Another Lunatic

What is it about the anti-war left that seems to attract so many people who have taken leave of their senses? Could it be that all the hatred and venom that have been directed at the war and those responsible for it push some people right off the cliff of sanity? And when is the media going to begin to hold the left accountable for that venom? Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the New York Times feels much responsibility in this regard.

If one expects the worst from people he will find that the secular left rarely disappoints. The recent ad placed by MoveOn.org in the Times (below) has proven too much even for the stomachs of many of its satellites in the United States Congress.

The problem with much of the left is not just that they're wrong. About that people can certainly disagree. It's that so many of them simply don't know how to function in a civil society. They seem to think that the basic rules of human decency don't apply to them. Two of their favorite weapons are vitriol and character assassination. The NYT ad attacking General Petraeus is a disgraceful blend of both.

It was bad enough that Al Gore apoplectically accused George Bush of betraying the United States, but at least that was one politician making a despicable charge against another. For the MoveOn people, though, to besmirch a man whom everyone agrees has conducted himself with honor, professionalism and extraordinary competence in service to his country, for the people at MoveOn, most of whom have accomplished nothing in their lives comparable to what Petraeus does every day before breakfast, for the people at MoveOn to label this man a traitor is absolutely revolting. But then what else should we expect from people who have never grown up?

I wonder if an ad that suggested that, say, Hillary Clinton was somehow involved in the Vince Foster suicide would ever be run on the Times' pages. I doubt it, but the Times has no problem with a sophomoric ad accusing a decent and honorable man of treason when he is serving his country more competently and bravely than any of his critics ever could. Pretty pathetic.

RLC

Was Clinton Worse Than Craig?

Byron forwards this New Republic article on the recent flurry of sex scandals among politicians. The column, by Michael Schaffer, raised a couple of thoughts:

Schaffer refers to the hypocrisy of Republicans who espouse family values nevertheless being discovered engaging in very family unfriendly circumstances, but as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think the hypocrisy angle of these sad episodes is being overstated. It's not hypocritical to think that a behavior is wrong even if one engages in it oneself, and, if a legislator thinks his behavior is wrong, the fact that he engages in it himself is hardly a reason why he should vote to legitimize it.

Schaffer also contrasts the relatively "normal" affairs of two California Democratic mayors and the more sordid escapades of Republican senators David Vitter and Larry Craig as though Democratic dalliances are somehow not as bad as those of Republicans. I'm not sure what he's trying to prove with this argument, but it fails in any event once one recalls that for sheer sleaziness there's little that can compare with New Jersey's former Democrat governor Jim McGreevy's secret lifestyle.

I did think, though, that Schaffer was on the mark with this:

But once we start having scandals that involve extramarital others with real power who demand real payoffs from our pols, we may well be wishing they'd take their cheating selves straight back to the bathroom stall.

In fact it was precisely this concern which so deeply disturbed many people about President Clinton's satyriasis. What would happen (or what might have actually happened), people wondered, if a man in Clinton's position received "favors" from someone who in turn demanded a political quid pro quo - especially one which compromised our national security?

The question itself seems crass, but the media might well ask it of themselves as they gleefully pillory Senators Vitter and Craig: Which is worse, anonymous degrading encounters with powerless prostitutes or men in a restroom, or elegant liaisons in luxury hotels with sophisticated women who might use their sexual power to extort or blackmail a president of the United States?

I don't think Schaffer intends to say this, but the logic of his column leads to the conclusion that Clinton's infidelities were far more dangerous to the nation, far more reckless, and therefore far more reprehensible than those of either Vitter or Craig.

RLC

Worst GOP Candidate?

Richard Brookheiser at National Review Online thinks the worst candidate among the leaders of the GOP field is ..... Check the link to see if you guessed correctly.

RLC

Inference to the Best Explanation (Pt. II)

On Sunday we introduced a series of posts which will attempt to make the case that the existence of a personal God is the best explanation for a host of facts about the nature of the world and the human existential condition. In this post we'll discuss three of those.

1) The first is our conviction that the universe must have had a cause and that it didn't cause itself. The universe is contingent, or seems to be. It's therefore prima facie reasonable to think that its existence depends upon something beyond itself. It's possible, perhaps, that it somehow created itself, but that seems counter-intuitive and ad hoc.

