John Rabe

Ever think you'd watch a movie in which the hero was a member of the German Nazi party? Well, okay, Oscar Schindler in the movie Schindler's List, was a party member, I guess, but I can't think of any other candidates, or at least I couldn't until I watched the movie John Rabe the other evening.

Rabe's story was very much like that of Oscar Schindler. He was a German businessman, working for Siemens in Nanking, China in 1937. This was the year the Japanese invaded China and perpetrated the mass slaughter of what became known as the Rape of Nanking, brutally raping and slaughtering some 300,000 Chinese. The horrors perpetrated by the Japanese in Nanking are beyond imagining (see link), but the movie gives a glimpse of what it was like.

Since the Germans were allies of the Japanese in 1937 Rabe was able to use his Nazi Party credentials to carve out a demilitarized safety zone in the city in which Chinese civilians were able to find relative safety from the savagery of the Japanese troops. It's believed that Rabe and a dozen or so other foreigners working together were able to save the lives of some 200,000 Chinese.

The movie (2009) stars Ulrich Tukur as John Rabe and is very well-acted. I strongly recommend the film to anyone who wants to know more about one of the most savage episodes of man's inhumanity to his fellow man ever recorded, and who also wants to watch a film about real heroism during these terrifying days.

There's a biography of Rabe at Wikipedia. The tragedy of his life seems to have been compounded after he left Nanking and returned to Germany, but what he and his associates did for the Chinese is something which should never be forgotten.

Democrat Difficulties

National Review's Yuval Levin lays out the difficulties the president faces in coming up with a viable campaign strategy:

I know we’re all supposed to think that the primaries are poised to turn out a weak Republican nominee and that President Obama will swoop in this fall and carry the day with some brilliant pincer move that simultaneously dubs the Republican too extreme, too moderate, too boring, and too weird. And I suppose it’s possible that the president and his team will suddenly turn out to possess keen political skills they have been hiding somewhere for the past three years. But can we spend a moment pondering the approach that team Obama seems to be hatching so far? Looking at what the administration and the Obama campaign have been doing and saying in the buildup to the general election, it has been awfully difficult to find evidence of a plausible strategy.

Obama has some very daunting problems to contend with, of course. His record of accomplishments, amassed mostly in his first two years in office, is extremely unpopular and so could not be the centerpiece of a reelection campaign. He has presided over the largest deficits in American history and nearly doubled the national debt. He pushed through a large stimulus bill in 2009 that is taken to have been a failure (in no small part because the administration defined metrics for success, like keeping unemployment from rising above 8%, that have plainly not been met) and a health-care reform in 2010 that started out quite unpopular and has gotten only more so with time. Meanwhile the economy remains weak, unemployment remains high, and 80 percent of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country.

This has left the president in an exceptionally challenging political position in a re-election year. At the beginning of November of 2010, on the day Republicans took 63 House seats and 5 senate seats from the Democrats, Obama’s job approval in Gallup’s daily tracking poll was 44 percent; today it is 43 percent. Party identification in November 2010, according to Gallup, was 31 percent Democrat, 26 percent Republican, and 41 percent independent; in December 2011 it was 27 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 42 percent independent. Republicans held a 5 point lead in Rasmussen’s generic congressional ballot that November, and today they have a 6 point lead.

All this suggests there is no self-evident path to reelection for the president. He can hope for significant improvements in the economy to change his fortunes (although the unemployment rate is a good bit lower today than in November 2010 and that doesn’t seem to have done the trick), but he can’t run on his record or rely on some cushion of public confidence and satisfaction. He needs a positive strategy to improve his circumstances. But the campaign strategy his team appears to be putting into place would seem to be very poorly suited to doing so.

To further consternate the Democrats, it looks as if the Republicans are poised to take the Senate and keep control of the House. If this happens, Obama, if he's reelected, will find it very hard to do much of anything which, given his apparent ambitions for the country, is probably a good thing. Not only will Republicans block his legislative agenda and prevent him from naming radical judges to the federal bench and Supreme Court, but they'll surely press investigations of some of Mr. Obama's more suspect cabinet members, particularly Attorney General Eric Holder.

There are thirty three Senate seats up for reelection in 2012 and only ten of them are currently held by Republicans. The remaining twenty three are occupied by Democrats (and one Independent who caucuses with the Democrats), and several of those twenty three look very vulnerable. Given that in order to take control of the Senate the GOP need only capture seven more seats - and hold on to the ten they have - it looks like 2012 is shaping up to be a very glum year for the Democrats.

Anyway, Levin has some interesting things to say about Mr. Obama's campaign options at the link. It's an interesting read. One of the things we can expect the Republicans to press him on is what, exactly, he intends to do with four more years in the White House. As Levin observes, nothing he's already done is popular (Stimulus, Obamacare), and the only thing he's talked about doing in the future is raising taxes on the rich and imposing more regulations on business. There's nothing innovative, positive or even specific in his message. It's all vague platitudes about everyone doing their "fair share," etc.

One gets the feeling that the only reason he wants to be reelected is so he can continue to take extravagant vacations and play more golf. Of course, if Republicans wind up with control of Congress that's about all he'll be able to do.

Camp Fire Girls

Warren Cole Smith shares the improbable story of how a chance encounter with a Camp Fire Girls leader turned him into a fiscal conservative:

It was the fall of 1981. The United States was coming out of a recession. Ronald Reagan had been president since January. Among his first acts in the White House had been to dramatically cut spending for social programs.

And the woman sitting next to me on an airplane was not happy about it.

I was sitting on the aisle, and she had the window. She worked for an organization called Camp Fire Girls, now called Camp Fire USA, and she couldn’t stand Ronald Reagan. I wanted to know why. She described an after-school program she ran that served hundreds of poor children. I remember thinking then that it sounded like a worthwhile endeavor. The program had received about $100,000 — almost its entire budget — from the federal government. Reagan had eliminated that funding.

In 1981 I was a young man whose thinking was in a state of transition. In 1976 I had voted for Jimmy Carter, but in 1980 I pulled the lever for Reagan, in part because I thought Carter had shown general incompetency regarding economic matters. I had graduated from college in 1980, in the midst of the Carter Recession. I then spent more than a year in a series of part-time and temporary jobs, all the while looking for full-time employment. I had voted for Reagan not so much because I was a conscious part of the “Reagan Revolution,” but because — like many who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — I was hoping for change.

