Explaining Naturalism (Pt. I)

Alex Rosenberg is an atheistic naturalist [One who holds that nature is all there is, there is no supernature] who seeks in this essay to provide an overview of what it is that naturalists believe. He begins with this preface:

This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.

Rosenberg wishes to draw "the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position," as Sartre put it in describing existentialism. He will have none of the namby-pamby naturalism of those atheists, like Hitchens and Dawkins, who think they can reject God and still cling to belief that life is meaningful, that morality exists, and that truth can be known. Rosenberg's is a full-blooded naturalism that recognizes that all of those things are contingent upon the existence of a transcendent moral authority. Rosenberg's essay is a call to his fellow atheists to "man-up" and disabuse themselves of their comfortable illusions. No God, he avers, means no genuine meaning to life, no non-arbitrary morality, and no objective truth.

He divides his essay into eight topics, some of which will be addressed here at Viewpoint over the next couple of days. His first topic is headed, Why Leave Life’s Persistent Questions to Guy Noir? and is an explication of "scientism," a term that is in some disrepute but which Rosenberg wants to resuscitate. Here's an excerpt:

We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address. But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science....Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality. You don’t have to be a scientist to be scientistic.

Scientism is the view that answers to all important questions can be provided through scientific investigation. This is because everything that exists is simply some combination of matter and energy [This is a view called materialism]. Since science investigates matter and energy it will eventually find the answers to all our questions. If one embraces naturalism [the belief that nature is all there is] then one is likely also to embrace scientism.

Rosenberg's claim here that science can answer all the important questions is surely wrong. It can't, for example, answer the question whether we have a soul, whether there's life after death, whether altruism is morally superior to selfishness, whether God exists, or a host of other very important matters about which human beings frequently wonder. At least, it can't give answers to those questions which are any more authoritative than are, say, the answers provided by religion or philosophy.

In the next topic, titled The Nature Of Reality? Just Ask Physics Rosenberg gives a pretty clear statement of what materialists believe about the world:

What is the world really like? It’s fermions and bosons [subatomic particles], and everything that can be made up of them, and nothing that can’t be made up of them. All the facts about fermions and bosons determine or “fix” all the other facts about reality and what exists in this universe or any other if ... there are other ones.

Ideas have consequences. If Rosenberg is right in saying that all that exists is matter, energy and the forces between them then several conclusions inevitably follow. Those conclusions are the topic of the remaining sections of his paper. We'll reflect upon them over the next several days.

The End of the Revolution?

Camille Paglia is as ardent an advocate of the sexual revolution as you're likely to find this side of the Playboy mansion so when she talks about the revolution's demise it catches one's eye. In the U.K. Sunday Times Paglia points to the exotic and beguiling Lady Gaga as exhibit A in her case that the social revolution in sexual mores which began after WWII has run its course. I'm not nearly as educated on these matters as is Ms Paglia, but nevertheless I'm not so sure that Western society could be so fortunate. In any event, here's a bit of what Paglia has to say about Ms Gaga:

Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…

Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest video-Alejandro) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over…

Actually, I doubt it. That "blazing trajectory" which has left so much pain, heartbreak, and shattered lives in its wake won't be over until the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, recognize that sexual license causes far more hurt and suffering than it does pleasure. It has certainly been lethal to families and destructive of young lives, particularly those of women, especially minority women, and their children. Sexual liberation created a culture of death, represented by the abortion industry, fed an explosion in the rate of divorce, and an increase in the incidence of STDs. It could be argued that the only people who have really benefited from the revolution are pornographers, doctors, lawyers, therapists and abortionists.

Easy access to sexual gratification has led to the devaluation of marriage and a disinclination on the part of men to make a commitment to one woman for a lifetime. It has been something less than the blessing its proponents were promising back in those heady years of the late fifties and early sixties when women were encouraged to loosen their inhibitions and men were urged to act pretty much like a buck in rut.

Lady Gaga is not, in my opinion, a symptom of the revolution's demise so much as a symptom of it's weariness. When society wearies of sex, when sex begins to cloy, people don't lose interest. They turn instead to ever more bizarre, destructive, and violent means of gratification. If Ms Gaga's peculiar persona is a manifestation of sexual ennui then it's also a sign of even more perverse expressions of sex to come.

Lucky us.

Coping with IEDs

Strategy Page has an interesting piece on how the military is minimizing the threat of IEDs in Afghanistan. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The tactics and equipment that neutralized IED (Improvised Explosive Device, a roadside, or suicide car bomb) in Iraq, have arrived in Afghanistan. There are now 12,000 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles in Afghanistan, and they have played a major part in reducing NATO casualties there. In Iraq, the use of a similar number of MRAPs, reduced casualties from IEDs by over 60 percent. In Afghanistan, the math is similar. While 80 percent of hummers or trucks hit with IEDs result in one or more passengers killed, that only happens in 15 percent of MRAPs hit with IEDs. A year ago, About two-thirds of all casualties in Afghanistan were from roadside bombs. Thus these vehicles reduced overall casualties by about a third, and now IEDs create less than half the casualties.

Over the last year, the U.S. has been hustling to get MRAP vehicles to Afghanistan. At times, over 500 a month were arriving. Most of those coming in are the M-ATV model, designed for use in Afghanistan. A B-747 freighter can carry five M-ATVs per trip, but larger An-124s are also being used. The vehicles are moved by ship to a European or Persian Gulf port, to shorten the flight time (and enable a fully loaded B-747 to make it in one jump from the Gulf.)

