Another Stem Cell Success

Another apparent success in the use of stem cells to produce medical marvels:

Surgeons have used stem cells from fat to help repair skull damage in a 7-year-old girl in Germany, in what's apparently the first time such fat-derived cells have been exploited to grow bone in a human. The girl had been injured two years before in a fall, which destroyed several areas of her skull totaling nearly 19 square inches, the German researchers reported.

Other surgeons had failed to correct the defects, and the girl wore a protective helmet. Her brain could sometimes be seen pulsating through the missing areas of her skull.

But several weeks after the stem-cell surgery, she was able to leave her helmet behind, the researchers report in the December issue of the Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery. The skull is now smooth to the touch, the missing parts replaced by thin but solid bone, said Dr. Hans-Peter Howaldt of the Justus-Liebig-University Medical School in Giessen, Germany. The child was not identified.

Howaldt, who performed the surgery last year, said the damage was too extensive to be repaired with bone grafts from her body. He said the hope was that if bits of the child's bone were mixed with stem cells, the cells would turn into bone-building cells that would create additional bone.

That appears to have happened, Howaldt said in a telephone interview Thursday. "I cannot prove that our success comes from the stem cells alone," he said, "but the combination of the two things simply worked."

In August, other German doctors reported growing a jaw bone in a man's back muscle and transplanting it to his mouth to fill a gap left by cancer surgery. The researchers used bone marrow, which also contains stem cells, to help grow the bone. But it's not clear whether the stem cells were responsible for the bone growth.

So Roy C. Ogle of the University of Virginia, an expert in skull reconstructive surgery who has been studying bone regeneration from fat-derived cells, said he considered the new report to be the first indicating that any kind of stem cell had been used to grow bone in a human. "It is a very big deal," said Ogle, who called the study a landmark.

He agreed that the study didn't prove that stem cells provided the new bone. But it also indicates that the implanted cells did no harm, which has been a concern with using stem cells in people, he said. Ogle said many surgeons would have augmented the child's bone with a mineral paste or collagen instead of stem cells. Howaldt said he believes it's better to use the body's own tissue.

Howaldt and his colleagues treated the skull in the same operation that recovered bone from the girl's pelvis and about 1.5 ounces of fat tissue from her buttocks. The bone was milled into chips about one-tenth of an inch long and placed in the missing areas of the skull. Then surgeons added the stem cells to the bone chips. The cells had been extracted from the girl's fat in a laboratory while surgeons prepared the girl's skull.

Howaldt said the bone chips appeared to instruct the stem cells to make more bone. While the new bone should grow as the child grows, she's old enough that her skull won't grow much more anyway, he said.

Hmm. The stem cells were taken from fat removed from the girl's body? They weren't embryonic stem cells? There must be some mistake.

Falling On Deaf Ears

Peggy Noonan tells the Democrats how they can turn their political fortunes around overnight. It could bring millions of voters back to the party of their ancestors and wouldn't cost the Democrats a dime. It's a "can't lose" suggestion:

Always in politics it comes down not to words but to actions. It's not poetry but policy that claims support and wins. Allow me to prove this, for I think I can. I know something the Democratic Party can do right now that will improve its standing and increase its popularity. It can be done this week. Its impact will be quick and measurable.

It is this: Stop the war on religious expression in America. Have Terry McAuliffe come forward and announce that the Democratic Party knows that a small group of radicals continue to try to "scrub" such holidays as Christmas from the public square. They do this while citing the Constitution, but the Constitution does not say it is wrong or impolite to say "Merry Christmas" or illegal to have a cr�che in the public square.

The Constitution says we have freedom of religion, not from religion. Have Terry McAuliffe announce that from here on in the Democratic Party is on the side of those who want religion in the public square, and the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wall for that matter. Then he should put up a big sign that says "Merry Christmas" on the sidewalk in front of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters on South Capitol Street. The Democratic Party should put itself on the side of Christmas, and Hanukkah, and the fact of transcendent faith.

This would be taking a stand on an issue that roils a lot of people, and believe me those people don't think conservatives are scrubbing America of Christmas, they think it's liberals; and they don't think it's Republicans, they think it's Democrats. Confound them, Terry! Come forward with a stand. It is the stand that is the salvation, not mysterious words or codes or magic messages.

Do this, Democrats. Announce you will apply pressure to antireligious zealots throughout the country. You have nothing to lose but a silly and culturally unhelpful reputation as the party that is hostile to religious expression. What you could gain is respect and gratitude. Pick up that Christmas tree, Terry, take it outside and put a star on top, stand next to it, yell Merry Christmas and ring a bell. That's a manipulation of symbols that would actually make sense.

Like we said, it's a can't lose recommendation. Problem is, as Ms Noonan surely knows, it'll never happen.

Intelligent Design and the Public School

Nearby Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania has made the national news and is being discussed on all the talk shows because of a decision by it's school board to require biology teachers to mention the concept of Intelligent Design (ID) in their classrooms when they discuss evolution. They are currently being sued in Federal Court by the ACLU, representing eleven parents in the district, for allegedly trying to smuggle religion into the science classroom. This is the first time ID has been the subject of a Federal Court case so there is a lot of attention being paid to the proceedings.

There are two separate questions in this case, as we see it. The first has to do with the nature of ID, and the second has to do with the motives of its proponents. We hope that the Court considers these separately. The first question hinges on whether ID is essentially a religious construct or whether it is philosophy of science. This is the crucial question before the Court because the answer the jurists come up with will determine the legitimacy of ID as a topic for inclusion in science curricula all across the country.

This post addresses the question of whether ID, irrespective of the intentions of some of its supporters, should be taught in public schools. Is ID a religious hypothesis, and, if not, are the implications of ID any more religious than the implications of Darwinian materialism?

We have weighed in on this issue in the local papers and on this blog several times in recent months (See here, here, and here) and have chosen to pick up the cudgels once again by reworking a post from last week and submitting it for publication in the paper. Whether it will be printed or not we don't know yet, but we've decided to run it again on Viewpoint so that our readers can comment upon it if they wish. The letter follows:

Recent statements by people on both sides of the controversy over the teaching of intelligent design in public schools suggest a lot of misunderstanding about what exactly ID is.

Intelligent Design starts from the simple fact that human beings are able to recognize design. For the most part that recognition is intuitive. One important aspect of ID is the elucidation of the criteria we employ to distinguish purposely designed objects from those which may be the products of random, purposeless processes. ID theorists seek to codify how it is that we manage to distinguish intelligent agency from the work of mindless forces.

