Science Vs Religion (Pt. III)

In the New Republic column we've been reviewing biologist Jerry Coyne makes some interesting claims about the relationship between science and religion (See Part I and Part II). Some of what he says is helpful and some is not. An example of the latter is this graph:

[A]ll creationists share four traits. First, they devoutly believe in God. No surprise there, except to those who think that ID has a secular basis. Second, they claim that God miraculously intervened in the development of life, either creating every species from scratch or intruding from time to time in an otherwise Darwinian process. Third, they agree that one of these interventions was the creation of humans, who could not have evolved from apelike ancestors. This, of course, reflects the Judeo-Christian view that humans were created in God's image. Fourth, they all adhere to a particular argument called "irreducible complexity." This is the idea that some species, or some features of some species, are too complex to have evolved in a Darwinian manner, and must therefore have been designed by God. Blood clotting in vertebrates, for example, is a complex sequence of enzyme reactions, involving twenty proteins that interact to produce the final clot.

As it happens Coyne is presenting us with a straw man. First, he conflates creationism with ID and then claims that because all creationists believe in God therefore all IDers believe in God. This is false, of course. IDers believe in a designer. Some think the designer is the God of the Bible, but others have no idea who or what it is. It could be an Aristotelian prime mover, a Platonic demiurge, or, for all we know, an inhabitant of one of the infinite worlds posited by multiverse enthusiasts.

Second, Coyne asserts that IDers all believe that God intervened at points in the evolution of life to create various forms, especially man. Some do believe this, of course, but it's simply false to claim that all do. One model of God's creative activity sees God not as an artist doing touch up work on a canvas but more like the bed of a braided river:

Just as the bed guides the flow of water as it splits and wanders toward its destination, so, too, might God underlie the entire process of evolution leading it at every moment in the direction he wants it to flow. In this model, God's intervention is not a one-time or periodic event, but rather a continuous, moment by moment channeling of the flow of evolutionary progress.

Coyne continues:

ID turns out to be simply a "god of the gaps" argument--the view that if we do not yet comprehend a phenomenon completely, we must throw up our hands, stop our research, and praise the Lord. For scientists, that is a prescription for the end of science, for perpetual ignorance.

The problem for Coyne's thesis here is that it's refuted by the fact that people like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell and so many others, ID advocates all, didn't just throw up their hands and say "God did it" and proceed to look for some other line of work. These men spawned the age of science and they all believed exactly what Coyne claims to be fatal to the scientific enterprise: That the world reveals evidence of having been intelligently engineered.

The "god of the gaps" argument is invoked by people who have no explanation for a phenomenon, but modern ID isn't based on what we don't know, its based on what we do know. What we know is that the biosphere is information-rich and that information, whenever we have otherwise encountered it, has always and invariably been the product of intelligence. The information coded in our DNA, for example, or the information on display in something like the Krebs cycle, or biomolecular machines, have their analogs in computer software and hardware and what we know is that these are certainly not artifacts produced by blind, purposeless forces.

Coyne goes on to say:

But no serious scientist wants evolution to become anything like a religion, or even a source of ethics and values. That would mean abandoning our main tool for understanding nature: the resolution of empirical claims with empirical data.

Evidently Coyne hasn't read Richard Dawkins' God Delusion in which Dawkins grounds all of life in an evolutionary worldview. And what's this about resolving empirical claims with empirical data? Where are the data to support the claim that life arose by a purely naturalistic process? Or the claim that consciousness is a purely physical, material phenomenon? Or that this world is one of an infinite number of worlds? Where are the data that show that blind, purposeless chance and natural selection have produced butterfly metamorphosis, or sexual reproduction, or insect flight, or human consciousness?

A lot of people are impressed by the astonishing fine-tuning of cosmic parameters and forces (see here and here) and impute this to intelligent, intentional engineering, but not Coyne. He's committed, we are to understand, only to what the data show. He'll admit only the empirical facts of the matter. So how does he explain cosmic fine-tuning? With empirical data? Alas, he offers us only vague hopes, wishes, and speculative metaphysics:

[S]cientists have other explanations [for the universe's exquisite precision], ones based on reason rather than on faith. Perhaps some day, when we have a "theory of everything" that unifies all the forces of physics, we will see that this theory requires our universe to have the physical constants that we observe. Alternatively, there are intriguing "multiverse" theories that invoke the appearance of many universes, each with different physical laws; and we could have evolved only in one whose laws permit life. The physicist Lee Smolin has suggested a fascinating version of multiverse theory. Drawing a parallel with natural selection among organisms, Smolin proposed that physical constants of universes actually evolve by a type of "cosmological selection" among universes. It turns out that each black hole--and there are millions in our universe--might give rise to a new universe, and these new universes could have physical constants different from those of their ancestors. (This is analogous to mutation in biological evolution.) And universes with physical constants close to the ones we see today happen to be better at producing more black holes, which in turn produce more universes. (This resembles natural selection.) Eventually this process yields a population of universes enriched in those having just the right properties to produce stars (the source of black holes), planets, and life. Smolin's theory immensely raises the odds that life could appear.