In addition to many more MRAPs going to Afghanistan, the supply of explosives (nitrate based fertilizer) has been reduced by mandating the use of non-explosive fertilizers in Afghanistan. The U.S. also transferred its bomb detection techniques, and equipment, to Afghanistan, along with its methods of identifying and hunting down the teams that manufacture and place the bombs. These tactics greatly reduced the number of bombs being placed, and the MRAPs made those that did get used, much less effective. In some parts of Afghanistan, the use of IEDs has already declined enormously. This is usually due to finding the specialists who build the IEDs (and killing or capturing them) and destroying the workshops and supplies of bomb components.

I think the Obama administration seriously blundered by announcing a withdrawal date from Afghanistan, but other than that they seem to be doing all they can to protect our troops and to bring that conflict to a reasonably successful conclusion. Who'd have thought during the 2008 campaign that Mr. Obama would turn out to aggressively prosecute a war?

The New Literature

At Patheos Robert Velarde writes that film and tv are the new literature:

The Western world has, by and large, shifted from what Neil Postman called the Age of Exposition to the Age of Entertainment (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985). Contemporary culture has in many respects left behind the scholarly engagement of literary ideas and displaced them with film and television. We have shifted from a "Have you read?" mentality to a "Have you seen?" perspective.

While I firmly believe that literary people will always exist, they are now in the clear minority. This is unfortunate, since the great ideas of history are most commonly discussed in depth not on screen, but in print. Nevertheless, thoughtful films can indeed offer much to ponder philosophically and theologically, while even poorly constructed films can provide us with opportunities to discuss meaningful ideas.

Velarde is right, of course. Film affords us a rich mine of ideas, illustrations, and metaphors to aid us in bridging the social chasms that have opened up between people who live in different cultural worlds and hold to completely disparate worldviews.

Pundits often lament that our nation has become increasingly divided over the last couple of generations, that we don't really talk with each other so much as at each other, and that when we do talk it's as if we're broadcasting over a radio on one frequency while their "receiver" is set at a different frequency.

The medium of film (and music) can give a powerful assist to our attempts to communicate to our friends our own thoughts and convictions, and it has this critical advantage: It's a lot easier today to persuade someone to watch a film than it is to read a book.

Check out the rest of Velarde's column at the link.

Beware the Tea Party Terrorists

It's a measure of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Left that they so frequently resort to such laughable tactics as seeking to discredit their opposition by conflating in the public mind the Tea Party with all sorts of nefarious far-right organizations. The Daily Caller, for instance, tells us that:

Tea Party leaders say a series of reports by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) attempting to connect the Tea Party movement with domestic terrorists in the militia movement shows how desperate the left has become trying to stop the political juggernaut.

The group says individuals such as Glenn Beck, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann — all regulars at major Tea Party gatherings — have given widespread visibility for ideas espoused by the militia movement, or the “Patriot movement” as SPLC calls it.

According to SPLC, the Patriot movement — largely comprised of white supremacists — was animated in the 1990s by a shared view of the federal government as the enemy and a belief the Federal Emergency Management Agency secretly runs concentration camps.

“The ‘tea parties’ and similar groups that have sprung up in recent months cannot fairly be considered extremist groups, but they are shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories and racism,” Mark Potok, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, wrote in a piece titled “Rage On The Right: The Year In Hate And Extremism” from the group’s Spring 2010 edition of its Intelligence Report.

Yes, indeed. There's even photographic evidence of some of those hate-filled bigots and potential terrorists plotting violent revolution at one of their insidious rallies:

Beware.

Honoring Our Heroes

Today is a day to remember those who died on this date nine years ago as well as to honor the men and women who have been fighting ever since against the people who launched the 9/11 attacks and their allies. The Washington Post has an account of one such young man. It begins with this:

Under a bright Afghan moon, eight U.S. paratroopers trudged along a ridge in the Korengal Valley, unaware they were walking right into a trap. Less than 20 feet away, a band of Taliban fighters executed the ambush plan perfectly, enveloping the paratrooper squad in an explosion of bullets and grenades.

Salvatore Giunta, a 22-year-old Army specialist from Hiawatha, Iowa, was knocked flat by the gunfire; luckily, a well-aimed round failed to penetrate his armored chest plate. As the paratroopers tried to gather their senses and scramble for a shred of cover, Giunta reacted instinctively, running straight into the teeth of the ambush to aid three wounded soldiers, one by one, who had been separated from the others.

Two paratroopers died in the Oct. 25, 2007, attack, and most of the others suffered serious wounds. But the toll would have been far higher if not for the bravery of Giunta, according to members of his unit and Army officials.

Read the rest of the story of Giunta's bravery here.

The Post article goes on to tell us that President Obama will award Giunta the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor, and that will make him the first living recipient of the medal who has served in any war since Vietnam.

This is hard to believe. There've been so many stories of incredible bravery emerging from the wars of the last nine years that the military bureaucracy must be a very stingy bunch to find none of them deserving of its highest award. What Giunta did was extraordinary and merits the Medal of Honor, but so do the actions under fire of these and many other Americans who are risking and giving their lives every day to keep us safe from the barbarian hordes who want to kill us and our children and return the world to the 7th century.

The Amoralist

Joel Marks is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut who writes for the blog Philosophy Now. He's an atheist and has come to realize that attempts by atheists to defend their belief in the validity of moral obligation in a Godless world are futile. Rather than retain his belief in moral obligation by accepting the existence of God, however, Marks chooses to retain his belief in atheism by rejecting morality. Marks explains his decision to become an "amoralist":

In a word, this philosopher has long been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely, that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t.

How I arrived at this conclusion is the subject of a book I have written during this recent period (tentatively titled Bad Faith: A Personal Memoir on Atheism, Amorality, and Animals). The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. I call the premise of this argument ‘hard atheism’ because it is analogous to a thesis in philosophy known as ‘hard determinism.’ The latter holds that if metaphysical determinism is true, then there is no such thing as free will. Thus, a ‘soft determinist’ believes that, even if your reading of this column right now has followed by causal necessity from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago, you can still meaningfully be said to have freely chosen to read it.

