Meet the New Atheists, Same as the Old Atheists

U.S. News and World Report (11/5) recently ran an article titled The New Unbelievers in which the unbelievers in question said some pretty unbelievable things. Here are a few examples:

[Richard Dawkins] and the other new atheists are more interesting when they challenge the unexamined confidence some believers have in the adequacy, if not the necessity, of religion as a guide to the good and moral life. At the very least, the new atheists make a compelling case that moral and socially productive behavior is in no way dependent on religious belief.

Indeed, Dawkins, [Daniel]Dennett, and [Sam]Harris argue that religious beliefs, particularly those derived literally and selectively from religious texts, can lead to behavior that is dubiously moral according to universal principles of right and wrong. The killing of innocents in the name of holy war is only the most obvious instance. Discouraging the distribution of condoms in societies plagued by AIDS on religious principles is another. "Religious people are able to talk about morality without thinking about suffering," says Harris.

Dennett, by contrast, extends a conciliatory hand to believers so long as they are willing to subject any purported God-given moral edict to "the full light of reason, using all the evidence at our command."

Well let's subject the above to the full light of reason. These skeptics maintain that there are universal moral principles that exist independently of God which we can use to evaluate what Christians believe about right and wrong, but they don't say what these principles are. What exactly are they and are they really independent of God?

Presumably, one such principle is that cruelty is morally wrong, but, if so, why is it? What is it about cruelty that makes it wrong? Is it that it hurts people? Why is hurting people wrong? Is hurting people wrong because I wouldn't want someone to hurt me? Of course I wouldn't want to be hurt, but that's no reason why I should not hurt someone else if I can.

Perhaps our skeptic friends would reply that we shouldn't hurt others because if we get caught we'd be punished. Quite so, but then this is a prudential, not a moral, reason why I shouldn't be cruel. If I could be cruel and get away with it there would be nothing immoral about doing so.

The problem for the atheist is that there can be no moral obligation apart from something or someone who has the authority and power to impose that obligation, but the atheistic materialist denies the existence of any such entity, and instead, like a magician finding a coin behind a child's ear, seems to simply pull moral obligation out of thin air.

They may deny this and point out that the consensus among humans is that cruelty is wrong, and therefore it must be, but even if they could know what the consensus is, since when is right and wrong established by whatever the majority believes? What if the majority of people held that atheism is wrong (which it does)? Would Dennett and Dawkins abandon their atheism and bow to that consensus?

Perhaps they would insist that cruelty is wrong because it stifles human fluorishing, but why is that a reason for it to be wrong? Where in the vast reaches of the cosmos do they find the principle that we are obligated to enhance the well-being of others? What reason can they give me why I should not instead adopt the principle that I should enhance my own well-being at the expense of that of others? What makes that principle less moral than the alternative? Is it just that people don't like it as much?

The fact of the matter is that when an atheist starts talking about universal moral principles to which we should all adhere it's about as meaningful as a politician making a campaign speech. Such principles can only exist if there is a universal mind which weaves them into the fabric of creation. If no such mind exists then neither does moral obligation. Morality becomes a matter purely of one's own tastes, preferences, and biases. Moral disputes are like disputes about whether anchovies on a pizza are better than sausage.

When Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris declaim about the moral horror of killing innocents in a holy war they are saying nothing more than that they don't like killing innocents, just like they don't care for anchovies on their pizza. That's nice, but it's a far distance from telling us why killing anyone is actually wrong. This they don't do, because, quite simply, on the assumption of atheism, they can't.

Finally, there was this reliable old irrelevancy often trotted out by religious skeptics to achieve rhetorical ambush of unsuspecting Christians:

Dawkins and other atheists charge that the religiously intense "red" states have higher rates of violent crime and social breakdown than do the liberal "blue" states.

No kidding. This is surely a surpassingly dumb observation. Dawkins apparently believes that those states in which Bush carried a slight majority of the 50% of the people who troubled themselves to vote are filled with more "sinners" than those states in which Kerry won the votes of a slight majority of the 50% of those who went to the polls. What, though, does the political orientation of a state have to do with the crime statistics from that state? It is not, after all, as if everyone in a "red" state were a Christian. Nor is it as if the people who voted for Bush (about 25% to 30% of the eligible voters) are both Christian and criminal.

The question we should ask Prof. Dawkins is not which candidate won the state's electoral votes, but rather who, exactly, in the state is committing crime. When we look at the loci of criminal activity in the U.S. we find them to be invariably concentrated in urban areas and these, even in red states, are overwhelmingly "blue". And, I suspect, overwhelmingly atheist.

Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris flatter themselves that they are among the "brights" in our society. They are the intellectual luminaries, they would have us believe, by whose light the rest of us can, and should, seek to make our way in the world. Unfortunately, the arguments they shine on our path are pretty low-wattage.

Jinxing Pres. Bush

I had two thoughts while reading this report: First, why bother? The president seems to be jinxed enough as it is. Second, this guy sounds like he's right out of the fever swamps of The Daily Kos or Democratic Underground:

A renowned black magic practitioner performed a voodoo ritual Thursday to jinx President George W. Bush and his entourage while he was on a brief visit to Indonesia. Ki Gendeng Pamungkas slit the throat of a goat, a small snake and stabbed a black crow in the chest, stirred their blood with spice and broccoli before drank the "potion" and smeared some on his face.