Many atheists tell us that the existence of the universe is just a brute fact and that nothing is gained by positing a Creator since the Creator Itself requires an explanation. As Del Ratzsch (Nature, Design and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science) points out, however, this sort of reply, as common as it is, is not very compelling. He invites us to consider this analogy:

"Suppose a perfect ten-meter cube of pure titanium were discovered on Mars. Most people would think that the cube was produced by aliens and would regard the cube as virtual proof that aliens existed. Suppose, though, that there are those who deny either the existence or relevance of aliens, claiming that the cube is just there - a brute fact of nature. Suppose, too, that when pressed for some further explanation, their reply was to point out that the advocates of the alien theory had no clue as to where the aliens came from or how they had manufactured the cube."

Ratzsch goes on to explain that the inability to say anything much about the aliens doesn't count at all against the theory that aliens were responsible for the cube nor does it mean that the alien theory is on par with the brute fact theory. The existence of an intelligent alien manufacturer of the cube is an inference to the best explanation.

2) The second fact about the world is that the cosmic parameters, forces and constants which govern it are exquisitely fine-tuned. Here is one example of the dozens which could serve:

If the initial density of matter in the universe had deviated by as little as one part in 10 to the 60th power (a value referred to by scientists as the "density parameter"), the universe would have either fallen back on itself or expanded too quickly for stars to form. This is an unimaginably fine tolerance.

Imagine a stack of dimes stretching across 10 to the 30th universes like our own. Let the dimes represent calibrations on a gauge displaying every possible value for the density parameter. Imagine, too, that a needle points to the dime representing the critical value. If the initial density of our cosmos deviated from that critical value by a single dime our universe, if it formed at all, would not be suitable for life.

Or imagine a console featuring dials and gauges for each of the dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of constants and parameters which define the structure of our world. Imagine that each dial face shows trillions upon trillions of possible values. Each of those dials has to be calibrated to precisely the value to which it is set in our world in order for a universe to exist and/or for life to thrive.

Of course, it could be an astonishing coincidence that all the dials are set with such mind-boggling precision. Or it could be that there are a near infinite number of universes having all possible values and that ours just happens to be one that is perfectly calibrated for life. But not only is this an extraordinarily unparsimonious hypothesis, it also elicits the question of what it is that's generating these universes and what evidence we have that they even exist. It's much simpler to bow to Ockham and assume that there is just one universe and that its structure manifests a level of engineering of breath-taking precision, a conclusion perfectly compatible with the idea that there's an intelligent agent behind it all.

3) The third fact about the world from which we might infer that there is an intelligence behind it is the existence of biological information. The biosphere is information-rich, a fact which raises the question of where this information came from and how it got here. The naturalist's answer is that the information, such as we find in DNA and cellular processes, resulted from blind mechanistic forces acting purposelessly and randomly over the eons. Such a thing is within the realm of the logically possible, of course, but if we're going to limit ourselves to the lessons of experience we must acknowledge that information whose provenience we can ascertain is always the product of an intelligent mind.

Random processes can produce highly improbable structures (like the particular arrangement of rocks at the base of a mountain) and they can produce very specific recognizable patterns (like the repetition of a single letter typed by a monkey), but what we've never observed a random, non-teleological process do is generate both (such as a computer program). Yet that is precisely what we have in the genetic code.

There may someday be a satisfactory naturalistic explanation for the origin of biological information, but until that day arrives the obvious existence of that information suggests an intelligent agent somewhere in its history.

We'll continue this series of posts tomorrow.

RLC

Re: Racial Disparity

A student of mine comments on our Feedback Page about our recent post on the academic shortcomings of minority students. Give it a look.

RLC

The Challenge of Iraq

Reading between the lines of this brief but very good primer on the history and problems of Iraq, one gets the impression that a major impediment to any kind of functional government in Baghdad is Islam. What is needed between Sunni and Shia is trust and forgiveness and Islam is not a religion notable for its emphasis on either.

Indeed, a religion that emphasizes retribution and vengeance and which is deeply ingrained into the cultural assumptions by which people live is not likely to result in harmony between groups which have been at each other's throats for centuries. It's interesting to note that every Arab state is either a dictatorship or a monarchy. True democracy is not part of the heritage handed down to Arabs by their Islamic tutors and ancestors.