Analogously, a ‘soft atheist’ would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Why do I now accept hard atheism? I was struck by salient parallels between religion and morality, especially that both avail themselves of imperatives or commands, which are intended to apply universally. In the case of religion, and most obviously theism, these commands emanate from a Commander; “and this all people call God,” as Aquinas might have put it.

The problem with theism is of course the shaky grounds for believing in God. But the problem with morality, I now maintain, is that it is in even worse shape than religion in this regard; for if there were a God, His issuing commands would make some kind of sense. But if there is no God, as of course atheists assert, then what sense could be made of there being commands of this sort?

In sum, while theists take the obvious existence of moral commands to be a kind of proof of the existence of a Commander, i.e., God, I now take the non-existence of a Commander as a kind of proof that there are no Commands, i.e., morality.

Give Marks credit for finally seeing what Christians have been telling atheists for decades if not centuries: Take away God and you take away any ground for moral judgment. As I mentioned in a post last week the atheists that Marks refers to as soft atheists live in an unsustainable tension. They want to hold on to moral judgment while also holding on to their atheism. As Marks has realized, it can't be done. Unfortunately, of the two solutions available to him - reject atheism or reject morality - Marks has chosen the latter which, although consistent, strikes me as almost perverse.

The rest of the post is interesting, and I invite you to read it. Meanwhile, I wonder now whether Marks, having claimed to be an amoralist (one who rejects the view that there are moral duties), will be able to refrain, as he must, from making moral judgments. I wonder, for example, whether he really will be able to say that kindness is no more "right" than cruelty, that selflessness is no more right than selfishness, or that there's no obligation to help the poor. I wonder whether he'll now say that torture is neither right nor wrong, and that acts like murder, though they may be unpopular, are not really morally wrong. I wonder if Marks even realizes that he's going to have to answer these questions.

Which Year Is It?

As Tony Blankley observes there are two ways of seeing the growing crisis in Iran. Some people see it through the lens of 1964 and some through the lens of 1938. Blankley explains:

Neoconservatives, Reaganites and other militarily assertive factions in the United States are sometimes accused of thinking it is always 1938 (Britain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich) -- that there is always a Hitler-like aggressor being appeased and about to drag the world into conflict. There is sometimes merit in that charge.

As, likewise, there is sometimes merit in the charge against isolationists and other doves that they always see 1914 (start of WWI) or 1964 (beginning of escalation of troops in Vietnam) -- the imminent and foolish entry into or escalation of a war that can't be won -- or even if victory were to be gained, it would be Pyrrhic.

[T]hose for whom it is now 1938 make a number of assumptions: 1) The Iranian regime intends to develop nuclear weapons; 2) once it has them, being fanatics, they may actually use them against Israel, as they have repeatedly threatened; 3) even if they don't use them, it will change the dynamics of the Middle East by inducing a nuclear arms race between Sunni Muslim countries and Iran, and by giving Iran a huge capacity to intimidate and dominate the region; 4) both Europe and the United States will eventually fall within the missile shadow of a nuclear Iran -- thus giving Iran capacity to be a world player and possible precipitator of nuclear war even beyond the Middle East; 5) the regime is inherently hostile and aggressive, particularly against the U.S. and Israel, and will keep pushing until pushed back; and 6) even tough sanctions will not deter Iran -- moreover, Russia is too invested in Iran to truly cooperate with us, and even Europe will not enforce tough sanctions.

The 1938'ers further believe -- or claim to believe -- that while Iran can create havoc in response to our military action (threaten oil transport out of the Gulf, terrorist attacks in the Middle East, Europe and probably the United States, further harm to our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan), they would be even more dangerous -- and just as ill intentioned -- if nuclear armed.

On the other hand, there are those, many Obama people among them, who see the world through the lens of 1964. They hold vastly different assumptions. They argue that:

1) Iran may actually not want nuclear weapons. 2) If they do want them, Russia will help us stop them. 3) If we settle the Israeli/Palestinian dispute that will reduce any nuclear aspirations Iran may have. 4) If we were to attack Iran, Iran could create more chaos than we can manage. 5) But if Iran did develop their nuclear weapons, we can deter their use by providing a nuclear umbrella for both Arab and Israeli. And, factually, they assume the danger is off by at least a year -- and that Iran is running into technical problems.

Blankley thinks this view is much too pollyannish. I think he's right. The advantage possessed by those who see the world through the lens of 1938 is that it is based on historical experience and not wishful thinking. There have always been and are today lunatic, power-mad dictators out there ready to destroy the world in order to gain it. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad certainly has all the field marks to identify him as one of these.

President Obama has been trying without much success to appease the Iranian leader while not giving the appearance of appeasing him. The problem is that, just as Neville Chamberlain learned to his everlasting shame with Hitler, what Ahmedinejad wants the United States can't give him, and what we can give him he doesn't want, at least not as much as he wants to destroy Israel.

No Need for God

Our post on Stephen Hawking's new book in which he apparently claims that all that's necessary to account for the existence of the universe is a force like gravity, and that there's no need to posit a role for God, reminded a reader of this old joke:

God was sitting in heaven one day when a scientist said to Him, "God, we don't need you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing - in other words, we can now do what you did in the beginning."

"Oh, is that so? Explain..." replies God. "Well," says the scientist, "we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man."

"Well, that's very interesting... show Me."

So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil into the shape of a man. "No, no, no..." interrupts God, "Get your own dirt."

