Philosophy of Religion

Those readers with an interest in philosophy of religion and Christian apologetics will find William Lane Craig's site called Reasonable Faith an excellent resource. Craig is one of the foremost philosophers of religion in the U.S. and has appeared in numerous debates over the years defending traditional orthodox Christianity. He has also been addressing a different question submitted by readers each week and his answers are usually very lucid. There's an archive on the home page which lists the 146 questions he's addressed so far.

For those who have a graduate level interest in the subject I recommend The Prosblogion, but be advised that the material here is highly technical.

RLC

Pots and Kettles

I don't like to make fun of the intelligence of other people, and am the first to lament my own intellectual deficiencies, but when people who themselves are walking around under an empty attic enjoy ridiculing others for being dim then I think their stupidity should at least be pointed out. The video below features talk show host Joy Behar and Eve Ensler, author of the play The Vagina Monologues, enjoying a good chuckle at the feeble-mindedness of - who else? - Sarah Palin and the tea partiers.

Palin and her ilk are people who "play fast and loose with facts" - as if the current administration and Congress have been the picture of probity - and, according to Ensler, they're people whose intelligence simply has yet to "evolve." These Neanderthals - fascists, Behar calls them - believe in creationism and are dubious of man-caused global warming. Ms Behar interprets Sarah Palin's advice to President Obama to be tougher on national security to mean that Palin wants to start a world war. Ms Ensler chimes in that this is a consequence of Palin being an NRA member and "shooting animals from a plane," and also, somehow, a consequence of her wish to see us develop our domestic oil resources.

Don't ask me to explain any of this. I was as mystified by it as you are, but I really look forward to hearing Ms Behar expatiate on the creation/evolution debate, or Ms Ensler explain the logical connections between hunting, drilling for oil, and wanting to precipitate a world war. That'd be a show I'd be sure not to miss.

But more to the point: however dumb Sarah and her fans may be I'll bet even the most dull-witted among them knows that earthquakes and tsunamis have nothing to do with global warming, man-caused or otherwise. Perhaps one of these benighted tea-partiers might venture to enlighten Ms Ensler about the nature of tectonic shifts and their causes:

It's pretty funny listening to two people who lack any understanding of the rudiments of either logic or geoscience deriding others for being skeptical of what people like these two believe. It's just as amusing listening to two people who shouldn't be making fun of anyone else's intelligence doing just that.

RLC

Armageddon

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post argues that President Obama's failure to successfully pressure Iran to stop its manufacture of nuclear weapons, and his apparent unwillingness to use the American military to destroy the production facilities, is forcing Israel to take matters into its own hands. This is very unsettling, though not unexpected. What was surprising in Goodwin's piece, though, comes in the fourth paragraph.

Goodwin writes:

Here's the nightmare scenario. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel requests an urgent, private meeting with President Obama. At the White House, the two men sit alone and Netanyahu, looking grave, dispenses with pleasantries and gets to the point:

"Our intelligence services have determined that Iran is less than three months from making a nuclear bomb. Mr. President, as I have told you, no Israeli leader can let that happen because a nuclear-armed Iran is an existential threat to our country.

"You previously asked that I not surprise you with any unilateral action. Therefore, I am here to inform you that we have decided to take military action against Iran. Based on weather conditions, our air force will carry out the raids in the next week.

"Furthermore, my military advisers all agree that we do not have sufficient conventional firepower to accomplish the mission. We are compelled to use tactical nuclear weapons. It is the only way we can be sure of success. "Mr. President, I assure you that Israel fully appreciates the seriousness of this decision and the potential consequences. My Cabinet fully supports this decision. Opposition leaders also have been informed and they, too, agree this is the only responsible course."

If the scenario sounds too cinematic and far-fetched, consider this. It was suggested to me by one of Israel's top political insiders as the almost-certain outcome of the failed international efforts to get Iran to stop enriching uranium.

