Galston on Americans' Religious Beliefs

William Galston, currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, served in the Clinton administration and in the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale and Al Gore. He's written a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he reflects on American exceptionalism and cautions his fellow Democrats against disregarding the religious sentiments of the American people that are largely responsible for it:

Although this phrase [American exceptionalism] is much abused in partisan polemics, it should not be discarded. The United States does continue to differ from most other developed democratic countries. And the heart of that difference is religion. The durability of American religious belief refutes the once-canonical thesis that modernization and secularization necessarily go hand in hand....

It's common to hear modern western society described as post-Christian, but Galston cites statistics to indicate that this isn't quite accurate, at least not in the U.S.:

[D]espite the enormous growth in the nation’s diversity over the past 225 years, Christian conviction remains pervasive.

If you doubt this, take a look at the survey the Pew Research Center released without much fanfare two weeks ago. Among its principal findings: 73% of U.S. adults believe that Jesus was born to a virgin; 81%, that the baby Jesus was laid in a manger; 75%, that wise men guided by a star brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh; and 74%, that an angel announced the birth of Jesus to shepherds. Fully 65% of Americans believe all four of these elements of the Christmas story, while only 14% believe none of them.

Although Republicans are more likely to espouse these beliefs than are Democrats and Independents, each group endorses them by a two-thirds majority or more. As expected, conservatives are more likely to espouse them than are moderates and liberals. But here again, majorities of each group endorse each belief. Among liberals, 54% profess a belief in the virgin birth.

What about the growth of secular thought in young Americans? As the Pew report dryly notes, there “is little sign of a consistent generation gap on these questions.” That’s an understatement. Seventy percent of adults age 18 to 29 believe that Jesus was born to a virgin; 69% that an angel announced his birth; 80% that he was laid in a manger; and 74% that the wise men made their gift-laden trek.

To be sure, the most-educated Americans are less likely to profess belief in the Christmas story. But even among adults with postgraduate degrees, 53% affirm the virgin birth of Jesus, with comparable or larger majorities for the story’s other elements.

All of this may be true, but what it suggests, I think, is that Americans live in a manner very inconsistent with what they profess to believe. Majorities of Americans may cling to the traditional Christmas story, perhaps for sentimental reasons, but an awful lot of us evidently live as though the significance of that story were irrelevant to modern life.

In any case Galston issues a warning to his colleagues on the left:

These public beliefs have constitutional consequences. When it comes to church and state, many Americans are soft rather than strict separationists. When asked whether religious symbols like Christian nativity scenes should be permitted on government property, 44% said yes, whether or not the symbols of other religions are present. An additional 28% said that Christian symbols would be acceptable only if accompanied by symbols of other faiths. Only 20% took the position that no religious symbols should be allowed.

Democrats should pay careful attention to these findings. In reaction to the excesses of the religious right in recent decades, many secularists and strict separationists took refuge in the Democratic Party. Their voices are important. But if the party takes its bearings only from their concerns, it risks serious misjudgment.

I'm not sure what the excesses were to which Galston alludes, nor do I think that whatever they were they were the motivating factor driving secularists into the arms of the Democrat party, but, nevertheless, skeptics and their philosophical allies have indeed taken up residence there, and their views have come to dominate the party's agenda. Even those who claim to be religious subordinate their religious views to the ambitions of the secular wing of the party.

Many Americans believe that religion has a legitimate if limited role in public life—including politics. Many Americans believe that it is wrong—not always, but usually—for laws and regulations to coerce individuals contrary to their conscientious beliefs. As Democrats pursue new policies in areas from health care to equal rights, they should work hard to minimize their intrusion on these convictions.

They should, but it's doubtful that they will. Much of the Democrat party stands for too many things the opposition to which comes almost exclusively from those whose convictions are informed by their religion. Abortion on demand and gay marriage are just two examples. Put differently, Democrat policies have, wittingly or unwittingly, facilitated the erosion over the last few decades of sexual restraint, the traditional family, the importance of work, individual liberty, and religious freedom. This is why many religious people tend to be conservatives and gravitate to the Republican party.

It's not that they like everything Republicans stand for, but rather that they see Republicans as their only realistic hope, short of divine intervention, for arresting the progressive statist juggernaut that threatens to steamroller them.

Why Dads Matter

One of the chief concerns of many Americans, including those who are socially liberal, is domestic violence and abuse. The irony of this concern is that the high rates of domestic turmoil we've witnessed over the last several decades may largely be the result of successful attempts by liberals to weaken the traditional family structure.

W. Bradford Wilcox at The Federalist has a column in which he in effect makes the politically incorrect claim that the safest place in our society for women and children is in a home in which the biological father is present. He writes:

[V]iolence against women (not to mention their intimates and children) is markedly rarer in families headed by married parents regardless of how well-off or well-educated mom is. We can speculate about the precise mechanisms—is it the commitment, the stability, the mutual support, the kinship ties, or the sexual fidelity marriage fosters more than its alternatives?—that accounts for this empirical link. But what should be clear to analysts willing to follow the data wherever it leads is this: a healthy marriage seems to matter more than money when it comes to minimizing the scourge of domestic violence in American families.

Wilcox develops his argument by citing a study that includes this graph:

The disparity depicted in this chart is rather startling. Wilcox adds:

[H]omes headed by never-married, separated, or divorced mothers are about five times more likely to expose children to domestic violence, compared to homes headed by married, biological parents. What’s more: family structure outweighs education, income, and race in predicting the odds that children witness domestic violence in the home.

Women and children are in much greater jeopardy when the male in the household is not married to the woman than when the male is the woman's husband and the father of her children. The left has been telling us since the sixties that the traditional family is an oppressive, patriarchal social structure that women and children are often better off without and that other arrangements are at least as conducive to their flourishing as is the traditional structure. Well, we've largely abandoned the traditional structure, the data are in, and the results are not anything the left is likely to boast about.

Who's Angry?

I have to say that as one who considers himself moderately conservative, I cringe when listening to some of the major voices on talk radio. Some conservative talkers too often sound shrill and angry. I thought of this the other day reading a piece by James K.A. Smith a philosopher at Calvin College and the editor of the journal Comment. I like Smith's work and have enjoyed and profited from reading several of his books, but in the course of his editorial in which he made the case for redeeming and refashioning conservatism as a more sunny sort of ideology I felt vaguely miffed.

Smith wrote (subscription required):

...those Christians who trumpeted their 'conservatism' just seemed so, well, angry. Their demeanor felt more like reactionary warfare than charitable hospitality. In many ways their moral crusades demonized the people we went to college with and the causes our friends care about. What they decried as ominous threats and menaces had names and faces for us: they were our classmates, our teammates, our roommates - and we liked them, loved them. For a host of reasons, then, we shouldn't be surprised that the default posture for a new generation is leftish, perhaps without realizing it.

When I asked myself why I was bothered by this several thoughts came to mind at once. First, it seems like the only people on the ideological spectrum who are ever described pejoratively as angry are conservatives. If a black liberal or a liberal woman is angry, then their anger is "righteous." If the talking heads at MSNBC look like they're about to burst a carotid artery, well, they have good cause to be outraged considering what those right-wing extremists in Congress are trying to do to our sainted president's agenda. Indeed, has Smith never read the writers and academics on the left who talk about "hating" Republicans, conservatives, and George W. Bush? Who on the right talks that way? When someone like Ann Coulter traipses close to the line she's repudiated and reproved for it by other conservatives.

