Paper Dragon

The conventional wisdom is that China is an economic juggernaut that'll overtake the United States by mid-century as not only the world's foremost economic dynamo but also the world's premier military power. The problem with conventional wisdom, however, is that it's so often wrong. Jonathan Wellum at Comment throws cold water on the Golden Age of China speculation and argues that China suffers from systemic moral problems that are more likely to turn it onto a path similar to that which Japan followed twenty years ago.

Here's his introduction:

With the U.S. embroiled in economic turmoil, three decades of unprecedented economic growth behind it, a seemingly endless supply of cheap labour and bulging foreign currency exchange reserves due to massive trade surpluses, Chinese growth does indeed appear unstoppable. Even the world's largest bank by market capitalization is now Chinese. Yet it is the image of the "flawless" girl lip-synching her way through the opening of the Beijing Olympics while the real singer was set aside due to her chubby cheeks and less than perfect teeth that offers insight into the challenges ahead.

Remember that 20 years ago, the same experts predicting China's inevitable coronation were forecasting that Japan would dominate the world financially. At that time, Japan housed some of the world's most highly valued corporations, including the most expensive financial institutions. Its future also seemed inevitable. But the Japanese forgot the most pedestrian of all economic realities: if you are not prepared to reproduce, you guarantee your extinction. Its low birthrate now means that, according to its own statistics, Japan will lose 70 per cent of its workforce by mid-century, and already its share of the world economy has dropped from a high of 18% in 1994 to below 10% in 2008.

Read Wellum's essay to find our what he thinks China's specific problems are.

RLC

Ending the Search for the Real Killer

O. J. Simpson has been sentenced to nine to thirty three years in jail for armed robbery. It couldn't happen to a more deserving guy, but we wonder now how anyone will find the real killers of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown now that O.J. won't be able to continue his tireless search of the nation's golf courses for the murderer.

Ron Goldman's father and sister talk about the sentence here:

For those too young to remember why Mr. Goldman is so gratified by the verdict and why the verdict is so significant you can catch up on the history here.

RLC

Fading Away

Materialists appear to be genuinely worried that confidence in their model of mind and brain - i.e. that mind is simply a word we use to describe what the brain does - is being eroded by contemporary challenges to that model.

Amanda Gefter is herself a philosophical materialist and a writer for New Scientist. She attended a September conference of neuroscientists who are skeptical that materialism can explain the problems posed by human consciousness and reports on the proceedings here. Her article includes this summary of remarks by Jeffrey Schwartz:

"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."

Gefter interviews materialist neuroscientists for their reaction, which is unsurprisingly hostile, to the speakers at the conference. Nevertheless, despite their disdain for the views expressed by those speakers, everyone of the researchers she interviews admits there's no evidence for their conviction that mind is fundamentally reducible to the operations of the material brain. Their conviction is obviously an assertion of faith, a product of their a priori commitment to materialism.

Gefter's article raises two essential questions: First, is materialism false, and, second, does substance dualism, if true, refute evolutionary Darwinism? David Chalmers, who's considered one of the top thinkers in the field, answers yes to the first and no to the second. Michael Egnor disagrees and answers yes to both of them. Egnor's article is heavy surf but it's worth the effort it takes to row through it.

The fact that so many people in the field of neuroscience are having doubts about the materialist paradigm is an intriguing development. A generation ago hardly anyone doubted it, but today dualism is experiencing a resurgence. This is significant because metaphysical materialism and naturalistic evolution comprise the two intellectual pillars holding up contemporary atheism, and both are teetering from serious challenges to which it has proven difficult for them to muster adequate responses.

It may well be that we're living in what Alister McGrath calls the twilight of atheism.

RLC

Why Johnny Doesn't Know Politics

A couple of weeks ago a man named John Ziegler commissioned a Zogby poll of Obama voters which revealed that many of them didn't have a clue about who Barack Obama was or what the political facts of life in this country are. Ziegler took some heat for this poll because it focused only on Democrats, but the criticism was somewhat unfair because it misconstrued his intent. He wasn't trying to show that Obama voters were particularly dumb, as some of his critics alleged, but rather that much of the American media, particularly the liberal outlets, have failed their audience. People who relied on the liberal media, which most Obama voters did, were obviously and grossly underinformed or misinformed.

Having been criticized for focusing on Obama voters in the original poll, Ziegler recently commissioned Wilson Research Strategies to conduct a poll of McCain voters who were asked the same twelve questions as Zogby had put to his sample, and the difference in the results is stark. The GOP voters scored much higher than did the Democrats. Zeigler is adamant that the disparity has nothing to do with one group being smarter than the other but has everything to do with where the respective groups get their information.

Voters who watch Fox news and listen to talk radio scored much better than those who watch CNN and/or network news. McCain voters largely belonged to the former group and Obama voters largely belonged to the latter. Ziegler talks about his results here and the complete results can be found at his web site (you may have to scroll down to find the most recent poll results). Here's a quick sample:

35 % of McCain voters got 10 or more of 13 questions correct.

18% of Obama voters got 10 or more of 13 questions correct.

McCain voters knew which party controls congress by a 63-27 margin.

Obama voters got the "congressional control" question wrong by 43-41.

The most amazing result Ziegler's study turned up was that those who get their news from liberal outlets were stunningly uninformed about most of the questions asked about Obama and American politics, but they scored very high on questions about Sarah Palin.

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person upon whom their party spent $150,000 in clothes. Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the candidate with a pregnant teenage daughter, and 86.9 % thought Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though it was Tina Fey who said that on Saturday Night Live.

