The Mystery of Consciousness

The Philosopher's Magazine recently passed along this quote from Thomas Huxley:

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp, or any other ultimate fact of nature.

Indeed, and neuroscientists still marvel that something as astonishing as consciousness could be somehow generated by brute matter and could have evolved through purely mechanistic processes acting blindly and by chance.

How this could be so no one has as yet been able to say. Consciousness is a mystery, like life and gravity. It's hard enough to define it, it's devilishly difficult to understand it, and it seems impossible to explain it. How material substance can give rise to what philosophers refer to as the qualia of experience, sensation and awareness, is a bafflement.

Someday it might all be figured out, but we wonder whether it will ever be explicable in purely materialistic terms. We'll be greatly surprised if it is.

More On Social Security

From the inimitable Richard Russell...

On Tuesday President Bush visited the office of the Federal Bureau of Public Debt in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The Prez passed by a cabinet that contained the $1.7 trillion in Treasury securities that make up the so-called Social Security Trust Fund.

Later, in a speech at a nearby university, Mr. Bush announced, "There is no trust fund, just I.O.U.'s, that I saw first hand."

Yeah, Mr. President, we knew that. The government has spent all of the so-called Social Security trust fund, and in its place they have left a load of I.O.U.'s. But listen, Mr. President, the dollar itself is an I.O.U. In the good old days when the U.S. was solvent, a dollar was an I.O.U. which said the Treasury owed you one dollar's worth of gold. Today the dollar is a piece of paper that says a dollar owes you "nothing."

You don't believe it. Then try turning in your dollar to the Treasury and see what you get for it. What you'll get is another dollar with the slogan, "in God we trust." Hey, I already trust God. What I'm worried about is trusting my government.

What's wrong with that picture?

You and me have paid into Social Security all of our working lives only to have those dollars taken by our politicians spent on other programs that fulfilled their fancy. Now we hear that those dollars have been replaced by I.O.U.s of the federal government which means they will tax a future generation to make good on the debt. In other words, all that you and I have paid to Social Security has gone somewhere else. Our politicians have ripped us off. And the next generation will have to make good for it. Where is the outrage?

As long as people continue to support the present two-party system that is hell-bent on leading the American individual to a standard of living far below what currently exists, we will continue to have more of the same. Beyond a few issues, their isn't a dime's worth of difference between the two parties.

I have maintained for years that the two party system in this country is like a highway. The republicans are in the right (cruising) lane and the democrats are in the left (passing) lane. While the democrats may reach the destination before the republicans, the outcome will ultimately be the same. It doesn't really matter which lane you choose, the highway leads, inevitably, to an impoverished American society that will embrace total socialism with open arms.

To Your Health

Fox News has a couple of reports on nutrition that might be of interest.

The first is that researchers have found that pomegranate juice not only appears to prevent hardening of the arteries by reducing blood vessel damage, but the antioxidant-rich juice may also reverse the progression of this disease. So where can we get the stuff?

Another report discusses what are referred to as Superfoods. Salmon, trout and albacore tuna may reduce the risk of heart disease. So may olive oil, almonds, walnuts, Cheerios and Boca Burgers. See the article for more details.

Viewpoint is optimistic that researchers will soon discover that chocolate, potato chips, oreo cookies, and mayonnaise promote weight loss and lower cholesterol. In fact, I'm assuming that this is so and am celebrating the good news by just now eating the ears off of one of my daughter's chocolate Easter bunnies. I feel healthier already.

The Infamous Memo

PowerLine has what appears to be the full story on the infamous "talking points" memo to which Democrats are so fond of adverting and in which Republicans seem to be urged to exploit the Schiavo tragedy for political profit. It turns out that, contrary to what the Washington Post and ABC reported, the memo was not authored by Republican leaders and officials, but was the work of an aide to Republican senator Mel Martinez who has been serving in office for all of three months. Martinez is hardly a Republican heavyweight, much less is his aide, who, it turns out, has resigned. Nor was the memo distributed to other senators as the Post implied.