"I don't hate Americans, but I don't like Bush," said Pamungkas, who believed the ritual would succeed as, "the devil is with me today."

He said the jinx would sent spirits to posses Secret Service personnel guarding Bush and left them in a trance, leading them into falsely thinking the President was under attack, thus eventually causing chaos in Bogor Presidential Palace, where the American leader was scheduled to meet President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Monday.

Imagine. Hoping the devil will help you jinx the evil George Bush. Sounds like something John Kerry would say.

Thoughtful Comments

Check out the Feedback page for some responses to articles posted last week.

Milton Friedman (1912 - 2006)

One of the most influential and consequential economic thinkers since Adam Smith has passed away. Milton Friedman has died at the age of 94. Vivien Lou Chen writes this about Friedman at Bloomberg.com:

Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate economist who shaped the philosophies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and successive Federal Reserve chairmen, has died, his daughter Janet said.

Friedman's theory that inflation results from too much money chasing too few goods inspired a generation of central bankers, beginning with Paul Volcker, who was Fed chairman from 1979 until 1987. Alan Greenspan and Ben S. Bernanke also credit Friedman's work as a blueprint for policy making.

"Friedman's monetary framework has been so influential that, in its broad outlines at least, it has nearly become identical with modern monetary theory and practice," Bernanke said at a conference in October 2003 when he was a Fed governor. He became chairman in February 2006.

Friedman wrote, co-wrote or edited 32 books, including "A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960" with Anna Schwarz in 1963, and argued that the goal of monetary policy should be long-term, stable growth in the supply of money. He championed individual initiative and deregulation and influenced decisions from severing the dollar's peg to gold in the early 1970s to ending the military draft.

"It's hard to think of anyone who's had more of a direct influence on social and economic policy in this generation," said Carnegie Mellon University Professor Allan H. Meltzer, who is preparing a two-volume history of the Fed and has been an adviser to the Bank of Japan. "He, along with others, promoted the idea of low inflation and a more disciplined central bank."

In his later years, Friedman advocated that the Fed adopt an inflation target, a numeric price goal which the central bank should pledge to hit over a specified period of time. He supported George W. Bush's failed effort to overhaul Social Security, counseled California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and predicted the demise of the euro.

With his trademark pronouncement that inflation was "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" Friedman was among the Fed's most vocal critics as inflation accelerated through the 1960s and 1970s. He said the central bank failed to control the supply of money, should be stripped of its autonomy and forced to focus on keeping money supply growth steady at about 3 percent.

The Fed kept its independence. Friedman's arguments were acknowledged, though, when Volcker launched an attack on inflation in 1979 by targeting money supply and pushing up interest rates to crush inflation.

The Brooklyn-born Friedman traveled the world promoting balanced budgets and limited state spending. He joined Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board in the early 1980s, helping guide and reinforce the president's views on government largess and tax reduction.

He served as an adviser to Thatcher, U.K. Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, who pushed for a free-market economy, low taxation, and the sale of state-owned industries. Bush credited Friedman's ideas with bringing inflation under control in Chile, the adoption of a flat tax in Russia, and the creation of personal retirement accounts in Sweden.

Friedman's teachings at the University of Chicago helped foster the "Chicago School" of economics, known for theories associated with free-market libertarianism.

Those ideas were put to use in Chile during the 1970s and 1980s, when a group of economists trained at the University took key government positions under General Augusto Pinochet. The so- called "Chicago Boys" advocated widespread deregulation and privatization, helping Pinochet's military junta bring inflation down from as high as between 700 percent and 1,000 percent.

"He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision: the vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where government is not as free to override their decisions," Bush said in a May 2002 speech at the White House to honor Friedman on his 90th birthday. "All of us owe a tremendous debt to this man's towering intellect and his devotion to liberty."

There's more at the link and also here.

Submit or Fight

Mark Steyn's new book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It has received a lot of praise, and it's one of the books I hope to get to soon. In the meanwhile, this review by Steven Warshawsky in The American Thinker is an eye-opener.

Warshawsky admires Steyn's book as an excellent guide to the nature of the crisis presented to us by Islamic jihad, but he criticizes Steyn for not following his thesis to its logical conclusion. Warshawsky argues that if Steyn is right we are headed ineluctably toward a global war and that as a matter of national security we, and Europe, must immediately stop Muslim immigration.

Warshawsky writes:

Steyn reports that Western women in Europe have an average of 1.4 children, whereas Muslim women [in Europe] have an average of 3.5 children. The result is a "baby boom" among Muslims that, within our lifetimes, will completely change the European countries in which they live. Steyn's analysis strikes me as right on the mark.

Yet after spending page after page highlighting the demographic disaster that awaits Europe (and to a much lesser extent the United States), Steyn fails to state the logical conclusion, which is that Muslim immigration must be stopped. Period.

If one believes, as Steyn clearly does (with strong support from the evidence), that Muslims as a group not only are not assimilating into Western culture but are actively hostile toward the very principles upon which our societies are built, then it is "suicidal" (a term frequently used by Steyn) to permit millions of Muslims to take up residence within our countries.

Warshawsky recognizes all the problems such a drastic measure entails, but, he argues, unless we prefer to live in a state of denial about the threat posed by radical Islamism, such a step is imperative for the security of our nation.