This is precisely the problem Hawking has. Where does the dirt - the energy as well as the dozens of laws and forces that comprise the universe - come from in the first place? What determines that these essential components of the cosmic structure will have the precise values they do such that had the value of any one of them deviated by as much as the mass of an electron compared to the mass of an aircraft carrier, the universe would not have formed?

What Hawking wants us to believe is the equivalent of asserting that an aircraft carrier could have been built such that had its mass varied by as much as an electron, had its height been off by as much as the thickness of an atomic nucleus, had its width fallen short by the width of a razor blade, had its color been any shade but precisely the one it is, had the friction in the propeller shaft been different by the weight of a mosquito, had any of these and more been the case the carrier would have collapsed in the drydock and never made it to sea. Then Hawking serves up the pièce de résistance by assuring us that these extraordinarily exacting specifications notwithstanding, blind, purposeless forces just accidentally managed to pull all the requisite parts together and perform the dazzling feat of arranging them with such astonishing precision that those specifications would be satisfied and the ship would be launched.

And then he and his fellow atheists scoff at Christians for believing in miracles. Pretty funny.

He Wants Your Money

Jason tells me that this film is being made by a writer from MAD magazine. I wonder if it's not really about a government that writers from MAD might have dreamed up had they been in a malicious mood:

Decapitation Strategy

Strategy Page gives us an update on military operations in Afghanistan. Here's part of it:

Between April and July of this year, U.S. and allied (including Afghan) special operations forces killed nearly 400 Taliban leaders, and arrested another 1,400 Taliban. All this was mostly done via night operations by commandos (mainly U.S. Special Forces and SEALs) and missile attacks by American UAVs. This is part of a trend.

This “decapitation” campaign was successful in Iraq, and earlier, in Israel (where it was developed to deal with the Palestinian terror campaign that began in 2000.) Actually, the Americans have used siimilar tactics many times in the past (in World War II, 1960s Vietnam, the Philippines over a century ago and in 18th century colonial America.) But the Israelis developed decapitation tactics customized for use against Islamic terrorists.

In some cases, the Special Forces efforts have been so successful that the Taliban has been unable to get anyone to take the place of dead leaders. In some cases, the Taliban have called on friend and kin in the Afghan government, to try and get the Americans to stop. This puts these Afghan officials in a tight spot. While they are officially on board with this campaign against the Taliban, they also have members of their tribe, or even close relatives, who are in the Taliban. That’s not unusual in Afghanistan, where even the most pro-Taliban tribes have members who are not only pro-government, but actually work (most of the time) for the government. That’s how politics works in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the major media rarely report any of this stuff. Listening to the evening news one would think that all is doom and gloom in Afghanistan and that U.S. forces are on the verge of being run out of the country by the Taliban with their tail between their legs. Of course, this is how they reported on Iraq, too. It seems that when it comes to American efforts abroad the media can't help but focus on the clouds and ignore the wide swaths of blue sky.

Polyamory and Gay Marriage

Over the last few days we've commented a couple of times on an article in Scientific American by research psychologist Jesse Bering. In the essay Bering makes this assertion:

...human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out ‘extra-pair copulatory partners’—having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes—then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

Let us for the sake of discussion grant that human beings, at least male humans, are not naturally monogamous (I happen to believe that that's true. Men have to be taught to value monogamy). What are the implications of this for the future of marriage once we remove the legal barrier to homosexual marriage? If the natural state of humans is polyamory and if in our enlightened times we decide that the gender of the individuals entering into marriage no longer matters, what reason could there possibly be for saying that the number of people in the marriage matters?

Bering gives us a peek at the future debate. It will go something like this: Polyamory is a natural urge. To stifle peoples' natural urges is oppressive. Therefore it is oppressive for a society to deny people the right to form unions of any number of people they wish.

Once we've accepted the proposition that the gender of the married persons doesn't matter there'll be no basis for resisting the argument that the number of people in a marriage shouldn't matter either. And once we acknowledge that polyamorous marriages should be permitted for those who desire them, marriage will cease to have any real meaning or significance and will probably cease to exist.

Bering doesn't think that people will really want to form group marriages because, human nature being what it is, jealousy will obtrude forming an insurmountable obstacle. This is, in my opinion, naive. Polyamory has existed in various permutations throughout human history, and there will certainly be those who will wish to have it legitimated by the state once the philosophical and religious objections have been bulldozed out of the way by same sex marriage. Whatever people can do some will surely do. To think otherwise seems to reflect an inadequate understanding of human nature, and I'm surprised that a research psychologist doesn't recognize this.

Re: Whites Need Not Apply

A number of students replied to the recent post titled "Whites Need Not Apply" which addressed the racial discrimination being experienced by whites and Asians from admissions offices at major universities. Many of the responses were interesting and thoughtful and some were sad. Here are excerpts from five of the many that were received:

Buchanan wishes to express the huge injustice going on at these universities, but is it injustice or are the roles simply being reversed. He states that minorities have a huge competitive advantage because of not being white. Yet, I wonder if he has even taken the time to see why these particular minorities score so low on their SATs. Did he take into account the preparation (to be more specific; the rigorous curriculums) needed to even score high on the SATs? Maybe here is where they (colleges) make up the difference.

Buchanan also states that whites are a minority and are being discriminated against at these Ivy Leagues. If this were the case, then perhaps he should go to an HBCU where he could in fact receive admittance and a scholarship for truly being a minority. Make the system work for you. I must ask the question is he angry because he was denied admittance into an Ivy League school (where upon graduating, you will leave with a prestigious reputation and degree) or was he truly aggrieved at the injustice he received. I can agree with him till a certain extent.