There's more at the link. Meanwhile, here's the dilemma for those who believe that we should keep our own military out of this affair: Given all the awful geo-political consequences that will ensue from allowing Iran to build weapons, and all the awful consequences that will follow upon any attempt to destroy their ability to build those weapons, which is worse, an American conventional strike, or series of strikes, that destroys Iran's nuclear weapons facilities, or an Israeli nuclear strike against those facilities? Take your time. You probably have a couple of months yet to decide.

RLC

Passing of a Hero

There aren't many politicians of whom we might say this, but Charlie Wilson was a great man. Wilson was a little known, hard living, skirt-chasing, party-loving former Congressman from Texas, but he was nevertheless a genuine hero. He passed away yesterday at the age of 76, an event which wouldn't be especially notable were it not for the fact that this particular Congressman, despite his many peccadilloes, was a savior to the Afghan people. He and a small coterie of CIA agents were, more than any other Americans, responsible for the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in the late eighties. Wilson's story was made into an outstanding movie a few years ago (Charlie Wilson's War), with Tom Hanks as Wilson. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julia Roberts also had starring roles.

Wilson freely confesses to his personal shortcomings, but he was truly an outstanding man. If you watch the movie you'll understand why.

RLC

9/11

ABC has a series of never before released aerial photos of the collapse of the second World Trade Tower here. They should serve as a reminder that the conflict with radical Islam may ebb and flow, but they will never stop trying to do it again. Evil is relentless.

RLC

Champion of Small Minds

In the spirit of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 this wonderful Knight of the Darwinian Faith intrepidly strides into bookstores and, hush now, surreptitiously moves intelligent design books from the science section and reshelves them in the religion section! Isn't that something? Don't you just admire the guy? Not only does he have the courage to do this great deed, but he proudly boasts of his mighty blows on behalf of the suppression of ideas on his blog.

It's not every day that we hear about such anti-intellectual heroics. It's not every day that people, scared to death of ideas and arguments that conflict with their own cherished convictions, manage to overcome their fears and their bigotry and actually rise up and do something to protect others from being exposed to those ideas. It's not every day that we're privileged to witness the glorious conjunction in one solitary man of a narrow mind and the impulse to extinguish uncomfortable and unacceptable ideas.

Our hats are off to today's champion of small minds everywhere, University of Montana grad student Michael D. Barton.

HT: John West at Evolution News and Views.

RLC

Philosophy Students' Lament

The author of the book C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea, is a philosophy professor by the name of Victor Reppert, who has apparently been hearing grumblings from his students about the value of studying philosophy. Everyone who teaches the subject (or any other subject, for that matter) has heard similar complaints. Philosophy students are often frustrated by the fact that philosophy seems to raise more questions than it answers and by the fact that few of the answers it does give are definitive. All of this is why I found Reppert's reply to his students very much on the mark.

He begins with this:

This is a response to some frustrations which a student expressed to me, and which are, I think, typical of a lot of people who are introduced to the subject. If you've taught philosophy for any length of time, you know where this student is coming from.

I know that philosophy, by its nature, can be frustrating, and it requires somewhat different skills than what you might be accustomed to using in other classes. I make no apologies for that; the discipline of philosophy is what it is.

There is a common conception when students come to philosophy classes that everything falls into two general categories, fact and opinion. If it is a matter of fact, we can settle it by some broadly scientific method. If it is a matter of opinion, then different people have different opinions, and we are all entitled to our opinions. Philosophical questions are all matters of opinion, and therefore there is something absurd and perhaps even offensive about grading a philosophy paper.

I think this neat division of everything into two boxes, fact and opinion, which we learned all the way back to fourth grade at least, is a distortion of the truth. Just because we cannot settle a question to everyone's satisfaction through a well-defined method doesn't mean that there can't be better or worse reasons for believing what we do, or that we shouldn't be aware of the reasons for and against what we believe. Whether it is worthwhile to spend time working through one's world-view and putting a lot of reflection into that, or whether there are other, more adequate uses for a person's time is not something I can answer for someone else.

If you've entertained the same musings as Reppert's student, or if you're a teacher, I encourage you to read the rest of his reply. It's quite good.