He notes that:

It should not be surprising, then, as Steyn emphasized in a recent column, that the vast majority of Muslims worldwide feel primary loyalty to their religion ("Pan-Islamism"), instead of to the particular nations in which they live. For example, according to a recent poll (cited by Steyn), only 8 percent of Muslims living in Great Britain consider themselves British first, whereas 81 percent consider themselves Muslim first. Given the stark differences between what it means to be British and what it means to be Muslim, these poll results portend a disastrous future for the British nation. Indeed, given the gulf that exists between Western culture and Islamic culture, the growing size and influence of the Muslim world portends a disastrous future for us all.

It might be argued that Christians would also claim to be Christians first and Americans second, but the difference is that Christianity is largely compatible with the fundamental principles upon which this country was founded and until we stray further from those principles than we have so far Christians will be content to live as Americans. This is not the case with many Muslims who find the ideas of the American experiment theologically repugnant. The concept of human equality, freedom of religion, free press, and separation of Church and state are irreconcilable with their interpretation of Islamic law and tradition.

Whether we like it or not, large parts of the Islamic world have declared war on the West. Because Muslim countries, to date, have lacked the military and economic capability to wage conventional warfare against us, they have engaged in vicious acts of terrorism designed to intimidate and undermine Western society. They may soon be in position, through developments in Iran and, perhaps, Pakistan, to commit acts of nuclear blackmail or actual nuclear warfare. (And just imagine if, a few decades from now, a Muslim majority took control of France or England's nuclear arsenal, with the capability to destroy large parts of the United States.) The West can either submit to this violence and intimidation, or we can fight back. But what does "fighting back" mean?

Steyn offers ten measures we can take to "fight back" but Warshawsky notes that at least four of them amount to a tacit declaration of war against the Muslim world. In other words, we seem to have only two options: submit or fight. The only question for those not inclined to submit is what form, exactly, should fighting back take.

The debate over this question will be, I think, the most important political and cultural undertaking of the next ten years.

Conversion of the Purse

Joe Carter, in a post titled Conversion of the Purse, criticizes a friend for being too concerned about the economic peril of the middle class. I think I understand what his friend was trying to say, but Carter is surely right that much of that peril his friend is concerned about the middle class in America has brought upon itself by its excessive committment to a materialistic, consumerist, hedonistic lifestyle that is a poor fit with the basic adjurations of the Gospel of Christ.

I'm not sure that Carter is quite saying this, but I think it bears saying: Our greatest fault, in my opinion, is not so much that we don't do enough for the poor, but that we over-indulge ourselves. We lavish upon ourselves all manner of trinkets and baubles, eliminating every discomfort from our lives, indulging in a narcissism that makes us at once soft, selfish, and egotistical.

The temptation to yield to this decadence is unrelenting, it goes on every waking moment of our day, and the battle against surrendering to it is not fought just once and for all but must be re-fought constantly throughout our lifetimes. The cultural forces of consumerism and narcisssism arrayed against us exert overwhelming pressure, and it's so easy to just give up and give in. Yet we're called by Christ to shun the blandishments and seductions of the advertisers and keep our focus not on ourselves and our wants, but on the "higher things", what Paul called the things of the Spirit and what Plato identifies with the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Too easily, however, we're mesmerized by the allure of things we don't need and of comforts from which we don't benefit.

I know whereof I speak, I'm embarrassed to admit, because the above criticism is uncomfortably autobiographical. I write this not so much for those who are going to read it on Viewpoint but for myself because I need to remind myself of what I've said in the previous two paragraphs far more than I need to be chiding others about it.

Great Ads

I thought it might be fun to re-post some stuff we had up on Viewpoint last spring that everyone got a kick out of and which will give readers a break from our usual fare:

The universe of good beer advertisements is not large, but this one is a hoot. Be sure to turn on the sound. Music lovers will appreciate the use of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

Then go here and here for a couple of outstanding car ads. Very clever.

A Regenerated Heart, So to Speak

There's an interesting article on organ regeneration at EurekAlert that has fascinating philosophical implications. Here's an excerpt:

When a portion of a zebrafish's heart is removed, the dynamic interplay between a mass of stem cells that forms in the wound and the protective cell layer that covers the wound spurs the regeneration of functional new heart tissue, Duke University Medical Center scientists have found.

The scientists further discovered that key growth factors facilitate the interaction between the cell mass and the protective covering, encouraging the formation of new heart muscle.

Many cell biologists believe the ability to regenerate damaged heart tissue may be present in all vertebrate species, but that for unknown reasons, mammals have "turned off" this ability over the course of evolution. Zebrafish could provide a model to help researchers find the key to unlocking this dormant regenerative capacity in mammals, and such an advance could lead to potential treatments for human hearts damaged by disease, the Duke scientists said.

"If you look in nature, there are many examples of different types of organisms, such as axolotls, newts and zebrafish, that have an elevated ability to regenerate lost or damaged tissue," said Kenneth Poss, Ph.D., senior researcher for the team, which published the findings on Nov. 3, 2006, in the journal Cell. First authors of the paper were Alexandra Lepilina, M.D., and Ashley Coon.

"Interestingly, some species have the ability to regenerate appendages, while even fairly closely related species do not," Poss added. "This leads us to believe that during the course of evolution, regeneration is something that has been lost by some species, rather than an ability that has been gained by other species. The key is to find a way to 'turn on' this regenerative ability."

This is strange given the Darwinian paradigm. One would think that regeneration would have tremendous adaptive value to an organism and thus be strongly conserved. Why would such a capacity, once developed, get turned off?

