The Current Counter-Reformation

Those who have been following the intelligent design/ Darwinian evolution debate for a long time will appreciate Tom Bethell's retrospective on the early years. Those who have come to the controversy more recently will benefit from reading about its origins.

Bethell writes:

I first heard about Phillip Johnson from a retired lawyer named Norman Macbeth. Two decades earlier Norman had written a marvelous book called Darwin Retried and it made a big impression on me. We became friends. He lived in Spring Valley, north of New York City and I stayed with him several times.

More than once we went to see a friend of his, Ron Brady, who taught philosophy at Ramapo College. He too was a Darwin doubter. Macbeth would take me along to meetings at the American Museum of Natural History, where he introduced me to curators at meetings of the Systematics Study Group. Some were amazingly critical of Darwinism.

One day, in the fall of 1990, Norman told me that he had recently heard from a lawyer at UC Berkeley's law school -- "Boalt Hall," but I hadn't heard of that. The lawyer's name was Phillip Johnson. He had just written a book critical of Darwin, and had sent it along so that Macbeth could render a verdict. He didn't show it to me, but he told me it was excellent.

We were both delighted to know that another lawyer would be entering the lists and helping to make the case against Darwinism. Macbeth died about a year later. It was as though he knew that he had passed on the baton.

It wasn't until the following summer that I met Phil Johnson at his house near Berkeley. By then I had read Darwin on Trial, now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Curiously, the concept of "intelligent design" wasn't explicitly invoked in the book, and ID certainly didn't exist as a movement. An odd parallel is that the word "evolution" doesn't appear in Darwin's Origin of Species. (The word "evolved does occur, once, and it is the last word in the book.)

I was familiar with some of the arguments in Darwin on Trial, but I now realize that the key to the book's influence was that religious objections to Darwinism were replaced by scientific and philosophical ones. Macbeth's book had done the same, but it never achieved the resonance of Phil's book.

Bethell's column brought back memories. As a grad student Norman Macbeth's book was one of several that inspired me to challenge the dogma that Darwinism (or more precisely materialistic "molecules to man evolution") is a scientific theory in my Master's thesis. My belief then, and still today 30 plus years later, is that it's a metaphysical hypothesis, based on untestable assumptions and a faith commitment to materialism.

If Darwin's Origin of Species triggered a "Reformation" in intellectual history then today we're experiencing a counter-reformation in which Norman Macbeth and Phillip Johnson have been pioneers and leading players.

The rest of Bethell's article is interesting and instructive. Give it a read.

Climate-Change Game-Changer

Matt Ridley is a highly celebrated science writer who recently (October 31) gave a speech at the Royal Academy of Arts in Edinburgh Scotland on confirmation bias (seeing what you want to see in the data), pseudoscience, and climate change. It's a fascinating ten pages of PDF that'll grab you in the first paragraph and cause you to not want to move until you've finished it - at least, it will if you have an interest in any of the three topics he blends into his lecture.

Drawing from history, both recent and not so recent, Ridley begins by formulating "six lessons" which we should bear in mind about scientific controversies:

• The media is incredibly gullible.
• Facts are like water off a duck’s back to pseudoscience.
• Heretics are sometimes right.
• Some great scientists, like Newton, dabbled in pseudo-science.
• Be careful of your own confirmation bias.
• Never rely on the consensus of experts about the future.

Having elaborated on these he launches an assault on the sacred cow of climate change alarmism that is perhaps the best piece I've ever read on the subject. I have no doubt that many of his listeners were squirming in their seats. He sets the table with this:

Using these six lessons, I am now going to plunge into an issue on which almost all the experts are not only confident they can predict the future, but absolutely certain their opponents are pseudoscientists. It is an issue on which I am now a heretic. I think the establishment view is infested with pseudoscience. The issue is climate change.

Now before you all rush for the exits, and I know it is traditional to walk out on speakers who do not toe the line on climate at the RSA – I saw it happen to Bjorn Lomborg last year when he gave the Prince Philip lecture – let me be quite clear. I am not a ‘denier’. I fully accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the climate has been warming and that man is very likely to be at least partly responsible.

When a study was published recently saying that 98% of scientists ‘believe’ in global warming, I looked at the questions they had been asked and realized I was in the 98%, too, by that definition, though I never use the word ‘believe’ about myself. Likewise the recent study from Berkeley, which concluded that the land surface of the continents has indeed been warming at about the rate people thought, changed nothing.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed.

I also think the climate debate is a massive distraction from much more urgent environmental problems like invasive species and overfishing.

I was not always such a ‘lukewarmer’. In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening.

I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine. Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick.

The case Ridley amasses in the remainder of his speech is devastating, or at least it seemed so to me. It may be that climate change is indeed the imminent threat some climatologists say it is, but the evidence that that is so seems exiguous at best. Moreover, the harm that's being done by government policies in an effort to mitigate CO2 emissions is extremely high in terms of both lives and treasure, especially given the paucity of empirical warrant.