Yes more and more schools are admitting more minorities than whites. With that said I do not believe that colleges (Ivy Leagues included) will admit any “run of the mill” minority student just because they want money. Their SAT score may not be the highest but they may offer something more than just a score or sport. Perhaps they have potential unseen by others.

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What happened to equality? These application “boosts” don’t promote equality at all. A girl in my high school was born in Africa but she is white. She was in the same academic classes with me and several other white males and females. However, she was lucky enough to have the ability to put down African American on all her applications for scholarships, colleges, and any other applications. Because of that distinction, she received the majority of the scholarships available and made it into the honors programs at all her college choices.

I do not doubt the fact that she was smart. However she wasn’t at the top of our class, yet she managed to beat out more qualified students based solely on where she was born. Since when does judging one’s mental capabilities and intelligence depend on their race? If the point of applications is to sift through students to find the best on that class, shouldn’t they be compared to each other on even ground? The students aren’t being compared to each other at all; they are merely being exposed to the discrimination of race. So despite all the actions to stop inequality, the problem remains, only this time the targets have been changed.

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I am a Sergeant in the United States Army Reserve and the effect of this racism has even entered our military. Over my six years in the Reserve’s I have often seen African American and Hispanic soldiers promoted over a white soldier just because of the soldier’s race. I have witnessed this happen on occasions when the white soldier was much more qualified for the promotion, had more experience, more time in service, and had better leadership skills. This not only kills white soldiers’ morale but weakens our military.

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My mother is white and my father is black, creating a beautiful mix of culture and history in my life. I have always loved American history and I have always enjoyed hearing my dad talk about stories from growing up in Louisiana, discussing how his life changed as America became more integrated and accepting of color.

I know that affirmative action was created to allow underrepresented races a chance to be more accepted in the educational setting, as well as when dealing with employment, and at the time it was brought about it was necessary and many benefited. I feel, though, that this article has proven that it has now gone too far and that those in the minority position are being given almost too much of an advantage and I might even go on to say that it is insulting.

I thoroughly understand that there are a lot of differences when it comes to those of different races, social economic levels, and gender. No two lives are the same and because of the differences listed above, individuals will live very different lives and be given different opportunities. I feel though that Harvard has gone too far to make such a blatant difference between SAT scores based on race.

I understand there may be honest intentions behind it, but it could also be seen as though those who are minorities do not have the ability to get the kind of results as those who are white or Asian. I also think that it is very stereotypical to think that whites and Asians are the "smarter" races and that there scores must be that high in comparison to "lower" races.

We are in a new time, a new decade, and the playing field has been leveled so to speak. Yes, there is still discrimination and bigotry but I believe that that will always exist. It would be wonderful to know that when someone looks at me, my intelligence level is not automatically assumed because of the color of my skin.

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I completely and utterly agree with this viewpoint post! I can personally relate to this testimony. This past fall, I applied for guaranteed acceptance to Hershey Medical School. I was born for this program; it was suited to absolutely every aspect of my future career goals. This program started with 200 invited applicants and I was one of the lucky ten selected for an interview. When I walked into the room full of other interviewees, I noticed that [there were few] Caucasian people there. All of the applicants represented all of the possible races and genders. It was obvious to me right away that I had no chance of getting into this program.

Every other applicant in that room had an advantage over me because they were minorities. Each of the students I met that had been previously elected into this program were all minorities: one was Jewish, one was Indian, one was Muslim, one was African American, and so on. I had one reassurance because I was the only student there that seemed 100% dedicated to the intention of the program… to become a rural primary care doctor. All of the others expressed interest in other fields of medicine, and clearly were not meant for the program.

Six weeks after my interview, I made a phone call and found out I was not selected. Hershey neglected to even call me and tell me I did not make it. So much of my time, energy, and money were wasted on this failed attempt to fulfill my dreams. They told me I was an excellent candidate and they would love to have me, but in the end they could only pick two people… two very non-Caucasian people.

I am a humanitarian. I wholly believe in equality. I believe that minorities (African Americans, Asians, Hispanics) are equivalent in every way to the Caucasian majority. In addition, I do not believe that sex differentiates anything other than reproduction. I believe everyone should be treated with fairness and equality; everyone should be given the same opportunities as the next. Everyone in this world should be placed on an even playing field, despite race, gender, or religious beliefs.

People like myself have worked for so many years to bring equality to minorities. I find it disturbing that people like myself are now being punished for the selfless work they have done for minority rights. The flaws in our society regarding inequality have been excessively overcome--the majority is now the minority. The system has reversed itself. Today the majority can not succeed because the minority is being given special preference and special treatment.

Someone, somewhere is no doubt saying that all this is somehow fair and just, but it's a strange notion of fairness and justice that one has to hold in order to think so.

Burning the Koran

Pastor Terry Jones of The Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida has announced that his congregation will observe the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks by burning a stack of Korans, a statement for which he has taken considerable heat from all over the world.

I think there's some irony in the pastor's plan and some hypocrisy in the reaction to it. Here's why:

The pastor certainly has the right to burn the Koran if he wants, just as Muslims have the right to build the Ground Zero mosque if they want. What I don't understand is why he (or they) wants to. I know he's tired of the politically correct bowing and scraping that the media and our government engage in whenever there's an encounter with Muslims, and I sympathize with his refusal to be dhimmified.

Even so, the pastor is ostensibly a Christian leader, and as such he's familiar with Jesus' injunction to love our enemies. Surely this includes showing respect to those who are members of a different religion. He must, too, be aware of Paul's admonition not to give needless offense to others. Although the context of Paul's words is concerned with offending other Christians, the principle may doubtless be extended to embrace members of other religions. This was, after all, the lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan in which Jesus taught that our moral obligations extend far beyond just our own particular ethnic or religious group.

