In the Crosshairs

The New York Daily News reports this story about plans to assassinate President Bush:

WASHINGTON - Before he was captured last spring, Osama Bin Laden's top operational commander was solely focused on killing President Bush and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharaff, the Daily News has learned.

The capture last May of Al Qaeda's No. 3 leader, Abu Faraj Al-Libi, apparently thwarted plots to assassinate the two partners in the global war on terror, said a senior Pakistani official, whose information was corroborated by two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials. "Al-Libi had one mission: Kill Bush and Musharraf," the Pakistani official told The News. "He wanted to kill Bush in the White House, preferably."

"It was clearly something they wanted to do. There's no question about that. It's the holy grail of jihad," a senior U.S. counterterrorism official confirmed. Al-Libi organized several failed assassination attempts on Musharraf before he was nabbed, officials have said. But the plot by Al Qaeda's international operations chief to send assassins to the U.S. to kill Bush was only disclosed this week.

The officials asked for anonymity because details of the Bush plot are still highly classified. The officials added that there is little evidence the U.S. mission advanced beyond initial planning by Al-Libi in Pakistan. Two years before Al-Libi's capture by Pakistani and CIA operatives in Pakistan's mountainous North-West Frontier province, near where many believe Bin Laden is hiding, American officials were informed by Musharraf envoys that the top Al Qaeda thug was bent on assassinating Bush, officials said.

Officials said it was not known if Bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, personally ordered Al-Libi to hit the U.S. President. Al-Libi replaced 9/11 attacks mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. Al-Libi's aide and successor, Abu Hamza Rabia, was killed this month in Pakistan by a missile fired from an unmanned CIA predator drone, sources said.

How many liberals calling for Bush's impeachment because of the "secret surveillance" being conducted by the NSA are right now in the Islamists' cross-hairs, do you suppose? No doubt the answer is zero. On the other hand, how many of them do you think would be demanding that that same surveillance be expanded if they found out that they themselves were indeed being targeted? Probably about the same number that are currently wailing about Bush's alleged abuse of power.

The Spirit of Iraq

There's a photo montage which does a nice job of capturing the spirit of the recent Iraqi elections at Michael Yon's blog. Go here and follow the link. While you're watching you might keep in mind what it cost to bring this gift to the Iraqis and how important it is that we not listen to the John Murtha and Nancy Pelosi Defeatocrats when they urge us to just give up and get out.

Christian Belief IV

The question remaining from our previous post in the series on Christian belief is why the words of a 1st century Jewish rabbi should carry such enormous metaphysical weight with Christians today. The answer, we said, is that for two thousand years Christians have believed that Jesus was not just a rabbi, not just some specially chosen messenger from God, not just a prophet, but that he was God Himself.

Certainly this is what the Bible teaches about Him and what He said about Himself. Consider a couple of examples from Paul writing about Jesus:

He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. For in Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth...all things have been created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. (Col.1:15-17)

...our great God and savior, Christ Jesus (Titus 2:13)

And here's John describing Christ:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. (Jn 1:1-3)

And the Jews were seeking to kill Him, because He...was...making Himself equal with God. (Jn 5:18)

And Thomas:

Thomas answered and said to Him, "My Lord and my God!" (Jn 20:28)

And here is Jesus speaking of Himself:

The Jews therefore said to Him, "You are not yet fifty years old and have you seen Abraham?" Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly I say to you, before Abraham was born, I AM." Therefore they picked up stones (to stone Him for blasphemy since I AM was a name God assigns to Himself in the Old Testament to indicate His timelessness) (Jn 8:57-59)

"I and the Father are one" (and the same). The Jews took up stones again to stone Him. Jesus answered them..."for which [of my works] are you stoning me?" The Jews answered Him..."for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God." (Jn 10:30-33)

"He who has seen Me has seen the Father." (Jn.14:9)

It is the belief in the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus that separates Christians from other monotheists. It is a belief unique to Christianity among modern world religions. It is also what makes Christmas so significant and special to believers. As the world turns toward Christmas eve we've resolved to keep well in mind why it is that Christians have always thought this birth, this child, to be full of mystery, wonder, awe and love. The Creator of the world, despite our rejection and betrayal of him, is born into the world as a human, to human parents, in the meanest surroundings, so that ultimately He may one day coax us back to Himself. Christmas reminds us all of the depth of His devotion to us. It reminds us that God chose to identify Himself with us in our humanity by sharing in our suffering and enduring an awful physical death, all of which He did as an expression of purest love. It was completely gratuitous. He needn't have done it, but for reasons we can't really understand on this side of eternity, it was apparently the only way He could win us back.

Christmas reminds us that God became man and dwelt among us, but couldn't Jesus have been mistaken about who He was? Couldn't He have been lying? Couldn't He have been deranged? Yes, He could have been any of these which is why we are not just left with a record of what He said about Himself but also a record of what happened at the end of His life. It was these events which authenticated the claims that He and others made about who He was.

More on that after Christmas. In the meantime, we wish all of our readers a wonderful Christmas filled with the love of family and friends.

Plugging Leaks

A guy writes to a blog at National Review Online with a clever idea for how to investigate the leaks from the NSA and CIA concerning domestic surveillance and other matters:

Forget about prosecuting anyone for now. Justice should set up a special full time grand jury, meeting five days a week, to questions everyone connected in any way with the leak, including congressional staffers and elected officials. Everyone gets a grant of immunity for any underlying crimes before testifying. The only thing they can be prosecuted for is perjury.

It would take about an hour to put each person on record against future perjury charges. Do you know reporter x? Did you talk with reporter x, what was the nature of your conversation etc. etc.

Witnesses are required, as a condition of employment by the CIA, to reveal their testimory to CIA counsel. Those who leaked have three options. They can refuse to testify and be held in contempt, since immunity has been granted and fifth amendment protections are irrelevant, at which point the CIA has grounds for dismissing them. They can tell the truth, admit to leaking, and be fired. Or they can lie and hope that Riesen and company won't give them up after sitting in jail for six months. Most will probably tell the truth and resign their positions.

The point here is that instead of dragging this thru the legal system for years, the whole issue could most likely be resolved in a matter of weeks. The removal of these employees would have a powerful deterrent effect as well.