His book, by the way, is an excellent treatment of Lewis' argument in Miracles that the existence of human Reason is much better understood on the assumption that there's a God than it is on any naturalistic explanation.

RLC

Miss Me Yet?

The internet has been abuzz the last couple of days over a mysterious billboard in Minnesota that has a picture of George W. Bush with the words "Miss Me Yet?"

Michelle Malkin manages to resist nostalgia's seductive tug and lays out nine reasons why the thought of Mr. Bush's presidency fails to fill her with yearning for the old days:

President Bush put America on the proper war footing after 9/11 and deserves much credit for doing so, but he also:

1) joined with open-borders progressives McCain and Kennedy to try to force shamnesty down our throats;

2) massively expanded the federal role in education;

3) championed the Medicare prescription drug entitlement using phony math;

4) kowtowed to the jihadi-enabling Saudis;

5) stocked DHS with incompetents and cronies;

6) pushed Hillarycare for housing;

7) enabled turncoat Arlen Specter;

8) nominated crony Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court;

9) pre-socialized the economy for Obama by embracing TARP, the auto bailouts, the AIG bailout.

This is all true and cannot be gainsaid. At one point in his presidency I thought Mr. Bush had a chance to be a great president. Then came #1, 2, 3, 9 and his reluctance to explain and promote those of his policies which really were noble, and I gave up hope. I still think he's a classier human being than the men who preceded and succeeded him, but I'm afraid he let greatness slip through his fingers. It's really quite sad, actually.

RLC

Root Causes

Those concerned with the problems of our inner cities are forever talking about the "root causes" of the crime and educational failure besetting those, largely African Americans, who inhabit our urban areas. Usually, the proffered solutions involve spending money, but rarely does spending money do any good. The reason economic solutions fail, of course, is that the problem isn't really economic.

There's a column at City Journal that every person concerned about inner city poverty, educational failure, crime, illegitimacy and other dysfunctions should read. It's written by Heather MacDonald, and she puts her finger on the reason why people who are poor often remain poor, sometimes for generations. She lays the blame for crime, educational failure, and all the ills which plague the lower social classes on one single common denominator - fatherlessness.

It's an excellent article and MacDonald is very persuasive. Here are a few excerpts:

In 1984, Obama's first year in Chicago, gang members gunned down a teenage basketball star, Benjy Wilson. The citywide outcry that followed was heartfelt but beside the point. None of the prominent voices calling for an end to youth violence-from Mayor Washington to Jesse Jackson to school administrators-noted that all of Wilson's killers came from fatherless families (or that he had fathered an illegitimate child himself). Nor did the would-be reformers mention the all-important fact that a staggering 75 percent of Chicago's black children were being born out of wedlock. The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children's mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.

In 1994, two particularly savage youth murders drew the usual feckless hand-wringing. An 11-year-old Black Disciples member from Roseland, Robert "Yummy" Sandifer (so called for his sweet tooth, the only thing childlike about him), had unintentionally killed a girl while shooting at (and paralyzing) a rival gang member. Sandifer's fellow Black Disciples then executed him to prevent him from implicating them in the killing. A month later, after five-year-old Eric Morse refused to steal candy for an 11-year-old and a ten-year-old, the two dropped him from a 14th-story window in a housing complex, killing him. Eric's eight-year-old brother had grabbed him to keep him from falling, but lost his hold when one of the boys bit him on the arm. None of the perpetrators or victims in either case came from two-parent families.

In the early 2000s, the number of assaults reported in and around schools increased significantly, according to Northwestern University political scientist Wesley Skogan. School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students don't have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.

In September 2009, that now-notorious cell-phone video gave the world a glimpse of Barack Obama's former turf. Teenagers-some in an informal school uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, others bare-chested-swarm across a desolate thoroughfare in Roseland; others congregate in the middle of it, indifferent to the SUVs that try to inch by, horns blaring. Against a background din of constant yelling, some boys lunge at one another and throw punches, while a few, in leisurely fashion, select victims to clobber on the torso and head with thick, eight-foot-long railroad ties. Derrion Albert is standing passively in the middle of a knot on the sidewalk when one boy whacks him on the head with a railroad tie and another punches him in the face. Albert falls to the ground unconscious, then comes to and tries to get up. A boy walking by gives him a desultory kick. Five more cluster around him as he lies curled up on the sidewalk; one hits him again with a railroad tie, and another stomps him on the head. Finally, workers from a nearby youth community center drag Albert inside.

