Malkin Calls For FEMA Head to be Fired

New Orleans has been largely evacuated and the long hard job of finding housing, jobs, and schools for the evacuees is ahead of us. Michelle Malkin insists that we don't want the same people handling that work who bungled the immediate storm aftermath. She singles out Michael Brown as one man who shouldn't be in the position he's in and says why.

Brown as head of FEMA certainly has a lot of questions to answer, and we don't want to pass a judgment until more of those answers come in. Likewise, with Mayor Nagin of New Orleans and Governor Blanco of Louisiana. They may turn out to have done as well as could be expected given the circumstances, but their performance raises questions and needs to be scrutinized.

Much more important than fixing blame, however, is that we learn the lessons of this calamity. Without wishing to sound perverse, Katrina may have done us a favor if it forced us to address weaknesses in our emergency preparedness. We know that Muslim terrorists are trying to find a way to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major city. Should they succeed, God forbid, the lessons we learn from this hurricane will be essential to responding to that disaster.

Let's hope that state and city governments across this nation have called for meetings all next week to begin the process of reviewing, assessing, and improving their plans for dealing with devastating catastrophes in their jurisdictions.

Rehnquist's Passing Occasions Liberal Glee

In the wake of Justice Rehnquist's passing much will be written about who his successor will be. Meanwhile, though, the folks at Democratic Underground can scarcely contain their joy that this great and good man is dead.

For those who have the stomach for it here and here can be seen the hideous face of many of the rank and file liberal activists in the Democratic party. Read it and weep for how ugly we've become.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the tip.

Stages of Grief

William Dembski traces the steps of a scientific revolution and finds them very much the same as the stages of grief. When a person is suddenly beset by tragedy he first goes through a time of denial followed by anger, then bargaining with God, depression and, finally, resignation.

We are witnessing such a transition today in the contest between ID and materialistic Darwinism, and the materialists are deep into the anger stage. Thomas Kuhn, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, wrote that a revolution is rarely completed by the older generation of scientists. They have devoted too much of their lives and reputations to the old theory to give it up. Like Kuhn, Dembski believes that the final stage will never be reached by the present generation of materialists but will be left to a younger cadre of thinkers who are not so heavily invested in the materialism of their predecessors.

It's an interesting read.

On Playing Politics With Tragedy

My friend Byron Borger, who is diligent in calling me to account whenever he thinks I need it (which is frequently), has a response to my recent post about how many of president Bush's critics are using the calamity in New Orleans to score political points. Byron's criticism can be found by clicking on the Feedback button.

My reply is here:

By,

You said in your e-mail that:

...you should have some shame about violating your usual high regard for honesty. To put it bluntly, you do not know what drives, purely, the motives of anyone who has blamed the current Administration for inadequate policies and action. How do you know that such concerns are to gain "political advantage."?? I think this is a hunch on your part, and not all "provable" let alone related to "objective facts on the ground" (whatever that means.)*

Why not just say that you disagree with those who tend to think that policies to cut funding have been wrong, that failure to send help promptly has been a mistake. You can say that. But to ascribe the worst of partisan motives to those believe these things, and to say that their deeply held convictions are shameful just doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Why do you presume something corrupt, or insincere, as if critics don't really care about this huge human suffering, but only want to sound off against Bush?

The media and the Dems and even some Republicans are faulting the administration for the apparent delay in getting order restored to the city. The charge seems to me to be premature, excessive, and focussed on Bush rather than FEMA and thus suspicious. Fair-minded people would be more hesitant to point fingers until the facts are in as to why it took five days to get the National Guard into the city. Questions need to be answered like whose task is it to do disaster planning? How adequate were the plans that were in place and how well executed were they? Whose decision is it to request troops? The federal response was slow compared to what? How easy is it to get troops federalized, mobilized and sent into a flood zone? That people are so quick to assume that it's all Bush's responsibility and to fault him without knowing the answers to any of these questions is more than just unwise. It suggests that there are political motives behind the charges. Imagine that Clinton were still president and the same events unfolded. Do you think these same people would have been as critical of him? I don't.

Bush has been accused of everything from dawdling at the ranch (Mayor Nagin) to racism (Rep.Elijah Cummings), to lacking the manpower to handle the crisis because he has it foolishly tied up in Iraq (Al Sharpton), and yet no one knows at this point where the breakdowns in the chain of responsibility occured or why. Would these people have said these kinds of things about Clinton? I honestly don't think any of them would, and if I'm right, then to say them about Bush suggests a purely partisan intent and a disregard for any knowledge of relevant facts.

You're right that I can't prove that conclusion in a legal sense, but it's more than just a hunch.

Bush has been accused of having failed to grant the Army Corps of Engineers the amount of money they requested to upgrade the levees as if this is proof of his culpability(see here, for example). This criticism has been made by leftists who generally disdain the corps of engineers for their environmental depradations and would be happy to see them disappear altogether. Doesn't that strike you as a little odd? Doesn't it seem irresponsible to just accept the charge at face value without asking why the funds were denied? Should we just give the corps whatever money it asks for whenever it asks for it? Even if their budgets had been approved why should we think that the work would have been completed by now? It sometimes takes years just to get such projects planned out and moving. In short, was the decision to shave the corps' funding request understandable and was the difference between the amount requested and the amount actually granted really a factor in the failure of the levees after Katrina? How can anyone start pointing fingers until these questions are answered unless they're just trying to score cheap political points?

