Racial Cowardice

There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the media over Attorney General Eric Holder's maladroit criticism of what he perceives to be the reluctance of Americans to talk about race:

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," said Holder, the nation's first black attorney general.

Race issues continue to be a topic of political discussion, Holder said, but "we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race."

He urged people of all races to use Black History Month as a chance for frank talk about racial matters.

"It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation's history, this is in some ways understandable," Holder said. "If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us."

I say Holder was "maladroit" because "cowards" hardly seems the appropriate word to use in this context. People don't talk about race because they're afraid, rather they don't talk about race, at least in racially mixed company, for the same reason they often decline to talk about politics and religion in mixed company: They don't wish to offend nor do they care to abase themselves.

Discussions about race can go badly for two reasons. First, many people don't know what to say. What's there to talk about, exactly? Most whites don't think much about race and they read even less. It's not something they're interested in, particularly, and to expect them to engage in a conversation about it is like someone who never reads the financial pages being pressed to engage in a discussion on the global banking system.

Moreover, a lot of whites feel that any conversation with a black interlocutor is only going to wind up with the black venting about white racism and oppression. At this point the white knows that he'll have two options. He can either nod his or her head in agreement, which many see as an act of servility, or he/she can take issue with the charges, which leads to the second reason such conversations go wrong.

As soon as a white person disagrees with a black person about race, many whites are convinced, their racial bona fides will be called into question and suspicions will be raised about latent racism lurking in the white person's heart. If the disagreement continues then the suspicions mount until the R-word is trotted out and that's the end of that conversation.

Holder wants Americans to have "frank conversations" about race, but it's not clear to me that that would be a good thing. Genuinely frank conversations, I'm afraid, are too often too painful for one party or the other to endure with equanimity.

Better to avoid the unpleasantness altogether, many conclude, by simply not talking about it. That's not cowardice, it's good manners.

RLC

Oops

Yet another Democrat has been found to be suffering from ethical difficulties. This time it's the new senator from Chicago, Roland Burris. Mr. Burris was apparently less than candid in his sworn testimony before an Illinois state House committee weighing whether to impeach Governor Rod Blagojevich for allegations that he sought to sell President Obama's senate seat.

It's getting hard to keep track of all the miscreants among our political ruling class, particularly those in the President's party, and especially those from Chicago or those the President has himself appointed. Obama cannot be blamed for the fact that yet another (allegedly) dishonest pol sits in our nation's capitol building, of course, but the long string of tainted nominees to his cabinet is another matter.

It's hard to say exactly how much responsibility President Obama actually bears for the incompetence of his vetting team, but surely he has been poorly served by those he has entrusted with the job of making certain his appointments have no ethical or legal skeletons squirreled away in their Georgetown closets.

At some point his inability to find Democrat appointees who have a clean record with the IRS has got to become a severe embarrassment to the president. Indeed, the joke is that the reason he picked a Republican (Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire) to head up the Commerce Department was that he wanted to have at least one cabinet secretary who pays his taxes. Now that Gregg has withdrawn, the challenge for the Obama team is to find somewhere in the country a Democrat to run Commerce who can pass an ethics investigation.

Now word has it that the investigative spotlight is shining on Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. It turns out that he may have tax problems similar to those of Tom Daschle.

Where does it end? Pretty soon the only Democrats who will qualify for a job in the Obama administration will be high school students who never made enough money to have to file a tax return.

RLC

Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin*

Edward Schumacher-Matos at The Washington Post thinks that despite having won a referendum that removes term limits and effectively allows him to be president for life, Hugo Chavez's days as president of Venezuela are numbered:

Venezuela is suffering from the worldwide recession, low oil prices, high inflation, and Chavez's mismanagement. Schumacher-Matos thinks that he will soon go the way of so many other socialist leaders in South America who drove their country to ruin.

There is a lesson here for the new Obama administration. It should not engage Ch�vez in public quarreling and certainly should not work privately against him inside Venezuela. Both approaches are a fool's errands, ones that leftover Cold War warriors foisted on George W. Bush during his first term. The clever Ch�vez verbally made Bush into a laughingstock south of the border and badly damaged hemispheric trust in the United States when the Bush administration seemed to endorse a 2002 coup against Ch�vez that failed.

Well, yes, but that's not the only lesson for the Obama administration. High inflation and economic recession are in the offing here at home as well, and these two apocalyptic horsemen have a way of trampling those who have the bad luck to be responsible for them.

