The Edge of Evolution

This link takes you to a video that shows transport proteins moving along a cilium (It's called a flagellum at the site) in an alga called Chlamydamonas. Michael Behe talks about this system of proteins in his new book The Edge of Evolution, and it's astonishingly complex. Imagine small railroad cars carrying building supplies moving along a track that runs up and down an under-construction skyscraper.

The whole system would consist of hundreds of parts whose movements must be coordinated and timed with the availability and need for different supplies. The supplies would need to be loaded onto the cars and off-loaded at the site, and so on.

These proteins carry the materials necessary for the construction of a cilium and no one, evidently, has a clue as to how this system got set up or what keeps it organized, synchronized and functioning.

Behe describes the system in some detail, and it's fascinating reading. I'm about half-way through his book and if the second half is as interesting as the first it's going to be extremely hard to put down.

RLC

The Iranian Gambit

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seems to be trying to provoke Israel into an attack upon Iran as this NewsMax story suggests:

Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday said the world would witness the destruction of Israel soon, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Ahmadinejad said last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah showed for the first time that the "hegemony of the occupier regime [Israel] had collapsed, and the Lebanese nation pushed the button to begin counting the days until the destruction of the Zionist regime," IRNA quoted him as saying.

By threatening Israel's destruction Ahamdinejad seems to be hoping that Israel will launch a preemptive strike that will justify Iran's retaliation, or at least earn Israel further international contempt.

The Iranian leader is playing his hand cleverly. If Israel doesn't rise to his bait Iran will just grow stronger until it is able to destroy Israel on some other pretext. Israel will be damned if it does attack and damned if it doesn't.

The danger for Iran is that Israel will decide that if it's going to be damned either way it might as well be damned for doing something rather than for doing nothing. And it might decide to hit Iran much harder than they anticipate.

RLC

The Atheist's Con

Johann Hari, an anti-theist leftist, is in a quandary about Tony Blair's successor as British prime minister, Gordon Brown. Apparently Brown is a devout Christian heavily influenced by Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine. Hari sees this as both good and bad.

The irony of Hari's post on Brown is that he sees no irony in statements like this:

All this puts left-wing atheists like me in a quandry [sic]. I think faith is a dangerous form of bad thinking - it is believing something, without evidence or reason to back it up.

[But] If religion drives Brown's best instincts and whittles down his worst, should we still condemn it?

The "best instincts" Hari refers to are Brown's concern for the poor, the worst are what Hari assumes, because of Wallis' influence, would be Brown's opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and a preference for non-secular schools.

So what's the irony? Hari, as an atheist, is making a moral judgment about Brown's instincts. It is, he implies, more moral to be in favor of the poor and less so to be against gay marriage, but where does Hari get this from? Why, on his assumption that there is no moral standard beyond ourselves, would it be wrong to despise the poor? What is the source from which he draws his moral valuations? In actual fact, having denied any transcendent ground for moral value, he's left with no ground at all. He simply draws upon his own preferences and tastes and seeks to gain for those subjective inclinations some sort of privileged standing. When an atheist employs moral language it's really nothing more than a con game that they are fond of pulling on everyone else, even though most of them don't even realize what they're doing.

RLC

Gonzalez Appeal Rejected

Iowa State astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez has had his appeal of the decision to deny him tenure rejected by university president Gregory Geoffroy. Why did this happen? ISU will not open up the records of their deliberations despite being legally required to do so thus we're left to draw our own conclusions. Most of the rationales we've heard sound pretty flimsy. Gonzalez has led his department in authoring scholarly papers and textbooks (See also here) and consistently receives good reviews for his teaching.

We're left to conclude that the ISU authorities succumbed, like the 17th century town sages in Salem, Massachusetts, to the hysterics of a few of Gonzalez's faculty colleagues who wanted to get him fired because, of all things, Gonzalez is not a naturalistic materialist.

Gonzalez believes the order and fine-tuning of the cosmos point to an intelligence behind it and for that, it appears, he is being led to the academic equivalent of the stake. Meanwhile, professional frauds like Ward Churchill are still drawing paychecks at the University of Colorado for telling students that the people who died on 9/11 deserved it.

