Adult Conversation

It's hard to edify the public about the issues we face when one party in a discussion insists on misrepresenting the position of the other. Take, for example, this exchange between Democrat congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Republican congressman Paul Ryan:

Congresswoman Wasserman-Shultz is actually misrepresenting Congressman Ryan's plan. He has not suggested "pulling the rug out from under seniors." What he has proposed is giving people under the age of 55 the option of investing in the stock market a part of their income that would otherwise go to Social Security. Ms Wasserman-Schultz surely knows this, but she obfuscates the truth as though she doesn't want people to hear it for fear they might like the idea.

I wonder why it is that Ms Wasserman-Schultz, and most of her Democrat allies, are appalled by the idea of giving people the option of investing their own money in ways likely to produce the greatest return. Every retirement system in the country, except Social Security, is invested in the stock market. Could it be that Democrats don't like this idea because it would mean that revenue that would otherwise be available to them to spend on, say, bailing out union pensions, would no longer be there for them?

Who do you want to have to depend on for your retirement: the stock market or a government that is so far in debt that by the time you retire it'll no longer be able to meet its obligations to retirees? Wouldn't you like to be able to decide that question for yourself? People like Ms Wasserman-Schultz don't want you to have that choice.

Wave of the Future

A lot of people are taking their children out of public schools and are frustrated enough with the local school system that their investing the time and resources into teaching their kids themselves. It's a Tea Party movement, of sorts, for education.

They're tired of apathetic teachers, crowded and rowdy classrooms where nothing much gets accomplished, unchallenging curricula, and a moral climate in the halls and cafeterias that can best be described as debauched.

They feel helpless against administrators, courts and politicians who seem unwilling or unable to do much about the problems and they figure that they can do at least as good a job as the schools are doing and provide a better environment for their child while doing it.

And their numbers are exploding:

Texas Home School Coalition, an advocacy organization, said an estimated 120,000 families statewide opted to home-school 300,000 children this school year, an increase of about 20 percent over the past five years.

About 4.5 million Texas children attend schools in the public school districts.

I've had a lot of students who were home-schooled take the college classes I teach. Many of them are still in high school, but they're taking college courses and are usually at, or near, the top of the class. I recently had one home-schooled student, still in the equivalent of high school, take three different philosophy courses from me while also at the same time studying Greek and Latin at another nearby college. My point is that home-schooled kids are often very bright and highly motivated students, and they're giving up on the government schools.

Maybe this article (also see previous post) in the Wall Street Journal on the sort of books public schools are using to try to get young boys to read gives us a hint.

I suspect that home-schooling will be the wave of the future unless the government panics and steps in to make it impractical. That's a possibility and it's another good reason to vote against candidates and parties that stand against individual freedom.

How Not to Close the Gap

Thomas Spence, in a column at the WSJ, observes that there's a growing literacy gap between boys and girls. The good news, he says, is that influential people recognize the problem. The bad news is that their solutions are just awful.

A considerable number of teachers and librarians believe that boys are simply bored by the "stuffy" literature they encounter in school. According to a revealing Associated Press story in July these experts insist that we must "meet them where they are"—that is, pander to boys' untutored tastes.

For elementary- and middle-school boys, that means "books that exploit [their] love of bodily functions and gross-out humor." AP reported that one school librarian treats her pupils to "grossology" parties. "Just get 'em reading," she counsels cheerily. "Worry about what they're reading later."

So, the solution our pedagogues have come up with to getting reluctant boys to read is to teach them to be boorish, moronic slobs. Sounds like a great plan.

Spence adds that:

Education was once understood as training for freedom. Not merely the transmission of information, education entailed the formation of manners and taste. Aristotle thought we should be raised "so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; this is the right education."

"Plato before him," writes C. S. Lewis, "had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."

The idea that we have to cater to the young savages' penchant for the prurient is an abdication of one's role as an educator. What's next? Teaching arithmetic by counting the number of chocolate bars floating in the toilet bowl?

The problem, as you probably guessed, is that young boys spend a lot more time than girls with electronic amusements of one sort or another. The solution, Spence rather reasonably insists, is to severely curtail their access to these nefarious devices, and then ply them with good books.

