate, it now turns out that Dr. Gonzalez has obtained a teaching and research position at Grove City College in western Pennsylvania where he will continue his fascinating work.

Photo of solar eclipse taken by Dr. Gonzalez

RLC

<i>Bella</i>

Like many folks, I guess, I rarely see movies until they're out on DVD, and even then it's often a year after their theater release that I finally catch up to them. Such is the case with the film I watched last night, but if you haven't seen it you shouldn't put it off.

The movie is Bella, the inaugural effort of a small indy film company released last fall. In the behind the scenes stuff that's included on the DVD one of the actors notes that this may be the first film made about Mexicans that's not about drugs, murder and foul language. Indeed, Bella is a movie about family, love, redemption and forgiveness. It's a simple but beautiful story of a troubled, lonely young woman, Nina, who finds herself pregnant and who wrestles with whether to have an abortion (it reminds me in this respect of Maria, Full of Grace which, however, was much more violent and dark), and a young man, Jose, whose professional soccer career has been shattered by an accident, and who finds himself befriending Nina and changing both her life and his.

The film struck me as a cinemagraphic version of the parable of the lost sheep in the New Testament with Jose as an obvious but understated Christ-figure.

The acting is excellent, even among the supporting cast, and you grow fond of every character in the film. Parts of the story might be confusing or troubling for younger children, but I enthusiastically recommend Bella for families with older children looking to share an evening together. It'll give you a lot to talk about.

If you do watch it be sure to also watch the extra background material on the DVD.

RLC

Squeezing Us

This is not an endorsement of NozzleRage.com about whom I know nothing except that they've made a video which is a pretty good parable of the consequences of our failure to become energy independent:

HT: PowerLine

RLC

LSEA

John G. West at National Review Online explains why the recently passed Louisiana law protecting teachers who try to promote critical analysis of ideas in their classrooms is a good step for Louisiana and the nation. If you haven't been following this act as it has been buffeted and battered along its way through the state legislature suffice it to say that it has been opposed by the usual enemies of free speech and academic freedom among the Darwinists and other secularists, but in the end only three legislators voted against it.

Here's West's introduction:

To the chagrin of the science thought police, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has signed into law an act to protect teachers who want to encourage critical thinking about hot-button science issues such as global warming, human cloning, and yes, evolution and the origin of life.

Opponents allege that the Louisiana Science Education Act is "anti-science." In reality, the opposition's efforts to silence anyone who disagrees with them is the true affront to scientific inquiry. Students need to know about the current scientific consensus on a given issue, but they also need to be able to evaluate critically the evidence on which that consensus rests. They need to learn about competing interpretations of the evidence offered by scientists, as well as anomalies that aren't well explained by existing theories.

Yet in many schools today, instruction about controversial scientific issues is closer to propaganda than education. Teaching about global warming is about as nuanced as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Discussions about human sexuality recycle the junk science of biologist Alfred Kinsey and other ideologically driven researchers. And lessons about evolution present a caricature of modern evolutionary theory that papers over problems and fails to distinguish between fact and speculation. In these areas, the "scientific" view is increasingly offered to students as a neat package of dogmatic assertions that just happens to parallel the political and cultural agenda of the Left.

You can read the rest of West's article at the above link. To read more about LSEA you can go here.

RLC

Why I Won't Vote for Barack Obama

Voting is a grave responsibility. When one casts one's ballot he votes for the kind of future he wants for his children and grandchildren. John McCain would not ordinarily be my first choice for President, but he is, by my lights, far more qualified for the office than is Barack Obama.

Obama voted "present" almost 130 times in the Illinois state senate, refusing to take positions on tough votes, but he roused himself sufficiently to vote against a bill that would have given protection to babies born alive after a failed abortion procedure. He surrounds himself with shysters, charlatans, and unrepentant terrorists. His early experience as a community organizer was working with the far-left group ACORN which has a reputation for voter fraud and other malfeasances. He often seems to take multiple positions on issues of importance and switches his position when it's politically expedient (a partial list of such changes includes his views on nuclear power, FISA, gun laws, campaign financing, Jerusalem, NAFTA, gay marriage, welfare reform, and Iraq. He even vowed in 2006 that he would not run for president). He sacrificed his pastor and friend to political expediency after telling us that he couldn't do such a thing and was willing to denigrate his own grandmother to advance his political fortunes.

