Mutually Exclusive

Alvin Plantinga lays out his famous and important argument that, contrary to what most people would think, naturalism (the belief that nature is all there is) is actually incompatible with evolution. Unfortunately, the argument may be a little hard to follow for philosophical novices, so here's a quick and doubtless inadequate summary:

If our cognitive faculties (our reason) are the product of evolution then they have arisen because they confer fitness upon us in the struggle for survival.

However, survival advantage is irrelevant to the pursuit of truth. To see this, imagine there's a genetic propensity in some people to believe that one's reward in the afterlife is directly proportional to the number of offspring one has. Such a belief would have very high selection value since those who held the belief would tend to produce more offspring than those who didn't, but the belief has nothing to do with the truth. Thus our cognitive faculties would over time tend to produce beliefs which promote survival but which have only a coincidental relation to the truth.

Thus we would have no good reason, given the evolution of our cognitive faculties, to think any of the beliefs produced by those faculties, particularly our metaphysical beliefs, to be true. But naturalism is a metaphysical belief produced by our cognitive faculties. Therefore, if evolution is true we have no good reason to believe that naturalism is true. They're mutually exclusive.

Indeed, Plantinga argues that the probability of naturalism being true is either low or unknowable (inscrutable) and therefore we lack epistemic justification for believing it.

Those intrepid enough to wade through the entire argument will find it, and a criticism of it, at the link.

RLC

Nature/Nurture

Is intelligence a function of one's environment or of the genes one has inherited from one's ancestors? Thomas Sowell weighs in on the debate to tell us that there's research out there that suggests an answer may be forthcoming to this traditionally uncrackable nut.

RLC

Attack on Iran Imminent

This story carried by DEBKAfile may have serious implications for the near future in Iran:

The Khorramshar News Agency, which is published by the ethnic Arab underground of Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan, reported early Oct. 1 that the entire staff of Russian nuclear engineers and experts employed in building the nuclear reactor at Bushehr had abruptly packed their bags Friday, Sept. 28, and flew back to Russia. The agency's one-liner offers no source or explanation. DEBKAfile have obtained no corroboration of its report from any other source.

The story appears to have originated with the ethnic Arabs who live near the reactor or who come in contact with its Russian staff. If true, DEBKAfile can offer three hypothetical scenarios to account for the Russians' precipitate departure:

1. Another crisis has cropped up in the patchy Russian-Iranian dealings over the Bushehr reactor. This is unlikely because Russian president Vladimar Putin is due for a high-profile visit to Tehran on Oct. 16, when he plans to sign a series of nuclear accords with the Islamic Republic. Furthermore, Moscow, like Beijing, stands foursquare behind Iran's efforts to delay harsher sanctions for its continued uranium enrichment. Only this week, the two powers gained Iran two to three months' grace by forcing a delay in the UN Security Council session that was to have approved a third round of sanctions.

2. Moscow or Tehran has been tipped off that a US or Israeli attack is imminent on the Bushehr plant and Iran's other nuclear installations and acted to whip Russian personnel out of harm's way.

3. Moscow has learned that an Iranian pre-emptive attack is imminent against American targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf and/or Israel.

If the story is true the most likely explanation is number two. The second most likely is number three although I don't see it as being very likely at all. In any case, either two or three suggest that an attack on Iran is imminent.

RLC

Blog Burnout

Christianity Today has a short but interesting article on blogs. It starts with this:

As weblogs proliferated earlier this decade, Andy Warhol's famous aphorism was modified to read, "In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people." Now it looks like Warhol was right after all: Thanks to widespread blog burnout, everyone will be famous to 15 people for 15 minutes.

Tech researcher Gartner Inc. reported earlier this year that 200 million people have given up blogging, more than twice as many as are active.

"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer told reporters. "Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Given the average lifespan of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, Gartner says blogging has probably peaked.