Interesting idea, but we still think the leakers should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The Real Setback in the Dover Trial

There is much to criticize in the 139 page decision handed down by Judge John Jones after the Dover ID trial, and we'll take a look at some of that in the days ahead. The undoing of this case for the defense, however, was the perceived, or actual, dishonesty on the part of a couple of the Dover school board members. The saddest legacy of this whole affair is not that the board sought to inform students that there are legitimate alternatives to the materialist narrative on origins but rather the discredit that some of them brought upon the word "Christian" by publicly denying having said what they evidently did say and, worse, by denying it while under oath.

Secularist and Darwinian blogs are touting their conduct as typical of Christians in general, and ID advocates in particular, and surely the message will be repeated and amplified by the media, in ways both subtle and not so subtle, that anyone who advocates ID is a liar and that Christians can not be trusted in positions of civic responsibility.

Christianity Today concludes a fine report on the court's decision with these words:

When it comes down to it, though, which do you think God cares more about? That those who act in his name got a school district to call Darwinian evolution a theory, or that the entire world now considers them perjurers?

The impression left by the conduct of a few people, no matter how well-meaning their original intention, has probably done far more to set back the cause of ID than all the expert testimony offered by the plaintiffs and all the negative media commentary spawned throughout the trial. People will accept or reject ideas they don't feel particularly competent to evaluate themselves on the basis of whether or not they feel they can trust those who do have expertise to be telling them the truth. To the extent that one or two of the board members have been called liars by the trial judge and to the extent that those individuals are identified with Intelligent Design, ID will have been wounded and discredited in the eyes of a public that is largely confused about the philosophic and scientific questions ID addresses.

The lesson for all of us, whichever side of this debate we're on, is that no matter how right we think we are, our opinions on matters like these are not so important that we should ever sacrifice our integrity to promote them.

Christian Belief III

Continuing our series on basic Christian convictions we turn next to the idea of eternal life. One of the things we learn in the Bible is that death is not the end of our existence. Man has always yearned to live, to survive the death of his body, but apart from any revelation from God he has no reason to think that there's any life beyond this one.

The New Testament makes it clear, however, that the death of this physical body is not unlike the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. Just as the butterfly emerges transformed from the chrysalid, so, too, we are assured, we take on a whole new form of life and being.

This makes, or should make, an enormous difference in the way we view this life. If the atheistic materialist is right and death really is the end for each of us, then this life has precious little meaning. Death obliterates everything, nothing we do ultimately means a thing. Our lives are like the flash of a firefly's light in the dark night. It appears and then it's gone, forever. If death is the end then there's no reason at all why anyone should live one way rather than another. Nothing really matters, so whether one lives like Adolf Hitler or Mother Teresa it's all the same. When Hitler and Mother Teresa died they both ceased to exist, their fate, their destinies were the same so what difference did their decisions about how they would conduct their lives ultimately make?

If death is the end, there's no ultimate justice, no recompense for those who've done terrible things and caused great suffering. Such people will not be punished and those who've done wonderful things fare no better than those who didn't. So what's the point? If death is the end then we're just temporary assemblages of atoms that are destined to become topsoil. There's no dignity or value in being just a lump of flesh and bone. If atheism is true then man has no dignity or worth. He's just an animal to be herded and manipulated to suit the whim of whomever has the power to impose his will on the rest.

Christians, however, believe that when we die something of us lives on. Call it our soul, the totality of information that gives an exhaustive description of who we are. This information that describes us exists in the mind of God and is reinstantiated in some other body, some other mode of expression, when this material body is no longer able to function. Because our soul is information in the mind of God, it never ceases to exist. It's always in His database, as it were, ready to be downloaded at the next iteration of our existence. Because of this each of our lives, being eternal, is infinitely important and meaningful. Because of this we can hope that justice does exist and we have a reason for believing that the moral choices we make really do matter. Our eternal destiny may hinge upon them.

Why do Christians believe this? What do they base their hope upon? Consider just a few of the words of Jesus on the topic:

"Whoever believes [in me] may have eternal life." (Jn.3:15).

"He who believes in the Son has eternal life." (Jn.3:36)

"But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst but the water that I shall give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life." (Jn.4:14)

"Already he who reaps....is gathering fruit for life eternal." (Jn.4:36)

"My sheep hear my voice...and I give eternal life to them and they shall never perish; and no one will snatch them out of my hand." (Jn.10:28)

It's clear that Jesus believed that there was life after physical death, but this raises a question: Why should we place confidence in the words of an itinerant rabbi who lived in an obscure corner of the world two thousand years ago. The answer is that Christians have always believed that Jesus was not just a rabbi, not even just a man, but that he is in some sense divine. That He is God.

That'll be our topic in the next post in the series.

Christmas Message

I'm (Bill) going to be away for the Christmas holiday and probably won't have access to post anything so I thought I would leave you with a singularly unique thought that might be inspirational during this special time of the year.

I came up empty with nothing to say that would capture the significance of Christmas...until I found this which says it all much better than I ever could...

Mary did you know

God bless all of us during this celebration of God's gift to us, the birth of Christ.

Creation Myth For Young Materialists

Joe Carter has a clever creation story for young materialists that deserves as wide an audience as possible so we post it here, with Carter's introduction, in its entirety:

Throughout history children have been awed and thrilled by retellings of their culture's creation story. Aztec's would tell of the Lady of the Skirt of Snakes, Phoenicians about the Zophashamin, and Jews and Christians about the one true God -- Jehovah. But there is one unfortunate group -- the children of materialists - that has no creation myth to call its own. When an inquisitive tyke asks who created the sun, the animals, and mankind, their materialist parents can only tell them to read a book by Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins.

No child, though, should have to go without an answer which is why I've decided to take the elements of materialism and shape them into an accurate, though mythic, narrative. This is what our culture has been missing for far too long -- a creation story for young materialists.

******

In the beginning was Nothing and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it explode. The explosion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.