President Obama's misnamed stimulus plan requires that we choose from among three unpalatable alternatives to get the money to pay for it: Either we raise taxes - which would strangle in the crib any nascent recovery; or we borrow trillions - if we can find lenders - and go into enormous debt for generations; or we just print the money we need to pay for all the spending the stimulus authorizes - which means we inflate the currency to close to Zimbabwean dimensions.

Whichever we choose we could easily become the next Venezuela, and Obama could be the next Chavez. He has until the summer of 2010 to make the stimulus work. If he hasn't done it by then - and few think he will - if unemployment is high and the value of the dollar is low, the writing will be on the wall. Voters will have weighed the Democrats in the balance and found them incompetent. Republicans will likely take back control of the Congress, if not numerically, at least in terms of being able to block any further manifestations of Democratic recklessness, and if that happens, Obama will either have to bend to Republican will and policies, as did Clinton with welfare reform, or risk being a one-termer.

As of yet it's not clear how Obama expects to pay for all the goodies he's loaded onto his sleigh - although from what I hear the printing presses are running merrily churning out crisp, new inflated dollars - but when we find out it will tell us much about what the next couple of decades will be like in this country.

* See here

RLC

Many Earths

There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy. So says Dr Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Science at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. According to a BBC report:

[T]elescopes have been able to detect just over 300 planets outside our Solar System. Very few of these would be capable of supporting life, however. Most are gas giants like our Jupiter; and many orbit so close to their parent stars that any microbes would have to survive roasting temperatures.

But, based on the limited numbers of planets found so far, Dr Boss has estimated that each Sun-like star has on average one "Earth-like" planet. This simple calculation means there would be huge numbers capable of supporting life.

"Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited," Dr Boss told BBC News. "But I think that most likely the nearby 'Earths' are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago." That means bacterial lifeforms.

Dr Boss estimates that NASA's Kepler mission, due for launch in March, should begin finding some of these Earth-like planets within the next few years. Recent work at Edinburgh University tried to quantify how many intelligent civilisations might be out there. The research suggested there could be thousands of them.

Well, maybe. Dr. Boss is an expert and I'm not, but the experts I've read would, I think, say that his optimism is unwarranted. The article makes it sound as if planets suitable for life are commonplace in our galaxy, but all the astronomical discoveries of the last couple of decades point to the conclusion that life-sustaining planets are probably very unusual if not very rare in our galaxy.

In the first place, for the opening sentence above to be true, each star in the galaxy, not just each sun-like star, would have to average one earth-like planet in it's gravitational field, but astronomers know that most stars are completely unsuited for sustaining life.

In order to support life in its solar system a star must be located within a fairly narrow region in the galaxy. It can't be too close to the center, where radiation would be intense, nor too far away where it would revolve at dangerous speeds around the galactic pinwheel. The star has to be rich in heavier elements, and has to be fairly remote from other stars in the galaxy. It has to be a middle-aged star of relatively constant luminosity, not too big and not too small, not too old and not too young.

In other words, stars suitable for sustaining life are relatively unusual in our galaxy, but this is just the beginning. The star has to possess a planetary satellite capable of generating and sustaining life and this means it has to have perhaps hundreds of precisely-tuned properties. The planet has to be just the right distance from its star which means it has to revolve around the star at just the right speed. It has to have a nearly circular orbit and the right tilt to its axis. It has to be just the right mass so that its gravity will hold oxygen in the atmosphere but not hold slightly lighter noxious gases like ammonia. It has to rotate on its axis at the right speed, lest the temperature differences between day and night be too great, and it must possess a shifting crust. It must also have ample water and carbon, among other things, and also a large moon which has to be at just the right distance from the planet to stabilize its wobble. It must also be in a solar system where it's protected from meteorites by large gravitational vacuum sweepers like Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn, and so on.

As the number of parameters that must be just right in order for a planet to be able to support life increases the chances of such planets existing in great numbers in our galaxy decrease.

This is why Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee titled their book on this subject Rare Earth. It's why Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards titled their book on a similar subject Privileged Planet. Life, so far from being widespread throughout the Milky Way, may well exist on only one planet in the entire galaxy, indeed in the whole universe --- ours.