Consider your own words in a paragraph from your e-mail:

I am not sure if you meant that as a jab, but his [Mayor Nagin's] comments in this story didn't strike me as excessive. Not sure about that picture. Wonder why he couldn't get to them? Maybe they were surrounded by deeper water. Maybe he couldn't get them across one of the bridges. Maybe the roads were so jammed with outgoing evacuees that it would have been unhelpful to drive the buses away, only to find out you needed to get them back. (It seems, although I don't know what happened 24 hours before) that they still hoped against hope and didn't act decisively themselves until it was too late. I suppose they didn't count on that levee breaking. Anyway, I just don't know what the bus picture comment was to imply, but again it seems unfair.

You try here to give Mayor Nagin every benefit of the doubt, as well you should, but I think that that same fair-mindedness should be extended also to governor Blanco and the president. I have heard very little criticism of Nagin or Blanco, both democrats, but it's been heaped on Bush and Mississippi governor Haley Barbor (both Republicans). Why? Might there not have been reasons why Bush's response, like Nagin's, was not as quick as some think it should have been? Why should Bush's critics not be expected to give him the same benefit of the doubt as you give Nagin? That Bush is denied that benefit suggests to me that a significant number of his critics see a political opportunity to discredit him in this calamity and they don't want to pass it up.

You write that:

Anybody anywhere who criticizes the President, it seems, you insist are hateful, shameful and with nefarious motives.

This is untrue and unfair. I have myself criticized the president in Viewpoint on a number of occasions and have cited the criticisms of others with which I disagreed, but which I thought were done respectfully and sincerely. All I ask from his opponents is the same fairness you ask for Mayor Nagin. If they don't give it then I have to ask why not. If that means impugning their motives then maybe they need to be impugned.

Parenthetically, I want to add that your words above (to ascribe the worst of partisan motives to those believe these things, and to say that their deeply held convictions are shameful just doesn't make a bit of sense to me. Why do you presume something corrupt, or insincere, as if critics don't really care about this huge human suffering, but only want to sound off against Bush?) are irrelevant to my post. I didn't criticize anyone for holding views about the role of government similar to your own. I criticized people for throwing around contemptible allegations without having yet any understanding of what happened. I criticized them for being unwilling to extend the same fairness to Republicans that would be, and is, granted by them to Democrats. I criticized them for crass political opportunism in the wake of tragedy.

Decent observers who hold views like yours are not taking advantage of the emotions and suffering of those trapped and victimized by Katrina to play the blame game and to call Bush incompetent and racist. If the facts warrant it later then that will be different. As of now, however, decent people should, and will, withhold judgment on where the fault lies.

Unfortunately, the people we're hearing most from on the left are too often like the person you mentioned from Air America:

"The Anchoress" who quoted an Air America person who said that Bush may enjoy seeing poor people of blue states suffer and therefore won't rescue them. I don't know how, but I will reply to that.

You might include in your reply that the individual who made that statement ought to get his/her facts right before sounding off so that he/she doesn't appear so dumb. Louisiana is a red state. It voted for Bush.

Best,

Dick

Dennett's Sub-Optimal Argument

Darwinian atheistic philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University offers up an editorial in last Sunday's New York Times in which he probably says more than some of his anti-ID allies would have liked.

For instance, one of the claims we hear from evolutionists in the battle over the teaching of ID is that there's no reason why one can't be both an evolutionist as well as a religious believer. Darwinism is not hostile to theism, we are assured, but then Dennett lets the cat out of the bag:

[N]atural selection, by executing God's traditional task of designing and creating all creatures great and small, also seems to deny one of the best reasons we have for believing in God.

True, you can still believe in God and accept evolution, Dennett informs us, but your belief in God is plainly irrational. In other words, he suggests, Darwinism renders the existence of God highly implausible and unlikely.

In his column, the Tufts philosopher accuses Intelligent Design advocates of perpetrating an "ingenious hoax" which accusation is, of course, a slander. It entails that ID scientists and philosophers know full well that intelligence was not at work in the development of life, but nonetheless deliberately deceived, and continue to deliberately deceive, the gullible masses into believing it was. This is to impute reprehensible behavior and motives to people in the ID camp, and unless Dennett can back his allegation up with some justification he ought to apologize. His reckless and insulting charge is reminiscient of Richard Dawkins' asinine claim that anyone who denies evolution is either "ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked-but I'd rather not consider that)."

Amusingly, having called ID a hoax, Dennett implies that the assurance we have of the truth of the Darwinian doctrine that natural processes are sufficient by themselves to account for the emergence of all living things is comparable to the assurance we have of the truth of both quantum physics and relativity theory.

Both quantum physics and relativity theory have been tested and confirmed many times. When has the claim that mechanistic forces are adequate by themselves to create biological information ever been tested, much less confirmed? How could it even be tested? Dennett's doctrine is a piece of metaphysical speculation, not science and his claim that it enjoys the same degree of confirmation as the theories of physics is risible.

Dennett also finds himself unable to talk about biological structures and processes without resorting to the vocabulary of purpose and intelligence that he disdains, which is an interesting admission in itself. He sprinkles his essay with terms and phrases like:

"the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs"; "Brilliant as the design of the eye is"; "the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive"; "Evolution is cleverer than you are"; "When evolutionists like Crick marvel at the cleverness of the process of natural selection"; "The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant", etc.

Dennett would deny any telic intent in these phrases, of course, but the fact remains that brilliance and cleverness are attributes of minds, not purposeless forces. That he feels constrained to use those words to describe biological phenomena does not help him make the case that these phenomena were not intentionally designed by an intelligent mind.