When Coyne says there are explanations "based on reason, not faith" what he actually means is that there are explanations based on materialism not on intelligence. After all, he himself is displaying a powerful faith that ultimately a plausible materialist explanation will be found.

In any event, such a theory as he proposes might be true, who knows? But that's the point. There's no empirical evidence for these hypotheses. Our Knight of Faith has tacitly admitted that his belief is based not on empirical facts at all but upon an unshakeable metaphysical faith-committment to naturalism.

Moreover, if there is a multiverse in which all logically possible conditions prevail then there might well be a world in which there dwells a being capable of creating a world like ours. If so, why could not our world represent the creative effort of such a being? In other words, by embracing the concept of the multiverse Coyne refutes his own argument that ID's designer has to be the God of the Bible.

Coyne seems to vaguely realize that he's wandered onto very thin ice and tries to explain why his faith in nature is better than belief in an intelligent agent:

[Belief in] the existence of multiverses does not require a leap of faith nearly as large as that of imagining a God.

This is interesting. He acknowledges that his views are based upon faith, not empirical data, but he justifies taking the "leap" by asserting that his leap is shorter than that of the IDer. How, though, does Coyne measure the size of such leaps? What metric does he use? Are such leaps subject to empirical quantification? Coyne thinks that the breath-taking precision of dozens of cosmic properties is easier to impute to the existence of a near infinity of contingent worlds, all having different constants and forces, none of which we have any evidence for, and whose origin itself would stand in need of an explanation, than it is to attribute it to the existence of a singular intelligence whose existence is not contingent upon anything. How does Coyne decide that the latter requires a greater leap of faith than the former?

And some scientific explanations of the anthropic principle are testable. Indeed, a few predictions of Smolin's theory have already been confirmed, adding to its credibility. It may be wrong, but wait a decade and we will know a lot more about the anthropic principle. In the meantime, it is simply wrong to claim that proposing a provisional and testable scientific hypothesis--not a "belief"--is equivalent to religious faith.

This is what the materialist usually winds up saying: "Wait a decade." He insists that empirical claims must be resolved with empirical data, but if the empirical data is lacking, materialist conclusions are drawn anyway. They're simply backed by a promissory note: "Just wait," the materialist urges. "Someday the empirical evidence will arrive, but in the meantime you must have faith that they will." This sounds very much like secular eschatology.

At any rate, if ID believes in a "God of the gaps" then materialism believes in a god of the promises. What Coyne apparently meant by resolving empirical claims with empirical data was that empirical claims must be resolved with empirical data or by nebulous promises of such data appearing in the future. Meanwhile, we are commanded to just believe and not question our scientific bishops.

RLC

Shameful

How anyone with a shred of decency could vote to spend $780 billion of our money and thereby risk plunging us into a hyperinflationary depression and piling trillions of dollars of debt onto the backs of our children and grandchildren without even having taken the trouble to read the bill mystifies me. How anyone with a shred of intelligence and concern for their country and their children can vote to keep these people in office is every bit as mystifying.

The Democrats promised that members of congress would have 48 hours to review the bill before the vote was taken. Instead, they rammed it through before anyone had a chance to examine what was in it. No one who voted for this bill really knows what they voted for. Only three Republicans voted for it, but all but seven Democrats did. There's a joke in Washington that says that Republicans worry that people won't understand what Republicans are trying to do and Democrats worry that people will understand what they're trying to do.

It's no longer funny.

RLC

Time and Creation

I stated in an earlier post that it may be that young-earth creationism (YEC) and evolutionary time-lines for the age of the earth and the universe are not incompatible. YEC states that both the earth and the universe as a whole were formed about 10,000 years ago whereas the consensus scientific view is that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the universe itself is about 14 billion years old. How then could these two views both be correct?

It depends on your view of what time is. If, as people from George Berkeley to Immanuel Kant to modern quantum physicists have suggested, the world, or in Kant's case, time, is a function of being apprehended by a conscious mind then talk about the lapse of time before there were minds to experience it is meaningless. It's like talking about what color the sky would be if there were no such thing as color vision or what color radio waves or x-rays are. They are no color at all because the proper apparatus to convert their energy into color doesn't exist.