A second reason I was somewhat consternated by Smith's criticism is that although it certainly does apply to two or three radio talkers, there's far more humor and good cheer on the contemporary right than on the left. Think of the work of Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, P.J. O'Rourke, Jim Geraghty, and many others and compare them to the utter desert of mirth that is liberal/left journalism. Has Smith never opened the pages of the Nation which is the most humor-deficient political magazine on the American newsstand? Car and Driver is funnier to read. For that matter, has he never listened to a Hillary Clinton speech and compared it to, say, a Mike Huckabee peroration?

Third, Smith unwittingly insults his friends and loved ones whom he claims are driven left, not by rational analysis of the ideologies of right and left, not because they've taken the trouble to think seriously about the ramifications of liberal and conservative policies, but because they're put off by personalities, of all things. Smith makes these people whom he says he loves sound like they have the maturity of a bunch of middle-schoolers.

Finally, it occurred to me that if some conservatives are angry, just maybe they have good reason to be. Are we not assured that if women and African-Americans are angry their anger is totally justified because they see themselves treated like second-class citizens, they see their "rights" under assault? Yet conservatives see the country they love being dismantled and the values they cherish being discarded and presumably they're supposed to put on happy faces and yuk it up with the people doing all the damage.

As I said above, I agree with Smith that the tone of people like Mark Levin or Michael Savage is counterproductive, and I agree that it's not something a Christian should be comfortable with, but it's hardly a problem unique to the right, and I find it a little annoying when it's insinuated, implicitly or explicitly, that it is. If he keeps writing like this it may push me toward being a little "leftish," perhaps without realizing it.

The Cosmological Argument

One of the classical arguments for the existence of God is called the Cosmological argument. The name refers to the fact that the argument is based on the existence and/or nature of the cosmos (it was first called the Cosmological argument by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century in his Critique of Pure Reason).

There are many variations of the argument. Here's one that's been championed in recent years by philosopher William Lane Craig. It's simple, easy to understand, and enjoying renewed popularity:

UPDATE: Several days ago I cited a column by Eric Metaxas in the Wall Street Journal in which Metaxas expressed his amazement at the examples of fine-tuning scientists have discovered to pervade the universe and which he attributed to a Cosmic Designer. Since then, atheistic cosmologist Lawrence Krauss has responded in a letter to the editor criticizing Metaxas' column.

Another cosmologist, the Australian Luke Barnes, has weighed in on his blog Letters from Nature. He faults Metaxas for sloppiness (though I don't think Barnes' criticisms affect Metaxas' overall argument) and faults Krauss for just being wrong. Readers interested in the exchange are invited to follow the links Barnes provides.

Cosmic Fine-Tuning

One of the most impressive arguments for the existence of an Intelligent Designer behind the universe is the extraordinary precision with which so many of the parameters, forces and constants that comprise the structure of our universe are set. The precision is so fine that should the value of any one of them have deviated from its actual value by the most unimaginably tiny amount the universe would either not have formed, or not have lasted, or not be the sort of place that could sustain life.

I suspect that 99.9% of the people who have lived on this planet have had no idea how incredibly improbable it is that such a universe as ours could have come into being.

Anyway, I came across a short video the other day which does an excellent job of illustrating this. The video is accessible to any reasonably intelligent, educated, and interested viewer and is only a few minutes long. Despite its brevity it provides a great education on the topic of cosmic fine-tuning. Give it a look:

2014's List of Books

In keeping with established precedent here's a list of books I completed in the year just past with a sentence or two of description:

1. Knowing Christ Today (Dallas Willard): A contemporary examination of who Jesus Christ is and was.
2. Coming Apart (Charles Murray): A sociological study of the increasing divergence in attitudes between upper and lower class whites toward traditional values.
3. The Rebel (Albert Camus): A study in European nihilists and nihilism.
4. Human Traffic (Craig MacGill): A look at the worldwide problem of human trafficking.
5. The Possessed [2nd reading](Fyodor Dostoyevsky): Dostoyevsky's novel about 19th century Russian leftist anarchists.
6. The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): An allegorical account of innocence in the midst of a materialist superficial culture.
7. The Fault in Our Stars (John Green): A rather implausible story of two teenagers both afflicted with cancer.
8. Crime and Punishment [2nd reading](Fyodor Dostoyevsky): Dostoyevsky's classic treatment of a man who believes himself beyond the slave morality categories of good and evil. Dostoyevsky guides the reader through the man's fall and redemption.
9. The Pursuit of God (A.W. Tozer): A classic in Christian devotional literature.
10. Poor Folk (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): An exchange of letters between an impoverished man and the similarly poor younger woman he loves illustrating both the hopelessness of their condition and of his love for her.
11. Who's Afraid of Relativism (James K.A. Smith): Smith defends postmodern epistemological relativism.
12. How (Not) to be Secular (James K.A. Smith): A helpful commentary on philosopher Charles Taylor's massive work A Secular Age.
13. Return to Life (Jim Tucker): Fascinating accounts of young children who apparently have memories of events that occurred long before they were born.
14. Nothing to be Frightened of (Julian Barnes): Barnes' amusing and thoughtful meditation on death. Written from an atheistic point of view.
15. The Book Thief (Marcus Zusak): A novel about a girl living in Munich toward the end of WWII and how she coped with the war.
16. How the West Won (Rodney Stark): Stark enumerates the virtues of western civilization and why it has achieved cultural ascendancy.
17. Quantum Enigma [2nd reading](Rosenblum and Kuttner): A lucid and fascinating introduction to the mysteries of quantum mechanics.
18. Finite and Infinite Goods (Robert M. Adams): A fairly technical treatment of Adams' version of Divine Command ethics.
19. Five Views on Apologetics (S. Cowen, ed.): Five approaches to Christian apologetics by practitioners of each.
20. Flags of Our Fathers (James Bradley): An account of one man's experiences during the WWII battle for Iwo Jima.
21. Diary of a Superfluous Man (Ivan Turgenev): The diary by a man who has a few days left to live as he recounts incidents of his life.
22. The Divine Comedy (Dante Alighieri): Dante's famous journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Highly recommended that anyone reading this work do so with a commentary in hand.
23. The House of the Dead (Fyodor Dostoyevsky): A novel based on Dostoyevsky's own experiences in a Russian prison camp.
24. The Broker (John Grisham): A novel set in Italy read enroute to Italy to get me in the mood for my visit.
25. The Harbinger (Jonathan Cahn): A book by a rabbi who finds current events foretold in the book of Isaiah.
26. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh): A novel about life among the British upper crust in the early years of the 20th century.
27. Ameritopia (Mark Levin): Levin traces the history of utopian ideas and discusses how these same ideas are extant today among contemporary statists.
28. From Union Square to Rome (Dorothy Day): Dorothy Day's account of her conversion from atheistic communism to devout, socially-conscious Catholicism.
29. Scholastic Metaphysics (Ed Feser): A treatment of the metaphysics of Aristotle, Aquinas, and their medieval successors.
30. Mysteries of the Middle Ages (Thomas Cahill): Fascinating details of of the lives of some figures whose names are often the only thing about them that appears in our history books.
31. Morality: It's Critics and Defenders (Timm Triplett): A fictional series of student discussions on ethics.
32. Being as Communion (William Dembski): A metaphysical analysis of information and the difficulties it poses for naturalism.
33. Bonhoeffer (Stephen Nichols): A look at Bonhoeffer's Christian beliefs.
34. True Paradox (David Skeel): A collection of arguments in support of the Christian faith.
35. This Town (Mark Leibovitch): An amusing exposé of the foibles and conceits of the Washington elite.
36. Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson): A wonderful book written by a man who has given his life to providing legal and emotional support to poor people on death row in Alabama.
37. Bad Religion (Russ Douthat): An account of the decline of the Christian church from the years prior to WWII up to the present. Douthat prescribes what he thinks is needed to reverse the decline.