He completely misses the point when he writes that:

Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.

Surely Professor Dennett doesn't think that ID needs to explain how structures like the bacterial flagellum were designed. A tourist need not have any idea how Mt. Rushmore came into existence in order to conclude that it is the product of intelligent agency. A detective need not have any idea how a crime was committed in order to know that it was an intentional act and not an accident. The role of ID is not to explain, but to identify, intelligent purpose in biological structures.

Nor do ID'ers argue that because evolutionists haven't explained everything yet that therefore ID is true. They argue that some things haven't been explained in terms of purely natural mechanism because any such explanation that could be offered is so improbable and implausible as to render it literally incredible. They argue that it is only an apriori commitment to material explanations that prevents researchers from admitting that biological sytems and structures certainly appear to bear the impress of intelligent input in their manufacture.

Finally, in his quest to strike a fatal blow to ID he stumbles over a few hoary myths left over from the 1950s. He claims for example that:

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

Well, no. Michael Denton lays out the physiological rationale for the wiring of the eye's nervous system in a 1999 article that can be found here. It turns out that the eye's neural wiring itself manifests an extraordinary bit of engineering and design. Dennett will have to come up with another "accident" if he's going to use sub-optimal designs as an argument against ID.

Dennett's editorial may be compelling to those readers who may be eager to be persuaded, but as a piece of convincing argumentation it's pretty lame. It suffers itself from an intellectual sub-optimality analogous to the "accidents" he cites against the existence of an intelligent designer. There's much additional criticism of Dennett's essay here.

Playing Politics With Tragedy

PowerLine is one good place to go for sanity in the midst of the criticism of the federal government for a seemingly slow response to the needs of the hurricane victims. Whatever blame is merited for the problems being experienced there must be shouldered by the local and state government whose responsibility it is to provide the planning and resources for the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The attempt to blame Bush for the delay in the delivery of rescue, security, food and shelter is driven not by any objective facts on the ground but purely by the desire to gain political advantage. It's shameful.

Yahoo has a photo of a school bus parking lot filled with school buses up to their axles in water. While New Orleans' mayor Ray Nagin rants about the need for buses to move people and the lack of state and federal help these school buses were sitting in the lot since before the storm.

Michelle Malkin also has some good stuff on events in the Gulf region.

Anyone who would like to contribute to the recovery effort can do so at the Red Cross site here.

Not Playing Fair

Perhaps it is becuse Jim Glassman is a white, middle-aged male that he seems to have an inordinate affinity for basing conclusions on facts rather than feelings. This is not a welcome trait among post-modern ideologues, and no doubt many such will be thrown into a snarl by this essay by Glassman at Tech Central Station. In it Glassman unfashionably and unconscionably introduces a few scientific facts into the debate among lefties over whether Katrina was the result mostly of purely natural geophysical forces with some input by George Bush, or whether it can be, as many on the left suspect, laid entirely at the feet of Bush and his anti-environmental cronies. The facts adduced by Glassman make the enviro-loonies look even more looney than usual.

He writes:

...the response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now. (Emphasis mine)

Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.

Giant hurricanes are rare, but they are not new. And they are not increasing. To the contrary. Just go to the website of the National Hurricane Center and check out a table that lists hurricanes by category and decade. The peak for major hurricanes (categories 3,4,5) came in the decades of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when such storms averaged 9 per decade. In the 1960s, there were 6 such storms; in the 1970s, 4; in the 1980s, 5; in the 1990s, 5; and for 2001-04, there were 3. Category 4 and 5 storms were also more prevalent in the past than they are now. As for Category 5 storms, there have been only three since the 1850s: in the decades of the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s.

But that doesn't stop an enviro-predator like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from writing on the Huffingtonpost website: "Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which [Haley] Barbour and his cronies have encouraged. Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children."

Or consider Jurgen Tritten, Germany's environmental minister, in an op-ed in the Frankfurter Rundschau. He wrote (according to a translation prepared for me): "By neglecting environmental protection, America's president shuts his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes like Katrina inflict on his country and the world's economy."

The bright side of Katrina, concludes Tritten, is that it will force President Bush to face facts. "When reason finally pays a visit to climate-polluter headquarters, the international community has to be prepared to hand America a worked-out proposal for the future of international climate protection."

He goes on, "There is only one possible route of action. Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced, and it has to happen worldwide." In other words, thanks to Katrina, we'll finally get Kyoto enforced. (He might start at home, by the way. Europe is not anywhere close to reducing carbon dioxide to Kyoto standards. In fact, the U.S. is doing much better than many Kyoto ratifiers.)

Ross Gelbspan, in a particularly egregious, almost giddy piece in the Boston Globe that was reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, wrote that the hurricane was "nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service Katrina, [but] its real name was global warming." He also finds global warming responsible for droughts in the Midwest, strong winds in Scandinavia and heavy rain in Dubai. The reason for all this devastation, of course, is that the Bush Administration is controlled by coal and oil interests.

And the Independent, a widely read British newspaper, reported today that "Sir David King, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, has warned that global warming may be responsible for the devastation reaped by Hurricane Katrina." King contended that "the increased intensity of hurricanes is associated with global warming."

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

"Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught 'is very much natural,' said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.'"

An article on TCS quoted Gray last year as saying that, while some groups and individuals say that hurricane activity lately "may be in some way related to the effects of increased man-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide,...there is no reasonable scientific way that such an interpretation...can be made."