Read his speech. It could be a game-changer for you. Thanks to Scott for calling it to my attention.

Most Ethical Administration Ever

We can add yet another of President Obama's cabinet appointees to the list of those associated with possible scandal. First it was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Tax Cheating), then came Attorney General Eric Holder (Fast and Furious, inter alia), followed by Energy Secretary Steven Chu (Solyndra), now it's Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius implicated in a scandal being dubbed "Shreddergate."

Kathleen Sebelius is the former governor of Kansas whom President Obama named as his Secretary of HHS. When you read this column by Jack Cashill you might wonder why she isn't in jail. If she were a Republican she doubtless would be.

You should read the whole of Cashill's report, but the quick summation is that as governor of Kansas Sebelius was implicated in an attempt to cover-up wrong-doing in her administration related to a criminal investigation of local Planned Parenthood personnel:

In 2002 Republican Phill Kline was elected attorney general of Kansas, and Democrat Kathleen Sebelius was elected governor. They had different agendas.

Kline wanted to know how Kansas, despite tough laws he had helped write as a legislator, had emerged as the world capital of late-term abortions. Sebelius did not want to know or want anyone else to know, either.

Kline quickly discovered that abortions performed on under-aged girls were not being reported to the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, or SRS, as mandated by law.

The purpose of the mandatory reporting laws is to remove a child from a situation in which the abuse is likely to happen again.

To track the reporting failure, Kline needed the abortion records kept by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, or KDHE, which, like the SRS, was now being run by Sebelius appointees. Although these records are kept for law-enforcement purposes, both agencies resisted in every which way they could.

It took Kline years of legal haggling to get the records. They showed that in the years 2002 and 2003, 166 girls under 15 had abortions at Kansas clinics, the great majority of them at George Tiller's clinic in Wichita or Planned Parenthood's in suburban Kansas City. Only two of them were reported to SRS, and both of those stories were already in the news.

Unable to stop Kline legally, Sebelius persuaded a popular Republican district attorney to switch parties to run against Kline in 2006. Through various cut-outs, Tiller invested nearly $2 million in the anti-Kline effort. And the Star won Planned Parenthood's top editorial honor for its virulent campaign against "Snoop Dog" Kline. Kline lost.

In a wonderful twist, Republican precinct captains elected Kline to take the DA spot vacated by Sebelius' new attorney general. Planned Parenthood just happened to be in that county. In October 2007, Kline charged Planned Parenthood with committing 107 criminal acts, including 23 felonies for manufacturing documents – the first criminal charges ever brought against Planned Parenthood anywhere.

Although the usual suspects saw to Kline's re-election defeat in 2008, new Johnson County DA Steve Howe continued the case Kline had launched. Last week, however, Howe had to ask that the felony charges be dropped. As he had just learned, the evidence had been destroyed.

As the Star reported on Thursday, "All copies of key documents needed to support those charges no longer exist." Sebelius's hand-picked attorney general, Steve Six, destroyed the certified copies in 2009, and the Sebelius-run KDHE destroyed the original records in 2005.

There's much more on Shreddergate at the link.

Mr. Obama promised us the most ethical, the most transparent administration in history. What he's delivered is certainly something less than that.

Thanks to Byron for passing the story along.

A Movie Running Backwards

There is a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views invites us to imagine a scenario which illustrates this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards! The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the simplest explanation for the phenomena in the video, certainly simpler than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell wants to relate this to the problem of Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a professor describing the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class. “Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms formed by pure chance that was able to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded into a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have switched the pictures!” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

That's the problem with Darwinian evolution. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as butterfly metamorphosis, or create a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these things were the intentional product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

Of course, if a mind was somehow directing the process that would change everything.

Mind v. Matter

Raymond Tallis reviews a couple of books on mind and materialism for the Wall Street Journal. One of the books is titled Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter by Terrence Deacon the other is by Michael Gazzaniga titled Who's In Charge? Tallis begins his column with this:

The world of academe is currently in the grip of a strange and worrying epidemic of biologism, which has also captured the popular imagination. Scientists, philosophers and quite a few toilers in the humanities believe—and would have the rest of us believe—that nothing fundamental separates humanity from animality.

Biologism has two cardinal manifestations. One is the claim that the mind is the brain, or the activity of the brain, so that one of the most powerful ways to advance our understanding of ourselves is to look at our brains in action, using the latest scanning devices. The other is the claim that Darwinism explains not only how the organism Homo sapiens came into being (as, of course, it does) but also what motivates people and shapes their day-to-day behavior.

These beliefs are closely connected. If the brain is an evolved organ, shaped by natural selection to ensure evolutionary success (as it most surely is), and if the mind is the brain and nothing more, then the mind and all those things we are minded to do can be explained by the evolutionary imperative. The mind is a cluster of apps or modules securing the replication of the genes that are expressed in our bodies.

