Bashir's Dilemma (Pt. I)

Last week we posted an interview with pastor and writer Rob Bell in which the interviewer, MSNBC's Martin Bashir, pressed him with the ancient dilemma long favored by skeptics:

Since evil exists, it seems that it must be the case that either God is able to eliminate it but doesn't want to or that He wants to eliminate it but is not able to do so.

Bell never really answered the question which made it seem, perhaps, as if there is no answer to it, but there is. Philosophers have long pointed out that there's an obvious third possibility, i.e. God both wants to eliminate evil and is able to eliminate evil, but has good reason for not eliminating evil.

Of course, although the answer deflects the logical force of the dilemma, it raises the further question of what possible reason God could have for not doing something that any parent who sees his child suffer would do if he could. If human parents would alleviate their child's suffering, the question goes, why doesn't God?

Most philosophers prefer to break this question into two parts. They make a distinction between two kinds of evil, moral and natural. Moral evil is evil (or suffering) that results from human volition. Natural evil is evil that results from natural forces like, drought, disease, tsunami, earthquake, etc.

So the question bifurcates into why doesn't God prevent evil like the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan recently, and why doesn't God prevent the kind of evil in which one person treats another cruelly?

One possible answer to the latter question goes back to Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) and is called the Free Will defense. It says essentially that God desires to end evil and is able to end it, but the cost of doing so would be to override or strip us of our freedom to make our own choices.

Well, why doesn't God do that? What good is free will if so much misery results from it? The answer to that question goes, perhaps, to the reason He created us in the first place.

God created human beings to live in a love relationship with Him. Such a relationship, in order to be satisfying and meaningful, requires that both parties be free to choose to requite the love of the other. Thus God invested us with free will to enable us to choose to love Him or not. It is that freedom, the existentialists remind us, which makes us significant, which makes us different from everything else in the world. It's also that freedom that people abuse when they exercise it for the purpose of hurting others.

God could strip us of our freedom and compel us to love Him, but not only would that defeat the purpose of a loving relationship, it would essentially dehumanize us. It would make us less than human and it would drain God's relationship with us of any real significance. This is, in God's mind, apparently too high a price to pay.

Thus He tolerates evil in order to preserve His romance with His creatures.

There's much more to this question than what I've outlined in this short post, but this is at least a start of an anaswer. What, though, of natural evil? Why doesn't God prevent that? We'll take a stab at that question in a day or so.

In Casey's Shoes

We received a number of replies to our post titled Rough Justice, the account of how a boy named Casey who had been constantly picked on by the juvenile hyenas at his school, finally got tired of it. The following is typical of several of the stories we were sent:

This post hits far too close to home for me. I remember growing up in a public junior high school and always being taunted for the way that I looked and also for my weight. Ever since I can remember I have been a big boy. My mom would always tell me that I was just big boned, which I still hold to be true today. I found myself in junior high being like Casey, being harassed by the same group of kids over and over again. I can’t tell you how much that affected my self-image and even my self-worth.

Sadly I wasn’t like Casey, I never had the guts to stand up and punch that punk in the face, I was the kid however, that would walk different ways home and even take different hallways making myself late for classes so that I wasn’t harassed.

I am glad that Casey wouldn’t take it anymore and taught that kid a lesson that he would never have learned from school discipline.

The nonsense that surrounds bullying is all a joke anymore. School districts spend thousands of dollars to fund anti-bullying campaigns and yet never stop bullying or punish the correct kids. This is the same turnout in Casey’s case. Casey was punched in the face and punched in the stomach multiple times by his ignorant tormentor, and yet he is suspended for protecting himself? This is complete idiocy on the school official’s part. What are you trying to promote when you make these kinds of decisions?

I don’t understand it, and I didn’t understand it back when I was in Casey’s shoes. I think there are times when you need to stand up for yourself no matter the cost, and that’s what Casey did, and if he needs to do it again, so be it!

Better People

Deroy Murdock documents the awful behavior of the progressive left during the Wisconsin budget brouhaha. It's good that someone has documented it because it's awfully hard to find any mention of it in the major media which seems to have imposed a news blackout on anything that makes the Left look bad.

There have been literally dozens of threats against the lives of Republican legislators and their families during the weeks that this crisis unfolded. Many of those making the threats have been identified although no criminal action has as yet been taken against them despite the fact that their threats are violent, grisly, vile, and ugly, not to mention grammatically atrocious.