Indeed, there is no evidence that hurricanes are intensifying anyway. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: "Reliable data...since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased."

Yes, decreased.

Not only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.).

But environmental extremists do not want to be bothered with the facts. Nor do they wish to mourn the destruction and death wreaked on a glorious city. To their everlasting shame, they would rather distort and exploit.

This really is a cheap polemical trick by Glassman to insert a few discordant facts into the left's otherwise highly satisfying argument: Katrina was caused by global warming, global warming is caused by American intransigence on Kyoto, America is lead by Bush. Ergo, Bush caused Katrina and should be impeached this very afternoon!

As a footnote to the left's wild suppositions and misunderstandings about the effects of global warming, Chris Matthews on Wednesday night actually suggested that it was the cause of the Indian Ocean tsunami last December. NBC science advisor, Robert Bazell, had to explain to him that the tsunami was a result of an undersea earthquake and totally unrelated to atmospheric temperatures. To his credit, Matthews seemed to comprehend, somewhat, the irrelevance of a degree or two rise in global temperature to the periodic slippage of the earth's crustal plates and was content to let the matter drop.

Muslim Gratitude

Here's another grateful Muslim whose fat the United States pulled out of the fire in '91, but whose memory is so short and whose gratitude so scant that he rejoices in the havoc Katrina has wrought. After we delivered his country (Kuwait) from Saddam's savage invasion and restored that country's independence we get this from one of its officials.

"Oh honored gentlemen, I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year... and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

"But before I went to sleep, I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R'ad ['The Thunder' chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: 'The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.' [Koran 13:31]."

Evidently, Muslims aren't big on "thank yous."

I wonder if this means that there'll be no economic aid from Kuwait to help defray the cost of recovery from Katrina. And we were expecting boodles of it to be offered by all those Islamic countries we've helped in the last couple of decades, too.

Someone ought to do a study of the difference between Christian benevolence to Muslims around the world, and Muslim benevolence to Christians in need. I'm sure they'd find a rough parity.

Or maybe not.

The Border War

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail has an interesting series of posts on the border war in Iraq and how it is evolving into a war between Iraqi tribes fighting mostly foreign jihadis, with the tribes receiving American air support. Begin with this post, and then go here and finish here.

Roggio also notes that there is almost nothing in the MSM about this conflict and its significance. If it weren't for blogs no one would know anything of importance about what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's no wonder that support for the Bush's policy is eroding. Nobody knows whether we're making progress or not because the only information people get is filtered through the steady drizzle of negativism and body counts dispensed by the media.

One of the big stories that'll someday be written about this war is the ineptitude displayed by the media in reporting it. Vietnam received much more thorough coverage, such as it was, than has Iraq.

Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life

The Pew Forum On Religion and Public Life has published the results of a survey of 2000 adults conducted last July. There are many findings of interest, but here are just a few:

By a wide margin, 51% to 28%, the Republican Party is seen as most concerned with protecting religious values. By a nearly identical margin (52%-30%), the Democratic Party is perceived as most concerned with protecting the freedom of citizens to make personal choices.

Only about three-in-ten (29%) see the Democrats as friendly toward religion, down from 40% last August. Meanwhile, a solid majority (55%) continues to view the Republicans as friendly toward religion.

Most independents (54%) think religious conservatives have too much influence over the Republican Party, while fewer, 43%, think secular liberals have too much sway on the Democratic Party.

[W]hite evangelical Protestants and conservative Republicans are the most uniformly critical of liberal efforts on these types of issues. Nearly nine-in-ten (87%) in both groups believe liberals have gone too far on church-state issues. But many Democrats share this view, particularly moderate and conservative Democrats. Overall, 56% of Democrats say liberals have gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government, and moderate-to-conservative Democrats are twice as likely as liberal Democrats to express this view (67% vs. 33%, respectively).

Interestingly, three-quarters of African Americans also see liberals pushing too far in keeping religion out of schools and government. It is important to note, however, that this negative perception of non-religious liberals is not linked to views of the Democratic Party among blacks. Blacks are nearly twice as likely as whites to say the Democratic Party is friendly toward religion and, by a 58%-24% margin, blacks say the Democratic Party, not the GOP, is most concerned with protecting religious values in the country.

Overall, about half the public (48%) says that humans and other living things have evolved over time, while 42% say that living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. Fully 70% of white evangelical Protestants say that life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time; fewer than half as many white mainline Protestants (32%) and white Catholics (31%) agree.

I think the 70% figure here is misleading. I suspect that many of the respondents really don't understand what it means to say that "life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time." I wonder how many of them thought that the only alternative to this was that man descended from an ape-like ancestor. I doubt that most people, when they think about it, would deny that variation, at least on a small scale, has occured. Fixity of species is certainly not the position of creationists, not even young earth creationists.

Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants are most distinctive in their support for the creationist position....In contrast, most white mainline Protestants (60%) and white Catholics (61%) believe that living things have evolved over time, while only 32% and 31% of mainline Protestants and Catholics, respectively, accept the creationist account.

[M]ost Americans (64%) say they are open to the idea of teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools, and a substantial minority (38%) favors replacing evolution with creationism in public school curricula....Even many who are politically liberal and who believe in evolution favor expanding the scope of public school education to include teaching creationism. (Emphasis mine)

Most Americans believe that God was responsible for the creation of life on earth but divide on the question of whether and how life has changed since the creation. Overall, 78% say God created life on earth, while 5% think a universal spirit or higher power was responsible for the creation.