The challenge the United States faces is trying to impose a form of government based on Christian assumptions of freedom, equality, civil rights, and honesty on people who despise Christianity. Yet what realistic alternative do we have at this point but to do our best to try?

RLC

Scandal, Scandal Everywhere

The buzz around Washington for the last two years has been all about how the Republican party is the party of corruption, etc. etc. Not that there haven't been Republicans who have disgraced the party and the ideals they were elected to work for, but the notion that corruption is a monopoly of the GOP is going to be a much tougher sell now that eleven New Jersey Democrats, including some big fish and friends of Hillary, have been indicted by the FBI on corruption charges.

Michelle Malkin has the details.

Coming on the heels of the Norman Hsu scandal this news can't be helpful. By the way, how is Hsu feeling, I wonder, after his sudden illness?

Meanwhile, the lips of the MSM are zipped tight on separate scandals involving Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein. If you look on the sidebar on the right of Malkin's page you'll find the background on these stories which the media, ever vigilant to broadcast every tawdry truth about Republicans, have done their best to say nothing about.

I wonder when Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews at MSNBC are going to get around to mentioning this. Probably this week, I should think.

RLC

Dawkins on Hitchens

I haven't yet read God is Not Great: The Case Against Religion, by Christopher Hitchens, but judging from Richard Dawkins' gushing review any serious reader looking for a telling argument against the truth of Christianity will find the book disappointing.

If Dawkins' analysis is any measure, the closest Hitchens comes to scoring a blow against Christian belief is when he trots out the same old higher critical hypotheses about the New Testament's supposed lack of authenticity. It's a pretty shallow harbor in which to anchor an argument that Christianity is false, but Dawkins gives us no reason to think he has access to a deeper one. A readable antidote to this old chestnut is Mark Roberts' Are the Gospels Reliable?

Hitchens also tries to discredit Christian belief on the basis of the alleged "evil" of the Gospel message. What exactly is that evil, you ask? It turns out to be the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ. Really. After finding all manner of horror in the sacred writings of the Muslims and Jews, the best that Hitchens can do to show the moral equivalence of Christianity to Islam is to hold up the idea that God became man to demonstrate the depth of His love for us by sacrificing Himself in our place. In Hitchens' mind that's a terrible evil.

Those not familiar with this aspect of Christian theology are invited to read this little allegory and decide for themselves where exactly the evil lies in the idea of substitutionary atonement.

Anyway, like I said, I haven't read Hitchens book, and perhaps if I had I would be more impressed. If any readers have read it and think that it makes a stronger case against Christianity than what I've suggested here please let me know.

RLC

Inference to the Best Explanation Pt. I

Among the indictments of religious believers recently handed down by skeptics such as the coterie of anti-theists lead by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, et al. is that belief in God is at best irrational and at worst pernicious. Theism is all faith and no evidence, the believer is condescendingly assured, but should a theist try to pin down his antagonist and ask him exactly what he means by evidence, it often turns out that the word is being employed as a synonym for "proof."

Well, of course there's no proof that there is a personal God, but that's hardly a reason not to believe that one exists. We have proof for very little of what we believe about the world, yet we don't hold our beliefs less firmly for that.

The skeptic's claim that there's no evidence that God exists and that theistic belief is thus irrational is, ironically, the reverse of the truth. It's actually more rational to believe that a personal transcendent creator of the universe exists than to disbelieve. Moreover, as I hope becomes evident in what follows, the logical consequences of atheism turn out to be psychically toxic.

Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests on the side of the believer. This is because almost every relevant fact about the world, and every existential characteristic of the human condition, makes more sense in light of the hypothesis of theism.

Put differently, the conclusion of theism is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation. I don't mean to suggest that there are no facts about the world that militate against the God of Christian theism - there are, of course. Nor do I mean to suggest that atheism can offer no account of the facts of human existence. Perhaps it can. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism the facts are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism. If that is the case, it follows that it's more reasonable to believe that the explanation for them is the existence of a personal God.