Once the criteria of design recognition are established, at least in broad outline, they may be turned toward living organisms and the structures found in those organisms. Everyone involved in the controversy agrees that biological structures are designed. The question at issue is whether the designer is mindless chance and physical law or whether it is some form of intelligent mind.

ID theorists conclude that complex, specified arrangements or patterns are the hallmark of intelligent provenience and that organisms possess these qualities in abundance down to the tiniest microscopic bio-machines which cram living cells. They claim that it is therefore at least as plausible that these structures are somehow the result of intelligence as that they are not.

ID advocates argue that public schools shouldn't implicitly foreclose the possibility of an intelligent agent being responsible for nature's architecture by refusing to acknowledge that possibility to their students while at the same time teaching them a view that explicitly denies that possibility. This certainly seems reasonable, but, nevertheless, there is opposition.

The resistance stems in some measure from the possibility that if ID is accepted it might lead to certain philosophical conclusions about the ultimate nature of reality which are unpalatable to philosophical materialists. There is thus a major effort to prohibit such instruction by those who fear that in any fair consideration of the evidence the hypothesis that natural processes are perfectly adequate to account for the myriad of molecular machines we observe in our microscopes will look pale in comparison to the alternative.

Consequently, in order to prevent such comparisons, strenuous efforts are made, whenever the spectre of Intelligent Design looms large, to characterize it as religion while simultaneously packaging the materialist hypothesis as science. The fact is, of course, that materialism is not science and ID is not religion. They are both philosophical or metaphysical hypotheses which rely upon empirical data for their conclusions.

Consider a few ways in which ID has been mischaracterized in the Dover school board controversy:

1) It's been argued that ID should not be taught in public schools because the Supreme Court has prohibited it. This, though, is not true. The relevant ruling, Edwards v. Aguillard, was not about ID, it was about creationism, and the Supreme Court explicitly said that teachers are free to teach creationism if they wish. The Court merely prohibited state legislatures from mandating it. Creationism has a strong religious component, depending as it does upon the Bible. ID has no such component, so if teachers are free to teach creationism they would certainly be free to teach ID. One of the issues that a court case will have to address is whether a school board can mandate ID, and that decision will probably pivot upon whether ID is seen as essentially religious.

2) ID is philosophical, and philosophical concepts have no place in the science classroom. This objection belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of philosophy in science. The two are very nearly inseparable. If science teachers cannot introduce philosophical concepts into their classrooms then they cannot talk about what science is, the scientific method, the basic principle of cause and effect, the principle of sufficient cause, the principle of uniformity, the law of parsimony, the criteria of a good scientific theory, the laws of logic, the trustworthiness of reason and rational inquiry, and so on. All of these, and much more that might come up in an intellectually vivacious science class, are philosophical topics. It's very strange that all manner of philosophical questions are admitted into our classrooms without raising alarm, yet the notion that there might be an intelligence responsible for the basic structure of life sends half the population into a panic.

3) ID lends support to the belief that there is a God. This is true, but it's irrelevant. We don't prohibit teaching Darwinian evolution on the grounds that it lends support to the belief that there is no God. Simply because a field of study has implications for religious belief it does not follow that the study is itself religious.

Moreover, though ID is compatible with belief in the God of traditional monotheism, it doesn't require it. It claims only that life possesses the stamp of purposive, intentional organization. The organizer may be the God of Judeo-Christian tradition or it may be the God of Jeffersonian deism, or it may be extra-galactic beings which somehow seeded life on this planet, as some non-theistic scientists have suggested. Anyone who takes the design inference beyond the conclusion that life exhibits the impress of intelligent manufacture is making a philosophical leap that ID neither sanctions nor opposes.

This is why the allegation that ID is just a form of creationism is misinformed. Creationism says explicitly that the God of the Bible created everything in the space-time universe. Some forms of creationism go even further and claim that God created the major forms of life pretty much as we see them today, and that He did this relatively recently and very quickly.

ID makes no such claims. Some of its local proponents and adversaries notwithstanding, ID does not affirm that the world is created by God, it asserts nothing about how the world or life were created nor how quickly or long ago. Some ID theorists are, in fact, evolutionists (though not Darwinian evolutionists). They believe that life has descended from primitive ancestors pretty much the way Darwinians claim, but they depart from Darwinism by rejecting the notion that natural processes alone are sufficient to explain it.

The basic claim of ID is that however life came to be as it is, intelligent input must have been a factor at some point or points in the process. Life did not originate nor diversify solely by the action of physical or material causes. If people wish to see support in this for a belief in God, that is their decision, just as it is their decision if they find support in Darwinism for their belief that there is no God.

4) ID is religious and religion has no place in a science classroom. The latter part of this is true, but the first part is not. What is a religion? How do we recognize one? Not one person in a hundred who voices this objection can give a compelling definition of what "religion" is. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy acknowledges that religion eludes definition. Some religions have a god, some don't. Some religions involve worship of their deity, some don't. Some religions have a moral code, some don't. Some religions have a clerical hierarchy, some don't. Given the inability to specify exactly what characteristics a religion possesses it seems a little absurd to say that ID possesses them.

ID neither entails the existence of a god nor does it prescribe worship of one. Doubtless many ID adherents are religious as individuals and would like to see ID used as a means to point others to the Judeo-Christian God, but then many Darwinians are atheistic and see Darwinism as a useful tool for turning people toward materialism or naturalism. No one who has read Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, just to mention two prominent Darwinian writers, could miss the atheistic proselytism in their books. Should we keep texts and articles written by such authors from our students simply because they have a strong bias toward atheistic materialism?

5) ID is a Trojan horse for sneaking religion into schools. Even if it were true that ID is somehow religious, it should nevertheless be asked why Darwinism enjoys immunity against the same charge. Why should it not be seen as a Trojan horse for sneaking atheism into schools? Why are the alleged aims of one illicit while those of the other are deemed acceptable? Darwinism states that the universe, life, the diversity of life, and human consciousness were all fashioned by unguided, unintelligent, purposeless and purely natural forces. It asserts that no God is necessary to account for anything that exists, and it insists that the universe is closed to any non-natural intervention.

These are all essential philosophical assumptions of the Darwinian paradigm, and they have profound religious implications. They are in overt conflict with the basic tenets of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. They also implicitly entail atheism since they render God superfluous, and there is no rational justification for believing in a superfluous, unnecessary, metaphysical entity which serves no unique function. It is possible to teach evolution without discussing these assumptions and implications, but it's not possible to teach Darwinian evolution without discussing them.