[N]early four-in-ten of those who believe in evolution (18% of the public as a whole) say that evolution was guided by a supreme being for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today, a view that is consistent with some aspects of what has been called "intelligent design."

In the current survey, 64% support teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools, while only 26% oppose this idea. But significantly fewer people say creationism should supplant evolution in the curriculum: 38% say creationism should be taught instead of evolution (49% disagree).

It would have been more illuminating, perhaps, had the Pew people framed their questions about creationism and evolution a bit differently. Instead of introducing the term "creationism," the teaching of which is not really at issue any more, it would have been helpful had they asked, for example, whether the respondent favored or opposed teaching both the evidence for and the evidence against Neo-Darwinian evolution. It would also have been interesting had they asked whether the respondents favored or opposed science teachers pointing out that there are two ways to view the scientific facts of the universe and of life: One is to see them both as products of blind, unguided chance, and the other is to see them as the products of intelligent purpose.

If the questions had been asked in that fashion, it's my guess that the answers would have been even more overwhelmingly in favor of teaching both the pros and cons of evolution and also in favor of teaching both of the metaphysical interpretations of the scientific data.

There is much else in the Pew report and the reader is encouraged to check it out.

Gonzalez Replies

Guillermo Gonzalez responds in the Iowa State Daily to calls on campus for his professional emasculation. He also replies in the Des Moines Register to its article criticizing him for breaching the bounds of science in his book Privileged Planet. Gonzalez is a proponent of cosmic ID and for that offense against secular morality he must be punished. We discussed the matter here a week ago. Here is Gonzalez's letter to the Des Moines Register:

In her Aug. 24 commentary, "Stick to Science, ISU," Rekha Basu writes about an anti-intelligent design petition led by Hector Avalos, an associate professor of religious studies at Iowa State University and faculty adviser to the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.

Basu noted that I'm a national leader in the ID movement who "has said publicly he wants to find a graduate student to pursue that line of study," based on an August-edition Geotimes report on comments made at a Smithsonian presentation. In answer to a question about progress in ID, I said that I hoped graduate students would take up some of the suggested research presented in the book I co-authored. I didn't say I was going to have a graduate student working on ID. In any case, I don't have funding to do so.

I am often misrepresented by the press and certain ideologues at ISU.

First, I am not a fundamentalist. I don't believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old or that a global deluge created most of the geology we see today. I am convinced that most of the mainstream theories in geology, physics and cosmology are a pretty good representation of reality.

Second, ID is not scientific creationism (or just creationism). Creationists seek evidence to prove a particular interpretation of the book of Genesis in the Bible. They start with a specific set of prior religious commitments and seek evidence that conforms to those commitments. ID theorists start with the evidence of nature and remain open to possible evidence of design. This approach is no different from the approach taken by many of the founders of modern science.

Third, scientific theories can and do have metaphysical implications, but those are distinct from the theories themselves. Richard Dawkins once said that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. That implication doesn't invalidate Darwin's scientific idea. Similarly, ID research can have positive religious implications. Perhaps that explains some of the animosity toward ID.

Finally, "The Privileged Planet," which I co-authored with Dr. Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute, presents an original argument for design based on evidence drawn from the physical sciences. We do not discuss biological evolution in the book or in the documentary video based on it. Our argument is testable and should be challenged on the evidence.

The inquisition Hector Avalos is attempting to engineer isn't science. It's an attack on academic freedom.

-Guillermo Gonzalez, assistant professor of astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames.

It's important to reiterate that Gonzalez does not challenge Darwinian orthodoxy in his book. His argument is that the incredible fine-tuning of the structure of the cosmos makes it in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ways extremely well-suited for the emergence of higher life forms such as man. Were the values and properties of the forces, constants, and constituents of the universe not almost exactly what they are, life could not have arisen. None of this has anything to do with evolution nor is it denied by anyone in science, but Gonzalez thinks that such precision is more than just a flukish coincidence, he thinks it is an indication of purposefulness.

This belief, which is a philosophical inference drawn from the scientific facts and not itself a scientific matter, is held in contempt by atheistic materialists on the faculty who fear that such telic talk has about it the odor of Christian fundamentalism and who see it as a challenge to their own philosophical suppositions. Thus, lest others be persuaded by Gonzalez's arguments, they feel the need to stifle and gag him.

As Gonzalez says in his letter, this controversy is not about science, it's about religious philosophy, and there's no one so intolerant, so hostile to the free exchange of ideas, as an academic who sees his cherished anti-theistic philosophical convictions, to which he has devoted his entire professional life, come under withering assault. Gonzalez, like Richard Sternberg and others before him, is getting a taste of their despotic fury.

Sounds of Silence

Time for a rock concert or two to raise money for disaster relief in the Gulf, or do the rockers and beautiful people only raise money for relief in Africa? How much assistance will we be receiving from the rest of the world, especially the oil-besotted Arab world? Will the mucky-mucks at the U.N. be calling those who don't help relieve the human misery along the Gulf coast "stingy"? Just asking.

Here's a list of the countries which have promised economic aid in the wake of this catastrophe so far:

No doubt the list will be longer by tomorrow.

The Great Raid

Hugh Hewitt commends to us what he avers is an outstanding movie. I haven't seen it myself, but I've heard so many good things about it that I intend to do something I rarely do - go see the movie in the theater. Here's what Hewitt says:

It is time to rescue The Great Raid.