Who says universities are about diversity and tolerance and the marketplace of ideas? Schools like ISU are in the business of regimentation, indoctrination, and conformity. If you're doubtful perhaps the accounts of the Gonzalez affair at the above links and elsewhere on the web will change your mind.

Thanks to Evolution News Network for the picture.

RLC

Tyranny vs. Free Speech

Like tyrants and tyrant-wannabes everywhere, whether on American college campuses, North Korea or the old Soviet Union, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela will do whatever he can to eliminate free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

His latest move, however, closing down a popular television station, may prove to be the catalyst that leads to his downfall among the Venezuelan people.

RLC

Divisive Issue

The editors of National Review Online have challenged the editors of the Wall Street Journal to a public debate on the merits of the pending immigration legislation. As of this writing there has been no response from the WSJ. Apparently they're not so sure they can defend their support for this bill and their hostility to its opponents. I'm not surprised. It's pretty much indefensible.

Speaking of hostility, immigration reform is ripping the conservative movement apart. There are some things being said by those who favor the current bill put together by Ted Kennedy and John McCain that are creating wounds that may never heal. The otherwise estimable Linda Chavez has joined President Bush, Michael Chertoff, Ken Mehlman, and others in completely disparaging the motives of her opponents and misrepresenting their position.

I have to say that I have yet to hear an actual argument from supporters of the Kennedy bill on either the left or right as to why illegal aliens are good for America. President Bush and his spokespersons say they are, but they never really tell us why except to offer platitudes about doing jobs Americans won't do. Nor do they ever tell us why it is wrong to want to secure our borders, nor tell us why it is wrong to want to control who comes into this country.

Our country is our home. I'll be more impressed with the President's reluctance to build a fence to keep people from breaking into our home when he has the barriers around the White House removed and orders the secret service to stop shooting people who try to get in without permission.

RLC

Re: Reducing Poverty

Byron offers some comment on, and criticism of, Saturday's post titled Reducing Poverty. His thoughts can be read on our Feedback page.

Those interested in the book to which he refers in his last paragraph can order it here.

RLC

Thought For A Sunday

Earlier this week I stumbled across a 2x3 card that the church I attend gives out after each service. This particular one was from last October. It has a Key Scripture as well as a reference to a Psalm and Daily Scriptures for each day of the week. Quite a bit of stuff packed onto both sides of that little card.

The Key Scripture was from Micah 6:8; "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?".

I was quite taken by this verse and decided to read more of the book of Micah to get the context of the passage. The book is only seven chapters long. I saw that Micah was a contemporary of Isaiah. Both were prophesying around the same time and for the same reasons. For the most part the book seems to be pretty much doom and gloom and then the reader comes to the verse I mentioned above and sees a ray of hope.

And then I came to Micah 7:7 and what may be the most complete verse in all of the Bible; "Therefore I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation: my God will hear me".

Despite the impending doom of judgment Micah chooses to turn to the LORD. He does so with patience knowing any response may not be immediate. He's prepared to wait on God. And he does so with confidence that he will be heard. What an example and prescription for peace of mind.

Reducing Poverty

Jim Wallis of Sojourners (available by subscription) believes that poverty can be dramatically reduced both at home and across the globe:

"Our plan is nothing less than to put poverty on the national agenda, and to compel candidates from both parties to present the nation with their plans for dramatic poverty reduction both at home and globally. I believe we can vote out poverty, but only if we are all in it together."

This seems a little odd. If Wallis knows how poverty can be "voted out" I would certainly like to hear his suggestions. If he doesn't know but wants to support a candidate who advances some plan, that seems to me a little naive. What criteria will he use to evaluate whether the plan would be effective? Would he support any candidate who advances any plan?

Would Wallis, for instance, support whichever candidate proposes to spend the most money on the problem? Lyndon Johnson established the Great Society's War on Poverty back in the early sixties. Since then we've spent over six trillion dollars trying to eliminate poverty, and we still have lots of poor people. In fact, it can be argued fairly persuasively, I think, that the Great Society was, on balance, a disaster for the American poor.