Here's Murdock's opening:

"We will hunt you down. We will slit your throats. We will drink your blood. I will have your decapitated head on a pike in the Madison town square. This is your last warning."

Is this a passage from Bram Stoker’s Dracula? A snippet from al-Qaeda’s latest missive? No, this e-mail reached Wisconsin state senator Dan Kapanke (R., La Crosse) on March 9, after he voted for GOP governor Scott Walker’s controversial budget and labor reforms.

Kapanke is not alone. While the mainstream media generally yawn, leftists threaten top Wisconsin Republicans with murder.

He goes on to provide lots of examples. The language is vulgar in many of them which you would expect considering the source, but I recommend that you read the rest of the article anyway so that you understand the nature of the people who comprise much of the base of the Democrat party.

It's also important to read this so that the next time someone complains about the "extremist rhetoric" of the tea party and their allies you can, after you've politely chuckled at their naivete (or blind prejudice), challenge them to produce even one example of anything that is a tenth as reprehensible as what you'll find in Murdock's piece.

Here's his close:

[W]here is the condemnation against the anti-Walker Left for its criminal behavior?

In the Battle of Madison, and perhaps beyond, death threats appear to be a virtually exclusive tool of the pro-union Left.

That suggests two possibilities:

Pro-taxpayer rightists would love to issue death threats, but resist temptation, knowing full well that the slumbering mainstream media would arise, showcase such a development, and discredit conservatives.

Or, maybe, free-marketeers have not issued death threats, because — compared to their left-wing counterparts — they simply are better people.

Actually, either way they're better people.

Mr. Obama Goes to War

The Obama administration has determined that Moammar Qaddafi poses a significant humanitarian threat to his people and has decided that we will participate in - though not lead, the President has made clear - an attack on Mr. Qaddafi's ability to murder his own people.

Very well, if the administration believes that Qaddafi is about to commit mass slaughter we should do what we can to prevent it, but the President's tentativeness and timidity in this venture are disconcerting. He promises that we will be involved only for a few days, as if wars can be waged in between golf outings, and that we will not be deploying ground troops. Well, what if ground troops are the only way to stop the slaughter? What then? And why is he telling Qaddafi what we will do and not do? And what's wrong with American leadership, anyway?

One might think that we would have long ago learned a couple of lessons about these affairs. One lesson in particular is that it's folly to employ half-measures. If you're going to strike against the king, as Machiavelli advised some 500 years ago, you must kill him. To leave Qaddafi in place is sheer madness. Whether he is stymied in his attacks on the rebels or not he will almost certainly return to his support for terrorism against the West and probably on a greater scale than ever. He'll be a threat to every citizen in every nation in the coalition that has arrayed against him.

The President has made it clear (one of his favorite phrases) that getting Qaddafi is not part of our objective, we only want him to stop attacking the rebels, but if so we should never have launched missiles at Libya. Dealing with tyrants is not a pastime for dilletantes. We have essentially declared war (without consulting Congress, by the way), but we're going to allow the man who is responsible for that war to remain in place so that he can support more terror assaults against the West like the Pan Am 103 bombing. This makes no sense.

Mr. Obama has been at pains in his public pronouncements to tacitly stress that he is emphatically not George W. Bush. Unlike Mr. Bush's conduct in Iraq, Mr. Obama has instructed us that we are to make no mistake (another of his favorites), he has a coalition of nations with him, he is not leading those nations, he will not be inserting ground troops, and, apparently, he will not be cutting off the head of the snake.

He's right to insist that he's not George Bush, and it's most unfortunate that he's not.

Statistically Suspicious

Suppose there were some field of endeavor putatively open to minorities but in fact populated only by whites. There would, in such a case, almost certainly be a presumption of either discrimination or at least a hostile climate which deters minorities from entering that field. This rumination leads us to a piece in First Things about a concern raised by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt:

Social psychologists have “taboos and danger zones,” Haidt told a convention of his peers, drawing on his own observations and some statistical data. Harvard’s president Larry Summers asked why so many more men taught math and science at the nation’s top universities, and instead of reasonably considering his hypothesis that there may be “a sex difference in the standard deviation of IQ scores between men and women,” social psychologists stood by or joined the resulting attack on Summers as a sexist. “If you’re inside the force field, [Summers’ suggestion] is not a permissible hypothesis. It is sacrilege.”