In other words, an obscure assistant exercised very poor judgment, and the Democrats and their media amplifiers seized upon it to tarnish the reputations of the Republican leadership by falsely accusing them of churlish behavior. They didn't know the truth, nor did they care about the truth, they simply saw an opportunity to exploit the Schiavo tragedy for their political profit (by lying about Republican officials' alleged insensitivity to Terri Schiavo's circumstances), and they grabbed it.

The details are at PowerLine.

Lock and Load

This article suggests that the Florida legislature is about to pass a measure guaranteed to raise the level of uncertainty, and anxiety, among its sizable population of thugs, criminals, and other miscreants:

MIAMI (AFP) - Florida's legislature has approved a bill that would give residents the right to open fire against anyone they perceive as a threat in public, instead of having to try to avoid a conflict as under prevailing law.

Outraged opponents say the law will encourage Floridians to open fire first and ask questions later, fostering a sort of statewide Wild West shootout mentality. Supporters argue that criminals will think twice if they believe they are likely to be promptly shot when they assault someone.

Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who has said he plans to sign the bill, says it is "a good, commonsense, anti-crime issue."

Current state law allows residents to "shoot to kill if their property, such as their home or car, is invaded by an unknown assailant." But it also states that if a resident is confronted or threatened in a public place, he or she must first try to avoid the confrontation or flee before taking any violent step in self defense against an assailant.

The bill, supported by the influential National Rifle Association, was approved by both houses of the Republican-run legislature on Tuesday.

Viewpoint agrees with Governor Bush. There was a time when I thought we needed more gun control, but that was long ago when I was young and dumber. As I examined the arguments for taking guns out of the hands of citizens I realized that they just didn't make much sense. They were emotional rather than rational. Gun crimes are rarely committed by those who are licensed to carry concealed weapons, but those who perpetrate violent crime would hardly scruple to observe laws which prohibited them from possessing, and using, guns. All that gun control would accomplish would be to assure criminals that their intended victims would not pose any threat to them.

The Florida bill takes the right of self-defense one step further and seems eminently sensible. Why should the burden fall upon the victim to avoid a criminal attack? Why should the streets be conceded to the brutes? Why must citizens cringe, cower, and flee the threats of thugs? Why should laws be such that they emasculate the law-abiding and empower the wicked?

Violent crime is a serious threat to civilization. A few intrepid acts of self-defense with a suitable weapon, preferably one whose caliber begins with a four, would have a salutary effect on Florida's recidivism rate and provide a powerful object lesson for those predators contemplating similar assaults on innocent life or property.

The law might also go a long way toward restoring civility to our public intercourse. Bullies and other obnoxious louts might be much more reluctant to appear threatening to others if they think their demeanor might win them a view down the barrel of a semi-automatic. Such an experience can be as chastening as it is thrilling, and there are a lot of people out there who might benefit from a little chastening.

Attack on Abu Ghraib

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail analyzes the significance of the recent attack on Abu Ghraib prison. After discussing the insurgents' evident change in tactics Roggio writes:

Al Qaeda obviously believes it will gain some psychological advantage in attacking American and Iraqi bases, but it may want to weigh the psychological effects on their own troops after repeated failures. The assault on the prison was a military failure. Al Qaeda in Iraq states ten of the attackers were killed in the raid. They also claim to have breached the walls and overtaken a guard tower, but the US military disputes this account. The US military estimates the attacking force suffered over fifty casualties out of an estimated sixty attackers. Continued military defeats and high casualty rates will sap the will of al Qaeda's cannon fodder over time.

If al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorists want to engage in large scale assaults on US and Iraqi forces, this is their choice. But it will be a bad one. Every large scale engagement against American forces has been a miserable failure for the terrorists, as they cannot match the firepower or flexibility of American forces. Blackfive recently documented the success of an outmanned and outgunned MP convoy escort in routing a numerically superior ambushing force. Phil, a soldier currently serving in Iraq, reports on the effectiveness of an Iraqi unit repelling an assault on their base. The recent assault on a terrorist training camp also highlights the military superiority of Iraqi and Coalition forces. The increased use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) to provide intelligence on insurgent activities as well as the rapid reaction of air and ground assets when contact is made makes for a tactical nightmare for terrorists attempting to attack in large numbers.