Treating with contempt the book revered by the world's Muslims is also in conflict with Jesus' teaching on the Golden Rule. I'm confident that Pastor Jones would not like to hear that Muslims have taken to burning Bibles in their mosques. He should therefore refrain from doing to their Book what he would not want them to do to his.

In sum, Pastor Jones may insult a billion Muslims around the world by burning their sacred book if he so chooses, but it certainly would not be a Christian act if he did so, and it would ironic if it were a Christian pastor who committed such an unChristian deed.

As for hypocrisy we might reflect upon the scolding Pastor Jones is receiving from liberals, which, I'm afraid, is very hard to take seriously. These are people, some of them, who have no problem with burning the American flag, hailing photographs of a crucifix in a jar of urine as great art, using the words "Jesus Christ" as a profane exclamation, and mocking on television, film and books everything about Christianity. Now they are suddenly deeply concerned about offending the religious sensibilities of Muslims? Now they are deeply committed to being respectful of the Islamic faith? Come on.

The final irony (and hypocrisy) is the outrage being expressed by Muslims around the world. In the Islamic world Christians are being killed every day, churches are being burned, Bibles are illegal, and conversion from Islam is a capital offense, and few Muslims seem to care. Where do these people get off screaming about the sacrilege of burning the Koran? How can people who persecute and tyrannize members of other religions, and jail those caught bringing Bibles into their country, expect to be taken seriously when they express anger over someone in this country feeling about their Scripture the way they feel about his.

Many of the liberals and Muslims who are complaining about Pastor Jones' "blasphemy" simply have no grounds for being paid any attention. If liberals think Christians should treat Islam with more respect then those liberals should themselves treat Christians and Christianity with more respect. If Muslims want their holy book to be treated with greater dignity by Christians then they need to treat with greater tolerance and dignity not only the Christian Bible but Christians themselves as well as their churches.

Thinking About Islamophobia

One of the things about the debate over the Ground Zero mosque that disturbs me is the ease with which opponents of the mosque are being labeled "Islamophobes." Time magazine asks on a recent cover whether Americans are Islamophobic, but I'm not sure I understand what this term even means. If Islamophobia is defined as hatred for Muslims as people then it is indeed a reprehensible thing to be an Islamophobe, and we should reject it root and branch, but if the word is defined to mean a dislike or suspicion of the Islamic religion then I don't know why being an Islamophobe is so bad.

Surely there are many people who strongly dislike Christianity without hating individual Christians, and no one, except maybe Christians, seems to think that's such a terrible thing. Indeed, the authors of antiChristian books, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are feted on television and elsewhere and we rarely hear anyone say that their claims to despise Christianity are contemptible. No one in the media sputters the word "Christophobe" at these people as though they were pedophiles or something. They just see it as part of the intellectual/cultural give and take in our society.

Moreover, Jews and Muslims are understandably leery of the Catholic church due to atrocities perpetrated against Jews and Muslims almost a thousand years ago, and we're repeatedly admonished to be sensitive to these suspicions given that history. So why is it somehow despicable - Islamophobic - to be suspicious of Islam given the history of the crimes that have been committed in the name of Allah? Why is disdain for Christianity quite fashionable in our enlightened secular society, but disdain for Islam is seen as some sort of hate crime?

Chris Matthews on his Hardball show a couple of weeks ago badgered former New York governor George Pataki to explain why 54% of Republicans, according to a recent poll, apparently dislike Islam. Here's the video of the segment:

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Matthews made it sound as if it were almost unAmerican to be less than enthusiastic about Islam, and Pataki seemed unable, or unwilling, to give him a straightforward answer to his question, a question which was really more of an accusation.

As I watched the show I wished Pataki would have asked Matthews what it is, precisely, that's unAmerican about disliking a religion or a set of religious beliefs. Where does the Constitution demand that we "like" the beliefs of others, and why is it that liberals only apply this demand to non-Muslims? The books that attack Christianity have soared to the top of the best-seller lists, but Time magazine seems blithely indifferent to the possibility that we're becoming a Christophobic nation. Matthews, who claims to be a Catholic, has never, as far as I know, reproached any of the authors of these books for their hatred of his religion. Yet let someone oppose building a mosque at a particular site, and Matthews acts as if the Spanish Inquisition was about to start all over again.

I suspect that much of the liberals' "concern" for the Ground Zero mosque is motivated not so much by a fondness for the freedom of religion clause in the First Amendment, on whose behalf they've never before been particularly zealous unless it's employed in the cause of secularism, but rather by a hostility to Christianity, especially conservative Christianity. Christian conservatives comprise a hefty segment of the people who are reluctant to see the mosque constructed so close to the site of the WTC infamy, therefore an attack on opponents of the mosque is a subtle way to tacitly smear Christian conservatives as "intolerant, insensitive and bigoted."

Be that as it may, we might ask what it is about Islam that makes many Americans squeamish? Perhaps the following doctrines and practices are not typical of Islam, but they're certainly believed and practiced by many Muslims in much of the world. If they aren't intrinsic or fundamental to Islam then Muslims might consider being more emphatic and outspoken in explaining to non-Muslims why so many of their co-religionists are just plain wrong to practice them and explicate more effectively what the Koran really teaches about these things.

