Why So Few Republican Scientists?

Slate has a good piece by Daniel Sarewitz lamenting the fact that science in America is dominated by members of a single political party. Sarewitz argues that this state of affairs is good neither for science nor for the future of our democracy. Here are a few excerpts:

It is no secret that the ranks of scientists and engineers in the United States include dismal numbers of Hispanics and African-Americans, but few have remarked about another significantly underrepresented group: Republicans.

No, this is not the punch line of a joke. A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation.

Yet, partisan politics aside, why should it matter that there are so few Republican scientists? After all, it's the scientific facts that matter, and facts aren't blue or red.

Well, that's not quite right. Consider the case of climate change, of which beliefs are astonishingly polarized according to party affiliation and ideology. A March 2010 Gallup poll showed that 66 percent of Democrats (and 74 percent of liberals) say the effects of global warming are already occurring, as opposed to 31 percent of Republicans. Does that mean that Democrats are more than twice as likely to accept and understand the scientific truth of the matter? And that Republicans are dominated by scientifically illiterate yahoos and corporate shills willing to sacrifice the planet for short-term economic and political gain?

Or could it be that disagreements over climate change are essentially political—and that science is just carried along for the ride? For 20 years, evidence about global warming has been directly and explicitly linked to a set of policy responses demanding international governance regimes, large-scale social engineering, and the redistribution of These are the sort of things that most Democrats welcome, and most Republicans hate. No wonder the Republicans are suspicious of the science.

Think about it: The results of climate science, delivered by scientists who are overwhelmingly Democratic, are used over a period of decades to advance a political agenda that happens to align precisely with the ideological preferences of Democrats. Coincidence—or causation?

I wonder if one reason that most scientists are Democrats isn't the same as the reason that most academics in general are Democrats. Scientists are often dependent upon government largesse for grants and employment. Thus scientists are going to favor a government that's generous with grant money, i.e. the sort of government promoted by the Democrat party.

Perhaps another reason is that science serves as a kind of substitute religion for at least some of its practitioners. Most Republicans already have a religion and don't feel drawn to the sciences to find one. Those who don't have a religion, however, which is the condition of many on the political left, often seek to find meaning and purpose in their life by making discoveries that will advance our knowledge and understanding of the world and ourselves. Thus they are drawn to the practice of science.

Or it may be that scientists gravitate toward the Democrat party because for three generations now, the media has portrayed Republicans as oafish, benighted and greedy. People who are intelligent and caring don't wish to be associated with a party in which, to their way of thinking, so many ignorant souls find refuge.

Or it may be that liberals simply tend to value scientific and other intellectual pursuits more than conservatives do.

Or it may be that the reason is either none of the above or a combination of all of the above. Whatever it is I think we can agree with Sarewitz that it's not healthy for either science or the country to have such a lop-sided distribution of ideological perspectives among those to whom we often turn for expert opinions on important matters of public policy.

Cultural Shift

Andrew Klavan at NRO makes the case that there is a fresh conservative breeze blowing through the leftist stronghold that is American culture. He stresses in his concluding paragraph why culture matters:

The fight for the culture may not always seem urgent, but it truly is. Arguments are won and lost in hearts and minds long before they’re ever decided at the polls. The arts not only reflect the conscience of the hour, they also shape the conscience of the age.

An earlier paragraph elaborates:

We fret because we fear that ignorant people — especially the young — will take leftist art as truth, essentially giving the Left the power to rewrite history and reality in the American mind. Perhaps the next generation will come to believe that Oliver Stone’s absurd but well-made JFK tells the true story of the president’s assassination or that American operatives and soldiers routinely committed the sorts of atrocities depicted in Rendition or Redacted. As former ambassador Joseph Wilson boasted about the contrafactual heroic impression given of him and his wife, Valerie Plame, in the new film Fair Game: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.”

He goes on to cite examples of how the fare to which Americans are exposed on the screens of their theaters and televisions is shifting rightward along with the mood of the country. Here's part of his brief:

For the last few years, movies promoting the Western ideals of self-reliance, morality, and faith have scored at the box office — see The Incredibles (“If everyone is special, that means no one is”), The Blind Side (“Who would have thought we’d have a black son before we knew a Democrat?”), and Toy Story 3 (a takedown of the nanny state). They have also been more innovative and creative — 300, Gran Torino, No Country for Old Men — than the products of the desiccated and outmoded Left.

Our best novelist (Tom Wolfe) and two greatest English-speaking playwrights (Tom Stoppard and David Mamet) are now all open about their political conservatism. And new top-notch mainstream TV shows (Justified, Blue Bloods) have arrived to offset the lefty Law and Order and Jon Stewart.

I don't know if Klavan is just indulging in wishful thinking or has spotted a genuine trend, but his article may interest those who need a reason to hope that maybe things are indeed getting better.

Our culture reflects our view of both God and man, and the view that is too often promoted in much of our music and films is that there is no God, and man is just an animal with brutish appetites whose satisfaction is the path to happiness and fulfullment.

It's a view of man that glorifies the base, the crude and the vulgar while denying that there's anything particularly noble or sublime about being human. This, of course, is precisely what one would expect from a culture that no longer believes that man is created in the image of God and made a little lower than the angels.

I hope Klavan is right about the wind shift, but I need to see a more consistent turn of the weathervane before I begin to celebrate.

Protein Folding

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of metabolic processes occurring in each of the trillions of cells in your body at this very moment. Each of those processes requires the work of a team of specialized proteins, and each of those proteins must have a particular shape in order to perform its assigned task.


Examples of Protein Shapes

 If a particular protein fails to achieve the proper shape when it is formed the fitness of the cell will suffer and thereby hangs an interesting problem. Given that the universe of possible configurations that a protein could adopt is vastly greater than the number of seconds since the earth formed, how is it that just these highly specific shapes have been discovered for each of the myriad proteins in the cell by natural selection? Biologists tell us that the shape of a protein is a function of the sequence of amino acids that make the protein up, much like beads make up a necklace, but how, out of all the possible sequences that there are, did just the right sequence arise?