It's also strange that it's very hard to turn on a capacity that is believed to be already present and latent within us, but the development of that capacity by the blind, undirected forces of evolution isn't considered at all extraordinary. If turning the capacity on is proving devilishly difficult how much more astonishing is the erection of the entire biochemical apparatus from scratch?

Finally, does the latent power of regeneration in mammals suggest that our ancient ancestors were at least in some ways more highly evolved than we are today? In other words, the evidence from regeneration suggests that rather than evolving from more primitive states to more advanced, we may have started out as more highly advanced and subsequently devolved from that initial state over time to a state of lower complexity. This evidence, at least, seems to suggest that living things are not as complex as they originally were, which is precisely the opposite of what Darwinian evolution maintains.

Now wouldn't more evidence for that hypothesis just throw the Darwinians into a tizzy?

Course Correction

Robert Kagan and William Kristol call for the only change in course in Iraq that makes sense - send in more troops:

In Iraq, US policies have steadily undermined public confidence that America has either the will or capacity to provide the security Iraqis need. So they have turned to their own sectarian armed groups for protection. That, and not historical inevitability or the alleged failings of the Iraqi people, has brought Iraq closer to civil war.

These policies have been equally damaging in the US. The American people have rightly judged that the administration is floundering in Iraq and, worse, is not committed to doing what is necessary to succeed. This perception undoubtedly played a large part in last week's mid-term election. Now, many Americans are looking to the Iraq Study Group, the commission headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, for a face-saving, bipartisan way to withdraw from Iraq as quickly as possible. The great irony is that with nothing new to offer, the Baker commission's forthcoming report - if it takes the shape most observers predict - will probably suffer the same fate as similar past efforts.

There is a popular theory that the prospect of US withdrawal will force Iraqis to reach an accommodation with one another. This would be more plausible had it not been disproved by three years of painful experience. Instead of looking for a face-saving way to lose in Iraq, President Bush could finally demand of his top advisers a strategy to succeed: provide the US force levels necessary to achieve even minimal political objectives. This could begin by increasing US troops in Iraq by at least 50,000 in order to clear and hold Baghdad without shifting troops from other parts of Iraq. These operations could then be expanded into areas of insurgency. This strategy would not stabilise the country right away but could secure Iraq's vital centre and provide real hope for progress.

We have two realistic options in Iraq. Either quit or win. If we're going to quit we should do it now, with all the calamitous consequences such a course of action would entail for the people of that region, before any more Americans lose life or limb. If we're going to win then we should send in the manpower necessary to accomplish the task and get it done. The Republicans lost the Congress partly because the Bush administration has given the impression that they've made the decision to opt for a third course - to neither quit nor win. The American people quite rightly have no patience for the ineptitude that kind of "strategic thinking" exposes.

Build the Fence!!

Yet another American has been murdered by an illegal alien and several handicapped girls were raped by illegals, but still George Bush thinks there's no problem with an open border. His and the Republican Senate's complete cluelessness on this issue probably did as much as anything to lose Congress to the Democrats. Our political leaders will dawdle and twiddle on this issue until there is so much resentment in this country toward Hispanics that we find ourselves in open conflict.

There are only two reasons for allowing the problem of illegal immigration to continue and both of them are ignoble. Businesses want cheap labor, and the major political parties don't want to antagonize the massive immigrant population because they don't want them to join the other party when they get citizenship. That's assuming, of course, that someone will even need to be a citizen to vote in the next election.

Americans of both parties should make it clear that they will not support any candidate in the next, or any future, election who does not take an oath that he will vote to build and fund the fence along all 1200 miles of the border with Mexico. Anything less than this is indicative of a lack of committment to stopping the tidal wave of illegals pouring across the Rio Grande and all of the social and environmental problems they bring with them. Anyone running for public office who is indifferent to this crisis, in our opinion, thereby disqualifies him or herself from serving.

This is indie film-maker Adrienne Shelly, the woman murdered in New York by an Ecuadoran illegal, who told police he "was having a bad day":

See Cheat Seeking Missiles and Michelle Malkin for the awful details.

Rummy's Obsession

A friend sends along a column which advances one theory about why Donald Rumsfeld is no longer the Secretary of Defense. The essay is by Frederick Kagan at the LA Times. I don't know if Kagan is right, but his column makes a lot of sense. I'm sure Rumsfeld is a good man, and he presided over two very quick and impressive military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a military leader must be flexible, and apparently flexibility was not Rumsfeld's greatest virtue.

Read the whole article at the link.

Antonin Scalia

A friend links me to this excellent article in The Weekly Standard by Terry Eastland on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The essay does a fine job of not only explaining who Scalia is and what his judicial philosophy looks like but also of explaining what the alternatives to Scalia's philosophy are and why the differences matter. Anyone who wishes to understand more about the sort of person that President Bush said serves as his role model for what a Supreme Court Justice should be would do well to read Eastland's column in it's entirety. In case you can't, here are just a few excerpts:

More than a century ago, in the hands of the Supreme Court, the judicial power began to undergo a transformation that was well advanced by the time Scalia was in elementary school. In the 1986 book tracing the evolution of the judicial power, published just as Scalia joined the Supreme Court, political scientist Christopher Wolfe described the emergence of "judge-made law," which, against the hopes of the Framers, had become "another variant of legislative power."