Many in the humanities have embraced these views with astonishing fervor.

Indeed. Materialism is the reigning religion in academe today, but judging from what Tallis writes in his review, that may be changing. Setting aside his curious insistence on making it clear that he himself is definitely not an apostate from Darwinian orthodoxy he makes many interesting observations. Some are those of the authors he reviews and some are his. Here's a sample:

A brain in good working order is, of course, a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, from basic perception to the most complex constructed sense of self. It does not follow that this is the whole story of our nature—that we are just brains in some kind of working order. Many aspects of everyday human consciousness elude neural reduction.

Biologism commands acceptance in the humanities because it is promoted or endorsed by scientists whose prowess in their chosen field seems to qualify them to pronounce on what are essentially philosophical questions. Thus it is notable when two books written by neuro-biologists of the greatest distinction are nonetheless critical of the simplifications—both scientific and philosophical—of biologism. Both authors look outside the conceptual frameworks upon which biologism depends.

"Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter"... does not deliver on its subtitle ... is long, slow-moving and peppered with neologisms, but it is infinitely preferable to the flashy tomes of the Professors of Legerdemain who assure us that the mind could emerge from matter in the brain "just like that" simply because "the brain is the most complex object in the world."

Along the way, Mr. Deacon demolishes fashionable computational theories of the brain. Anyone in the future who is tempted to assert that "the mind is the software of the brain" should reflect on Mr. Deacon's observation that the apparent agency of a computer "is just the displaced agency of some human designer." The use of simplistic analogies to make the mind look machine-like and machines mind-like and thereby solve the mind-brain problem should never again pass unchallenged.

One of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology, Jerry Fodor, has argued that to solve the puzzle of conscious experience "there's hardly anything we may not have to cut loose from." Mr. Deacon has not cut loose from quite enough yet—in particular from the notion that matter organized in a certain way must be mindful—but he has started to reframe the terms of the discussion. His 500 densely argued pages testify to his awareness of the intractability of the problem.

Having considered Deacon's book in far more detail than I have suggested here, Tallis turns to Gazzaniga's work:

Unlike many in his profession, Mr. Gazzaniga is philosophically sophisticated. He believes that, while the brain "enables" the mind, mental activity is not reducible to neural events.

If the mind really were identical with activity in individual brain-bits, which were themselves machines causally wired into the material world, free will would be an illusion. One purpose of Mr. Gazzaniga's book is to reveal the implications of this mistaken notion for one of the most sinister of the neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines: "neuro-law." Neuro-law aims to replace the untidy processes of the current judicial system with something more biologically savvy. Isn't criminal behavior the result of (abnormal) brain function? If so, the brain, not the defendant, should take the rap.

Mr. Gazzaniga will have none of this, and he deplores "neuroscience oozing into the courtroom." The author savages the uncritical use of neuro-technology in court and laments that juries and judges have little idea of the shakiness of the connections between minor abnormalities on brain scans and the commission of a particular crime. Neuro-law is not merely premature; it overlooks the fact that, as Mr. Gazzaniga says, "we are people, not brains," and brain scans tell us little about our personhood.

Mr. Gazzaniga's incomparable knowledge, along with his mastery of the art of making things clear without oversimplifying them, means that "Who's in Charge?" is a joy to read. Is his book, along with Mr. Deacon's, an indicator that the mighty edifice of philosophically naïve conventional neuroculture is starting to fall apart? Are these books harbingers of a better future in which the task of trying to make sense of what we are is not hampered by a reductive scientism that identifies us with the activity of brains evolved to serve evolutionary success? I hope so. While we are not angels fallen from heaven, we are not just neural machines. Nor are we merely exceptionally clever chimps.

One may be forgiven for thinking that even Darwinians are bailing on strict materialism. Matter and force, it is coming to be recognized, simply leave too much about the world unexplained. The mysteries of human consciousness as well as the mysteries of quantum physics point to not only the existence of mind, but also, perhaps, its ontological pre-eminence.

Where's the Honor in This?

A young man, his father and his mother are charged in Ontario with having murdered the young man's three sisters and the man's first wife in an "honor killing." Evidently, the girls were dating guys. That can get you killed if your father's a Muslim. MacLean's is following the trial:

Hamed Shafia wants to look at the photographs of his dead sisters, their drowned bodies freshly extracted from an underwater car. Sgt. Michael Boyles tries to convince him otherwise, but Hamed is nothing if not determined. He wants to see the corpses.

“Please,” he says quietly.

“Alright,” Boyles answers.

It is July 23, 2009, almost 3 o’clock in the morning, and the 18-year-old Afghan immigrant is sitting in a police interrogation room in Kingston, Ont. A video camera is rolling. He has just been arrested—along with his beloved mom and dad—for the alleged “honour killing” of four family members: three sisters (Zainab, 19; Sahar, 17; Geeti, 13) and his father’s first wife in the polygamous clan, Rona Amir Mohammad. The doomed foursome was found, nearly a month earlier, at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, the victims of what investigators say was a mass execution meant to look like a freak car accident.