Check out the results. It'll make you wonder how well democracy in America is being served by a large segment of our media, particularly television networks.

RLC

Proposition 8

You're aware, perhaps, of the virulent reaction by the left, particularly the gay left, to the passage in California of Proposition 8 which effectively prevents the legalization of gay marriage. Since the Mormon church played a role in the campaign they've come in for special abuse by the erstwhile apostles of tolerance and progressivism. It is deeply ironic that some who call for tolerance of those whose beliefs on sexuality are different from our own are calling for violence against those whose beliefs on sexuality are different from their own.

Jonah Goldberg has a fine column about the very unliberal tactics employed by these folk against those who want nothing more than to preserve marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

Goldberg asks:

Did you catch the political ad in which two Jews ring the doorbell of a nice, working-class family? They barge in and rifle through the wife's purse and then the man's wallet for any cash. Cackling, they smash the daughter's piggy bank and pinch every penny. "We need it for the Wall Street bailout!" they exclaim.

No? Maybe you saw the one with the two swarthy Muslims who knock on the door of a nice Jewish family and then blow themselves up?

No? Well, then surely you saw the TV ad in which two smarmy Mormon missionaries knock on the door of an attractive lesbian couple. "Hi, we're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints!" says the blond one with a toothy smile. "We're here to take away your rights." The Mormon zealots yank the couple's wedding rings from their fingers and then tear up their marriage license.

As the thugs leave, one says to the other, "That was too easy." His smirking comrade replies, "Yeah, what should we ban next?" The voice-over implores viewers: "Say no to a church taking over your government."

Obviously, the first two ads are fictional because no one would dare run such anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim attacks.

The third ad, however, was real. It was broadcast throughout California on election day as part of the effort to rally opposition to Proposition 8, the initiative that successfully repealed the right to same-sex marriage in the state.

There's much more at the link, and, as usual with Goldberg, his essay is good reading.

Truth to tell, the liberal opponents of Prop 8 didn't discriminate. Outraged that the demographic group most notably in favor of the ban on gay marriage was African Americans (70% of African Americans who voted in California voted to pass the ban) some of the lefty progressives even hurled vulgar racial epithets at blacks who were in fact protesting the passage of the Proposition.

Part of the left's outrage, perhaps, stems from the fact that for years progressives have been pushing against an open door in getting their agenda enacted in this country, but now, on this one issue, they're meeting resistance. Some of them are venting their frustration like spoiled children accustomed to having their way but who find themselves thwarted in a matter of particular importance to them.

Their anger is directed at the church, of course, because only people of the Book have any grounds for mounting opposition to the push for gay marriage. Secularists have long since recognized that they have no moral basis other than their own subjective preferences for opposing anything, let alone gay marriage. Realizing that their dislike of the notion of two members of the same gender engaging in connubial bliss was nothing more than a matter of personal taste, secularists quickly abandoned their opposition. Religious people remain the last impediment to the redefinition of marriage, but their opposition is intractable because it's based not on personal taste but upon what they believe to be the will of God.

Like the brat who screams that he hates his parents when they stand in the way of his obtaining something he wants, those who claim the right to reorder social arrangements that have thousands of years of tradition behind them may well increase the volume and frequency of their hatefulness toward conservative Christians and Jews if these groups continue to refuse to give them their way.

RLC

Congealed Information

Physics students have probably heard their teachers refer to matter as "frozen energy", i.e. matter is really energy that has been "compacted" to take solid form, somewhat like rain drops are condensed water vapor. It was one of Einstein's great insights that matter and energy are interconvertible, a relationship he famously expressed in the equation E=mc2.

The mass/energy relationship came to mind the other day as I was reading a paper in which the author somewhat in passing suggested that our bodies may in fact be congealed soul. This is, to me at least, an interesting thought because my view of the soul is that it's not a substance of any kind but is rather information.

I think that our soul is our essence. It's the sum of every true proposition about us. It's like a data file that contains an exhaustive description of our personal history, our personality, our likes and dislikes, our physical appearance at every moment of our lives, and so on. I envision this information existing eternally in the mind of God. Perhaps upon death this information is "downloaded" in such a way that it forms a new body of some sort in some other reality. Somewhat like the teleportation device in Star Trek reassembled atoms to reform the teleported crew of the Enterprise, perhaps bodies can be formed, at least in part, from the information comprising our soul.

Taking this thought a step further, maybe everything, the whole world, is really a manifestation of information. Perhaps God's mind is like a vast supercomputer with near infinite data storage capability. All the information about the world exists in His mind and in some corner of that Divine intellect there's a module that acts something like a computer monitor. We might imagine God, at the moment of creation, performing a mental keystroke and the data describing the world expressing itself in images on the monitor, just as the images you're viewing right now are really manifestations of the information stored on your hard drive and on the server which hosts Viewpoint. The images on the monitor in God's mind include us. Our physical bodies are, in this view, actually "congealed" information.

In any event, I think one of the manifold blessings of modern technology is that it affords us new metaphors and rich resources to help us understand better than our ancestors ever could the nature of God and the world He has created.

RLC

For Want of a Birth Certificate...

There's an item that's been simmering on the back-burner of our politics for a while and which every now and then boils up so that the public catches a glimpse. I don't know what to make of it, but I think we'll be hearing more about it as time goes on, and despite the fact that it sounds a bit crack-pottish it could turn out to be very significant.