The growth of judicial power is in an important sense a story of liberties taken with texts--specifically of the refusal by justices to follow the text of laws as understood at the time of their enactment and of the willingness by courts to "interpret" the law in light of various extratextual considerations. The kind of text in a given case--statutory or constitutional--did not matter. The result was the same: The people's text, whether made by majorities or, in the case of the Constitution, supermajorities, would be displaced by the judges' text. The justices became lawmakers.

For Scalia, the right kind of judging is much different. It construes the text of the statute, he says, neither "strictly" nor "liberally" but "reasonably." The judge--the good judge--should ask what the statute meant to the legislators who enacted it and the people whom it obligates and also--as the Court did in Holy Trinity before it went off the rails--understand the statute in terms of the law or code of which it is a part. Dictionaries, including ones from the era in which the law was enacted, may prove helpful.

For Scalia, the starting point for constitutional interpretation is recognition that the Constitution, as he put it in the Tanner Lectures, is "an unusual text." It is the supreme law through which we govern ourselves and thus does not contain "nit-picking detail" (which detail is found in the mind-numbing U.S. Code). Its words and phrases should be given, says Scalia, "an expansive rather than narrow interpretation--though not an interpretation the text will not bear." Not "strict construction" but "reasonable construction" is the goal.

Here, too, Scalia is a textualist, since he starts with a legal text, the Constitution. And he is an "originalist," since he seeks the "original meaning" of the text. He does so not by pursuing the subjective intentions of individual framers, but by asking how the text was understood by the society that adopted it. Nor is Scalia unaware of the difficulties posed by originalism, for as he said in his Taft Lecture at the University of Cincinnati in 1988, "historical research is always difficult and sometimes inconclusive."

Scalia has a simple way of capturing what happened to constitutional interpretation. It came to serve the "Living Constitution," which Scalia defines as "a body of law that (unlike normal statutes) grows and changes from age to age, in order to meet the needs of a changing society."

Maybe Scalia was right when he said in his Tanner Lectures that "the American people have been converted to belief in the Living Constitution." Still, with the change in the Court's composition over the past year, Scalia has more colleagues receptive to his interpretive approach than he did when he went to the Court two decades ago. With another "good judge" or two, the Court could start to turn his way.

That is a prospect fervently to be hoped for.

Cut Taxes, Raise Revenue

Ed Feulner at Fox News explains why it is that cutting some taxes actually increases the tax revenue flowing into the national treasury:

[W]hen the government cuts confiscatory tax rates, people tend to work more, save more and invest more. That improves the economy, which means tax collections can also increase. Lower tax rates also improve compliance since people have less incentive to avoid and evade the IRS.

Problem is, Congress doesn't count these "supply-side" benefits of lower tax rates. Instead, before lawmakers vote on a spending or taxation bill, they give it to the Joint Committee on Taxation. The JCT is supposed to "score" it, or explain what the revenue effects of the legislation will be.

If the bill calls for a tax cut of, say, $100 billion over 10 years, the JCT generally subtracts $100 billion from its revenue predictions. But this approach simply doesn't work, because it ignores the fact that certain types of tax cuts -- such as lower tax rates -- tend to boost the entire economy.

Remember the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act? When lawmakers were debating that bill, the JCT guessed the entire tax cut package would cost some $4.5 billion in its first year. That was off by just a bit. In fact, the change brought in an additional $16 billion in the first year.

Feulner's reasoning throughout the rest of the article is unassailable and one would think that liberals and other left-minded folk would embrace the idea of cutting taxes since what they want, presumably, is for the government to have more money to spend on the programs they promote. Nevertheless, the left almost always opposes tax cuts, which leads one to wonder whether they really want more revenue flowing into the treasury or whether they simply want to punish people in upper income brackets by taking as much of their wealth as they can.

The only other possibility is that, despite the lessons of history which teach that every time taxes have been cut revenues grow, liberals just don't believe that tax cuts work. If you know someone like that, forward them Feulner's article.

God Almost Certainly Does Not Exist

At least that's what atheistic Darwinian Richard Dawkins tells us in this article excerpted from his new book The God Delusion. Dawkins bases his certainty on several surprisingly weak arguments - I say "surprisingly" because he invests so much confidence in such thin ice.

His assurance that there almost certainly is no God is derived firstly from his belief that God's existence is highly improbable. This is a peculiar claim given that it's very difficult to see how one could know that God's existence is highly improbable. Dawkins argues that God's improbablity follows from the fact that there's no evidence that God exists, but how does an alleged lack of evidence makes God's existence highly improbable?

If there's no evidence for something then it might be argued that there's no reason to believe it, but that's not the same as saying that the existence of the thing is "improbable". There is no evidence for the existence of other universes or other dimensions but that by itself doesn't make their existence improbable. There's no evidence for the existence of life on other planets either, but Dawkins is at pains in this essay to convince the reader that, even so, extra-terrestrial life is another "almost certain" fact. Why are ETs almost certain to exist even though we have no evidence of them, but God is almost certain to not exist for the same reason?

What, secondly, of this claim that there's no evidence for God's existence? What is Dawkins' support for it?

Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.

First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished.

This is an unpromising beginning. The assertion that the arguments for God's existence are easily demolished is simply false. It's the kind of claim made by someone who doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. Dawkins is evidently unaware of the wrestling matches among experts on these arguments over the last 1500 years. He's unaware, too, of the contemporary work of people like William Lane Craig on the Cosmological argument and Alvin Plantinga on the Ontological argument. These people, and the hundreds of philosophers like them, may be wrong, but if anything is certain it is that the arguments they present are not "easily demolished".