He chooses Clinton administration officials as policy advisors while promising to break with the politics of the past. He opposes increasing our oil supply and any restrictions on partial-birth abortion. He favors open borders, high fuel prices, higher taxes, tax-payer funded abortion, and the redistribution of wealth from producers to non-producers. He also favors increased regulations on business, a universal health care plan that will, many experts claim, diminish the quality of health care in the country, and a toothless foreign policy.

Moreover, he is very likely to appoint judges and justices, like Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, who will use their power to create law rather than to interpret it, and has promised that he will appoint jurists to the Supreme Court who will uphold Roe v. Wade. At least that's where he stands as of today, tomorrow might be different.

Other than his personal charm and likeability he has nothing to commend him. He has no r�sum�. He has never been an executive or administrator. He has served neither in the business world nor the military. His only previous employment was as a "community organizer", whatever that is, and he has served in the U.S. Senate for about 150 days. There is nothing in his background which qualifies him for the post of either Chief Executive or Commander-in-Chief.

Abroad we are faced with an enemy determined to annihilate our way of life, our culture and our children. At home we are oppressed by an enormous regulatory bureaucracy and a culture of litigiousness that oppresses and stifles innovation and public life. Senator Obama is ill-prepared to confront the first - he was, in fact, endorsed by the terror organization Hamas - and is actually favorably disposed toward the second.

In short, based on what we know of him, I fear his election would be a grievous setback for our country and its people.

RLC

The Rock and the Hard Place

There seems to be some reason to think that Democrats may be starting to see the light on offshore oil drilling:

A top U.S. Democratic senator said in a newspaper interview published Wednesday that he would consider supporting opening up new areas for offshore oil and gas drilling.

"I'm open to drilling and responsible production," Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin told The Wall Street Journal, adding that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could also support the move.

It's great that the Democrats are beginning to realize that their previous strategy of blocking offshore drilling was growing increasingly untenable with gasoline exceeding $4.00 a gallon at the pump, but I still have a couple of questions for them:

1. If their original opposition had been predicated on a desire to maintain the natural beauty of our coasts I would have thought them mistaken, but I would have empathized with their concern. However, the reason we heard from many Democrats (though I don't know if Durbin and Reid themselves ever specifically said this) was that even if we drilled today it would be years before the oil reached the market and anyway there wouldn't be enough of it to make a significant difference in the price. Now if this was really the basis for their opposition to drilling before why would they now change their view? Have the facts changed or were they being less than sincere before citizen outrage concentrated their minds?

2. Where does this put Barack Obama who opposes drilling and consequently now risks appearing to be out of step on this issue not only with most of America but also with his own party? Can he afford to switch yet another previously held position? Does he remain steadfastly opposed to drilling and suffer the slings and arrows of voter disenchantment? The more Democrats warm to tapping domestic reserves the more unsustainable becomes his opposition to it, and yet he can't change his mind without reinforcing his self-inflicted image as a complete political opportunist. Obama is going to find himself between a very hard rock and a very rocky hard place on this one.

RLC

Waiting for Godot

Listening to media forecasts of impending economic recession is like watching Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. Commentators keep insisting a recession is on its way, but it never seems to arrive. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and so far we have yet to have even one negative quarter, much less two in a row. I know the Dems want to paint this as the worst economy ever but, as is often the case, the facts are just not on their side.

The stock market is down and the economy is not great (1% growth in the last quarter), but it's not in recession. It could be, however, if Democrats have their way and taxes are raised on everything we earn, social security remains unfixed, fuel prices are allowed to continue their rise, and business is taxed and regulated into the economic doldrums. The left's solution to a sluggish economy is to smother it with taxes and regulations that drive investment and jobs overseas, the end result of which is to make the problem worse, rather than better.

Their slogan this election might well be: Bring Back the 70s; Vote for Obama!

HT: Hot Air

RLC

The God of the Philosophers

Philosopher William Craig offers readers of Christianity Today a fine introduction to natural theology, the attempt to demonstrate God's existence apart from special revelation. He points out that natural theology has been enjoying a renaissance among contemporary philosophers since the late sixties and his overview of the classical arguments for God's existence will be very helpful to students interested in Christian apologetics.

Perhaps the most interesting part of his essay, however, is the final section where he asks the question, why, in a postmodern age, should we concern ourselves with arguments? He writes:

However all this may be, some might think that the resurgence of natural theology in our time is merely so much labor lost. For don't we live in a postmodern culture in which appeals to such apologetic arguments are no longer effective? Rational arguments for the truth of theism are no longer supposed to work. Some Christians therefore advise that we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate in it.

This sort of thinking is guilty of a disastrous misdiagnosis of contemporary culture. The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism! That's just old-line verificationism, which held that anything you can't prove with your five senses is a matter of personal taste. We live in a culture that remains deeply modernist.