RLC

Lost in the Cosmos

Peter Steinfels in The New York Times reviews two books written by atheists who, unlike some of their angry, militant colleagues who focus their fire entirely upon religious belief, address instead the problems of living a life without God. One of the authors, Ronald Aronson, says this:

A "new atheism must absorb the experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st," he wrote. "It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today."

Actually, if any of this could be done it would have been done a long time ago. Philosophical atheism has been with us for a long time, but no one has been able to accomplish what Aronson says needs to be accomplished. In a world without God, there is no secular morality other than might-makes-right. There is no coming to terms with death except to resign oneself to its inevitability. There's no basis whatsoever for thinking that there's any "meaning" in hope. Indeed, if death is the absolute end of all life all there can be is hopelessness.

Steinfels goes on quoting Aronson:

[C]ontemporary secularism has lost the buoyant confidence it once gained from "its essential link to the idea of Progress, which promised so much and came to such grief during the 20th century."

"To live comfortably without God today," he says, "means doing what has not yet been done - namely, rethinking the secular worldview after the eclipse of modern optimism."

Modern optimism was based on the belief, derived from a Darwinian worldview, in the perfectability of man. It was rooted in the belief that man was evolving toward greatness. He was becoming progressively better, more intelligent, wiser, more moral. Then came the 20th century with all of its grisly horrors and the clear evidence of man's savagery. The idea of man's perfectability went up in the smoke of Auschwitz.

Aronson again:

"[R]eligion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today's atheism, agnosticism and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something."

Unfortunately, if atheism is true there's not much to turn toward. Today's atheism is empty and thin because it has no real answers to life's most profound questions (See Without God in our Hall of Fame).

Moreover, Aronson's task of finding the existential silver lining of atheism has been made exceedingly more difficult by the fact that so many thoughtful atheists have so clearly and emphatically articulated the meaninglessness and absurdity of life without God. To conclude that such a life leads one anywhere but to nihilism requires a willful leap of blind faith and escapism.

Consider, for instance, the lament of some prominent 20th century figures:

• Life is a short day's journey from nothingness to nothingness. - Ernst Hemmingway
• All we are is dust in the wind. - Kansas
• The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless. - Woody Allen (Hannah and Her Sisters)
• If God is dead everything is permitted. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Brothers Karamazov)
• God is empty and so am I - Smashing Pumpkins (Zero)
• In all of our searching the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. - from Contact
• Ethics is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. - E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
• The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life. - Theodosius Dobzhansky
• Our only significance lies in the fact that we can look out on the universe and it can't look back on us. - Will Durant
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear - and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will.... Will Provine
• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins
• Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal. Jean Paul Sartre
• For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Albert Camus
• Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness. - Clarence Darrow
• Man knows ... that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity out of which he emerged only by chance. - Jacques Monod
• Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose. - Bernard Rensch
• If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for....Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning." Somerset Maugham (The Summing Up)
• I was thinking...that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there's nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing. Jean Paul Sartre (Nausea)
• There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it. Voldemort

The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote a play about hell titled No Exit in which people were trapped together in a room forever with no way out. Atheism might be thought of the same way. There's no exit from it's consequences. To accept the premise that God is not is to accept the conclusion that there's nothing about life that can support meaning, morality, justice, dignity, hope, or even reason. We are forlorn, lost in the cosmos, as Walker Percy put it, and books like Aronson's, though they raise important questions, offer answers which are little more than whistling past the graveyard.

RLC

Do Something, <i>Anything</i>

The Democrats "stimulus" bill is, in large part, a spending and welfare bill being foisted on the American people under cover of fear and disingenuousness. Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid acknowledged that only 58% of the bill is geared to creating jobs, and he was probably exaggerating. That three Republican senators - Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins - would go along with this charade is inexplicable, at least to one who wants to give his elected representatives the benefit of the doubt that they have good reasons for voting the way they do.

Jonah Goldberg, in a biting essay at National Review makes the case that these three "centrists" could not have had any idea what they were doing when they voted for the bill.

Goldberg describes a political centrist this way:

For certain Beltway centrists, the highest principle is to prove that you are attached to no principle. Rather, your duty is to split the difference between the "ideologues." If one side says we need a 1,000-foot bridge to span a canyon, and the other side says we don't need a bridge at all, the centrists will fight for a bridge that goes 500 feet and no farther, then pat themselves on the back.