Cornelius Hunter offers an interesting discussion on the problem at Darwin's God. He writes:

But [the protein] works just fine only because a very special amino acid sequence was specified. That amino acid sequence is just as astronomically rare as the three dimensional structure that the unfolded protein was able to find. So from where did this amino acid sequence come?

The string of amino acids that make up a protein comes from the cell’s translating machine called the ribosome. The ribosome takes as input a string of nucleotides and produces as output a string of amino acids. The translation is done according to the genetic code.

And from where did the string of nucleotides come? It came from the DNA. A massive protein copying machine slides along an opened section of DNA and copies a gene.

And from where did the DNA gene come? According to evolution it evolved, but it is here that we find another entropy barrier. Just as the folding protein is confronted with an astronomical number of structures, so too the DNA gene is confronted with its own nightmare of choices. But that is where the similarities end.

DNA is a code. It's information. At bottom is the question of where information comes from. Can it be produced by chance and blind forces, or does it require intention and intelligence? We have never experienced information such as a code being produced apart from a mind, and yet despite the complete lack of empirical warrant the naturalist takes an enormous leap of faith and chooses to believe, without any evidence, that not only are such wonders possible but that they actually happened in the origin of living things.

Then the naturalist, having committed himself to the belief that unthinking nature is capable of such miracles, the equivalent of believing that a computer program could be produced by a random symbol generator, criticizes those who are skeptical as being superstitious and unscientific for thinking that the existence of information is evidence of the existence of an intelligent mind. Pretty funny, I think.

Mixed Feelings on the DREAM Act

The DREAM act failed to achieve cloture in a bipartisan vote (55-41) in Congress over the weekend, which means it's dead for this session and probably for the foreseeable future. It would have granted citizenship to children who were brought to this country by their parents who were themselves illegal aliens if those children completed high school and/or served in the military.

Guests on some of the Sunday talk shows were saying what a terrible thing it is to deny citizenship to men and women who serve in the military, and other supporters of the act have expressed similar sentiments. Here are some examples from the linked article:

“A minority of senators prevented the Senate from doing what most Americans understand is best for the country,” Obama said. “There was simply no reason not to pass this important legislation.”

“This is a dark day in America,” said Jorje-Mario Cabrera, a spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. “The Senate has … thrown under the bus the lives and hard work of thousands and thousands of students who love this country like their own home, and, in fact, they have no other home.”

“They stand in the classrooms and pledge allegiance to our flag,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the bill’s chief sponsor. “This is the only country they have ever known. All they’re asking for is a chance to serve this nation.”

“This country has a history of opening its arms,” said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. “Today, it’s arms were closed, but we’re going to get there.”

Be all this as it may, the failure to give these children a path to citizenship lies squarely on the shoulders of those, both Democrats and Republicans, who have refused to take the common sense measures necessary to solve the problem of illegal immigration and to insure that granting citizenship to those who complete high school or serve in the military isn't simply a first step toward granting citizenship to tens of millions of other aliens who entered this country illegally.

If people really want to see the DREAM act passed in some future congress all they need do to win over their opponents is the following:

• Do what it takes to secure the border. Illegal immigration must be slowed to a trickle before any reform makes sense. Otherwise, we're laying the carpet in the house before we've put the roof on.
• Insure that no one who came here illegally as an adult will be granted citizenship as long as they remain in this country. To grant them citizenship is to reward illegal entry and to guarantee more of it.
• Alter the current interpretation of the 13th amendment. The amendment has been interpreted to confer citizenship on any children born here to parents who arrived illegally. Conservative scholars argue that this is a misreading of the amendment and it should be clarified or changed.

There has been little appetite in Congress for any of these changes, mostly because Democrats see the illegal alien population as a vast sea of potential Democrat voters and Republicans see them as a vast sea of cheap labor. Both see them as the solution to funding the social security shortfall.

I'm quite sure though, that if congress and the president were able to pass legislation that allayed the three concerns mentioned above there would be a lot more support for legislation like the DREAM act among the general public and among those Senators who currently oppose it.

That Congress (and the administration) refuses to do this suggests that granting a path to citizenship for the children of illegals is not really the goal but rather a sly first step toward granting amnesty to all illegal aliens. Let's give these children, who are here through no choice of their own, who have never really known any other home, a chance to become citizens, but only after we've made sure that they're the only ones who'll be awarded that prize.

Expelled for Being "Potentially Evangelical"

Martin Gaskell is by all accounts one of the better scientists on the faculty of the University of Kentucky. Unfortunately for Professor Gaskell he's a bit of an iconoclast and heretic. You may have thought that universities nurtured such qualities in their faculty and students, but you would be wrong. That's only true when the iconoclasm is directed at things like Christianity or conservative politics. Rejecting these, especially with a contemptuous air, is the sort of thing that's much admired on college campuses, and those who indulge in it are often feted as courageous and bold heroes of academic freedom.

Professor Gaskell, to be sure, is skeptical of certain religious beliefs, but the religion about which he expresses his doubts is Darwinian naturalism, and that's simply an unacceptable breach of intellectual propriety and orthodoxy at UK as elsewhere.

What was the precise nature of his offense? Uncommon Descent provides some details:

No one denies that astronomer Martin Gaskell was the leading candidate for the founding director of a new observatory at the University of Kentucky in 2007 — until his writings on evolution came to light.

Gaskell had given lectures to campus religious groups around the country in which he said that while he has no problem reconciling the Bible with the theory of evolution, he believes the theory has major flaws. And he recommended students read theory critics in the intelligent-design movement.