So when this Camp Fire Girl leader started railing against Reagan, I offered no defense. “That’s terrible,” I said. “Sorry that program got eliminated. What do you do now?”

“Oh,” she said. “I still run the program.”

I was confused. “I thought you said Reagan eliminated the program,” I said.

Smith goes on to recount the rest of the tale of how this conversation precipitated his conversion to conservatism. It's interesting. Check it out at the link.

Why Do They Dislike Him So?

Denver quarterback Tim Tebow has become something of a cultural phenomenon in the last couple of months, hated by some, loved by many (He was voted the most popular professional athlete in a recent ESPN poll). It's easy to understand why he's loved, of course. He's a great success story - told by most experts that he lacked the skills to be a successful pro quarterback, relegated to third string on the Denver depth chart, coming off the bench to lead his team to several dramatic last minute, last second, victories and propel them into the playoffs.

On top of that he is by all accounts a humble young man of outstanding character and leadership skills. It's a perfect script for a Hollywood movie.

So why is he disliked, perhaps even hated? Ostensibly, it's because he's outspoken about being motivated by his Christian faith and love for Jesus Christ. An article by Matt Higgins at CBS elaborates:

Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow has seemingly made himself the poster boy for Christianity, praying on the field after a win, putting Bible verses on his eye black during games and even starring in an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl, but one atheist group believes he’s doing it all for personal gain.

American Atheists — a New Jersey based group that promotes the separation of church and state — tells CBSDenver.com that the only reason Tebow is popular is because he constantly injects his Christianity among the public.

The only reason? There are others who have made no secret of their faith who have not achieved the level of celebrity that Tebow has. What makes Tebow different is the aura of the near-miraculous that surrounds some of his triumphs, particularly his role in the overtime win against the Pittsburgh Steelers. To the American Atheists, however, the amazing success of an unabashed Christian is like a chicken bone stuck in their windpipe:

When we watch a sporting event, we are all united for our team,” says David Silverman, president of American Atheists. “Tebow takes religion and injects it into the mix and divides the fan base.

Silverman seems to think that the Denver "fan base" is as narrow-minded and intolerant of other people's desire to express their deepest convictions as he is and that their common joy over the Broncos' success disintegrates as soon as Tebow kneels briefly in the endzone after a score. Presumably, Silverman is fine with the borderline-obscene dances with which some players celebrate their success, or the embarrassingly childish antics of other players who mimic and mock their opponents after a sack or a touchdown. Those ridiculous displays of arrested development are okay, Silverman would have us believe, because they're not "divisive," but an act of genuine humility and gratitude apparently just rips fan unity to shreds in Mile High Stadium.

Silverman states that Tebow’s repeated references to God in his post-game comments after a win is "bad" for football.

“(Religion) injects the divisive force into football,” Silverman says. “Why in the world are we talking about religion when we are talking about football?”

This is laughable. Anyone who has ever listened to athletes' post-game comments knows that they're usually as trite, banal, and hackneyed as the reporters' questions that elicit them. If Silverman thinks he's missing something important when Tebow takes three seconds to thank God for helping him to do his best then he hasn't listened to very many of those interviews.

Look. Tebow hasn't promoted himself. He never asked for all this attention. He just went about his business doing his job, and the media, always digging for a story, generated all the buzz about "Tebowmania," not just in the wake of his on-field success but also as a consequence of the mockery he has endured from other athletes, commentators, and people like Silverman. People talk about him, he doesn't talk about himself. As Higgins says:

The fascination over Tebow officially reached national heights when people across the U.S. started “Tebowing,” mimicking Tebow’s sideline prayers.

But Silverman, swimming furiously against the tide of opinion of everyone who knows the young man best, alleges that Tebow is a hypocrite:

Silverman believes that Tebow is “full of crap” when he publicly displays his Christianity on the football field and said his prayers are for publicity. “It’s not that Tebow prays, it’s that he waits for the cameras to be on him to do it,” Silverman says. “He’s totally faking.”

This is absurd. How does Silverman know this? Does he have access to Tebow's mind? Does he know something about Tebow that his teammates don't? Silverman's pinched, dessicated worldview has no room for the belief that someone can be absolutely sincere about their love for God.

Athletes give thanks all the time to different people - parents, coaches, mentors - for their success. Why is it over the line for someone to believe that God is the source of their ability and to thank Him for it?

Silverman says if Tebow is truly a Christian, he would pray in private, not public. “It is not surprising Tebow ignores Matthew 6:5 in which Jesus says, ‘When you pray, do not pray like the hypocrites in the street,’” Silverman says. “They pray to be seen praying. Pray in the closet.”

So this is it? Silverman thinks that Tebow is not sincere because he's praying where people might see him? Silverman simply fails to comprehend that the passage he cites is not about where one prays but about why one prays. Jesus is adjuring his followers not to pray with the purpose of bringing some sort of renown or credit to themselves but to pray with sincere gratitude to God.

Of course, Silverman doesn't think Tebow is sincere, but that's more a reflection upon Silverman's cynical and uninformed view of Christianity than it is upon Tebow whose sincerity no one closest to him questions.

David Silverman might be a pleasant enough fellow in person, but in this piece he comes across as sour, jealous, and petty. What a contrast with the guy he seems so bitter toward.

Snowy Owl

This winter has seen an influx of one of the largest and most beautiful North American owls into the lower 48. Fans of Harry Potter are familiar with the Snowy owl, but most people have never seen one in the wild. Snowies are residents of the Arctic tundra where they feed largely on lemmings, but they move southward in winter and sometimes travel all the way to the U.S.

This year there's been a large-scale movement of these owls into the states and several have turned up in Pennsylvania. Unlike most owls, which are nocturnal, snowy owls are diurnal — they're active both day and night which makes them easy to see if one is in the area.

Snowy Owl

A Snowy was found recently near Shippensburg which isn't far from where I live so I went this afternoon to see it. It was a gorgeous bird, large and almost completely white. Younger owls have dark edges to their feathers giving a barred appearance, but older Snowies, especially older males, are almost completely white.

There's a very interesting story on this year's irruption of these birds which can be read here.