Otherwise, how do we make sense of the popularity of the New Atheism? Dawkins and his ilk are indelibly modernist and even scientistic in their approach. On the postmodernist reading of contemporary culture, their books should have fallen like water on a stone. Instead, people lap them up eagerly, convinced that religious belief is folly.

Seen in this light, tailoring our gospel to a postmodern culture is self-defeating. By laying aside our best apologetic weapons of logic and evidence, we ensure modernism's triumph over us. If the church adopts this course of action, the consequences in the next generation will be catastrophic. Christianity will be reduced to but another voice in a cacophony of competing voices, each sharing its own narrative and none commending itself as the objective truth about reality. Meanwhile, scientific naturalism will continue to shape our culture's view of how the world really is.

A robust natural theology may well be necessary for the gospel to be effectively heard in Western society today. In general, Western culture is deeply post-Christian. It is the product of the Enlightenment, which introduced into European culture the leaven of secularism that has by now permeated Western society. While most of the original Enlightenment thinkers were themselves theists, the majority of Western intellectuals today no longer considers theological knowledge to be possible. The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.

Properly understanding our culture is important because the gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the current cultural milieu. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the gospel. But you may as well tell the secularist to believe in fairies or leprechauns as in Jesus Christ!

Christians who depreciate natural theology because "no one comes to faith through intellectual arguments" are therefore tragically shortsighted. For the value of natural theology extends far beyond one's immediate evangelistic contacts. It is the broader task of Christian apologetics, including natural theology, to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women. It thereby gives people the intellectual permission to believe when their hearts are moved.

I appreciate Craig's idea of the myth of a post-modern culture. I think he's right that the anti-theists are attacking theism on modernist assumptions and that most people are still influenced to some degree by argument. Even so, I think it's also true that the most powerful appeals are those which are made to one's heart rather than one's head. One does not fall in love as a consequence of a syllogism or rational analysis.

The value of arguments such as Craig outlines in his article is that they help create a cultural milieu in which the idea of God is recognized as intellectually compelling. This is an important precondition because few will be charmed by the claims of the gospel in an environment in which it is presupposed that the traditional idea of a God is intellectually indefensible. Arguments themselves may not often actually result in conversion, but they create an environment in which personal narrative, fiction, music and art can more powerfully exert their tug on the heart and woo people toward a love affair with Christ.

Christian philosophers like Craig have since the late sixties been forcing atheists to play defense, but now a new generation of young intellectuals is needed to rise and fill the shoes of those who are moving on into retirement. It's a noble calling for a young man or woman of keen intellectual gifts, and I urge students who are unsure about the direction they want their life to to take to give it prayerful consideration.

Speaking of students interested in Christian apologetics, this article in the same issue of CT may be of interest to those who fit the description.

RLC

Super Glue

Geoffrey Simmons, author of Billions of Missing Links: A Rational Look at the Mysteries Evolution Can't Explain, is excerpting his book at Evolution News and Views. His latest excerpt is fascinating quite apart from its implications for the debate about the ability of purposeless processes to bring about any significant evolution:

The adhesive used by barnacles is among the strongest in the world. It is reported that a layer merely 3/10,000 of an inch thick can support a weight of 7000 pounds. This relative of the shrimp and crab glues its head down and keeps its feet up to catch the next meal. Its adhesive sets in water at any temperature and will not dissolve in most acids, bases, and solvents. Fossil records suggest it has been used by barnacles unchanged for 400 million years. Nothing seems to be known about its intermediates before that.

Mussels have a similar glue, which sets underwater and has enormous strength. It takes about five minutes for the mussel to create a "dab" of this glue beneath its foot on a piling or rock. Twenty dabs will do it, and the job can be completed overnight. Imagine the consternation of intermediate species when they secreted what they thought was glue, but kept being washed away by the waves. Or the species that couldn't store their glue and found their bivalves stuck together.

It never fails to astonish me that purposeless forces can produce such prodigies of engineering as a glue as strong as this just by accident, but brilliant chemists have trouble producing an adhesive that can keep the heat-resistant tiles from being shaken off the space shuttle during lift-off.

RLC

The Illusion of Consciousness

Denyse O'Leary takes us back a couple of years to a claim made by Nicholas Humphrey that what we call consciousness is not real, that the phenomena of conscious experience are just an illusion. Here's Humphrey's reasoning:

Our starting assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has to be an illusion. The reason is obvious: If nothing in the physical world can have the features that consciousness seems to have, then consciousness cannot exist as a thing in the physical world. So while we should concede that as conscious subjects we do have a valid experience of there being something in our minds that the rules of the physical universe doesn't apply to, this has to be all it is - the experience of something in our minds."