I wish you all much personal growth and accomplishment in 2015.

Superintelligence

We've run a few posts here at VP lately which talk about reasons for believing that the conditions necessary to permit the emergence and persistence of advanced life may be exceedingly rare in the cosmos and that intelligent life may exist only on one solitary planet in the entire cosmos, ours.

There are some philosophers and scientists, however, who still think that there must be many planets out there which exhibit the properties necessary for life and among these thinkers are those who believe that many of those planets must host civilizations much older and far more technologically advanced than ours.

This line of thinking has led some like Nick Bostrom to assume that at some point computers would be built by a race of beings so incredibly brilliant that they'd be able to program their machines to run simulated universes much like your computer can run a simulation of a medieval battle. Indeed, Bostrom argues that it's likely that we ourselves are living in one such simulation.

Others believe that technology must be so far advanced elsewhere in the universe that computers have replaced brains and that the intelligence of these silicon-based creatures is to human intelligence as human intelligence is to the intelligence of a goldfish. Motherboard has an interesting, though highly speculative piece on this theory. Here are a few excerpts:

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers — outside the realm of science fiction, that is — have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program....

Schneider argues that given the fact that alien civilizations that we might come in contact with would be vastly older than our own they'd likely be far more technologically advanced than we are. According to Schneider:

Everything about their cognition — how their brains receive and process information, what their goals and incentives are — could be vastly different from our own. Astrobiologists need to start thinking about the possibility of very different modes of cognition.

There’s an important distinction here from just ‘artificial intelligence.’ I’m not saying that we’re going to be running into IBM processors in outer space. In all likelihood, this intelligence will be way more sophisticated than anything humans can understand.

The reason for all this has to do, primarily, with how old those civilizations may be. Seth Shostak explains:

As soon as a civilization invents radio, they’re within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI. At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model.

The way you reach this conclusion is very straightforward. Consider the fact that any signal we pick up has to come from a civilization at least as advanced as we are. Now, let’s say, conservatively, the average civilization will use radio for 10,000 years. From a purely probabilistic point of view, the chance of encountering a society far older than ourselves is quite high.

One question all this raises is whether any kind of artificial intelligence could be conscious in any meaningful sense. Schneider acknowledges the possibility that it's not, but thinks that consciousness could nevertheless arise in superintelligent artificial beings.

I believe the brain is inherently computational — we already have computational theories that describe aspects of consciousness, including working memory and attention. Given a computational brain, I don’t see any good argument that silicon, instead of carbon, can’t be an excellent medium for experience.

Be that as it may (I'm skeptical), the article addresses several other interesting questions. One of them is whether superintelligent aliens would care to contact us. Schneider and Shostak don't think it's likely. Here's Shostak:

If they were interested in us, we probably wouldn’t be here. My gut feeling is their goals and incentives are so different from ours, they’re not going to want to contact us.

I’d have to agree with Susan on them not being interested in us at all. We're just too simplistic, too irrelevant. “You don’t spend a whole lot of time hanging out reading books with your goldfish. On the other hand, you don’t really want to kill the goldfish, either.

I have my doubts about this, too. Suppose we had the chance to study some earlier evolutionary precursor to human beings (assuming for the moment such precursors existed), some australopithecine apes, for example. Would we not want to examine these more primitive species and perhaps communicate with them if we could? Would we not be fascinated by the prospect of gaining more clues as to where we came from and how we arrived where we are? Why think the super-advanced creatures out there would not be curious enough to want to treat us as living fossils to be studied for clues about their own ancestry?

Anyway, like I said above, as interesting as all this is, it's highly speculative. So far, after decades of searching, there's absolutely no evidence of any life anywhere else but earth. That doesn't mean there's none out there, but as of now there's little reason, as opposed to faith and hope, that there is.

NYPD Work Stoppage

It appears that the NYPD has decided that for whatever reasons it's not going to go out of its way to enforce minor infractions of the law such as illegally selling loose cigarettes. Apparently the officers have decided that if one unfortunate bungled arrest attempt resulting in tragedy is going to bring down the wrath of a sizable number of protestors and the contempt of their boss, Mayor de Blasio, then why risk it? The following is from the New York Post's report:

It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage.

NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety, The Post has learned.

Angry union leaders have ordered drastic measures for their members since the Dec. 20 assassination of two NYPD cops in a patrol car, including that two units respond to every call.

It has helped contribute to a nose dive in low-level policing, with overall arrests down 66 percent for the week starting Dec. 22 compared with the same period in 2013, stats show.

Citations for traffic violations fell by 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587, during that time frame.

Summonses for low-level offenses like public drinking and urination also plunged 94 percent — from 4,831 to 300.

Even parking violations are way down, dropping by 92 percent, from 14,699 to 1,241. Drug arrests by cops assigned to the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau — which are part of the overall number — dropped by 84 percent, from 382 to 63.

Police sources said Monday that safety concerns were the main reason for the dropoff in police activity, but added that some cops were mounting an undeclared slowdown in protest of de Blasio’s response to the non-indictment in the police chokehold death of Eric Garner.

“This is not a slowdown for slowdown’s sake. Cops are concerned, after the reaction from City Hall on the Garner case, about de Blasio not backing them.” The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association has warned its members to put their safety first and not make arrests “unless absolutely necessary.”

The lack of police protection doesn't extend to felonious behavior, for which the people of New York can be thankful, but if it did we'd be able to witness an interesting experiment. Throughout the protests of the last days angry protestors and pundits have frequently alleged that people in black neighborhoods live in fear of the cops. Perhaps so, and if so, it should not be so, but if the police were to stop protecting the people who say they fear them what would ensue? What would these neighborhoods look like if all the thugs, miscreants, rapists, and thieves that inhabit them knew that they could perpetrate their depredations on the innocent with impunity?

If the police did limit their presence in these neighborhoods we'd get a chance to see who it is the people really fear. How long would it be before the citizens of these neighborhoods would be pleading with the "racist" cops who "don't care about black people" to come back and risk their lives to protect them from the predators in their midst?

They might not like or appreciate the cops, they might not like being hassled on occasion, but they have far more cause to fear their own neighbors than they do to fear the cops, and if they don't know that I suspect they'd learn it pretty quick were the police to simply stop responding to calls in those precincts. In other words, the real problem, the real threat, to black kids in cities all across the country is not racist cops, though there probably are some, the real threat is other black kids. That's what Mayor de Blasio should have cautioned his son about, that's what the protestors should be demonstrating about, and that's what the talking heads on tv should be addressing.

Theory of Everything

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking is perhaps the most famous living scientist, famous not only for his brilliance but also for his decades long battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. What's less well-known, perhaps, is that Hawking, an atheist, had been married until the mid-nineties to a woman named Jane who is a devout Christian.