Where Things Stand

Strategy Page fills us in on the nature and effects of the sanctions imposed against Iran:

These sanctions ...prohibited Iran's major customers from buying Iranian oil, and made it more difficult to pay for it if they did buy the stuff. The Europeans are switching suppliers, and East Asian ones (at least Japan and South Korea) are under pressure to do so. China is lining up suppliers outside the Persian Gulf. The $110 billion annual oil revenue is what keeps the Iranian religious dictatorship in power. As those new sanctions went into effect at the end of 2010, the value of the Iranian currency plummeted over ten percent and the Iranian economy shuddered.

Actually, in the last year, the Iranian currency has lost 60 percent of its value against foreign currencies. Now, it costs 16,000 Iranian riyals to buy one U.S. dollar. A year ago, it only cost 10,000. So not only are smugglers demanding higher fees to get forbidden goods to Iran (because of the increased risk of getting caught and prosecuted), but it costs 60 percent more to buy foreign currency to pay the smugglers, or legitimate suppliers of goods. All this grief doesn't get much attention in the foreign press, but in Iran it's big and seemingly unending bad news. Iran also sees income cut by ten percent because of additional banking sanctions, which makes it riskier to do business with Iran (and not have your transaction seized for violating sanctions.)

The new sanctions will not be completely successful, but if Iranian oil income were cut by a third or more, most Iranians would feel it. Iran has responded with threats, saying it will close the Straits of Hormuz (the narrow entrance to the Persian Gulf, where 40 percent of world oil passes on its way to world markets). Another aspect of the new sanctions makes it more difficult (and expensive) for Iranian banks to operate overseas. Iranian economists and financial experts have convinced Iran's leaders that the new sanctions are worse than any previous ones and a real threat to the Iranian economy, and the survival of the religious dictatorship.

So the new sanctions have teeth, or will have if they're imposed rigorously. How will the Iranians respond? Strategy Page lays out the likely scenario:

Iran has long issued dire threats, and never followed through. Iran much prefers to operate in the shadows by quietly supporting terrorists and irregulars. Iran could use this approach by using submarines and small boats to plant naval mines in the Straits of Hormuz. This would quickly escalate as local and foreign navies moved in mine-clearing forces, along with warships and aircraft to protect the continuous mine-clearing operation. Iranian bases would be attacked to destroy the mines and delivery vehicles (small subs and boats). This would quickly escalate to an attack on all Iranian military equipment.

That is not likely to happen any time soon, as it will take months before the sanctions actually translate into significant lost Iranian oil sales. During that time, negotiations, many of them secret, will take place with Iran about nuclear weapons, support for terrorism and other bad behavior.

Perhaps the one thing that will give the Iranian fanatics pause as they try to find a way to survive an all-out war such as the one that toppled Saddam Hussein is that they have precious few friends in the world, not even in the Middle East:

Iran's bad behavior (supporting terrorism, developing nuclear weapons, threatening neighbors) has left it with few foreign friends. China, one of its major trading partners, is its major customer for oil. But China has made it clear that if Iran finds itself with more oil than customers, China will expect to pay less for Iranian oil, if only to compensate for any sanctions damage China might suffer.

Russia is another Iranian ally, but will not do much to help, because closing, or even trying to close, the Straits of Hormuz will be a bonanza for Russia, a major oil exporter that does not use the Straits of Hormuz. Oil prices will surge as long as there are problems at the Straits of Hormuz. Other Iranian friends, like North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, are more a burden than a benefit.

Iran is holding very few high cards in this poker game. The smart thing to do would be to fold and follow the Libyan example of giving up nuclear aspirations. Unfortunately, fanatics don't always do the smart thing, and even when they do they often push matters to the very brink before they pull back.

There are other factors working against Iran. For instance, our pullout from Iraq has opened up Iraqi airspace making it much easier for Israeli warplanes to reach Iranian targets. Will Israel avail themselves of the opportunity?

Another is the coming presidential election. How will Mr. Obama's electoral prospects bear on what we do in Iran? If he's polling behind his opponent in October will he be more likely or less likely to launch a strike at Iran's nuclear facilities in order to gain a popularity surge?

My own feeling is that the Iranians will not back down and neither will the Israelis. In the end, neither will the U.S. The Iranians believe they're on a mission from God. The Israelis believe their survival is at stake, and the U.S. has said many times that we will not accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Given those three positions it's hard to see how the worst will be averted, unless there's a change in leadership in Iran.

Another Iranian Scientist Hit

You'd never know it from watching the news talk shows, obsessed as they are with Mitt Romney's machinations at Bain Capital, but we seem to be hurtling toward war with Iran. The Iranians are determined to build a nuclear weapon and, one hopes, we're determined to prevent it. The U.S. is now poised to impose tough sanctions on Iran which, if they do what they're supposed to do, will cripple Iran's already feeble economy.

Iran threatens to retaliate by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz which would block a lot of oil from getting from the wells to the market and cause oil prices to skyrocket around the globe. Of course, it would also shut down their own ability to sell oil which seems somewhat counterproductive.

In any event, the U.S. has vowed it will not let the Iranians close the Strait.

Meanwhile, Debkafile reports that yet another Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated in Tehran:

Forty-eight hours after Iran began advanced uranium enrichment in the fortified Fordo bunker near Tehran, Prof. Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, deputy director of the first uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was killed early Wednesday, Jan. 11 by a sticky bomb planted on his car by two motorcyclists. It exploded near the Sharif technological university in northern Tehran.

The pair made their escape. Prof. Ahmadi-Roshan was the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be mysteriously assassinated in Tehran in two years. The same method of operation was used in a similar operation last year. Iran has blamed them all on Israel.

There's more on this at the link. One wonders how deep the Iranian's bench of nuclear scientists is and how much it has to be attrited before the nuclear weapons program grinds to a halt.

One also wonders how these guys sleep at night knowing that they're probably on the list to be blown to smithereens, and that if they escape and are successful in building a nuke, it'll be used to blow a lot of children to smithereens. It must be as tough on the nerves as it is on the conscience, if they have one.

Anyway, perhaps the Iranians can be persuaded to give up their nuclear ambitions before it comes to war or before any more scientists are dispatched to Paradise, but there's not much grounds for optimism, I fear.

The Conflict

I've just finished reading Alvin Plantinga's latest book Where the Conflict Really Lies and recommend it enthusiastically to anyone interested in issues lying at the interface of science, philosophy, and religion. Plantinga is probably the most consequential philosopher of the last thirty years so whenever he speaks the entire philosophical community listens.