Dawkins continues to embarrass himself:

Several of them [arguments for God's existence], such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself.

Surely, though, Professor Dawkins understands the concept of necessary existence. A necessary being has no need of explanation, only contingent being needs be explained. If God exists, he is a necessary being, i.e. he is the ultimate cause of all contingent beings, and thus, not only does he not need a causal explanation, there can be no causal explanation.

To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer - a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it - it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not.

God, of course, is not something which "just happens". God is. He is not an event like the Big Bang. He is the cause of all events, the cause of all contingent entities. Moreover, we need to ask why Dawkins thinks that ultimate causes must be simpler than their effects. What principle leads him to this conclusion? Couldn't we just as easily argue that the sufficient cause of X must be at least as complex as the effect it produces? Thus the cause of the universe would have to be at least as complex as the universe itself.

The first cause cannot have been an intelligence - let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

This is a marvelous case of begging the question. The creative cause of the universe cannot be intelligence, Dawkins avers, because intelligence is part of the creation, not its cause. But whether the cause can be an intelligence is precisely the point at issue. Dawkins decrees by fiat that intelligence cannot be the cause because it is the effect, but this is ludicrous. If humans ever succeed in creating artificial intelligence (AI) in computers shall we conclude that intelligent humans couldn't really have been the creators because intelligence only comes along later in the scheme of technological development, when AI appears? It's a bit irregular to try to neatly define things so that one wins the argument, but this is what Dawkins does. He stacks the deck by stating as a premise the very thing he wants us to conclude.

The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today, sometimes called the Argument from Design .... is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered - and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.

And what precisely is the fallacy? Dawkins explains:

Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable?

I've already pointed out that Dawkins' assumption that God's existence is highly improbable is pure flummery. Apparently fond of circular reasoning he assumes a priori that the chances of God's existing are exceedingly low and goes on, then, to argue that none of the evidence for God's existence, obtained through the argument from Design, can really be evidence for a God because he's already demonstrated that God is too improbable to actually exist.

Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And - this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in - Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.

Here he underminines his own argument about God's improbability based on the lack of evidence by claiming that it is probable that life exists on billions of other planets even though we have no empirical evidence that there are billions of other planets and certainly no evidence that there is life on any planet but our own. He also shows here that he either hasn't read, or is deliberately ignoring, works like Rare Earth, Privileged Planet, The Fifth Miracle, Nature's Destiny, Ancient Faith Modern Physics, all of which emphasize the uniqueness of earth as a habitat for life, the numerous factors which have to be just right for a planet to sustain life, and the sheer unliklihood that other planets, even if they number in the billions, would possess more than a few of those necessary properties. In other words, Dawkins' argument that there are billions of planets in the universe capable of supporting life is about thirty years out of date.

The book from which Dawkins' essay was excerpted, The God Delusion, has been widely panned by philosophers and scientists, both theistic and atheistic alike. Judging from the arguments he offers above it's little wonder.

Keep Hope Alive

Ed Whelan at The Ethics and Public Policy Center argues that despite Democratic control of the Senate President Bush still has a good chance of getting a quality nominee onto the Supreme Court should an opening appear. Getting judges approved for the Federal Court of Appeals looks much more difficult but then it has been difficult for the last six years even with the Democrats in the minority.

The core of Whelan's case is this:

...the high-profile politics of a Supreme Court nomination enhances the case for confirmation of a strong pick. Opponents can't rely on obscure procedures to block the nomination. They need to make their case openly, and in the Internet age, unlike with the 1987 nomination of Judge Bork, their distortions won't go unanswered.

More importantly, the conservative case against liberal judicial activism has powerful public appeal across a broad swath of the political spectrum. Opponents of a strong nominee will have to be ready to pay a high price for their opposition. Plus, President Bush, having appointed two white males to the Court, still has the diversity card to play, so a nominee who is a committed proponent of judicial restraint and also a female or a minority would have added political punch.

Forty-one of 45 Democrats voted against Justice Alito's nomination. But the four Democrats who voted for him -- Byrd, Conrad, Johnson, and Ben Nelson -- would be decent bets to vote for the next strong conservative nominee. To be sure, the votes of Byrd, Conrad, and Nelson may have been influenced by the fact that they were up for re-election this year. But since their re-election prospects were never in serious peril, that factor would not seem a major one.

Besides, of course, other Democrats are now looking ahead to re-election in 2008. Along with Johnson (South Dakota), Senators Baucus (Montana), Landrieu (Louisiana), and Pryor (Arkansas) will be running in "red" states in 2008. Especially if they face the prospect of hefty Republican opponents, they won't be eager to be siding with Teddy Kennedy as he rants against the nominee.

Senator-Elect Casey of Pennsylvania is an eighth Democrat whom the White House could reasonably look to for a "yes" vote on confirmation. Casey might as well dance on the grave of his father (a hero of mine) if he would vote against a nominee who could provide the decisive vote to restore abortion policy to the democratic processes.

In sum, a high-quality conservative nominee with a good public presence -- and with the support of the broader conservative coalition that coalesced around Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito -- should be able to hold all, or virtually all, the 49 Republicans and to pick off the one or more Democrats needed for confirmation. Vice President Cheney's tiebreaking vote shouldn't even be needed.