A movie based on his life has just been released titled A Theory of Everything which is a reference to the holy grail of cosmologists: a single equation that would tie together both relativity and quantum mechanics and unite the four fundamental forces in a single force. Fr. Robert Barron at Real Clear Religion has some interesting things to say about the movie which he describes as "God-haunted."

In one of the opening scenes, the young Hawking meets Jane, his future wife, in a bar and tells her that he is a cosmologist. "What's cosmology?" she asks, and he responds, "Religion for intelligent atheists." "What do cosmologists worship?" she persists. And he replies, "A single unifying equation that explains everything in the universe." Later on, Stephen brings Jane to his family's home for dinner and she challenges him, "You've never said why you don't believe in God." He says, "A physicist can't allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator," to which she deliciously responds, "Sounds less of an argument against God than against physicists."

This spirited back and forth continues throughout the film, as Hawking settles more and more into a secularist view and Jane persists in her religious belief. As Hawking's physical condition deteriorates, Jane gives herself to his care with truly remarkable devotion, and it becomes clear that her dedication is born of her religious conviction.

Their relationship is reminiscent of that between Charles Darwin, who was an agnostic, and his wife Emma who was devout, and is interesting on its own, but the more important part of Barron's piece is what he has to say about how the science Hawking (and Darwin) loved so deeply was actually the product of a Christian worldview:

[I]t is by no means accidental that the modern physical sciences emerged when and where they did, namely, in a culture shaped by Christian belief. Two suppositions were required for the sciences to flourish, and they are both theological in nature, namely, that the world is not divine and that nature is marked, through and through, by intelligibility.

As long as the natural world is worshiped as sacred - as it was in many ancient cultures - it cannot become the subject of analysis, investigation, and experimentation. And unless one has confidence that the world one seeks to analyze and investigate has an intelligible structure, one will never bother with the exercise. Now both of these convictions are corollaries of the more fundamental doctrine of creation. If the world has been created by God, then it is not divine, but it is indeed marked, in every nook and cranny, by the intelligence of the Creator who made it.

Hawking's pursuit of what scientist's call the TOE (Theory of Everything) serves to illustrate Barron's point:

In light of these clarifications, let us look again at the central preoccupation of A Theory of Everything, namely, Hawking's quest to find the one great unifying equation that would explain all of reality.... Why in the world would a scientist blithely assume that there is or is even likely to be one unifying rational form to all things, unless he assumed that there is a singular, overarching intelligence that has placed it there? Why shouldn't the world be chaotic, utterly random, meaningless? Why should one presume that something as orderly and rational as an equation would describe the universe's structure?

Why, indeed, is the universe the sort of place that discloses its secrets to reason and logic? Why is it intelligible? Barron and many other scientists and philosophers, both past and present, have argued that the intelligibility of the universe is much more probable given the belief that the universe was created by an intelligent agent than on the assumption that it's the product of sheer chance. Moreover, since reason instructs us to always believe what is more likely than what is less likely the rational position is to incline toward the view that the universe is the product of an intelligent creator.

It seems remarkable, at least to me, that so many people, brilliant people like Stephen Hawking, accept that principle in every precinct of their personal philosophy and professional endeavors except when it comes to God. In that one sector of their intellectual life they for some reason set the principle aside.

I wonder how they'd explain that.

Science and the Case for God

Recently I've posted several pieces on Viewpoint on how many aspects of the solar system and the earth must be just as they are in order for intelligent life to arise and persist on the earth (Here, here and here). Eric Metaxas has an essay in the WSJ (subscription required unless you google his name and the title) titled Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God in which he expresses his astonishment at how exquisitely engineered not only the solar system but the entire universe must be in order for creatures like us to exist.

Metaxas writes:

In 1966 ... astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 21 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.

In light of these calculations it seemed obvious to everyone that other intelligent beings were out there and that it was just a matter of time and effort before we detected their presence. Sagan's ideas were the inspiration for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project and also for the movie Contact. It began in the 60s but, as Metaxas puts it:

[A]s years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis—0 followed by nothing. What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

In other words, the earth, and the intelligent life it sustains, may be unique in the universe. For anyone who absorbed their science from shows like Sagan's Cosmos in the 60s through the 80s when it was simply assumed that life would be abundant in the universe this is a jaw-dropping conclusion. Metaxas goes on:

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here.

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart....The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are. How do we explain it? Or, as Metaxas asks,

Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

I agree with Metaxas' point, but in the eyes of the materialist he's got things a bit backward. The materialist might counter Metaxas' implied conclusion by insisting that there is no God and thus, since we're here, the coincidences, as amazing as they are, must have occurred. Metaxas, in other words, sees these coincidences as clear evidence of intentional design, the materialist doesn't, or maybe more accurately, chooses not to.

Metaxas is astonished by the evidence of fine-tuning exhibited not only by the earth but by the whole universe:

There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp(See here for a couple of even more incredible examples).

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” Theoretical physicist Paul Davies [an agnostic] has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

The sorts of facts Metaxas musters in WSJ have been circulating among scientists and philosophers for about two decades now and many books have been written about them. The fact that the arguments are making their way into more popular venues like newspapers means that more non-academics will be exposed to the impressive cumulative argument they make for the existence of intelligence as the ontological source of the cosmos. That can only be a good thing.

The Secular Life

My friend Byron passed along a link to Susan Jacoby's discussion in the New York Times of a book by Phil Zuckerman titled Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions. Jacoby's review serves up several examples of missing the point. As an atheist herself Jacoby is eager to defend Zuckerman's thesis that one can live a life that's just as morally good, or better, than that of any theist. Belief in God, both Jacoby and Zuckerman aver, is not necessary for the moral life. She writes:

Many years ago, when I was an innocent lamb making my first appearance on a right-wing radio talk show, the host asked, “If you don’t believe in God, what’s to stop you from committing murder?” I blurted out, “It’s never actually occurred to me to murder anyone.”

In addition to the usual tendentious use of the word "right-wing" whenever a progressive is referring to anything to the right of the mid-line on the ideological highway, her answer to the question is a non-sequitur. The host is obviously asking her what, in her worldview, imposes any moral constraint on her. To answer that it never occurred to her to do such a thing as murder is to duck the question. The question is on what grounds would she have thought murder to be morally wrong if it had it occurred to her to commit such a deed? She continues her evasions when she says this:

Nonreligious Americans are usually pressed to explain how they control their evil impulses with the more neutral, albeit no less insulting, “How can you have morality without religion?”

We might want to pause here to ask why Ms Jacoby feels insulted that someone might ask her what she bases her moral values and decisions on. Is it insulting because she's being asked a question for which she has no good answer? Anyway, after some more irrelevant filler she eventually arrives at the nub of Zuckerman's book:

[Zuckerman] extols a secular morality grounded in the “empathetic reciprocity embedded in the Golden Rule, accepting the inevitability of our eventual death, navigating life with a sober pragmatism grounded in this world.”

Very well, but why is it right to embrace the principle that we should treat others the way we want to be treated but wrong to adopt the principle that we should put our own interests ahead of the interests of others? Is it just that it feels right to Zuckerman to live this way? If so, then all the author is saying is that everyone should live by his own feelings. In other words, morality is rooted in each person's own subjective behavioral preferences, but if that's so then no one can say that anyone else is wrong about any moral matter. If what's right is what I feel to be right then the same holds true for everyone, and how can I say that others are wrong if they feel they should be selfish, greedy, racist, dishonest, or violent? Just because I, or Susan Jacoby, feel strongly that such behaviors are wrong that surely doesn't make them wrong. Jacoby seems unaware of the difficulty, however:

The Golden Rule (who but a psychopath could disagree with it?) is a touchstone for atheists if they feel obliged to prove that they follow a moral code recognizable to their religious compatriots. But this universal ethical premise does not prevent religious Americans (especially on the right) from badgering atheists about goodness without God — even though it would correctly be seen as rude for an atheist to ask her religious neighbors how they can be good with God.