Which isn't to say that blogging is dead. Quite the opposite. Blog aggregator Technorati estimates that 3 million new blogs are launched every month. The site's tongue-in-cheek slogan: "Zillions of photos, videos, blogs, and more. Some of them have to be good."

Actually, some Christian blogs are very good. What tired bloggers are increasingly discovering, however, is that it's not necessarily the quality of their blog posts that matter. It's matching their quality with frequency.

Well, maybe, but I think a bigger problem is exposure. With so many blogs out there it really is hard to get noticed, and it's difficult to work hard at producing either quality or frequency when the feeling that you're just writing for yourself is creeping all over you.

Nevertheless, we here at Viewpoint keep plugging away, hoping that if you see something that interests you you'll link us to friends and that perhaps by word of mouth, so to speak, we'll gradually grow. Meanwhile, we continue to strive to bring you both quality and frequency. Thanks for reading us and telling others about us.

RLC

Seventeen Questions for Barack

George Will poses 17 questions for Barack Obama and in the process gives the reader the disconcerting impression that the Senator really hasn't thought through the things he says in public. Here are a few of the 17:

You advocate leaving in Iraq "some" U.S. forces for three missions -- fighting al Qaeda, training Iraqi security forces and protecting U.S. forces conducting those two missions. Some experts believe that even 60,000 U.S, troops would be insufficient for those functions -- even if the Iraqis were not, as they will be for the foreseeable future, dependent on U.S. logistics, transport, fire support, air support, armor and medivac capabilities.

What is your estimate of the numbers required by your policy? How, and in consultation with whom, did you arrive at your estimate? As to fighting terrorists but not insurgents -- how would soldiers and Marines tell the difference? If, while searching for terrorists, they make contact with insurgents, would your rules of engagement call for a full force response? You say all "combat brigades" should be out of Iraq "by the end of next year." Even if al-Qaeda is still dangerous? Who, after the end of next year, will protect U.S. noncombat forces that you say "will continue to protect U.S. diplomats and facilities" and to "train and equip" Iraqi forces?

Will assures us at the end of the piece that once Senator Obama answers his 17 questions there will be lots more where those came from. That should be troubling news for supporters of Senator Obama.

RLC

The Marketplace of Ideas

Peggy Noonan has a fine column on the open exchange of ideas within a society. It's a good reminder that we were once a people who valued ideas, even those which challenged our own orthodoxies, and even when their advocates were personally odious.

The concept of a free exchange of ideas was a classically liberal notion, but somewhere along the line we've lost it. Now when conservatives appear behind campus lecturns they have pies thrown at them. Those who fail to bow at the altar of politically correct opinion, like Harvard's Larry Summers, have their speaking invitations rescinded. Intelligent Design proponents are stripped of their teaching positions. Pro-life advocates are often shouted down when the speak in public. Radio talk show hosts are condemned on the floor of the Senate for saying things that were at best misunderstood and at worst deliberately and maliciously distorted in order to smear the host.

We no longer seem to prize diversity of opinion, today we want only assent and agreement. If you dissent, especially from the orthodoxies which reign on today's campuses, then you must be shut up one way or another. We have indeed lost something precious to the totalitarian wannabes who walk among us.

RLC

Hall of Fame Induction

The series of posts titled Inference to the Best Explanation has been collated and added to the Hall of Fame at the upper left margin of this page. A click on the link will bring up the entire series.

While you're at it you might wish to peruse some of the other inductees among that list.

RLC

Concentrating the Mind

Duke University president Richard Brodhead has issued an official apology to the falsely accused students whose travails were national news throughout the past year. The AP article says this:

Brodhead, speaking at the university's law school, said he regretted Duke's "failure to reach out" in a "time of extraordinary peril" after a woman accused three players of rape at a March 2006 party thrown by the team.

"Given the complexities of this case, getting the communication right would never have been easy," Brodhead said. "But the fact is that we did not get it right, causing the families to feel abandoned when they were most in need of support. This was a mistake. I take responsibility for it and I apologize for it."