His project, as he makes clear several times throughout the book, is not to argue for the existence of God, nor to argue that atheism is false, nor to argue that evolution is bogus (he himself accepts the principle of descent through modification), but rather to argue that those who believe that science and religion (or more precisely, theism) are incompatible with each other are mistaken.

Indeed, he argues for much more than that. He mounts a persuasive case that whatever conflict there is between science and theism is superficial, but that there is profound conflict between science and naturalism - the belief, as Plantinga states it, that there is no God nor anything like God. He also wants to show that the concord between science and theism is deep while the concord between science and naturalism is superficial.

This will not surprise those who've been reading Plantinga for a while since he's been making this case in various venues for at least twenty years, but it'll come as a shock, perhaps, to many who've been inculcated with the idea that science and religion have been at war with each other ever since the Enlightenment.

Plantinga argues that the notion that evolution discredits theism is simply wrong. There's no conflict between evolution and theism. There is, however, great conflict between theism and unguided evolution, the idea that evolution is a purely fortuitous unplanned process governed only by natural forces. The belief that evolution is unguided in this sense, however, is not any part of proper science. It's metaphysics. It's an entailment of naturalism.

Moreover, naturalistic evolution is incompatible with confidence that our cognitive faculties (our reason) are reliable. If unguided evolution is a fact then we have no grounds for trusting any belief that we hold including the belief that unguided evolution is a fact. One can be an atheist (or naturalist), or an evolutionist, or believe that his reason is trustworthy, but he can't hold all three positions at the same time.

Plantinga has been making this argument for a long time and he's at his persuasive best in Conflict. Since the theory of evolution is a major pillar of modern science and since it's virtually impossible to dispense with confidence in our cognitive faculties, it seems that the conflict is between science and any metaphysics which entails the conclusion that we can't trust our cognitive faculties. That is, the conflict is really between science and naturalism.

This is not the place to lay out Plantinga's argument in detail, so I encourage anyone interested in these issues and who has read a little bit of philosophy to read the book for themselves. It's very accessible to the layman and constitutes one of the best rebuttals to the New Atheists on the market today. It can be ordered from our favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds.

Tebow

For those, like me, who are reveling in how Tim Tebow is making his detractors look like chuckleheads, I offer this little diversion from our usual fare:

Moral Confusion, Logical Consistency

In an excellent piece at The Algemeiner Rabbi Moshe Averick analyzes the statements of four prominent atheistic thinkers with regard to the Jerry Sandusky pederasty allegations and finds that none of them have any basis for deploring or condemning what Sandusky is accused of doing. The interesting thing is that all but one of them admits it.

After clarifying precisely what he will claim in his argument Rabbi Averick examines the moral philosophy (and confusions) of philosophers Michael Ruse, Jason Rosenhouse, and Joel Marks as well as biologist Jerry Coyne, all four of whom have been discussed here at VP over the last couple of years.

He begins with Ruse who wants to have it both ways. Ruse says in several places that morality is a purely subjective phenomenon, but then in the wake of the Sandusky revelations he insists that "I want to say that what Jerry Sandusky was reportedly doing to kids in the showers was morally wrong, and that this was not just an opinion or something based on subjective value judgments. The truth of its wrongness is as well taken as the truth of the heliocentric solar system.”

How can he say this? What does he base it on? Actually, as his fellow atheists point out and Rabbi Averick explains, he bases it on nothing more substantive than that he simply feels very strongly that abusing young boys is wrong.

Coyne, Rosenhouse and Marks are more faithful to their fundamental assumption that there is no God. They just deny that pedophilia is really wrong. Here's Marks, for example:

Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.

He further explains his position in this passage:

The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. [Some atheists] would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Averick closes his post with a plea to atheists:

The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.

Atheism stands for nothing, signifies nothing, and affirms nothing except for one thing: All the moral aspirations of the advanced primate we call a human being are nothing more than a cosmic joke….and not a very funny one at that.

Ideas have consequences. Some people think that there's no difference between theists and atheists except that theists go to church, synagogue or mosque and believe a lot of crazy things. Nothing could be further from the case. There's a wide chasm between the two worldviews and Averick highlights it in this column.

The atheist has no basis for making moral judgments other than his own subjective, arbitrary feelings and tastes. When the atheist says pederasty is wrong he's saying nothing more than "I don't like pederasty." Any judgment based on one's personal tastes, however, has no more moral force than saying "I don't like sushi and you shouldn't like it either." One's personal preferences certainly don't make something morally wrong.

Here's the difficulty the atheist finds himself in: If there is no God then Sandusky's pedophilia is not morally wrong, but most atheists feel deep inside themselves that pedophilia is morally wrong. Thus they hold two mutually incompatible beliefs at the same time. Their problem is compounded in that despite holding simultaneous incompatible beliefs they also hold the belief that they're somehow more rational than the theist.

As more and more atheists realize where their disbelief logically leads them they find themselves confronted with the choice of either abandoning their disbelief or embracing moral nihilism which, as Averick notes, dooms them to a man-made hell of the human jungle where not even the sexual abuse of children can be said to be wrong.

Do read Rabbi Averick's post and also the comments. Some of them afford excellent examples of missing the point and other failed attempts to avoid the force of the rabbi's argument.

Does the Future Belong to Islam?

In a recent column Pat Buchanan gives reason to answer this question either way. First some reasons to think the answer is yes:

If demography is destiny, the future would seem to belong to Islam.

Consider. The six most populous Muslim nations — Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Turkey — had a total population of 242 million in 1950. By 2050, that 242 million will have quintupled to 1.36 billion people.

Meanwhile, Europe’s fertility rate has been below zero population growth since the 1970s. Old Europe is dying, and its indigenous peoples are being replaced by Third World immigrants, millions of them Muslim.

But there are also reasons for thinking the answer is no:

[T]here is another side to the Islamic story.

In international test scores of high school students in reading, math and science, not one Muslim nation places in the top 30. Take away oil and gas, and from Algeria to Iran these nations would have little to offer the world. Iran would have to fall back on exports of carpets, caviar and pistachio nuts.

Not one Muslim nation is a member of the G-8 economic powers or the BRIC-four emerging powers — Brazil, Russia, India, China.