I think he's right. Reading is not an enjoyable activity for many young boys. They'd rather be creating mayhem on the video screen. But just because civilizing males is not an easy task is no reason why parents and public schools should shirk the job of doing it.

Check out Spence's essay, especially if you're thinking about going into middle school or elementary ed. He makes a lot of interesting, and important, points.

Destroying Health Insurance

Throughout the debate over health care reform last winter and spring numerous critics argued that the package being voted on by the House and Senate was going to make health care more scarce and less affordable. Nancy Pelosi did little to reassure us that Congress knew what it was doing when she announced that we had to pass the bill so that we could find out what was in it (and liberals mock Christine O'Donnell for being empty-headed?).

Well, now the bill has passed and we're starting to learn what's in it, and what's in it is going to make a lot of people very unhappy. National Review focuses on just one item: child-only policies. These are policies written specifically to cover children, and they're relatively inexpensive because the policy doesn't have to cover items, like colonoscopies, prostate exams, mastectomies, etc., that children would never be expected to need.

It turns out that one of the many unintended consequences of Obamacare is that insurance companies are going to have to stop offering these policies. National Review's editors explain why:

Health-insurance giants Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Aetna, Cigna, CoventryOne, Humana, and UnitedHealthCare have stopped writing child-only policies in those jurisdictions where they are able to do so. The reason for this is obvious: Because Obamacare forces insurance companies to accept children who are already sick with pre-existing conditions on the same terms as healthy children, parents now have a strong incentive to wait until their children are sick to buy child-only policies, making the products a guaranteed money-loser for insurers, which are not in the business of guaranteeing losses to their investors and employees.

Those losses would be passed on to health-care consumers in the form of higher premiums and reduced benefits, meaning that the mandate to cover those with pre-existing conditions will function as a tax on other insurance consumers, and those who were responsible enough to buy insurance before they got sick will be punished to bail out those who were not similarly responsible.

The requirement to accept patients with pre-existing conditions essentially guarantees that a lot of people simply won't be buying insurance until they need the coverage. The insurers will have much less money coming in and much more money going out. There's no way a company can survive such mandates, which may actually be President Obama's plan. One way to achieve his goal of having a single-payer system where the government is the single-payer is to drive insurance companies out of business, and one way to do that is to make their coverage so expensive that fewer and fewer Americans can afford it.

If that's not his deliberate plan it is nevertheless what his plan may well achieve.

Are We A Simulation?

A post by Nullasalus at Telic Thoughts caused me to reflect on what I think is an interesting development in the battle over Intelligent Design as an explanation for both the highly ordered precision of the universe and the complexity of living things.

There seems to be a growing tendency among naturalists to tacitly acknowledge that the universe is quite probably designed by an intelligent agent of some sort even as they refuse to consider any non-natural agent as the designer. We talked last week about John Gribbin's hypothesis that the universe was designed by super-intelligent beings like ourselves, only much more advanced, living in some other universe.

Nullasalus also jogs our memory of a proposal by Nick Bostrom, made about a decade ago, that we are actually living in a computer simulated world designed by a civilization that has evolved from us. This civilization has an enormous amount of technological power at its disposal and has chosen to construct a simulation of its evolutionary past. Since we are part of that past, even though we seem to be real we're really just a sophisticated form of Sim City.

The world that we inhabit, according to this theory, is not real. It's like the Matrix designed by beings living in the future, our descendents. Bostrom, believe it or not, actually constructs a pretty interesting argument for this belief and claims that it's much more likely that we really are a sim than that we're not.

Whatever the case, I have three thoughts:

1) As I said in the post on Gribbin I find it amusing the lengths to which naturalists will stretch their imaginations in order to avoid having to say that maybe a God did design the world after all.

2) It also seems that given the expanding number of potential naturalistic designers it's time to tow the old clunker of an argument that ID is a necessarily religious hypothesis, a gussied up version of creationism, out to the junkyard of broken down ideas.

3) I have no problem with the notion that we are living in a simulation and in fact wrote a post suggesting something somewhat similar to this about four years ago. The difference between what Bostrom and I imagine, however, is pretty stark. It's the difference, really, between naturalism and theism.

Check it out.

Can't We All Just Talk Nice

Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine recently issued a plea for civil discourse in the upcoming election season.

Let’s try it. For the next six weeks before the election, let’s focus on truth and civility.