This paragraph is unfortunate for at least three reasons. First, Jacoby's insinuation that only a moral pervert would reject the Golden Rule (GR) is a case of begging the question. She's assuming the GR is an objective moral principle and then asks how anyone could not see it as such, but the notion that there are objective moral principles is exactly what atheism disallows. Indeed, as indicated above, it's what Zuckerman and Jacoby both implicitly deny.

Second, the fact that someone can choose to live by the GR is not to the point. Anyone can live by whatever values he or she chooses. The problem for the atheist is that she cannot say that if someone disregards the GR and chooses to live selfishly or cruelly that that person is doing anything that is objectively wrong. In a Godless world values are like selections on a restaurant menu. The atheist can choose whatever she wants that suits her taste, but if her companion chooses something she doesn't like that doesn't make him "wrong."

Third, Jacoby seems to imply that belief in God doesn't make one good, and in fact makes it hard to be good. This is again beside the point. One can believe in God and not know what's right. One can believe in God and not do what's right. The point, though, is that unless there is a God there is no objective moral right nor wrong. There are merely subjective preferences people have to which they are bound only by their own arbitrary will.

Morality requires a transcendent, objective, morally authoritative foundation, a foundation which has the right to impose moral strictures and the ability to enforce them. That is, it requires a personal being. If no such being exists then debates about right and wrong behavior are like debates about the prettiest color. They're no more than expressions of personal taste and preference.

Jacoby unwittingly supplies us with an interesting example from which to elaborate on the point:

Tonya Hinkle (a pseudonym) is a mother of three who lives in a small town in Mississippi....Her children were harassed at school after it became known that the Hinkles did not belong to a church. When Tonya’s first-grade twins got off the school bus crying, she learned that “this one girl had stood up on the bus and screamed — right in their faces — that they were going to HELL. That they were going to burn in all eternity because they didn’t go to church.”

Jacoby thinks this was awful, as do I, but why does Jacoby think that what these children did to Tonya's children was wrong - not factually wrong but morally wrong? She might reply that it hurt the little girl, and so it did, but on atheism why is it wrong to hurt people? Jacoby, falling back on the GR, might say that those kids wouldn't want someone to hurt them. Surely not, but why is that a reason why it's wrong to hurt others? How, exactly, does one's desire not to be hurt make it wrong to hurt others? All an atheist can say by way of reply is that it violates the GR, but then she's spinning in a circle. Where does the GR get it's moral authority from in a godless universe? Is it from social consensus? Human evolution? How can either of these make any act morally wrong?

At this point some people might reply that it's wrong to hurt others because it just is, but at this point the individual has abandoned reason and is resorting to dogmatic asseverations of faith in the correctness of their own moral intuitions - sort of like some of those obnoxious fundamentalists might do.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is, though, that, on atheism, if those kids can hurt Tonya's children and get away with it, it's not wrong, it's only behavior Jacoby doesn't like, and we're back to right and wrong being measured by one's personal feelings.

It's a common error but an error nonetheless when non-theists like Jacoby and Zuckerman seek to defend the possibility of moral values while denying any transcendent basis for them, and it's peculiar that Jacoby feels insulted when she's asked to explain how she can do this.

Another atheist, Robert Tracinski at The Federalist, makes a related mistake in an otherwise fine discussion of the thought of philosopher Ayn Rand. Tracinski explicitly acknowledges that most thoughtful atheists, at least those on the left, embrace moral subjectivism. He writes:

Probably the most important category [Rand] defied is captured in the expression, “If God is dead, all things are permitted.” Which means: if there is no religious basis for morality, then everything is subjective. The cultural left basically accepts this alternative and sides with subjectivism (when they’re not overcompensating by careening back toward their own neo-Puritan code of political correctness).

This is mostly correct except that I'd quibble with his use of the term "religious basis." Morality doesn't require a religious basis, it requires a basis that possesses the characteristics enumerated above: It must be rooted in an objectively existing moral authority - personal, transcendent and capable of holding human beings responsible for their choices. The existence and will of such a being - God - may or may not be an essential element of a particular religion.

Tracinski, then says that:

The religious right responds by saying that the only way to stem the tide of “anything goes” is to return to that old time religion.

This, too, is wide of the mark. It's not necessarily a return to "old time religion," or any religion, for that matter, which is needful for eliminating the subjectivity of moral judgments. It's a return to a belief that the world is the product of a morally perfect being who has established His moral will in the human heart and who insists that we follow it, i.e. that we treat others with justice and compassion.

Those beliefs may be augmented by a belief in special revelation and by the whole edifice of the Christian (or Jewish, or Islamic) tradition, but the core belief in the existence of the God of classical theism is not by itself "religious" at all. That core belief may not by itself be a sufficient condition for an objective morality but it is necessary for it.

Which is why people ask the question Jacoby finds so insulting. Put a different way, it's the question how an atheist can avoid making right and wrong merely a matter of personal taste. If that sort of subjectivity is what the secular life entails then its votaries really have nothing much to say, or at least nothing much worth listening to, about matters of right and wrong.

For Christmas Eve

Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children - rather it's the sense of mystery surrounding the Incarnation. The magic is a by-product of the belief that Christmas celebrates a miracle, the Creator of the universe deigning to become one of His creatures so that in the fullness of time He and His creatures could enjoy each other forever.

It's that belief, affirmed by Christians for 2000 years, that's so awe-inspiring and which fills us on Christmas with an ineffable sense of love and being loved, a sense that makes the whole experience of Christmas Eve tingle with magic.

The secular, commercial world has drained much of that excitement from the night by pretending the source and meaning is irrelevant. All the talk of Santa Claus, ads for cars, beer, movies and phones, all the insipid secular "holiday" songs, none of these do anything to touch people's hearts or imaginations. They don't inspire awe. Christmas Eve is sterile and empty without the message of the Gospel and the conviction that this night is special, not because of the office Christmas party, last minute shopping, or Home Alone reruns, but because it's a night haunted by the presence of God and set apart for the delivery of the greatest gift in history.

Here are two traditional Christmas pieces that capture some of the magic, mystery, and power of this night. I hope you enjoy them and hope, too, that each of you has a wonderful, meaningful Christmas and a very special 2015:



It might be best just to listen to this next one without watching it since the video is a bit out of synch with the audio:

Thoughts on the Murder of Ramos and Liu

When Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords was shot a few years ago the left was all over the media blaming what they called the "incendiary rhetoric" of conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh for creating a climate that encouraged acts of violence. Now that two New York Police officers have been gunned down by a black murderer will the same folks who were so sure that the relatively anodyne comments of Palin and Limbaugh were responsible for the Giffords tragedy now be insisting that Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, the New York City protestors who demanded dead cops, and Mayor Bill DiBlasio all be blamed for the murders of these officers? Don't hold your breath.