Would Wallis support a candidate who believes that the best way to help people out of poverty is to foster a strong economy? Republicans from Reagan to Bush have taken that approach, with considerable success, but Wallis doesn't seem enthusiastic about their philosophy of cutting taxes and reducing stifling regulations.

Would Wallis support a candidate who argues that most poverty in America today is due to unfortunate choices people have made throughout their lives which have rendered them unable to take advantage of the opportunities which are there for anyone who has the skills, discipline, and ambition to take advantage of them? Would he agree that the problem is, to a large extent, exacerbated by a degenerate culture which bathes people in assumptions which are often harmful to their prospects for achievement? He does acknowledge the insidious effects of our culture, I'm sure, but I doubt that he would be satisfied with any presidential candidate who believed that the most government can do for the poor is to change the culture.

I don't know this, of course, but my hunch is that were Wallis confronted with three candidates who each represented one of the three positions outlined above, he'd opt for the one who promised to raise taxes and initiate a vast transfer of wealth from the haves to the have nots, just as LBJ did. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the candidate who will win Sojourners' support will not be the one who promises to throw the most money at poverty, but I'll be surprised, pleasantly so, if it's not.

RLC

Atheist Taxonomy

Joe Carter claims that there are four kinds of atheists: Disproof atheists, Methodological atheists, Mystical atheists, and Faith atheists. A description of each, along with an interesting discussion on the topic, can be found in his post.

RLC

Preparing for War , Again

Hamas has launched a total of 310 rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot in the last couple of weeks, but Israel has done little to stop it. One reason, according to some Israeli observers, may be that Israel is gearing up for a war with Syria this summer. Meanwhile, according to Transport minister (formerly Defense minister) Shaul Mofaz, Hezbollah has returned to Israel's northern border area and is even better positioned than they were prior to their war with Israel last summer.

Of course this was not supposed to be allowed to happen, but it was the U.N. which was supposed to prevent it, so no one is surprised that it has happened.

Word in Israel is that it looks to be growing increasingly more likely that there will be another Israeli incursion into Lebanon this summer with the Israelis this time going all the way to Syria to cut off the head of the snake. The rest of the world, which has done absolutely nothing to protect Israel from its enemies, will surely scream if Israel decides that it must protect itself, but their outrage may fall on deaf ears this time around. We'll see.

RLC

Bush Bashes His Base

If you are a conservative and/or a Republican then Peggy Noonan's latest column is a must-read. It essentially discusses why the administration has resorted to insulting it's own strongest supporters over the immigration issue, and it's wonderfully written.

In the course of her column she says this:

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

The problem that Bush presents to conservatives dismayed by his support for a bill that is so obviously awful is that he has been steadfast on four things that are so important to them: The war on terror, supreme court justices, tax cuts, and support for Israel. He's also been right to shun the Kyoto sham and to pursue a missile shield.

His failures - his exorbitant spending, his embrace of Donald Rumsfeld's policy of a lean military presence in Iraq and his inability to articulate a compelling defense of his policies and thus be an inspiring leader for the nation - have been galling, but tolerable. Until now.

As Noonan says, the administration is consciously trashing those who feel that illegal immigration is a calamity for this nation and is opening a breach that will not likely be mended if the immigration bill passes.

The President would have done much better to have taken her advice:

If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

Bush could have been a great president, but as Noonan points out in a different context, he squandered the opportunity. It's too bad.

RLC

More Hitchens vs. Wilson

The debate between atheist Christopher Hitchens and theologian Douglas Wilson continues at Christianity Today with part IV and V.

Hitchens, I'm sorry to report, insists on missing the point. His argument in part IV is that atheists can be good without God. Wilson replies that it is not a question of how atheists can behave, rather it is a question of whether there can even be such a thing as "good" if there is no God.

Think of it this way. You and I disagree on how a word is spelled. How do we resolve our disagreement? We agree to consult a dictionary and accept its authority. Now suppose you say lying is wrong and I say it is not. How do we adjudicate our dispute? Must we not hold our two opinions up to some higher standard of moral authority, a moral dictionary, and see which of our views is compatible with that authority? Yet the problem for the atheist is that there is no moral dictionary. There's no right or wrong answer. Thus each of us is our own moral authority and whatever we think is good is ipso facto right.