For three hours, officers presented Hamed with clue after damning clue, including their smoking gun: shattered pieces of a Lexus headlight found at the midnight crime scene. (The victims were discovered in a submerged Nissan Sentra, but prosecutors allege that the family’s other car, a silver Lexus SUV, was used to ram the sedan over the edge of the Kingston Mills locks.) As Hamed flips through the full-page photos, his eyes fixated on the departed, Boyles urges him to finally come clean. “They deserve to know the truth,” he says. “They deserve better than this.”

It's hard to understand how people can think that a loving and merciful God condones the murder of young girls, but evidently, many Muslims do. It's also very difficult to see how anyone could think that murdering one's family somehow restores honor to the family.

Read the rest of this riveting account at the link.

He Wouldn't Do That, Would He?

Victor Davis Hanson believes that an attack on Iran is far more likely in an Obama administration than it would have been under President Bush. The reason, he opines, is the Left's inconsistency:

In terms of the Obama presidency, there is now no anti-war movement. It simply vanished in January 2009. Former outrages like Guantanamo, renditions, and Predator-drone assassinations almost magically became A-okay. The left-wing base dared not continue its old Bush slurs, given its support for Obama’s liberal domestic agenda. Quiet conservatives were perplexed over whether to be outraged that Predator-in-Chief Obama proved to be such an abject hypocrite, or relieved that, better late than never, he had morphed into a Bush-Cheney national-security disciple.

The result is that for the next year or so, Obama can more or less do whatever he wishes abroad. If he chooses to bomb a country that poses no direct threat to the U.S. without congressional authority, like Libya, or to assassinate a U.S. citizen-terrorist, like Anwar al-Awlaki, the Left will keep mum. And the Right, for different reasons, probably will, too.

If we get to the scary point of Iran’s going nuclear in 2012, expect the Obama administration — up for reelection and without much of a domestic record to run on in these hard times — to consider a preemptive strike. Be assured that if it does, there will be no outrage in the Democrat-controlled Senate, no campuses on fire, no ad hominem Moveon.org ads in the New York Times — all the sorts of anti-war hysteria that once sought to turn a moderate like George W. Bush into a caricature of some trigger-happy yokel from shoot-’em-up Texas.

And conservatives? Again, they would mumble that an Obama “wag the dog” strike would cynically be all about the president’s reelection. Or they would at least note the irony, given the Nobel Laureate–in–Chief’s prior demonization of Bush’s use of military force. Nonetheless, Republicans would largely grow silent if — a big if — a strike were successful and ended Iran’s nuclear threat.

This is an extraordinary charge Hanson is making here. He's telling us that President Obama is not above risking a massive war with Iran just to extend his tenure in office. If Hanson is right, a prospect I deeply doubt and find hard to accept, it would require the president to be a far more contemptible man than even his most implacable political foes think him to be.

Heretofore, Mr. Obama hasn't shown much of an appetite for military risk. Killing terrorists with Predator drones and bombing Libyan mercenaries are, after all, relatively risk-free ventures. Bombing Iran, on the other hand, would be cataclysmic.

It would almost certainly result in a massive assault by Hezbollah, Syria, and Hamas against Israel. It would also trigger terror attacks throughout the Western world. Oil supply lines would be sabotaged and chemical and biological agents might well be unleashed in Western cities.

Does Hanson suggest that President Obama might be the sort of man who would risk all this just to remain in the White House? Does he believe Mr. Obama is willing to accept massive civilian casualties, a possible nuclear war in the Middle East, and the reproach of his Left-wing, anti-war base just to avoid political defeat?

It's troubling to think that serious people have such a view of the president and it's also troubling that the fate of the world could hinge on Mr. Obama's poll numbers next Fall. Would he be willing to roll the dice if it looks like he's headed for electoral ignominy and gamble that a successful strike against Iran would win him the acclaim of the American electorate who might temporarily forget about the miserable economy in the afterglow of a military operation that relieved the world of the threat of Iranian nukes?

Taking out Iran's nukes may turn out, for strategic reasons, to be the right thing to do, but to do it for political reasons would be reprehensible. As much as I disagree with our president I don't believe, pace Hanson, that he's a man who'd sacrifice many thousands of lives for his political career.

The rest of the world better hope I'm right and that Hanson's wrong.

Stiffing the Pipeline, Squandering Jobs

There are good reasons, perhaps, for delaying the decision to construct the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring oil from Alberta to Texas, create twenty thousand jobs, and go a long way toward making us energy independent, but do they outweigh the benefits of constructing the pipeline?

The proposed path of the pipeline was feared to threaten Nebraska's water table, but the pipeline's environmental impact has been studied for 39 months with no compelling evidence that the water would be affected. Nevertheless, President Obama has decided that it needs to be studied some more, until, well, until after the 2012 election.