Likewise, until there were conscious minds to experience time, perhaps there was no time at all. I wrote about this possibility about a year and a half ago in a post titled On Time and the Age of the World. Here's what I said:

Scientists tell us the universe is some 14 billion years old while young-earth creationists maintain that according to the biblical book of Genesis it's only about 10,000 years old. So which is it? It may be that both sides are correct - it all depends on how we look at time.

Time is generally considered to be an objective dimension of reality. It's believed to exist independently of our human experience of it. If there were no humans, according to this view, time would still roll on. Perhaps this is correct, but there is another possibility. Suppose that time is not an objective phenomenon at all but rather a subjective phenomenon. Suppose that time, not just our sense of time, is actually something that our minds impose upon the world just like they create color, fragrance, sound, and so on. If there were no minds there'd be no color, only electromagnetic radiations. Color is the mind's interpretation of these radiations and perhaps time, too, is a creation of the mind.

If so, then time, like color or sound, did not exist until there were human perceivers (for the sake of brevity let's ignore animal perceivers) on earth.

If this is the case, then there may have been a vast sequence of events that led up to man's appearance on earth - a Big Bang, stellar life cycles, stellar nucleosynthesis, the origin of our sun and earth, the origin of living things, etc., but these events did not occur in our time frame. They were tenseless events.

Perhaps it would help us understand this if we imagine videotaping a friend going about his everyday life for, say, two hours. Our friend would experience two hours of time elapsing, and, were we to view the tape, it would take two hours to watch it. The tape, however, could be sped up so that every event is still witnessed and still stands in the same relative spatio-temporal relation to every other event on the tape, but it only takes two minutes to watch it, or two seconds. Theoretically the information on the tape could be compressed so that it takes virtually no time at all.

To our friend "in" the film time would be unchanged, but from the perspective of the viewer "outside" the film the lapse of time would be whatever we chose it to be. We, as observers, are not in the same time as is our friend in the video and our perspective on the amount of time it takes for the events on the tape to unfold is completely different.

Perhaps, were we an observer embedded somehow in the universe during the events leading up to the appearance of human beings, it would seem to us to have taken billions of years to get to that point, but since there were no observers to these events, at least not observers in our temporal frame of reference, it's really meaningless to talk about how long it actually took to go from the moment of creation to the first appearance of human beings. All the events that precede man's arrival might be compressed like a zip file, occurring almost instantaneously, though in the same relationship with each other, and then, once human minds appear, the occurrence of those events gets "stretched out" in a temporal frame of reference imposed by man's consciousness.

Our minds place the events that scientists believe happened into a temporal context so that as we extrapolate back we assume that an event that would today take one year would also have taken one year before there were minds. What in fact we mean, though, is that the event would have taken one year if there had been human witnesses to observe it. If there were no such observers it would be literally meaningless to talk about how long the events took to occur. It would be like asking what's north of the north pole or what's beyond the edge of the universe. The events prior to man's appearance literally took no time at all.

Perhaps, the writer of Genesis is trying to put something like this into words we can understand when he talks about the days of creation. God creates the universe in a relatively brief period of time, perhaps instantaneously, perhaps more slowly. If this is so, then the Genesis account gives us a good idea of the age of human civilization, but how much time preceded the appearance of modern humans is inscrutable. It may have been very long or it may have been relatively brief or there may have been no time at all. We can only say that were those same events to occur in such a way that we could observe them they would take billions of years. Whatever time it actually took, however, was determined by God's temporal context, not ours, since He was the only observer.

RLC

Shrinking Hillary's Profile

Dick Morris argues that the Obama team has effectively isolated and marginalized Hillary Clinton by relieving her of most of her important responsibilities and giving them to people who will have greater access to the White House. Doubtless this was not done unintentionally. By taking her out of the limelight enjoyed by previous Secretaries of State it makes it harder for her to mount an effective challenge to Obama in 2012.

By putting her at State the Obama people removed her from the Senate where she was a high-profile figure. Now, if she remains at the State Department, she's too far removed from the action to draw much publicity or to build her résumé, and if she resigns in frustration then she's left with no platform at all upon which to launch a campaign.

Even so, it seems that the safest course for the President would have been to make her an integral part of his team, or at least make it appear that she was. This would have made it much harder for her to generate sympathy among Democrats for a primary challenge against the gracious incumbent. She would have appeared ungrateful and disloyal. As it is, she, and Bill, are probably now more determined than ever to send Mr. Obama back to Chicago in 2012.