"Duke needed to be clear that it demanded fair treatment for its students," he said. "I took that completely for granted. If anyone doubted it, then I should have been more explicit, especially as the evidence mounted that the prosecutor was not acting in accordance with the standards of his profession."

Brodhead also said the school could have done more to show that some members of Duke's faculty who were openly critical of the lacrosse team did not speak for the university as a whole.

I wonder whether the University would have been slow to support the students and their coach had this not been a crime involving the politically correct trifecta of race, class, and gender. I'm sure that Brodhead has had many more headaches as a result of this episode than what have been made public.

Might his regrettable mistake - and that of many on the Duke faculty - have been a result of seeing the original charges against the boys as a chance to show the university community and the nation that he was one white man who, despite his privileged status, stood in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed? Such opportunities to assuage "white guilt" don't come along very often, and perhaps, blinded by the sudden opportunity to demonstrate that his heart was in the right place, he simply forgot about his responsibility as president to withhold judgment until the evidence was in.

At least he seems to have forgotten about it until it became clear to him that his solidarity with the accuser and against the accused was going to cost his University a bundle. No doubt that realization served to concentrate his mind and helped him to see clearly the error of his thinking.

Thanks to Bill for passing along the article.

RLC

More on Jena

Dissatisfied with media coverage of the Jena 6 matter, Joe Carter has posted links to many of the relevant documents. It's a good source for material on the case that's hard to find anywhere else.

RLC

The Slaughter in Myanmar

The slaughter in Myanmar is worse than originally thought. Apparently thousands of Buddhist monks, non-violent by creed and tradition, have been butchered by the government of the country formerly known as Burma.

This article gives details and it also provokes a couple of questions. Why, for example does Marcus Oscarsson, the journalist who wrote the piece, print the name of a defector who provided the information when the defector's family remains in Burma?

This strikes me as terribly reckless at the very best. It's amazing to me that anyone would want to talk to journalists when so many show such insensitivity and concern for those they exploit as sources. Oscarsson says that his source "had no fears for his family's safety because his brother is a powerful general who will protect them," but why does Oscarsson take it upon himself to take that chance?

The second question this entire tragedy raises is for those who lean toward a pacifist solution to conflict. The Burmese interviewed for the story fear that the current protest movement, like the last one in 1988, has been extinguished for another generation. No one is more non-violent than Buddhist monks, but their attempts to reform their government have met with nothing but repression and murder each time they try to have their oppression eased. What are the lessons to be learned from both this terrible atrocity and the atrocity perpetrated by the Burmese junta's masters at Tianamen square?

Perhaps one lesson is that peaceful, non-violent protest generally succeeds only in countries where the government has a tradition of respecting human rights and where the government is accountable to the people - in other words, in Western democracies and states like India and Israel which are based on Western traditions.

In repressive regimes ruled by thugs, the non-violent solution may work, but experience seems to indicate that it's more likely to produce little more than the corpses of martyrs.

RLC

Centers of Moral Clarity

What does it say about American universities that, on the one hand, Columbia U. was willing to provide a platform for a terrorist who ought to be tried for war crimes and who is seeking the destruction of Israel, while on the other Sacramento/UC rescinded an invitation to former Harvard president Larry Summers, whose unpardonable offense was to observe that males may have a better aptitude for math and science than females? For this crime against humanity the Sacramento faculty pressured the administration to have him disinvited. I'll bet, though, they would have gladly taken A'jad had he been available.

It's comforting to know that the centers of moral clarity that are our universities have no trouble telling who the real criminals are.

RLC

Pass the Prozac

More good news from Iraq:

US-led forces have killed one of the most important leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq, a Tunisian believed to be connected to the kidnapping and killings last summer of American soldiers, a top commander said Friday.

Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson said the death of the suspected terrorist and recent similar operations have left the organization in Iraq fractured.