Hitchens would reply that our sense of morality is innnate in us, a product of our evolution, but this helps his case not at all. As Wilson points out, just because we have a moral sense is no reason to think that sense is authoritative or that it somehow obligates us to live by it. Why should a moral sense which evolved to suit us for life in the stone age have any bearing on how we live today? Moreover, there is a lot about us - aggressiveness, lust, greed, etc. - which are also innate. Why are these things not morally obligatory? How do we choose between innate tendencies which are moral and those which are not?

Wilson makes this explicit in pt. V:

I have been asking you to provide a warrant for morality, given atheism, and you have mostly responded with assertions that atheists can make what some people call moral choices. Well, sure. But what I have been after is what rational warrant they can give for calling one choice "moral" and another choice "not moral." You finally appealed to "innate human solidarity," a phrase that prompted a series of pointed questions from me. In response, you now tell us that we have an innate predisposition to both good and wicked behavior. But we are still stuck. What I want to know (still) is what warrant you have for calling some behaviors "good" and others "wicked." If both are innate, what distinguishes them? What could be wrong with just flipping a coin?

He then goes on to point out how Hitchens' view leads him to a physical determinism which completely negates the validity of his opinions. If determinism is true then whatever views we hold we hold because of the dance of atoms in our brains and not because of any truth-value inherent in those opinions:

If you were to take a bottle of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which one is "winning the debate." They aren't debating; they are just fizzing. You refer to "language in which to write this argument," and you do so as though you believed in a universe where argument was a meaningful concept. Argument? Argument? I have no need for your "argument hypothesis." Just matter in motion, man.

In other words our thoughts about right and wrong are just chemicals fizzing in our brains as a result of all the chemical reactions that have occured in our brains throughout our lives. They don't correspond to any "truth" about morality at all.

Wilson then adds this:

You praise reason to the heights, yet will not give reasons for your strident and inflexible moral judgments, or why you have arbitrarily dubbed certain chemical processes "rational argument." That's absurd right now, and yet there you are, holding it. So for you to refuse to accept Christ because it is absurd is like a man at one end of the pool refusing to move to the other end because he might get wet. Given your premises, you will have to come up with a different reason for rejecting Christ as you do.

But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.

Read the whole debate at Christianity Today. It's very good - unless you're on Hitchens' side of the argument.

RLC

Hitler's Religion

I and a friend who I would describe as a somewhat pallid deist (almost an atheist) have been enjoying a sporadic dialogue by e-mail over the last couple of years.

He recently said something that one often hears in such discussions that I think needs to be explored.

In response to his point that the history of Christianity was littered with the "insanity" of the "murders of millions upon millions" of people, I said that:

"I don't wish to minimize the abuses and horrors that stain the history of the Church but "millions and millions" is a gross exaggeration of the historical record. I think you'd be hard put to document that number. It's not an exaggeration, however, to note that that number accurately reflects the fruit of state atheism in the twentieth century, so one might well ask when the 'insanity' of atheism is ever going to end."

My friend replied with this:

"Fifty to sixty million people died during WWII started by Hitler. Hitler was not an atheist; in fact he was a Christian who believed himself to be some kind of a Messiah on a mission to kill all the Jews."

Now, in fact this is true, if at all, only in the most tenuous sense. Hitler was in fact a deist. His God was the laws of the universe. He used Christian churches, but he despised Christianity and believed that it was incompatible with National Socialism.

You can read about his religious views in his own words here. The link is to excerpts from Hitler's Table Talk, informal discussions written down for posterity for the most part by Martin Bormann between July 1941 and June 1942. Here are a few of Hitler's thoughts Bormann recorded:

Man has discovered in nature the wonderful notion of that almighty being whose law he worships.

Fundamentally in everyone there is the feeling for this almighty, which we call 'God' (that is to say, the dominion of natural laws throughout the whole universe).

The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.

Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.

So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic. When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.

[T]he only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.

And so on. There's much more at the link. These are not the words of a Christian nor of a theist. They are the words of a man who set nature as his god and who was so situated that he was able to carry out the logic of his beliefs. They resulted in the holocaust.