The Great Raid is in theaters now, though it may not be for long unless movie-going America quickly realizes that there is a wonderful and inspiring film in its midst, one that celebrates courage, sacrifice and endurance, and which unabashedly proclaims that hope (plus superior firepower and tactical surprise) can conquer all. It is a movie which deserves a vast and appreciative audience.

It is 1945, and Douglas MacArthur has returned to the Philippines. More than 500 American survivors of the Bataan Death March languish at the Cabanatuan prison camp, and the Japanese plan to exterminate them, rather than allow them to survive and bear witness to Japanese war crimes. The men of America's untested 6th Army Ranger Battalion set out to save these prisoners. This exceptional movie tells the stories of the warriors who went to save the captives, the prisoners who endured unspeakable cruelty, and the Filipino resistance that came to the aid of both.

As with Saving Private Ryan, audiences have been lingering at the end of the film. There is spontaneous applause. And there are tears. The generation that fought to liberate the Philippines is passing away, but those who survive and the best of their children and grandchildren are appreciating the movie.

The Great Raid has received favorable reviews from esteemed and honest critics such as Michael Medved and Roger Ebert. But the bulk of the high-brow reviewers have rejected the movie. The New York Times's Stephen Holden represented the caucus of the dismissive when he wrote that "it is not the actors' fault that their characters fail to establish any emotional connection; they aren't given the words for the task." Holden damned the film as "a tedious World War II epic that slogs across the screen like a forced march in quicksand," and slammed it for "its scenes of torture and murder [which] unapologetically revive the uncomfortable stereotype of the Japanese soldier as a sadistic, slant-eyed fiend."

Holden isn't reviewing a movie; he's defending his own politics, as he's done before. In an October 2003 review of the documentary Fog of War about former Kennedy/Johnson administration Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Holden rebuked McNamara for serving during World War II under Gen. Curtis LeMay, thus being "part of the team that made the decision to firebomb 67 Japanese cities, killing large numbers of civilians. In Tokyo alone, more than 100,000 civilians died one night in March 1945." It is not difficult to conclude that any war movie that celebrates American resolve while neglecting to savage American hubris and American cruelty is going to fare very poorly at Mr. Holden's hands. This is the political agenda that The Great Raid is up against, and it is not limited to the New York Times and Stephen Holden. To praise The Great Raid is to praise America, and that's too much to ask of many film critics, especially in this era of the global war against terror.

Director John Dahl's dad served in the Philippines, and he told me that as he came to understand the story of The Great Raid, he also came to realize--again--the incredible modesty of the generation that beat back Hitler and Tojo. So modest are they that they have refused to proclaim their stories. We are lucky that directors such as Spielberg and Dahl have come along to do it for them.

The West is once again under siege, as it has been in the past and will be again in the future. Brave men have always risen up to defend the West--even when the odds were long--and to take the necessary but often harsh measures required to preserve civilization. Wars to preserve freedom can require terrible, but just, measures. Enemies of freedom can be the worst sort of human beings, and their defeat may indeed require devastating blows.

Now in the middle of another such struggle a movie has arrived which celebrates the very virtues that allow free men to survive, and many in the chattering class have dismissed it as crude and "disconnected" from their emotions.

"The secret to happiness is freedom," wrote Thucydides. "And the secret to freedom is courage." Courage is on display in The Great Raid.

Celebrate courage and thus freedom. Take everyone you know to see The Great Raid.

If any of our readers have seen this film please let us know your opinion of it via our feedback forum.

LAT to Dems: Become Hawks

The LA Times strikes a hawkish chord:

Beyond stopping the cut-and-run strategy brewing in the House, Democratic leaders must define a meaningful victory as 1) a unified, stable Iraq with 2) a non-theocratic democracy that protects minority and women's rights and 3) a functioning economy. If the constitutional process crumbles and these goals prove impossible, the U.S. will need enough troops to stop a partition from becoming a bloodbath and jihadists and radical clerics from grabbing power. The key, then, remains security.

Democratic Sens. Joseph Biden of Delaware and John Kerry of Massachusetts have offered proposals such as deploying Iraq's militias and introducing NATO troops. But militias are neither loyal nor answerable to government authorities. And Germany would never agree to send NATO troops with general elections scheduled for this year.

While Democrats admonish Bush to come clean about the task ahead, they have not shown the political courage to do what is necessary: call for more American troops. Although 135,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Iraq, at most only 60,000 American and coalition troops, along with a much smaller number of Iraqi soldiers, are available for combat. Democrats should urge the U.S. to increase combat forces by up to 20,000 troops for the period necessary to elect and secure a permanent government. This would approximate the force during successful interim elections in January. More troops can stop jihadists from infiltrating Iraq and prevent enemy fighters from retaking territory, as in Fallouja.

The administration argues that newly trained Iraqis should fill this role. But only a fraction of the 107 Iraqi battalions being trained can operate independent of American support. We cannot afford to wait. Rumsfeld announced last week that he will boost troop strength temporarily to about 160,000, mostly by juggling troop rotations. But those levels will fall again after Iraqi elections in December - too soon to secure the new government.

Opponents claim that a larger U.S. presence would fuel anti-Americanism. Yet higher troop levels late last year did not spark an anti-U.S. backlash. Also, most new troops would deploy along sparsely populated borders.

Bush has said he will send more troops if U.S. military authorities ask. Widespread press reports confirm that ground commanders privately say they need more. Yet no Democratic leader currently supports increasing troops. Like the president, Democrats fear that increasing troop levels could be politically costly, even though an August CBS poll found Americans divided on the issue.