The Globe and Mail has some details and adds this:

But the delay, which will very likely place a final Keystone decision well after the presidential election a year from now, was the culmination of a remarkable few weeks that saw the president take an increasingly personal interest in the issue. That interest, many observers believe, makes it clear this was a political decision, made by a White House eager to hold on to a base of young environmental-minded voters who were instrumental in handing Barack Obama the presidency.

“It’s blatant politics,” said David Wilkins, former U.S. ambassador to Canada, in an interview Friday. Mr. Wilkins lobbied for Keystone on behalf of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. “It’s politics at its worst. It was a move by the president to placate a certain wing of his party and I think it was a real travesty.”

Mr. Wilkins pointed out that Mr. Obama had passed up 20,000 Keystone jobs to “protect one job, his own.”

Canadian officials have declared that they're now prepared to build a pipeline to their west coast where the oil will be shipped to China. In other words, the oil is going to be mined. It's going to be shipped, it's going to be burned, and it's going to help the economy of a rapidly growing nation, but that nation won't be the U.S. Moreover, the nation that burns it has far fewer regulations controlling emissions than does the U.S. Thus, environmentalists who oppose the pipeline because they don't want more carbon being spewed into the atmosphere are about to receive a lesson in unintended consequences.

This is not to say that there aren't legitimate concerns about shipping the oil across the United States, but every major project carries with it environmental risks. Building the interstate highway system or dams that harness the energy of moving water or digging a coal mine all create hazards, but the jobs they create and the improvements they make in the quality of life of every American have made those hazards worth risking.

It's hard to believe Mr. Obama sincerely wants to put Americans back to work when he declares a drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that costs tens of thousands of jobs and devastates economies of towns all along the Gulf coast and follows that moratorium with an order to delay a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline that curtails the creation of tens of thousands more jobs.

Would he really play games with peoples' livelihoods just so he can keep his own job? I want to believe that he's a better human being than that, but I'm mystified as to why he's doing the things he's doing when it comes to developing oil resources and energy independence.

Note: The first two paragraphs have been revised since they were posted yesterday.

Lines in the Sand

Satellites orbiting the earth have recently discovered some interesting markings in the Chinese desert. New Scientist makes a convincing case that, given what one can see when the photos are blown up, they're designed by the Chinese military to serve as an artillery range.

Even so, suppose we were unable to magnify the pics. What would you attribute these patterns to:

Would you think them to be the products of purely natural causes, like wind, water, and chemical activity? If not, why not? Most of us doubtless ascribe these lines to intelligent agency, but why? It's not as if they showed some regular geometric pattern. The lines appear random except for their borders, but I suspect that even if the borders were irregular most of us would still think the lines to be intentionally constructed, even if we didn't know who did it, or why, or how.

This recognition of intelligent agency is precisely the intuition that underlies the believe that life is not solely the product of random natural processes. The probability of blind, natural processes being able to produce the Chinese lines is far higher than the probability of natural processes producing by chance a living, reproducing proto-cell. Yet, despite the sheer improbability of the latter, many folks nevertheless immediately assume it happened even as they would scoff at the notion that the lines in the desert were produced in the same way.

Why is that? The only way it makes any sense is if the existence of an intelligent designer of some kind is ruled out apriori, but that would be to reject the conclusion of the argument before the argument is allowed to make its case. It begs the question to assume there is no designer and then dismiss any evidence which might establish that a designer exists.

This, however, is what the materialist (or more precisely, the physicalist) does. He's certain that there's nothing to reality other than matter, energy, and force, and thus he excludes any explanation for any phenomenon that relies on a purposeful mind. There's no room in his worldview for any kind of God, and so he has no trouble imputing to intelligent human agents the Chinese lines but imputing to chance and the laws of physics the almost infinitely less likely emergence of life and biological information.

Your GPS

Ever wonder how your GPS works? Here's a one minute animation that explains the basics compliments of New Scientist:

The Global Warming Debate

This pretty much covers all the talking points. It's amusing.

Well, some won't find it amusing, but others will. It depends upon what side of the debate you're on, I guess:

HT: Evolution News and Views.

Ten Best Bio Pics

This is a magnified cluster of stink bug eggs the photograph of which placed in the top ten biological photographs of 2011:

I'm sure that many readers have found the adult stink bugs endearing over the last couple of years.

The other nine winners can be viewed at MSN.com.

Who Says They Had a Moral Obligation?

One of the interesting aspects of the Penn State case, at least for me, is the way in which people are tossing around the term "moral obligation." The coaches and administrators, we're being told, had a "moral obligation" to intervene to protect children from a man they knew to be a sexual predator.

So, we might ask, where does such an obligation come from? Who imposes it? Why is it wrong to just mind one's own business in such situations? The secular man simply has no answers to these questions. In order to make a moral judgment of the behavior of Jerry Sandusky he has to parasitize the Christian world-view and talk as if his moral sentiments were actually grounded in something beyond his own subjective predilections.