Wretchard at Belmont Club adds some additional thoughts. He quotes one commentator as noting that:

Al Qaeda claimed the raid was a success, but a few more victories like this and their insurgency will be over.

Both Roggio and Wretchard are worth reading in full.

Jim Wallis: Unpartisan Liberal

As liberal democrats (I know. It's a tautology.) cast about for an authentic religious voice with which to persuade the red state voters that they're not all militant secularists eager to destroy everything that evangelical Christians hold dear, they have brought Jim Wallis of Sojourner's magazine to the nation's attention.

As a result he's been the topic of conversation recently in blogs and in journals like the The Weekly Standard. He's also been making appearances on television, most recently on Tim Russert's Face the Nation a week ago.

Jim Wallis presents himself as a man of neither the left nor the right but as one who desires simply to follow the scriptures. Yet, to listen to him speak he sounds for all the world as if he's a liberal first and a Christian second. Consider, for example, his responses on Face the Nation:

MR. RUSSERT: Reverend Jim Wallis, how do you see the Democrats, the Republicans, both of which you have written about, in terms of faith and spirituality and religion, approaching the Schiavo case?

JIM WALLIS: Well, first of all, our hearts go out this morning to Terri Schiavo and the family. It appears she's near the end of her life, and so deep compassion for the family, and all of us care so much about this.

Having dispensed with the necessary amenities, Wallis quickly heads for the fertile political territory Russert's question brought into view, and seeks to score political points by decrying the scoring of political points:

In principle we should always err on the side of life...that's the safer moral course, but we also should worry about the politicizing of any case, and I'm alarmed by memos that talk about firing up the base or defeating the Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida. That's way out of bounds for a case like this.

I think the conversation about life is a good conversation. But then let's talk, as the Catholics do, about a consistent ethic of life. Today a silent tsunami will take the lives of 30,000 children because of hunger. Lives are lost in Iraq. On death row innocent people are executed. The bishops this week launched a new campaign against the death penalty. I think a consistent ethic of life is a good moral guide for politics and it cuts both ways, cuts Republican and Democratic. Religion should be able to critique left and right, not be ideologically predictable or loyally partisan.

Let's not talk about Schiavo, Wallis seems to be urging, since the Republicans were largely on the proper side of that one. Let's talk instead about those issues where we can be tacitly critical of Republicans even as we claim that as Christians we are not ideologically predictable(!), and let's at the same time disavow any intention of trying to score political points off the Schiavo tragedy.

Russert the reminded his audience that during the 2000 campaign candidate Bush was asked to name the political philosopher or thinker he most identifies with and why, to which he responded: "Christ, because he changed my heart."

When asked to elaborate, Bush replied: "Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain. When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me."

Russert then asked Wallis: "Can you imagine a Democrat responding in the same way?" Given a wonderful opportunity to amplify to a national secular audience George Bush's words about the importance and life-changing effect of a Christian commitment, Wallis quick-kicked, apparently unable to muster much enthusiasm for discussing the implications of Christian conversion on national television if it would make Bush look good:

REV. WALLIS: Well, there's no reason why [Democrats] shouldn't [answer the same way]. The part of that [Bush's answer] that I don't like was when he said, "And if people don't understand that, I'm sorry." As you know, I believe in bringing religious values into the public square. Where would we be if the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kept his faith to himself? But, you know, religion must be disciplined by democracy. We have to argue on the basis of the common good, not say, "I'm religious, you won't understand, but I'm going to be talking Jesus."

Not only does Wallis misrepresent Bush's perfectly sensible concern that secular listeners might fail to understand the life-transforming power of the gospel if they haven't experienced it themselves, the rest of Wallis' answer is almost indecipherable:

Jesus talked about blessed are the peacemakers. Love your enemy. He talked about the poor over and over and over again. So I want to see the words of Jesus be part of our discourse. But we're a pluralist society now....so how do you argue on the basis of what's best for the common good to convince a very pluralistic nation that what we think is good for all of us, not just the Christians?