Why? Because it’s getting worse. With the campaign season in full swing, the level of our public discourse has hit new lows. From politicians to commentators, I keep hearing the same thing, “We’ve never seen it get this bad.” And some of them are clearly helping to make things worse.

Except for the part about it never having been this bad before - it was much worse, in my opinion, when George Bush was president, and Barack Obama hasn't been subjected to anything close to the horrendous treatment dished out to Bush or to Sarah Palin in the last campaign and its aftermath - I totally support what Wallis is asking for. Our public discourse is often abominable and degrading.

As an example here's Ed Shultz, one of MSNBC's stable of liberal talk show hosts, who doesn't seem to have gotten Wallis' memo. Shultz is referring to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in this video. The relevant portion starts at the 2:00 minute mark:

Wow, that was a persuasive argument Ed made there, don't you think? I was feeling pretty good about Christie until I heard Ed's analysis of what's wrong with him. Now that I know that Christie's just a "cold-hearted fat slob" I've changed my mind completely about the Governor. Now I want him to run for president in 2012 instead of 2016.

Seriously, personal insults, misrepresentations of opponents' positions, and baseless accusations of malicious motives, should have no place in our public discourse. We should be better people than this. Let's show each other some respect, especially when we disagree.

Saved by Camus?

Rob Moll at Christianity Today recounts some of the influences that led him as a college senior back to the faith of his childhood. Surely the most unlikely of the influences Moll discusses was his reading of Albert Camus' novel The Plague. I say this is unlikely since Camus was an atheist and the hero of The Plague is also an atheist. Indeed, the only Christian in the novel, a Father Paneloux, is something of a buffoon.

Anyway, here's the heart of Moll's account:

[T]he biggest influence on my spiritual journey was the novels and philosophy of Albert Camus, a French existentialist of the 1940s and '50s—and an atheist. C. S. Lewis warned, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading." Camus should have been safe territory for me, but as I like to say now, I was saved by an atheist....

The world, as Camus found it, is absurd. Humans yearn for meaning, yet life offers none. God is absent. But Camus argued against the nihilism of his fellow Europeans who found life meaningless and therefore flocked to totalitarian, fascist, or communist philosophies. "I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it," Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus, his argument against suicide. "But I know that I do not know that meaning." Rather than take a leap of faith, Camus sought to "know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone."

He illustrated his philosophy of creating meaning in the face of meaninglessness in the novel The Plague. When the city of Oran is struck by disease, officials quarantine the city. The main character, the physician Rieux, chooses to stay, throwing himself into caring for the sick. This is how one creates meaning amid the meaninglessness of the sudden outbreak of plague. And life is no different, Camus believed. We are to work against wrongs and injustice, with humility, trying to aid others in small ways.

Rieux....realized that "I, anyhow, had had plague through all those long years in which, paradoxically enough, I'd believed ... I was fighting it." Not only that: "I have realized that we all have plague."

Camus was right, and I, too, had plague. I was sick and in need of a Physician. Camus' willingness to accept the truth that humans are fallen allowed me to do the same. Camus held a mirror to my face—in a way that no pastor, preacher, or professor had—and I knew I needed salvation.

There's much more in the essay that makes it worth taking five or six minutes to read. Indeed, there's much in others of Camus' works that's worth reading, not just in The Plague but also in his other famous novel The Stranger. Camus doesn't shrink from portraying the awful emptiness of a life lived in the absence of God. To repeat Lewis' words, "A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading."

Disincentives to Crime

Caleb passes along a report released by the NRA based on recently released FBI crime statistics. The report points out that over the last two decades violent crime has been decreasing as private gun sales have been increasing. I think we have to be careful about drawing a cause and effect relationship, though all the trends are certainly suggestive of one, but we need not be coy about declaring that predictions that more guns would result in greater crime rates have been pretty much discredited.

The NRA summarizes their report in this paragraph:

Coinciding with a surge in gun purchases that began shortly before the 2008 elections, violent crime decreased six percent between 2008 and 2009, including an eight percent decrease in murder and a nine percent decrease in robbery. Since 1991, when violent crime peaked, it has decreased 43 percent to a 35-year low. Murder has fallen 49 percent to a 45-year low. At the same time, the number of guns that Americans own has risen by about 90 million.