In the 20th century, the world saw the rise of the Asian “tigers” — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong. Where are the Muslim tigers?

A few years back, the gross domestic product of the entire Arab world was only equal to Spain’s. Take away oil and gas, and its exports were equal to Finland’s.

Measured by manufacturing power, the Islamic world, though more populous, cannot hold a candle to China. And while Islam was a civilization superior in some ways to the West from the 7th to 17th century, somewhere that world began to stagnate and decline.

So the question arises: If Islamism is capturing Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, and will capture other Muslim nations as the Arab Spring advances, where is the historic evidence that these Islamic regimes can convert their states into manufacturing and military powers?

Where is the evidence that Islamist regimes, such as Sudan and Iran, can deliver what their peoples demanded when they brought down the dictators?

And if, like the communist regimes of the 20th century, they cannot deliver the good life that the rebels sought when they dumped the tyrants, what will follow Islamism, when Islamism inevitably fails?

In the long run, does Islamism really own the future of the Islamic world? Or has the clock begun to run on the fundamentalists as well?

The only way the Islamic world could come to dominate the world would be if an effete West simply decides it doesn't want to fight for its culture, which is certainly a possibility. Otherwise, the Islamic world will be a force to reckon with only so long as it has oil.

After the oil is gone, or it becomes available elsewhere, the strict uniformity of thought - religious, scientific, and political - imposed by Islamic authorities will stifle any incipient advance, and the loss of oil revenue will cause the rest of the Islamic world to revert to the same levels of poverty which prevail in those countries, like Afghanistan, which have no petroleum.

The crucial question is whether the West has the will to resist the Islamic quest for world domination until that happens.

Do We Have Free Will? (Pt. II)

Biologist Jerry Coyne, an atheist, wrote a column for USA Today in which he teases out the implications of an atheistic worldview for our belief in human free will. I shared some thoughts on the article on Saturday and would like to finish those up today.

Coyne argues that atheism, or metaphysical naturalism, entails that there is no free will as it is commonly understood. In other words, at every given moment there really is only one possible future and the conviction that we really were free to choose other than what we did choose is an illusion.

Toward the end of his column he talks about the implications of his denial of free will for our belief that we're morally responsible for the choices we make:

But the most important issue is that of moral responsibility. If we can't really choose how we behave, how can we judge people as moral or immoral? Why punish criminals or reward do-gooders? Why hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions aren't freely chosen?

We should recognize that we already make some allowances for this problem by treating criminals differently if we think their crimes resulted from a reduction in their "choice" by factors like mental illness, diminished capacity, or brain tumors that cause aggression. But in truth those people don't differ in responsibility from the "regular" criminal who shoots someone in a drug war; it's just that the physical events behind their actions are less obvious.

But we should continue to mete out punishments because those are environmental factors that can influence the brains of not only the criminal himself, but of other people as well. Seeing someone put in jail, or being put in jail yourself, can change you in a way that makes it less likely you'll behave badly in the future. Even without free will then, we can still use punishment to deter bad behavior, protect society from criminals, and figure out better ways to rehabilitate them. What is not justified is revenge or retribution — the idea of punishing criminals for making the "wrong choice." And we should continue to reward good behavior, for that changes brains in a way that promotes more good behavior.

Set aside the objection that, given determinism, there is no "good" or "bad" behavior, just behaviors that we like or don't like. Still, Coyne never addresses the important point. If determinism is true not only are reward and punishment never deserved, but moral outrage is absurd. The man who tortures children and then kills them is not immoral. Those who let others starve while indulging themselves to excess are not immoral. The person who legally bilks the elderly out of their life savings is not immoral. There's no moral duty not to do any of these things.

None of those things are wrong because to be wrong an act has to be in some sense freely chosen by the agent. If a "choice" is merely the result of fermions and bosons spinning about in someone's brain then there simply is no moral responsibility.

It's understandable why Coyne would finesse this point by raising it and then changing the subject to crime, though. If he were to follow the logic of his claim that we can't hold people morally responsible for their actions most of his readers would be repelled by his conclusion and thus repelled by the atheism that leads to it.

Is Romney Worse Than Obama?

One of the left's criticisms of presidential candidate Mitt Romney is that his work at Bain Capital resulted in people losing their jobs. In order to make their business clients stronger in the long-run real people were sacrificed. This is cited as proof that Romney is heartless and ill-suited to be president.

It's an amusing ploy as A. Barton Hinkle, in a column at Reason shows. It turns out that this very criticism of Romney, that he eliminated some jobs in order to make his clients stronger and better off in the end, is precisely the same rationale that the left uses to justify the loss of jobs in the fossil fuel industries.

Hinkle notes that:

[J]ust a couple of weeks ago the AP reported that “more than 32 mostly coal-fired power plants in a dozen states will be forced to shut down and an additional 36 might have to close because of new federal air pollution regulations.” That estimate is based “on the [EPA]’s own prediction of power plant retirements.” When a plant shuts down, people lose their jobs – regardless of whether the job losses are offset by gains elsewhere.

In other words, forcing people out of work is okay when government does it in the name of improving human well-being, but it's a terrible thing when a private firm does it in order to make their business more efficient. Hinkle goes on to say that:

The Center’s overview notes that green-energy cheerleading includes “no analysis of job destruction due to increased cost of energy.” Furthermore, “there is no effort to balance the potential positive impacts with potential negative impacts of job destruction and higher energy costs. In a sense, these studies are cost-benefit analyses without any cost considerations.”

Now, you can argue—the EPA certainly does—that environmental regulations which force coal plants to shut down make society better off in the aggregate. You also can argue ... that while environmental rules might cause job losses over here, they are more than offset by job gains over there. And you can likewise argue that, in the long run, Americans will all be better off if Washington forces the country to embrace green energy.

Just remember: If you do argue those things, then you are making the same point Romney makes about the “creative destruction” of leveraged buyouts: Over the long term, it makes everybody better off—despite the temporary “human toll.”

Here's Hinkle's conclusion:

There is one major difference, however. If you disapprove of what Bain and other venture-capital firms do to companies, you don't have to support it. That's one of nice things about free enterprise: You're free to choose. But if you disapprove of what the federal government's energy policies do to companies, too bad. You're going to take part—whether you like it or not.