RLC

Cindy Sheehan

Gary Randall of Faith and Freedom Network and Foundation hits all the right notes in his commentary on Cindy Sheehan's departure from the anti-war movement. Thanks to Byron for passing it along to "his few conservative friends." I suspect that means that I'm the only one who received it.

Anyway, here's the first half of Randall's piece:

The woman who became the "face" of dissent toward the Iraq war and President Bush is quitting - and going home.

In an essay entitled, "Good Riddance Attention Whore" that she posted on Daily Kos, a popular secularist blog, she said she was broken and disillusioned and was going "to take whatever I have left and go home."

I, of course, have never been a fan of hers. I have not agreed with what she has said nor most of her methods. Her photo opts with Castro and Chavez were offensive to me personally. But, as I read her hurt and confusion, I looked through the politics that have broken her and saw a human being who, I feel, desperately needs something and someone to believe in.

I have noticed that most major news outlets are not quoting the part of her essay that says, "When I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the Left started labeling me with the same slurs the Right used ... It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on."

I do not know this woman, nor do I suggest I have all the answers, but I do know this one thing. Every human being has a need to believe in someone and something.

In her case, she believed in Howard Dean, moveon.org, and the other components of the extreme Left in this country. While she was grieving the loss of her son, she was quickly pushed to the front to advance the extreme Left-wing agenda. When she wasn't valuable, they threw her "under the bus," as they say. That can happen in both parties.

Read the rest at the link. Her letter is here. One of the things she says is that her opponents frequently claimed that she was just being used by the secular anti-war left. It turns out, evidently, that her opponents were right and that she's come to think the same thing.

One can't help but feel sorry for this woman who, although I profoundly disagree with her about the war and much else, always struck me as a basically good person who tried so hard and sacrificed so much in her belief that she is right and that she could make a positive difference. Now she is worn out and exhausted and her former allies are saying "good riddance" to her. Nice people, those lefties.

God bless her.

RLC

Conservative Primers

For the political philosophers among our readers, and those just interested in the history of political thought, probably the best way to gain an understanding of conservative thought is to read Russell Kirk's early fifties classic The Conservative Mind.

Perhaps the second best way is to read the excellent essay by Mark Henrie at The New Pantagruel on Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism. It's an historical overview of the origins of modern conservative thought and it's an enchanting, if somewhat lengthy, read. Even though it's long it's still a lot shorter than Kirk's wonderful book.

The third best way, of course, would be to frequent National Review Online. The folks at NRO bring the principles elucidated by Kirk and Henrie to bear on the issues facing America and the world today. It's very good stuff.

RLC

Why Do People Resist Science?

Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg ask in an article at Edge, why some people, perhaps a lot of people, resist science.

I think the question is miscast. Very few people resist science. People are, by and large amenable to empirical demonstration. Even counterintuitive theories like Einstein's relativity theory are not rejected by the average person even if he doesn't understand it.

What people tend to resist is a metaphysical agenda masquerading as science and the two examples of resistance that Bloom and Weisberg site are perfect confirmations of that.

The authors are concerned because so many Americans refuse to accept the notion that there is no immaterial soul and they resist the idea that natural processes are sufficient to explain all of life and the cosmos.

Neither of these is a scientific idea, however. They are the metaphysical conclusions of some scientists who are a priori committed to a materialist worldview. If materialism were obviously true then of course it would be puzzling that so many people reject it, but materialism is not science. It's not something that can be proven by empirical investigation like whether the earth is round or revolves around the sun.

The truth or falsity of materialism is a philosophical question so Bloom and Weisberg would have done better to ask why so many people resist the philosophical entailments of materialism.

The answer to that question is much easier to see. They resist it because they see its sterility. They see that it leads to a view of life that renders all meaning, morality, human dignity, and hope just so much illusory baggage. They resist it because, quite frankly, a lot of people think that anything so at odds with their common sense intuitions about life is just false, and if the only evidence scientists can offer in its support is their testimony that it's true they're not going to persuade any but those who want to be persuaded.

And most people simply don't want to be persuaded that their lives are hopeless and meaningless.