Intelligent Design logically entails no deity, it enjoins no worship, it promotes no sacraments, it possesses no scriptures, it teaches no dogma, it maintains no clergy, and it is affiliated with no church. Contrary to the hopes of some and the fears of others, intelligent design is not a stalking horse for Christianity, and shouldn't be used as one. It is simply not a religious hypothesis. Its critics point to the fact that many of its proponents are theists or deists and claim that this demonstrates the religious underpinnings of ID, but the fact that there are many theists among the ID ranks no more disqualifies it as a legitimate topic of discussion in a science classroom than the fact that so many Darwinians are atheists disqualifies materialistic versions of evolution from being presented to our students.

Biology teachers should seek to instill in their students a sense of awe at the wonders of the natural world, from the thousands of tiny molecular machines that carry out the myriad tasks of life within every cell to the marvels of the human immune system or the human brain. They might then point out that there are two ways of thinking about how those wonders came to be. They are either the result of eons of random chance and purposeless physical forces or they are the product of a superintending intelligence acting in concert with the laws of nature. There is nothing objectionable about teaching our students the beauty and complexity of the biological world, presenting them with the competing metaphysical explanations of random chance or intelligent purpose, and letting them decide for themselves which they accept. To teach one alternative, however, while suppressing the other is the very definition of indoctrination.

Meacham's Folly

Hugh Hewitt credits the blogosphere with a sound debunking of Jon Meacham's attempted debunking of the story of the first Christmas in the December 13 issue of Newsweek. Actually Hewitt gets a lot of the credit for mobilizing bloggers to analyze Meacham's rather silly effort. His symposium on the article resulted in a condign thrashing of Meacham's limp attempt to undermine the credibility of both the gospels and Christian tradition.

In any event, here's part of what Hewitt says about it in his Weekly Standard Online column:

Newsweek put Christmas on the cover of its December 13th issue, and the reaction among orthodox Christians was widespread and emphatic. Once again a leading member of the legacy media had produced a hit piece on Christian belief, employing many deceits, including the use of false dilemmas, the employment of only scholars with radical views, and the omission of evidence in support of the Biblical account of the birth of Jesus.

The author, Newsweek managing editor Jon Meacham, didn't even try very hard to conceal his bias, becoming to religion reporting what Dan Rather has become to political reporting. My favorite line is this gem: "To many minds conditioned by the Enlightenment, shaped by science and all too aware of the Crusades and corruptions of the church, Christmas is a fairy tale." Meacham goes on to immediately declare that "faith and reason need not be constantly at war," but makes it clear that this is possible only when faith surrenders pretty much everything that defines it as orthodoxy. No explanation is ever given as to why the Crusades have any bearing on the legitimacy of Luke's and Matthew's accounts of the Nativity.

Within 10 days of Meacham's article's appearance, his credentials had been reviewed for all to see by Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The article itself had been painstakingly--and fairly--sliced and diced by accomplished theologian, pastor, scholar, and author, Dr. Mark D. Roberts, whose double Harvard degrees, including a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, make his careful and complete criticisms of Meacham's reporting hard to dismiss.

After interviewing both Mohler and Roberts for two hours on the air, I then posted links to the Newsweek piece and their criticisms, and invited bloggers from around the internet to weigh in via a virtual symposium I term a "Vox Blogoli." Dozens of bloggers accepted the invite, and an astonishing array of piercing reviews of Meacham followed. Among many favorites are the Evangelical Outpost and Tapscott's Copy Desk, but all of them are well worth the read. (The complete list of symposium posts can be read here.)

What the blogosphere allowed to happen is the organization of dissent which is focused, credentialed, complete, and--crucially--publicized. No fair reader of Meacham's piece and the commentaries on it can conclude that Meacham produced good journalism. It is simply too one-sided, too agenda-driven, and too ignorant of serious scholarship to qualify as anything other than a polemic.

The exposure of Meacham's folly doesn't guarantee that Newsweek won't stumble again, but it surely must give others in his position pause. The blogosphere has experts and megaphones. As Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost concluded "the mainstream media is only able to retain their influence by convincing the populace they possess special skill and knowledge. But as the Internet continues to fill with . . . debunkers, the media continues to lose credibility, influence, and power."

We're a little miffed that Hugh didn't mention Viewpoint's humble contribution to the symposium as among his favorites, but, nevertheless, if any of our readers missed it they can check it out here.

Kyoto

President Bush has taken a lot of criticism for refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global greenhouse gas emissions. Now, according to Nick Shulz at National Review Online, it appears that the president's decision is being validated by events:

President Bush rejected Kyoto for a few simple reasons. First, it would impose significant economic damage on the American economy (a Clinton administration report on the costs of Kyoto put the tab at $300 billion per year). Second, the reduction targets and timetables were impractical from a technological perspective. Third, the treaty exempted developing economies such as India and China from any restrictions even though their emissions are rising rapidly. Instead, the Bush team under Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham charted a different course, which involved investment in basic research, technology transfer to poor countries, and bilateral agreements.

Critics cried foul at President Bush's "unilateral" decision and questioned his motives, saying he was ignoring scientific evidence and rewarding fossil-fuel producers and users who supported him politically. It's too bad the critics focused on the administration's alleged motives and not its arguments. As it turns out, several key players in the climate-change debate are starting to come around to President Bush's view.

The rest of the article explains who the players are and how and why enthusiasm for the Kyoto treaty appears to be waning.

Republican Brutality

Michael Moore quotes from a woman who has it all figured out as to why the Democrats lost in November:

Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the 'new' language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, "Why did they beat me?"

And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before. They will tell you: Every single day.

The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.

As victims we can't stop asking ourselves what we did wrong. We can't seem to grasp that they will keep hitting us and beating us as long as we keep sticking around and asking ourselves what we are doing to deserve the beating.

Listen to George Bush say that the will of God excuses his behavior. Listen, as he refuses to take responsibility, or express remorse, or even once, admit a mistake. Watch him strut, and tell us that he will only work with those who agree with him, and that each of us is only allowed one question (soon, it will be none at all; abusers hit hard when questioned; the press corps can tell you that). See him surround himself with only those who pledge oaths of allegiance. Hear him tell us that if we will only listen and do as he says and agree with his every utterance, all will go well for us (it won't; we will never be worthy).

And watch the Democratic Party leadership walk on eggshells, try to meet him, please him, wash the windows better, get out that spot, distance themselves from gays and civil rights. See the Democrats cry for the attention and affection and approval of the President and his followers. Watch us squirm. Watch us descend into a world of crazy-making, where logic does not work and the other side tells us we are nuts when we rely on facts. A world where, worst of all, we begin to believe we are crazy.