Predictions by gun control supporters, that increasing the number of guns, particularly handguns and so-called “assault weapons,” would cause crime to increase, have been proven profoundly lacking in clairvoyance.

Documentation is provided at the link. Perhaps criminals perform a subconscious calculation, pondering the chances that an intended victim may be armed and proceeding accordingly. As gun ownership has increased, the likelihood of encountering an armed victim increases apace, and the thug's crude cost-benefit analysis weighs heavily against an assault.

This stands to reason, especially in crimes like rape or robbery. If most potential robbers thought their intended victim was likely to produce a weapon instead of a wallet it could make the crime decidedly unprofitable and just not worth the risk.

Parting the Sea

There's a new theory among some scientists as to what may have happened during the events surrounding the Israelites' flight from Egypt. The book of Exodus records that the Israelites were pinned against the sea as the Egyptian military pursued them. It appeared as if there was no escape, but then, the record shows, the sea parted as a result of a strong wind, and the Israelites were able to cross over to the other side. The 14th chapter of Exodus says: "And the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided."

When the Egyptians tried to follow them the next day the winds abated and the waters flooded back over them, drowning many of their number.

This video is an animation of what the latest theory proposes. The site of the crossing is at what is called the Sea of Reeds, and it would have taken a wind of about 60 miles per hour to drive the water back:

There's more on this hypothesis in a summary at New Scientist, which is pretty interesting despite the gratuitously dismissive tone of the author's passing reference to the possibility that God was somehow involved.

"Shut Up," They Explained

Apparently the notion that knowledge is best advanced by encouraging a free exchange of ideas by men and women dispassionately engaged in the quest for truth has become obsolete in countries other than just the United States. Christopher Booker recounts his experience at a conclave of French scientists several months ago in which the scientists recounted the personal and professional price they've had to pay for dissenting from orthodox Darwinism. Booker writes about it at Deccan Chronicle and opens with this lede:

Three months ago I spent a fascinating few days in a villa opposite Cap Ferrat, France, taking part in a seminar with a dozen very bright scientists, some world authorities in their field. Although most had never met before, they had two things in common. Each had come to question one of the most universally accepted scientific orthodoxies of our age: the Darwinian belief that life on earth evolved simply through the changes brought about by an infinite series of minute variations.

The other was that, on arriving at these conclusions, they had come up against a wall of hostility from the scientific establishment. Even to raise such questions was just not permissible. One had been fired as editor of a major scientific journal because he dared publish a paper sceptical of Darwin’s theory. Another had not yet worked out how to admit his scepticism to his fellow academics for fear that he too might lose his post.

The typical mode of academic disagreement on the left (the people who act this way are almost always ideological leftists), whether the issue at stake is Darwinism, global warming, or whatever is not to calmly reply to the dissenters with arguments and evidence to show how they are mistaken. It is rather to avoid engaging them with arguments at all and instead to punish them, vilify them, and portray them as scientific lepers. Here's Booker:

[N]othing better reveals the hole at the heart of their belief system than the fanaticism with which they turn on anyone who dares question the assumption on which it rests, who must be anathematised with all the venom once turned on heretics by the churches.

But the response of the Darwinians has not been to debate these very serious questions but simply to scorn them, caricaturing anyone who raises them as a “neo-Creationist”, no different to those zealots who take Genesis as literally true.

There's more in Booker's column that's worth reading, especially in his last couple paragraphs, but there's something happening here that's not good for science and the cause of Truth. The left is trying to use science as a Trojan horse for smuggling into the culture a naturalist, materialist worldview that they want hardened into a dogma that will brook no challenge. They are totalitarians of the mind, seeking to impose a tyranny of uniform thought on a society that largely has no idea what's happening. They are contemporary Torquemadas, and the more they succeed the less free all of us will be to say, think, and believe what we wish.

The Liberal Lexicon

In the wake of the upset of Delaware congressman Mike Castle by Tea-Party endorsed Christine O'Donnell who thus won the right to run for the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by Joe Biden, there's been a lot of liberal wailing and teeth-gnashing. Many hands have been wrung, for example, over "fears" that there's no longer any room in the GOP for "moderates" and "alarm" that "extremists" are taking over the Republican party.