He seems to be saying that he doesn't want to talk about how Christ can change peoples' lives, he doesn't want to talk about a personal encounter with Christ, he prefers instead to talk about the corporate political obligations Christianity imposes upon one, and those obligations are evidently to adopt left-liberal social and foreign policies.

So much for being ideologically unpredictable and non-partisan.

Wallis may not mean this, but he certainly seems to imply that the value of employing the language of evangelical Christianity is that it can be used as a code to put the denizens of Jesus Land more at ease and make them more amenable to the left's political project. The value of God talk, Wallis seems to aver, is that it befuddles the unsophisticated into thinking that liberal democrats are really at one with the folks in the pew. It's a way of winning their trust, of deceiving them, actually, so that they won't be so resistant to liberal political candidates and ideology.

Maybe this is unfair to Wallis, maybe he was just clumsy in expressing himself on Russert's show. I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but a visit to the other sites linked above does nothing to reassure one that clumsiness is a satisfactory explanation for Wallis' apparent political partisanship.

Alvin Plantinga

The Washington Times has a story on Alvin Plantinga, one of the most influential of contemporary philosophers and author of what will no doubt come to be regarded a classic work in epistemology and philosophy of religion titled Warranted Christian Belief.

Plantinga, who at 72 still teaches at Notre Dame, has also written a number of other important books and papers and has perhaps done more to change the religious complexion of philosophy departments in American universities than any other living philosopher.

A discipline which was dominated a generation ago by secular materialists is today home to an increasing number of Christians and other theists (see here). It has been a remarkable transformation and Plantinga's influence has been in large measure responsible for it.

China's Plans for Surprise Attack

The Chinese strategy for launching a surprise attack on Taiwan is discussed at The Strategy Page. Some analysts think it's just a matter of time.

The Chinese probably aren't too concerned about our reaction since our economies are so interdependent they probably calculate (correctly) that if they can launch a successful assault on Taiwan before we have a chance to get a carrier battle group to the region that they will have a fait accompli over which we will not be willing to wage all out war.

There will follow grave diplomatic harrumphing, of course, but eventually the imperatives of commerce will cool tempers, and we will grudgingly accept the Chinese takeover (and subsequent executions) of the Taiwanese.

No doubt the biggest concern of the Chinese is whether they would be able to overwhelm Taiwan's defenses swiftly enough to preclude American involvement. This may be quite difficult to accomplish, for reasons discussed at Strategy Page.

It's interesting reading.

The Coming Conservative Crack-Up

Mark Steyn writes a very funny piece on the perennial prognostications of a "conservative crack-up". Here's an excerpt:

Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:

"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."

Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.

Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.

Read the whole thing. It's a hoot.

Saudis Take on al-Qaida

There are unconfirmed reports of a major battle raging in Saudi Arabia between government troops and al Qaida mujahideen in the town of Al-Raas.

There's a bit more information on the battle at the link.

Atheists Convene

A CNSNews report tells us of a gathering of about one hundred atheists from California to Connecticut in Philadelphia over Easter weekend to discuss issues of interest to those who call themselves "Godless Americans" and to plan activities to advance their cause. Several items in the report caught our eye. One was a sentence that noted that:

While the 31st National Convention of American Atheists had no official theme, one topic that came up often during the event was the future of "nonbelievers," as well as what's ahead for atheism itself.

The future of nonbelievers is indeed an interesting theological question about which the New Testament has some disquieting things to say, but we suspect that that's not what those who raised the topic at the conference had in mind. If the conference attendees were concerned about the future of atheism in this world, perhaps they might have gleaned some insight from the fact that their nationwide convocation could have been held around the kitchen table.

The news account also mentioned this observation from Boston University anthropologist David Eller:

Because having a "belief" enables a person to claim something is true with no evidence to support it, Eller said he'd like to strike the word from our language altogether. "I have no beliefs," he noted.

Presumably, then, the professor lacks a belief that he has no beliefs, an odd piece of thinking for a university Ph.D. Or maybe not.

Because he works in an academic environment, Eller said he is comfortable "living from the neck up" and acknowledged that atheism "appeals only to the rational few," while religion is a "whole-body experience" that "holds onto people's hearts even as they lose their minds."