During the campaign candidate Obama promised, essentially, to destroy the coal industry. If Romney were to say something like this the media would be apoplectic over the number of jobs people would lose:

For more on the human consequences of the president's war on fossil fuels see this article at Prison Planet.

Do We Have Free Will?

One of the enduring philosophical questions is the nature of human volition or choice. Are our choices really free, as we feel them to be, or are they the inexorable product of our genetic dispositions or the environmental influences exerted on us throughout our lives? If our choices, or at least some of them, really are free what does that mean? What exactly is a free choice? Is it completely uncaused and spontaneous? If so, in what sense can we be responsible for it?

If, on the other hand, our choices are determined by factors over which we have no control it doesn't seem we could be responsible for them either. Moreover, if our choices are the inevitable result of extrinsic factors like our childhood upbringing, etc. then how can there be an obligation to behave one way rather than another? How can we have a duty to do anything unless we can make a meaningful decision to do it?

Biologist Jerry Coyne is an atheistic materialist who shares his thoughts on this matter in a column in USA Today. According to Coyne atheism entails determinism, and this has very important consequences. I think he's right. Here's part of his column:

You may feel like you've made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your "will" had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year's resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you'll have no choice about whether you keep them.

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation. A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing." And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.

Coyne is correct, I believe, if his implied assumption that brains are all that are involved in the choices we make is correct, but why think it is? If, in addition to our brains, we are also possessed of an immaterial mind (or soul) then all this talk about physics determining our choices is so much flummery. In order for Coyne's argument to have any force one would have to accept his materialism, but in order to accept materialism Coyne would have to persuade us that there's no immaterial mind and this task he doesn't assay. He just assumes it as though it were a settled matter. It's not.

Parenthetically, it's odd that he suggests that our brains, like real computers, are programmed by blind forces like genes and experiences. Real computers are programmed by minds and would hardly function, let alone evolve, were they solely operated and designed by random, purely physical forces.

In any case, we have an overwhelming sensation of being free. That sensation - Coyne calls it an illusion - would seem improbable if materialism is true but not so unlikely if we, in fact, have an immaterial aspect to our selves, a mind or soul. A mind or soul, however, would seem to be less probable on atheism than on theism. Thus, our sense that we are free seems more likely to be correct if theism is true than if atheism is true. That's why atheists like Coyne are anxious to persuade us that we're not free.

In other words, if you believe you are able to make choices that are in some sense free, if you believe that at least at some moments in time there is more than one possible future, then you should be a theist of some sort. Your belief in free will is much less likely to be true if atheism is true. The sensation of being free counts as evidence for theism and against atheism, and the belief that one really is free comports more easily with theism than with atheism.

I'll have a bit more to say on Coyne's column on Monday.

Racist Undertones

Columnist Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times offers what seems like a parody of how liberals think about race and racism but which is evidently a serious column. Rosenthal writes:

Talking about race in American politics is uncomfortable and awkward. But it has to be said: There has been a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years, and in this dawning presidential campaign.

Rosenthal is apparently one of those folks who sees racists behind every tree. I like when he says "it has to be said." This is what people often say by way of patting themselves on the back for their courage and resolve when they're about to say something that no one in their circle would object to.

You can detect this undertone in the level of disrespect for this president that would be unthinkable were he not an African-American.

Surely he's not serious. Does he think no Republican would disrespect, say, Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi, or even Bill Clinton the way President Obama has been disrespected? Is it really "unthinkable"? Rosenthal offers us examples:

Some earlier examples include: Rep. Joe Wilson shouting “you lie” at one of Mr. Obama’s first appearances before Congress, and House Speaker John Boehner rejecting Mr. Obama’s request to speak to a joint session of Congress—the first such denial in the history of our republic.

We pause to gasp at the indignity of it. This is what passes for evidence of racism in the minds of people like Rosenthal? Newt Gingrich just called Mitt Romney a liar and nobody thought that was racism, but perhaps that's because they're both white. Then again, lots of black commentators accused George Bush of lying about WMD in Iraq, but that's different, too. It's only racism, we're supposed to believe, when whites do it to blacks, not when blacks do it to whites. If you don't understand that then you must be a political Neanderthal.

More recently, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, in a conversation overheard at Reagan National Airport in Washington, said of Michelle Obama: “She lectures us on eating right while she has a large posterior herself.” He offered a lame apology, but as Mary C. Curtis put it on the Washington Post’s new blog She the People: “Can you imagine how the incident would play out if an African American congressman made a crude remark about First Lady Laura Bush’s body? It certainly would have taken more than an insincere apology to wash that sin away.”

Someone in private conversation is overheard to comment unfavorably on the dimensions of Mrs. Obama's gluteous and we're to think this reveals latent racism lurking in his heart? Is Rosenthal serious? Any crude remark about a black person's butt is ipso facto a racial affront. Would it be racism, a "sin," if a black man were to joke about Hillary's hair style or the shape of her legs?

By the way, I'm curious as to what criticism anyone could utter about Laura Bush's body?

This ugly strain was crudely evident in the “birthers” and their ridiculous demands that Mr. Obama produce his birth certificate to prove that he was American, and not secretly an African Muslim.

For Mr. Rosenthal it's a reliable indicator of racism if anyone should want a black candidate to meet the same constitutional eligibility requirements as anyone else who aspires to serve as president. It would be okay, presumably, to question the citizenship of a white candidate were that in doubt, but any misgivings about a black candidate are simply beyond the pale (no pun intended).

Blacks, Mr. Rosenthal implicitly argues, should not be held to the same standards as whites. Who among us would even hesitate if asked to show their birth certificate to insure there was no question about one's identity, and why is it "ridiculous" to be suspicious of someone who does refuse to show it? Mr. Rosenthal doesn't tell us.

Just the other day here in Iowa, Mitt Romney’s son, Matt, said his father might release his tax returns “as soon as President Obama releases his grades and birth certificate and sort of a long list of things.” The younger Mr. Romney later backtracked, either because he was sincerely chagrined, or, perhaps more likely, because he recognized that it could hurt his father.

Again, why, exactly, is it racist to ask to see a black man's college grades? Didn't the liberal media make a big deal about George Bush's mediocre academic record at Yale (until they discovered that John Kerry's was worse)? Why is it okay to scrutinze a white candidate's record but not that of a black candidate? Does Mr. Rosenthal assume that Barack Obama's grades would be embarrassing? If so, why would he make that assumption?