Senator Specter's argument (The other two, as far as I know didn't even bother to defend their recklessness) went something like this: The economy is in bad shape. Something must be done. Therefore, we must pass this bill. Of course, he has little idea what's in the bill since no one really had much chance to study its 1000+ pages before the vote, but the President says we need it, the President invited Senator Specter to the White House to watch the Super Bowl, so, by golly, let's pass this thing.

Goldberg calls Specter a living antonym for the word "Churchillian." Jonah's at his best in this essay. Give it a read.

RLC

Stoicism

This video is of a Democrat lady back in 2000 who had just learned that George Bush had beaten Al Gore in the presidential election -- just kidding. Actually, it's video of a woman who arrived at the departure gate at Hong Kong International airport too late to board her plane for San Francisco. She appears to be someone who's very much used to having her way.

At any rate, she was put on a flight a couple of hours later and, I understand, made all of her fellow passengers totally miserable the whole way to San Francisco.

RLC

Israeli Covert Ops

Last December President Bush refused to give Israel the go-ahead for an attack on Iran's nuclear bomb-making facilities, opting instead for vague "destabilizing" covert activities. This report in the Telegraph is a little more specific as to what those covert activities entail. Here's the gist:

Israel has launched a covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran's nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed. It is using hitmen, sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime's illicit weapons project, the experts say.

The most dramatic element of the "decapitation" programme is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran's atomic operations.

Reva Bhalla, a senior analyst with Stratfor, the US private intelligence company with strong government security connections, said the strategy was to take out key people. "With co-operation from the United States, Israeli covert operations have focused both on eliminating key human assets involved in the nuclear programme and in sabotaging the Iranian nuclear supply chain," she said.

Israel has also used front companies to infiltrate the Iranian purchasing network that the clerical regime uses to circumvent United Nations sanctions and obtain so-called "dual use" items - metals, valves, electronics, machinery - for its nuclear programme. The businesses initially supply Iran with legitimate material, winning Tehran's trust, and then start to deliver faulty or defective items that "poison" the country's atomic activities.

Well, now. This poses some interesting ethical questions. Let's assume that the Israelis could be successful in retarding the Iranian weapons program until some future date when the government collapses due to, say, low oil prices. Suppose further that the only realistic alternatives to the Israeli covert ops are a) we allow Iran to procure nuclear weapons, or b) we, and/or Israel, bomb Iran and risk a lot of carnage and a much wider war. Given those two suppositions, what are the moral objections, if any, to doing what the Israelis are doing? Take your time thinking it over.

RLC

Killing Her Softly

Muzzammil Hassan resides in Orchard Park near Buffalo, NY, and is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that its programming would help boost the image of Muslims in the eyes of Americans.

He was arrested the other night for having murdered his wife...by beheading her.

That's probably not going to help his cause of portraying Muslims in a positive manner much, at least with anyone other than wife-beaters and misogynists.

But before you think poorly of Muslims let me remind you that there are many moderate Muslims out there who don't behead their wives and who are doubtless appalled at what Hassan did. After all, there are other ways of killing one's wife without resorting to such grisly means as this.

It's not the Hassans of the world who should shape our opinion of Muslims, but rather the millions of moderates who would be satisfied with just giving their wives a good beating or, if need be, murdering her more gently, to whom we should turn to gain a better understanding of Islamic culture.

By the way, Kaled Hosseini's most recent book A Thousand Splendid Suns offers the reader some disturbing insights into that culture. It's not quite as riveting as The Kite Runner, but it's still a very good read.

RLC

Obama Picks Defender of Child Porn

President Obama has appointed David Ogden to be Deputy Attorney General. This selection will be a major disappointment to anyone concerned about our cultural slide into the sewer since Ogden, in private practice, was an ardent defender of pornographers in general and child pornographers in particular. Now as a Deputy Attorney General it will be his job to prosecute those who seek to exploit children for sexual purposes, but it's hard to imagine how he could do this with any enthusiasm given his view that pornography is protected free speech.

Here's Matthew Schmitz of the Witherspoon Institute on Ogden:

Ogden has argued that a law designed to protect children from molestation and rape at the hands of child pornographers would "burden too heavily and infringe too deeply on the right to produce First Amendment protected material." The law Ogden opposed reasonably asks that those who wish to profit by selling explicit content keep documents verifying that their models are of legal consenting age.

