More on Stuxnet

DEBKAfile has a report on the panic and havoc in Iran's military-industrial complex that's apparently being caused by the Stuxnet worm. The story opens with this lede:

Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer security experts in West and East Europe with offers of handsome fees for consultations on ways to exorcize the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc through the computer networks and administrative software of its most important industrial complexes and military command centers. Debkafile's intelligence and Iranian sources report Iran turned for outside help after local computer experts failed to remove the destructive virus.

None of the foreign experts has so far come forward because Tehran refuses to provide precise information on the sensitive centers and systems under attack and give the visiting specialists the locations where they would need to work. They were not told whether they would be called on to work outside Tehran or given access to affected sites to study how they function and how the malworm managed to disable them.

The Iranians seem to be desperate and helpless to stop the worm's ravages. It's not only destroying industrial machinery it's also apparently stealing classified military information. The story concludes:

While Tehran has given out several conflicting figures on the systems and networks struck by the malworm - 30,000 to 45,000 industrial units - debkafile's sources cite security experts as putting the figure much higher, in the region of millions. If this is true, then this cyber weapon attack on Iran would be the greatest ever.

This seems to me to be the international news story of the year and I'm surprised it's not getting more coverage in the press than it has.

Gliese 581G

The Washington Post has a story about the discovery of a planet orbiting a star some 20 light years from earth that seems to be about the same size as the earth and about the right distance from its star to qualify as a "Goldilocks" planet - neither too far from the star nor too close to prevent simple life forms from existing on it. From these meager facts about the planet, named Gliese 581G, some media commentators have concluded that the planet is just right for life.

This is certainly a premature claim and goes beyond what the scientists themselves are saying.

The planet hasn't actually been seen, rather its presence is inferred by detecting slight wobbles in the star it orbits. From these it is deduced that there must be a planet of a certain mass and distance from the star. Scientists deduced a few other things as well. For instance they believe the planet always has one side facing the star and one side facing away, a condition called tidal lock, which means that whatever life might exist there must be restricted to a narrow band where the lit portion fades into darkness and the temperature is not too high nor too cool.

But there's much more to being a life-sustaining planet than just having the right temperature, and it's not known whether the new planet possesses any of these other necessities. For example, in order to sustain life of any kind, much less complex life, a planet needs to have water, a stable atmosphere, plate tectonics, a large moon, and a magnetic field. It also must be shielded from radiation and incoming meteorites. It also needs to have a rich supply of available oxygen, carbon and other elements, and the star itself must have an orbit that does not take it into the galaxy's spiral arms where life would be prevented or extinguished by violent collisions and radiation.

That planets of roughly the mass of the earth exist in the habitable zone of stars is not surprising. That any would be found that would possess all the conditions necessary to allow for life to emerge and survive would be. As Ward and Brownlee conclude in their book Rare Earth the conditions for life are so many and so rare that the earth may well be the only planet in the entire universe which possesses them.

The Worm Turns

The Iranian computers used in their nuclear weapons production program have been mysteriously hit by Stuxnet, a computer worm of enormous sophistication and lethal capability. New Scientist has some very helpful background on how the worm operates and why it represents a quantum leap in terms of the potential hazard.

The fact that this worm seems to be concentrated in Iran and has infected their nuclear program naturally raises a lot of questions. For instance:

Who designed this worm? It seems to require resources that only a national organization could command. Is this a strategy initiated by the U.S. or Israel to compromise the Iranian nuclear program without having to launch military strikes or is there some other player involved (Some have suggested the Chinese)? If so, will it work, and how will Iran respond? Will they launch a cyber attack against whomever turns out to be the source of the worm?

Stay tuned.

Why They're Leaving

The other day we commented on the increasing number of parents who are choosing alternatives to public education for their children. A reader writes to share his experience and why he left the public school system:

I had an experience dealing with administration shortcomings and failures in the public school setting. During my sophomore year of high school I had an issue happen where I became a personalized victim. One day after being in the wrong place at the wrong time (ironically this meant standing at my locker collecting my books before heading to the bus to go home), I was assaulted. A teenager snuck up from behind and tackled me to the ground and beat me. Thankfully I was not badly hurt other than a couple of bruises and scrapes. However, I was caught totally off guard.

Not knowing what to do past that, I went on the bus and traveled home. Of course, when I got home my parents were furious and called the administration as soon as possible trying to get this matter resolved. Unfortunately, the administration did nothing other than suspend the boy for a couple of days, pat me on the shoulder telling me it was okay, and send both of us on our ways.

However, that did not stop or change the situation. Apparently, what had happened was I was wrongly confused with another person who had turned this man (as well as a group of students) in to the administration the previous year for selling marijuana on the school grounds. Completely unaware of the reason this happened, I was flabbergasted to find out that I was the target of some of those people who were suspended. They were trying to teach me a lesson that those who snitch will get punished.

Ironically I was very quiet in high school and tried my hardest in everything to mind my own business. However, somehow I was mixed up in this problem. Eventually it got so bad that I had to pull myself out of that high school and transfer to a private, Christian school. The administration did practically nothing despite threats, warnings, and even legal action. I was left to fend for myself in a situation I had nothing to do with and had no control over. Even getting the parents involved with this matter did not resolve the problem. In the end I was forced to abandon the life I had come to know at my public school.

This sort of story saddens me because I know from personal experience that there are a lot of fine schools out there staffed by many outstanding teachers, some of whom are personal friends and relatives. Yet, one wonders how long such schools and teachers will remain in the majority and whether there's a day coming when they become the exception.

Until administrators get serious about making schools safe for their students, until they get serious about culling from their student bodies the sort of thugs and riff-raff that populate too many public school hallways and classrooms, the best and the brightest will continue their exodus. Eventually, all that will be left will be those students too poor to afford an alternative and the punks and goons who prey upon them.

Mr. Wallis Please Call Your Office

The other day we noted Jim Wallis' call for a more civil political discourse this election season. It was a call that we are firmly behind, but I think Jim's plea has fallen on deaf ears among his friends in the Democratic party. Take Florida congressman Al Grayson, for example. Grayson, an incumbent running against a Republican named Dan Webster, has sponsored what is probably the most dishonest, sleaziest political ad since the Democrats tried to connect George Bush to the murder of a black man in Texas back in the 1990s.

Here's Grayson's ad:

To see how dishonest this is compare it to what Webster actually said:

It's clear that Grayson is portraying Webster as having said exactly the opposite of what he did say. This is not the first time Mr. Grayson, one of the left-most members of congress, has used such tactics. He had earlier accused Mr. Webster of being a draft dodger when it turned out that Mr. Webster, who had served four years in an ROTC program was turned down for active duty because of a medical condition.

It would be a real shame if Grayson were reelected to office. I hope Wallis publicly takes him to task for so despicably corrupting the political debate. We'll see.

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.