This is the matter of Barack Obama's birth certificate. There have been a number of attempts to get the President-elect to produce his birth certificate to prove that he was really born in the U.S. as the constitution requires of all serving presidents. The allegation is that Obama was actually born in Kenya and that his claim to have been born in Hawaii is false. His campaign has produced a certificate on the internet they claim to be legitimate, but a number of lawsuits have been initiated claiming that it's not.

The Philadelphia Bulletin notes that problems with this certificate are too many to ignore:

The short list is first that the document is not signed. Secondly, it has no seal. Third, is that the security border doesn't match similar documents from the same time period. Other objections are that the race of Mr. Obama's father is listed as African. In the early '60s the State of Hawaii listed African- Americans as Negroes.

What is missing from the document is the doctor's signature and physical characteristics at birth that every original birth certificate reveals.

Some interested parties have submitted the internet document to the scrutiny of Adobe and graphic experts who all agree the document is highly questionable or a complete fraud. Is it? Who knows at this point? What is far more intriguing is the resistance being thrown at uncovering the true vault document. This is what is spawning suspicion and doubt.

Now one of the lawsuits that has been filed to force him to present a paper copy is going to the Supreme Court on Friday. Despite the fact that this sounds nutty, there are several reasons it's significant.

First, if it turns out that Mr. Obama was not born in the U.S. then he's disqualified from serving as president according to Article 2, section 1 of the constitution. He'll soon (December 15th) be certified as the president-elect by the members of the electoral college, and there's no enforcement mechanism for removing a president who has been duly certified except the impeachment process. Since impeachment certainly won't happen with a Democratic congress the constitutional provision requiring the president to be a natural-born citizen will have been effectively ignored.

This means that in 2012 there would be very little standing in the way of, say, an Arnold Schwarzenegger throwing his hat into the ring. And if the provision against non-native born presidents is to be disregarded why not dispense with the provision that requires a president to be 35 years of age and/or to have been a resident for fourteen years?

Secondly, there are questions whether anything Obama signs as president - legislation, treaties, directives - would have any legitimacy since he, himself, would be serving illegitimately. Everything would be open to challenge, and the courts would be working through the mess for years.

In other words, President-elect Obama's birth certificate could trigger a constitutional crisis of unprecedented proportions. As the Bulletin points out, he could end the controversy today and spare everyone a lot of trouble and expense by simply producing the original or by requesting that Hawaii do so. Why doesn't he?

CORRECTION: This post originally stated incorrectly that the electoral college has already officially elected Barack Obama to be our next president. It has been corrected to show that this will not occur until December 15th.

RLC

Public Education and ID (Pt. IV)

This post will conclude our examination (see previous posts in this series) of philosopher Thomas Nagel's arguement that the objections to ID are religious/theological rather than scientific and that to exclude it from public school classrooms on religious grounds is indefensible. Nagel is an atheist and a Darwinian, as we have previously pointed out, so his paper in Philosophy and Public Affairs is all the more noteworthy. He writes that:

The consequence of all this for public education is that both the inclusion of some mention of ID in a biology class and its exclusion would seem to depend on religious assumptions. Either divine intervention is ruled out in advance or it is not. If it is, ID can be disregarded. If it is not, evidence for ID can be considered. Yet both are clearly assumptions of a religious nature. Public schools in the United States may not teach atheism or deism any more than they may teach Christianity, so how can it be all right to teach scientific theories whose empirical confirmation depends on the assumption of one range of these views while it is impermissible to discuss the implications of alternative views on the same question?

The question is even more difficult for the ID critic if we keep in mind that IDers take no formal position on who the designer is. Nagel assumes it's God, but ID is officially agnostic on the point. For all anyone knows the designer might be the result of a science project conducted by a precocious student inhabiting one of the universes posited by multiverse theorists. The point of ID is not to prove that God exists but to show that this world shows evidence of having been intelligently planned and engineered and any metaphysics or science which rules out intention and purpose as an explanation is inadequate.

Nagel goes on to ask:

What would a biology course teach if it wanted to remain neutral on the question whether divine intervention in the process of life's development was a possibility, while acknowledging that people disagree about whether it should be regarded as a possibility at all, or what probability should be assigned to it, and that there is at present no way to settle that disagreement scientifically? So far as I can see, the only way to make no assumptions of a religious nature would be to admit that the empirical evidence may suggest different conclusions depending on what religious belief one starts with, and that the evidence does not by itself settle which of those beliefs is correct...

This is precisely how all controversial issues would be addressed in a healthy educational system, but the Darwinians are repelled by Nagel's sensible suggestion. They act as if they're terrified by the prospect that students exposed to the possibility that the biosphere reveals intention would quickly believe it and then a century of indoctrination in materialism would be undone.

Nagel again:

Judge Jones (in the Dover ID trial) cited as a decisive reason for denying ID the status of science that Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for the defense, acknowledged that the theory would be more plausible to someone who believed in God than to someone who did not. This is just common sense, however, and the opposite is just as true: evolutionary theory as a complete explanation of the development of life is more plausible to someone who does not believe in God than to someone who does.

Many who followed the Dover trial were mystified by the fact that the plaintiffs and Judge Jones made such a big deal about Behe's statement because, as Nagel points out, it's simply common sense. Theists are going to be less resistant to the notion that the world was intentionally designed than would non-theists. This is hardly the gaffe it was portrayed as, but Judge Jones was so shocked by Behe's remark that he thought it all the proof he needed to rule that ID didn't qualify as science.

Either both of them are science or neither of them is. If both of them are scientific hypotheses, the ground for exclusion must be that ID is hopelessly bad science, or dead science, in Kitcher's phrase. That would be true if ID, like young earth creationism, can be refuted by the empirical evidence even if one starts by assuming that the possibility of a god who could intervene cannot be ruled out in advance.