In Part II tomorrow we'll consider seven or eight particulars about the world and our existential condition within the world which harmonize more easily or readily with the belief that there exists a transcendent personal Creator than with the belief that the universe is all that there is. The series will conclude with Part III in which we'll review an additional eight or nine such facts.

RLC

The Darwinians' Learned Desperation

Eugene Koonin has written a paper on the origin of life in which he acknowledges that, given what we know, the odds of any system capable of replication of genetic material and translation (replication and translation: R&T) into proteins of that genetic material arising by chance are exceedingly close to zero.

That being so how can we account for the appearance and existence of life? We must certainly increase the odds somehow, but there are really only two ways of doing that - either introduce intentionality (Intelligent Design)or postulate a near infinite number of worlds in which chance operates.

Koonin explicitly wants to avoid the former so he embraces the latter and plunges himself into the very metaphysical speculation he wants to avoid:

I only discuss here what is often called "weak" anthropic principle and is the only acceptable scientific rendering of this concept. The so-called "strong" anthropic principle is the teleological notion that our (human) existence is, in some mysterious sense, the "goal" of the evolution of the universe; as such, this idea does not belong in the scientific domain.

Having discarded an explanation because he considers it metaphysical and unscientific he then adopts a second hypothesis that is itself metaphysical and unscientific.

He argues that the universe is really a multiverse, infinite in extent, containing every possible kind of universe consistent with the laws of physics (I'm not sure why he adds this qualifier since there could certainly be universes which are inconsistent with the laws of physics, at least as we know them). If that is so, and given that a universe in which R&T occurs by pure chance is a possible universe, no matter how unlikely, such a universe must exist and we're in it. In other words given enough trials anything that is possible to happen, no matter how improbable, will happen. Since our universe is a possible universe, given an infinite number of worlds and an infinite amount of diversity, our universe must exist.

This is a wonderful piece of metaphysical legerdemain. Simply postulate the existence of a near infinite number of worlds, never mind about adducing evidence for them, stir in the tacit but crucial assumption that those worlds would be infinitely diverse, and presto, a world with life in it just has to exist.

Koonin's goal in writing this paper is, as he makes clear, to allow his fellow materialists to avoid the despair which results from having no answer to those pesky Intelligent Design people. He writes:

A final comment on "irreducible complexity" and "intelligent design". By showing that highly complex systems, actually, can emerge by chance and, moreover, are inevitable, if extremely rare, in the universe, the present model sidesteps the issue of irreducibility and leaves no room whatsoever for any form of intelligent design.

Perhaps, but at what cost? After all, if we are to accept the assumption that in an infinite number of worlds all possibilities consistent with the laws of physics become actual (and they must do so an infinite number of times) then it follows that there must be an infinite number of worlds that are intentionally designed since that is certainly a possibility consistent with the laws of physics.

But set that aside and note the implicit admission in Koonin's words. Unless there are an infinite number of worlds representing all possible biological histories the idea of Intelligent Design becomes very difficult to avoid.

Note, too, that Koonin purports to be advancing a legitimate scientific hypothesis even though it's full of metaphysical speculation. Yet Intelligent Design is condemned by the scientific establishment because it has metaphysical implications.

Koonin's paper is very learned, but it's really an act of learned desperation.

RLC

BDS in Seattle

How deep is the hatred for George W. Bush among Democrats in this country? How completely irrational is it? Well, this story out of Seattle might offer us some insight:

Are you still fans of Matt Hasselbeck and Mack Strong after they visited President Bush last week in Bellevue? Or have their political leanings turned you against them?

The Seahawks quarterback and fullback gave the 43rd president a No. 43 jersey with his name on it at a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser for Rep. Dave Reichert at the Hyatt.

At the time, Hasselbeck called it a thrill and said it was a win-win, this opportunity to meet the president and get out of a team meeting.

But as soon as he saw the picture of the two players with Bush, Gary Wright, the team's vice president of administration, said he was concerned about negative reaction.

Maybe in really red Republican states, it would not have been a big deal. But Washington is a blue state, and deep, deep Democratic blue in King County. So objections were raised, and Hasselbeck heard them and read them. He got nasty voice mails, e-mails and text messages.

"I had no idea," Hasselbeck said.

One guy told him: "I hate you, I'll never wear your jersey, I'll never like the Seahawks again."