For no particular Reason - for Reason is rarely particular -- Time and Chance took a liking to this wet little blue rock and so decided to stick around and see what adventures they might have. The pair thought the Earth was intriguing and pretty, but also rather dull and static. They fixed upon an idea to change Everything (just a little) by creating a special Something. Time and Chance roamed the planet, splashing through the oceans and scampering through the mud, in search of materials. But though they looked Everywhere there was a Missing Ingredient that they needed in order to make a Something that could create more of the same Somethings.

They called to their friend Everything to help. Since Everything had been Everywhere she would no doubt be able to find the Missing Ingredient. And indeed she did, hidden away in a small alcove called Somewhere, Everything found what Time and Chance had needed all along: Information. Everything put the Information on a piece of ice and rock that happened to be passing by the planet Pluto and sent it back to her friends on Earth.

Now that they had Information, Time and Chance were finally able to create a self-replicating Something which they called Life. Once they created the Life they found that it not only became more Somethings it began to become Otherthings too! The Somethings and the Otherthings began to fill all the Earth -- from the bottom of the oceans to the top of the sky. Their creation, which began as a single Something eventually became millions of Otherthings.

Time and Chance, though, where the bickering sort and were constantly feuding over which of them was the most powerful. One day they began to argue over who had been most responsible for creating Life. Everything (who was constantly eavesdropping) overheard the spat and suggested that they settle the debate by putting their creative skills to work on a new creature called Man. They all thought is was a splendid plan - Man was a dull, hairy beast who would indeed provide a suitable challenge - and began to boast about who could create an ability, which they called Consciousness, that would allow Man to be aware of Chance, Time, Everything, and Nothing.

Chance, who had always been a bit of a dawdler, got off to a slow start so it was Time, who never rested, that was able to complete the task first. Time rushed around, filling the gooey matter inside each Man's head with Consciousness. But as he was gloating over his victory he noticed a strange reaction. When Man could see that Everything had been created by Time, Chance, and Nothing his Consciousness would fill up with Despair.

Chance immediately saw a solution to the problem and used the remaining materials she was using to make Consciousness to create Beliefs. When Chance mixed Beliefs into the grey goo, Man stopped filling with Despair and started creating his own Illusions. These Illusions took various forms - God, Purpose, Meaning - but they were almost always effective in preventing Man from filling up with Despair.

Nothing, who tended to be rather forgetful, remembered her creation and decided to take a look around Everything. When she saw what Time and Chance had done on planet Earth she was mildly amused but forbid them to fill any more creatures with Consciousness or Beliefs (which is why Man is the only Something that has both). But Nothing took a fancy to Man and told Time and Chance that when each one's Life ran out that she would take him or her and make them into Nothing too.

And that is why, my young friends, when Man loses his Life he goes from being a Something created by Time and Chance into becoming like his creator - Nothing.

The End

Well, it's certainly the end if you're a materialist.

Behe on Dover

BeliefNet has an interview with Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe on the Dover verdict. Behe's not impressed:

What is your reaction to Judge Jones' decision in the Dover intelligent design case?

I'm very disappointed in it, because not only did he say that the school board was motivated by religious feelings, but he said that intelligent design itself is religious. And I simply disagree with that. It seems that he simply adopted all of the arguments of the plaintiffs and just dismissed out of hand the arguments of the witnesses for the defendants [the Dover Area School Board, which instituted the policy of reading a statement informing students of gaps in Darwin's theory of evolution and directing them to an intelligent design textbook titled "Of Pandas and People."] So, it's a drag.

Judge Jones says the motivation behind the school board's policy was primarily religious and so violated what is known as the Lemon test, arising from the 1971 Supreme Court decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman,-that the primary motivation for public policy decisions cannot be the promotion of a religious perspective.

I don't know what the motives of the Dover board were. I didn't listen to their testimony. But the question is, can ID be investigated solely because of interests other than religious ones? I think the answer is clearly yes. It's an explanation that immediately suggests itself when one learns about the complexity of life. And so does not necessarily arise from religious motivations.

You can find the rest of the interview at the above link.

LaShawn Barber

LaShawn Barber has been accused of hating black people because she refuses to endorse quotas, affirmative action, and other nostrums out of the liberal goody bag. She gives a marvelous apologia at her blog. Here's a taste:

I am more critical of blacks than I am of whites because, no offense, I care more about what happens to blacks. That is, I care whether they're valuing education as highly as they should, whether they're pushing themselves and their children to be the best and not wallowing in excuses or hurling unfounded charges of racism.

Having grown up black among black family and friends, I noticed a certain undercurrent that didn't have a name. Whether a person actually suffered from racial discrimination or not, there was an urge to "keep whitey on the hook," a term I picked up from John McWhorter. He articulated it so well in Authentically Black. We are never to allow whites to forget our historical grievances, whether an individual white person was guilty of discrimination or not. Most whites seem intimidated by blacks who do this. I dare say some of my white commenters are probably intimidated as well, despite their boldness on this blog.

I vowed to take the opposite approach. Rather than using this blog to bit** and moan session about slavery, institutional racism and such, I'd use it to "keep blacks on the hook." It's a fresh approach and much more interesting than telling whites how racist they are. Blacks need to be reminded, constantly, of our responsibility in this mess.

One of the government policies I hate is skin color preferences, which I've written about ad nauseum and will continue to do so as long as it exists. So-called affirmative action was intended to include more blacks in the candidate pool, but it has become the biggest entitlement program ever conceived. It has nothing to do with so-called racial discrimination and everything to do with lowered standards.

Apparently, it's difficult to find black job candidates and potential university students with credentials comparable to whites. On the one hand, some blacks claim that credentials are comparable, but whites need a "push" to hire or admit. On the other hand, some blacks claim that "comparable" is relative. Just because a black person has a lower score, it doesn't mean he's not qualified for a job or admission. It is reasonable, however, to set hiring and admissions criteria, and if your score is below the threshold, you are, by those standards, not qualified. Unfortunately, some blacks - not all, thank goodness - see racial motives behind everything.

I hate "affirmative action" because it's immoral, unconstitutional, embarrassingly unfair, and undignified.

If blacks with comparable credentials are being passed over, blanket skin color preference policies are not the remedy. Courts are where such disputes should be heard. If blacks are passed over because they don't have comparable scores, we need to address the problem at a much earlier stage. We all know how dumbed down government schools have become. Get the socialist bureaucrats out of the front offices and demand better for your kids. Fight for school choice, support rigorous standards, and advocate excellence, not mediocrity. And for the love of God, stop making excuses. Discipline your children to turn off that idiot box and study. Embrace and reward studious behavior and penalize laziness.