Even those who think that adults have a right to obtain and use pornographic material should recognize that David Ogden's advocacy for the pornography industry goes much further. His position would allow the purveyors of exploitative images to hide their abuse behind a vanishing paper trail. There is some irony in the fact that while our country employs thousands of inspectors to ensure that meat and poultry are safe, David Ogden opposed even basic steps to ensure that the images consumed by pornography users are not of children. While David Ogden's stated concern was protecting "free speech"-in his confirmation hearing he said that he is opposed to the exploitation of minors, and presumably he is sincere-it is hard to see any justification for a position that has the effect of abetting abuse.

In addition to making it harder to prosecute those who sell images of child molestation and rape, Ogden has sought to ensure that pornography can be easily distributed and readily accessed in almost any medium or location. He has fought cases in Puerto Rico to allow Playboy to broadcast explicit programming on TV. He represented Philip Harvey, a man who runs the nation's largest mail-order pornography shop out of North Carolina, in his attempt to deflect a Department of Justice investigation of his business. Completing a sort of multi-media grand slam, Ogden has sued to allow sexually-explicit content to be transmitted over the phone. Taking this quest to its absurd limits, he has even claimed in court that there is a constitutional right for pornography to be kept in firehouses. Ogden's position is good for the industry groups he has represented but bad for female firefighters who could be subjected to humiliating and harassing images in the workplace. With an equal disregard for the comfort and protection of children, in 2000 Ogden sued to allow pornography to be accessed in public libraries.

It's hard to imagine how a man with two young daughters would choose someone with Ogden's history to serve anywhere in his administration, let alone in the Justice Department, but he has. The Senate must still confirm the appointment so there's a chance that enough senators will find Ogden more repellent than does our President. But who knows with this bunch?

Rumor has it that Larry Flynt is set to chair the President's new Council on Marriage and the Family.

RLC

British Dhimmitude

Dogs, cats and other animals will often, when afraid, adopt a posture of submission and obsequiousness to their owner, and may, if they're nervous enough, even wet the carpet. I thought of that when I read about the action of the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband.

In an astonishing spasm of cowardice and dhimmitude Miliband has barred Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian, from entering England. Wilders, recall, was the man who made the sixteen minute movie Fitna which inflamed Muslims because it revealed the truth about Islamic extremism. Now the Foreign Secretary prevents Wilders from entering his country on the pretext that Fitna contains "extreme anti-Muslim hate and we have very clear laws in this country" against that sort of thing. Perhaps, but according to a post by Andrew Stuttaford at NRO Fitna itself has not been banned in England, so why should its producer be?

But here's the best part. Edmund Standing at Harry's Place writes:

Miliband, having watched Fitna, obviously feels it does "stir up hate, religious and racial hatred." But, hold on... When asked by the interviewer if he had actually watched Fitna he responded that he had not and didn't need to as he already knew what was in it!

Fitna is a 16 minute film, easily accessible online. Is it really so much to ask that our political overlords bother to watch a film before condemning it and supporting its creator being barred from the country? How is Miliband any better than Muslims who screamed about The Satanic Verses without bothering to read it?

This is as reckless and irresponsible as three Republicans and all but seven congressional Democrats voting on the $780 billion stimulus bill without having read it.

Anyway, Mark Steyn, the Canadian writer who was recently hauled before a Canadian tribunal for the crime of offending Muslim sensibilities in his book America Alone, has some caustic reflections on the unseemly self-abasement Western political leaders seem determined to disgrace themselves with when any Muslim chooses to be insulted by an exercise of free speech. It's worth a read.

Meanwhile, next time the British Muslim population casts a baleful glance at Secretary Miliband somebody better quick grab the carpet cleaner.

RLC

Loose Lips

No wonder the Bush administration tried to keep sensitive information from the Democrats. They just can't help blabbing whatever they know to anyone who'll listen. Take, for instance, the recent case of Senator Dianne Feinstein:

A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an airbase inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a U.S. official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistani opposition to the ongoing campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Al Qaeda targets along Pakistan's northwest border.

"As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said of the planes.

The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counterterrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

This information had been kept secret because it would doubtless create problems for the Pakistani government if their people knew we were launching air strikes on Islamic terrorists from their soil. Now there might well be pressure to end the use of Pakistani air bases which may make it more difficult to hit terrorist leaders in the western wilderness of the country.

I wonder how many intelligence services around the world are reluctant to share sensitive information with the U.S. because they know that our government is filled with Dianne Feinsteins?

RLC

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