That stance alarmed UK science professors and, the university acknowledges, played a role in the job going to another candidate.

Now a federal judge says Gaskell has a right to a jury trial over his allegation that he lost the job because he is a Christian and “potentially evangelical.”

“The record contains substantial evidence that Gaskell was a leading candidate for the position until the issue of his religion or his scientific position became an issue,” U.S. Senior District Judge Karl S. Forester of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote late last month in rejecting the university’s motion for summary judgment, which would have dismissed the case.

Forester has set a trial date of Feb. 8 on Gaskell’s claims the university violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on job bias on the basis of religion.

UK, in a legal brief, acknowledged that concerns over Gaskell’s views on evolution played a role in the decision to chose another candidate. But it argued that this was a valid scientific concern, and that there were other factors, including a poor review from a previous supervisor and UK faculty views that he was a poor listener.

In its brief, UK said professors worried about Gaskell’s “casual blending of religion and science” and feared the then-planned MacAdam Student Observatory’s “true mission … would be thwarted by controversy that has nothing to do with astronomy.”

Gaskell’s lawsuit, however, argues UK officials repeatedly referred to his religion in their discussions and e-mails. And he argues that UK mistook him for a creationist — someone who believes the Bible disproves the theory of evolution.

Well, Professor Gaskell should be thankful he still has a teaching job, although that, too, may be in jeopardy for all we know. But what did he say that caused the UK high priests to rent their garments and remove him from consideration for the directorship at the UK observatory? At this point, no one knows for sure, but Joseph Knippenberg provides some quotes from Gaskell's lecture notes on a talk he gives on "Modern Astronomy, the Bible, and Creation".

If you're disturbed by reading heretical opinions then I suggest you skip these paragraphs. They're very troubling, especially if one is a Darwinian fundamentalist:

“God made everything pretty much as it is now in six 24-hour days about 6000 years ago” – the so-called “Creationist” position (a bad name! – I, and many writers on the subject prefer the name “Young-Earth Creationist” for this position). This is the position of the Creation Research Society (CRS), the San Diego based Institute for Creation Research (ICR), and a number of other “Creation Science” organizations. I have a lot of respect for people who hold this view because they are strongly committed to the Bible, but I don’t believe it is the interpretation the Bible requires of itself, and it certainly clashes head-on with science.

“The Answers are not in yet”. This is part of my own viewpoint. I believe that God has not yet revealed everything to us in the Bible (see Deuteronomy 29:29 and I Corinthians 13:9-10,12), and I know that we don’t know all the answers in science yet.

The main controversy has been between people at the two extremes (young earth creationists and humanistic evolutionists). “Creationists” attack the science of “evolutionists”. I believe that this sort of attack is very bad both scientifically and theologically. The “scientific” explanations offered by “creationists” are mostly very poor science and I believe this sort of thing actually hinders some (many?) scientists becoming Christians. It is true that there are significant scientific problems in evolutionary theory (a good thing or else many biologists and geologists would be out of a job) and that these problems are bigger than is usually made out in introductory geology/biology courses, but the real problem with humanistic evolution is in the unwarranted atheistic assumptions and extrapolations.

It is the latter that “creationists” should really be attacking (many books do, in fact, attack these unwarranted assumptions and extrapolations). While discussing controversies and interpretations of Genesis I should mention something that has been much debated in recent years but is not an interpretation of Genesis: what is called “Intelligent Design”. This movement, which is often erroneously confused with young-earth creationism, is just exploring the question of what evidence there is in the universe for design by an intelligence. This is really a general, non-religious question (although with obvious religious implications), and there is no opinion on the interpretation of Genesis.

Pretty raw stuff. I mean, the man is obviously sympathetic to intelligent design, and worse, Christianity, and he seems to be trying to give an objective, unbiased factual explanation, of all things, of the controversy between "creationists" and Darwinian naturalists over origins. This objectivity apparently poses such a threat to UK's standards of academic decency that the university simply cannot allow it to be tolerated. To be sure, Professor Gaskell affirms the scientific consensus on matters of origins and evolution. That's not the problem. The problem is that he manifestly rejects the naturalistic religion that many scientists hold to be the one true faith.

I don't know if there's anything to it, but there's a rumor floating about that the higher-ups at UK have summoned the men in this video to come to Kentucky to deal with people like Professor Gaskell.

Mexico Calls in Their Marines

Mexico has turned up the heat on its drug cartels in the last year. It's now using special ops Marines, aided by American intelligence, in the war against the cartels and they're proving to be lethally effective. Strategy Page has an interesting report on this escalation:

Mexico-U.S. cooperation in running counter-drug operations has increased over the last 18 months. The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been providing intelligence to Mexican police and other security forces, including the Mexican Navy's elite marine commandos. The Mexican marines have carried out several very high profile (and successful raids), beginning in 2009. The strikes often target drug cartel leaders and senior drug cartel enforcers (hit men).

Critics are arguing that the DEA is going around Mexican police because the U.S. is concerned about corruption in the police forces. That is very true, but the conspiracy theorists seem to ignore the fact that just about every other day the Mexican government points out that it is concerned about police corruption. Unreliable or corrupt police forces is one reason it began using military forces – the other reason being the drug cartels have more firepower than local and state cops.

Several of the more spectacular Mexican marine operations in northwestern Mexico are special operations raids, both strike raids and snatch (arrest) raids. The marines treat the cartelistas as an insurgent force and the cartel leaders as insurgent commanders.

There's more on this at the link.

The drug cartels are waging a low-level civil war in Mexico and elsewhere in Central and South America. Hopefully, the combination of highly trained combat forces and American intelligence-gathering capabilities will make their business more risky and less profitable than it has been up till now.