"Huh?" Hasselbeck thought. "Seriously?"

"Politics can be very mean and dirty," he said. "The things politicians say about each other, and what activists say, I had a brief glimpse of that for a couple of days.

"If I ever had any questions about whether I wanted to run for office, I now know the answer -- I don't."

As a quarterback, he's used to getting booed. "But this was a whole new level," he said. "I was very surprised how mean (they were)."

As evidence were these responses to Angelo Bruscas' blog posting on seattlepi.com:

"How dare Hasselbeck declare Bush an honorary Seahawk," wrote one. "Who is Matt speaking for? Bush is no Seahawk. He is the worst president of my lifetime, and I'm almost 60. Shame on you, Matt."

"To learn that two of the most popular Seahawks are strong (Bush) supporters ruins the season for me and my family," wrote another.

And Timothy P. wrote: "Just goes to show you that being a great athlete doesn't make you smart."

The rest of this sad story can be read at the link. Evidently, there are quite a few people in the northwest who need to get a life. It may be comforting to the left to hear that Bush Derangement Syndrome is flourishing in Seattle, but it's certainly disturbing to the mentally sane to read this stuff.

RLC

Terrorist Takedown

ABCNews has a few details on the German investigation that led to the arrests of three German Muslims who plotted to kill Americans in night spots near Ramstein Air Force base in Germany (Yes, our military is still in Germany sixty seven years after the end of WWII).

RLC

Testing Syria's Defenses

The Israeli foray, into Syrian airspace earlier this week has apparently mystified commentators, some of whom have speculated that it was a navigational mistake.

Probably the real reason was to test the capability of a newly-installed anti-aircraft system that the Russians have sold to both Syria and Iran. The system failed to down any of the Israeli jets which failure has no doubt embarrassed the Russians, frustrated the Syrians and caused deep concern among the Iranians who were surely hoping it would give some measure of protection against an American strike on their nuclear facilities.

DEBKAfile says:

The purported Israeli air force flights over the Pantsyr-S1E site established that the new Russian missiles, activated for the first time in the Middle East, are effective and dangerous but can be disarmed. Western military sources attribute to those Israeli or other air force planes superior electronics for jamming the Russian missile systems, but stress nonetheless that they were extremely lucky to get away unharmed, or at worst, with damage minor enough for a safe return to base.

The courage, daring and operational skills of the air crews must have been exceptional. They would have needed to spend enough time in hostile Syrian air space to execute several passes at varying altitudes under fire in order to test the Pantsyr-S1E responses. Their success demonstrated to Damascus and Tehran that their expensive new Russian anti-air system leaves them vulnerable.

There's more on this incursion at the DEBKAfile link.

RLC

Support the Mission

If you agree with the following four points you can go here to sign a petition that will be given to members of Congress this month to let them know how you feel.

• Recognize the importance of fighting and defeating al-Qaeda, wherever they can be found, not least in Iraq;
• Consider the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker with an open mind and without regard for partisan politics;
• Recognize the significant threat to U.S. national security that a hasty retreat or a made-in-Washington timetable for withdrawal from Iraq would generate; and
• Listen to the U.S. service members who willingly sacrifice to protect our country and who do not want defeat legislated in Washington so long as American troops are on the battlefield.

It's important.

RLC

Dog Evolution

Denyse O'Leary has an interesting post at Uncommon Descent in which the diversity among dogs is explained. The variations among canines, it turns out, are not the result of an evolutionary process in which genetic information is increased, as Richard Dawkins suggested in his critique of Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution. Rather what happens is that new varieties arise when genetic information is actually degraded.

O'Leary quotes David DeWitt:

Many of the traits for different dog breeds are examples of neoteny.

Neoteny refers to the maintaining of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Mutations can prevent proper development and maturation. Even though particular traits might seem like they are novel, in such cases it is really a loss of information since the animal has stunted development in one trait.

This is why some breeds of dogs are so cute and look like puppies even though they are full grown (Jack Russel, Shitzu etc).

In other words the regulatory processes that shut off the juvenile characteristic and allow for maturation have been somehow disrupted, probably through some genetic mutation, so that the juvenile characteristic persists. This is not Darwinian evolution which posits an increase in genetic information. It is in fact, the opposite.