RLC

Happy Birthday, Charles

Forget terrorism. Forget the economic crisis. Forget the Chinese and the Russians who still want to bury us. Forget Dick Cheney and George Bush. The Gallup people have uncovered the greatest threat to America's future in a new poll, the results of which have just been released: Less than 40% of Americans say they believe in "the theory of evolution."

For those who think that belief in evolution is the linchpin to achieving secular nirvana this must come as dispiriting news, and on the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, no less.

Twenty five percent of respondents do not believe in the theory and 36% had no opinion. To be sure, the more education the respondent had the more likely they were to accept evolution, but, in fact, the results of the survey strike me as meaningless unless the pollsters actually defined the word evolution. If they didn't, how could the question be answered meaningfully?

Evolution could mean the descent of all life from a single simple primitive cell. Or it could refer to mere variation around a genetic mean. Or it could mean nothing more than that things change. Without explaining what is to be understood by the word "evolution" pretty much any results must be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Even so, the fact that only four in ten Americans accept the theory, however it is defined, suggests that we're likely to hear a lot more invective along the lines of Richard Dawkins' infamous imprecation that anyone who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution is either "ignorant, stupid or insane."

RLC

Feedback

There are a couple of thoughtful letters on our Feedback Page which you might wish to check out.

RLC

Factually Inaccurate

Ed Morrissey makes a case that President Obama told two brazen lies to the American people at his press conference Monday night and displayed on top of that a distressing lack of historical understanding. I didn't see the conference, but I did hear about his statements and as much as I'd like to think that he was just misinformed or mistaken, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he deliberately misrepresented the Republican position on the stimulus package. There's simply no excuse for anyone to claim that the Republican position is one of "just doing nothing" about our economic crisis.

I'm less certain that I agree with Morrissey on Obama's second "lie,"which, I think, can be more charitably chalked up to the President's characteristic lack of precision.

Morrissey may well be correct, however, that Obama really doesn't seem to know much history. I thought this in listening to him talk about Roosevelt's response to the Great Depression, and Morrissey points out that President Obama got the economic circumstances in Japan in the 1990s exactly backward - a mistake that has important implications for his "stimulus" package.

Anyway, you should read his column for yourself. It gives insight into the man who will be at the helm for at least the next four years.

RLC

Science Vs. Religion (Pt. II)

We begin Part II (See here for Part I) of our consideration of biologist Jerry Coyne's essay in The New Republic on the incompatibility of science and religion with this passage by Coyne:

True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. )....The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?

Science and religion are incompatible, implies Coyne, because science accepts only what can be empirically demonstrated whereas religion admits of truths that are not testable and thus not subject to empirical confirmation. Would that this were true. If it were then there might not be any real conflict since naturalistic scientists would recognize the limits to their domain. As it is, there's conflict for precisely the reason that many scientists wish to extend the realm of science beyond the empirical to encompass all reality and thought, including the metaphysical, while at the same time criticizing religion for making metaphysical claims and being insufficiently scientific. Science serves for many scientists as a kind of Trojan horse that enables them to smuggle into their work and writing a materialistic, atheistic worldview that has no empirical warrant.

A few examples of this overreach may suffice. Scientists, either some or most, hold fast to the following things, none of which are supported by any empirical evidence:

1. The Many Worlds Hypothesis: The idea that ours is just one of a nearly infinite number of universes, all of which are closed off from each other thus defying detection.

2. The Oscillating Universe Hypothesis: The theory that our universe has expanded and collapsed an infinite number of times.

3. String theory: The idea that the fundamental units of material substance are unimaginably tiny vibrating filaments of energy.

4. The existence of other dimensions: The theory that the four dimensions of space-time are only part of physical reality.

5. The Principle of Uniformity: The assumption that the laws and properties of the universe are homogenous and constant everywhere throughout the cosmos.

6. The Assumption of Uniformitarianism: The idea that the same processes and forces at work in the world today have always been at work at essentially the same rates.

7. The Scientific Method: The idea that there is a particular methodology that defines the scientific process and which ought to be followed.

8. The Law of Parsimony: The principle that assumes that the simplest explanation which fits all the facts is the best.

9. The assumption that human reason is trustworthy: The notion that a faculty which has evolved because it made us better fit to survive is also coincidentally a dependable guide to something else, truth, which has no necessary connection to human survival.

10. The assumption that we should value truth: The idea that truth should be esteemed more highly than competing values, like, for instance, personal comfort or group advancement.

11. The assumption that there is objective truth: This is the assumption that there is truth about the world that is independent of our own subjective biases, perceptions, etc.