Apparently, the exalted rationality of professor Eller has yet to lead him to the realization that if materialism is true then he really has no basis for trusting his reason to lead him to truth. But never mind. There are few sensations more gratifying to an academic than the satisfaction of knowing that one is intellectually superior to one's fellows. We should avert our eyes from professor Eller's unseemly arrogance, acknowledging that the pleasure he derives from flaunting his superior rational gifts doubtless makes the practice of it irresistible for him.

Colson Critiques the Darwinian Hegemony

Chuck Colson weighs in on the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate with an essay in Christianity Today. He notes that:

Sure, there's evidence that evolution takes place within a species-but the fossil record has not yielded evidence of one species becoming another, as Darwin confidently predicted. This lack of evidence has not gone unnoticed by sociologist Rodney Stark. Stark calls himself neither an evolutionist nor an advocate of Intelligent Design; instead, he says, he is merely a scholar pursuing the evidence where it leads. In For the Glory of God (Princeton University Press, 2003), Stark offers startling evidence that Darwinists have covered up mounting flaws in their theory.

He concludes that the battle over evolution is hardly a case of "heroic" scientists fighting off the persecution of religious fanatics. Instead, from the start, evolution "has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator-an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin's work."

Committed Darwinists continue this strategy today. For example, nine years ago biochemist Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996). Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts-catch, spring, hammer, and so forth-must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.

Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the article-and found that the study proved just the opposite: It supported his theory. Behe confronted Doolittle, who privately acknowledged that he was wrong-but declined to make a public retraction.

So who's really rolling back the Enlightenment? Those who invite us to follow the evidence wherever it leads-or those demanding that we ignore it? The folks who want both evolution and Intelligent Design taught in school, with all their strengths and weaknesses-or those who attempt to silence any opposition?

Darwinians act like medieval clerics whose religion is under attack. The best way to preserve it is to insulate it against scrutiny. They "must not let a divine foot in the door", as Richard Lewontin famously put it. Their worst nightmare is not that natural selection will be unable to withstand careful examination as a mechanism of change, but rather that the metaphysical underpinnings of Darwinism, the dogma, for instance, that natural processes are by themselves sufficient to explain the origin and diversification of life, will dissolve in a trice once they are immersed in the acids of free inquiry.

The Darwinians are not defending their science. Indeed, it is not their science that is in question. It is the philosophical assumptions of atheistic materialism that are woven into their science that they strive to defend, and they know that, if they allow students to examine the philosophical alternatives, materialism will suffer in the comparison. No one wants to see his religion discredited, especially when, like the Darwinians, they've invested their entire professional lives in its credibility, and so they fight like desperate zealots to prevent our public schools from exposing young people to the challenges that Intelligent Design presents. Don't question, just believe is the Darwinian mantra, a mantra suitable for fundamentalist mullahs and others who fear the consequences of free and open inquiry.

Check out the rest of what Colson says at the Christianity Today site.

What the Polls Show about Schiavo

In the days leading up to the death of Terri Schiavo some commentators made much of polls which showed that those who believed that the feeding tubes should never have been removed were grossly out of step with the consensus in America. As a sociological matter the polls were not without interest, but as a means of providing moral guidance they were irrelevant. Right and wrong are not matters to be settled by consulting popular opinion polls.

Even so, it turns out that those who supported Terri's parents in their wish to keep her alive were not at variance with popular opinion after all, a fact which goes some distance toward restoring our confidence in the moral wisdom of the American people.

A Zogby poll asks this question:

"If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water?"

A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9 percent said yes.

When asked directly about Terri's case and told that her estranged husband Michael "has had a girlfriend for 10 years and has two children with her" 56 percent of Americans believed guardianship should have been turned over to Terri's parents while 37 percent disagreed.

Another question asked:

"When there is conflicting evidence on whether or not a patient would want to be on a feeding tube, should elected officials order that a feeding tube be removed or should they order that it remain in place?"

Some 18 percent said the feeding tube should be removed and 42 percent said it should remain in place.

There's more on the results of the Zogby poll at the link.