The Doxastic Minimum

There's an interesting discussion at Uncommon Descent on the question of what exactly is the minimum one can believe and be a Christian. The specific trigger for that question was the question whether one could be a Darwinist and still be a Christian. Denise O'Leary says no, Barry Arrington, citing Paul (Romans 10: 9,10) as his authority, argues that technically they can. O'Leary's response to Arrington is here. Perhaps they're both right. If, as Arrington points out, a Darwinist confesses belief in Jesus as Lord and also believes that He rose from the dead, then he's a Christian. Nevertheless, as O'Leary argues, it's difficult in practice to find people who are serious Darwinists who believe in a God who works the kind of miracles the Incarnation and the Resurrection require.

Darwinism is the belief that natural processes are completely responsible for the appearance and development of living things. No intelligent agent was involved.* Thus, Darwinists almost always believe that God has no role in evolution or the creation, and that if He exists at all he's somewhat like Aristotle's Prime Mover. Moreover, as O'Leary points out, Darwinism entails that Christianity is itself the product of blind, impersonal, purposeless forces acting in human societies and resulting in all the different belief systems we see in the world. The idea that the Christian faith is really the product of purposeful divine intervention is antithetical to a Darwinian worldview which is uncompromisingly naturalistic.

Arrington is saying that it's possible for a Darwinst to believe that God has acted in the world whereas O'Leary maintains that in practice they can do so only by setting aside their naturalism. Arrington is right in establishing Romans 10 as the doxastic minimum. O'Leary is right in pointing out that a Darwinist is logically prohibited from embracing that minimum.

*Thus, views like theistic evolution, or God-directed evolution are not Darwinian in the strict sense.

ATP Synthase

Every high school biology student learns that the molecule that provides the energy for the metabolic requirements of every cell in living things is ATP. ATP is synthesized in the cell from a precursor called ADP. This process is catalyzed by an enzyme named ATP Synthase which is a tiny molecular motor of astonishing design. Here's a video that gives an idea of just how remarkable this protein motor is:

The narrator states that these structures are evolutionary impossibilities, but I don't know why he says that. All that had to happen was lots of mutations acting on lots of genes which control lots of proteins, a pinch of pixie dust, a wave of a magic wand, and a few miracles from mother nature, and anyone can see that motors such as these would be almost inevitable, even within the relatively brief window of time between the point when genetic material learned to replicate and the appearance of the first cells.

If you're skeptical it's because you lack faith in the power of blind, impersonal forces to do miracles. You need to try harder to convince yourself that engineering marvels don't necessarily require intelligent engineers. After all, if you put all the individual molecules that comprise a computer in a box and set it out in the wind and sun, after enough time there could be a fully functioning pc in the box. Just ask any Darwinian.

Thanks to Uncommon Descent for the tip.

Merry Reasonmas

Over at Telic Thoughts Bradford calls our attention to the latest doings among our atheist friends. It turns out that the American Atheists association has erected a billboard on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel which says, "You Know It's a Myth. This Season, Celebrate Reason." The billboard cost them $20,000 which would have bought Christmas dinners for a lot of poor children in New Jersey, but never mind that.

Reading about the sign has actually put me in the spirit of celebrating Reason and all the wonderful blessings that pure Reason, unencumbered by any mystical, superstitious theistic nonsense, has bestowed upon us. It has, for example, given us state atheism which, in its twentieth century communist incarnation, was responsible for the murders of over 100 million people. The communists believed that they were following the dictates of Reason as they slaughtered their millions, and indeed, they were.

If man is nothing more than a machine, to which conclusion Reason, without the constraint of religious insight, leads us, then he has no special dignity (See Harvard neuroscientist Steven Pinker on the stupidity of thinking we have dignity), no worth, no meaning, none of that anthropocentric silliness Christianity has foisted upon us, so why not simply eliminate him if his existence proves inconvenient?

Consider a few other conclusions arrived at by some of Reason's modern herald angels:

‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ - biologist Francis Crick in The Astonishing Hypothesis

If you and I are just a pack of neurons neither of us is ultimately distinguishable from the other and therefore no individual is intrinsically valuable. We're like so many cattle to be milked, herded, bred, or slaughtered as those in power see fit. Here are a couple more meditations for the Reason holiday:

[T]he worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. - Physicist Steven Weinberg

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. - biologist Richard Dawkins

Don't these thoughts, the deliverances of unadulterated Reason, just warm your heart this Reasonmas season? If only there was a Reason Eve the devout would surely compose a vast body of beautiful music and carols to celebrate the event, and atheists, swept up in the ineffable spirit of the day, would open wide the doors of their hearts, as well as their purses, to their fellows during this magical time. Or maybe not.

Some have gotten swept along by the logic of celebrating reason and have just gone, well, to extremes. For example, consider this perfectly sensible question:

If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then — then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing.

What an impeccably rational piece of thinking. It was written by Jeffrey Dahmer. And then there's this:

What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.

Indeed, it is. That provocative question was posed by uber atheist and man of Reason Richard Dawkins, and he's right. If there is no God who's to say Hitler was wrong? So, this year let's dispense with all that Christian claptrap about God becoming man and saving us from our sins. Let's just worship Reason's marvelous ability to produce such moral profundities as we've listed above. Let's also pray to the goddess Reason that no one actually takes the worship of her glorious self too seriously and follows the logic of it too far.

Let's celebrate Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men this Reasonmas. At least those men who are the same ethnicity, race, nationality, and sexual orientation as we are. All others, of course, are the losers in the grand evolutionary struggle for survival, but let's not think about that.

The Greater Evil

In Sudan a woman suspected of prostitution is treated much differently than she would be in a civilized society not run by brutes. The punishment the woman in this video is subjected to is horrible enough, but to laugh at her agony, as one of her tormenters does, is simple savagery. Which is worse, we might ask, to commit prostitution or to sadistically whip a woman fifty three times for the offense? Which is more evil, prostitution or a law that demands such barbaric sentences?