12. The preference in science for naturalistic explanations: This is a preference based upon an untestable assumption that all knowable truth is found only in the natural realm.

13. Naturalistic abiogenesis: The belief that natural forces are sufficient in themselves to have produced life.

14. The assumption that if something is physically possible and mathematically elegant then, given the age of the universe, it probably happened.

15. The assumption that the cosmos is atelic: I.e. that it has no purpose.

16. The assumption that there's a world external to our own minds.

17. Materialistic reductionism: The conviction that all phenomena, including mental phenomena, can be ultimately explained solely in terms of physics and chemistry.

18. Assumption that the universe arose out of a "vacuum matrix" rather than out of nothing.

19. The appropriateness of making ethical claims regarding the environment, climate change, nuclear power, cloning, or genetic engineering. Ethical judgments lie beyond the scope of science but that doesn't stop scientists, qua scientists, from making them.

20. The Concept of the Meme: According to biologist Richard Dawkins memes are the cultural analog to genes. They are ideas or customs that are believed by Dawkins and others to get passed along according to their survival value rather than their truth value (see #9, above). An example of this, unfortunately, is the concept of the meme itself.

21. The criteria by which we distinguish science from non-science.

All of these transcend the realm of empirical science yet scientists like Coyne doubtless accept most of them. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, it's just that it's a bit disingenuous to claim that scientists confine themselves only to what is testable and empirical, as though scientists were concerned merely with accumulating and compiling facts about nature and not in trying to interpret what those facts mean. As soon as they do try to decipher the meaning of their data, however, they're doing the same thing that religion does, and that's why there's conflict.

There are two competing metanarratives vying for people's allegiance. One claims that nature is all there is and the other claims that nature, by itself, is inadequate to explain all we know about ourselves and the cosmos. Neither metanarrative is scientific, they're both metaphysical. The former seeks to infiltrate the culture under the guise of science, but it goes well beyond the pursuit of empirical knowledge. The naturalist, or materialist, believes that he alone should have the right to determine the meaning of scientific data, but why should he be granted that privilege? Why should an atheistic worldview be awarded supremacy over all competitors?

The role of science is to discover the data, and the role of philosophy is to determine which explanation best conforms to the data we have. Thus the conflict is not between science and religion, but between two disparate philosophical approaches to the data: atheism and theism, naturalism and supernaturalism. In that conflict science, properly understood, is neutral.

RLC

Fathers of the Surge

General Petraeus rightly gets a lot of credit for the ongoing pacification and stabilization of Iraq, but according to Tom Ricks at the Washington Post it was General Raymond Odierno and retired General Jack Keane who initiated the idea of the surge. It was these two men who circumvented the chain of command at the Pentagon and pushed the Bush administration to implement the escalation of forces that was primarily responsible for the present state of affairs.

Anyone interested in the recent history of the Iraq war will find Ricks' article a fascinating read.

RLC

Blowing Themselves Up

Suicide bombing in Afghanistan is in decline, and Strategy Page tells us why. The quick summary is that Afghans are extremely resentful of the tactic, the Taliban lack the technical resources to support suicide bombers, and the coalition forces have been successful in dismantling the few cells which carried out these gruesome acts of terror.

They conclude their piece with this observation:

Suicide bombing is described as a weapon of the weak. What it cannot be described as is a weapon of the victorious. In the last few decades, whoever used suicide bombers not only failed to gain anything, but saw their cause harmed in the process. You can draw your own conclusions, as have most Afghans.

RLC

Who's to Say?

Over the years we have brought to our readers' attention the sublime beauty of Islamic law when instances of it came to our notice. Here's an example we came across thanks to a tip from Hot Air:

A Saudi judge has ordered a woman should be jailed for a year and receive 100 lashes after she was gang-raped, it was claimed last night. The 23-year-old woman, who became pregnant after her ordeal, was reportedly assaulted after accepting a lift from a man.

He took her to a house to the east of the city of Jeddah where she was attacked by him and four of his friends throughout the night. She later discovered she was pregnant and made a desperate attempt to get an abortion at the King Fahd Hospital for Armed Forces.

According to the Saudi Gazette, she eventually 'confessed' to having 'forced intercourse' with her attackers and was brought before a judge at the District Court in Jeddah. He ruled she had committed adultery - despite not even being married - and handed down a year's prison sentence, which she will serve in a prison just outside the city.

She is still pregnant and will be flogged once she has had the child.

The Saudi Arabian legal system practices a strict form of medieval law. Women have very few rights and are not even allowed to drive. They are also banned from going out in public in the company of men other than male relatives.