Needless to say, everyone involved in the Albert beating came from a fatherless home. Defendant Eugene Riley hit Albert with a railroad tie as he lay unconscious on the ground in his final moments. According to 18-year-old Riley's 35-year-old mother, Sherry Smith, "his father was not ready to be a strong black role model in his son's life." Nor was the different father of Riley's younger brother, Vashion Bullock, ready to be involved in his son's life. A bare-chested Bullock shows up in the video wielding a railroad tie in the middle of the street. As for Albert himself, his father "saw him the day he was born, and the next time when he was in a casket," reports Bob Jackson, the worldly director of Roseland Ceasefire, an antiviolence project.

In Chicago, blacks, at least 35 percent of the population, commit 76 percent of all homicides; whites, about 28 percent of the population, commit 4 percent, and Hispanics, 30 percent of the population, commit 19 percent. The most significant difference between these demographic groups is family structure. In Cook County-which includes both Chicago and some of its suburbs and probably therefore contains a higher proportion of middle-class black families than the city proper-79 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock in 2003, compared with 15 percent of white children. Until that gap closes, the crime gap won't close, either.

All the maladies associated with our inner cities occur everywhere and among all races wherever fatherlessness is the norm. Black crime is disproportionately high because black fatherlessness is disproportionately high. The solution to the problems of our cities isn't to throw more money at them, MacDonald argues, it is to get men of whatever color to learn to value monogamy and to be present in the home to nurture their children as they grow up. If that doesn't happen the future for the children of those who refuse to be real fathers will look increasingly violent and relentlessly bleak.

There's no quick fix for the social breakdown that has occured in our cities, but the path leading out of it is clear for anyone who wants to take it:

• Get all the education you can get.
• Don't have children until you're married and once you're married stay married.
• Get whatever job you can and be the most dependable, hardest worker on the job.
• Get involved in a church where you can get social and spiritual support.
• Stay away from drugs and alcohol.

This is the route to the middle class taken by generations of Americans. It's the route that has resulted in generations of Americans having a better standard of living than did their parents who walked that path so that their children could benefit from their discipline.

RLC

Calvin and Hobbes

Count me among those who were crushed:

In today's cult of celebrity, it's a rare phenomenon: an artist who produces much-loved work, wins the hearts of fans and critics, and then abruptly retires and attempts to lead a normal, sometimes reclusive, life.

We're talking about the likes of Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger and "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip creator Bill Watterson, who recently gave what's believed to be his first interview since 1989, to his hometown newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Watterson, now 51, crushed millions of funnies readers around the world in 1995 when he suddenly retired Calvin, a 6-year-old, philosophical version of Bart Simpson, and Hobbes, the stuffed tiger who comes to life in his imagination. Watterson has never really talked about it publicly, until now.

Read the rest at the link. C&H may have been the funniest, most intelligent "cartoon" strip ever. I don't begrudge Watterson his desire to retire, but I wish he hadn't.

RLC

How the Climate Change Movement Died

Margaret Wente at The Globe and Mail looks at the state of the global climate change "movement" and finds it on life support if not altogether dead. After summarizing all the scandals, shoddy science, and unseemly suppression of dissent she notes that:

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC (Intergovernmental on Climate Change) is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As analyst Walter Russell Mead succinctly puts it: "Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead." That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

The shame of this is that it seems undeniable that something is happening to the earth's climate, but the people tasked with determining what, exactly, it is have so discredited themselves that it will be very difficult to regain the trust necessary to take collective action if ever we do gain a comprehensive understanding of the problem.

Read the rest of Wentke's column. It's very good.