Democrats have a tremendous opportunity - as FDR and JFK did - to appeal to service and sacrifice to help the nation achieve long-term security. Democrats must stop following the polls and start assuming leadership on national security. Sixty percent of Democrats think that the Iraq war has increased the threat of terrorism against the United States, according to the CBS poll. They may be right, but losing the war will definitely hurt our security.

Unless Democrats demonstrate the political courage and resolution to win a war, rather than just criticize it, they will remain a minority party no matter what the polls show.

There is much good advice here, but it's doubtful that the Democrats will follow it since to do so would be to hand a boon to George Bush. The president is at present reluctant to do what it would take to win more quickly in Iraq because, quite simply, what it would take is more troops, and that might entail some sort of draft, and that's politically undoable as long as the Democrats are yelping and sniping at his ankles.

If the Dems, however, suddenly exhibited the same ferocity toward the insurgents in Iraq that they have shown toward Mr. Bush's judicial and U.N. appointments, then the president would have a green light to increase the size of the military with political impunity and be able to prosecute the war with much more alacrity. The Democrats, of course, find the idea of a Bush success in Iraq insufferable, and it would be made even more so by the fact that they would receive zero credit for it.

The only way the Democrats would take the advice of the Times on this one is if there were a Democrat president in the White House, and that won't happen, if it happens at all, for another three years.

Walter Reed Protests

A blog called Conservative Propaganda has an interesting report on the Walter Reed protest and counter-protest complete with photos. The Code Pink anti-war protestors are apparently completely out-matched by their antagonists in terms of numbers, wit, and knowledge about what's going on in the world.

Among the most interesting things about the report are the anecdotes about the reactions of the soldier/patients. The Code Pink group claims to be supporting the troops, but the patients want nothing to do with them and have bluntly expressed this sentiment in the universal sign language of disdain. On the other hand, several of them stopped to thank the counter-protestors.

The guys who have paid a heavy price know who's really on their side and who's merely trying to use them as a prop to promote their agenda.

A Strategy, Not a Sound Bite

One of the criticisms of the administration's approach to the current war has been that it seems to lack a grand strategy beyond training Iraqis to take over the burden of fighting it. Andrew Krepinevich, a retired West Pointer, is contemptuous of the calls to withdraw and finds the administration's "stay the course" rhetoric something less than a plan. He presses for an alternative known as the oil spot strategy. In an article in Foreign Affairs that is being widely heralded in the blogosphere he writes:

Instead of a timetable for withdrawal, the United States needs a real strategy built around the principles of counterinsurgency warfare. To date, U.S. forces in Iraq have largely concentrated their efforts on hunting down and killing insurgents. The idea of such operations is to erode the enemy's strength by killing fighters more quickly than replacements can be recruited. Although it is too early to tell for sure whether this approach will ultimately bring success, its current record is not good: even when an attack manages to inflict serious insurgent casualties, there is little or no enduring improvement in security once U.S. forces withdraw from the area.

Instead, U.S. and Iraqi forces should adopt an "oil-spot strategy" in Iraq, which is essentially the opposite approach. Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people, thereby denying insurgents the popular support they need. Since the U.S. and Iraqi armies cannot guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously, they should start by focusing on certain key areas and then, over time, broadening the effort -- hence the image of an expanding oil spot. Such a strategy would have a good chance of success. But it would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties in the short term, and an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq, albeit at far lower force levels than are engaged at present. If U.S. policymakers and the American public are unwilling to make such a commitment, they should be prepared to scale down their goals in Iraq significantly.

It sounds like a good concept to this untrained observer, but it also seems that it's not much different than cleaning out a rat's nest and leaving trained Iraqi troops in the nest to make sure the rats don't come back. I'm sure I was mistaken, but I had thought that this is what we had been doing as competent Iraqi forces became available.

Anyway, there's much more to Krepinevich's argument at the link.

The Inquisition is in Session

Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer on the faculty at Iowa State University. He also has co-authored a book entitled Privileged Planet which points out the amazing fitness of our universe for the existence of higher life forms. The book is strongly teleological and for this Gonzalez is being hounded by a group of self-appointed inquisitors of the Church of Naturalism to give an account of his heresies.

The book, as far as I know, addresses only the cosmic argument for design and makes no disparaging mention of biological evolution. Yet, when the Darwinian Torquemadas are determined to commit a victim to the flames, anything remotely close to unorthodox opinions will suffice as a justification.

Even the DesMoines Register has waded blithely into the midst of the fray with an article by Rekha Basu who evidently occupies the Karl Popper chair for the philosophy of science at the Register and who suggests that ISU "issue its definition of what constitutes science, and make sure faculty uphold it."

Great idea. Perhaps Ms Basu has a definition in mind because philosophers of science sure don't. One can picture the science faculty at ISU rushing to clasp their hands metaphorically over Ms Basu's mouth to shut her up, knowing that any definition the university comes up with will either include almost everything or exclude somebody's pet discipline. Science, someone should whisper to Ms Basu, is whatever scientists do. There is no definition for science so clear-cut and universally accepted that the university could force their faculty to "uphold it".

Mike Gene at Telic Thoughts composes an amusing and condign skewering of Ms Basu and Professor Gonzalez's other adversaries at ISU. His chief antagonist, it turns out, is an atheistic Bible scholar and professor of religion named Hector Avalos. One wonders where a Bible scholar gets the expertise to criticize an astronomer. That aside, you'll have to read Gene's essay to apprehend the dogmatic intolerance fueling Professor Avalos' crusade against Gonzalez and to appreciate the full measure of his inanity.