Some of our readers may be thinking that, well, this sounds pretty bad, but that's their culture and what's right for them is right. After all, who's to say they're wrong? Right and wrong are relative to the time and culture in which people live, are they not?

Suppose, though, that you were visiting Saudi Arabia and this happened to you. Would you still think they were doing the right thing? Is not justice a universal moral obligation? In what sense is what was done to this woman just?

Suppose, further, that a community of Saudi immigrants in the U.S. engaged in this particular practice. Would we say that "that's their culture so if it's right for them then it's right?" It does no good to reply that they are now in our culture and should abide by our values. The fact is they have a foot in two different cultures so which should be morally authoritative? How does one decide that? Does the majority decide what's right? If so, how do we determine the majority? Is it the majority within the subculture or the majority within a nation's boundaries? Aren't these all arbitrary criteria?

And if we agree on which majority should be morally authoritative how do we determine what the majority thinks? And if we could determine what the majority thinks then the minority opinion must be wrong ipso facto. Someone living in Saudi Arabia who thinks that whipping this woman for the crime of getting raped is immoral would himself be holding to a morally wrong position, by definition. He's in the minority so he can't be right.

Islamic law is horrific. Ethical relativism is hopelessly confused. They're both for people who prefer not to think.

RLC

The Guilty Party

Recently we linked to a list of people that the British paper The Guardian deemed culpable for the current financial crisis which began, you'll remember, with the imminent collapse of government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) like lending institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Prominent on that list were Alan Greenspan and George Bush and absent, oddly, were any congressional Democrats.

This video of a Fox News report, however shows that Greenspan and the Bush administration in its first term sought greater oversight and more effective regulation of the GSEs but were resisted by congressional Democrats, particularly Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer. It explains the time-line which reveals that, contrary to the claims of Democrats that the failure of the GSEs was due to GOP unwillingness to regulate them, it was, in fact, the result of the failure of congressional Democrats to support Bush administration proposals to strengthen oversight.

The Democrats didn't want to rein in Fannie and Freddie and tighten their lending practices because they thought that doing so would make it more difficult for low income people to get home mortgages. A Senator at the time, Barack Obama and the black congressional caucus pushed the GSEs to keep their lending practices lenient so that people who were bad risks could still buy houses. Obama, after less than two years in the Senate, was rewared for his efforts by becoming the second highest recipient of cash contributions from Fannie and Freddie - which bespeaks their gratitude to him for helping to keep them unregulated:

After this display of wretched misjudgment on the part of people charged with congressional oversight of the GSEs how can they still be serving in Washington today? Why isn't this dereliction publicized more vigorously? You can be assured that had the fault lain with Republicans we'd be hearing about it every night until the villains were all either in jail or hounded from office. The major media has rightly been vocal in their outrage of corporate golden parachutes awarded to CEOs whose judgment was so bad that the companies they ran crashed and burned. Yet politicians are also being rewarded for abject incompetence. They get elected and re-elected to high office, and the liberal media helps them do it by keeping the people in the dark about the role these people played in bringing us to the brink of financial ruin. The MSM helps put into office to solve the crisis the very people who caused it. What a country.

RLC

Science Vs. Religion (Pt. I)

The recent issue of The New Republic contains an essay by Darwinian biologist Jerry Coyne on why he believes there can be no rapprochement between science and "religion." I place the word religion in quotes because it's a slippery term and Coyne never really defines what he means by it. At any rate, over the next several days I'd like to offer a few thoughts on Coyne's column.

He starts off talking about Darwinian evolution, the belief that all life arose through blind, purposeless physical processes:

The ideas that made Darwin's theory so revolutionary are precisely the ones that repel much of religious America, for they imply that, far from having a divinely scripted role in the drama of life, our species is the accidental and contingent result of a purely natural process.

This is an important point, one that's often lost on people. The intellectual conflict today is not between "religion" and evolution. There's no necessary incompatibility between the two, not even between young-earth creationism and evolution (as I hope to point out in a future post). The conflict, rather, is between Darwinian evolution and the belief that an intellect is involved in the creation of the world. Darwinism denies any role for purpose, intention, or mind in the generation and diversification of life and it is this view, which is at bottom a non-scientific, philosophical belief, which many religious people reject.

Coyne goes on to lament that:

[W]hile 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent accept that we evolved from apelike ancestors.

Little wonder, actually. Perhaps three out of four people find it easier to believe that angels exist than to believe that a process like the Krebs cycle or the human brain could have evolved by pure, mindless serendipity. How many people have ever studied the question of human evolution - at least subsequent to their high school graduation, at which ceremony their minds are purged of all that they learned over the last couple of years anyway? What reason do most people have at hand for believing that we evolved from apelike ancestors? Should they believe it just because the scientific high priests like Coyne tell them they should? If so, how is that different than the warrant people have for believing, on the authority of their pastors and priests, in angels?