And there is, Haidt continued, “a statistically impossible lack of diversity” in social psychology. He polled his audience of approximately 1000 social psychologists and found the ratio of liberals to conservatives was approximately 266 to 1. “When we find any job in the nation in which women or minorities are underrepresented by a factor of three or four, we make the strong presumption that this constitutes evidence of discrimination. And if we can’t find evidence of overt discrimination, we presume that there must be a hostile climate that discourages underrepresented groups from entering.”

Contrasting this to a Gallup data that showed that Americans are about two-to-one conservative, he concluded that “underrepresentation of conservatives in social psychology, by a factor of several hundred, is evidence that we are a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering.”

The same sort of underrepresentation exists in the major media. A survey conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1997 found that 61% of reporters shared the beliefs of the Democratic Party. Only 15% said their beliefs were best represented by the Republican Party. The rest were undecided or Independent.

There's nothing wrong with unequal ratios if they result from a disinclination on the part of conservatives to enter these fields and as long as ideological bias is straightforwardly acknowledged by those who hold it. It's when the bias of the scholar or the journalist distorts and misrepresents the truth the general public trusts them to deliver that there's a problem, and when the public believes it's getting a slanted, inaccurate picture of things from the "experts" and those who report the news, that mistrust grows. That's the situation much of the media, and the academy, finds itself in today.

Ten Books That Shaped Modern Conservatism

My friend Jason turns our attention to an ISI article that discusses ten of the most influential books in the shaping of modern conservative thought. The ten are:

• The Road to Serfdom ........................... F. A. Hayek
• Socialism ................................... Ludwig von Mises
• Memoirs of a Superfluous Man ...... Albert Jay Nock
• Witness ................................. Whittaker Chambers
• The New Science of Politics ............... Eric Voegelin
• In Defense of Freedom ........................ Frank Meyer
• The Conservative Mind ....................... Russell Kirk
• Ideas Have Consequences ............... Richard Weaver
• The Quest for Community .................Robert Nisbet
• On the Democratic Idea in America .... Irving Kristol

The article gives a summary of each and discusses their impact. Anyone who wishes to understand the intellectual foundations of modern conservatism should be familiar with at least several of them, and the article at the link is a good starting point.
It might be noted that these books were all written between 1940 and 1960. There were a number of books written both before and after that period which have also been very influential in shaping conservative thought. Several that come to mind are:

• The Federalist Papers ...... James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, et al.
• Democracy in America ..... Alexis deToqueville
• On Liberty ..... John Stuart Mill
• Atlas Shrugged ..... Ayn Rand (actually written during the same period as the above works)
• Conscience of a Conservative ..... Barry Goldwater
• Almost anything written by William F. Buckley, including his magazine, National Review.

Perhaps one explanation of the current difficulties we face in America is that there are too many Americans who have never read any of these works.

Are Stings Immoral

Readers have perhaps heard of the surreptitious videotaping of Planned Parenthood staffers by pro-lifers who pass themselves off as underage pregnant girls or prostitutes. The "stings" have been carried out by Lila Rose’s group Live Action and involved deceiving Planned Parenthood staffers into revealing their actual practices and attitudes, which were shocking and sometimes illegal.

At First Things ethicist Robert George takes issue with the practice of lying, even in a good cause. Pro-lifers, he says, whatever their religious commitments, should:

reject lying even in the greatest of good causes. What we fight for is just and true, and truth — in its unparalleled splendor and luminosity — is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal. It is the truth about the precious life of the child in the womb, and about the consequences of abortion for women and men, and the effects of abortion on families, on the medical profession, and on society more broadly, that will ultimately enable us to build a culture of life.

George holds that even though the other side lies about the nature of what happens in an abortion pro-lifers should not do as they do:

[I]n working to protect the victims of abortion, it is frustrating to hold ourselves to standards that so many on the other side freely disregard.”

He goes on to say that:

[T]here are no moral shortcuts to victory in this struggle. A culture of life can only be built on a foundation of truth. Lying may produce short-term victories, but it will, in the end, frustrate our long-term objective. Respect for life—like respect for every other great human good and every other high moral principle—depends on love of truth. Our efforts in the cause of life and every other worthy goal will, in the end, prove to be self-defeating if they undermine love of truth.