Since real consciousness would be non-physical, Humphreys concludes, it can't really exist because only physical entities exist. But why not draw the inference that since we have conscious experience, and since conscious experience is non-physical, therefore physical reality is not all there is?

In order to deny the existence of a non-physical level of reality Humphreys has to deny what seems obvious to everyone else, i.e. that we have genuine subjective experiences.

And what's he talking about when he says the denial of the reality of consciousness ought to be the starting assumption of science? Good heavens, how did science manage all these years without making that assumption at all, much less making it its fundamental assumption?

The starting assumption of science is, and should be, that our reason and our senses are generally reliable and that the world can be known through them.

The irony of Humphreys' remark is that it seems he has to make a conscious effort to deny the existence of consciousness. That is, he has an intention, based upon desires, based upon a belief, all of which cause him to will the statement that none of these things really exists except as chemical reactions in the brain. How, though, does a chemical reaction translate into an intention or a belief? What is the precise chemical formula which expresses a desire? Humphreys has no idea, of course. He just knows that there must be one.

RLC

Indecent Exposure

Rick Moran at American Thinker has a piece which illustrates why the liberal media are held in such low esteem by so many in this country:

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published an exciting story about how the CIA broke 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaik Mohammed. The hero of the story was a nondescript CIA interrogator who astonished his CIA colleagues by eliciting enormous amounts of valuable information from KSM, all by using psychological ploys and developing a rapport with the terrorist rather than the tactics used by the "knuckledraggers" as the interrogator's colleagues called the CIA paramilitary types, who were using waterboarding and other methods of torture.

In the story, the Times saw fit to give the real name of the interrogator - despite pleas from him and the CIA that doing so would place he and his family in danger.

Moran goes on to give the Times' justification for using the interrogator's name and to explain why that justification holds no water.

The point is the Times didn't have to use the man's name, the public didn't have to know the man's name, and the Times was asked not to use the man's name, but they did anyway. Why? What purpose did it serve? And this from a paper whose editorial writers for the last three decades have made a living urging us to be more "sensitive" to the needs and feelings of others.

We drew some flak at Viewpoint for claiming in a post last month that too many in the mainstream media seem to feel it's their job to destroy lives, but what is this if not an example of exactly that? How much peace of mind will this interrogator have for the rest of his life knowing that every would-be jihadi in the U.S. knows who he is and where he and his family live?

The Times' editors are either incredibly obtuse, indifferent to the anxiety they cause others, or malicious. What other conclusion is left for us?

RLC

Ten Books Before You Die

AOL has a list of Ten Books to Read Before You Die. I don't know how they came up with the list but here it is:

1. Gone With the Wind
   
2. Lord of the Rings (that's actually three books)
   
3. Harry Potter (that's actually seven books)
   
4. The Stand (a 1978 Stephen King novel)
   
5. The DaVinci Code (!?)
   
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
   
7. Angels and Demons (!?)
   
8. Atlas Shrugged
   
9. Catcher in the Rye (Count me as one who never could see what all the swooning was about over this book)
   
10. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    

I never read The Stand nor The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy so I have no comment about them. I mostly enjoyed Dan Brown's two books (#5 and 7), despite having to swallow a character parachuting safely out of a plane with an umbrella or something, but I would hardly say they're books one should read before they die.

I do tell my students from time to time that there are three books they should read before they graduate, however:

1. Les Miserables (unabridged, of course)
   
2. The Brothers Karamazov
   
3. Tale of Two Cities
   

How any of these could be left off the above list is beyond me unless the authors of the list just think they're too hard for the average reader.

RLC

Cosmopolitans and Populists

Byron sends along a link to a talk by Michael Lindsey at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in which he explores contemporary evangelical Christianity and its discontents. It's a fascinating lecture and the response by David Kirkpatrick is equally interesting. There is also a panel of questioners comprised of some jounalistic heavyweights who ask some great questions. If you're interested in the sociology of modern protestant Christianity you'll find this transcript riveting. Here are some highlights from Lindsey's talk:

The difference between evangelicals and fundamentalists is how they respond to secular society. A fundamentalist comes into contact with secular society and his or her natural inclination is to pull back, to withdraw, to maintain the integrity of his or her faith. It's something that's borne out of religious conviction. Evangelicals, on the other hand, encounter secular society and their natural inclination is to engage it because they're wanting to win it over.