In other words, in at least one area where we have evidence of evolution, it seems to go from more complex genetic arrangements to less complex which is exactly what creationists have been claiming for decades that all evolution does.

I'll bet Dawkins wishes he hadn't brought up the subject of dog evolution.

RLC

Worldviews

Civis at Politics, Sex and Religion asks some important questions about worldviews and their philosophical implications. Check out his site and join the conversation.

RLC

From Iraq

Ralph Peters has been to Iraq several times and has given us some good insights into the situation there. His latest column is a must-read piece for anyone who wishes to be informed on both the difficulties and the successes that we are experiencing. He looks down the road at what the problems will be several months hence and also at the current state of the war against the insurgency. He tells us, for instance of one officer's rather startling assessment of the military conflict:

One blade-sharp officer, Lt. Col. Doug Ollivant, the 1st Cavalry Division's G-5 Plans officer, even proposes that "our counterinsurgency fight is largely won," with the fading of the Sunni insurgency and the gutting of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Peters goes on to say that:

I've listed the key problems that may lie ahead, but this visit to Iraq further convinced me that we're on a promising track, security-wise:

• Al Qaeda, America's enemy, has suffered a catastrophic strategic defeat and a humiliation - rejected by its own kind - that will resound in the Muslim world.
• That hotbed of insurgency, Anbar Province, has largely come over to our side.
• The surge strategy is bringing peaceful conditions to ever more Iraqi neighborhoods - and street-level Iraqis are grateful. They don't want us to leave.
• Despite Iran's growing involvement, we've limited Tehran's effectiveness - thus far.

Meanwhile, Fox News recently ran an article in which they mentioned a comment by a Lt. Col. Kenneth Adgie. Adgie said he received a report last Monday that Al Qaeda in Iraq beheaded a 12-year-old boy in the middle of the street because his father was cooperating with the Americans. "That's the level of evil we're dealing with here," he said.

Think of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have cooperated with Americans. What would be their fate and that of their children if we were to pull out before Iraq was safe from these cretins?

Those who advocate withdrawal respond with something like, "Well, we don't really know that these people would be massacred when we get out." That response is as stupid as it is pusillanamous. The rational course is to assume that the future will resemble the past, that the people who behead 12 year-old children to get revenge on the parents and who booby trap children's bodies so as to also kill their grieving parents, aren't going to renounce their savagery just because the Americans leave.

What is far more likely is that the horror inflicted upon that 12-year-old boy and his family will be repeated tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. It is that expectation, that liklihood, which should inform our policy, not the wishful thinking embraced by those who rely on the desperate hope that our withdrawal will miraculously assuage the hatreds and change the hearts of these most evil of men.

RLC

Atheist Manifesto

TotheSource has an interview with Alister McGrath, author of The Dawkins Delusion, a book written in response to atheist Richard Dawkins' God Delusion. In the interview it's pointed out that Dawkins' arguments are so bad that even fellow atheists like Michael Ruse are saying that they cause him to be embarrassed to be an atheist.

This comment by Ruse is equally appropriate to another atheist book, a big seller in Europe but less well-known in the United States, by French philosopher Michael Onfray. Onfray has composed a work which he titles, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam about which there are several things which might be said:

First, anyone expecting an argument for an atheistic view of the world should go elsewhere. Onfray nowhere in the book actually provides an argument for atheism or, for that matter, against theism. The entire book is instead a screed against the three major monotheistic religions.

Moreover, even if everything the author says about the failings and crimes of the adherents of these religions is true, none of it gives anyone any reason to abandon belief in God. The book can be distilled to a single sentence: Religious people in each of the three major traditions have done many awful things, terrible things, therefore these religions are all false. It's not much of an argument, of course, but there you have it.

So, if the book is not an argument for the truth of atheism and doesn't really demonstrate that the world's major religions are false, then what is Onfray's point? He seems to be intent on showing that Christians (and Jews and Muslims) are generally evil people. Of course, to make this case he has to be very selective in the evidence he cites, and he has to put the worst possible construction on much evidence that admits of more than one interpretation.