RLC

Soda Is Very Bad For You

This will make your day. It turns out that a common additive in Coke, Diet Pepsi, and other soft drinks is believed to cause damage to the DNA of our cells and precipitate a host of degenerative neurological diseases as well as cancer. The additive is sodium benzoate. I leave you to read the article while I go check my Diet Rite Cola to see if it contains the stuff.

UPDATE: Diet Rite contains Potassium benzoate. Since potassium behaves chemically very much like sodium it looks like my favorite soft drink may be my undoing.

Maybe the only healthy diet is to starve yourself.

RLC

Quantum Theory

I may have mentioned this before but the March issue of First Things has a particularly clear exposition by Stephen Barr on quantum theory. Along the way Barr shows how quantum theory leads some physicists to conclude that there are a near infinite number of alternative worlds, why it is incompatible with physical determinism, and why it is antithetical to materialism.

It's a good article for the layman who knows little about quantum mechanics but would like a simple, basic understanding of its philosophical implications.

The irony of modern physics is that beginning in the early 19th century science in general, and physics in particular, were used as dispositive justifications for a deterministic, materialistic, naturalistic worldview. Science, we were told, had proven that there's nothing to reality but matter and energy, nature is all there is.

Then came the discovery of the world of quantum phenomena and the crucial importance of observers in the twenties and thirties and suddenly the role of mind took on new significance. Physical determinism collapsed along with the idea that matter is the sole component of reality.

The main prop of metaphysical naturalism was now revealing that naive materialism was an inadequate explanation of reality. It was telling us, in effect, that "there are more things in heaven and on earth than we dream of in our philosophy."

Now, in the early years of the 21st century, more and more non-scientists are beginning to grasp the obsolescence of the earlier views. Today, the universe often looks less like a Newtonian machine and more like a grand idea, an idea, perhaps, in the mind of God.

RLC

Cyber-Terrorism

England's Daily Mail offers a cyber-threat scenario which security experts say is almost certain to one day soon become a reality:

At first it would be no more than a nuisance. No burning skyscrapers, no underground explosions, just a million electronic irritations up and down the land.

Thousands of government web pages suddenly vanish to be replaced with the Internet's version of the Testcard - that dreaded screen '404 - Not Found' or, more amusingly, some pastiche or parody.

Then the Labour website starts to promise a wholesale renationalisation of the railways. The popular response this generates turns to amusement then bemusement as everything from Jaguar to BT is, the sites claim, to be taken back into state hands.

When conservatives.org.uk starts to promise compulsory repatriation and the return of capital punishment, bemusement turns to alarm.

The disruption continues: thousands of popular websites, from eBay to YouTube, start malfunctioning or are replaced by malicious parodies.

Tens of millions of pounds are wiped off the share price of companies like Amazon as fears grow that the whole Internet credit card payment network is now vulnerable and insecure.

Eventually, reports start to flood in that hundreds of thousands of personal bank accounts have been raided overnight.

Panicked bank chiefs and PR men go on TV to try to reassure, promising that this is no more than an electronic glitch, but thousands of anxious citizens take to the streets, many in tears, and pour angrily into the banks to demand their savings in cash.

When the ATM system goes down, the government steps in. A task force is appointed. There is a rush on hard cash that leads to a shortage of notes and coins.

Soon, it is clear that the United Kingdom (and much of Europe) has been subjected to a sustained and effective cyber-terrorist attack. Disaster is narrowly avoided when a series of sophisticated viruses disrupt the workings of the National Air Traffic Control System.

Slowly, the computer network is disinfected; the viruses, botnets and worms that are the electronic versions of bombs and bullets are defused and rendered harmless. No one has died, but the attack has cost Britain �10bn, and share prices take months to recover.

Such a scenario, say some experts, is not only possible but likely in the near future.

In fact, the article notes, a similar scenario actually occured in Estonia last year. The account is in the story at the link.

Imagine if U.S. banks or Wall Street were attacked and your life's savings were wiped out over night. Were this to happen on a large scale it could easily produce immense panic and chaos in the country. Just thought I'd mention this in case you were feeling too cheery this morning.

RLC