RLC

The Green Police

I don't know if the folks at Audi were intending this to be a parody of the brave new world to which modern progressivism is taking us, but they couldn't have done a better job if they were:

As funny as this spoof is I fear that there are a lot of folks who watched it and didn't see the absurdity of a "green police" force at all - and that's pretty scary.

RLC

John Murtha, RIP

Congressman John Murtha is dead at the age of 77. For those who don't know who Murtha was or why his passing is worth noting please read this.

Murtha represented almost everything that people find disagreeable about American politics, his name was sullied by his involvement in the Abscam scandal and he was one of the all-time champions of earmark pork (Do a Viewpoint search on John Murtha to find more on the controversies surrounding Murtha). On the other hand, he was also a man who served his country admirably, volunteering when in his thirties to serve as a combat Marine in Vietnam, winning two purple hearts and a bronze star. When he came to Congress he was perhaps the strongest advocate for the military on his side of the aisle.

His constituents loved him for the truckloads of federal largesse he brought to his district and those who campaign for virtuous husbandry of the taxpayers' money found him to be a major obstacle to their efforts.

He was a complex man in complex times. May God look favorably upon his soul.

RLC

No More Soup

Generations of biology students have been taught that life originated in a primordial soup of simple organic molecules that gradually combined to form amino acids, nucleic acids and ultimately proteins and DNA. The exact pathway for this miracle was never very clear which may have been because it turns out that it probably didn't happen that way in the first place.

Based on new research reported in Science Daily researchers inform us that we must now throw out the primordial soup and look instead to chemical reactions occurring around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans for the conditions under which the first life was spawned:

For 80 years it has been accepted that early life began in a 'primordial soup' of organic molecules before evolving out of the oceans millions of years later. Today the 'soup' theory has been over turned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth's chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.

"Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won't work at all," said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. "We present the alternative that life arose from gases (H2, CO2, N2, and H2S) and that the energy for first life came from harnessing geochemical gradients created by mother Earth at a special kind of deep-sea hydrothermal vent -- one that is riddled with tiny interconnected compartments or pores."

Well, maybe so, but isn't it a bit disconcerting that just about everything that scientists have told us over the years about evolution turns out to be either untrue or questionable? Everything from the importance of natural selection and genetic mutation, to Haeckel's phylogenetic law, to the proof provided by finch beaks and peppered moths, to the crucial importance of the gene, to the junkiness of junk DNA, to the primordial soup, to who knows what next. The only belief about evolution that's remained undiminished over the decades is the dogmatic certainty that it happened, even though at the rate we're going everything we believe about it will be proven wrong by 2020.

This is not to say that organisms haven't evolved or that life didn't begin in some warm little vent. Rather it's to say that the details of evolutionary theory are a lot less settled than the confident pronouncements of the theory's advocates would have us think. And if the premises of an argument are uncertain how can anyone be expected to have any confidence that the conclusion is assured?

RLC

Rescinding Don't Ask

The Wall Street Journal features a column by Mackubin Thomas Owens in which he makes a case against rescinding the ban on open homosexuals in the military. At one point in his column he writes:

There are many foolish reasons to exclude homosexuals from serving in the armed services. One is simple antihomosexual bigotry. But as the late Charles Moskos, the noted military sociologist, observed during the Clinton years, this does not mean that we should ignore the good ones. And the most important is expressed in the 1993 law: that open homosexuality is incompatible with military service because it undermines the military ethos upon which success in war ultimately depends.

President Obama has promised on numerous occasions that he will work with Congress to overturn the ban and the media and gay organizations are holding him to that promise. Congress, though, has to pass the legislation and it's not clear what they're hearing from their constituents. Nevertheless, they'd do well to keep in mind Owens' concluding paragraph:

The reason for excluding open homosexuals from the military has nothing to do with equal rights or freedom of expression. Indeed, there is no constitutional right to serve in the military. The primary consideration must be military effectiveness. Congress should keep the ban in place. It certainly should not change the law when the United States is engaged in two wars.

Congress should think long and hard about the effects overturning the ban would have on unit cohesion and the ability of our military to carry out its mission as effectively and as efficiently as possible. That should be the overriding consideration. The decision should certainly not be based on considerations of political correctness, sociological fashion, or "equal opportunity."