So far as I can tell, however, no such refutation has even been offered, let alone established. What have been offered instead are necessarily speculative proposals about how the problems posed by Behe might be handled by evolutionary theory, declarations that no hypothesis involving divine intervention counts as science, and assurances that evolutionary theory is not inconsistent with the existence of God. It is also emphasized that even if evolutionary theory were false, that would not mean that ID was true. That is so, but it is still not a sufficient reason to exclude it from discussion.

If reasons to doubt the adequacy of evolutionary theory can be legitimately admitted to the curriculum, it is hard to see why they cannot legitimately be described as reasons in support of design, for those who believe in God, and reasons to believe that some as yet undiscovered, purely naturalistic theory must account for the evidence, for those who do not. That, after all, is the real epistemological situation.

Nagel's paper is altogether reasonable and fair-minded, which probably insures that it will receive little attention from those in whose hands these virtues rest awkwardly.

RLC

Why They're Not Competitive

Ramirez tells an important truth in this cartoon, but it might be more accurate if he had hooked two more trailers onto the first. One of them should be labelled government regulations and the other labelled executive mismanagement.

RLC

The Bush Legacy (Pt. II)

Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times has written an excellent overview of the ideological legacy of the Bush presidency. We began a consideration of it in a previous post by looking at his fiscal and economic record, and we'll conclude today with a summary of where his social (domestic) and foreign policy place him on the ideological spectrum.

From a conservative point of view President Bush's domestic record has been mixed. His Supreme Court appointments (Roberts and Alito) were excellent - save the stumble with the abortive Harriet Miers nomination - but his refusal to do anything much about our porous borders and his willingness to grant amnesty to 20 million illegal aliens put him once again outside the conservative mainstream. So, taken as a whole, his record on the economy, spending, reducing the size of government, illegal immigration, etc. is one that liberals should laud him for but in which conservatives find little to like. Indeed, Kuhner believes Mr. Bush has almost single-handedly driven a stake through the heart of the conservative movement that had been ascendent since 1980:

Mr. Bush's enduring political legacy is the death of the conservative movement. He was not a small-government individualist in the mold of Ronald Reagan. In fact, he was the very embodiment of the "Third Way" fusing cultural conservatism and social liberalism that was espoused but never really implemented by the likes of former President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair: an activist big government combined with a defense of traditional values.

It is on foreign policy, however, that George Bush has secured the gratitude of those on the right and, indeed, should have won the gratitude of the entire nation. Conservatives generally (but not universally) supported the war in Afghanistan and, because, like everyone else in the world, they feared Saddam Hussein's WMD program and despised Saddam's tyranny, they supported the invasion of Iraq. There was disagreement among conservatives on this war, but I think it fair to say that most of them saw both Afghanistan and Iraq, unlike Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as theaters of national interest. But the real source of conservative support for Bush throughout his tenure was his prosecution of the overall war on terrorism. It was because he had such a clear-eyed vision of the threat Islamism poses, coupled with the lack of a credible liberal alternative policy, that led conservatives to ignore Bush's other shortcomings, particularly his inability or unwillingness to rally the country to his side. Once more to Kuhner's essay:

Conservatives did not mount a frontal assault on the Bush administration for one simple reason: the war on terror. Most on the right supported Mr. Bush's foreign policy - and, therefore, they overlooked many of his flaws. Mostly, he was an ineffective communicator. It is not just that he mangled words, displayed a poor vocabulary, and uttered silly phrases such as "strategery" or "misunderestimated." He presided over the most rhetorically inept administration in recent memory - a public diplomacy failure that enabled his opponents to misrepresent his national security strategy and fill the vacuum with lies and half-truths, especially about the Iraq war. It eventually cost Mr. Bush his popular standing at home and abroad, thereby reducing his presidency to rubble.

Mr. Bush, however, was farsighted in foreign policy. He toppled two dictatorships in Afghanistan and Iraq, liberating more than 50 million Muslims from totalitarian regimes. His actions broke the back of al Qaeda, disrupted countless terrorist cells, and exposed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's corruption of the United Nations through the massive Oil-for-Food scandal.

There's an irony here. There was a time when it was liberals who championed the oppressed and tyrannized of the world. There was a time when liberals could say, as John Kennedy did in his much-quoted inaugural address, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Nowadays when a president takes those words seriously liberals execrate him. I suspect that no one was more surprised than George Bush when, after liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq from horrific oppression, the left in this country gave him nothing more than the back of their hand.

But there's more for which the President deserves credit:

Also, his administration dismantled A.Q. Khan's international black market nuclear network. It convinced Libya to abandon its weapons of mass destruction program. It managed to contain rogue states, such as Syria, North Korea and Iran. It forged a path toward an independent Palestine - providing it embraces democracy and renounces terror. Most importantly, it achieved its primary goal: preventing another attack on American soil. Mr. Bush kept the American people safe. And he did this in the face of ferocious Democratic opposition and a hostile mainstream media.

Mr. Bush's central insight is that the key to defeating Islamic fascism is to bring democracy to the Middle East. Arab autocracies have fostered the conditions for a culture of jihadism to take root. Political and economic reform will drain the swamps of Islamist terror at its source. This is why the Iraq war is pivotal to winning the larger war on terrorism: A stable, democratic Iraq will serve as a strategic linchpin for transforming the wider region. The Bush Doctrine is similar to President Harry Truman's containment policy in one crucial respect: Mr. Bush has laid down the foundations for eventual victory - but only if his initiatives are sustained.