Many non-Muslim Americans believe, for example, that Islam, at least the version of it that is practiced by millions of Muslims around the world, is a religion that:

• celebrates, or at least tolerates, violent conquest. Killing non-Muslims in order to spread Islam is not a violation of Koranic teaching insofar as many Muslims are concerned.
• considers women to be the property of men and that it often condones honor killing, wife beatings, genital mutilation, and polygamy. Women are not only required to wear clothing such as the burqa, which many non-Muslims consider dehumanizing, but in much of the Islamic world they're not allowed to be seen in public with a non-relative male, nor are they allowed to drive a car, testify in court, or get an education.
• condones the execution of gays as well as those Muslims who leave the faith or who even merely criticize it.
• condones the oppression of non-Muslims, relegating them to second class status called dhimmi.
• has no sympathy for freedom of speech, religion, or church-state separation, and that if Muslims had the power they would abrogate much of the Bill of Rights and impose Sharia law.
• teaches in madrassas all over the world that Jews are despicable and deserve to be killed.
• places severe ritualistic burdens on its adherents.

Now some, or all, of these beliefs may be mistaken, but until American Muslims do a better job of explaining their religion those beliefs will continue to thrive among people who read books such as those by Khaled Hosseini (Kite Runner, Thousand Splendid Suns) or who watch movies like The Stoning of Soraya M., or read the accounts of the experiences of Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Salman Rushdi, or who listen to the sermons of the imams in the Middle East on MEMRI or who simply read the daily reports in the newspapers of Muslim violence and terrorism all around the globe.

Until these beliefs are dispelled and a compelling Islamic apologetic makes its way into the national mainstream it's going to be very hard to convince many Americans that they should like and admire, much less embrace, the religion, as distinct from the people, of Islam.

Black Liberation Theology

President Obama acknowledges that while living in Chicago he went to church almost every Sunday for twenty years to listen to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons. Rev. Wright has told us that he is an ardent admirer of James Cone, the man who claims to have founded Black Liberation Theology. We can assume, then, that President Obama was hearing, not infrequently, Black Liberation Theology preached from the pulpit at Trinity U.C.C. and that he found it congenial enough to continue to attend for two decades.

So what is Black Liberation Theology? Kyle-Anne Shiver at American Thinker breaks it down for us, but first she lays a little groundwork. Here's part of it:

Writing on "Faith," in The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama went to great lengths to explain that his own "conversion" was enabled not by an orthodox Christian awakening, but by the explicitly political nature of the Black Liberation Theology preached by Jeremiah Wright, Jr. And the thrust of Obama's entire chapter on faith in his own book was to show how his own liberation theology should not frighten secular progressives because it bore little to no resemblance to the religion of those Bible Belt "bitter clingers." As observant Americans know well, Barack Obama was so ardent a follower of Jeremiah Wright's brand of Christianity that he named his book after a Wright sermon, The Audacity of Hope.

While it is true that Barack Obama never (that I know of) used the explicit words "Black Liberation Theology" in his speeches or his books, everything about his claims to faith in his writing, his speeches, and his current actions as president is filled with the tenets of this fringe system of beliefs.

What are these beliefs that have shaped Mr. Obama's worldview? Shiver quotes from Cone's writings:

[From] Black Theology and Black Power: Whiteness, as revealed in the history of America, is the expression of what is wrong with man. It is a symbol of man's depravity. God cannot be white, even though white churches have portrayed him as white (p. 150). The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us (p. 150). Negro hatred of white people is not pathological -- far from it. It is a healthy human reaction to oppression, insult, and terror. White people are often surprised at the Negro's hatred of them, but it should not be surprising (p. 14).

[From] God of the Oppressed: Black people must be aware of the extreme dangers of speaking too lightly of reconciliation with whites. Just because we work with them and sometimes worship alongside them should be no reason to claim that they are truly Christian and thus part of our struggle (p. 222).

[From] Speaking the Truth: Liberation is not simply a consequence of the experience of sanctification. Rather, sanctification is liberation. To be sanctified is to be liberated -- that is politically engaged in the struggle of freedom. When sanctification is defined as a commitment to the historical struggle for political liberation, then it is possible to connect it with socialism and Marxism, the reconstruction of society on the basis of freedom and justice for all (p. 33).

[From] A Black Theology of Liberation: What need have we for a white Jesus when we are not white but black? If Jesus Christ is white and not black, he is an oppressor, and we must kill him. The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about the white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution (p. 111).

One certainly shouldn't jump to the conclusion that the President of the United States shares all these odious views, but it certainly should give us pause that he would subject himself and his family to such vitriolic racism for twenty years. Why did he? What does he really believe? Would not the media be all over a Republican president who spent two decades of his life listening to a pastor who was a proponent of the KKK? Why are they so indifferent in this case? Perhaps they simply believe Mr. Obama's church attendance was insincere, a cynical ploy to enable him to network with community power-brokers.

Whatever the case, one thing this article helps us understand, although Shiver never mentions it - is why so many Americans question whether Mr. Obama really is a Christian. Black Liberation Theology is certainly unlike any form of Christianity with which most people are familiar. There's much, much more in her article. Give it a read.

Proof?

I know it's not wise to talk about a book one hasn't read, but after seeing this article about Stephen Hawking's new book I'm afraid I can't help it. I hope Hawking answers a few questions in his book that the article elides. Here's what the AOL News piece said:

Entering the ongoing debate between faith and science, renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking claims that modern physics has now proved that God played no role in the creation of the universe.

"Proved?" How can anyone, no matter how brilliant, prove that God was not involved in the birth of the cosmos? Moreover, there's no ongoing debate between "faith and science." There's only a debate about which interpretation of the empirical evidence best explains the data. Is it best explained by intelligent agency or is it best explained in terms of blind, impersonal forces?

The article goes on:

In a new book -- "The Grand Design," co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow -- the theoretical physicist sets out to demolish Sir Isaac Newton's claim that an "intelligent and powerful Being" must have shaped the universe, which he believed could not have emerged from chaos. Hawking and Mlodinow rule out the possibility of divine intervention, saying that new theories have made the idea of a supernatural creator redundant.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," the pair write, in an extract published in today's London Times. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going."