This is difficult for me to say because I sympathize with Professor George's insistence on the value of truth, but I don't think matters are as simple as he implies. I wonder, for instance, what he would say about the lies that must be told by undercover police or intelligence agents trying to pull off a sting of a gang of thieves or infiltrate a drug cartel or infiltrate a terror cell. I wonder, too, what he would say about the military putting out disinformation in order to deceive the enemy the better to defeat them in battle, or a government threatening the use of nuclear weapons to deter a nuclear attack even if they knew they would not, in fact, retaliate with nukes.

Truth is certainly among the greatest goods, one that is too much under-valued in modern society, but it is not the greatest good. It is not an idol. There are circumstances in which telling the truth would be a great wrong - for instance, if telling the truth would lead directly to the murders of innocents. Likewise, lying, though otherwise almost always wrong, would be a great good if it led to the saving of the lives of innocents.

Imagine, for example, that Col. Qaddafi is about to commit wholesale slaughter of the families of the rebels who rose up against him. Suppose further that our intelligence agents report that he will likely not do this if he thinks the American president would use force to stop him. Would it be wrong for the president to declare that the United States will invade Libya with the tacit purpose of killing Qaddafi if he begins his genocide, even if the president knows in his heart that he will do no such thing? Is political bluffing wrong?

Professor George would apparently say that it would be wrong for those hiding Jews from the nazis in the early 1940s or slaves from their owners in the underground railroad of the 1850s to lie to those who question them about their knowledge of such operations. If the nazis came to a home where Jews were being hidden and asked the homeowner if he knows where there are any Jews, does Professor George say that the homeowner should tell the truth and reveal their presence in his attic? Or should he lie to save their lives? What do you think?

Hell? No.

I've never watched Martin Bashir on MSNBC before nor have I ever read any of Rob Bell's books, but after watching this interview I'm convinced that I've been missing something by not watching Bashir and missing nothing by not reading Bell.

I don't think Bell lucidly answers a single question Bashir puts to him about his new book and each response he does make sounds like a contradiction of a position he holds in the book. Bashir prods him to answer whether it is irrelevant and immaterial how one responds to Christ in this life in terms of determining one’s eternal destiny, to which Bell replies that it is immensely important, but then he never really tells us why, and indeed, gives the impression that he doesn't really believe his own answer.

Bashir's summation is that Bell is trying to "amend the gospel" to make it "palatable" to modern people. It sounds to me like he might be hitting the nail pretty much on the head:

Bell's book is titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived and has apparently ignited a theological firestorm because allegedly (I haven't read it so I can't say with confidence) Bell argues for a position called universalism which is the belief that everyone will ultimately have eternal life with God. No one will be eternally separated from the love of God. God's love is so powerful that it will win even the most recalcitrant and obdurate to His bosom.

For the sake of his reputation I hope he does a better job in the book defending that view than he does in his interview with Bashir.

At any rate, without judging Bell's book, which, as I say, I haven't read, I recommend C.S. Lewis' Great Divorce as an alternative to universalism. Lewis illustrates nicely how human perversity creates its own hell and how many people willfully choose hell over heaven even if given a clear choice.

The video raises a couple of questions I'd like to explore over the next day or two. The first has to do with the dilemma that Bashir presents in the opening, and the second concerns God's justice.

Amateur Night

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has had it with the weak leadership of the current White House. According to The Daily.com a Clinton insider reveals Ms Clinton's frustration with Mr. Obama:

Fed up with a president “who can’t make his mind up” as Libyan rebels are on the brink of defeat, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is looking to the exits.

At the tail end of her mission to bolster the Libyan opposition, which has suffered days of losses to Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s forces, Clinton announced that she’s done with Obama after 2012 — even if he wins again.

“Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”

He went on, “If you take a look at what’s on her plate as compared with what’s on the plates of previous Secretaries of State — there’s more going on now at this particular moment, and it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.”

When French president Nicolas Sarkozy urged her to press the White House to take more aggressive action in Libya, Clinton repeatedly replied only, “There are difficulties,” according to Foreign Policy magazine.

“Frankly we are just completely puzzled,” one of the diplomats told Foreign Policy magazine. “We are wondering if this is a priority for the United States.”

Or as the insider described Obama’s foreign policy shop: “It’s amateur night.”