Just like Truman, Mr. Bush is a reviled leader. In fact, Truman's popular approval ratings were even lower when he left office than Mr. Bush's. Both men oversaw protracted, unpopular wars (Truman in Korea; Mr. Bush in Iraq). Both men ushered in transformative foreign policies opposed by media elites. Both men alienated key aspects of their base (Truman with economic liberals and Southern Democrats; Mr. Bush with fiscal conservatives and border security Republicans). And both men saw their respective political parties decline under withering partisan attacks (Truman from McCarthyism; Mr. Bush from the netroots, loony left).

Yet Truman is now viewed as a courageous, successful president. His staunch opposition to Soviet communism was vindicated. Mr. Bush's principled stand against Islamofascism will be vindicated as well.

So, what will Mr. Bush's legacy be? Two years ago I thought he had a chance to be one of the great presidents of the last 100 years, but I'm no longer so sure. I think that in too many ways he has acted unwisely and has not even attempted to explain his policies to the people, assuming, apparently, that we would all just understand why he was doing what he was doing with immigration, the surge in Iraq, the bailout and the budgetary deficits. Nevertheless, on perhaps the most important issue of our time, the threat of global terror, he has, despite vicious opposition from his political opponents, acted wisely and heroically. It will be for his farsighted determination to prevail in the most critical conflict of our time - despite ferocious opposition from the media and the Democrats - that he will be most remembered.

RLC

Contemporary Hero

Once upon a time one could find on almost every street corner someone proclaiming the words attributed to Voltaire that he might "hate what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it". It sounded good and won the admiration of all who heard the speaker's vow to defend with his life the right of others to say even those things he despised. But then came Islamic fascism and the very real possibility that one might actually be required to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend free speech and suddenly the street corners were empty and silent. To paraphrase Machiavelli, when times are peaceful there are plenty of people who can be found to swear their undying loyalty to the First Amendment, but when the savages are howling at the gates free speech will find but few defenders. And so it has been since 9/11.

One such heroic defender of the right to speak the truth, however, is a man by the name of Geert Wilders. Wilders was a member of the Dutch Parliament who has put his life and career on the line to warn of the threat to the Netherlands posed by the growing Islamic population in his country. The Wall Street Journal has recently run an excellent warts-and-all column about Wilders that everyone should take the time to read.

Here's an excerpt that gives a sense of Wilders' blunt outspokenness that certainly won't endear him to the multicultural PC crowd:

As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."

Wilders acknowledges that "the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people." But he says "it really doesn't matter that much, because if you don't define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change -- all the freedoms we have will change."

The article mentions the short film Wilders produced last spring titled Fitna. If you missed it when it came out last April you can view it here.

Despite his frank, and doubtlessly accurate, assessment of the problem created by the massive influx of Arab Muslims into Europe, Wilder's solution is troubling. He says that the problem is the Koran and that "You have to give up this stupid, fascist book" -- the Quran. This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book."

As the writer of the WSJ column notes:

Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.

Quite so if Wilders is actually saying that Muslims should be legally required to renounce their scriptures, but perhaps he is merely saying that they need to be challenged and urged to reconsider their interpretations of the Koran and indeed the validity of its claim to divine authority. If so, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with engaging Muslims theologically and exposing them to the problematic nature of those beliefs which ill-suit them for life in a pluralistic, civilized world. Such engagement should occur, though, in the arena of ideas, not in legislatures. If Europeans were to compel Muslims by legislative fiat to renounce the Koran then Christians would have very little ground to stand upon should some future tyrant demand they give up their Bibles.

Even so, Mr Wilders is a modern hero who is placing his life at risk to save European culture and the principles of freedom. Read the whole article.

RLC

Public Education and ID (Pt. III)

Thomas Nagel's paper in Philosophy and Public Policy makes the case that Intelligent Design has the same philosophical or theoretical status as the Darwinian view it challenges. Nagel's argument is all the more provocative given that he is himself an atheist and a Darwinian. We've looked at the first part of his paper in earlier posts and consider more of it here. Nagel asserts that the critic of ID often bases his opposition on philosophical, rather than scientific, grounds. He writes that:

Those who would not take any amount of evidence against evolutionary theory as evidence for ID ... seem to be assuming that ID is not a possibility. What is the status of that assumption? Is it scientifically grounded? It may not be a matter of faith or ecclesiastical authority, but it does seem to be a basic, ungrounded assumption about how the world works, essentially a kind of naturalism.

In other words, the rejection of ID is grounded not on scientific reasons, but on reasons which are best described as theological. Either there is no God, the critic maintains, in which case ID is impossible, or, if there is, we can be assured that He doesn't work the way the IDers think He does. Nagel explains:

The denier that ID is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief that a designer is possible. If on the other hand he believes that a designer is possible, then he can argue that the evidence is overwhelmingly against the actions of such a designer, but he cannot say that someone who offers evidence on the other side is doing something of a fundamentally different kind. All he can say about that person is that he is scientifically mistaken.

I think there are only two possible justifications for this asymmetry. Either there is strong scientific evidence against the existence of God; or there is a scientific default presumption that the prior probability of a designer is low, and the only possible basis for assigning it a higher probability - high enough to make it eligible as an explanation of what is empirically observed-is faith, revelation, or ecclesiastical authority. Is either of those things true, however?