"Abu Usama al-Tunisi was one of the most senior leaders ... the emir of foreign terrorists in Iraq and part of the inner leadership circle," Anderson said.

Anderson said recent coalition operations also have helped cut in half the previous flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, which had been at about 60 to 80 a month.

He credited the work of the Iraqi Department of Border Enforcement and US teams.

Maybe we can get the Iraqi Department of Border Enforcement to come over here.

Anyway, the news out of Iraq since the surge began has been very positive and encouraging. Somebody please hand the anti-depressants to Congressman Murtha and Senator Reid.

RLC

She Can't Be Serious

Hillary seems determined to undermine her own reputation for seriousness with this kind of crass political pandering:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 "baby bond" from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.

Clinton, her party's front-runner in the 2008 race, made the suggestion during a forum hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus.

"I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that downpayment on their first home," she said.

The New York senator did not offer any estimate of the total cost of such a program or how she would pay for it. Approximately 4 million babies are born each year in the United States.

Break out your calculators students. Four million babies a year at a rate of $5000 per baby comes to 20 billion of the taxpayers' Abe Lincolns every year if Hillary has her way. And if she has a Democratic congress she'll have her way.

Looks like if Hillary wins in 2008 we'll be keeping even less of our paychecks starting in 2009.

RLC

Inference to the Best Explanation (Conclusion)

This series of posts has been devoted to defending the claim that the simplest explanation for the nature of the world and the deepest yearnings and feelings of the human psyche is that they are what they are because they conform to some existential reality. Those profound convictions we hold are most simply explained by positing the possibility of satisfaction, but they can only be satisfied if there is a being that corresponds to the traditional notion of God. If theism is correct we can find intellectual and emotional contentment in believing that the tragic condition of the world and of our lives is only temporary, that death is not the end and that a beautiful future lies ahead.

If God exists then we can assume that He made us for a reason, that there is a purpose to our existence and that we have dignity and inalienable rights as human beings because we are made in the image of God and loved by Him. If God exists then there is a transcendent moral authority which will ultimately mete out justice and which provides us in this life with an objective standard upon which to base moral judgment. We feel guilt because we're actually guilty. We feel free because we're actually free. We have an identity that endures because that identity exists in the mind of God. If God exists there is a basis for hope and some sense can be made of an otherwise senseless world.

The atheist, if he's consistent with his belief that there is no God, finds himself completely at odds in almost every important way with the structure of his own being. He finds himself inexplicably out of synch with his world. He is alone, forlorn, abandoned in an empty, unfeeling universe that offers no solace nor prospect that there might be meaning, morality, justice, dignity, and solutions to the riddles of existence. The atheist lives without expectation or hope that any of the most profound yearnings of our hearts and minds can ever be fulfilled. How, then, do we come to have them? Why would natural selection shape us in such a way as to be so metaphysically and psychologically incompatible with the world in which we are situated?

It's possible, of course, that the atheistic answer is correct, that this is just the way things are, and we should simply make the best of a very bad situation. Yet surely the skeptic should hope that he's mistaken. Surely he would want there to be a God to infuse the cosmos with all the richness it is starved of by His absence. Nevertheless, I've never known or read one who held such a hope. It's incomprehensible that some, like philosopher Thomas Nagel, for instance, actually cling to the fervent desire that there be no God. This is tantamount to wishing, bizarrely enough, that life really is a meaningless, senseless, cruel and absurd joke. Nagel says in his book The Last Word:

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

Nagel's ability to see his motivations clearly is uncommon and commendable, but his honesty and insight are little compensation for the profound sadness one feels at what he finds in his own heart. How anyone can actually wish the universe to be the sort of place where meaning, morality, justice, human worth and all the rest are vain illusions, is very difficult, for me at least, to understand.

For previous posts in the series use the following links: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII.