This unfortunate lady goes on to offer advice on how to break this awful cycle of abuse visited upon the poor, defenseless Dems by those horrid, cruel Republicans. The politics of victimhood. That'll be a winner in 2008, we're sure.

Meanwhile, the Republican batterers must be in a beer-soaked rage in the south. The GOP now holds 22 of the 26 Senate seats in 13 Southern states. Before Bush took office in 2000 the GOP had 18. The GOP has now won the last 10 open-seat Senate races in the South. In the House, the GOP had 27 seats before Bush took office in 2000, now they have 40.

Gosh. Isn't there a hotline or something that terrorized victims of Republican violence can call? Isn't there a shelter or refuge somewhere for abused Democrats to which they can flee to escape the brutality of Karl Rove's minions stomping across the land in their mindless fury? Our hearts go out to these people.

Statins

This may be of interest to readers over 50. After a recent physical exam turned up cholesterol levels in President Bush's blood work that were well within acceptable limits he was nevertheless prescribed a statin. The article talks about why.

The Face of Islamism

Robert Spencer has a piece at FrontPageMag.com that no one who wishes to understand Islamism should forego. The article discusses a Muslim rally in Dearborn, Michigan last Friday that was essentially an anti-American, anti-Israeli demonstration and focuses on the teaching of one hero of the Faith, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Here are some excerpts:

As Khomeini himself put it: "Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world....But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world."

The goal of this conquest would be to establish the hegemony of Islamic law. As Khomeini put it: "What is the good of us [i.e., the mullahs] asking for the hand of a thief to be severed or an adulteress to be stoned to death when all we can do is recommend such punishments, having no power to implement them?"

Khomeini accordingly delivered [this]notorious rebuke to the Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace crowd: "Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies].... Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur'anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim."

Was the woman who carried Khomeini's image in the Dearborn demonstration concerned about the human rights of women? Did she know that the Ayatollah himself married a ten-year-old girl when he was twenty-eight? Did she know that Khomeini called marriage to a girl before her first menstrual period "a divine blessing," and advised the faithful: "Do your best to ensure that your daughters do not see their first blood in your house"?

That should give us an idea of what sort of men are lionized by the Muslim community in our midst. If putative Christians were to march through a large city carrying placards with Adolf Hitler's visage the MSM would be apoplectic, and rightly so. So where is the outrage over Dearborn? Why do Muslims get a pass from the MSM when they all but worship bloodthirsty perverts?

Included in Spencer's essay is this very revealing paragraph:

It is unlikely that the protestor knew that in 1985, Sa'id Raja'i-Khorassani, the Permanent Delegate to the United Nations from the Islamic Republic of Iran, declared, according to Amir Taheri, that "the very concept of human rights was 'a Judeo-Christian invention' and inadmissible in Islam. . . . According to Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the Shah's 'most despicable sins' was the fact that Iran was one of the original group of nations that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

Human rights derive from a Judeo-Christian world-view, and Islam repudiates the very concept. There is a profound admission here that needs to be more fully explored. It needs to be addressed by those in Europe who may be voting to admit Turkey into the EU, and it needs to be given serious consideration as we move further down the road toward democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. If this view of human rights really is the Muslim view, will Muslims ever be able to live in, and among, truly democratic governments? Will they be willing to abjure some of their Islamic convictions in order to hoist themselves into the twenty first century?

It seems to us that the West has four choices if it wishes to survive the Islamic threat: We can try to persuade them to modify their view of human rights (and much else) as we teach them the ways of democracy and freedom; we can quarantine them by placing a military-political-economic cordon around the Middle-East and keeping Muslims out of our own countries; or we can engage them in endless war for the next three or four generations until one side or the other lies exhausted on the field; or we can simply annihilate them with nuclear weapons.

The last is unthinkable, the third is unacceptable, the second is impractical, and the first is what President Bush is trying to achieve. He deserves our prayers, especially because the future peace of the world, and perhaps its very survival, depends upon his success.

Heroes and Zeroes

The next time the President decides to award presidential medals of freedom he ought to give one to these two guys. They get our vote for heroes of the week:

ST. PAUL, Minn. - A retiree who tussled with a man half his age who was using foul language in a restaurant was sentenced to probation, but he got a thumbs-up from attorneys and others who sympathized with his motives.

Bill Stevenson, 79, of Lake Elmo, pleaded guilty to one count of disorderly conduct Tuesday in Ramsey County District Court, and judge Paulette Flynn placed him on three months of probation. "I think I could've won my case by going to trial, with a sympathetic jury," said Stevenson. "I've had over 30 calls and letters and e-mails, and I've not had one negative call. They're all on my side."

Stevenson and another retired 3M engineer, Sten Gerfast, 74, confronted the man July 15 at Bruegger's Bagels in the Sun Ray Shopping Center. The two retirees were going over a design Gerfast had invented when Jesse Tabor, of Minneapolis, entered the bakery with his 13-year-old daughter.

In an interview after the incident, Tabor, 40, said he was talking on his cell phone with a man whose home he was remodeling and said he didn't recall cursing. But Stevenson and Gerfast remember it differently. "He was using the F-word against this guy he was talking to," Stevenson said. "There was an argument on the phone. The third time he walked by our booth where Mr. Gerfast and I were trying to design something, Mr. Gerfast said to me, 'Should I do something about it?' I thought a moment and thought, 'What can you do in a case like this?' I didn't know what you could do."

So Gerfast, of Mendota Heights, decided to confront Tabor. He tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to take his call outside, Stevenson said, but Tabor said something like, "This is none of your business."

"It was only when he used the words, 'you f-ing bastard' - it was yelled across the bagel shop so everybody heard it - that I started walking up to him," Stevenson said. "Then he said 'you f-ing a-hole" and that really bothered me. I've been in lots of different places, but when I heard that kind of stuff coming in my hometown, I thought, 'Somebody's got to do something.' "

Stevenson grabbed the phone from Tabor and the two men played tug-of-war for a few seconds. Stevenson realized it was a dumb thing to do, let go of the phone and Tabor "went sailing across the floor," Stevenson said. The three men with charged with disorderly conduct. Gerfast was acquitted in a court trial last month.

Tabor, who has previous convictions for criminal sexual conduct and drug possession, failed to appear at a September hearing and a bench warrant was issued for him. Attempts to reach him Tuesday were unsuccessful.

Stevenson claimed Tabor "mocked me about being an old man."

"I just sat there and drank my coffee," said Stevenson. "I thought, 'You can think what you want, mister, but a couple of senior citizens stood up to you, and we ought to get a little bit more respect.' "

Viewpoint also nominates Mr. Tabor, the cretin with whom they tussled, for an award. We nominate him for the human slug trophy. The trophy is, fittingly enough, a giant gastropod slathered in slime, given to that individual who best exemplifies the worst traits of a human being.