This morning I heard on the radio a story about the recently resigned president of PSU, Graham Spanier. Penn State had sponsored a "sex fair" on their campus a couple of years ago, at taxpayers' expense, which amounted to a festival given to pornography and sexual licentiousness. When President Spanier went later to the state legislature to ask for funding for the university he was grilled about this. He waffled, ducked and weaved and never really answered any of the legislators' questions. Finally, one exasperated lawmaker asked him point blank whether he thought the sex fair was wrong. Spanier replied that he really couldn't answer the question because he didn't know what the legislator meant by "wrong."

That, in a nutshell, explains what the problem is at Penn State and many other universities in the country. Academics can no longer talk about right and wrong because, having jettisoned the traditional Judeo-Christian ground for morality, they no longer possess the categories necessary to give those words meaning.

Indeed, I don't see how a secularist can even say that Jerry Sandusky's behavior with young boys was morally wrong. If a secularist wanted to say it was wrong because children are harmed by it they simply move the question back one step. Why is harming children wrong? It won't do to respond, as so many of the New Atheists do, that most people feel it to be wrong. If this were the standard then if people's feelings were changed then child rape would become right. Moreover, if the consensus determines right and wrong what if the consensus supports genocide or slavery, would that make these horrors right?

Harming children is not wrong because people have a subjective aversion to it. It's either wrong objectively or it's not really wrong at all, and it's only wrong objectively if it violates the law of an objective, transcendent, moral authority.

Graham Spanier and Jerry Sandusky give us a glimpse into the world as it will be when the secular tide is completely successful. It's not only not pretty, it's thoroughly ugly. Indeed, it looks a lot like Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Omen

A lot of attention was been showered on the success of Issue 2 in Ohio which was a repudiation of the efforts of the Republican governor, John Kasich, to limit the power public employee unions wielded over the state's taxpayers. The failure of the Ohio GOP to turn back the unions on this ballot initiative was seen as a massive setback for the GOP and a favorable augury for President Obama in this pivotal 2012 state.

Almost lost in the media excitement over this single hopeful reed to which the administration is clinging was the news out of Virginia which is a far more unfavorable augury than Ohio is hopeful. Despite extraordinarily heavy investments of time and resources in Virginia the Democrats were trounced.

Kim Strassel at the Wall Street Journal fills in the details:

Virginia Republicans added seven new seats to their majority in the House of Delegates, giving them two-thirds of that chamber's votes—the party's largest margin in history. The GOP also took over the Virginia Senate in results that were especially notable, given that Virginia Democrats this spring crafted an aggressive redistricting plan that had only one aim: providing a firewall against a Republican takeover of that chamber. Even that extreme gerrymander didn't work.

Every Republican incumbent — 52 in the House, 15 in the Senate — won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War. This is after winning all three top statewide offices — including the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell — in 2009, and picking off three U.S. House Democrats in last year's midterms.

Elected state Democrats — who form the backbone of grass-roots movements — couldn't distance themselves far enough from Mr. Obama in this race. Most refused to mention the president, to defend his policies, or to appear with him. The more Republicans sought to nationalize the Virginia campaign, the more Democrats stressed local issues.

According to Strassel many Democrat candidates even tried to identify themselves with the state's Republican governor in a desperate bid to separate themselves in the voters' minds from a president whose policies are growing increasingly unpopular in a state he won easily just three years ago.

Virginia may not be a bellwether for 2012, but it's certainly an omen and, viewed from the Oval Office, it's can't be a happy one.

One More Word

The Penn State scandal continues to receive attention from both the media and readers of Viewpoint. One theme that keeps popping up among those commenting on the discovery by Mike McQueary of coach Jerry Sandusky with a young boy in the locker room shower is that McQueary was morally obligated to do something to stop the assault on the boy, and that he failed this duty. I agree and have tried to offer over the last two days an explanation of why he didn't meet that obligation that doesn't call him a coward or impugn his moral character.

There is an obvious possibility, however, that has oddly been overlooked by many of the commentators, including me, that sounds very plausible and which anyone should consider who wants to give McQueary the benefit of the doubt rather than just revile him, like some of the people I've heard and read in the media seem wont to do.

In the narratives of this awful episode it's been assumed by McQueary's detractors that when he chanced upon Sandusky raping the boy in the shower that he quickly left without saying or doing anything to stop the crime, but how does anyone know that when Sandusky saw McQueary the whole thing didn't end right then? It might well have happened that when Sandusky realized that he'd been discovered he released the boy. Indeed, it's hard to imagine that the brutality continued after Sandusky, perhaps mortified that a former player and now a coaching colleague had witnessed him engaging in his disgraceful, disgusting and criminal behavior, realized that he'd been found out.

If Sandusky did stop when he and McQueary saw each other what more do McQueary's critics think he should have done other than taking the boy with him, an action which again presupposes that McQueary was able to think calmly and clearly at a moment when his whole world had been turned upside down?