[T]he real divide, in my opinion, in evangelicalism is not between the left and the right; it's not between the young and the old. It is between a group that I call the "cosmopolitan" evangelicals and "populist" evangelicals. And these are very, very significant divisions.

You see, populist evangelicals are what we often think [of as] evangelicals. These are the folks who are culture warriors, who say that they want to take back the country for their faith. They see themselves as embattled against secular society. They are very much concerned that they are in a minority position, and they've got to somehow use very strong-arm tactics to win the day.

So populist evangelicalism is alive and strong, especially in the evangelical subculture: the music, the publishing, the entertainment segment of the evangelical subculture. But there is a whole other segment. The people who I interviewed, by and large, fit more this cosmopolitan outlook. They are less interested in taking back the country for their faith. They really are more interested in their faith being seen as authentic, reasonable, and winsome. So they still have an evangelistic impulse, but their whole modus operandi looks quite different. Because of that they have different ultimate goals of what they are actually trying to achieve. They want to have a seat at the table. They want to be seen as legitimate. They are concerned about what The New York Times or TIME magazine thinks about evangelicals because they [the cosmopolitan evangelicals] are concerned about cultural elites. They want legitimacy. Legitimacy is actually more important to them than necessarily taking back the country. And so that cosmopolitan-populist divide I find to be quite significant.

Here's an interesting tidbit: Twenty years ago, the Campus Crusade for Christ chapter at Yale University, one of the leading evangelical campus ministries, was 100 percent white. Today it's 90 percent Asian-American.

Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, is an outspoken theistic evolutionist. And that's significant because the close identification of evangelicals with either traditional creationism or intelligent design is actually going to be giving way, I think, to a whole new generation of theistic evolutionists.

Note: I think he's mistaken here as well. Theistic evolution is coming to be seen more and more as theologically and philosophically incoherent. The future of this issue, in my opinion, lies with a form of intelligent design known as "front-loading." (See The Design Matrix).

[I]n the United States, cultural capital is revealed by having an omnivorous approach to cultural artifacts. You have to be cultural omnivores. So you not only have to like the opera and the symphony; you also have to like jazz and hip hop. You have to be omnivorous in your cultural tastes. And you think about it; that's exactly the case for political figures. You have to be able to have a very interesting conversation with nuclear physicists at 12 o'clock and at 2 o'clock be bowling with the folks down the street. You have to be able to walk in these two arenas, and [Mike]Huckabee actually can do that. So in the very moment that he's talking about how he believes in creationism about science, he also says, the book I'm reading right now that's very interesting on religion and science is Francis Collins' book, The Language of God.

I think there are some issues that people assume will be huge elements that I think are going to go away: same-sex unions, for example. I think the train has left the station. I don't think evangelicals 20 years from now will be raising concerns about it. I think same-sex unions will be across the country in 20 years. And I don't think evangelicals will raise a very big stink because this is one of the issues where you do see very significant generational divides. Older evangelicals are very opposed to it; younger evangelicals are not. And in this way, it mirrors the rest of the country.

Note: I hope Lindsey's wrong about this. Marriage has for two thousand years been seen as a union of one man and one woman. If we decide that the gender of the individuals entering into marriage no longer matters then there will be no logical impediment to concluding that the number of individuals no longer matters either. Once we've crossed this Rubicon there will be no basis other than the arbitrary preference of judges and legislators for restricting marital rights on any grounds whatsoever. There will be no logical reason for imposing any restrictions on kinship, or even the species, of the participants and marriage and family will have ceased to be a sacred committment and will have collapsed into a farcical carnival.

There are some theologically literate cosmopolitan evangelicals, people who are able to articulate how their faith matters and drives them to particular positions, but the interesting thing about that is that almost all of them come from the Reformed tradition. The rise of Presbyterian theology has been very interesting to observe. Abraham Kuyper has been one of the figures that is oftentimes cited among the people I interviewed. But on the whole, most of the evangelical leaders that I interviewed -- most of the folks who are in powerful positions who are evangelicals, they are like most of their fellow churchgoers. They are like most Americans: they don't know what they believe or why. They cannot articulate basic theological ideas. There have been a number of folks who have written books about how America is becoming a theocracy as evangelicals have come into powerful positions. One of the interesting notes they talk about is how evangelical ideas about the apocalypse or eschatology are driving American foreign policy. You know, that would be interesting, except most of the people I interviewed do not know the difference between premillenialist and postmillenialist theology. They can't articulate that.

There's much more from Lindsey and the other participants at the link. It's interesting stuff.

RLC