Hath Hell Frozen Over?

It must be as cold a day in hell today as it is in central Pennsylvania, because Viewpoint finds itself agreeing with Michael Moore who writes that:

[It's awful] to watch the pathetic sight of the DLC (the conservative, pro-corporate group of Democrats) apologizing for being Democrats and promising to "purge" the party of the likes of, well, all of US! Their comments are so hilarious and really not even worth recognizing but the media is paying so much attention to them, I thought it might be worth doing a little reality check. The most people the DLC is able to get out to an event of theirs is about 200 at their annual dinner (where you have to pay thousands of dollars to get in).

Contrast this with the following:

*Total members of Move On: More than 2,000,000

*Total Attendance at Vote for Change Concerts: An estimated 280,000

*Total Union Members in U.S.: Around 16,000,000

*Total Number of People Who Have Seen "Fahrenheit 9/11": Over 50 million

*Total number of you reading this: Perhaps 10 million or more

The days of trying to move the Democratic Party to the right are over. We lost a very close election (a one-state difference) by running the #1 liberal in the Senate. Not bad. The country is shifting in our direction, not to the right. But the country was attacked and people were scared. They were manipulated with fear. And America has never thrown a sitting president out during wartime. That's the facts. Oh, and our candidate could have run a better campaign (but we'll have that discussion another day).

We agree with much of what Moore says in this last paragraph, but we would decline to say that our fear of terrorism was somehow "manipulated". We would also add that not only was the campaign flawed, so was the candidate. He had a suspect military record about which he obviously lied, he spent twenty years in the senate without a major accomplishment to his credit, and he projected the image of a vacillator unable to take a stand. He appeared to be a man with no deep convictions.

Even so, he almost won, and we think Moore is right that there is a leftward flow in the country. The whole ideological spectrum is shifting leftward, so that people who would have been considered centrists a generation ago are today labeled conservatives. George Bush is a good example. President Bush holds views on many issues not much different than FDR, but the left has drifted so far toward the nether regions of the solar system that Bush appears conservative by comparison. Confirmation of this drift can be found in the names gracing the current Republican Hall of Heroes: John McCain, Rudy Guiliani, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not a particularly conservative bunch.

What this shift augurs for the future of the U.S. is not hard to discern. All we need do is look at Europe.

The Beauties of Islamic Justice

Thanks to Little Green Footballs for directing us to this glimpse of the beauties of Islamic justice:

A teenage girl with a mental age of eight is facing the death penalty for prostitution in Iran. The trial comes only four months after the hanging of another mentally ill girl for sex before marriage in a case that has prompted a human rights lawyer to prepare a charge of wrongful execution against the presiding judge.

The girl, known as Leyla M, is in prison while the Supreme Court decides on her "acts contrary to chastity", among the most serious charges under Iranian law. Under the penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be executed.

In an interview on a Persian-language website, the 19-year-old says she was forced into prostitution by her mother at the age of eight. Amnesty International refers to reports that say she was repeatedly raped, bore her first child aged nine and was passed from pimp to pimp before having another three children.

She told the website: "The first time I was taken to a man's house by my mum I was eight. It was a horrible night and I cried a lot but then my mum came the next day and took me home. She bought me chocolate and cheese curls."

Iranian press reports say Leyla was charged with controlling a brothel, having sex with blood relatives and bearing an illegitimate child. Amnesty says the court refused to admit social workers' evidence of her young mental age and convicted her on the basis of confessions.

Her prosecution echoes the fate of an even younger girl, Atefeh Rajabi, executed in August. In her case a judge known as Hajj Rezai reportedly put the noose around her neck himself after convicting her on the basis of her confessions for the fourth time in two years. She begged for her life while being led to the gallows, shouting "repentance".

Shadi Sadr, a human rights lawyer representing Atefeh's family, has filed a suit of wrongful execution against the judiciary and is preparing a murder case against Mr Rezai after uncovering new evidence. She has found documents seen by The Independent that prove Atefeh was mentally ill and her confessions should not have been used.

"There is an article in the penal code that if somebody is sentenced to lashing on three separate occasions for the same offence, the fourth conviction incurs the death penalty," Ms Sadr toldThe Independent. "The same judge tried her for each of these past cases but we haven't been allowed to see the files."

A different man was involved in each of Atefeh's convictions. All refused to confess but the judge said it was obvious they had sex with her and sentenced them each to 95 lashes.

After her trial, Atefeh said she had been a victim of sexual assault during spells of mental ill health. After her first conviction in 2001 when 14, she spent time in a state facility for the "socially harmed". Ms Sadr has obtained documents written by officials there backing up her story.

An undated report written by the facility's psychiatrist says she had a history of "chronic sexuality" and was given to "pseudo hallucinations" and seductive behaviour. He diagnosed her with borderline bipolar disorder.

People in Atefeh's neighbourhood wrote two petitions - one before her conviction and one afterwards - affirming that she suffered from mental illness and begging for leniency. Ms Sadr has been unable to locate the defence lawyer in the case.

After the verdict, Atefeh wrote to the High Court, saying: "There are medical documents that prove I have weak nerves and soul. In some minutes of the day and night I lose my sanity. During these attacks any kind of positive or negative actions may be done by me. In a society where an insane person can be serially raped or abused it is no wonder that a person like me is the victim of such an ugly act." Ms Sadr says Atefeh's mental state should have invalidated the case.

The day before the execution Atefeh told her aunt she had written three words to the High Court: "Repentance, repentance, repentance." In Iranian law, somebody who repents their crime is granted the right to appeal against their sentence.

A social worker's report says Atefeh's father and brother were heroin addicts and after her mother's death "she sought affection on the streets".

Ms Sadr says it is impossible to verify lurid claims in dissident websites about an improper relationship between girl and judge. "We will never know what happened between Atefeh and the judge because she is dead, he won't tell and she was tried in a closed court."

Just makes you wish we were all under Shari'a law, doesn't it? We've been listening carefully for howls of outrage from the human rights advocates who were so much in evidence before Operation Iraqi Freedom, but we haven't heard much. Maybe we can persuade some of those human shields who went to Iraq to deter American bombs to go to Iran and plant themselves outside their courtrooms to deter Islamic judges from hanging eight year-old girls. Or maybe not. Maybe some of the cultural relativists who are forever celebrating diversity and extolling the equal validity of all cultures, ethnicities, and religions will come forward and instruct us on how what the Iranian courts did is really no different than a California court sentencing Scott Peterson to death. It's all relative, after all.