In light of how frequently words like these are bandied about among the lefties it might be helpful to define exactly what is usually meant by them. It's not what you think.

You might assume, for instance, that a "moderate" is someone who votes liberal and conservative with approximately equal frequency, but you would be mistaken. You might also think that an "extremist" is someone lurking on the fringes of society, whose views are so far out of the mainstream as to reasonably be considered weird. Again, you'd be wrong. This is what the left wants you to think when you hear these words, of course, but it's not how they use them.

The real definition of "moderate" as it is often employed by liberal pundits in today's political discourse is this: "Any Congressperson or Senator who votes with the Democrats when the vote matters and votes with the Republicans when it doesn't."

Thus Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Colin Powell (although he's not a Congressman), and Mike Castle are all regularly referred to as moderates, while Christine O'Donnell, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Jan Brewer, Sharon Angle, and Glenn Beck (another non-politician) are called extremists. (Hmmmm, do liberals have something against women?)

The liberal definition of "extremist" is equally exotic. A political extremist is: "A Republican (There are no Democrat extremists) who opposes the policies of the Democrats."

In other words, in the liberal worldview there are no Democrats who are extremists and no genuine Republicans who aren't. It's certainly strange that according to the liberal lexicon views held by over 70% of Americans get you labeled as an extremist if you happen to share them.

Bravo, Mr. Jones

I don't know exactly what this father said, and maybe he went too far, but I admire him. His daughter, who has cerebral palsy, was afraid to get on the bus because on previous occasions she'd been tormented by the riff-raff that rides it with her. The dad apparently did what any father who cares about his daughter would want to do, which is to come within a whisker of knocking a couple of those punks silly. He also, apparently, had some bracing words for the bus driver who'd done nothing to stop the harassment of his daughter.

I know we should eschew violence, and there were doubtless innocent kids on that bus who were terrified by Mr. Jones' angry rant, but sometimes, like when your child is the victim of malicious bullying, I think turning the other cheek is just not the loving thing to do. Sometimes what a young miscreant needs most is a strategically delivered boot, and for my part, I wish there were more fathers like Mr. Jones (and fewer mothers like the one in the video). If there were there might be fewer young thugs plaguing society and pushing young girls into contemplating suicide.

Atheists Can Be IDers, Too

Adversaries of the view that the universe shows evidence of having been intelligently designed (ID) have been successful in keeping ID out of public schools because they've managed to persuade school boards and school administrators that ID is a fundamentally religious hypothesis. Since ID entails the existence of a designer, and since that designer has to be God, ID must be religious, or so the argument goes.

It's a philosophically bogus argument, but educators, unfortunately, are often too philosophically naive to see the problems with it (For starters, there's no reason, as you will see below, why the designer must be God).

Even so, atheist physicist John Gribbin has apparently made the ID opponents' case even less persuasive than it was previously. Gribbin offers us this hypothesis:

[I]s our universe a designer universe? By this, I do not mean a God figure, an "intelligent designer" monitoring and shaping all aspects of life. Evolution by natural selection, and all the other processes that produced our planet and the life on it, are sufficient to explain how we got to be the way we are, given the laws of physics that operate in our universe.

However, there is still scope for an intelligent designer of universes as a whole. Modern physics suggests that our universe is one of many, part of a "multiverse" where different regions of space and time may have different properties (the strength of gravity may be stronger in some and weaker in others). If our universe was made by a technologically advanced civilisation in another part of the multiverse, the designer may have been responsible for the Big Bang, but nothing more.

There are a couple of things to say about this. First, a designer that is only responsible for the Big Bang is not really a designer, it's just an initiating force and there's no reason to think it intelligent. Second, it's not just the origin of the universe that needs to be explained as I discuss in the previous post (This Too shall Pass).

In any event, Gribbin goes on to describe how a non-theistic intelligent designer might have operated and then adds this:

This might sound far-fetched, but the startling thing about this theory is how likely it is to happen – and to have happened already. All that is required is that evolution occurs naturally in the multiverse until, in at least one universe, intelligence reaches roughly our level. From that seed point, intelligent designers create enough universes suitable for evolution, which bud off their own universes, that universes like our own (in other words, suitable for intelligent life) proliferate rapidly, with "unintelligent" universes coming to represent a tiny fraction of the whole multiverse. It therefore becomes overwhelmingly likely that any given universe, our own included, would be designed rather than "natural".