The claim that ID is bad science or dead science may depend, almost as much as the claim that it is not science, on the assumption that divine intervention in the natural order is not a serious possibility. That is not a scientific belief but a belief about a religious question: it amounts to the assumption that either there is no god, or if there is, he certainly does not intervene in the natural order to guide the world in certain directions.

This is a point similar to that made by Cornelius Hunter in Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. The irony is that Darwinians base their argument on particular theological suppositions about God whereas IDers maintain theological neutrality and say nothing about God. Yet the Darwinians wrap themselves in the mantle of science while calling the IDers religious zealots. Pretty amusing.

More on Nagel's paper anon.

RLC

Fish in a Barrel

News reports tell us that officials in our major cities are looking at how they would respond to a Mumbai-style terror attack. One hopes they realize that whatever measures they take to prevent such an attack their measures may fail, and they need to ask themselves, what then? One lesson to take from Mumbai is this: The carnage was high because the victims were completely defenseless. Had at least some of the guests in those hotels had access to firearms the casualty toll may have been limited to dozens instead of hundreds.

An unarmed population is a gift-wrapped present to terrorists. An armed citizenry, licensed and trained, presents a much more difficult challenge for those bent on mass murder. If terrorist planners knew that they would be likely to encounter armed resistance in Mumbai they may have considered the chance of success too low to be worth the effort. As it was they knew that, once they attacked the police station, killing civilians would be like shooting fish in a barrel. And it was.

Here's video of the capture of the one terrorist who was taken alive. Good thing they don't have an ACLU in India. Some of these guys would be in a spot of trouble. Also watch the Sky News segment on the "Snapper who captured the carnage on film". As you watch imagine that someone in those crowds of victims had been in a position to return fire:

One wonders how many of these horrors it will take before "moderate" Muslims, if such there be, become so embarrassed at what's being done in the name of their religion that they start screaming from the top of their lungs for their co-religionists to stop besmirching Islam. It's hard to imagine that these terrorists can undergo months or years of training without other Muslims catching wind of what's going on. Their silence makes them complicit even more than those German citizens who stood silent during the holocaust were complicit. The average German citizen had no recourse to authorities who would stop the genocide. There was nothing the citizens could do to stop the killing. That's not the case with Muslims who overhear talk in the mosques of preparations for a terrorist attack by people they know.

RLC

The Loss of Transcendence

Perhaps there's a tragic symbolism in Friday's trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee by a mob of Christmas shoppers. The mob broke down the doors, knocking the employee to the ground where he was kicked and stomped by the crowd as they rushed headlong into the store to lay their hands on some trinket.

When the holiday becomes a celebration of consumption, an orgy of spending, rather than the birth of the Son of God people no longer think much about good will and all that pious nonsense. All they want is the latest technological googaw to put a little significance in their otherwise empty lives, and heaven help whoever gets in their way.

Paramedics try to save the life of the Wal-Mart employee who was trampeled by shoppers last Friday.

The votaries of secularism have largely succeeded in draining the public observance of Christmas of any real meaning. They've emptied it of transcendence, mystery, and awe and every reason it once gave us to feel warmth and love toward our fellow human beings. They've left us instead with a day the meaning of which is to join the desperate throng stampeding like cattle to grab the latest gadget. The malls, our post-Christian cathedrals, do their part by supplanting the timeless, sublime beauty of Silent Night with tawdry assaults on the spirit of Christmas like Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer - a tragically apposite piece of inane seasonal flotsam.

We've been told for so long that, just as there's nothing transcendent about Christmas, there's nothing transcendent about us. We have no soul. There's no imago Dei. We're just naked apes, the accidental product of chance, chemistry and physics, so no one should be shocked when we act like the herds of dumb brutes that our intelligentsia insists we are.

Once upon a time the symbol of Christmas was a child, our Redeemer, lying peacefully in a manger, shrouded in peace, wonder and gentleness. After last Friday the symbol may well be a frenzied mass of mindless people crushing a man to death in their meaningless lust for material junk.

RLC

The Bush Legacy (Pt. I)

There are three spheres of life and politics in which the differences between conservatives and liberals are often expressed. These are social and domestic matters, fiscal management, and foreign policy. Socially, conservatives generally support traditional values, especially as they relate to the cluster of issues concerning family and sexual behavior, and they also favor localized control and decision making with regard to schools, etc. They tend to feel strongly, moreover, that judges should rule according to the original intent of the constitution and should leave law-making to legislators.

Fiscally, conservatives endorse low taxes, balanced budgets, low debt loads, and free markets.

On matters of foreign policy, conservatives are loath to embark on overseas adventures unless our national interest is clearly at stake, but once we are committed to an endeavor beyond our shores conservatives believe we should do all we can to prevail. They believe that a strong national defense is the best deterrent to war and that no negotiation with foreign powers will ever bring a resolution to disputes unless there lies behind those talks the credible threat of decisive force.

Liberalism pretty much holds the opposite views. Liberals tend to be progressive with respect to social issues. They're not reluctant to supplant traditional values with innovation, nor do they feel constrained by the original intent of the framers of the constitution, preferring to view that document as a "living guide" which must be interpreted in light of current social and philosophical fashion.

Fiscally liberals are fond of the idea of omni-competent government as the solution to all our most pressing national problems and they accordingly favor high tax rates, high spending, and centralized control of education and the marketplace.

In the arena of foreign policy liberals are, as a rule, much more inclined than conservatives to plunge us into conflict abroad. The progressive Woodrow Wilson took us to war in 1917, and, even without Pearl Harbor, FDR probably would have gotten us into war with Germany a quarter century later. The wars in Korea and Vietnam were both initiated by liberal Democratic presidents (Truman and JFK/LBJ) and it was another liberal president (Clinton) who got us involved in the Bosnian conflict.