Deconstructing the Christmas Skeptics

Pastor, theologian, and author Mark Roberts has undertaken a thorough response to the current Christmas cover stories in Time and Newsweek. Both magazines feature stories which attempt to discredit the traditional Christmas story, and both of them are plagued by shoddy scholarship, sloppy reasoning, and indefensible assumptions.

Viewpoint weighed in on Newsweek's article, written by John Meacham,a week and a half ago, but Roberts' defense of the traditional view, and his critique of the Meacham essay, are much more complete and scholarly than our modest effort. His analysis is posted in five easy to read installments, and there are more to come. They are very much worth reading.

The Argument From Reason

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has summarized what is becoming a popular philosophical argument against naturalism or, more precisely, against physicalism (the belief that all that exists is comprised solely of matter, energy and physical force).

One version of the argument is essentially this: If we are naturalists, i.e. we believe that physical nature is all there is, what do we base this belief upon? Most naturalists would reply that they believe it based upon the dictates of their reason. But what is reason? It might be replied that it is the ability to draw conclusions or inferences from facts. But how do we know we can trust this faculty of reason to give us truth? At this point the naturalist would offer some argument or another in support of the general trustworthiness of reason, but in so doing he must use reason to demonstrate the trustworthiness of reason. In other words, he must assume the truth of the very thing he seeks to demonstrate the truth of. This is called begging the question, and it's logically fallacious.

This is perhaps not necessarily fatal to naturalism since lots of beliefs, if taken far enough, have the same problem. The special difficulty it presents for naturalism, however, is that naturalism offers itself as a more rational or reasonable alternative to theism. Naturalism, we are told, dispenses with irrational constructs like faith, but this is manifestly not true. Naturalism places a great deal of confidence in the reliability of reason, a reliability it is unable to rationally demonstrate and which must therefore be accepted on faith.

Philosopher Victor Reppart has written a book titled C.S.Lewis's Dangerous Idea upon which Carter relies for his post. Reppart, following Lewis's argument in his classic work Miracles, asks where our faculty of reason comes from. The physicalist replies that it comes from non-rational matter, energy, and forces which over time produce brains that possess the ability to draw inferences from facts. This means that all of our beliefs (inferences), including our belief that naturalism is true, are ultimately the product of non-rational causes.

However, Reppart argues, no belief that is fully explained in terms of non-rational causes can be rationally arrived at. Thus, if physicalism is true, none of our beliefs are rational. They may be true by coincidence, but they're not rationally justified. Any thesis that entails the conclusion that no belief is rationally justified is self-referentially incoherent, i.e. it refutes itself, and should be rejected. Therefore, physicalism, Reppart concludes, should be rejected.

Reppart is not alone in his "Argument from Reason", of course, since Alvin Plantinga and others have offered similar arguments in recent years, but he draws out the implications of Lewis's thinking in a way that is devastating to naturalism. There's much more to his argument than what we can discuss here. To get a fuller picture go here and scroll down to the post titled C.S.Lewis's Dangerous Idea: Physicalism and the Argument from Reason then work your way up. Carter has six brief posts on the argument elucidating six different aspects of it.

Readers who are interested in Reppart's thinking might also wish to go here to read an interview with him.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

It is astonishing that teachers would put children in this position but apparently Washington has somewhat looser requirements for those exercising responsibility and oversight of children than one might have hoped:

UNIVERSITY PLACE, WA - A 'Fear Factor' type assembly at Narrows View Intermediate left some with a bitter taste in their mouths. A family watches and squirms knowing what their daughter went through. They consider it hazing.

"She must have been under a tremendous amount of pressure," says the girl's dad who does not want the family identified.

There were three teams, each made up of a teacher and two students doing stunts similar to the popular television show "Fear Factor."

In fact, a consent form went home to parents. It said, "Your child will not be forced to do anything they don't want to do... One team member will bowl twice to knock over all the pins. However many pins are left standing will be the number of meal worms the contestant must eat..."

Since "the contestant," not the whole team, would incur the penalty, the parents we talked to signed the form.

In home video given to KOMO 4 News the teacher bowled. Instead of just her eating the meal worms, like the permission slip stated, the school counselor and that same teacher tried to make all the team members eat the meal worms.

One girl in the video is visibly uncomfortable - and even clenches her hands together and shakes her head no. But the teacher tugs at the girls hands repeatedly. Long enough for the entire assembly to start chanting. The girl says because she didn't want to eat a worm the entire 6th grade class got disqualified from the games. She felt a horrible pressure.

In the end, the counselor gives her a 'high five', but it was too late -- other students attacked. "He was calling me a swear word, a wimp and everyone else too and made me feel really awful," says the sixth grader.

The family is shocked. They say adults should not let a child be ridiculed. The girl told KOMO 4 News that even though she was teased - she's glad that she stood her ground.

University Place School District Superintendent Patti Banks gave this statement: "My staff has not yet had an opportunity to investigate the incident, and so I'm not able to make a comment at this time."

Indeed. We look forward to hearing the official administrative explication of the underlying pedagogical theory being applied here. We're sure there is one. By the way, if this occurred at an assembly, where were the building principals?

Historical Miracle and Media Indifference

The incomparable Charles Krauthammer at the Washington Post notes the MSM's utter lack of enthusiasm for giving President Bush credit for the successes occurring in Afghanistan. Indeed, the only time we hear mention of Afghanistan in the media is when there are casualties to report or when we're informed of the difficulties Hamid Karzai faces in governing this wild land. Afghanistan is a miracle, says Krauthammer, and the media can only manage a disinterested yawn:

"Miracle begets yawn" has been the American reaction to the inauguration of Hamid Karzai as president of Afghanistan. Before our astonishing success in Afghanistan goes completely down the memory hole, let's recall some very recent history. For almost a decade before Sept. 11, we did absolutely nothing about Afghanistan. A few cruise missiles hurled into empty tents, followed by expressions of satisfaction about the "message" we had sent. It was, in fact, a message of utter passivity and unseriousness.

Then comes our Pearl Harbor, and the sleeping giant awakens. Within 100 days, al Qaeda is routed and the Taliban overthrown. Then the first election in Afghanistan's history. Now the inauguration of a deeply respected democrat who, upon being sworn in as the legitimate president of his country, thanks America for its liberation.

This in Afghanistan, which only three years ago was not just hostile but untouchable. What do liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies.

Good grief. This is news? "Afghanistan grows poppies" is the sun rising in the east. "Afghanistan inaugurates democratically elected president" is the sun rising in the west. Afghanistan has always grown poppies. What is President Bush supposed to do? Send 100,000 GIs to eradicate the crop and incite a popular rebellion?