Be advised that this is not easy to watch:

CNN has the details.

It tells us something about the ideological quirkiness of the left, I suppose, that here and abroad leftists were horrified and outraged by revelations that the United States had waterboarded three murderous terrorists in hopes of saving thousands of innocent lives, among whom, no doubt, were many women. Meanwhile, cruel atrocities such as we see on this video are perpetrated daily in cities and villages throughout North Africa and the Middle East, wherever Sharia law is strictly enforced, and the world's leftists just turn their heads and yawn.

When the U.S., in order to prevent mass murder, uses an interrogation technique which causes no real pain nor permanent harm, it is roundly condemned. It's told that it is just creating more terrorists, and that it is committing crimes against humanity. But when genuine torture is used in an Islamic, African country, not to save lives, but as punishment for a non-violent offense, one hears scarcely more than a quiet tsk, tsk from the left.

Why is that? Is it that, with the exception of a few intrepid voices like those of Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, the left is afraid to criticize the behavior of Muslims? Or is it black Africans whose behavior they can't bring themselves to condemn? Or is it both?

Anyway, don't hold your breath waiting for this video to get the sort of play on the world's evening news programs that Abu Ghraib received.

Life's Meaning and the Death of God

Sean Kelley is the chair of the Harvard philosophy department, and he's written an essay on, as far as I can tell, the meaning of life now that God is dead. Or something like that. I'm not sure because the piece isn't entirely clear, which may, of course, say more about my comprehension skills than Kelley's writing ability.

At any rate, Kelley seems to be saying that even in the absence of God life can still be pretty meaningful:

The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings. They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events. But they are nothing like the kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of Christianity had hoped.

Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way, the commitments that animate the meanings in one person’s life ─ to family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community ─ become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else with radically different commitments might nevertheless be living in a way that deserves one’s admiration.

The death of God therefore, ... leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings.

Well, maybe, but I doubt it. After all, just because someone considers their life meaningful doesn't make it so. The question I'd like to see Professor Kelley address is this: If death is the end of our existence, if the fate of every living being is annihilation, why and how does anything we do really matter?

Almost everything we do in our day to day lives we do in order to stay alive, and we strive to stay alive so that we can perform those day to day tasks. We're inescapably caught in a cycle of meaninglessness. Even the pleasures that some are able to enjoy before they die are like a prisoner's last steak before he's executed. None of what we do matters unless it lasts forever, but unless there's a God nothing lasts forever. A couple of generations from now 99% of the people who have ever lived, along with everything they did in their lives, will be utterly forgotten. How can any of it have meaning? What does it matter that you went to college, worked at a job, had a family, loved your dog, collected stamps, baked cookies, suffered an illness, and ultimately died? What difference does any of it make once we're gone and forgotten?

At the blog The Philosopher's Magazine there's an essay on this topic titled Meaning Machines. The commenters weigh in with their views on what the purpose of an individual life is, and from these folks we learn that it's in fact nothing more than reproducing and "creating protein".

That's where atheism leads us. Man can't live without meaning, but according to the atheist there just isn't any meaning to be found. There are only activities that we enjoy while we wait around to die - like condemned men playing checkers to pass the time until they're marched to the gallows. Atheists themselves can't live with this. Their reason tells them there's no meaning to their life, but, unable to bear the existential burden of nihilism and wishing to avoid despair, they abandon reason and live irrationally as if there's some point to it all.

Writers like Kelley are simply doing philosophical cosmetology. They're trying to cover and soften the ugly truth by pretending that it's not really there. Perhaps the following quotes will give a sense of the despair felt by some of those who are willing to face the consequences of the "death of God" honestly:

• Life is a short day’s journey from nothingness to nothingness. – Ernst Hemmingway
• All we are is dust in the wind. – Kansas
• The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless. - Woody Allen (from Hannah and Her Sisters)
• God is empty and so am I – Smashing Pumpkins (Zero)
• In all of our searching the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. – Carl Sagan (Contact)
• There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. – Albert Camus (Myth of Sisyphus)
• The only plausible answer to the problem of the meaning of life is to live, to be alive and to leave more life. – Theodosius Dobzhansky
• Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death…There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will… - Cornell biolgist Will Provine
• The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. - Richard Dawkins
• Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal. - Jean Paul Sartre
• Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. - Albert Camus
• Life is an unpleasant interruption of nothingness. – Clarence Darrow
• Neither the existence of the individual nor that of humanity has any purpose. – Bernard Rensch
• Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is seen no more. It is a tale told by an idiot; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. – William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
• If death ends all, if I have neither to hope for good nor to fear evil, I must ask myself what am I here for….Now the answer is plain, but so unpalatable that most will not face it. There is no meaning for life, and [thus] life has no meaning.” Somerset Maugham (The Summing Up)
• I was thinking…that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing. Jean Paul Sartre (Nausea)

The worldview of the atheist is pretty bleak. Modern man is dying of spiritual inanition, and the atheist offers him a piece of dry leather to chew on. Indeed, that's all he can offer him. It's all he has.

Extending Unemployment Compensation

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air explains that the tax rate deal between the GOP and President Obama which includes extending unemployment compensation for 13 months does not mean that unemployed persons who now get federal unemployment for 99 weeks will receive it for another 13 months:

There seems to be some continuing confusion over exactly what form the unemployment extension takes in the Obama-GOP tax deal. On every occasion where I have discussed this, people have understood it to mean that unemployment benefits are being extended past the 99-week limit, allowing people to collect another 13 months of unemployment checks. That’s not actually the case.

The extension in this case applies to the entire program, not individual benefits.

See the link for his explanation of what exactly the extension does. It's very helpful.