Despite government policies designed to force equal outcomes, thanks to human nature, it ain't going to happen. We each have different or varying degrees of talent, drive, and motivation. This is where "diversity" bites liberals on the rear end. In a society as diverse as America, individuals will never have equal stuff. You won't find equal outcomes within the same biological family, for crying out loud, so how can you expect to find it within a diverse country???

Equal opportunity is the best we humans can hope for and what the Constitution guarantees. That document does not have the power to ensure equal distribution of material wealth, nor should it. I'm glad to know that more people are publicly expressing their disdain for skin color distinctions imposed by government.

Go to her blog (linked above) for a lot more. She's feisty and decidedly un-PC. Would that more people, both black and white, thought as she does.

Go Ahead, Make My Day

The Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot...again, according to this column by John McIntyre at RealClear Politics.com. Here are some highlights from McIntyre's essay:

The public resents the overkill from Abu Ghraib and the hand-wringing over whether captured terrorists down in Gitmo may have been mistreated. They want Kahlid Mohamed, one of the master minds of 9/11 and a top bin Laden lieutanent, to be water-boarded if our agents on the ground think that is what necessary to get the intel we need. They want the CIA to be aggressively rounding up potential terrorists worldwide and keeping them in "black sites" in Romania or Poland or wherever, because the public would rather have suspected terrorists locked away in secret prisons in Bulgaria than plotting to kill Americans in Florida or California or New York.

The public also has the wisdom to understand that when you are at war mistakes will be made. You can't expect 100% perfection. So while individuals like Kahled Masri may have been mistakenly imprisoned, that is the cost of choosing to aggressively fight this enemy. Everyone understands that innocents were killed and imprisoned mistakenly in World War II. Had we prosecuted WWII with the same concern for the enemy's "rights" the outcome very well might have been different.

One of the major problems working against Democrats is many on their side appear to be rooting for failure in Iraq and publicly ridicule the idea that we actually might win. When this impression is put in context of the debate over eavesdropping or the Patriot Act, Democrats run the significant risk of being perceived to be more concerned with the enemy's rights than protecting ordinary Americans. This is a loser for Democrats.

If Democrats want to make this spying "outrage" a page one story they are fools walking right into a trap. Now that this story is out and the security damage is already done, let's have a full investigation into exactly who the President spied on and why. Let's also find out who leaked this highly classified information and prosecute them to the full extent of the law. If the president is found to have broken the law and spied on political opponents or average Americans who had nothing to do with terrorism, then Bush should be impeached and convicted.

But unlike Senator Levin, who claimed on Meet The Press yesterday not to know what the President's motives were when he authorized these eavesdropping measures, I have no doubt that the President's use of this extraordinary authority was solely an attempt to deter terrorist attacks on Americans and our allies. Let the facts and the truth come out, but the White House's initial response is a pretty powerful signal that they aren't afraid of where this is heading.

Bush hit a low point last summer and Fall with the PR disaster of Katrina and the Harriet Miers nomination and his relative silence about the war in Iraq. The Democrats, seeing an opportunity to capitalize, rushed in like a mob of thugs each vying to get a good kick in on the president, but in the process they reminded the country why they don't want Democrats in control of national security. In word and deed they painted themselves as the party of defeat and retreat, the Defeatocrat party, as they're now being called in the blogosphere.

The president has apparently had enough of the pummeling he's been taking, and has come off the ropes with hard combinations to the Defeatocrats' vitals. His approval ratings are beginning to climb into the high 40's as the public becomes more aware that Iraq is not at all the mess that the Dems have portrayed it, the economy is robust, and we haven't had a terrorist attack on our soil since Bush took the war to the Middle East. If the Democrats want to question Bush's integrity on the secret surveillance and hold investigations, all they'll succeed in doing is showing the public how diligently the president has been working to protect them from al Qaeda. George Bush should send a memo to Harry Reid, "Go ahead, Harry, make my day."

Taboo

The audacious Jennifer Senior apparently enjoys professional danger. She's written an article in New York magazine which explores the work of two researchers who live even more dangerously, Henry Harpending, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Utah, and Gregory Cochran, an independent scholar. She writes that:

The two shopped around a paper that tried to establish a genetic argument for the fabled intelligence of Jews. It contended that the diseases most commonly found in Ashkenazim-particularly the lysosomal storage diseases, like Tay-Sachs-were likely connected to and, indeed, in some sense responsible for outsize intellectual achievement in Ashkenazi Jews....Most American academics expected the thing to drop like a stone.

Yet to invoke the genome as an explanation for anything more complicated than illness or the most superficial traits (like skin color) is still considered taboo, as Harvard president Larry Summers discovered when he suggested the reason for so few female math and science professors might lurk in scribbles of feminine DNA (rather than, say, the hostile climes of the classroom, the diminished expectations of women's parents, or a curious cultural receptivity to Pamela Anderson's charms).

Though Jews make up a mere 0.25 percent of the world's population and a mere 3 percent of the United States', they account, according to their paper, for 27 percent of all American Nobel Prize winners, 25 percent of all ACM Turing Award winners for computer science, and 50 percent of the globe's chess champions. (What the paper doesn't say is that these numbers seem to be tallied for optimum Jewishness, counting as Jews those who have as few as one Jewish grandparent to claim; it also wrongly assumes these winners are all Ashkenazim. But still.) Cochran and Harpending also cite studies claiming that Ashkenazim have the highest IQ of any ethnic group for which there's reliable data, perhaps as much as a full standard deviation above the general European average, which means, at the far end of the spectrum, that 23 per thousand Ashkenazim have an IQ over 140, as opposed to 4 per thousand Northern Europeans.

Freud and Marx, Einstein and Bohr, Mendelssohn and Mahler. The brothers Gershwin. The brothers Marx. Woody Allen. Bob Dylan. Franz Kafka. Claude L�vi-Strauss. Bobby Fischer. The list of accomplished and brilliant Jews seems endless and begs an explanation.