Atheism's Existential Predicament

The following is a slightly revised version of a post which appeared on Viewpoint last summer titled In the Absence of God. Since we've picked up new readers since then it might be worthwhile to post it again.

A couple of days ago Viewpoint posted a piece titled The Devil's Chaplain about Richard Dawkins, the well-known British biologist and anti-theist. Dawkins, we pointed out, finds it difficult, if not impossible, to live consistently with his atheism, denying the existence of God but living his political life as if there really were a transcendent moral law-giver.

I once heard someone say that the only real difference between a theist and an atheist is that the theist gets up and goes to church on Sunday whereas the atheist sleeps in. The remark was meant to be taken only half-seriously, but the tongue-in-cheek delivery masked an attitude that is not uncommon among atheists. The feeling is that the benefits of theism are either bogus (e.g. eternal life) or that they (e.g. morality) can be had by the atheist without all the strictures of religious dogma. The Dawkins piece shows, I think, that this is deeply mistaken.

Whether there is a God or not is not a trivial question. Nor is it like asking whether there is a tenth planet at the edge of the solar system, a matter which makes no practical difference in our lives. The question of God's existence has the most far-reaching ramifications, not just for eternity, but for this life here and now, of any question we could possibly encounter in life. It makes an immeasurable difference whether God exists or not. To understand why, consider the implications of assuming that he does not exist.

First, let's stipulate that the world is, to borrow a term from the existentialist vernacular, absurd. That is to say that the world as it is is incompatible with man as he is. Both the theist and atheist can agree on this. Each of us is a complex bundle of yearnings and needs all of which must go unfulfilled and unsatisfied in a world without God. It is only if there is a God that the problem posed by the world's absurdity can ultimately be resolved.

Consider a baker's dozen reasons why this is true:

1) As human beings we long to ground morality in something more solid than our own subjective preferences, but in the absence of God there is nothing else. Morality is whatever feels right to the individual. This leads to a might makes right egoism, either on the level of the individual or at the level of the state. In either case, whatever the individual does is not morally right or wrong; it just is. Likewise, whatever the state does is not morally right or wrong, even if it commits torture or genocide, it just is. In other words, in the absence of God morality is either arbitrary and subjective, or it doesn't exist at all.

2) As human beings we seek to base our notion of human rights in something beyond our own prejudices, but in the absence of God there is nothing to sustain those rights. We have the right to life and liberty because we are children of the creator of the universe who has invested those rights in us. If there is no creator then there are no human rights, just arbitrary rules some people agree to follow but which could easily be revoked since they're merely words on paper.

3) As human beings we have a deep longing for justice. We yearn to see good rewarded and evil punished. Our hearts break when evil appears to triumph over good, but it's the common human experience that many good people live lives of terrible fear, pain and grief, and then they die. Meanwhile, many who were the cause of that suffering die peacefully and content after a long life of pleasure. In the absence of God there is no ultimate justice. Everybody dies in the end, and there's no reward or punishment, just nothingness.

4) As human beings we strongly desire union with our loved ones. The more we love someone the more closely we wish to be united with that person on every level of our being. Yet we are alienated, separated from them. No matter how close we are, we can never achieve that complete oneness we desire. The other is always "other". This alienation holds not only in our relationships with other people but also in our love for the earth and the realm of nature. In nature we are always an outsider. We are foreign, alien, no matter how much we might long for it to be otherwise. In the absence of God, it will always be thus until the day of our death.

5) As human beings we want answers to life's deepest, most perplexing questions, but in the absence of God there are no answers, there's no certainty about anything that matters, except that we'll eventually die. We shout the "why" questions of human existence at the vast void of the cosmos - why am I here, why do we suffer, why do we want from life what we cannot have - but there's no reply, only silence.

6) As human beings we crave meaning and purpose for our lives. We can't bear living a life we know to be pointless and insignificant, but death nullifies everything and renders it nugatory. In the absence of God there is no purpose or value to anything we do. Some day the earth will burn up in a solar explosion and there'll be not a trace that humans once existed. What will all of our striving matter then? Everything we do is just a footprint in the sand at the edge of the surf of space-time. Eventually all trace of our lives will be washed away as though we were never here.