RLC

Truth Matters

A left-wing blog called Media Matters recently provided us with a vivid illustration of Churchill's aphorism that a lie gets half-way around the world before truth can get its pants on. Media Matters ran a smear of Bill O'Reilly that was so dishonest it should have been criminal. Nevertheless, CNN and NBC picked up the libel and repeated it themselves.

When eventually confronted with the transcripts of what O'Reilly actually said everyone refused to recant. The damage had been done and O'Reilly has been trying hard on his show to recover something of his reputation. Columnist Juan Williams who was a witness to the remarks for which O'Reilly has been vilified recounts what really happened here.

But blood was in the water so this week Media Matters decided they'd shamelessly repeat the same dishonest tactic by completely distorting something Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program. Referring to frauds who claim to be combat veterans with eye-witness experience of war-time atrocities, but who had in fact never been in the military, Limbaugh called them "phony soldiers."

Never mind the context, Media Matters smeared Limbaugh for having called military critics of the war "phonies," and not only MSNBC repeated the slander but several Democrats rose to the floor of the House and the Senate to blast Limbaugh for his appalling lack of patriotism and whatever else they thought they could stick him with.

In a post-modern world where truth is whatever you feel it to be, and all that counts is winning, where peoples' reputations are fair game in the no-rules world of political combat, I guess this sort disreputable behavior is to be expected. Those of us, though, who believe that truth is of paramount importance should maintain a prudent skepticism toward anything we hear on CNN or MSNBC or indeed CBS, after Dan Rather, or The New Republic, after twice having carried columns by fabulists whose claims were subsequently found to be fabricated. These journalists apparently subscribe to the belief that even if you have to retract a claim later no one will notice, and the damage you had hoped for will already be done.

You might wonder how people can be this way. One of the heroes of the secular left, Karl Marx, once stated that the left's view of the world (communism) "abolishes all eternal truths, all religion and all morality." This pretty much explains everything.

RLC

Workers of the World Unite!

What do Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, and Iran all have in common? They are, of course, all murderous regimes (See what's going on in Burma here) which brutally oppress their own people and, in the case of Iran, export terror around the world. In addition, they all share one other thing in common. They are each one a client state of Communist China.

The most pathological, genocidal thugs in the world are all aided and abetted by a state which, since 1950, has been held up to us by our own secular leftists as a model toward which we should ourselves aspire. It's true that they've been rather mute on the point lately, but just as one rarely found criticism of the atrocities of the former Soviet Union in the leftist media so, too, one rarely hears criticism of Communist China, even though it is by far the worst oppressor and abuser (directly and indirectly) of human rights in the world today.

Perhaps I'm wrong and the left-wing blogosphere is actually full of denunciations of their ideological brethren across the Pacific for their support of the Burmese government and others. Perhaps the only reason I haven't seen any of these excoriations is because I haven't been to their blogs lately. Perhaps the secular left really does care about human rights enough to take time out from their fulminations over Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot act to direct their outrage at real tyranny, and I'm just not aware of it. It's possible.

On a related matter, I wonder, as Hugo Chavez arrogates more and more power for himself in Venezuela, if the Venezuelan people aren't just a little bit nervous given the nightmarish record of communist dictatorships in the old U.S.S.R., North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, and, of course, China.

RLC

Re: No Blood For Oil! Why Not?

Byron takes some issue with our the post directly below titled No Blood For Oil! Why Not?. His comments are on our Feedback page.

I should add that I agree with him that our long term goals should be the sorts of solutions he suggests, but the post was really geared more to addressing the question how we free ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil in the meantime, within the next ten years or so.

And while we're taking these measures we need to ask whether the objection summed up in the cry, "No blood for oil" has any validity in the current circumstances we find ourselves in.

RLC

No Blood For Oil! Why Not?

We often hear that the Iraq war is all about oil. Alan Greenspan is said to have made the comment in his recent book, although he has since claimed that he's being misunderstood and that although oil is the reason why Iraq is important, it's not the reason Bush launched the invasion.