Sometimes the racism is more oblique.

More oblique? More oblique than what Rosenthal has already given us?

Newt Gingrich was prattling on the other day about giving “poor children” in “housing projects” jobs cleaning toilets in public schools to teach them there is an alternative to becoming a pimp or a drug dealer. These children, he said, have no work ethic. If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t get that poor kids in housing projects is code for minorities, he or she hasn’t been paying attention to American politics for the last 50 years. Mr. Gingrich is also fond of calling Mr. Obama “the greatest food stamp President in American history.”

So it's racist for Mr. Gingrich to think that poverty, joblessness, and the need to develop work skills is especially acute among minorities? Does Rosenthal deny that minorities are in special need of such skills? Does he really think that black kids are generally on par with white kids in terms of what they see as their future employment opportunities? If not, why does he even bring this up?

Is Mr. Romney playing the same chords when he talks about how Mr. Obama wants to create an “entitlement society”? The president has said nothing of the sort, and the accusation seems of a piece with the old Republican saw that blacks collect the greatest share of welfare dollars.

Reading Rosenthal induces cognitive vertigo. He says above that Romney criticizes entitlements and insists that this is beyond any doubt a racist remark because Republicans associate entitlements with blacks, and since Romney doesn't want an entitlement society, he obviously doesn't like blacks, even though it's not true that entitlements only go to blacks, but Romney probably thinks they do, so there's proof that he's a racist. QED.

Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 was a triumph of American democracy and tolerance. He overcame incredible odds to become the first president of mixed race, the first brown-skinned president. It’s pathetic that some Republicans are choosing to toss that milestone into the garbage in their blind drive to destroy Mr. Obama’s presidency.

What's pathetic is the logical deficiencies in Mr. Rosenthal's thinking. It seems that he cannot imagine that people would really object to Mr. Obama's desire to spend this nation into bankruptcy and to crush us with taxes. For him such objections are inconceivable. They're a smokescreen hiding more nefarious motives. Mr. Obama's opponents don't really see him as a threat to the well-being of the nation nor do they care about the national debt, the unemployment numbers, the growing size of government and the erosion of freedom. What they really care about, Rosenthal assures us, is that the president's skin is brown.

Mr. Rosenthal is still living in the twentieth century, but let's turn this around. It seems evident that it's people like him who don't care about the debt, unemployment, bloated government and freedom. If they did care about these things, why on earth would they support Mr. Obama? Could it be that he's their hero just because his skin is brown?

Isn't that racist?

The New Old-Time Religion

Chunkdz at Telic Thoughts provides the transcript of a podcast by the BBC reporter Michael Buerk who was covering the Climate Summit in Durban, South Africa. I think he sums up pretty well what a lot of people think about Anthropogenic (man-caused) Global Warming (AGW). Here's what he said:

The latest so-called Climate Summit, that’s been taking place in Durban, hasn’t made many waves. It could be because global warming seems less daunting if you can no longer afford heating bills. It could also be that we’re getting fed up with the bogus certainties and quasi-religious tone of the great climate change non-debate.

Now, I don’t know for certain that man’s activities are causing the planet to heat up. Nobody does. We simply cannot construct a theoretical model that can cope with all the variables.

For what it’s worth, I think anthropogenic warming is taking place, and, anyway, it would be a good thing to stop chucking so much bad stuff into the atmosphere.

What gets up my nose is being infantilized by governments, by the BBC, by the Guardian that there is no argument, that all scientists who aren’t cranks and charlatans are agreed on all this, that the consequences are uniformly negative, the issues beyond doubt and the steps to be taken beyond dispute.

You’re not necessarily a crank to point out that global temperatures change a great deal anyway. A thousand years ago we had a Mediterranean climate in this country; 200 years ago we were skating every winter on the Thames.

And actually there has been no significant rise in global temperatures for more than a decade now.

We hear a lot about how the Arctic is shrinking, but scarcely anything about how the Antarctic is spreading, and the South Pole is getting colder.

Droughts aren’t increasing. There are fewer of them, and less severe, than a hundred years ago. The number of hurricanes hasn’t changed, the number of cyclones and typhoons has actually fallen over the last 30 years.

And so on.

There may be answers, I think there probably are – to all these quibbles – I would like to hear them.

I don’t want the media to make up my mind up for me.

I don’t need to be told things by officialdom in all its forms, that are not true, or not the whole truth, for my own good.

I resent the implication that the exercise of my reason is “inappropriate”, an act of generational selfishness, a heresy.

I want a genuine debate about the assumptions behind the more apocalyptic forecasts.

As recently as 2005, for instance, the UN said there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010. That was last year.

OK – so where are they?

I would like to hear a clash of informed opinion about what would actually be better if it got warmer as well as worse.

Where do you see reported the extraordinary greening of the Sahel, and shrinking of the Sahara that’s been going on for 30 years now – the regeneration of vegetation across a huge, formerly arid swathe of dirt poor Africa. More warming means more rainfall. More CO2 means plants grow bigger, stronger, faster.

I would like a real argument over climate change policy, if only to rid myself of the nagging feeling that sometimes it’s a really good excuse for banging up taxes and public-sector job creation.

It’s not happening. It’s a secular issue but skepticism is heresy.

They talk the language of science, but it is really a post-God religion that rejects relativist materialism. Its imperative is moral.

It looks to a society where some choices are obviously, and universally held to be, better than others. A life where having what we want is not a right and nature puts constraints on the free play of desires.

To reinvent, in short, a life where there is good and bad, right and wrong.

As with all religions, whether the underlying narrative is true, has become beside the point.”

No matter how hard people try to rid their lives of religious faith it keeps coming back in forms they don't even recognize.

Inflaton Fields, Multiverses, and Fine-Tuning

In the video below physicist Bruce Gordon gives a very informative 25 minute presentation on cosmic fine-tuning, inflation and the multiverse. Dr. Gordon emphasizes that the latter two theories raise more problems than they solve. It's a very helpful video despite the film quality, despite the fact that Gordon isn't an electrifying speaker, and despite the irritatingly low threshhold that humor must attain to trigger the laughter of one member of the audience.

Watch it to the end, especially if cosmology is something that interests you.

The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory & The Multiverse - Dr. Bruce Gordon from Philip Cunningham on Vimeo.