What has happened in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle. Who is responsible for it? The New York Times gives the major credit to "the Afghan people" with their "courage and commitment." Courage and commitment there was, but the courage and commitment were curiously imperceptible until this administration conceived a radical war plan, executed it brilliantly, liberated the country and created from scratch the structures of democracy.

Don't expect the MSM to give Bush any credit for anything. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union broke up it was all because of Michal Gorbachev, we were told. Ronald Reagan was relegated to the role of bystander even though the collapse of communism occurred largely due to Reagan's courage and leadership and to a lesser extent because of the courage and efforts of people like Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II. To ignore Reagan's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union or George Bush's role in the Afghan success while crediting the Afghan people is like ignoring the role of George Washington in defeating the British while crediting the troops in the Continental Army.

Suicide Murderers

The Strategy Page has an interesting feature on suicide bombers in Iraq:

Most of the suicide bombers in Iraq are foreigners. The volunteers are numerous, but they come prepared to die. The Sunni Arab Iraqi antigovernment organizations that come across these foreigners, pass them on to al Qaeda groups, who get the volunteer ready for the mission. Sunni Arab groups have been helping with getting cars (bought or stolen) and equipping them with bombs (usually artillery and mortar shells wired to explode when the driver pushes a button.) But most of the suicide car bombs have been al Qaeda operations.

Few Iraqis have volunteered to be suicide bombers, but the concept is popular in other Arab countries, where Palestinian suicide bombers have been turned into folk heroes. Many of the volunteers don't want to kill Iraqis. These are often told to go home. Others are convinced that they will be killing Kurds (who aren't Arabs, and are ethnically related to Iranians, who are much hated by Arabs) or Shia Arabs (al Qaeda is a Sunni movement that preaches death to Shia for not being Sunni enough.) Some of the suicide volunteers, the ones who aren't too bright to begin with, are simply deceived and sent out on their mission. It's not like the guy is likely to come back and complain that he was tricked.

The foreign volunteers are eager to kill coalition, especially American, troops. Some of the suicide car bombers are still directed against American troops, and sometimes they succeed. But most of the time they either can't get into position, or American troops shoot them. So the volunteers are given secondary targets, and these are the ones that are usually hit. The volunteers drive off with a non-suicidal guide/minder, who plays navigator until they are within sight of a target. The guide then arms the explosives, bales, and the volunteers drives off to do his best.

There have been 100-150 suicide car bomb attacks so far, with many more aborted, or the drivers arrested or killed before they could set off their explosives. Over 500 people, mostly Iraqis, have been killed by suicide bomb attacks so far. The attacks have made al Qaeda, foreign volunteers, and Sunni Arab rebels very unpopular with most Iraqis. This is what al Qaeda wants (the better to start a Sunni/Shia civil war), although it is not exactly working out according to plan.

Over a third of the Iraqi dead are Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs and Kurds are increasing their own security (with volunteer guards, or simply more civilians willing to point out attackers to police or coalition troops.). This forces the suicide bombers to increasingly hit targets in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. This is one of the reasons there have been so many attacks on police stations in Sunni Arab areas. While this demoralizes the police, it infuriates the Sunni Arabs because of all the Sunni Arabs killed in these attacks.

Seven suicide car workshops were found in Fallujah, and several more have been found in and around Baghdad. There are obviously more out there, and they will only be found when enough Sunni Arabs get fed up with the bombings and let the police know where the workshops are.

No Solution to the Falling Dollar

Bill posts an excellent piece by way of reply to the article titled The Falling Dollar posted on Saturday. Bill's essay is very informative and rather disturbing. Readers are urged to check it out in our Feedback Forum.

The Usual Suspects

It's now official. Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin. Word is that MoveOn.Org will soon reveal proof implicating the nefarious Bush administration in this attempt on the Ukrainian's life.

Intelligent Design and Religion

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost poses this question: If a scientist were able to produce an organism from scratch in the laboratory how could other scientists tell that it had been designed by an intelligent agent rather than by nature? There must be some distinctive characteristics of naturally designed organisms, Carter argues, which distinguish them from artificially designed objects. How else, he wonders, can Darwinians justify their certainty that organisms are only fashioned by natural processes and never intelligent ones?

His question points up a crucial element in the current controversy between Intelligent Design (ID) theorists and Darwinians. How do we recognize intelligently designed structures whenever we encounter them? How, if we didn't otherwise know, could we be certain that Mt. Rushmore was the product of intelligent artisans whereas we might not arrive at that same conclusion about The Old Man in the Mountain?

Intelligent Design theorists like William Dembski are attempting to remove design recognition from the realm of the intuitive and to ascertain exactly what it is that enables us to distinguish purposely designed objects from those which may be the products of random, purposeless processes. They are seeking to discover how it is that we manage to distinguish intelligent agency from the work of mindless forces.

Once the criteria of design recognition are established, at least in broad outline, they may be turned toward living organisms and the structures found in those organisms. No one denies that biological structures are designed. The question at issue is whether the designer is mindless chance and physical law or whether it is some form of intelligent mind.

ID theorists conclude that complex, specified arrangements or patterns are the hallmark of intelligent provenience and that organisms possess these qualities in abundance down to the tiniest microscopic bio-machines which cram living cells. They conclude that it is therefore at least as plausible that these structures are somehow the result of intelligence as that they are not.

ID advocates go on to argue that public schools shouldn't implicitly foreclose the possibility of an intelligent agent being responsible for nature's architecture by refusing to acknowledge that possibility to their students. This certainly seems reasonable, but, nevertheless, there is opposition.

The resistance stems from the fact that if ID is correct then it leads to certain philosophical conclusions about the ultimate nature of reality which are unpalatable to scientific materialists. Thus there is a major effort to prohibit such instruction by those who fear that in any fair consideration of the evidence the hypothesis that natural processes are perfectly adequate to account for the myriad of molecular machines we observe in our microscopes will look pale in comparison to the alternative.

Consequently, in order to prevent such comparisons, strenuous efforts are made, whenever the spectre of Intelligent Design looms up, to characterize it as religion while simultaneously packaging the materialist hypothesis as science. The fact is, of course, that materialism is not science and ID is not religion. They are both philosophical or metaphysical hypotheses which rely upon empirical data for their conclusions.

Consider a few ways in which ID has been mischaracterized:

1) It's argued that ID should not be taught in public schools because the Supreme Court has prohibited it, but this is not true. In Edwards v. Aguillera the Supreme Court explicitly said that teachers are free to teach creationism if they wish. The Court merely prohibited state legislatures from mandating it. Creationism has a strong religious component, depending as it does upon the Bible. ID has no such component, so if teachers are free to teach creationism they would certainly be free to teach ID.