While the intelligence required to do the job may be (slightly) superior to ours, it is of a kind that is recognisably similar to our own, rather than that of an infinite and incomprehensible God.

Note what Professor Gribbin is tacitly admitting: Our universe shows evidence of having been intelligently designed. In fact, the evidence is so strong, apparently, that Professor Gribbin is prepared to acknowledge that there is a designer behind it as long as the designer isn't God.

Moreover, this argument inadvertently opens the door for two consequences that would horrify Professor Gribbin and his fellow atheists if he realized what he was doing.

First, as I indicated above, he undercuts the argument of ID opponents against teaching ID in public schools. That argument is based largely on the allegedly religious nature of ID which, it is often falsely asserted, entails the existence of God as the designer. Gribbins' argument, though, explicitly claims that the universe is designed and that the designers are creatures much like ourselves. Since a scientist like Gribbin is admitting the possibility that the designer is not a deity, it simply cannot be said that ID is inherently a religious theory.

Second, any argument which invokes the multiverse in order to increase the probabilities of a life-sustaining universe existing by chance without the need for God is actually self-defeating. Here's why: If there really are an infinity of different universes, as the multiverse hypothesis suggests, then there must be an infinity of worlds capable of sustaining life. As long as the probability of one of these worlds being created by a transcendent intelligent agent (TIA) is greater than zero then, given an infinity of such worlds, one of them must have been created by a TIA and therefore such an agent must exist. Thus, so far from providing the naturalist with an escape from the conclusion that there is a TIA, the multiverse, if such there be, actually guarantees the existence of one. Furthermore, if ID opponents wish to stick with their claim that a cosmic designer must be God then surely God must exist.

This is certainly not the result that the atheists were hoping to achieve by touting the multiverse as a way of making our highly improbable universe inevitable without having to invoke a deity to explain it.

Anyway, as I read Gribbins' article I was struck by how far into the realm of the fantastical atheists are willing to burrow in order to find a theory that will allow them to explain the exquisite design of the universe without having to attribute it to the extraordinarily powerful, intelligent and personal mind of God.

Thanks to Telic Thoughts for the tip.

This Too Shall Pass

Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, is receiving a lot of attention, even though there's nothing really new about his claim that the universe is self-creating. That idea has been around since the ancient Greeks and received a big boost from the French philosophes in the 18th century. The nub of it, essentially, is that once the universe got started it pretty much unfolded in a deterministic, inevitable way and we don't need to posit God to explain any of it, not even as a first cause. The universe, modern cosmologists like Hawking tell us, could have simply caused itself.

Well, maybe, but beyond seeming counter-intuitive, to say the least, this idea has another problem that I think can be illustrated by comparing the universe to a Rube Goldberg machine that's set in motion by a single falling domino. The materialist wants to say that that first domino could have been knocked over by some pre-existing impersonal force, like wind, setting off the whole grand system. There's no need to say that "God did it."

Perhaps, but even if we set aside the problem of where the pre-existing force came from, or what it acted upon, or how it acted, there's another very serious problem in accounting for the complex precision of the machine itself. Watch this (Turn your sound on):

It's not hard to imagine the domino falling by some accident without the intelligent agent knocking it over with the toy car. What is hard to imagine, though, is this system constructing itself, not out of the parts we see but out of raw energy, and then arranging those parts to do precisely what it does purely through impersonal, purposeless accident, without any input from an intelligent agent.

This machine was designed by the engineers who are seen in the video standing on the platform overlooking their creation. It may seem superficially to be able to run it's course without their intervention, but not really. Their intervention came in the planning, design, and construction of the apparatus. Without them it never would have existed.

I wonder if Stephen Hawking has ever watched this video of This Too Shall Pass. He should. It sounds like an appropriate title for an assessment of attempts to do away with the need for God.

Synecdoche

When I think of movies that illustrate well the existential predicament of modern man, a couple come to mind. I think of the emptiness and sordidness of contemporary life portrayed in American Beauty, or the absurdity of life reflected in A Serious Man. And, henceforth, I'll think of a 2008 film I saw for the first time this weekend which stunningly captures all of these elements - emptiness, sordidness, and absurdity. The movie is Synecdoche, New York featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as the pathetic playwright Caden Cotard.