Middle Class Values

How might we distinguish between those in America who do well and those who don't? Rich Lowery at NRO suggests that two major factors are education and marriage:

The unemployment rate for people with a college degree or higher is 5 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1990s again. But college graduates are only 30 percent of the country. For the rest of the population, the jobs picture is grimmer. For people without a high-school degree, the unemployment rate is more than 15 percent. If that were the rate for everyone, it’d be the 1930s again.

But unemployment is only part of the difference between the well-educated and the moderately educated.

University of Virginia scholar Brad Wilcox details how the college-educated have embraced traditional mores and habits — especially the formation of stable families — while they erode among everyone else.

Our elites, broadly defined as the top third of our society, aren’t nearly as decadent as advertised. According to Wilcox’s data, the highly educated (with a college diploma or higher) are less likely to divorce, less likely to have children out of wedlock, and less likely to commit adultery than the moderately educated (high-school degree or some college) and the least-educated (no high-school diploma).

The moderately educated might be called the lower-middle class or upper-working class. Wilcox refers to them as the “solid middle”: “They are not upscale, but they are not poor. They don’t occupy any of the margins, yet they are often overlooked, even though they make up the largest share of the American middle class.” He documents an equally disturbing separation between the top and the rest, and a convergence between the middle and the bottom.

In the 1970s, 73 percent of both the highly and moderately educated were in intact first marriages. That figure plummeted across the board, yet the moderately educated (45 percent in intact first marriages) are now closer to the least-educated (39 percent) than to the highly educated (56 percent).

The number for out-of-wedlock births is starker. From 1982 until today, the percentage of non-marital births among the moderately educated exploded from 13 percent to 44 percent. That figure is close to the least-educated (54 percent) and a vast distance from the highly educated (only 6 percent). Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation compares the dynamic to a carpet unraveling from the bottom, as illegitimacy first took hold among the poor and now works up the income scale.

Lowery goes on to explain why this spells disaster for the middle class, but the reasons aren't difficult to see. As the middle class adopts the social values of the underclass it gravitates toward the underclass leaving us with a socioeconomic hourglass society, a bulge at the upper and lower ends with little in between. Moreover, the difference between the two classes becomes enormous with one valuing marriage, education and work and the other indifferent to them.

As long as single parenthood and lack of education were confined to the very poor, it was a tragedy, but it wasn't a calamity for the rest of society. If these dysfunctions continue to spread through the middle class, however, it will mean the end of the American dream. It's not hard to imagine that we'll eventually come to look, in relative socio-economic terms, like the France of 1788.

Xmas and Christmas

Some people get a little miffed during the Advent season over the use of Xmas rather than Christmas. There's no need to, as R.C. Sproul explains:

People seem to express chagrin about seeing Christ’s name dropped and replaced by this symbol for an unknown quantity X. Every year you see the signs and the bumper stickers saying, “Put Christ back into Christmas” as a response to this substitution of the letter X for the name of Christ.

First of all, you have to understand that it is not the letter X that is put into Christmas. We see the English letter X there, but actually what it involves is the first letter of the Greek name for Christ. Christos is the New Testament Greek for Christ. The first letter of the Greek word Christos is transliterated into our alphabet as an X. That X has come through church history to be a shorthand symbol for the name of Christ.

The idea of X as an abbreviation for the name of Christ came into use in our culture with no intent to show any disrespect for Jesus. The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom. There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

This is interesting, but I'm sure nevertheless that a lot of people use Xmas to avoid saying Christmas and who have no idea what the etymology of the word is.

War of Attrition

Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail reports on what's happening in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. To the extent that Afghanistan makes the news the reports are usually about whether and when we're going to pull out and how bad things are going there. Thus it's good to get the insight of people like Roggio who follow the day to day grind of the conflict. Here's his summary:

Coalition and Afghan special operations teams have hit hard at the Taliban and allied groups' leadership and rank and file during more than 7,000 raids throughout Afghanistan over the past six months.

Approximately 7,100 special operations counterterrorism missions have been conducted between May 30 and Dec. 2 of this year, the International Security Assistance Force told The Long War Journal. More than 600 insurgent leaders were killed or captured. In addition, more than 2,000 enemy fighters have been killed, and over 4,100 fighters have been captured.

The enemy commanders and fighters killed or captured are from various jihadist groups battling Coalition and Afghan forces, including the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, Hizb-i-Islami, al Qaeda, and the Islamic Jihad Group.

The numbers of insurgents killed or captured include only those targeted in special operations raids, ISAF stated. These numbers do not include Taliban and allied fighters killed or captured during conventional counterinsurgency operations, or during massed Taliban assaults on Coalition and Afghan bases.

Within the same time frame, special operations troops also completed more than 2,500 humanitarian operations, including the provision of medical and educational assistance.

This is not to say that things there are rosy, but it does look as if we have the upper hand and that being an insurgent, particularly one eager to climb the leadership ladder, is a very dicey career choice.

Creation Myth for Atheists

Joe Carter at First Things does materialists a great favor by bestowing upon them their very own creation myth. Here's how it starts:

In the beginning was Nothing, and Nothing created Everything. When Nothing decided to create Everything, she filled a tiny dot with Time, Chance, and Everything and had it expand. The expansion spread Everything into Everywhere carrying Time and Chance with it to keep it company. The three stretched out together leaving bits of themselves wherever they went. One of those places was the planet Earth.

For no particular Reason—for Reason is rarely particular—Time and Chance took a liking to this little, wet, blue rock and decided to stick around to see what adventures they might have. While the pair found the Earth to be intriguing and pretty, they also found it a bit too quiet, too static. They fixed upon an idea to change Everything (just a little) by creating a special Something. Time and Chance roamed the planet, splashing through the oceans and sloshing through the mud, in search of materials. But though they looked Everywhere, there was a missing ingredient that they needed in order to make a Something that could create more of the same Somethings.