RLC

Two Assumptions

Democrats, the WaPo's Charles Krauthammer observes, analyze their dismal performance in recent elections in the light of two guiding axioms:

(1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Krauthammer goes on to put flesh on these presuppositional bones and shows, in so doing, that Democrats seem to be completely wanting in the ability to see in themselves the faults they discern so clearly in others. He writes, for instance, that:

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda -- which couldn't get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts -- is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush -- from Iraq to Social Security reform -- constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is "one of the truest expressions of patriotism."

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. "They made a decision," explained David Axelrod, "they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed" -- a perfect expression of liberals' conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country's, that their idea of the public good is the public's, that their failure is therefore the nation's.

The whole op-ed is worth reading, but let's tarry for a moment over the main implication of his column: Democrats are becoming increasingly divorced from reality. They'd sooner demonize their political opponents and disparage the intellectual abilities of the voters than to contemplate the possibility that maybe there's something wrong with themselves.

When Scott Brown won in Massachusetts Democrat spokespersons were all over the airwaves claiming with straight faces and apparent sincerity that this should be seen as a signal to Democrats to put the public option back in health care reform. Brown's election against a Democrat progressive candidate was interpreted, with an astonishing indifference to common sense, as a protest against the Democrats for being too timid, for not spending enough money, for not driving the deficits even higher.

President Obama, as Krauthammer points out, assures us in the wake of electoral setbacks in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia that he's not an ideologue. Yet he insists that Democrats double down and get his agenda passed over the objections of the people no matter what the political cost. Isn't that exactly what an ideologue would do?

I'm reminded of Martin Luther's extraordinary affirmation of how, in his view, a Christian's faith should be impervious to evidence. He wrote that:

So tenaciously should we cling to the world revealed by the Gospel that were I to see all the Angels of Heaven coming down to me to tell me something different, not only would I not be tempted to doubt a single syllable, but I would shut my eyes and stop my ears, for they would not deserve to be seen or heard.

Substitute "progressive ideology" for "the Gospel" and Luther could have been talking about the modern Democratic party.

RLC

Is Religion Separable from Science?

It's a matter of entrenched conviction, I suppose, that religion has no place in science, but I wonder how it can be possible that the two be separated. I can see how Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam or any specific religion can be denied any role in scientific theorizing and data gathering, but what I can't see is how religion simpliciter could be excluded without the whole enterprise collapsing.

When we think of religious belief we almost always think of a belief in some sort of supernatural being, but religious beliefs need not be limited to supernatural entities for at least two reasons:

First, the meaning of the word "supernatural" is unclear. Usually it's intended to refer to that which transcends the laws and boundaries of our space-time world, but consider this possibility: Suppose there are other universes besides our own with different laws and even different forms of life, including intelligent life. This is the state of affairs scientists and philosophers who embrace the multiverse hypothesis believe is the case. These universes, and their inhabitants, would fit the definition of supernatural, but would we regard belief in their existence to be a religious belief? If so, should the multiverse hypothesis be excluded from science? Most scientists would say no.

Second, according to one popular text in the philosophy of religion (Reason and Religious Belief, Peterson, et al.) a religion is a "set of beliefs, actions, and experiences, both personal and corporate, organized around the concept of an Ultimate Reality which inspires worship or total devotion."

Based on this definition, is science itself, or at least scientific naturalism, a religion? The naturalist holds that nature is the ultimate reality and certainly many scientists are totally devoted to it.

In his Myth of Religious Neutrality, philosopher Roy Clouser identifies the crucial belief characteristic of all religions. This is the belief that there is something, some entity, that does not depend upon anything else for it's existence and upon which everything else depends. This is another way of saying that there is something which possesses necessary being. For the Christian this is God, for the materialist it's matter or the laws of nature.