Harpending and Cochran's study, though, has produced a great deal of consternation and criticism, not because people don't think that Jews really are smarter than the average Caucasian but because there's a very dangerous flip side to the discussion. If intelligence is correlated to ethnicity or race then...are we heading toward another Bell Curve debacle which brought no end of invective and criticism upon the head of author Charles Murray? Here lies ground the prudent academic dare not tread upon, and in order to avoid it all statements of the obvious, for example, that Jews and Asians seem to be disproportionately brilliant must be treated as if they carried HIV.

The problem with saying such things out loud in public is that people's minds immediately fly to another obviously disproportionate giftedness, that of African-American athleticism. So what's wrong with that, you ask? Silly you. You must be from Mars.

As William Buckley is fond of putting it, he who says A must say B. The flip side of the prowess displayed by Jews in the realm of the mind is that it certainly seems that Jews and, to a lesser extent, Asians are athletic underachievers (at least in most of the sports popular in America). But now we've gone and done it, because this observation invites the forbidden question of why African-Americans, taken as a whole, seem to be conversely situated.

Studies like the one Senior writes about are not welcome in the PC world of academe where uncomfortable racial implications of research are best swept quietly into the closet. If Jewish, and Asian, intellectual achievement is largely genetically explained then, the dread question is, does the failure of African Americans to do as well in the classroom as they do on the athletic field also have a genetic explanation? And this question, it is objected, plays right into the hands of racists. To which I, being one who is gifted neither intellectually nor athletically, say phooey.

Genuine racists, those who could and would do harm to people simply because of their race, are an insignificant fraction of the population today, at least among whites, despite what the race hustlers would have us believe. It's time we start addressing uncomfortable facts about ourselves like grown-ups instead of stuffing them in our national anxiety closet when they conflict with what we'd like them to be. We are better served by confronting difficult truths, if indeed truths they be, than by hiding from them. The more thoroughly we understand ourselves the more effectively we can work to make life better for all Americans. We say, let's take our hands from over our mouths, eyes, and ears, and let's do the research. Let the facts fall where they may. We shouldn't fear knowledge.

Well, Is It or Isn't It?

Compare this statement by Jamie Gorelick President Clinton's Deputy Attorney General in 1994 --

"The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General.

"It is important to understand, that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities." - Jamie Gorelick testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994 (Thanks to Byron York).

With this statement by Jamie Gorelick today:

"The issue here is this: If you're John McCain and you just got Congress to agree to limits on interrogation techniques, why would you think that limits anything if the executive branch can ignore it by asserting its inherent authority?" 12/20/05 Washington Post, p. A10. (Thanks to Cliff May)

Ms Gorelick's legal opinions concerning what presidents can and cannot do seem clearly to be a function of which party the president is a member of.

Follow Up

Not too long ago I posted an article that discussed the merits of acquiring gold when it had just reached the $540 per ounce area. In it, I pointed out that one might save $10 or $20 dollars if they waited for gold to drop back to a lower level but I also pointed out the risk of being left at the station only to see that the gold train had pulled away...without them.

Perhaps you spoke with your broker about gold. Well, this was most likely one of the guys who was touting the NASDAQ in 2000. I suspect they're not going to recommend gold simply because they stand nothing to gain. They're job is to sell paper...stocks. That's how they make commissions and their living. No, one has to stop listening to the siren songs of the last decade and look around a see what is going on and make their decisions accordingly.

Today, the price of gold has closed at $492 per ounce. Wow, was my statement really bad? Was your broker right after all? Well not really. The number one rule of investing is to not miss a bull market. The only way one can do that is to establish a position and be in...through the short-term highs and lows. Since the price of things fluctuates going up and down, the prudent individual invests over time using a mechanism known as dollar cost averaging. This means they make their acquisitions over time which smoothes out the variations. If I purchased an ounce of gold at $540 and a month later the price is at $460 and I purchase another ounce, my average cost is $500. Similarly, if after I purchased my first ounce, at some time in the future gold is at $620 and I purchase another ounce, my average cost is $580.

The take away message is that there is only one point to remember: in a bull market, (in 2000 gold was at $250 per ounce) the important thing is to establish one's position. The good news is that one doesn't have to plunge into the market hoping, against the odds, that they have gotten in at the bottom. They can implement a disciplined, orderly, regularly scheduled program of acquisition knowing that the ups and downs are smoothed out as they do so. It's next to impossible to buy on the exact low and the risk of trying to do it is that you may find yourself out of the market looking at higher cost to get in.

The price of gold is rising in what is called a channel. The channel can be illustrated by drawing two parallel lines on a graph of the price of gold over years. The lower line traces the lows of the price and the upper line traces the highs. They tend to illustrate the overbought and oversold state of a given item. Given that in 2000, gold was at $250 per ounce, the channel illustrates a bull market is in play. Also, given our governments proclivity to print money, it's no wonder. Last month, gold broke out of that channel to the upside and may be in the process of establishing a new channel at a higher angle of ascent, or it may return to the boundaries of the original channel. It doesn't really matter as ultimately, the trend appears to be up.

So, from a technical analysis perspective, given our channel work, the price of gold could possibly go to the lower line of the channel, approximately $460 - $480 (depending on the time frame) and if that level holds, the price should continue up again to the upper channel line of approximately $520-$540. On the other hand, if the price of gold fails to meaningfully penetrate the upper line of the channel ($480 - $490) a new channel could be established meaning that the rise of gold would be more vertical.

Got that? If not, feel free to drop us a line on the Feedback page and I would be happy to provide more explanation.

Through the last five years of the '90s, the slogan in the stock market was "buy the dips". Sure, it was a bull market and people became conditioned to buy any dips almost guaranteeing a profit. That behavior also ensured the bull market...until 2000 when the bull market was perceived to be a bubble and finally burst. Unfortunately, as the markets continued to plummet, they "bought the dips" like conditioned white rats (see B.F. Skinner on behavioral modification, reinforcement history and classical conditioning) during the corrections higher only to find the trend ultimately going lower. Since I believe the bull market in gold has 5 to 10 years to go, the "buy the dips" strategy makes sense once again but personally, I would only use it as a supplement to my basic strategy of dollar cost averaging mentioned above.