In any event, it's hard to draw any conclusions about the significance of statistics like these. Likewise with this factoid that Coyne serves up:

As Karl Giberson notes in [his book] Saving Darwin, "Most people in America have a neighbor who thinks the Earth is ten thousand years old."

I'm not sure what we should make of this bit of snideness, either. Should we assume that there are a lot of uneducated bumpkins in the world, or are we to conclude that a lot of these young-earthers are so anti-intellectual that they refuse to allow evidence to trump their religion? Probably Coyne intends for us to think both, but refusing to allow evidence to trump one's deepest convictions is not just a fault of the average guy in the neighborhood. There are a lot of educated people who are just as impervious to evidence as Coyne believes young-earthers to be. Among our professoriat, for example, there are many who, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, still believe that people are better off under Marxist communism than under any other political-economic system. If we're going to poke fun at beliefs that are at odds with the evidence maybe beliefs for which there is direct empirical refutation should be held in even greater derision than those against which the evidence is more indirect. In any case, Coyne's attempt to discredit American religiosity by associating it with young-earth creationism is no more persuasive than trying to discredit philosophical materialism by associating it with communism.

More tomorrow.

RLC

Proving His Point

Ben Stein is well-known for the documentary Expelled which exposes the academic closed-mindedness and intolerance of the Darwinian establishment. Stein documents in the film how those in the scientific community who question Darwinian orthodoxy often lose their jobs and suffer other forms of professional and social ostracism.

The film elicited a flurry of protests, denials, and other caterwauling from the members of that establishment who objected that Stein was exaggerating, and that there's certainly no persecution of those who question Darwinism nor stifling of speech. None.

Now the University of Vermont has turned around and demonstrated the very intolerance Stein claims pervades the liberal academic establishment by essentially rescinding an invitation to speak at the University's graduation ceremony. Apparently there was so much hostility to having a commencement speaker who challenged Darwinian orthodoxy, and who had the temerity to film some of the big-wig Darwinians - like Richard Dawkins - making themselves look foolish, that the president of the school urged Mr. Stein to cancel his engagement.

Talk about making the other guy's argument for him ...

Meanwhile, a contrite Stein kneels before the shrine of the great man himself seeking absolution for his impertinence. Maybe this will get him back into the good graces of the broad-minded folks at U of V:

RLC

LeConte's Sparrow

This tiny beauty has created quite a stir among Pennsylvania birders. It's a very rare and lovely sparrow found by a gentleman named Al Guarente in a grassy meadow in Darlington Park near Media, PA this winter. Normally the LeConte's stays west of the Mississippi and breeds in the north-central tier states and Canada, but every once in a while one makes its way east during the winter.

The bird is a skulker, staying hidden low in grasses and brush, so it's really quite amazing that it was found at all. I was fortunate enough to view it for about twenty minutes on Saturday. A photo of the actual individual seen at Darlington park can be found here.

RLC

Quantum Enigma

Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner are physicists who've written an excellent book for the layman on some of the perplexing mysteries entailed by quantum theory. The book is titled Quantum Enigma and the phenomena they discuss are certainly enigmatic. Not only do they reveal the world to be almost incomprehensible, especially at the level of the atom, but they have fascinating implications for our view of reality. Here are several of the more perplexing conclusions that quantum theorists have drawn:

1. Microscopic reality - atoms, atomic particles, etc. - is observer-dependent. There is no reality apart from observation. Nothing exists in the sense that we normally think of the word until a conscious being actually interacts with it.

2. Microscopic objects exist in more than one place simultaneously. Consider two boxes into which an atom has been randomly inserted by a machine. Since the atom was observed in the machine (let's assume) we can say that it exists, but we can't know in which box it was inserted. Indeed, until someone actually looks in the box the atom is literally in both of them, it has a dual existence, but once the lid is lifted on one of the boxes and someone peers inside the atom is found either in one or the other. In other words, the observer not only creates the reality (and a past history appropriate to the present reality) but the atom actually existed in two places at once prior to the observation.

3. Microscopic objects are entangled even at vast distances. Suppose two packets of light energy hurtle away from each other at the speed of light for two weeks. Suddenly, an observer somewhere in the galaxy passes one packet through a filter that imposes upon it a certain physical property. Simultaneously, the other particle will display the same property to another observer tracking it, even though there was no way the second particle could "know" what happened to the first. The property was created by the observation of that property in the first particle. Every particle is entangled throughout the cosmos so that what affects one affects them all. Instantly.