When masses of people march through the streets of the city shouting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!", when the attorney general of the nation and the mayor of the city both use rhetoric the logic of which indicts police officers for the deaths of people they're trying to arrest, when ignorant, ill-educated people are encouraged by provocateurs to think that cops are deliberately killing black men because they're black, then the blood of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu is not only on on the hands of the man who pulled the trigger but, according to the logic of those who blamed conservatives for the Giffords shooting, also on those of the people who contributed to a climate in which people feel justified in hating cops.

I'm personally reluctant to make the connection between rhetoric and deed in every case, but the semi-literate moral morons who celebrated the murder of these two officers on twitter willfully accept upon themselves a share of the moral guilt for these murders. To applaud the act is to dip one's own hands in the victims' blood. It is also to declare publicly that one is an execrable human being.

We've heard much in the media about how black lives matter, the subtext being that blacks are frequently killed by white police just because they're black. Indeed, no story on the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner failed to mention that these men were killed by white police officers (or a "white Hispanic" in the case of George Zimmerman). Yet as I watched the reports of the murders of Ramos and Liu on MSNBC the race of the shooter was scarcely mentioned. Why not? Is race only relevant when a black man is killed by a white man? When whites kill blacks is it ipso facto an act of racism, but when blacks kill whites it's something different?

In fact, as was stated in an earlier post, police are more likely to be murdered by blacks than vice versa and blacks are infinitely more likely to be killed by other blacks than by police. Why are there massive protests in the wake of the Garner and Brown deaths but not in the wake of the hundreds of black kids (on average, 40 a month) gunned down by other blacks just in Chicago alone every year?

If the deaths of Garner and Brown point to a serious problem in the prevailing racial attitudes among whites, as numerous commenters have alleged, what do the murders of Ramos and Liu point to? Why are there no calls to seriously probe the racism among blacks in our society?

Mayor DiBlasio publicly criticizes his police rather than support them and is then stunned when police are gunned down on the streets of Brooklyn. Why? In the wake of the Eric Garner death DiBlasio pontificated about having to have "the talk" with his son who is a racially mixed young man. Blacks frequently mention the need to have "the talk" with their sons, cautioning them to be leery of the police, as if "the talk" was a burden only blacks must bear, but it's not. My father had "the talk" with his sons as well. My father instructed my brothers and me that if ever we were stopped by the police to be courteous and respectful. Do whatever they tell you to do. Don't give them a reason to make your life difficult. I suspect that a lot of white fathers in the neighborhood I grew up in between Chester and south Philadelphia in Pennsylvania had the same talk with their sons.

When DiBlasio, the cops' boss, tells the world that he had to give similar advice to his son because his son is African American he implied that a lot of the cops in his city were racists looking for an excuse to bring the hammer down on black kids. Not only was it a public insult to the police of New York it's the sort of statement that feeds into the anger of those who would wish the police harm.

No wonder the cops turned their backs on him when he gave a press conference following the deaths of Ramos and Liu.

When people begin to hold themselves to the same standard of behavior to which they hold their ideological opponents we'll begin to see less polarization in our politics. When people stop making racism the first explanation for every tragedy and offense and begin making it the last, and when everyone, no matter their race, is held to the same standards and set of expectations, we'll begin to see less polarization between the races in our society.

What Is a Memory?

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor raises an interesting question, one that many of us might never think to ask. What, exactly, is a memory? A secondary question might be how does a materialist metaphysics account for memories?

Egnor begins by arguing that contrary to popular belief, and even the belief of many neuroscientists and philosophers, the brain doesn't actually "store" memories. In fact, he claims, it can't store memories:

It's helpful to begin by considering what memory is -- memory is retained knowledge. Knowledge is the set of true propositions. Note that neither memory nor knowledge nor propositions are inherently physical. They are psychological entities, not physical things. Certainly memories aren't little packets of protein or lipid stuffed into a handy gyrus, ready for retrieval when needed for the math quiz.

The brain is a physical thing. A memory is a psychological thing. A psychological thing obviously can't be "stored" in the same way a physical thing can. It's not clear how the term "store" could even apply to a psychological thing.

But what about storage as an engram, a pattern of electrochemical energy or proteins, that acts as a code for the information? Egnor doesn't think this explanation works either:

[C]onsider a hypothetical "engram" of your grandmother's lovely face that "codes" for your memory of her appearance. Imagine that the memory engram is safely tucked into a corner of your superior temporal gyrus, and you desire to remember Nana's face. As noted above, your memory itself obviously is not in the gyrus or in the engram. It doesn't even make any sense to say a memory is stored in a lump of brain. But, you say, that's just a silly little misunderstanding. What you really mean to say is that the memory is encoded there, and it must be accessed and retrieved, and it is in that sense that the memory is stored. It is the engram, you say, not the memory itself, that is stored.

But there is a real problem with that view. As you try to remember Nana's face, you must then locate the engram of the memory, which of course requires that you (unconsciously) must remember where in your brain Nana's face engram is stored .... So this retrieval of the Nana memory via the engram requires another memory (call it the "Nana engram location memory"), which must itself be encoded somewhere in your brain. To access the memory for the location of the engram of Nana, you must access a memory for the engram for the location for the engram of Nana. And obviously you must first remember the location of the Nana engram location memory, which presupposes another engram whose location must be remembered. Ad infinitum.

Now imagine that by some miracle...you are able to surmount infinite regress and locate the engram for Nana's face in your superior temporal gyrus (like finding your keys by serendipity!). Whew! But don't deceive yourself -- this doesn't solve your problem in the least. Because now you have to decode the engram itself. The engram would undoubtedly take the form of brain tissue -- a particular array of proteins, or dendrites or axons, or an electrochemical gradient of some specific sort -- that would mean "memory of Nana's face." But how can an electrochemical gradient represent a face? Certainly an electrochemical gradient doesn't look like grandma -- and even if it did, you'd have to have a little tiny eye in your brain to see it to recognize that it looked like grandma.

The engram is a code, but if so we need a key to decode it. How do we access the key? How do we remember where the key is stored in the brain? That memory must itself be coded somewhere in the brain which would require yet another memory to decode it, and so on:

And if you think that remembering your grandmother's face via an engram in your brain entails infinite regress, consider the conundrum of remembering a concept, rather than a face. How, pray tell, can the concept of your grandma's justice or her mercy or her cynicism be encoded in an engram? The quality of mercy is not [stored], nor can it be encoded. How many dendrites and axons for mercy?

You see the difficulty. We remember things all the time, but how often have we ever paused to ask ourselves what's going on when we remember? And whatever it is that's going on, how did such a highly specified and complex system evolve by random mutation and natural selection? And how are memories, like other aspects of consciousness (self-awareness, qualia, intentionality, free will), accounted for by a purely mechanical entity like a brain?

How then, you reasonably ask, can we explain the obvious dependence of memory on brain structure and function? While it is obvious that the memories aren't stored, it does seem that some parts of the brain are necessary ordinarily for memory. And that's certainly true....In some cases the correspondence between brain and memory is one of tight necessity -- the brain must have a specific activity for memory to be exercised. But the brain activity is not the same thing as the memory nor does it make any sense at all to say the brain activity codes for the memory or that the brain stores the memory.

For reasons such as Egnor calls to our attention some philosophers are rejecting the materialistic monism that has prevailed for the last century and a half and are returning for answers to some form or another of dualism. Dualism comes in many varieties but what they all share in common is the view that the material aspect of a human being - the brain in particular - is not all there is to us. Something else seems to be somehow involved in the phenomenon of consciousness. That something else may well be an immaterial but conscious mind.