Lastly, gold is insurance against the loss of one's wealth through the erosion of inflation and a general disenchantment and distrust of fiat currencies around the globe. Since it appears that this erosion is going to continue for the foreseeable future, it explains why the trend in the price of gold is up and it matters little if one acquires gold at every periodic bottom. What matters is that they acquire gold.

Hiding WMD

This report just about cinches the speculation that Syria has a death wish:

LONDON - Syria has signed a pledge to store Iranian nuclear weapons and missiles. The London-based Jane's Defence Weekly reported that Iran and Syria signed a strategic accord meant to protect either country from international pressure regarding their weapons programs. The magazine, citing diplomatic sources, said Syria agreed to store Iranian materials and weapons should Teheran come under United Nations sanctions.

Iran also pledged to grant haven to any Syrian intelligence officer indicted by the UN or Lebanon. Five Syrian officers have been questioned by the UN regarding the Hariri assassination, Middle East Newsline reported.

"The sensitive chapter in the accord includes Syria's commitment to allow Iran to safely store weapons, sensitive equipment or even hazardous materials on Syrian soil should Iran need such help in a time of crisis," Jane's said. The accord also obligated Syria to continue to supply the Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah with weapons, ammunition and communications. Iran has been the leading weapons supplier to Hizbullah, with about 15,000 missiles and rockets along the Israeli-Lebanese border.

The accord, negotiations of which began in 2004, was signed on Nov. 14 and meant to prepare for economic sanctions imposed on either Iran or Syria. Under the accord, Jane's said, Iran would relay financial aid to Syria in an effort to ease Western sanctions in wake of the UN determination that Damascus was responsible for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Iran also pledged to supply a range of military aid to Syria. Jane's cited technology for weapons of mass destruction as well as conventional arms, ammunition and training of Syrian military. Teheran would seek to upgrade Syrian ballistic missiles and chemical weapons systems. Under the accord, Iran would also be prepared to operate "advanced weapon systems in Syria during a military confrontation." Jane's said.

Hmmm. We thought Iran's pursuit of nuclear power was completely peaceful. Odd that they'd be signing accords to hide weapons they have no intention of building. And another thing: might this report hold some clue as to where Iraq's WMD disappeared to? Just wondering.

The Dover Decision

Judge John E. Jones has rendered his decision on the Dover Intelligent Design case and although we differ with him at several points in his 138 page opinion we agree generally with his conclusion:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board's ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs' scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.

To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an Case 4:04-cv-02688-JEJ Document 342 Filed 12/20/2005 Page 137 of 139 imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy.

The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, � 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.

The Dover Board members who sought to to get ID into the schools made at least two mistakes. They were clearly motivated by religious impulses in what they did and, as the judge points out elsewhere in his decision, they utterly failed the Supreme Court's Lemon test for acceptable intrusions of religious content into public schools.

Secondly, they sought to fight this out as a battle over whether ID is real science rather than as a conflict between competing views in the philosophy of science which is what it really is.

At any rate, the decision does seem narrow, applying, as it does, specifically to Dover, and we haven't had a chance yet to see what legal minds on both sides of the issue think about how this will effect other attempts to have ID presented in schools. One thing, however, is almost certain: very few schools are going to be willing to take the risk of introducing ID formally into a science curriculum after what happened in the Dover case.

Whose Side Are They On?

John Hinderaker at PowerLine.com offers this analysis of the media brouhaha over the New York Times story about secret surveillance of al Qaeda allies in the U.S. He makes an excellent point about what the constitution says about search warrants, but the most chilling stuff is in the last paragraph. The leakers and the Times, in their Ahab-like pursuit of the Bush administration, may well have made it very much more difficult to protect our families from terrorist attacks on our soil.

Hinderaker writes:

[T]hose who leap to the conclusion that the intercepts must be unconstitutional seem to assume that all searches require a warrant. That is not correct. The Fourth Amendment prohibits "unreasonable" searches and seizures. Warrantless searches are legal, and appropriately so, in a number of circumstances.

Second, the issue of speed is critical. When we capture a cell phone or laptop being used by a terrorist, it is usually because we captured or killed the terrorist. The amount of time we have to exploit the capture is very short. The terrorists will soon figure out that their confederate is out of business, and stop using his cell phone numbers and email addresses. So if we are to benefit from the capture, we must begin obtaining information right now.

A delay of even a few days may render the information useless, as the terrorists will have realized that their colleague has been neutralized. And it is likely that the first hours or even minutes after we obtain a cell phone number or email address are most apt to yield helpful new information. So it is easy to see why going through the process needed to obtain a warrant from the FISA court would undermine the effectiveness of our anti-terror operations.

This is entirely different from the situation we are all familiar with, where wiretaps are authorized against organized crime figures. Such wiretaps are not executed in connection with an arrest. They often continue for months or even years. There is ordinarily nothing about the context to suggest that the utility of the wiretap will expire in a matter of days, if not hours. Hence the delay required to obtain a warrant is usually immaterial.

Under the circumstances we face in dealing with the terrorist threat, is it unreasonable--the Constitutional standard--to begin immediately intercepting calls being made to a captured terrorist cell phone, whether those calls originate in the U.S. or another country? Of course not.

I'm just guessing here, but I suspect that we have technology in place that allows us to begin intercepting phone calls within a matter of minutes after we learn of a phone number being used by an al Qaeda operative overseas. My guess is that there is a system into which our military can plug a new phone number, and begin receiving intercepts almost immediately. I hope so, anyway; and I'm guessing that the disclosure of this system to al Qaeda is one of the reasons why President Bush is so unhappy with the New York Times. If we do have such a technology, it certainly would help to explain the remarkable fact that the terrorists haven't executed a successful attack on our soil since September 2001. And the disclosure of such a system, by leaking Democrats in the federal bureaucracy and the New York Times, makes it more likely, by an unknowable percentage, that al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations will launch successful attacks in the future.

There certainly seems to be cause here for an investigation into the source of this story. The leakers should be prosecuted and the Times should be economically punished by Americans fed up with the casual attitude displayed by liberals toward our national security. Perhaps it is time to indeed begin to start questioning the Left's patriotism, especially in light of the fact that, as Byron York demonstrates in an article at National Review Online, what the Bush administration did was done by every president, at least since Reagan.