They called to their friend Everything to help. Since Everything had been Everywhere she would no doubt be able to find the missing ingredient. And indeed she did. Hidden away in a small alcove called Somewhere, Everything found what Time and Chance had needed all along: Information. Everything put Information on a piece of ice and rock that happened to be passing by the former planet Pluto and sent it back to her friends on Earth.

I assume this is original with Carter, but at any rate it's very clever, and the rest of it can be read at the link. As one commenter wrote: "Somewhere there's an atheist saying, 'Hey, that could be true.' "

Libertarianism

In response to the two part post titled An Ideological Primer, I recently received a very well written clarification of the Libertarian position on social issues by a reader named Micah. It's very helpful, and I want to share it with the rest of our readership. Micah writes:

Mr. Cleary has already established where the Libertarian lies in the left/right economic spectrum. Now it is time to examine social issues. But when it comes to social issues, the Libertarian position is much harder to fit into a linear spectrum. This article explains how the Left, the Right, and the Libertarian view various social issues at the state and federal levels.

For argument's and simplicity's sake, I will deal herein with the social issues brought forth in the Ideological Primer, Part II. As a quick review, the Left/Liberals favor gay marriage, abortion, open borders, and gun control, while opposing capital punishment and public religion. The Right/Conservatives take positions opposite those of the Left/Liberals. Both the Left and the Right are so firmly convinced in the absolute correctness of their positions, that they have taken the federal government by storm in order to impose their views on the populace as a whole. But what about the Libertarian?

As an individual, a Libertarian may be either on the Left, the Right, or somewhere between the two extremes when it comes to social issues. The Libertarian is not characterized as much by their social stances as they are by the proper political sphere within which those stances are to be expressed. Since the United States Constitution is the “supreme Law of the Land,” we must turn to this document and its Amendments to ascertain the correct political sphere within which social issues are to be addressed. Recall, also, that the 10th Amendment clarifies and confirms the original understanding of the Constitution. Any power not specifically granted to the federal government has been reserved to the states and the people.

With this Constitutional foundation in place, it is time to search for the mention of social issues in the Constitution. Neither marriage nor abortion has been explicitly dealt with in the Constitution. These two issues, then, are rightfully delegated to the people and the states. This is the Libertarian position. Of course, the Libertarian puts these issues rather more with the people and less with the States. Notice that the Libertarian does not grant federal government influence over or interference in issues it has not been specifically tasked to be involved with.

Naturalization is the process by which citizenship is granted/acquired by a non-citizen of a nation-state. Congress is specifically delegated the power to establish a “uniform Rule of Naturalization,” meaning there is one standard for becoming a naturalized United States citizen. This is as close as the Constitution comes to mentioning border control, or lack thereof. Libertarians, while acknowledging the Constitutional need for a uniform standard, desire a reasonable and fair standard to be applied across the board with a minimal government bureaucracy supporting it.

Gun control is clear cut. The Second Amendment plainly states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Being that the Constitution and its Amendments are federal documents, this amendment plainly prohibits federal action when it comes to guns and their ownership. This, too, is an issue that is meant to be dealt with by individuals, local government, or by state government.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.” This is the extent to which the Constitution deals with capital punishment, via the Fifth Amendment. It only specifies the circumstances and procedure through which capital charges can be brought against a person. While grand juries operate without many of the constraints of the judicial system, they are still bound by the Constitution.

The matter of capital punishment is somewhat complicated by the prohibition of inflicting “cruel and unusual punishments” in the Tenth Amendment. Properly interpreted, the federal government is entitled to determine whether a punishment for a crime, including capital crime, is cruel and/or unusual. Take note that while the Constitution acknowledges the acceptability of capital punishment, it does not decree that such a punishment ever need be used, only that it may be used. As viewed by the Libertarian, capital punishment is an issue that government at all levels is able to weigh-in upon, provided each government does not overstep the bounds set forth in its founding documents.

Religion tends to be a particularly tender point in the land of politics. And yet, Congress has been prohibited from establishing a national religion and from interfering with an individual's free expression of their religious beliefs. Separation of religion and state was intended to prevent a religion from running the state and the state from running a religion. Both these ideas are equally valid, though their application in recent history has been toward the end of banning all religious activity, and removing all religious references, from public places and spaces. The Libertarian agrees with the individual freedoms granted by the lack of a national religion and the separation between religion and the state, provided such distinctions are not perverted by government.

The Left and the Right, while ideologically isolated from each other on social issues, nevertheless agree in practice that the federal government is the proper sphere for the dictation and enforcement of social norms, practices, and issues. Libertarians, on a personal level, may be on the Left, Right, or somewhere in between when it comes to social issues. In politics, the Libertarian believes that the Constitution should be followed, and that unless specifically mentioned otherwise, social issues were and are intended to be left up to the people and the states. This is in following with the Libertarian core belief of individual liberty, the free exercise thereof, and the avoidance of interfering with the individual liberties of others.

Kids' Books?

MSNBC has an acute case of PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome). You can't watch a single program on that network without at some point being subjected to a segment in which the whole point is to ridicule Sarah Palin. It reminds me of the two minutes hate in Orwell's 1984 where all party members in Oceania stop their work for two minutes while their country's enemies are shown on a television screen. For two minutes the party members work themselves into a frenzy, shouting their hate and loathing for the despised enemies on the screen. Then it's all over and they go back to work.

I don't know what the reason for the hatred of Palin is. She hasn't yet declared herself a candidate for President, but the left certainly seems to be as afraid of her as the Oceania apparatchiks were afraid of Emanuel Goldstein in 1984.