If that's true then not only is materialism false but the Darwinians' explanatory difficulties have significantly increased. How can something immaterial be subject to the physical evolutionary mechanisms that are postulated to explain the development of the human species? How can an immaterial mind be produced by matter and physical influences? It's an enigma. At least for the naturalistic materialist.

Moral Equivalence

Whenever hostilities break out between Israel and the Palestinians we're often told that both sides are equally guilty, that there's some sort of moral equivalence between them. At Viewpoint we have rejected this idea since it seems clear to us and indeed to anyone who looks at the facts objectively that the Palestinians are the chief obstacle, maybe the sole obstacle, to peace in that region.

Yossi Klein Halevi wrote a column at the Wall Street Journal (Subscription required) on the day in which four Jewish worshippers were butchered by Palestinian terrorists who hacked them to death while they were at prayer in their synagogue. Halevi compares this tragedy with another 20 years ago and the comparison is instructive. The reactions to those two events tell us much about the sort of people the Palestinians have chosen to be their leaders and the sort of people the Israelis have elected to be theirs.

Halevi writes:

On the morning of Feb. 25, 1994, the Jewish holiday of Purim, Baruch Goldstein, a far-right activist living in the West Bank town of Kiryat Arba, entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and gunned down 29 Muslim men at prayer.

The horror within Israeli society was overwhelming and unequivocal. Speaking from the Knesset podium, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin excommunicated Goldstein from the people of Israel. The country’s two chief rabbis denounced the attack as a desecration of God’s name, the ultimate Jewish sin. The official publication of the West Bank settlement movement, Nekudah, denounced Goldstein, a settler, as a stain on its camp. Only a radical fringe sought to justify and explain the massacre as a response to Palestinian provocations.

Tuesday’s massacre by two Palestinian terrorists of four Jews at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue is the Palestinian Baruch Goldstein moment. Yet rather than respond with shame to the murder of those Jews, as well as of an Israeli police officer, the Palestinian reaction has ranged from reluctant condemnation to outright celebration. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, reportedly after being pressed by Secretary of State John Kerry, condemned the attack—even as he cited Israeli “provocative acts.” Less equivocal was Mr. Abbas’s adviser on religious affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, who said of the terrorists: “We are behind them. The leadership is with them.” Palestinians cheered in the streets of Gaza.

The Palestinians' reaction to this savagery is as distressing as it is disgusting. It's hard to maintain the notion that there's a moral equivalence between the two sides as long as crimes like this are celebrated.

Halevi closes with this: In an era of moral madness, in which much of the world judges Israel more harshly than it judges Hamas, this must be said: Nothing Israel does or doesn’t do is responsible for provoking young Palestinians to hack to death Jews in prayer. The provocation is Jewish prayer itself, the right of the Jewish people to live in its land.

One image from the synagogue massacre will haunt Jews for a long time to come. According to a medic on the scene, terrorists severed an arm wrapped in the straps of tefillin, the phylacteries in which religious Jews recite their morning prayers. That terrible image has reinforced the prevailing sense within Israeli society that the war against the state of Israel is only the latest phase of an old war against the Jews.

If you google Halevi's name you might be able to find the entire column. It's worth reading.

Campus Rape Culture

An editorial by Jim Wallis and Sandi Villareal of Sojourners on the topic of campus rape addresses some very important facts about the problem of sexual assault on our nation's colleges and universities.

It's predictable but disappointing that in the wake of the phony Duke Lacrosse team case and the more recent Rolling Stone mess some commentators are minimizing the problem of sexual assault on campus. This, it seems to me, is precisely the wrong response. The conclusion that should be drawn from these episodes is not that there's really no problem, but that it's absurd to assume, as the left enjoins us to do, that every report of an assault is true.

Even so, given the atmosphere of sexual licentiousness that's promoted by and pervades our popular culture, given, too, the easy access to alcohol and drugs on campus and their effect on students' inhibitions, and given the complete inability of a secular society to instill in young men (and women) any sort of moral governor of their appetites, it would be remarkable were there not a problem with sexual assault. Indeed, in the current cultural and moral climate one wonders how there could not be.

Nevertheless, one sentence in the Sojourner's piece is a bit jarring. The authors write:

Rape culture is living in a society in which your story is dissected rather than heard; it’s being told your inherent, God-given value begins to disintegrate once your story gets uncomfortable and its trajectory skewed.

I'm not sure how the authors intend this rather opaque passage to be understood, but it sounds like they're saying that it's wrong for people to examine the claims made by putative rape victims and instead everyone should assume their claims are true.

If this in fact is the intended meaning then I think the authors are going way too far. It's the job of the police, for example, to ascertain that a crime really has been committed. That requires asking sometimes uncomfortable questions and seeking out evidence. The accuser's word that someone assaulted her is simply and unfortunately not enough upon which to base charges that could ruin someone's life. Unlike most crimes, sexual assault sometimes leaves no real evidence, sometimes involves a lot of ambiguity, and often takes place where there are no witnesses. It's thus very hard to prove. It's also very hard for the wrongly accused young man to prove his innocence. Even if he can demonstrate that the claims are false his reputation is often in tatters just by virtue of having the charges made against him.

All of this is tragic, but it's why the authorities just can't accept uncritically the alleged victim's word for what happened.

Sojourners nentions that only 2% to 8% of assault allegations are false, but even if those figures are accurate that's certainly not a reason, by itself, to believe that any given allegation is true.

Young women are in a tough spot in our culture. They're urged to go along with the prevailing sexual winds, but those prevailing winds often lead to awful destinations (Read for example, Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, if you can stomach Wolfe's enthusiasm for vulgarity). When a young woman finds herself victimized by young men weaned on the pornographic ideas and images served up to them throughout their adolescence - young men, it might be added, who've been taught that they're simply animals engaged in the Darwinian imperative to mate and that their sexual urges should never be repressed - she has either to try to prove what may be very difficult to prove and risk public humiliation, or she must accept what happened to her and realize that she is a victim of a culture that has lied to both her and her assailant about what human beings are, what right and wrong is grounded in, and what sex is all about.

One thing we can be pretty certain about: The campus rape culture will never fade away until sexual morality is once again considered part of the will of the God who created sex. Failing that, young women will continue to be victimized and young men will continue to be both victims of false allegations and victimizers of young women whom they'll continue to see as sexual prey.

The Horror That Is ISIL

With all the news vying for our attention it's easy for yesterday's news to be quietly overtaken by other events and forgotten, but it hasn't gone away. One example is ISIL in Iraq and Syria. A pair of reports on today's Drudge Report warn us that the horrors of radical Islam are still with us and remind us what lies in store for any people who come under the rule of these savages.

The first is a story by Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon. Kredo informs us that ISIS has released a penal code to which everyone in the territories it has subjugated must submit. It's unimaginably brutal. It imposes the death penalty for blasphemy against Allah, Mohammed, or Islam in general. Adultery is punishable by stoning if the adulterer was married and 100 lashes if he/she was not. Homosexuality, spying on behalf of unbelievers, murder and stealing are all punishable by death, the latter two by crucifixion. It should be pointed out that death has always been a standard punishment under Islamic law for most of these offenses.

Mercifully, some crimes do not merit the death penalty. Some forms of theft, for instance, will result merely in cutting off the offender's hand. Drinking alcohol will earn the tippler 80 lashes, as does the crime of slander. Banditry, a special form of stealing, will cause the criminal to have both his right hand and left leg cut off.