This is not surprising. We elected to the presidency a complete unknown, a man from nowhere, just because he spoke well and had an interesting racial identity. We swooned at his speeches and believed that we were witnessing the second coming. Now reality has set in, we've traveled to Oz and looked behind the curtain and found there a man who lacks any of the attributes required of someone who aspires to lead a nation. As others have noted, Mr. Obama clearly enjoys the perks of being president but seems to disdain the job itself. From the health care debate through every episode that has arisen in his tenure he has been disengaged, disinterested, and disinclined to lead. Throughout his short political career his predilection has been to vote present rather than to take a stand. It seems that inclination continues in the White House.

I suspect that Hillary knew this about him from the beginning, but thought she could help carry the man through his presidency. Evidently she underestimated the magnitude of the task.

Why We Celebrate St. Patrick

Millions of Americans, many of them descendents of Irish immigrants, celebrated their Irish heritage by observing St. Patrick's Day yesterday. We are indebted to Thomas Cahill and his best-selling book How The Irish Saved Civilization for explaining to us why Patrick's is a life worth commemorating. As improbable as his title may sound, Cahill weaves a fascinating and compelling tale of how the Irish in general, and Patrick and his spiritual heirs in particular, served as a tenuous but crucial cultural bridge from the classical world to the medieval age and, by so doing, made Western civilization possible.

Born a Roman citizen in 390 B.C., Patrick had been kidnapped as a boy of sixteen from his home on the coast of Britain and taken by Irish barbarians to Ireland. There he languished in slavery until he was able to escape six years later. Upon his homecoming he became a Christian, studied for the priesthood, and eventually returned to Ireland where he would spend the rest of his life laboring to persuade the Irish to accept the Gospel and to abolish slavery. Patrick was the first person in history, in fact, to speak out unequivocally against slavery and, according to Cahill, the last person to do so until the 17th century.

Meanwhile, Roman control of Europe had begun to collapse. Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 A.D. and barbarians were sweeping across the continent, forcing the Romans back to Italy, and plunging Europe into the Dark Ages. Throughout the continent unwashed, illiterate hordes descended on the once grand Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books. Learning ground to a halt and the literary heritage of the classical world was burned or moldered into dust. Almost all of it, Cahill claims, would surely have been lost if not for the Irish.

Having been converted to Christianity through the labors of Patrick, the Irish took with gusto to reading, writing and learning. They delighted in letters and bookmaking and painstakingly created indescribably beautiful Biblical manuscripts such as the Book of Kells which is on display today in the library of Trinity College in Dublin. Aware that the great works of the past were disappearing, they applied themselves assiduously to the daunting task of copying all surviving Western literature - everything they could lay their hands on. For a century after the fall of Rome, Irish monks sequestered themselves in cold, damp, cramped mud huts called scriptoria, so remote and isolated from the world that they were seldom threatened by the marauding pagans. Here these men spent their entire adult lives reproducing the old manuscripts and preserving literacy and learning for the time when people would be once again ready to receive them.

These scribes and their successors served as the conduits through which the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the benighted tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruin of the civilization they had recently overwhelmed. Around the late 6th century, three generations after Patrick, Irish missionaries with names like Columcille, Aidan, and Columbanus began to venture out from their monasteries and refuges, clutching their precious books to their hearts, sailing to England and the continent, founding their own monasteries and schools among the barbarians and teaching them how to read, write and make books of their own. Absent the willingness of these courageous men to endure deprivations and hardships of every kind for the sake of the Gospel and learning, Cahill argues, the world that came after them would have been completely different. It would likely have been a world without books. Europe almost certainly would have been illiterate, and it would probably have been unable to resist the Muslim incursions that arrived a few centuries later.

The Europeans, starved for knowledge, soaked up everything the Irish missionaries could give them. From such seeds as these modern Western civilization germinated. From the Greeks the descendents of the Goths and Vandals learned philosophy, from the Romans they learned about law, from the Bible they learned of the worth of the individual who, created and loved by God, is therefore significant and not merely a brutish aggregation of matter. From the Bible, too, they learned that the universe was created by a rational Mind and was thus not capricious, random, or chaotic. It would yield its secrets to rational investigation. Out of these assumptions, once their implications were finally and fully developed, grew historically unprecedented views of the value of the individual and the flowering of modern science.

Our cultural heritage is thus, in a very important sense, a legacy from the Irish. A legacy from Patrick. It is worth pondering on this St. Patrick's Day what the world would be like today had it not been for those early Irish scribes and missionaries thirteen centuries ago.