A humorous example of this occured on a recent edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, who never passes up an opportunity to laugh at Palin's intellect but who should himself be much more humble in such matters. His guest, one Richard Wolffe, scoffs at Palin's claim to derive inspiration from C.S. Lewis. The relevant portion starts at the two minute mark:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

All Wolffe knows about C.S. Lewis is that he's the "author of a series of kid's books"? He's never heard of Abolition of Man, On Miracles, The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, Pilgrim's Regress, The Great Divorce, Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed, The Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, the space trilogy, the Oxford debates, and so much more? And this uninformed man is chuckling at Sarah Palin for finding inspiration in Lewis? Does he not realize that millions of people have found inspiration in Lewis?

It gets worse as Matthews, who obviously doesn't understand how a guide works on a hunting trip, derides Palin for having people around her as she shoots a caribou (it wasn't a moose as Aaron Sorkin, who apparently can't tell the difference, mistakenly claims as he calls Palin a "witless bully").

These people would like everyone to think they're endowed with wisdom, erudition, and sophistication superior to that of the rest of us, but in their adolescent attempts to make Palin look foolish they instead make themselves look like a clique of unpopular middle school girls sneering at the attractive new girl of whom they're profoundly jealous.

Atta Boy

Here's some news to dampen your yuletide spirit. Investors Business Daily had conducted a poll of physicians last year that showed that almost half of them would leave the profession if Obamacare were enacted. Now another poll has come up with similar results. According to the more recent survey 40% of physicians are planning to leave the profession because of concerns over Obamacare. IBD comments:

When we said nearly half of U.S. doctors might close their practices or retire early rather than live under the Democrats' health overhaul, we were heavily criticized. The critics, though, were wrong.

Four in nine doctors responding to an IBD/TIPP poll sent out in August 2009 said they "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passed what has become known as ObamaCare. That means as many as 360,000 physicians have plans to be doing something other than treating the growing number of patients in this country.

The doctors also told us — 67% to 22%, with 11% not responding — that they expected fewer students to apply for medical school in the future if the plan became law.

Given these views, it's no surprise that 71% were doubtful that the government would be able to cover the 47 million uninsured Americans with better care at lower costs, which ObamaCare supporters have promised.

Other findings from our poll of 1,376 doctors included: six in 10 agreeing that the Democrats' plan would strip drug companies of the incentives they need to make lifesaving pharmaceuticals, and 65% believing that a government overhaul would lead to lower-quality care for seniors.

The critics said our poll was not credible, was "shabby" and "garbage." They accused IBD of being partisan, pursuing an agenda, trying to sway gullible readers with shameless journalism.

Now a Merritt Hawkins survey of 2,379 doctors for the Physicians Foundation completed in August has vindicated our poll. It found that 40% of doctors said they would "retire, seek a nonclinical job in health care, or seek a job or business unrelated to health care" over the next three years as the overhaul is phased in.

Of those who said they planned to retire, 28% are 55 or younger and nearly half (49%) are 60 or younger.

There's a lot more on this at the link. As you read you might want to send a big mental "atta boy" to Barack, Harry, Nancy and the gang. They're doing a heck of a job. It can't be easy to destroy the best health care system in the world with a single piece of legislation, but they seem to have managed it unless the Republicans pull us back from the brink of disaster by repealing it next year.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

Po-Mo Narcissists

Jason forwards an article from the WSJ titled Why Narcissism Defines Our Time. The piece is by a professor at USC named Elizabeth Currid-Halkett who argues that it was a mistake to drop narcissism from the list of personality disorders. Narcissism, she observes, is rampant in our culture:

Narcissism is one of the most obvious examples of a personality disorder. We see it everywhere in our culture. Narcissism can explain part of the motivation for participating in reality TV show antics, and Hollywood has always seemed a refuge for beautiful people who need to be the center of attention. We know that not much will change in Hollywood with this announcement. But will it change any other parts of our culture?

Most troubling about not including NPD as a personality disorder is that there is evidence of narcissism in all of our social lives. It’s alarming that in an age when narcissism is so evident, and with new ways for narcissists to get attention so apparent, that it would not be considered a personality disorder. The new world of democratic celebrities—on Facebook, reality TV and Twitter—where there are fewer traditional constraints on runaway narcissism, demonstrates the need to take this personality disorder seriously.

It’s almost tautological to say that celebrity favors narcissistic personalities. Michael Jackson is a tragic example: consumed with a desire to be loved, to stay young and to remain the “King of Pop,” he built a fantasy childhood kingdom at his house and subjected himself to disfiguring plastic surgery. He was particularly vulnerable and unsupported, but his quest for attention isn’t a million miles from Britney shaving her hair off or 80s-era Madonna and her endless and often sacrilegious desire to shock.

However, reality TV and the rise of the 24/7 news cycle (begetting the 24/7 gossip cycle) has enabled a very visual and real-time way to observe the dangers of narcissism. Like Jackson, Heidi Montag, former reality star from The Hills, is so pathologically obsessed with her physical appearance that she underwent plastic surgery multiple times while still in her early 20s. She and her husband, Spencer Pratt, appear to devote many of their waking hours to drumming up publicity for themselves. This past summer, Montag filed for divorce only to reconcile this November, admitting it was a stunt to make money. Pratt remarked in an interview with a tabloid, “Divorcing was the only way to keep Heidi’s career going.”

There's more at the link. It's a pretty good piece, but I had two thoughts as I read Currid-Halkett's essay, one important, I think, the other not so much.

The first was that I was a little disappointed, but not surprised, that the author didn't mention that narcissism is at bottom a moral problem, not just a kind of illness. Our infatuation with ourselves stems from an exaggerated view of our own self-importance and a failure to see others as equally important in the eyes of God. Unfortunately, one of the things our post-modern culture has deprived us of is the ability to make moral judgments. Thus, we'll say that things we think harmful are "disorders", they need "treatment", perhaps, but who's to say that they're actually wrong in a moral sense? That sounds so old-fashioned and judgmental.

Second, I wondered if the author's motivation for using a hyphenated name might not be just a little narcissistic itself.