He might have added to the mix that Jim Webb(VA) will be likely to support conservative judges and Joe Lieberman (CT) is not a safe bet to toe the party line set down by the Kennedy/Leahy/Kerry cabal. Another wild card is Hillary Clinton who will probably wish to appear moderate and reasonable in preparation for her presidential run in 2008.

All in all, things may not be quite as bleak as they seemed last Tuesday. There is a likelihood that at least one of the current liberal justices will step down now that the Democrats have captured the senate. Justice Stevens is 86, Justice Ginsburg is 73, and one or both of them may have been waiting until this election to retire with the expectation that a Democratic senate would prevent President Bush from nominating a conservative to replace them. We'll see whether or not they're calculation proves correct.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby

Gary Varvel explains why the Republicans got a "thumpin'" last Tuesday:

If the voters are given a choice between Republicans who act like Democrats or Democrats just being themselves, Republicans can hardly be surprised that the voters decided to elect the real thing.

Another Piece From Murray

Following up on last Sunday's post More on Murray, here's more perspective on the parable of the vine and the branches.

Abide In Christ, by Andrew Murray - In Affliction and Trial

"Every branch that bearest fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." - John 15:2

In the whole plant world there is not a tree to be found so specially suited to the image of man in his relation to God, as the vine. There is none of which the fruit and its juice are so full of spirit, so quickening and stimulating. But there is also none of which the natural tendency is so entirely evil - none where the growth is so ready to run into wood that is utterly worthless except for the fire. Of all plants, not one needs the pruning knife so unsparingly and so unceasingly. None is so dependent on cultivation and training, but with this none yields a richer reward to the husbandman. In His wonderful parable, the Saviour, with a single word, refers to this need of pruning in the vine, and the blessing it brings. But from that single word what streams of light pour in upon this dark world, so full of suffering and of sorrow to believers! What treasures of teaching and comfort to the bleeding branch in its hour of trial: "Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." And so He has prepared His people, who are so ready when trial comes to be shaken in their confidence, and to be moved from their abiding in Christ, to hear in each affliction the voice of a messenger that comes to call them to abide still more closely. Yes, believer, most specially in times of trial, abide in Christ.

Abide in Christ! This is indeed the Father's object in sending the trial. In the storm the tree strikes deeper roots in the soil; in the hurricane the inhabitants of the house abide within, and rejoice in its shelter. So by suffering the Father would lead us to enter more deeply into the love of Christ. Our hearts are continually prone to wander from Him; prosperity and enjoyment all too easily satisfy us, dull our spiritual perception, and unfit us for full communion with Himself. It is an unspeakable mercy that the Father comes with His chastisement, makes the world round us all dark and unattractive, leads us to feel more deeply our sinfulness, and for a time lose our joy in what was becoming so dangerous. He does it in the hope that, when we have found our rest in Christ in time of trouble, we shall learn to choose abiding in Him as our only portion; and when the affliction is removed, have so grown more firmly into Him, that in prosperity He still shall be our only joy. So much has He set His heart on this, that though He has indeed no pleasure in afflicting us, He will not keep back even the most painful chastisement if He can but thereby guide His beloved child to come home and abide in the beloved Son. Christian! pray for grace to see in every trouble, small or great, the Father's finger pointing to Jesus, and saying, Abide in Him.

Abide in Christ: so will you become partaker of all the rich blessings God designed for you in the affliction. The purposes of God's wisdom will become clear to you, your assurance of the unchangeable love become stronger, and the power of His Spirit fulfil you the promise: "He chasteneth us for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness." Abide in Christ: and your cross becomes the means of fellowship with His cross, and access into its mysteries - the mystery of the curse which He bore for you, of the death to sin in which you partake with Him, of the love in which, as sympathizing High Priest, He descended into all your sorrows. Abide in Christ: growing in conformity to your blessed Lord in His sufferings, deeper experience of the reality and the tenderness of His love will be yours. Abide in Christ: in the fiery oven, one like the Son of Man will be seen as never before; the purging away of the dross and the refining of the gold will be accomplished, and Christ's own likeness reflected in you. O abide in Christ: the power of the flesh will be mortified, the impatience and self-will of the old nature be humbled, to make place for the meekness and gentleness of Christ. A believer may pass through much affliction, and yet secure but little blessing from it all. Abiding in Christ is the secret of securing all that the Father meant the chastisement to bring us.

Abide in Christ: in Him you shall find sure and abundant consolation. With the afflicted comfort is often first, and the profit of the affliction second. The Father loves us so, that with Him our real and abiding profit is His first object, but He does not forget to comfort too. When He comforts it is that He may turn the bleeding heart to Himself to receive the blessing in fellowship with Him; when He refuses comfort, His object is still the same. It is in making us partakers of His holiness that true comfort comes. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter, not only because He can suggest comforting thoughts of God's love, but far more, because He makes us holy, and brings us into close union with Christ and with God. He teaches us to abide in Christ; and because God is found there, the truest comfort will come there too. In Christ the heart of the Father is revealed, and higher comfort there cannot be than to rest in the Father's bosom. In Him the fulness of the divine love is revealed, combined with the tenderness of a mother's compassion - and what can comfort like this? In Him you see a thousand times more given you than you have lost; see how God only took from you that you might have room to take from Him what is so much better. In Him suffering is consecrated, and becomes the foretaste of eternal glory; in suffering it is that the Spirit of God and of glory rests on us. Believer! would you have comfort in affliction? - Abide in Christ.