So given this overview of the distinctions between the two ideological camps how might we evaluate the legacy of George W. Bush now that his presidency is coming to a close?

Observers of Mr. Bush's presidency are pretty much in agreement that he was neither a conservative nor a liberal, and Jeffrey Kuhner at the Washington Times gives us an excellent explanation why this is so. Kuhner writes:

For the past eight years, liberal conventional wisdom has held that Mr. Bush is a rigid right-winger, a Christian cowboy obsessed with an anti-government ideology and imposing an American world empire. Mr. Bush, however, is not a conservative imperialist; rather, he is a big-government nationalist, who has presided over the greatest expansion of the state since the Great Society.

Conservatives made a mistake in believing Mr. Bush was one of their own. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he erected a domestic bureaucratic monstrosity, the Homeland Security Department. He implemented the Medicare prescription drug plan - a massive, new entitlement program. He pushed for the No Child Left Behind Act, carving out an unprecedented role for the federal government in education. He refused to take on the big spending, corrupt, pork-laden ways of the congressional Republicans. Under Mr. Bush's watch, domestic spending exploded. Budget deficits have soared. The GOP is no longer the party of fiscal restraint and competence. The result: The party has become relegated to political minority status.

So, if we add to Kuhner's litany the huge financial bailouts being undertaken by the Bush administration it seems pretty clear that President Bush is clearly as fiscally liberal as any president we've ever had, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's only his tax cuts that offer conservatives any solace in the realm of domestic economic policy.

We'll consider the rest of Mr. Bush's legacy tomorrow.

RLC

The Materialist Superstition

Michael Egnor discusses six aspects of our mental experience that make a dualist explanation of that experience more plausible than a materialist explanation. The six he describes are: Intentionality, Qualia, Persistence of Self-Identity, Restricted Access, Incorrigibility, and Free Will.

Egnor gives a good summary of each of these and concludes that materialism, the view that the material brain is the sole locus and cause of our mental life, can't explain any of them. It's worth the read especially for philosophy students. For example, here's what he says about free will:

If the mind is entirely caused by matter, it is difficult to understand how free will can exist. Matter is governed by fixed laws, and if our thoughts are entirely the product of brain chemistry, then our thoughts are determined by brain chemistry. But chemistry doesn't have "truth" or "falsehood," or any other values for that matter. It just is. Enzymatic catalysis isn't true or false, it just is. In fact, the view that "materialism is true" is meaningless...if materialism is true. If materialism is true, then the thought "materialism is true" is just a chemical reaction, neither true nor false. While there are some philosophers who assert that free will can exist in a deterministic materialistic world (they're called "compatibilists"), and some have argued that quantum indeterminacy may leave room for free will, the most parsimonious explanation for free will is that there is an immaterial component of the mind that is undetermined by matter.

Egnor is correct, of course. If a belief, say, is just a particular chemical reaction that occurs in my brain what sense does it make to talk of beliefs being true? Chemical reactions aren't the sorts of things that are true or false. Furthermore, how do mere chemical reactions produce something like an understanding or a doubt? To say that matter is the ultimate source of all our mental experience really does seem to fly in the face of our deepest intuitions about that experience.

Check out what Egnor says about the other five elements of our mental lives for which materialism seems ill-equipped to offer a plausible explanation.

RLC

More Bus Ads

You may have seen the story last week about the ads placed on buses in Washington D.C. by the American Humanist Association asking, "Why believe in a god?" and then urging us to "Just be good for goodness' sake." The ads will run through December. Last month the British Humanist Association ran a similar campaign on London buses with the message: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

The ads cost the AHA $40,000 so one might wonder why they'd spend so much money to try to convince people that God is not necessary. Spokesman for the Association Fred Edwords explains, sort of:

"We are trying to reach our audience, and sometimes in order to reach an audience, everybody has to hear you. Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of nontheists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion."

Anyone who thinks Christmas and Thanksgiving in the U.S. have anything to do with religion hasn't been in either a public school or a shopping mall lately, but, be that as it may, Edwords claims that the purpose of the ads isn't to argue that God doesn't exist or change minds about a deity, although "we are trying to plant a seed of rational thought and critical thinking and questioning in people's minds."

Well, they've been successful, at least with me. They've planted one question in my mind, which is: What on earth does it mean to be good for goodness' sake?

The article notes that Humanism offers itself as "a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism, affirms our responsibility to lead ethical lives of value to self and humanity."

Well. Where does this responsibility come from? In what sense am I responsible to humanity? What is the nature of this responsibility if I am not morally accountable to anyone but myself for my actions? If I choose to shirk this responsibility in what sense am I doing something morally wrong? I wonder if the people who designed the Humanist ad would be so good as to design more such ads with answers to those questions.

Unfortunately, I don't think answers will be forthcoming. The bus ad is simply making one of those vapid statements like "We are the world" or "Have you hugged a green plant today?" It sounds clever and meaningful until you think about it, which, contrary to what the Humanists say about their ad, you're not really supposed to do.

The article closes by observing that there was no debate at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority over whether to accept the ad. Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said the agency accepts any ads that aren't obscene or pornographic. Too bad they don't expand the criteria to include "vacuous".

RLC

Two Questions about Mumbai

Bill Roggio reports that captured terrorists in Mumbai have admitted to having connections to Pakistan. This raises two troubling questions: First, if these connections are confirmed will we see a deterioration in the uneasy peace between India and Pakistan? There are indications that some in the Indian military have been eager to go to war with their nuclear neighbor for some time, but have been restrained by the Bush administration. Now that the administration is a lame duck will the Indian hawks prevail?