But if this is true then naturalism, materialism, humanism, indeed every form of atheism found among modern scientists, is, in fact, religious, and any attempt to banish religious assumptions and influence from science would be like cutting out a vital organ. It would deprive it of its meaning and possibly entail the dissolution of science altogether. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to practice a meaningful science while somehow leaving one's total devotion to whatever constitutes one's ultimate reality at the door of the lab.

Attempts to exclude religion from science are as futile as attempts to exclude ideology from politics. Religion can no more be isolated from science than it can from morality. Indeed, the demand to banish religion from science is, in reality, an attempt to banish one kind of religion, theism, while privileging materialism and shielding it from all competition.

RLC

Eternal Recurrence

I remember as a boy growing up in the post-WWII years that it just seemed unthinkable and impossible that the same hatreds that led to the Holocaust would ever rear their ugly head again. How wrong I was. Mark Steyn gives us a glimpse of the recrudescence of anti-semitism that's infecting much of Europe today:

He writes:

In Scandinavia, "Jews Flee Swedish Town In Wake Of Anti-Semitism":

Last year, 79 crimes against Jewish residents were reported to the Malm� police, roughly double the number reported in 2008. In addition, Jewish cemeteries and synagogues have been repeatedly defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, and a chapel at another Jewish burial site in Malm� was firebombed last January during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

In the United Kingdom, "Record Number Of Anti-Semitic Attacks":

They included an incident in which a Jewish man driving an electric wheelchair was rammed by a car after leaving a synagogue. The driver shouted "Jew, Jew" at him, but he escaped with minor injuries.

In Yorkshire, strips of bacon were arranged in the shape of a star of David and stuck the fence of a home where a Jewish family lived with the word "Jewboy" written underneath.

A 12-year-old girl, the only Jew at her school, was attacked by a mob of up to 20 fellow pupils who pulled her hair and chanted: "death to Jews, kill all Jews."

And in Germany, just because you got rid of all the Jews, why deny yourself the pleasures of Jew-hating?

The leader of Germany's opposition Green party, Cem Oezdemir, who has Turkish roots himself, calls it a form of "anti-Semitism without Jews."

"These young Muslims are often people who don't know any Jews in person," Oezdemir said. "Their radical views stem from an over-identification with the Middle East conflict, from parents who are willing to employ all the well-known Jew-related cliches, and from schools that don't know how to tackle the problem in classes full of students with migrant backgrounds."

Of course, hatred of Jews is rife in the Muslim world, but in Europe? Why? It seems so irrational. It's as if there's something buried deep in human DNA that programs people to hate the Jews. Like a cat which can't resist attacking a dangling string, for reasons it surely doesn't understand, human beings often seem unable to resist their compulsion to hate Jews. Why is that?

It's not irrelevant, I think, that this new wave of anti-Jewish hatred seems to be occurring in the one part of the world that, more than any other, combines a well-educated public with a determinedly secular worldview. This is significant because it suggests that prejudice is not just a function of ignorance - even the educated have their hatreds. The problem is that secular man has no particular reason to stifle his animosities toward those who are different from himself. On a continent full of people who absorbed relativism with their infant formula there's no reason to think anti-semitism is actually wrong.

Only a Judeo-Christian society has the moral and theological resources to suppress the soul's darkest impulses, and although historically Christians and Jews too often failed to live up to their calling, it's nevertheless only a Judeo-Christian society in which any minority can expect to be accorded the same rights and respect everyone else has, because it's only Christians and Jews who are under a moral obligation to treat others justly.

RLC

Zinn Again

The other day we linked to two remembrances of the late historian Howard Zinn. One was a paen to the man's benevolent influence and the other was an acerbic dismissal of Zinn as essentially a fraud. Which you think he was will depend largely on your ideological point of view, but what cannot be gainsaid is that the man exerted great influence on several generations of American students. His People's History of the United States is the most widely used history text in American public schools and colleges, having sold over two million copies.

I wanted to bring Zinn up again because I've come across a column at National Review Online which explains in more detail why conservatives see his influence as pernicious and leftists see it as salutary. Roger Kimball argues at NRO that the People's History is filled with distortions and misstatements of fact that give a very misleading impression of the history of the United States. In Kimball's words, reading People's History is like offering to take someone on a tour of Versailles but stopping at a ramshackle shed on the outskirts and saying, "See? Pretty shabby, isn't it?"