I'm not recommending the film, even though I wish I could, because it's R-rated, and although there's no violence, there's plenty of other unfortunate stuff in it that makes it inappropriate, especially for younger viewers. Nevertheless, there are few films which present to their audience in starker accents what I believe is this movie's chief message: Life without God is a pretty pointless and joyless affair.

Cotard spends fifty years of his life trying to fill the emptiness of his miserable existence with sex and his art, but none of it is fulfilling. His wife, an artist herself, leaves him early on, taking their daughter with her to Europe. Cotard then tries to replace the emotional loss with a series of implausible sexual relationships - implausible given the attractiveness of the women drawn to this very unattractive loser.

He wants to produce an autobiographical play, but because his life keeps dragging on he never gets the play completed. Fifty years later he's still conducting rehearsals. In the meantime he's beset with a series of physical ailments that range from the bizarre to the disgusting and a series of emotional calamities that make his life agonizingly sad.

The story is mesmerizing, and the viewer can't help but feel pity for Cotard, played magnificently by Hoffman, as he endures one blow after another. Throughout the film the message that comes through, whether intentionally or not, is that modern, secular man is lost in space, to borrow Walker Percy's phrase. He's alienated from everything and everyone around him, he's all alone, forlorn, and his life is empty, paltry, pointless, sleazy and absurd. Cotard keeps plodding resolutely, even bravely, on but the only progress he makes is toward the senescence of old age, and then his life ends. None of his relationships, none of what he has striven to accomplish, amount to anything. Cotard's life serves as an artfully crafted synecdoche for human existence in the age of metaphysical naturalism.

Explaining Naturalism (Pt. III)

This is the third and final installment in our series of reflections on Alex Rosenberg's essay entitled The Disillusioned Naturalist's Guide to Reality. Parts I and II can be found here and here. In this section Rosenberg argues that naturalism (actually materialism) entails that there is no need to posit the existence of a mind distinct from the brain. Mind is simply a word we use to describe the functioning of the brain, just as we use the word digestion to describe the functioning of the stomach.

This claim has some interesting consequences. If all we are is matter and the matter that makes us up is constantly changing, it follows that there is nothing about us that stays the same over time. In the final analysis human beings are reducible to little more than a constantly shifting and changing bundle of perceptions. Here's Rosenberg:

Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time.

There seems to be only one way we make sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change. This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads. Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but non-spatial, and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion consciousness foists on us.

What are the consequences of denying that there is an enduring self? One is surely the bizarre conclusion that we cannot be said to be the same person today that we were ten years ago. If we are in constant flux then we are different from the individual who went by our name in the past. Now, if this is true it would be unjust to be held responsible for anything that other person did. In the same way that it would be unjust to expect you to keep the promises made by another person, it would be unjust to expect me to keep promises made years ago by a person who had my same name. Marriage vows, for one example, would become worthless once people realized that it wasn't they who made them.

Furthermore, it would be unjust to punish criminals for a crime committed years ago because the person we're punishing is not the same person who committed the crime. For those of you familiar with the movie, we might ask this question: Is Jason Bourne responsible for that couple he killed in the Bourne Identity if he has no memory of killing them? Was it really he who killed them? Rosenberg would be hard pressed to explain how it would have been.

T.S. Eliot puts it like this: "What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then....at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."

This seems absurd, to be sure, but it is another of the consequences of naturalism that Rosenberg wants his fellow atheists to recognize and acknowledge. Little wonder that so many atheists are unwilling to stay with him on the atheism train all the way to it's logical endpoint. They can see that the tracks terminate at a precipice and that the train is going to hurtle over a cliff into the abyss of nihilism and so, still clutching their atheism, they jump off before it gets there.

This is, of course, irrational, but perhaps the most irrational thing they do after having jumped off the train, after having made a completely arbitrary, unwarranted, and irrational leap in order to avoid going over the cliff of their logic, they turn and point to the Christian (or other theist), whose worldview entails none of these problems, and tell them that it is they who have abandoned reason because they chose not to take the train at all.

One can only smile and shake one's head.