This passage, taken from among the many which could serve, will afford the reader a sense of Onfray's style: (p.67)

The religion of the one God .... seeks to promote self-hatred to the detriment of the body, to discredit the intelligence, to despise the flesh, and to despise everything that stands in the way of a gratified subjectivity. Launched against others, it foments contempt, wickedness, the forms of intolerance that produce racism, xenophobia, colonialism, wars, social injustice .... the three monotheisms share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of of freedom; hatred of all books [other than their scriptures]; hatred of sexuality, women, pleasure, hatred of the feminine; hatred of the body, of desires, of drives ....

This description sounds a great deal like the state atheisms of the twentieth century, and perhaps Islam, but Christians, at least, will have a hard time recognizing in the indictment anything resembling the faith to which they cling.

It might help Onfray if he would provide some support for at least some of his claims, but there's not a footnote nor a literature citation anywhere in the book (not even an index!). The reader is left to trust him on those matters upon which the reader feels incompetent to judge, but Mr. Onfray's accuracy in those matters upon which the reader does have a little knowledge fails to inspire confidence in his overall veracity.

To take but one example, the author claims that Adolph Hitler, so far from being an atheist, was a Christian sympathetic to the Catholic Church (p.187). This is simply false. Hitler was at most a deist or pantheist who in fact despised Christianity (See here). Onfray's book is rife with similar examples of historical distortions.

There is one thing about it, however, which redeems it from total uselessness. Onfray's catalogue of horrors perpetrated by religious people throughout history contains more than a few which actually happened. Reading these should open the eyes of theists everywhere to the evil latent within every human heart and should make Christians, especially, more resolved than ever to fulfill their obligation as representatives of the Christ whose own heart breaks when such crimes are committed in His name.

RLC

D. James Kennedy (1930-2007)

A generation of very well-known Evangelical preachers seems to be passing from the scene in this first decade of the 21st century. First it was James Montgomery Boice in 2000, then Henry Morris (who was not really a preacher but whose ministry was probably more influential than that of any preacher except for Billy Graham) last year, then Jerry Falwell last May and now James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida. It's like an era in contemporary Christianity is coming to a close.

RLC

Qualia

One of the most fascinating areas of philosophical study is the study of human consciousness. What is it exactly and where does it come from? The physicalist view is that consciousness is just a product of brain chemistry, but many philosophers are not convinced that consciousness can be reduced to atoms spinning around in the brain.

Physicalism is essentially synonomous with materialism (the view that matter is all there is). It's the view that everything is explicable in terms of physical processes and forces. There's nothing about us, the physicalist maintains, which is non-physical. As such, it's possible that someday computers may possess all the attributes of human beings.

Human consciousness, however, is the fly in the physicalist soup. There is no physicalist explanation of consciousness that has really been successful in persuading philosophers not already inclined toward physicalism.

Consider one aspect of the problem posed to physicalism by consciousness - the problem of sensory experience, or what philosophers refer to as qualia. If human beings are purely physical, like machines, then everything about us should be quantifiable. A complete physical description of us should be a complete description of us. But it's not. The problem was illustrated by Frank Jackson in 1986. Jackson invites us to imagine a student named Mary:

Mary is confined to a black-and-white room, is educated through black-and-white books and through lectures relayed on black-and white television. In this way she learns everything there is to know about the physical nature of the world. She knows all the physical facts about us and our enviroment, in a wide sense of 'physical' which includes everything in completed physics, chemistry, and neurophysiology, and all there is to know about the causal and relational facts consequent upon all this, including, of course, functional roles. If physicalism is true, she knows all there is to know. For to suppose otherwise is to suppose that there is more to know than every physical fact, and that is what physicalism denies.

It seems, however, that Mary does not know all there is to know. For when she is let out of the black-and-white room or given a color television, she will learn what it is like to see something red, say. This is rightly described as learning--she will not say "ho, hum." Hence, physicalism is false.

In other words, Even if Mary knows everything there is to know about the physical world she doesn't know what it is like to see red (or hear noise, or smell fragrance). She can't know it until she has the experience, but this experience cannot be described in physical terms. A complete physical description of the world is not a complete description of the world.

Thus, there must be more to reality than just the physical, and it is doubtful that a computer, or any machine, could ever know what it is like to experience color or enjoy pleasure or suffer pain.

RLC