7) As human beings we long for peace, but throughout the history of mankind there's been nothing but conflict - conflict between individuals and conflict between nations. When the Berlin wall fell some thought conflict was at an end. There would be no more war, hot or cold. Few foresaw the rise of Islamo-fascism and the beginning of the modern struggle to convert the entire world to Islam. This struggle will last until either radical Islam dies out or Christianity, and every Christian, is dead. In the absence of God there is little basis for hope that someday there will be a lasting peace in the world.

8) As human beings we need a sense of dignity, but modern science tells us that we are little more than flesh and bone machines. There is no soul, there is nothing about us that makes us much different than any other mammal. We are more intelligent, of course, but that only makes the difference between us and a cow about the same as the difference between a cow and a trout. In the absence of God there's no reason why someone who has the power should not use it to manipulate and exploit us like the farmer exploits his cattle for his own purposes, slaughtering them when he can profit from so doing. The universe tells us we're nothing but "dust in the wind" and there's no dignity in that.

9) As human beings we yearn to live and yet we know we're going to die. In the absence of God, the fate of each of us is annihilation. There's no basis for hope that loved ones we've lost still somehow exist or that we'll ever see them again. There's no consolation for the bereaved, no salve for grief. Many face this bravely, of course, but, if they're reflective, their bravery must serve to mask an inner despair.

10) As human beings we all strive for happiness. In the absence of God it's perhaps the only thing about life that makes it endurable. Yet happiness is elusive. The world is full of misery. Even if our own lives are free of the afflictions which plague most of those who've ever been born on this planet, we're confronted with the irony that we can only be happy ourselves if we cease to care about others. It is at best unseemly, in the shadow of the awful anguish, pain, grief, tragedy, and other misfortunes which routinely occur in our communities, to declare that "even so, I'm happy". To care about others is to identify with them in their suffering, and it's hard to imagine how an empathetic person can be happy in a world of so much sorrow and distress. The paradox is that, in the absence of God, the only person who can achieve happiness is the person who can shut out the cries of his neighbor and turn inward upon himself.

11) We experience feelings of guilt, but in the absence of an objective standard of morality before which we stand convicted there is no actual guilt. The feeling of guilt then is something we should suppress since it bears no relation to any actual state of affairs.

12) In the absence of God our sense that we have genuine choices and are responsible for those choices is problematic. In a godless world we are just a collection of physical particles, and ultimately physical particles have no freedom, they simply move according to physical laws. There is no free will, there is only an inexorable determinism. At any given moment there is only one possible future.

13) In the absence of God there is no soul and therefore no self other than the physical body. Since our body is in constant flux we are continuously creating a new self, moment by moment year by year. There is nothing which perdures through time which makes me the same person I think I was ten years ago. There is no permanent I. There is only a kaleidoscopic bundle of patterns, impressions, memories, none of which has any real significance in determining who we really are.

If the theist is correct, however, then all of this changes. We can find happiness in knowing that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead. If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is, therefore, a purpose to existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which will ultimately mete out justice and who provides us in this life an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment. We feel guilt because we are actually guilty. We feel free because we are. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his assumption that there is no God, finds himself in a world which is completely at odds in almost every important way with the structure of his own psyche. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling universe that offers no solace nor hope that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, peace, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled. How, then, do we come to have them? Why would natural selection evolve us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically incompatible with the world?

The simplest explanation is that we experience the phenomena we've mentioned, these yearnings and feelings, because they, in fact, conform to some existential reality, some possibility of satisfaction. But they can only be satisfied if there truly is a God.

It's possible of course, that the atheist is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. It's possible, but surely the atheist should hope that he's mistaken. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually hope that there is no God. This is tantamount to hoping, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, absurd joke. Nagel says in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually want the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult to understand.

Beating the Terror Plague

The Strategy Page brings more glad tidings from the Iraqi security front:

April 1, 2005: Another major Shia religious festival, which lasted from 29-31 March, ended without incident. The government made a major effort to provide security for the large gatherings of Shia Arabs attending religious ceremonies. Sunni Arab terrorists, especially al Qaeda, consider these ceremonies a major insult to Sunni religious beliefs.