Abide in Christ: so will you bear much fruit. Not a vine is planted but the owner thinks of the fruit, and the fruit only. Other trees may be planted for ornament, for the shade, for the wood - the vine only for the fruit. And of each vine the husbandman is continually asking how it can bring forth more fruit, much fruit. Believer! abide in Christ in times of affliction, and you shall bring forth more fruit. The deeper experience of Christ's tenderness and the Father's love will urge you to live to His glory. The surrender of self and self-will in suffering will prepare you to sympathize with the misery of others, while the softening that comes of chastisement will fit you for becoming, as Jesus was, the servant of all. The thought of the Father's desire for fruit in the pruning will lead you to yield yourself afresh, and more than ever, to Him, and to say that now you have but one object in life - making known and conveying His wonderful love to fellow-men. You shall learn the blessed art of forgetting self, and, even in affliction, availing yourself of your separation from ordinary life to plead for the welfare of others. Dear Christian, in affliction abide in Christ. When you see it coming, meet it in Christ; when it is come, feel that you are more in Christ than in it, for He is nearer you than affliction ever can be; when it is passing, still abide in Him. And let the one thought of the Saviour, as He speaks of the pruning, and the one desire of the Father, as He does the pruning, be yours too: "Every branch that beareth fruit, He purgeth, that it may bring forth more fruit."

So shall your times of affliction become your times of choicest blessing - preparation for richest fruitfulness. Led into closer fellowship with the Son of God, and deeper experience of His love and grace - established in the blessed confidence that He and you entirely belong to each other - more completely satisfied with Him and more wholly given up to Him than ever before - with your own will crucified afresh, and the heart brought into deeper harmony with God's will - you shall be a vessel cleansed, meet for the Master's use, prepared for every good work. True believer! O try and learn the blessed truth, that in affliction your first, your only, your blessed calling is to abide in Christ. Be much with Him alone. Beware of the comfort and the distractions that friends so often bring. Let Jesus Christ Himself be your chief companion and comforter. Delight yourself in the assurance that closer union with Him, and more abundant fruit through Him, are sure to be the results of trial, because it is the Husbandman Himself who is pruning, and will ensure the fulfillment of the desire of the soul that yields itself lovingly to His work.

The Reason Why

Why have there been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11? It's certainly not that the terrorists haven't been trying. Harold Hutchison at Strategy Page explains the main reason for our good fortune:

The answer was a simple change of mission by the FBI and more communication between the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community.

In the 1990s, the FBI built criminal cases against terrorists - with the intention of locking them up in prison. This meant that making sure evidence of a terrorist's acts could be admitted to court. However, this led to problems, including the fact that when the evidence was provided to the attorneys for the accused terrorists, it eventually found its way back to terrorists still active, blowing methods of gathering intelligence in the process. In many cases, the FBI had to keep a wall between its intelligence side and its criminal prosecution side (some have called it the "Gorelick wall" after the author of one memo that was made public outlining the procedures to be used). Since 9/11, the FBI has changed its tactics, the wall has come crashing down, and attacks have been thwarted, with support networks also being rolled up.

The FBI's new approach has been to break up the attacks beforehand - with criminal cases being of secondary importance. This allows the FBI to do things it was not able to do earlier, like go to into chat rooms where recruiting occurs. It also means the FBI operates on a lower threshold. It is very similar to the approach the federal government used against Al Capone. Ultimately, Capone never served a day in prison for bootlegging or murder - his prison sentence was for tax evasion. Today, the FBI operates mainly to just stop the terrorists. They may not get jail time for terrorism, but there are other charges that can be used (immigration laws are one set of laws) if need be. Even these will break up cells - simply because the terrorists are human, and will make mistakes or do something illegal. If they are in prison, they cannot carry out attacks.

A number of human rights and civil liberties groups are not happy about this. In situations like those involving the National Security Agency's surveillance programs, this has led to lawsuits and hostile media coverage. These groups have viewed the intelligence community with suspicion at best - often they are downright hostile, despite the fact that the cooperation between the FBI and the intelligence community has broken up several attacks.

It will be interesting to see, now that the Democrats have some sway in the government, whether they push to return to the days of the "Gorelick wall" which was set up during the Clinton administration or whether they quietly allow the FBI to continue to do what they must to keep the rest of us safe.

In the meantime let's give the Bush administration some credit for having prevented any more attacks on our soil since 9/11.

A Giant Christmas Ball

That's what earth looks like in this photo taken from space, apparently with cloud cover removed:

It's beautiful in a way, but it's also a shame. All those lights obscure the night sky for modern viewers to the point where when we look up on a clear night we see only a fraction of what observers could see a hundred years ago. The real beauty, the beauty we're missing, is not the lights on earth, but the lights in the Milky Way.

Craig vs. Ehrman

One of the top Christian philosophers debated a professor of religious history at Holy Cross last March on the topic "Is There Historical Evidence For the Resurrection of Jesus?" The debaters were William Lane Craig of The Talbot School of Theology and Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina.

Craig laid out the evidence for Jesus' Resurrection and argued that the evidence is uncontroversial. What's at issue, he claimed, is not the evidence, but whether a miracle is the best explanation for that evidence. Ehrman maintained that it is not while Craig affirmed that it is. It's a fascinating exchange and you can read the transcript here.