4. What is true of the microscopic world is true of the macroscopic world. Since large objects are made of tiny atoms what is true of atoms individually turns out to be true of atoms in the aggregate. Nevertheless, these quantum effects are much more difficult to observe in large objects.

Bishop George Berkeley appears to have been correct when he pronounced some 250 years ago that "To be is to be perceived." If everything is determined by consciousness, if things don't have any existence apart from being observed, if particles at one edge of a galaxy are connected instantaneously to particles across the galaxy then our world is not at all as it seems to us at our scale of perception.

The authors quote physicist Martin Rees who said that the universe "could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years late. The universe exists because we observe it."

It seems totally bizarre that the existence of the world should depend entirely upon our perception of it yet Rosenblum and Kuttner argue persuasively that there's no getting around the fact that it does seem dependent upon consciousness. Perhaps we should consider Berkeley's solution and posit that everything in the world is observed continuously by a universal consciousness. That seems like such a plausible, obvious hypothesis, but in all their speculations Rosenblum and Kuttner never mention it, even though everything in their book leads to the possibility that the world is an idea in the mind of a cosmic consciousness, a God.

Even theists will blanche at the suggestion that the world as we experience it is an illusion, and yet the more one reads about the implications of quantum theory, a theory that is said to be the best tested hypothesis in all of modern physics, a theory that provides the theoretical underpinning for much modern electronic technology - things like MRIs, lasers, transisters all rely upon it - the more one realizes that the world cannot be as we perceive it to be. Could it be that the world of our senses is, like the Matrix, not true reality and that the really real lies elsewhere?

RLC

Squandering America's Trust

Charles Krauthammer at The Washington Post wields his journalistic scalpel to dissect some of the pretensions of the new administration. Here's his warmup:

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe." -- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

Krauthammer deftly filets Obama's appointment of Tom Daschle who "represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend," and the stimulus package which is in large part a hog trough for special interests:

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

President Obama can still recapture the credibility he has forfeited in these last two weeks, but he's going to have to want to do it. Right now he looks just like any other politician - what he does has little relationship to what he says. Krauthammer again:

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Krauthammer's trenchant analysis notwithstanding, most people in the country still want President Obama to succeed. They want to believe him when he promises a new kind of politics and transparency in the White House. He can still be what many hoped he would be, but not this way. He has squandered a lot of credibility and good will in the last two weeks and can't afford to fritter away much more.

RLC

Books for Black History Month

February is Black History Month and National Review Online has asked a number of distinguished thinkers, both black and white, to share their thoughts on their choice for the one book on the black experience in America that everyone should read.

My vote, had they asked for it, would have gone to Roots by Alex Haley for first place, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin for runner-up and W.E.B. DuBois' Souls of Black Folk would have received honorable mention. To my surprise, neither Roots nor Souls were nominated by the NRO reviewers, but several other worthy books were, and you can see what they were at the link.

RLC

Hyperinflation

Bill has forwarded me a link to an interview with Peter Schiff, an economist who foresaw the economic mess we're in today long before it arrived. He argues now that the only thing worse than doing nothing to solve our crisis would be to do what the Democrats are doing:

[N]o government action means a "terrible" recession. But the path of increased government intervention will lead to "unmitigated disaster"

He believes that we should bite the bullet and ride out the recession. Our economy will be much healthier in the long run if we do. Obama's Economic Recovery Act, on the other hand, is, he believes, almost certain to throw us into a hyperinflation depression.

This means that our currency will be so devalued that even basic staples will cost too much to buy. Imagine a loaf of bread, for instance, priced at $12 and a gallon of gas at about the same price. Most people won't be able to buy anything and consequently there will be massive job losses and enormous social disruption and dislocation as even essential services are curtailed.

Watch the video at the link and pray that Schiff is wrong.

RLC

Let Me Explain About the Fifty Ways

Stephen Spruiell and Kevin Williamson at NRO list and explain the 50 most egregious items in the stimulus bill being debated by the Senate. Some of these are actually items I'd like to see get funded, for example $1.7 billion for maintaining national parks, but they don't belong in a bill whose purpose is to create jobs. They should be debated on their own merits in separate legislation.

Of every item in the bill it should be asked how many jobs will this create? If it will not generate jobs, private sector jobs, then it should be taken out of legislation that is being justified on the grounds that we need it to stimulate the economy.

The stimulus package spends a lot of money, $900 billion, much of which will stimulate nothing. Spruiell and Williamson explain why.

RLC