The government deployed a security effort on the same level as the one rolled out for the January elections. Coalition troops deployed mostly as back up and quick reaction forces. Al Qaeda tried to use suicide car bombers, but none of them got through to large assemblies of Shia Arabs. In one incident, a car bomb went off and killed five people, which was the most any of the attacks were able to do.

Another reason the attacks were not successful was that, in the days before March 29th, police arrested hundreds of Sunni Arabs and foreigners suspected of being terrorists. Many were, and this is because an increasing number of Sunni Arab religious leaders have changed their minds about armed resistance to democracy, and coalition forces. This has made it easier for Sunni Arabs to pass on information to the police.

The Sunni religious leaders have done the math and concluded that they were backing the losing side. Some have made deals with the government, to provide information, or pro-government sermons, in return for favorable treatment (money, access to jobs for their followers, reconstruction projects). But most have simply stopped preaching violence, or cut back on the intensity of their calls for violence against Kurds, Sunni Arabs and infidels (non-Moslems). Many Sunni Arab clerics have also noted that most of their followers are not in favor of terror attacks that kill Iraqis, no matter what their religion or ethnicity.

The terrorists have largely given up attacking American troops. The level of such attacks is about half what it was a year ago. The reason is that the attackers are much more likely to fail, and get killed, when they attack American troops. It's much easier, and safer, to attack Iraqi civilians, or even Iraqi police and troops. But the Iraqi government forces are becoming more lethal as well, and Iraqi government forces usually have American troops backing them up.

The impact of all this has been striking. The overall level of terrorist violence has fallen by about half in the last month. Terrorist attacks that target Iraqis has been very unpopular in Iraq, and caused even many Sunni Arabs to turn against al Qaeda and Sunni Arab terrorist organizations. But at the street level, most Iraqis are more concerned with criminal gangs (who commit far more violence against Iraqis than terrorists) and corruption (which is encountered daily, while you might go weeks without even hearing about a terror attack in your neighborhood.)

Pretty soon we'll begin to notice that there are no reports at all on the evening news about Iraq. Once there's no longer anything bad to report then the whole topic of Iraq will just drop off their radar screen.

Why Iran Is Important

This soon-to-appear television ad on Iran's terrorist designs will pretty much spoil your day. You can go here for an extended version, but it won't make you feel any better.

Thanks to Regime Change Iran for the tip.

Political Violence

The Left did a lot of hand-wringing during the two-week long judicial murder of Terri Schiavo about the possibility of "right-wing violence" (see here, for example). Yet almost all of the actual violence of the last couple of weeks has been perpetrated by Leftists against conservatives, and there's been nary a peep of censure from the hand-wringers about it.

Richard Perle, William Kristol, Ann Coulter, and Pat Buchanan have all been assaulted as they spoke on various campuses around the country. The attacks have not been physically serious, they involved shoes and pies being thrown at them, which says something for the level of argument to which the Left has been reduced, but imagine the outcry if, say, Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy had been attacked in like manner by conservative students while trying to give a speech. The MSM would be apoplectic over goose-stepping brown-shirts on college campuses seeking to stifle free speech.

As it is, the attacks do not come from the Right, so the media chooses not to rouse itself from its torpor.

Democracy in America

Listening to Michael Schiavo's lawyer George Felos expatiate on Terri Schiavo's last hours and the scrupulous attention to judicial punctilio which, in Felos' telling of it, led up to them, I was reminded of a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville, writing about the legislative extirpation of the Creek and Cherokee Indians in the 1830's, says this:

"...[T]he conduct of the United States...toward the natives was inspired by the most chaste affection for legal formalities....The Spaniards, by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the...Americans have attained both these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity."

Tocqueville could have been writing, mutatis mutandis, about the judicial extirpation of Terri Schiavo.

RLC

The Origins Debate

The Discovery Institute lists a number of recent essays, gleaned from newspapers around the country, that address the current controversy between Intelligent Design theorists and Darwinian evolutionists. It's good reading for anyone interested in the debate.