Moreover, it was a policy vigorously defended by the Democrats in the Clinton administration whose point man (woman) on the issue was Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick argued in 1994 that the president has the power to do just what George Bush is being pilloried by Democrats for doing today. These people either have no memory or they are astonishing hypocrites.

Symposium on Torture

A number of Christian thinkers have been invited to participate at Evangelical Outpost in a symposium on the question of the use of torture:

"Torture is not always impermissible," argues Charles Krauthammer in "The Truth About Torture", his provocative essay in The Weekly Standard. "However rare the cases, there are circumstances in which, by any rational moral calculus, torture not only would be permissible but would be required (to acquire life-saving information). And once you've established the principle, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all that's left to haggle about is the price. In the case of torture, that means that the argument is not whether torture is ever permissible, but when--i.e., under what obviously stringent circumstances: how big, how imminent, how preventable the ticking time bomb."

The "truth" about torture is an issue being widely addressed throughout the country, yet our sense is that the Christian intellectual community has been relatively silent on this important issue. We believe a symposium of this nature could significantly aid and inform the Church and the wider culture and help provide clarification on the principles involved in judging this practice. In order to open the dialogue we have asked several leading Christian ethicists and opinion journalists to respond to Dr. Krauthammer's article and to address the questions: "What is the truth about torture from a Christian worldview? Is torture ever allowed? And if so, under what conditions and circumstances?"

The symposiasts include: Darrell Cole, John Jefferson Davis, Daniel Heimbach, Mark Liederbach, Kenneth Magnuson, Albert Mohler, Richard John Neuhaus, and Robert Vischer and their essays can be found here.

Kinsley's Anti-Torture Argument

It looks as if the McCain amendment on torture has unstoppable momentum. Evidently, our intrepid Congressmen and women are scared to death of being seen as even remotely in favor of being mean to terrorists. But as I've written on several occasions recently it's a mistake to embrace a prohibition on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment without clarifying exactly what cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment are. Without guidance on this matter American interrogators are going to be very reluctant to aggressively question detainees, and consequently innocent people are going to die.

There should indeed be laws governing the treatment of prisoners, but to ban absolutely anything that could be construed by a sufficiently clever or creative lawyer as cruel or degrading is to needlessly jeopardize peoples' lives. Even so, Michael Kinsley disagrees and asks some thoughtful questions of those who believe, as I do, that laws against torture should not be absolutized. For starters, he poses this scenario:

What if you knew for sure that the cute little baby burbling and smiling at you from his stroller in the park was going to grow up to be another Hitler, responsible for a global cataclysm and millions of deaths? Would you be justified in picking up a rock and bashing his adorable head in? Wouldn't you be morally depraved if you didn't?

Tough question, of course, but ethical conundrums which rely upon situations that can't possibly occur in the real world are singularly unhelpful in clarifying important issues. In the real world there simply is no possible way anyone could know what Kinsley posits, so he's proposing an impossible state of affairs and then asking what one would do. There's no way to answer the question.

Or what if a mad scientist developed a poison so strong that two drops in the water supply would kill everyone in Chicago? And you could destroy the poison, but only by killing the scientist and 10 innocent family members? Should you do it?

This scenario, or one like it, is much more plausible than the first and indeed has occured frequently since 9/11. We have a chance to kill a high-value terrorist murderer but certain of his innocent family members may be killed as well. Would it be wrong to do it? Not necessarily. If this is the only practical way to get the terrorist and as long as the deaths of his family are incidental to the attack on the terrorist then, although it would be tragic, it would not be immoral. It would be to a pacifist, of course, but I don't believe Kinsley to be a pacifist.

Or what if an international terrorist planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Manhattan, set to go off in an hour and kill a million people. You've got him in custody, but he won't say where the bomb is. Is it moral to torture him until he gives up the information?

Yes, of course, provided that no more pain is applied than what is necessary to elicit the information. Even John McCain agrees with this. He just wants to make it illegal and say it'd be acceptable, in an instance such as Kinsley proposes, to break the law.

Indeed, it's a strange aspect of McCain's proposal that almost everyone who has talked about it, including John McCain himself, and most recently Colin Powell, have said that, although there should be no exceptions to the ban on torture, there are circumstances which would make violating the law against it the right thing to do, and that the person who breaks the law in those circumstances should expect that the law will take them into account. In other words, they're saying, torture is not always wrong, but we should pretend that it is. This is a rather unsatisfactory way of looking at the matter. Kinsley himself admits the inadequacy of this position:

But what about [the ticking time bomb] conundrum? Will you eschew torture even when a few minutes of it, applied to a very bad person, would save a million lives? One answer is that the law wouldn't really be enforced in such an extreme situation....Surely [though] every law should at least aspire to be enforced. Or-an even more modest standard-a law should not depend on unenforceability for its very justification. Furthermore, a law expresses a social norm even apart from its enforcement. If the hypothetical situation ever arises, something will happen. What do we want that something to be?

But back to Kinsley's main argument:

If you would torture to save a million lives, would you do it for half a million? A thousand? Two dozen? What if there's only a two-out-of-three chance that person you're torturing has the crucial information? A 50-50 chance? One chance in 10? At what point does your moral calculus change, and why?

Good question, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be done to save even a single life. Nevertheless, his question about uncertainty is more difficult. It's not without analogs, however. We face the same problem with capital punishment. Just as in legal cases in which a man may be sentenced to death, we have to be as sure as we can be that the person being interrogated actually possesses the information needed to save lives. Sometimes we may be wrong, but we must do everything practical, given the circumstances, to insure that we're not.

Kinsley continues with his cross-examination:

What about someone wholly innocent? It's hard to imagine a situation where someone who refuses to supply life-saving information could be considered "innocent." But it's not impossible [i.e. suppose the terrorist is unbreakable under pressures applied to his person, but he has a child he dearly loves...] In this cold, hard world, allegedly facing a challenge greater than any the civilized world has faced before, would you torture an innocent individual for five minutes [if it would make the terrorist talk] in order to spare a million innocents from death?