Dispel the Myths

Jonah Cohen is not a supporter of Intelligent Design, but he does think it ought to be taught in public schools. He argues that there is so much confusion about what ID is that it should be taught just to dispel the misunderstandings, if for no other reason. In an essay in the American Thinker he sets out four "myths" about ID and proceeds to explain why those myths are, in his opinion, wrong.

The myths, he claims, are these:

1. The theory of intelligent design is a modern version of Creationism.

2. The theory of intelligent design claims that the designer is the God described in the Bible.

3. Conservatives and Christians necessarily accept the intelligent design argument.

4. The theory of evolution and monotheism are logically at odds or, at least, inimical.

You can read Cohen's response to each of these at the link.

Parenthetically, I'd like to call special attention to one of his concluding paragraphs:

The dispute between intelligent design versus a randomly ordered cosmos is age-old and fascinating and still unresolved. That smart and honest writers are now busy promulgating sheer fictions about this debate suggests that we are indeed in need of education on this topic. And that is a sufficient reason, in my opinion, for it to be taught in our schools, perhaps not in biology classes, but at least in mandatory philosophy classes, something our school systems do not demand to our national shame.

As one who taught a full year philosophy course in a public high school for almost twenty five years, the last two phrases were pleasant to read. I don't know that philosophy should be mandatory, but it should certainly be offered as an elective to secondary students. The benefits of studying philosophy are substantial, and it is indeed a shame that more high school students are denied the opportunity to share in those benefits.

How to Play Offense

On Saturday Viewpoint urged the White House go on offense in making its case for its policy in Iraq. Today we direct you to a marvelous example of precisely what they should be doing. If the White House needs advice on how to make the case for seeing the Iraqi project through to its conclusion they could hardly do better than to read this essay by Christopher Hitchens in The Weekly Standard.

Well, maybe they could do better if they hired Hitchens as a speech writer.

His column is must reading for anyone who has an opinion on the war in Iraq, whether pro or con. Indeed, anyone who opposes the war should be refused a hearing unless they first agree to read it.

Hitchens opens with this:

Let me begin with a simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad." I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?

After a page or two of journalistic virtuosity Hitchens concludes his article with this paragraph:

The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

In between those two passages is perhaps one of the most compelling defenses of what America is trying to accomplish in Iraq that has been written in the past twelve months. Give it a read.

The Basic Principle of Political Philosophy

My friend Byron Borger passes along a link to an article that will be of interest to anyone who has done any reading in political philosophy. The essay is written by David Koyzis, and in it he considers four main approaches to politics in the contemporary west, pointing out the weaknesses of each.

He concludes with what he believes must be the essential elements of any political philosophy that seeks to maximize human welfare. His crucial sentences are the ones he closes with. He says this:

Finally, a solid political theory - one that adequately accounts for reality and bears fruit as it is practiced - must recognize that ultimate authority belongs not to the state or any mere human institution, but to God who has called the state to its task of doing justice in the midst of societal pluriformity. In the words of an ancient, political authority, "The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all" (Psalm 103:19) (Italics his).

Koyzis is certainly correct about this. Almost everyone would agree that the task of the state is to do justice, but why do we think that? And how do we know what justice is anyway? Where does our modern notion of justice come from if not from a transcendent lawgiver?

Let us suppose there is no such Being. If such were the case the word "ought" would be emptied of any moral meaning. There would be no content to the assertion that the state "ought" to be just. Why should it? Nor is there any basis for grounding the concept of justice in our notion of equality. If there is no God then Thrasymachus was right when Plato has him declaim in The Republic that justice is merely "the interest of the stronger."

Marx was incensed that the state catered to the interest of the bourgoisie, but as an atheist Marx couldn't rationally say that this was morally wrong (although he tried). He couldn't protest that it was unjust or unfair, he could only resent it because it offended his own subjective predilections. Much of the bloodshed and oppression of the twentieth century, sadly enough, arose ultimately out of Marx's personal pique.

Where do we get our notion of justice from, and from whence do we derive the idea that we are obligated to do it if not ultimately from God mediated through both special revelation and the natural law? Again, if there is no god then our ideas about justice are at most products of our evolutionary past. As such they can be seen as vestiges of a blind process that suited us for life in the stone age, but there is no reason why we should feel compelled to heed them today. They have no moral value or heft. We do not offend heaven if we disregard them. We might offend our fellow man if we discard the popular notions of justice, but so what? To maintain that the state in a godless world has an obligation to provide justice for its citizens is as nonsensical as maintaining that the wolf has an obligation to provide justice for the sheep.

The history of the political philosophy of the last two hundred years is littered with the corpses of attempts to build a just society on an atheistic premise. Such philosophies always have and always will revert, sooner or later, to a might makes right ethic where justice is whatever the ruling power says it is. And, inevitably, the ruling authority will decide that justice is whatever promotes its own self-interest, its own survival, its own hold on power. This was Machiavelli's view, it was Nietzsche's view, it was the view of the heirs of Marx, and it was the view of the Nazis. It will invariably be the view of any state that denies the existence and sovereignty of God.

It is one of the ironies of modernity that a logically rigorous embrace of atheism, which seems to so many to be so philosophically and morally seductive, leads individuals and states ineluctably to nihilism. Modern man can't live without God and won't live with Him. Therein lies the tragic source of most of his troubles.