Buiochas le Dia ar son na nGaeil (Thank God for the Irish), and I hope you have a great St. Patrick's Day.

Rough Justice

The big kid in this video is a boy named Casey. According to schoolmates he's picked on every day. In this case the aggressor apparently had a friend videotape his bullying so that he could show it to his buddies and gloat over what a tough guy he is. Unfortunately for him Casey finally got tired of it:

There's been much tut-tutting about "all violence being bad" and how Casey "should have told a teacher" that he was being picked on. Nonsense. Not all violence is bad and telling a teacher often doesn't do any good. Sometimes the best response is to humiliate the little punk who was trying to look big at Casey's expense. Maybe next time he'll be a little more hesitant to pick a fight with someone.

No doubt Casey is a hero to every kid who's ever been picked on in school, but incredibly, the school officials suspended Casey. Having been punched in the face he's now serving a suspension for protecting himself. Pretty pathetic.

What Caused God?

Science writer John Horgan acknowledges that scientists haven't a clue as to how living things could have developed out of non-living chemical precursors but, he cautions, those who think that perhaps there was some intelligent agent involved, a God, shouldn't gloat over the enormous implausibility of every naturalistic hypothesis thus far proposed:

Creationists are no doubt thrilled that origin-of-life research has reached such an impasse, but they shouldn't be. Their explanations suffer from the same flaw: What created the divine Creator? And at least scientists are making an honest effort to solve life's mystery instead of blaming it all on God.

Mr. Horgan surely knows better than to offer up such a jejunne objection. If the existence of life seems inexplicable apart from an Intelligent Causal Agent (ICA) then it is no argument against the existence of an ICA that we don't know what caused it.

After all, as Mr. Horgan reminds us, scientists don't know what caused life to exist either, but no one regards ignorance of the cause of life to be a reason not to believe that it does in fact exist.

An ICA is either contingent (i.e. dependent upon something else for its existence) or necessary (not dependent upon anything else; self-existent). Suppose it's contingent. If a contingent ICA exists then the fact that it's contingent matters little for the purposes of the naturalist such as Mr. Horgan. The naturalist wants to deny any non-physical causes operating upon the cosmos. They want to deny that any intelligence was involved in the origin of life. But if such an intelligence was involved it'd be small comfort to the naturalist that that intelligence is itself the product of an even greater cause. Whether there's just one ICA or a series of increasingly greater ICAs doesn't matter. As long as there is at least one ICA the naturalist has lost the argument to the Creationist.

Moreover, if there is a contingent ICA there must be something else which caused it, but as Aquinas points out in the Summa Theologica there cannot be an infinite series of contingent causes. The series must end somewhere, and it can only end with a cause that is itself necessary, self-existent, an uncaused cause of all else that exists.

Furthermore, it's a principle in philosophical and scientific explanation that causes should never be multiplied beyond what's needed to account for a particular effect. The simplest explanation is that there is not an indefinite series of ICAs but rather a single ICA that is the cause of life.

No matter how one looks at it, the question "What caused God?" is either philosophically naive or a rhetorical paper tiger. Mr. Horgan is just whistling past the graveyard by invoking it. He'd be better off just not calling the possibility to his readers' attention.

Don't Give Up on Nuclear Power

I have in the past urged that the U.S. be much more committed to developing nuclear power for domestic energy needs than we have been over the last several decades. Nothing that has happened in Japan in the last few days persuades me that I should change my mind.

So far as I know as I'm writing this no one has died from radiation exposure or has even been exposed to dosages that would be lethal or life-threatening. That may change, of course, but even if it does why should that inhibit us from developing nuclear power? More people die in coal-mining accidents in one year than have died as a result of nuclear contamination, but we don't stop mining coal. Coal causes more long-term health problems in the general population than did the Chernobyl nuclear accident, but we don't stop burning it. Even if the death toll in Japan turns out to be in the hundreds from radiation exposure that many people could die in an airplane crash, but we don't stop flying airplanes. Tens of thousands of people are killed and maimed in auto accidents every year, but we don't stop driving cars. Nor did we stop the space shuttle program after the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Nor should we declare a moratorium on nuclear power.

There are currently three nuke plants under construction in the U.S. and two dozen more in the pipeline. The plants currently under construction are designed to be safer than the Japanese plants, which are forty years old, and much less likely to suffer the perfect storm of circumstances that led to the reactor failures at Fukushima.