This is what disturbs me about the media hostility to McQueary. There are a number of possible, at least partially exculpatory, explanations for what happened that night that people don't seem to be willing to concede.They seem instead to want to fulminate against McQueary, heaping opprobrium upon him, calling him a moral idiot and coward who had to "run to daddy," when it could easily have been the case that, in the very act of discovering what was going on, he brought the crime to a halt.

Parenthetically, others have pointed out that calling McQueary a coward is another example of the extraordinary judgmentalism that has surrounded this particular aspect of the case. It has come to light that this "coward" once intervened to break up a dining hall knife fight between two football players. I wonder how many of his despisers, happy to call him a coward from the safety of their arm chairs, would have had the guts to do that.

I don't know what all the facts are, but until we do know more I think it's reprehensible to burn McQueary at the stake, as so many people in the media and elsewhere are eager to do. It's especially reprehensible in my view to commit McQueary to the flames for allegedly failing to do what, in fact, he may actually have done. It may turn out that he's a much better man than a lot of his most hurtful critics think and a much better man than they are themselves.

More on the PSU Scandal

A couple of friends have written to ask me to clarify remarks I made in yesterday's post on the Penn State scandal. Specifically, there was concern about what was seen as an attempt by me to justify the failure of Mike McQueary to stop the assault on the boy in the locker room.

I should say first that I didn't try to justify McQueary's failure to act. I tried to explain and understand it. It may be that none of what I said about his possible mental state at the time was the case. He may have known very well what was happening and chose to ignore it and let the boy be raped. The point is that we don't know what he was thinking, and until we do, I think the chorus of condemnation in the media of this man is completely premature and cruel. I believe he should be given the benefit of the doubt until we know more about what happened.

I think those who condemn McQueary for not stopping Sandusky are being judgmental about a situation that probably few, if any of them, have ever been in themselves. I don't even know for sure what McQueary saw. He might've not even realized that he was seeing a child being raped until after he had a chance to reflect on it later. It's easy for people who've never been in a situation so shocking that they were completely disoriented by it to imply that were they in McQueary's shoes they would have taken action. It's easy but it's a claim rather lacking in humility.

There are lots of armchair heroes. We can all agree on what McQueary should have done at the time, and no one thinks he did the right thing at that moment, no one is excusing him, but to condemn him for failing to do what we wish he would have done in a circumstance for which nothing in his life had prepared him strikes me as deeply uncharitable and smacks of moral posturing, as if the critics are using McQueary's failure to assure their audience how righteous and macho they themselves are.

We'd all like to think that if we were faced with such a scenario we'd do the right thing, but none of us knows until we're in that spot - confronted with something so awful that we can't even process it, so foreign that we can't believe what we're seeing - what we would actually do. In such situations people often freeze up, they don't realize what's happening, they're so repelled that they can't think straight, and I think it's shameful that people who've never been confronted with such a horror themselves have been so quick to judge McQueary for failing in his moment of decision. It's like people who've never been in combat condemning those who have been for not behaving more valiantly under fire than perhaps they did.

Of course, having had time to reflect and put it all together, and after seeing that the Athletic Director wasn't going to do anything about Sandusky's crime, McQueary should have gone to the police. That he didn't makes him culpable and complicit, and should have, unless there are other considerations of which I am unaware, cost him his position on the coaching staff.

He Said, She Said

You won't hear this from most major media sources, and I confess I don't know how much weight to place on it, but a lawyer in Atlanta, using voice analysis technology often used by police departments to tell whether people are lying, has concluded that Herman Cain is telling the truth about his encounter with Sharon Bialek. In fact, it turns out that, according to the analysis, she herself appears to be the one prevaricating about what happened in their much celebrated meeting:

Private investigator TJ Ward said presidential hopeful Herman Cain was not lying at a news conference on Tuesday in Phoenix.

Cain denied making any sexual actions towards Sharon Bialek and vowed to take a polygraph test if necessary to prove his innocence.

Cain has not taken a polygraph but Ward said he does have software that does something better. Ward said the $15,000 software can detect lies in people's voices.

CBS Atlanta's Mike Paluska played Cain's speech for Ward into the software and watched as it analyzed Cain's every word.

If he is hiding something this thing would have spiked way down here," said Ward. "He is being truthful, totally truthful. He is a man with integrity and he talked directly about not knowing any incident he is accused of."

The software analyzes the stress level and other factors in your voice. During the speech, when Cain denied the claims, the lie detector read "low risk." According to Ward, that means Cain is telling the truth.

There's more at the link, including a video of the analysis of Cain's speech in which he claims innocence.

The Penn State Scandal

I'm reluctant to write about the Penn State mess because not everything is known yet about why people didn't go to the police with the information they had about assistant coach Jerry Sandusky's monstrous behavior. Even so, it's very hard to believe that there might be some exculpatory information still floating around out there.