No. The position taken here at Viewpoint is not utilitarian. The utilitarian would argue that the pain sufferered by a single individual is outweighed by the good of saving the lives of the many and therefore the infliction of the pain is the right thing to do. This is unacceptable. The Biblical command to do justice is a morally binding absolute, and if justice means anything, it means that you don't willfully and intentionally harm innocent people, even if it's to accomplish some great good.

If you say yes, [it's okay to] go ahead and torture an innocent person, you have pretty much abandoned the various exquisite moral distinctions that eased your previous abandonment of an absolute ban on torture. But if you say no, [because] my own moral hygiene, or my country's, forbids the torture of an innocent individual, even if the indirect but predictable consequence is a million human deaths, you are more or less back in the camp of the anti-torture absolutists whose simple-minded moral vanity you find so irritating.

Kinsley errs here in confusing the absolutes in question. Just as there is a vast moral gap between murdering an innocent child and executing the thug who murdered her, so, too, is there a vast moral gap between absolutizing torture and absolutizing justice. The presumptive reason for banning torture is that in the usual case it is either uncompassionate or unjust, but in the instance of using pain or degrading treatment on someone who plans to cause the deaths of others, in order to prevent those deaths, it would be uncompassionate or unjust to fail to do so.

Having said that, I should add that I see no objection to deceiving a terrorist into mistakenly believing that his loved one is being tortured if this were the only way to elicit life-saving information from him. Such a tactic, however, would probably be prohibited as "inhuman" under McCain.

Finally, it should be noted that liberals, who scoff at the slippery slope argument when it comes to gay marriage, who fondle nuances like Midas fondled gold, who disparaged Ronald Reagan twenty years ago for having a too simplistic view of the world, and who otherwise abhor absolutes, are now, when it comes to torture, embracing the slippery slope argument, disdaining nuance, and reveling in simplistic absolutes. If the subject matter weren't so somber it'd be funny.

The Only Alternatives: ID or the Multiverse

Physicist Leonard Susskind has written a book titled, Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design in which he seeks to explain away the fine-tuning of the universe by offering the hope that there are something like ten to the 500th power universes out there all with different laws and constants so that one of them just has to be like ours. He suggests that there really are only two options: The existence of zillions of universes, so many that we cannot comprehend the number (To get an idea of the size of the number there are only ten to the 80th atoms in the whole of our universe), or there is only one universe and it was intentionally designed by a cosmic intelligence.

New Scientist runs an interview with Susskind by Amanda Gefter. She asks him:

Gefter: So even if you accept the multiverse and the idea that certain local physical laws are anthropically determined, you still need a unique mega-theory to describe the whole multiverse? Surely it just pushes the question back?

Susskind: Yes, absolutely. The bottom line is that we need to describe the whole thing, the whole universe or multiverse. It's a scientific question: is the universe on the largest scales big and diverse or is it homogeneous? [i.e. Is it many universes or just one, Viewpoint] We can hope to get an answer from string theory and we can hope to get some information from cosmology.

There is a philosophical objection called Popperism that people raise against the landscape idea. Popperism [after the philosopher Karl Popper] is the assertion that a scientific hypothesis has to be falsifiable, otherwise it's just metaphysics. Other worlds, alternative universes, things we can't see because they are beyond horizons, are in principle unfalsifiable and therefore metaphysical - that's the objection. But the belief that the universe beyond our causal horizon is homogeneous is just as speculative and just as susceptible to the Popperazzi.

Gefter: If we do not accept the landscape idea are we stuck with intelligent design?

Susskind: I doubt that physicists will see it that way. If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent - maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation - I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.

Nuclear physicist David Heddle responds:

Susskind's answer shows that his book should be subtitled String Theory and the Possible Illusion of Intelligent Design. He has done nothing whatsoever to disprove fine-tuning. Nothing. He has only countered it with a religious speculation in scientific language, a God of the Landscape. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, he tells us that we should embrace the String Theory landscape, not in spite of its ugliness, but rather because of it. Physics should change its paradigm and sing praises to inelegance. Out with Occam's razor, in with Rube Goldberg. Out with reductionism, in with lots of free parameters. Why? Because if we don't (according to Suskind) there really is no way to explain the fine-tuning, except by Intelligent Design. He even likens, in his last sentence quoted above, those physicists who search for the antithesis of his landscape, a simple, beautiful fundamental theory, to IDers.

I think he is correct. For a fundamental theory that predicted all the constants would be a "win" for ID-it would destroy the only real threat to cosmological ID: multiple universes with varying laws of physics.

The subtext (at times explicit) in Susskind's book is that fine-tuning is real, in the sense that our universe really does exist on a knife's edge, so much so that it demands attention. The only possible way that it is an illusion is if our universe is but one of many. To save materialism, Susskind argues that we must explain this fine-tuning, and his landscape [i.e. that there are zillions of universes] has the best chance of playing the role of a white knight.

Susskind's argument demonstrates the desperation of materialists who wish to escape the conclusion that there is an intelligence behind the cosmos. He is willing to jettison the criteria of testability, falsifiability and Occam's razor and accept on faith, without any evidence, that there exits a nearly infinite number of other worlds. With so much cosmological variety, he believes, one of those other worlds just has to possess the extraordinary complex of features required to support life. Thus our universe is not so extraordinary after all.

Susskind's interview makes it plain that the battle over Intelligent Design is not one between science and religion but rather between two different philosophical views of the world. Susskind says that our universe certainly appears to be intricately well-ordered and planned for living things, but that any apparent purpose and intention woven into the parameters of the universe are simply illusions. Given the fact that so many universes exist, he asserts, the existence of one as improbable as ours becomes much less astonishing.

The intelligent design theorist counters that the only evidence we have tells us that this universe is the only one that exists. It tells us that our world is singular, unique, and alone and that this is in any event the most parsimonious hypothesis. Thus we think we see purpose and intentional engineering in the fabric of the cosmos because it's really there, and the only reason one would have for failing to accept this conclusion is an a priori metaphysical commitment to atheism which is not a very scientific approach to the search for truth.

Should anyone question why everyone seems to agree that the universe at least appears to be deliberately fine-tuned we commend either or both of the following: Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen Barr and Nature's Destiny by Michael Denton.