2) ID is philosophical, and philosophical concepts have no place in the science classroom. This objection belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of philosophy in science. The two are very nearly inseparable. If science teachers cannot introduce philosophical concepts into their classrooms then they cannot talk about what science is, the scientific method, the basic assumptions of cause and effect, the principle of sufficient cause, the principle of uniformity, the law of parsimony, the criteria of a good scientific theory, the laws of logic, and so on. All of these, and much more that might come up in an intellectually vivacious science class, are philosophical topics. It's very strange that all manner of philosophy is admitted into our classrooms without raising alarm, yet the notion that there might be an Intelligence responsible for the structure of the universe sends half the population into a panic.

3) If ID is correct then it lends support to the belief that there is a God. This is true, but it's irrelevant. We don't prohibit teaching Darwinian evolution on the grounds that it lends support to the belief that there is no God. Simply because a field of study has implications for religious belief it does not follow that the study is itself religious.

Moreover, though ID is compatible with belief in the God of traditional monotheism, it doesn't require it. It claims only that life is the product of intelligence. That intelligence may be the God of Judeo-Christian tradition or it may be the God of jeffersonian deism, or it may be extra-galactic beings which somehow seeded life on this planet, as some scientists have suggested. Anyone who takes the design inference beyond the conclusion that life exhibits the impress of intelligent manufacture is making a philosophical leap that ID neither sanctions nor opposes.

This is why the allegation that ID is just a form of creationism is misinformed. Creationism says explicitly that the God of the Bible created everything in the space-time universe. Some forms of creationism go even further and claim that God created the major taxa pretty much as we see them today and that He did this relatively recently and very quickly.

ID makes no such claims. It does not affirm that the world is created by God, it asserts nothing about how the world or life were created nor how quickly or long ago. Some ID theorists are evolutionists (though not Darwinian evolutionists). They believe that life has descended from primitive ancestors pretty much the way Darwinians claim, but they reject the notion that natural processes alone are sufficient to explain it.

The basic claim of ID is that however life came to be as it is, it must have involved intelligent input. It did not happen by the action of purely physical or material causes. If people wish to see support in this for a belief in God, that is their decision, just as it is their decision if they find support in Darwinism for their belief that there is no God.

4) Similarly, the claim that ID is religious is frequently raised, but how do we know it is religious? What is a religion? How do we recognize one? Not one person in a hundred who voices this objection can give a compelling definition of what "religion" is. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy acknowledges that religion eludes definition. Some religions have a moral code, some don't. Some religions have a god, some don't. Some religions involve worship of their deity, some don't. Given the inability to specify exactly what characteristics a religion possesses it seems a little absurd to say that ID possesses them. ID neither entails the existence of a god nor does it prescribe worship of one. Doubtless many ID adherents are religious as individuals and would like to see ID used as a means to point others to the Judeo-Christian God, but then many Darwinians are atheistic and see Darwinism as a useful tool for turning people toward materialism or naturalism.

5) ID is a Trojan horse for sneaking religion into schools. Even if it were true that ID is somehow religion, it should nevertheless be asked why Darwinism enjoys immunity against the same charge. Why should it not be seen as a Trojan horse for sneaking atheism into schools? Why are the alleged aims of one illicit while those of the other are deemed acceptable? Darwinism states that the universe, life, and the diversity of life are all solely the product of unguided, unintelligent, purposeless and purely natural forces. No God is necessary to account for anything that exists, and indeed Darwinism insists that the universe is closed to any non-natural intervention. Such a view has profound religious implications. It is an explicit denial of the basic tenets of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and it implicitly endorses atheism since there is no point in believing in any metaphysical entity which serves no unique function. Even if one could salvage from the periphery of the Darwinian world-view a minimal divinity of some sort, it clearly remains a view of reality fraught with religious implications, since it denies the existence of the God of most monotheisms.

Intelligent Design entails no deity, it enjoins no worship, it promotes no sacraments, it possesses no scriptures, it teaches no dogma, and it is affiliated with no church. It is not a religious hypothesis. Its critics point to the fact that many of its advocates are theists or deists and claim that this demonstrates the religious underpinnings of ID, but the fact that there are many theists among the ID ranks no more disqualifies it as a legitimate topic of discussion in a science classroom than the fact that so many Darwinians are atheists disqualifies it from being taught.

Biology teachers, when they talk about cell biology, for instance, should seek to instill in their students a sense of awe at the wonders of the natural world. They should then point out that there are two ways of thinking about how those wonders came to be. They are either the result of eons of random chance and physical forces or they are the product of a superintending intelligence acting in concert with those forces. Let's teach our students the beauty and complexity of the biological world, present them with the competing metaphysical explanations of random chance or intelligent purpose, and let them decide for themselves.

For more on this topic see several essays from the Viewpoint archive, specifically this one, this one, and this one.

The Falling Dollar

This article in the New York Times(subscription may be required)instructs us in the negative consequences of a falling dollar:

America's trade imbalance can be corrected, the current reasoning goes, with a much cheaper dollar - perhaps 30 percent cheaper than it is today. The idea - supported by Treasury Secretary John Snow and Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman - is that this would raise the price of imports for Americans, who would thus buy less from abroad. A cheaper dollar would also supposedly allow us to sell more to the world by making our exports less expensive.

Here is what's wrong with this analysis.

A falling dollar is unlikely to curtail imports as much as hoped. It is more likely instead to act as a consumption tax. About one-quarter of the United States import bill arises from oil purchases, which are priced in dollars. A rapidly depreciating dollar thus means lower earnings for OPEC producers. In response, the cartel might well raise prices. Goods from Asia, especially China, account for at least another 25 percent of our import bill. Because these computers, machine tools, TV's and toys are essential to our work and lifestyle, chances are that we will still buy them, even at higher prices.

Nor will a cheaper dollar encourage domestic production that can replace imports, as some argue. Auto parts, for instance, are increasingly produced in Mexico and other developing nations. These plants, part of a highly specialized global supply line, are not likely to be replaced by suppliers in the United States just because of temporary currency movements.

American exports, meanwhile, will not be spurred as much as most forecasters hope. Because currencies' values are relative to one another, the lower the dollar gets, the higher the euro and yen rise. As the currencies of Europe and Japan strengthen, the exports of these nations will become more expensive. That could easily translate into slower growth in those already slow-growing regions - and less money to buy our exports.

There's lots more analysis at the link, and reading the whole piece really is an education in macroeconomics.