We're going to need all the electricity we can generate in the 21st century and windmills aren't going to help much. Let's not make the same mistake we're making with our refusal to drill for offshore oil. Let's continue to develop a power source that, compared to any plausible alternative, is clean and safe.

Craig vs. Atkins

Bill Dembski at Uncommon Descent puts us on to this video clip of a 1998 discussion between philosopher William Lane Craig and Professor of Chemistry Peter Atkins on the late William F. Buckley's Firing Line. Atkins thinks that science can demonstrate everything that's worth knowing and challenges Craig to give an example of something important that can't be proven by the scientific method. Craig makes him wish he hadn't brought it up:

Atkins is a votarie of a metaphysical view called scientism, i.e. the belief that scientific investigation provides the only knowledge worth having. Craig shows that science is unable to answer many, perhaps most, of life's most important questions.

Craig is a remarkable thinker and a prolific writer. You can visit his website here.

Christian Persecution

At No Left Turns we read this tragic news:

Lela Gilbert notes that "a series of abuses against Christians has swept across the Muslim world," including "a murder in Pakistan, attacks on churches in Ethiopia, an attempted assassination of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Turkey, and repeated pogroms against the Copts in Egypt. Now, rights groups are reporting new developments in Iran's anti-Christian crackdown, which has swept up nearly 300 Christian believers since June 2010."

She also notes a detailed briefing document from January 2011 by Elam Ministries announcing a "severe intensification of arrests and imprisonment of Christians in Iran" and a report this week by Christian Solidarity Worldwide that five Iranian Christians had been sentenced to one year's imprisonment for "Crimes against the Islamic Order."

In Ethiopia attacks on Christians resulted from a Christian having torn up a Koran. Paul Marshall reports:

[L]ast Wednesday, after accusations that a Christian had torn up a Koran, mobs of several thousand Muslims began attacking local Christians and burning churches. The government sent the federal police force to protect Christians after the destruction of the first three churches, but the mobs overwhelmed the police force and burned down two more churches.

The violence reportedly spread to Chiltie, Gilgel Gibe, Gibe, Nada, Dimtu, Uragay, Busa, and Koticha, and as of yesterday had not stopped. Compass Direct reports that in the last five days as many as 59 churches have been destroyed, one Christian has been killed, and several thousand have been displaced.

The situation in Egypt (weren't we supposed to see freedom and democracy breaking out there now that Mubarak was gone?) is even worse. Nina Shea gives the details:

Violence against Christian Copts in Egypt escalated yesterday with reports that a mob of some 15,000 armed Muslims, using Molotov cocktails, guns, and clubs, violently attacked a vastly outnumbered crowd of Christians on the outskirts of Cairo. The Christians had been demonstrating in front of a television station and blocking a main road.

The Egyptian army, which was called to restore order, reportedly joined in the attack, shooting the Copts with live ammunition. Initial reports from Coptic sources indicate that nine Christians have been killed and over a hundred injured, scores seriously so. AP reports of the same incident state that six Christians and five Muslims were killed in what it describes as a “pitched battle” that lasted several hours.

The attacks started near St. Simon the Tanner Monastery in Mokatam Hills, near the Christian neighborhood near the capital known as “Garbage City.” Several garbage recycling plants and garbage trucks owned by the Copts were reportedly torched. The Christians were protesting last Friday’s burning of a Coptic church in Soul by a Muslim mob angered by a romantic relationship that violated sharia. (CBN reports that the Muslims had been incited to rid Soul of Christians by Mullah Ahmed Abu El-Dabah during mosque prayers on March 4.)

There was a time when Muslims were tolerant of other religions. There was a time when Muslims and Christians could be friends. In much of the world today that time is long past. The irony is that tolerance is a sign that one feels that his ideas are superior and can withstand the intellectual challenge presented by other points of view.

Intolerance and violence are signs, just as are rudeness and shouting, of a sense of intellectual and moral inferiority. When one lacks confidence that his most cherished beliefs really can withstand contact with competing ideas he often resorts to suppression of those ideas - by violence if necessary. This was the modus operandi of the communists in the 20th century and other leftists today against the seductions of freedom, and it's the path chosen by many Muslims in response to the challenge posed by the Christian Gospel.