The Logical Conclusions of Atheism

Alex Rosenberg is a philosopher of science at Duke who has written a book in which he calls upon his fellow metaphysical naturalists (i.e. atheists) to face squarely the implications of their worldview. The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, in a somewhat choleric critique, summarizes those implications as Rosenberg presents them in his book. Here's Wiesltier:

Is there a god? No. What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is. What is the purpose of the universe? There is none. What is the meaning of life? Ditto. Why am I here? Just dumb luck. Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding? Is there free will? Not a chance! What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them. Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral. Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes. What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it. Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.”

I take this cutting-edge wisdom from the worst book of the year, a shallow and supercilious thing called The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, by Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher of science at Duke University. The book is a catechism for people who believe they have emancipated themselves from catechisms. The faith that it dogmatically expounds is scientism. It is a fine example of how the religion of science can turn an intelligent man into a fool.

Rosenberg is an explicit exponent of a view called scientism, the view that science provides us with the only methodology for answering any questions that matter. According to scientism if a question can't be answered by the scientific method then it can't be answered at all. Indeed, there are no facts which are not scientific facts. Wieseltier elaborates:

Rosenberg arrives with “the correct answers to most of the persistent questions,” and “given what we know from the sciences, the answers are all pretty obvious.” (I have cited most of them above.) This is because “there is only one way to acquire knowledge, and science’s way is it.”

And: “Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality.” All that remains is to choose the wine.

Wieseltier concludes with this summation:

This shabby book is riddled with other notions that typify our time. Rosenberg maintains that atheism entails materialism, as if the integrity of the non-material realms of life can be secured only by the existence of a deity. Reason does not move him, no doubt because of the threat it poses to the physicalist tyranny ....

Rosenberg is untroubled by such complications. He is untroubled by everything under the sun. The man’s peace of mind is indecent. “We know the truth,” he declares sacerdotally in his preface. “Some of the tone of much that follows may sound a little smug. I fear I have to plead guilty to this charge ...” Once upon a time science was the enemy of smugness.

Actually, Wieseltier's umbrage precludes him from giving Rosenberg the credit he deserves. In my view he's being completely consistent. If atheism is true then materialism is more likely than not. Wieseltier thinks that one can be an atheist and still rationally believe in the trustworthiness of reason, a meaning to life and the cosmos, the objectivity of moral duties, but it's hard to see how such beliefs could be warranted given atheism. It would be nice if Wieseltier would give us an argument for his rather than simply venting his spleen at Rosenberg who is simply "drawing the full conclusion from a consistently atheistic position" to quote Sartre.

Anyone who doesn't like what Rosenberg is saying can choose to reject Rosenberg's logic or reject his atheism. To embrace atheism while rejecting Rosenberg's logic is, in my opinion, to abandon reason and make an irrational leap of faith. It's to choose to live life as one wishes it to be and not as it is.

At any rate, for anyone who might be interested, I critiqued Rosenberg's views in a series of posts about a year and a half ago. Part I in the series is here. Go here for the second installment and here for the conclusion.

Is Darwinism a Cult?

Philosopher of science Cornelius Hunter thinks so:

One day while walking to the life science library I was stopped by a cultist who wanted me to join. Having spoken with cultists before, I was able to explain his problems to him. The cult’s beliefs entailed several obvious contradictions, its leaders had well-documented ulterior motives, and so forth. But the fellow was undeterred. He was certain that his cult held the truth, in spite of the obvious problems.

Later I thought about some of the things he said. They revealed even more problems and I wished I had pointed them out. A few weeks later I saw him again and so I engaged him in conversation. Not only were there the problems I pointed out the first time we had spoken, but now I added several more. But again, the fellow was undeterred.

People have a remarkable capacity to hold bizarre beliefs. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not referring to beliefs that are not provable or don’t adhere to some logical formula. I’m referring to beliefs that are downright false. The cultist I spoke with was sure, and it is this unjustified certainty that revealed the problem, not the beliefs themselves. Who knows, maybe his cult did hold the truth, but his reasons provided little confidence. Between his assurance and his facts there was a wide chasm.

It is the same with evolution.

Hunter goes on to explain why he says this. I don't know that Darwinians comprise a cult, but they sure do seem dogmatic given the quality of their arguments.

It should be noted that a Darwinian is one who believes that the process of evolution is a completely physical, natural process requiring no intelligent agency at any point. Not all evolutionists are Darwinians but all Darwinians are evolutionists. Hunter doesn't make this distinction clear in his post, but rather tacitly conflates evolution, which could be an intelligently guided process, with Darwinian evolution which is not.

Movies in 2011

I didn't get to watch as many movies in 2011 as I might have liked but many of those I did see were very good and/or quite enjoyable. Here's the list. Four stars indicates excellent, three is good, two is not really worth watching, and one is avoid at all costs. Thankfully, there are no ones:

The Tree of Life *** A film about the meaning of life, I think.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days **** The gripping story of a young woman whose faith and courage in resisting the evil of Nazi Germany made her a national heroine.

The Rite *** Interesting depiction of possession and exorcism in the Catholic Church and how a faltering young priest has his faith restored by his experience with it.

Mugabe and the White African *** A documentary of one family's brave fight to save their farm from Mugabe's expropriation of land from white landowners in Zimbabwe.

True Grit *** A good remake of the classic John Wayne story of a young girl's courage and determination to gain justice for her father's murder. Much better acting than in the original.

Harry Brown ** A Death Wish-style movie of a retiree's attempt to avenge his friend's murder by street thugs.

About Schmidt *** A retired insurance salesman seeks to find meaning in a life filled with absurdity. Darkly funny but tragically sad.

The King's Speech **** Excellent telling of the battle waged by King George VI to overcome a speech impediment.

Waiting for Superman **** A documentary about the difficulty young urban kids have trying to escape deteriorating public schools and get a safe, quality education in private and charter schools. A must-see for every parent and educator.

Secretariat *** The moving story of the legendary racehorse.

Inception *** Mind-bending sci-fi tale that raises fascinating questions about the distinction between subjective and objective reality.

Unthinkable *** A must-see film for anyone trying to decide, or has decided, his or her position on the use of torture.

Avatar *** The story is diminished for me by its obeisance to the tired trope of evil Americans killing off peaceful, bucolic indigenous peoples and despoiling the natural beauty of the world.