Anyway, read Kimball's essay. It's important.

RLC

Whackos

The lefty blogosphere and its media arm at MSNBC were all aflutter this past week over the results of a Daily Kos poll of Republicans that finds, astonishingly, that many of them hold views that Democrats don't. This, some commenters are saying, is proof that Republicans are, by and large, crazy extremists.

Bruce Bartlett, for example, says that, "I can only conclude from this new poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans nationwide that between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid."

Chris Matthews on MSNBC calls these Republicans "lunatics" and "whack jobs."

Politico's Ben Smith writes, "A new poll from Research 2000, sponsored by DailyKos more or less with the goal of making Republicans look extreme, does a pretty good job of that."

Well, maybe, but what is it, exactly, that so many of these slobbering, lunatic extremist Republicans are believing these days? Here are the poll's results:

At the risk of being called an extremist whack job myself I have to say that I don't find these numbers all that surprising.

Progressive pundits are astonished, for example, that so many Republicans think President Obama is a socialist, but why is that surprising? What more would, say, Bernie Sanders, a real live socialist, have on his agenda were he President that Mr. Obama does not? Besides, why is it goofy to think that Mr. Obama is something that a majority of Democrats regard favorably? According to a recent Gallup poll 53% of Democrats and 61% of liberals overall have a positive opinion of socialism, so why should Democrats think it somehow weird that Republicans think Mr. Obama does, too.

The pundits are shocked that Republicans would think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Mr. Obama, but that seems obvious, don't you think? Palin had administrative experience as a mayor and a governor of a state. Barack Obama brought no such experience to the White House. Unlike Mrs. Palin, he never ran a business, never met a payroll, never had to manage an administration of any sort. He never did anything that qualified him for the role he now finds himself in. He was a community organizer, a college instructor, an undistinguished state senator for a few years, and a U.S. Senator for less than two years before he began campaigning for president. What exactly was it about Mr. Obama that would lead anyone to think that he was more qualified to run the country than Governor Palin?

The pundits are dismayed that so many Republicans are unsure about where the President was born, but how can an intelligent person be anything but non-committal on the matter? No dispositive documentation of Mr. Obama's birth has been brought forward, and he refuses to allow the state of Hawaii to release the long form birth certificate that would set concerns about this matter to rest. This, despite the fact that similar questions about John McCain's status were submitted to court adjudication, and he was required to produce the necessary forms. Until Mr. Obama does likewise the most anyone can say is that they just don't know where he was born.

In any event, a couple of years back polls were showing that 61% of Democrats believed that George Bush knew ahead of time about the attacks on the World Trade Towers and nevertheless let them happen. Barack Obama even appointed a man who believed this, Van Jones, to a position in his administration. Surely, that's wackier than Republican agnosticism on Mr. Obama's place of birth.

The pundits are incredulous that so many Republicans would think that ACORN stole the last election, and, of course, that does seem a little paranoid. It also shows a failure on the part of the surveyed Republicans to draw the fine distinction between actually stealing the election and merely trying to steal the election.

The pundits are also outraged that so many Republicans think Mr. Obama wants the terrorists to win, and here I sympathize with the pundits, but, on the other hand, the numbers may reflect exasperation with the fact that Mr. Obama throughout his younger years hobnobbed socially with terrorists and seems of late to have made some very dubious decisions concerning how captured terrorists should be handled. This, of course, does not warrant saying he wants terrorists "to win," but those who say they believe he does may simply be venting their frustration with what many believe to be the President's poor judgment on the terrorism issue.

Finally, the pundits are angry that so many Republicans want President Obama to be impeached. I wonder if those who find this absurd were similarly angered by the incessant calls for the impeachment of President Bush, even from the highest echelons of the Democratic party. I doubt it.

In any event, impeachment is entirely inappropriate unless the President has been found to be engaging in illegal activity. Mr. Obama may be in over his head, but that's not yet illegal.

RLC