Telling it Straight

For those readers who've not yet heard of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, or who've heard of him but don't know why he's considered a rising star in the Republican party, I invite you to watch this video of Christie responding to claims by New Jersey teachers that plans to curtail their pension benefits are having a deleterious effect on the morale of students in the classroom:

It's so refreshing to hear a politician talk like this. Most pols are terrified of the possibility that they might offend a major special interest and thus look for ways to appease them. Christie just doesn't care. He says he's not interested in the presidency, but at the rate he's going he'd be a frontrunner for the nomination in 2012 or 2016 if he did want it. He's turned into something of an icon among conservatives.

All Things Considered

In all of the sturm und drang over the Christine O'Donnell win over Mike Castle in the Delaware GOP primary I wonder if anyone has mentioned perhaps the strongest reason not to have voted for the very liberal Mr. Castle.

People have noted that Mr. Castle is a credible threat to bolt the party once he got elected, but suppose his victory had given the Republicans 51 seats and thus the majority. He wouldn't have to defect to the Democrats in order to render the Republican advantage useless. All he'd have to do would be to threaten it, and he'd be holding the whole GOP caucus hostage to the Democrats' progressive agenda, an agenda which he largely supports.

The mere threat to switch parties, an act which would result in the Republicans losing their majority, and thus control, of the Senate would be enough to frighten his GOP colleagues into compromising and dithering where compromise and dithering were not necessary. What then would Republicans have accomplished by electing him to the Senate?

Christine O'Donnell has some ethical problems (although it's not clear how serious they are), but in an election like last Tuesday's what Republican voters need to ask is which candidate's votes in the Senate would be worse for the country? Here's a thought experiment for conservatives: Suppose Bill Clinton, a moderate-liberal with a lot of well-documented ethical shortcomings, were running against Barack Obama, a far-left radical, for the United States Senate. Which man should you vote for? I can't imagine any conservative answering that they would vote for Obama even if it were more likely that his election would produce a favorable majority in the Senate.

O'Donnell has nothing like the ethical baggage of Clinton, and she's more conservative. Mike Castle is pretty much an older version of Obama, at least in terms of his votes in Congress.

All things considered, it seems to me that Delaware Republicans made the right choice.

The Case for Traditional Marriage

The editors at National Review make an excellent argument in favor of maintaining the traditional view of marriage and rejecting the arguments proffered on behalf of same-sex marriage. Here's an excerpt:

Both the fact that we are debating same-sex marriage and the way that debate has progressed suggest that many of us have lost sight of why marriage exists in the first place as a social institution and a matter of public policy. One prominent supporter of same-sex marriage says that the purpose of marriage is to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults; another says that its purpose is to make it more likely that people will have others to give them care in sickness and old age.

So at the risk of awkwardness, we must talk about the facts of life. It is true that marriage is, in part, an emotional union, and it is also true that spouses often take care of each other and thereby reduce the caregiving burden on other people. But neither of these truths is the fundamental reason for marriage.

The reason marriage exists is that the sexual intercourse of men and women regularly produces children. If it did not produce children, neither society nor the government would have much reason, let alone a valid reason, to regulate people’s emotional unions. (The government does not regulate non-marital friendships, no matter how intense they are.) If mutual caregiving were the purpose of marriage, there would be no reason to exclude adult incestuous unions from marriage. What the institution and policy of marriage aims to regulate is sex, not love or commitment.

If you're chary of same-sex marriage but not sure how to best respond to those of your friends who challenge you on the issue, this article is a must-read.

Hey, Let's Make 'em Vote

The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart offers a typically liberal solution to the problem of voter apathy: Compulsory voting. Pass a law that would require everyone to submit a ballot every election. With compulsory voting, Beinart argues, the Democratic base, normally torpid during mid-term elections, would be compelled to vote for whomever their political overseers instruct them to support, and we wouldn't be getting all these right-wing extremists winning elections. It would increase civic involvement, and given the edge enjoyed by Democrats in voter registration, ensure Democratic hegemony until, well, until the eschaton.

Great idea. Force people to vote. More state coercion. Less individual freedom. More corruption of the election process. More people voting who haven't a clue whom they're voting for or why. This is an idea to make a liberal's heart thrum with excitement and make everyone else wonder how a guy like this gets anyone to read him.