The violence against Christians throughout the Islamic world is, perhaps, a symptom of a deep fear that Christianity, if allowed a hearing, will prove too difficult to purge from the hearts and minds of young Muslims.

It also highlights a stark difference between Islam and Christianity. In Islam it is seen as one's religious duty to compel others, even at the point of a sword, to become believers. In Christianity it is one's duty to proclaim the Gospel and let people decide, between them and God, how they'll respond to it.

The Itamar Horror

Here's video of the vaunted deed perpetrated by brave Palestinian warriors whose bold thrust against the Israeli oppressors will live on in the annals of Palestinian heroics, inspiring generations of Arab youths to imitate their great feat and delight their God. This is the sort of victory that Palestinians celebrate with boasting and candy and dancing in the streets.

The background music, appropriately enough, is from Schindler's List. If the sight of brutally murdered children is something you can't bear then don't watch this video, but if you want a glimpse of what the Palestinians have in store for every Israeli should they ever get the chance, the video makes it pretty plain:

Thanks to Big Peace for the video.

Japan's Crisis

Hot Air has a very helpful series of updates on the nuclear crisis in Japan, and the Washington Post has an excellent series of graphics explaining, among other things, the design of the Japanese reactors and how the failures have occurred. It makes sense out of the welter of information, some of it contradictory, coming out of Japan.

Right now the situation is much worse than the Three Mile Island accident (which had no perceptible effect on anything outside the plant itself) and heading for a calamity of the proportions of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Questions for Libya Interventionists

Demands for the President to back up his ill-advised assertion that "Qaddafi must go" continue to arise on both the left and the right. People on both sides are strenuously insisting that we intervene in the Libyan civil war to stop Qaddafi from defeating and slaughtering the rebels in Libya. Before we do that, however, I think we must insist on answers to some very important questions from the folks who are calling for war:

• If we decide to get overtly involved in Libya what justification do we have for not also attacking Iran and North Korea? What are the essential distinctions in the three cases? Surely both of these nations are a greater threat to us and to the world than is Libya.
• If Mubarak had resisted the Egyptian demonstrators with force should we have gone into Egypt? What about Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or Bahrain all of which are or may soon be shooting demonstrators?
• Why should we stop Qaddafi from killing rebels but not stop Ahmadinejad from building nuclear weapons that he will surely use. Why not stop Kim Jong Il who murders his people in North Korea every day? Indeed, why not launch an attack on China which is led by Hu Jintao whom President Obama honored with a lavish state dinner despite the fact that he was partly responsible for the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square?
• If we use military aircraft to impose a no-fly zone we have to destroy anti-aircraft and radar systems. This means that we will be killing Libyans on the ground. Should we do that? Why? What happens when one of our bombs goes awry and kills a family of innocent civilians and the Arab world is incensed at us (again)? Is that a risk we should take? Why?
• When the rebellion began Libyans were displaying signs saying Foreigners Keep Out and threatening to turn their guns on our aircraft if we intervened on their behalf. Now they're pleading for help. Which of these messages should we heed?
• Even if we clear the skies, Qaddafi's forces on the ground will continue to drive the rebels back and possibly slaughter them. Should we attack his ground forces? Should we insert ground troops of our own if that's what's necessary to stop Qaddafi? Exactly how far should we go to stop him?
• How long should we stay in Libya once we manage to halt Qaddafi's advance? What is our exit strategy?

There is much for which to criticize Mr. Obama in the way he has handled the Middle East and North Africa, but unless one has answers to these questions why criticize him for not going to war with Qaddafi? So far I haven't heard many answers, and I've heard none that are persuasive.

Sickening

The story is horrific enough (see also here). Five members of an Israeli family, including three children, had their throats slit by an unknown assailant or assailants.

The level of degeneracy to which one must sink to do this to a child is hard to fathom, but to actually celebrate the brutal murders of little children puts one outside the community of civilized humanity altogether. These people are simply savages:

Gaza residents from the southern city of Rafah hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack in the West Bank settlement of Itamar where five family members were murdered in their sleep, including three children.

Residents handed out candy and sweets, one resident saying the joy "is a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank."

What sort of people are these who take joy in the murder of helpless children? The words of John Calvin leap to mind: "Total depravity".

Japanese Tsunami

Dramatic video of the moment the tsunami struck a fishing village along the Japanese coast:

The death toll is expected to exceed 10,000. They need our prayers and our help.