Be that as it may, even if it were the reason we are in Iraq what, exactly, is wrong with fighting over oil? The left declaims that there must be "no blood for oil," and the idea that we are in Iraq, as we were in Kuwait, to protect our access to oil causes steam to shoot from their ears like exhaust from a jet engine. But why?

Suppose it were not oil but some other resource that was at issue. Suppose the Middle East had the bulk of the world's drinking water, or food, and suppose a bunch of psychopathic terrorists threatened to seize total control of this resource and use it as a lever to insure their will be done around the world. Would it it be worth fighting to prevent that from happening?

If the answer is yes then how is oil any different? If our oil supply were to dry up our civilization would die just as surely as if our water were to dry up. It would take longer, but the end would be the same. Oil is the life-blood of the modern world, and we can't survive without it. Without oil there'd be no way to do agriculture on a scale large enough to feed 300 million people, much less get the food to market. Without oil most people would have no way to get to their employment and most businesses and industries would not be able to operate. Nor would we be able to heat many of our homes in the winter or maintain our schools and hospitals. It's simply naive to suggest that oil is not worth fighting over.

We can all agree that as long as we are dependent upon foreign oil we are vulnerable, but the left's solution to reducing that vulnerability is to force Americans to use less oil by raising the gasoline tax to the point where it becomes prohibitively expensive for all but the well-off. It's hard to see how this would reduce our dependency upon oil since we'd still need it. It's not hard to see, though, that though higher gas prices would reduce consumption, they would raise the price of everything else we need which would cause people to be thrown out of work, and our economy to be thrown into recession.

There are other measures we could take to reduce our dependence upon foreign oil, but the left vigorously opposes them. We could build new refineries, allow oil companies to drill offshore, open up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and build new nuclear plants. My environmentalist friends are aghast at the very mention of these options, but the serious harm any of them would cause to the natural environment would be minimal, as far as I have been able to determine. Meanwhile, the harm done to the United States by our continued dependence upon foreign oil or the consequences of inflation and recession, are, and would be, enormous.

RLC

Good Ol' Boys

Red State Update has a funny parody of the Lee Bollinger/Ahmadinejad contretemps.

RLC

Having the Right Tool

Catch Rich Lowery's piece on Iran at NRO. Lowery points out that while Iran is killing Americans and threatening to utterly destroy Israel, the Democrats have steeled themselves to fight the dread enemy tooth and nail - George Bush.

In a column that makes a number of salutary observations perhaps Lowery's best line is this:

"Liberals like to say of the Bush administration's allegedly militaristic foreign policy that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Likewise, if the only tool you have is dialogue, everyone looks like a reasonable interlocutor."

By noting that Iran is killing Americans in Iraq Bush is "saber-rattling." By announcing that Iran is a state sponsor of terror Bush is "increasing tensions." The Democrats apparently want Bush to just shut up about Iran and give peace a chance. The rhetoric coming from the left sounds a lot like Europe in the 1930s when Hitler was making frightful noises and no one wanted to call attention to it for fear that it would be seen as a provocation.

Kudos to Columbia President Lee Bollinger, a man of the left, for calling a criminal a criminal. Would that more in his party would follow his example.

As an aside, I acknowledge the point that some have made, including Ahmadinejad himself, that it's discourteous to invite someone into your home and then subject him to the kind of treatment that Bollinger accorded Ahmadinejad. Generally, I would agree, but the little Hitler is an exceptional case. With people like him, a cruel mass murderer both in fact and intent, it is necessary sometimes to speak prophetically, to dispense with the usual courtesies and pleasantries and, like Nathan did to David, tell him firmly and plainly, "You are that man."

It would have been bizarre, in fact, to treat Ahmadinejad with handshakes and smiles. The man is responsible for the deaths and maimings of hundreds of American young men and women, and is eager to utterly destroy Israel.

Bollinger's indictment was exactly the right thing, the prophetic thing, to do.

RLC