Second, how did the Indians manage to get the terrorists to talk so quickly? Whatever methods they used I hope they share them with the American intelligence services so that the CIA knuckle-draggers who resort to brutish interrogation techniques will learn that compassionate persuasion works just as well, if not better. One lesson to take from the Indian methods, which were doubtless gentle and sensitive to the terrorists' needs and comfort, is that places like Guantanamo Bay where prisoners are manacled and sometimes even looked at funny are barbaric anachronisms in a civilized society.

RLC

Post on <i>Most</i>

The story has it that a railway traversed a drawbridge and that commuter trains regularly crossed the span. One day the drawbridge operator brought his young son with him to work. A train was approaching and the bridge needed to be lowered to allow the train to cross. Tragically, the man realized as the bridge was lowering that his son was caught in the mechanism of the bridge. If he stopped the descent of the bridge to rescue his son the train would derail and tumble into the waterway below killing dozens of passengers. If he allowed the bridge to lower so that the train could pass safely his son would be crushed by the weight of the bridge.

I mentioned this story in class during a discussion of ethics and one of my students told me that it had recently been made into a short film, so I ordered it and watched it the other night. It's only thirty three minutes long, but it's a beautiful parable of heart-wrenching sacrifice, love, and redemption. The film is titled Most (Czech for "Bridge"), and the trailer can be viewed here.

Given the theme it might have been more appropriate to mention this film closer to Easter because the parable is really all about Good Friday, but it might be viewed with profit over the Christmas holidays as well. I couldn't find it on Netflix so those who would like to watch it might have to purchase it ($10) at the website.

RLC

Public Education and ID (Pt. II)

Atheistic philosopher Thomas Nagle has written a paper for the journal Philosophy and Public Policy in which he argues that the case for the exclusion of Intelligent Design from science curricula doesn't withstand scrutiny. We examined the first part of his essay last Monday. We'll continue our look at this noteworthy paper today.

Nagle writes that, contrary to what some critics have argued, we don't have to know how something was accomplished in order to recognize that it is purposefully designed. What the designer was thinking when it engineered a particular biological structure is not subject to scientific investigation, but the question whether the structure was purposefully designed is:

[T]he purposes and intentions of God, if there is a god, and the nature of his will, are not possible subjects of a scientific theory or scientific explanation. But that does not imply that there cannot be scientific evidence for or against the intervention of such a non-law-governed cause in the natural order. The fact that there could be no scientific theory of the internal operation of the divine mind is consistent with its being in large part a scientific question whether divine intervention provides a more likely explanation of the empirical data than an explanation in terms of physical law alone. To ask whether there are limits to what can credibly be explained by a given type of scientific theory, or any theory relying only on universal physical laws, is itself a scientific question.

This claim entails that questions like, "If God designed life why didn't he do it differently or better?" are irrelevant to the question of whether the claim that life is intelligently designed is scientific.

In other words, how and why the designer did what it did are different kinds of questions than whether some biological structure is, in fact, intentionally designed. The former are metaphysical matters whereas the latter is a scientific query and we need not be able to answer the former before we can scientifically investigate the latter.

Nagle observes that critics of ID assume that science cannot provide evidence for the existence of the designer (Which Nagle assumes to be God) and that therefore talk of designers is unscientific. He states flatly, however, that there's no reason to accept this assumption:

I suspect that the assumption that science can never provide evidence for the occurrence of something that cannot be scientifically explained is the principal reason for the belief that ID cannot be science; but so far as I can see, that assumption is without merit.

Indeed, many of the claims ID makes are certainly scientific claims. For instance, Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box and Edge of Evolution) offers empirical arguments in Edge that random mutation is not sufficient by itself to explain the enormous diversity of living things. Nagle observes:

This seems on the face of it to be a scientific claim, about what the evidence suggests, and one that is not self-evidently absurd. I cannot evaluate it; I merely want to stress its importance for the current debate. Skepticism about the standard evolutionary model is not limited to defenders of ID. The skeptics may be right or they may be wrong. But even if one merely regards the randomness of the sources of variation as an open question, it seems to call for the consideration of alternatives.

There is in the evolutionary community a great deal of dissent from the standard Darwinian model, but none of that dissent causes much of a stir because most of it does not get to the heart of the Darwinians' deepest commitments. The fundamental objection to ID, the implication that arouses such passionate protest, is not scientific, it's metaphysical. ID poses no greater challenge to the science that undergirds evolutionary theory than do its materialist competitors. The unique challenge of ID, the reason it provokes so much opposition, is that it calls into question the metaphysical materialism and naturalism that many opponents of ID embrace.

This bears emphasizing. ID is not scorned because it's not science. There's not much argument about the scientific facts of the matter. Both sides employ the same data, but they draw from it widely disparate metaphysical conclusions. The rejection of ID is primarily philosophical, one might even say religious. Opponents' arguments against the concept of intentional, purposeful design in the world distill to a desire that our children be taught only the belief that matter is the ultimate reality and that everything in the universe derives from, and is contingent upon, material substance. ID, on the other hand, promotes the possibility that the ultimate reality upon which all else is dependent is mind, and this many critics find philosophically and theologically intolerable.

Almost all other remonstrances against ID are either decoy and diversion or they are secondary theological objections. The value of Nagle's paper is that it helps us to see that more clearly. We'll continue with our reading of it in later posts.

RLC