Upon reading this my friend Mike wrote to ask me my thoughts. He said:

I feel as if I must be missing something, because it doesn't seem right that a mind as astute as Hawking's could make such an obvious and elementary mistake, but am I wrong in perceiving a gaping hole in his point: He argues "Because there is a law such as gravity" the universe can create itself from nothing, and yet if a pre-existing law of gravity is necessary for the universe to create itself out of nothing, then the universe can not create itself out of nothing because it requires a law of gravity, the existence of which would constitute more than nothing.

The Hawking quote strikes me as remarkably stupid, but given that my brain and body of scientific knowledge is so much smaller than his, I feel as if I must be missing something. Maybe the article just gave a snippet that's better clarified in the book?

This is a very insightful observation on Mike's part. If there was indeed a force like gravity prior to the creation of the universe then surely the universe didn't create itself from nothing. In addition, there seems to be a chicken and egg problem. Gravity is a property of matter, so how did gravity exist before matter did?

Not only might one wonder where, in Hawking's theory, gravity comes from, one might also wonder how gravity actually creates matter and how matter comes to possess just the right properties, and organize itself in just the right way, to allow for the emergence of creatures capable of wondering about these things. If it can do all of these marvelous things it would seem that gravity is God.

I'm sure, or at least I hope, that Hawking addresses these questions in his book which is due to be released next week.

Heartbreak

The other day I mentioned Jesse Bering's article in Scientific American in the post "Morality and Atheism". Today I'd like to look at another piece of that essay. Bering discusses the work of anthropologist Helen Fisher who studies the biology of broken relationships. I thought this was pretty interesting, having seen people I know go through almost exactly this progression on several occasions over the years.

Bering writes:

Drawing largely from work by psychiatrists, Fisher surmises that there are two main stages associated with a dead and dying romantic relationship, which is of course often preceded by a partner’s infidelities. During the “protest” stage that occurs in the immediate aftermath of rejection:

"Abandoned lovers are generally dedicated to winning their sweetheart back. They obsessively dissect the relationship, trying to establish what went wrong; and they doggedly strategize about how to rekindle the romance. Disappointed lovers often make dramatic, humiliating, or even dangerous entrances into a beloved’s home or place of work, then storm out, only to return and plead anew. They visit mutual haunts and shared friends. And they phone, e-mail and write letters, pleading, accusing and/or trying to seduce their abandoner.

"At the neurobiological level, the protest stage is characterized by unusually heightened, even frantic activity of dopamine and norepinephrine receptors in the brain, which has the effect of pronounced alertness similar to what is found in young animals abandoned by their mothers. This impassioned protest stage—if it proves unsuccessful in re-establishing the romantic relationship—slowly disintegrates into the second stage of heartbreak, what Fisher refers to as “resignation/despair”:

"With time the spurned individual gives up pursuit of the abandoning partner. Then he or she must deal with intensified feelings of helplessness, resignation and despair. Drugged by sorrow, most cry, lie in bed, stare into space, drink too much, or hole up and watch TV. Feelings of protest and anger resurface intermittently, but rejected lovers mostly just feel profound melancholy … Some people in the despair phase of rejection kill themselves. Some die of a broken heart. Broken-hearted lovers expire from heart attacks or strokes caused by their depression … As the abandoned partner realizes that [reunion] will never come, dopamine-making cells in the midbrain decrease their activity [causing] lethargy, despondency and depression."

Eventually, most people get over their heartbreak, the dopamine cells regain their vigor, and the person gets on with his or her life. In the meantime, however, some people experiencing this rejection act as if they've gone insane, which, in a way, I suppose they have. It's very sad.

A Gore Disciple?

How long will it be before the media blames Al Gore for the violence that could have cost lives in the Maryland Discovery hostage crisis? The man, one James Lee, apparently was motivated to take serious action to save the planet after having read Gore's book An Inconvenient Truth.

It would of course be silly to blame Gore for this deranged man's behavior, but what do you suppose would have been the media reaction had the unstable, intoxicated individual who recently stabbed a Muslim cab driver in New York acknowledged that he was angry with Muslims after reading a book by some conservative talk show host? I'm pretty sure that admission would be exhibit A in an indictment of how awful conservative talk radio is and how the FCC needs to rein it in.

If we were to blame Gore for inspiring this man's actions it would mean that any writer of any book on almost any topic could be held at least morally responsible for almost anything. Yet that's the logic of blaming the attack on the Muslim cabbie on opponents of the Ground Zero mosque as many have already done. It's also the logic that lay behind blaming Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing on Rush Limbaugh's conservative opinions.

The absurdity notwithstanding, the left continues to attempt to refute its opposition, not by addressing their arguments, but by trying to convince the public that there's a nexus between those arguments and the actions of sundry lunatics and morons. It's a tactic the left only employs, however, when the people "at fault" are on the right. We can be assured that there'll be no such connections made in the case of a disciple of Al Gore.

In fact, we'll probably hear that any attempts to blame Gore are nonsensical ideological partisanship, which they are, but nonsensical ideological partisanship is a two-way street. It's funny how differently things look when people have to confront the logic of their own tactics.

Insignificance

How big are you compared to the earth? Not very, of course. How big is the earth compared to the sun? Pretty small. How big is the sun compared to other stars in our galaxy? Take a look.

This would be a good video to return to whenever you start getting infatuated with your own importance. In fact, one of the lessons this video illustrates is how utterly insignificant we are, or would be, were we not loved by the God who made both us and those other stars.

If you'd like to watch some more there's a bunch of National Geographic videos at the link that are all pretty good. This animation of how scientists think the moon formed I found especially interesting.

Thanks to Jason for passing along the links.