It's also very hard to believe that Joe Paterno was the only member of the coaching staff who knew what was going on. Mike McQueary knew, he's the grad assistant who saw Sandusky raping the ten year old boy back in the late 90s, and he's still on the staff. I can't believe he never told anyone other than Paterno about what he saw.

Indeed, it almost has to be the case, the way such news carries, that the entire Penn State athletic department and much of the college administration was to some extent aware of this and yet no one went to the police. It really is astounding. It's likely to keep psychologists busy for the next hundred years spinning out explanations for it.

It's also unbelievable that students have rioted on the State College campus, not over the silence of their coaches and administrators in the face of the sexual abuse of young boys, but over the firing of Paterno. I don't know how the university could do otherwise. In fact, I don't know how they can not fire every coach who was on the football staff when this first happened because they all must have known about it. Indeed, the entire NCAA must have known about it because Sandusky was being touted as a future coaching star and yet when he left the PSU staff at age 55 he never got another coaching position. People must have known that he was a bad investment.

One thing about the media reaction to this, though, that I find disgusting is their willingness to condemn McQueary for not stopping it when he saw Sandusky in the shower with the boy. Unless someone has himself been in the position of seeing something so shocking, so alien, that he can't even process it, unless one has been in the position of being so completely stunned and confused by what he's seeing that he can't believe it and all he wants to do is get out of there, and those critics who were in that position nevertheless did the right thing, they should be very wary of condemning a young man who found himself in that position and didn't react the way, in retrospect, he should have.

It's a shame that JoePa is going out like this, but I see no other way around it than to acknowledge that he has no one else to blame. I don't want to second-guess him, but if he had a decent reason for not going to the police when he realized that the Athletic Director wasn't going to do anything about Sandusky's behavior I sure wish he'd tell us what it was.

See here for more on this awful episode. It looks like it may get even worse, if that were possible.

You Just Don't Understand My Religion

Julian Baggini one of the editors of The Philosopher's Magazine has initiated what promises to be an interesting and helpful series of columns at The Guardian on the conversation between the defenders and detractors of religious belief.

Baggini is himself a religious skeptic and his first installment addresses the inadequacy of the claim sometimes made by those religious folk who, in the course of defending their beliefs, say that "You just don't understand my religion." Baggini finds this somewhat less than compelling, at least in many contexts, and discusses how religious apologists have to do better than that:

Terry Eagleton's quip that reading Richard Dawkins on theology is like listening to someone "holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The British Book of Birds" is a funny and memorable contribution to a debate that is rarely amusing and frequently forgettable. Whether you agree with the charge or not, the complaint is of a kind we have become very familiar with: disputants in the religion debate are talking past each other because they do not have a sufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand against.

I might add here, parenthetically, that they also have an insufficiently rich understanding of the positions they stand for. Baggini continues:

I'm very much in sympathy with this view, and this series is largely an attempt to try to find more constructive points of engagement that can only emerge if we ditch lazy and tired preconceptions about those with whom we disagree. At the same time, however, I'm all too aware that "you just don't understand" is a card that is often played far too swiftly and without justification.

I agree with Baggini on this. Resorting to the dodge that the other guy is just too ignorant of one's religion to make a legitimate criticism of it is often a tacit admission of one's inability to defend his beliefs against the critic's animadversions.

It has become evident to me, however, that many people, especially the religious, suffer from a kind of conceptual claustrophobia. Their beliefs are of their essence somewhat vague and they are terrified of being pinned down.

Baggini goes on about this, instructively, I'd say, for several paragraphs, but the assumption seems to be that the fuzziness to which he alludes is an affliction of those who defend traditional religious beliefs while skeptics are lucid, precise, and logical.

Anyone who has read the recent works of the atheistic despisers of religion will have found that not only their antireligious arguments, but also the naturalistic Darwinism that they propose as an alternative, suffer from precisely the malaise that Baggini describes. Over and over we are soothingly assured by these scribes that the scientific illuminati have proven beyond doubt that science has all the answers to any question worth asking and that there's no need to resort to anything like God.

If, however, one were to impertinently ask a skeptic to explain how blind, purposeless forces and laws could have plausibly produced life from non-life and to have generated biological information, or if one were to ask them to explain how the impersonal can give rise to consciousness, or how something like butterfly metamorphosis or sexual reproduction could have evolved by purely non-teleological processes, one often hears the same vague appeals to mystery that Baggini deplores when they come from the traditionally religious. The inquirer is frequently told that his lack of scientific understanding impedes his comprehension of the Truth.

I hope that in future columns in the series Baggini brings out the fact that "You just don't understand my religion" is not just a dodge of the traditionally religious but also of those whose religion is scientific materialism.

The Illusion of Free Choice

My brother Bill, who is, I must say, a bit of a pessimist, offers the following philosophical commentary on the futility of placing one's hopes for the future in either of our political parties:

I try to assure him that it's not as bad as all that, but I must admit that I often think he has the better of the argument.