Meanwhile, Breitbart reports that at least 150 recalcitrant women and young girls, some pregnant, in Fallujah, Iraq were executed for refusing to accept "jihad marriage" to ISIS fighters. Many families fled the town of Al-Wafa after receiving death threats. Many of these families were stranded in the desert where their children perished.

The Islamic State also slaughtered over 50 people from the Al Bu Nimr tribe in Iraq’s Anbar Province on November 2. The massacre included six women and four children. Witnesses said the militants lined up the victims, whom they “publicly killed one by one.” Over seventeen people were kidnapped, as well. Militants murdered 98 people from the same tribe 24-48 hours before the massacre. The tribe is Sunni, which holds the same Islamic beliefs as the Islamic State, but ISIS views the tribe as a threat.

From the Breitbart article:

Militants claim they adhere to a very conservative interpretation of Islam, yet they run brothels and keep sex slaves. They even allow women from the West to perform “sexual jihad” for the terrorists. A 2013 edict allows this behavior “to boost the morale of fighters.” Islamic State issued its own edict in June after conquering towns in Iraq. Jihadists set up brothels filled with kidnapped females and placed British women in charge. One Yazidi sex slave begged the West to bomb the brothel at which she was held to end her suffering. A video in November showed militants laughing and joking about buying female Yazidi slaves.

It may be hard for some readers to believe that this sort of evil exists today. It sounds like something out of the Lord of the Rings, but it's how much of the Islamic world thinks. Unfortunately, we in the West have become so immersed in the cultural and moral relativism that's purveyed by so many of our intellectual betters that we're convinced that labeling this "evil" is to be inexcusably judgmental and culturally chauvinistic. Perhaps, but I'll bet that Yazidi woman would dearly love for us to be a little more judgmental and chauvinistic.

Voltaire, Please Call Your Office

Sony has cancelled their premiere of a comedy film about an assassination attempt on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The film was called The Interview and Sony claims that too many theater chains have chosen not to show it for fear of terrorist reprisals threatened by hackers who have infiltrated Sony's computers. In other words, the very people, liberal Hollywooders, who talk about how brave and bold and courageous it is when a film or book comes out that skewers Christianity are now not only meekly submitting to the tender sensibilities of Muslims but also to some of the most atrocious people on earth, the North Koreans.

It's fine if they don't want to offend people, and I certainly don't blame them for being anxious for their safety, but it's unseemly of them to prance, preen and bloviate about how brave it is to attack the beliefs of people who would never dream of retaliating, and then cower in fear when they're given ultimatums by people who just might carry them out.

I wonder, for instance, what the reaction would have been had a few anonymous threats of violence been received when Religulous or Last Temptation of Christ were released. I suspect there would've been a lot of defiant huffing and puffing about the First Amendment, the Critical Importance of Art, Freedom From Religion and all that, and the film would still have been shown amidst congratulations all around for the amazing heroism of the doughty people in the art world who surely deserve the Congressional Medal of Honor for their courage.

Liberals used to love to quote a dictum attributed to Voltaire to the effect that though they "may hate what you say they'll fight to the death for your right to say it." Apparently that only applies to saying things critical of people you know won't hurt you for it. Since Muslims have started to hold them to it liberals don't say that sort of thing much anymore. Indeed, the actors and cast of The Interview aren't showing their faces in public lately without bodyguards.

Totally Unnecessary Sacrifice

Anne Applebaum has an interesting article in The Spectator about the woes befalling the long-suffering Russian people. They're being caught in an economic squeeze by a combination of international sanctions imposed by the West in response to Putin's assault on the Ukraine, Putin's decision to retaliate against the West by refusing to import food from Europe which has caused food prices to rise in Russia, and the falling price of oil, Russia's chief export. Here's part of her article:

The US, Europe, Australia and Japan responded with sanctions which were deliberately designed to target a small number of wealthy Russians. But Putin broke new ground again. Instead of responding in kind, he banned food imports from the West. Because Russia normally imports at least a quarter and possibly as much as half of its food — not only Parmesan from Italy but frozen vegetables from Poland — he ensured that food prices would rise, not just for a small number of people but for the entire nation.

It was a calculated risk: the Russian President and his entourage apparently reckoned that the Russian people would agree to pay higher prices for food in exchange for military glory. Unlike decadent Europeans and spoiled Americans, Putin seemed to believe that Russians would stoically suffer on behalf of the motherland at a time of crisis.

Was he right? We are about to find out. This week the rouble, which has lost a third of its value in three months, slid by 9 per cent in a single day. A recession is now predicted. Inflation is predicted too, as high as 8 or 9 per cent. A controversial but long-planned pipeline construction has been abruptly cancelled. Major Russian banks are asking for government loans. Russian companies which earn in roubles and borrow in dollars are suddenly in trouble. Capital has been swiftly flowing out of the country, and some banks are rumoured to be limiting withdrawals. There are so many rumours about capital controls that the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, has explicitly denied them.

What effect have falling oil prices had? Applebaum explains:

Not all of Russia’s economic disruption is caused by sanctions, of course. Since last spring, oil prices have also dropped by nearly 40 per cent. The world’s largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, has just made it clear that it won’t lower production in order to push them up again, at least for the time being.

This might not matter as much to other oil producers, but for more than a decade Putin has coasted on the illusion that historically high oil and gas revenues could both support the national budget and disguise Russia’s failure to create a more productive economy. High energy prices even paid for the excesses of autocracy and an expansionist foreign policy: the Sochi Olympics, the billionaires’ palaces, the adventure in eastern Ukraine, the military exercises on a Cold War scale, even the €9 million loan which a shady Russian bank has just made to the far-right French National Front.

All this puts Russia in a difficult position as Applebaum goes on to tell us, but what the outcome will be is hard to predict. What's clear, however, is that Russia has embarked on a course that could lead the world back to a cold war, or even open hostilities, and nobody wants that. Here's how Applebaum concludes her essay:

... the past decade of high oil prices gave many Russians a standard of living that their Soviet parents and grandparents could never have imagined. There are not just oligarchs but concentric circles of people who have invested in the West, traveled in the West, shopped in the West or otherwise benefited from Russia’s integration into the global economy, if only because they bought those cheap frozen vegetables. They have no clear mechanism to respond to the onrushing economic crisis. Alternative leaders have been eliminated, and alternative policies are not discussed, but that doesn’t mean they’ll remain passive forever.

They could leave the country, withdraw their money, stage a palace coup or simply find ways to make life in Russia unpleasant for Russia’s leaders in ways we haven’t yet imagined.

It's unfortunate that Putin has chosen to take the path he has, he certainly didn't have to, but it's the road he's chosen, and it's a very dangerous road for everyone.

Thoughts on Some Racial News

Three black effigies were found hanging on the campus of UC Berkeley over the weekend. Perhaps this was the work of cruel, thoughtless, stupid bigots, but given the number of incidents staged by blacks to make whites look bad over the years we shouldn't automatically assume that it was the work of bigots, nor should we be surprised if it turns out that the perpetrators of this incident were themselves African-American students, trying either to make it appear as if it were done by white racists or trying to make a political statement about being black in America.

Also over the weekend thousands of people took to the the streets of New York and other cities to protest the killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others by police. It's good every now and then to protest excessive use of force by government agents, and to demand that they not use more force than a situation warrants, but I wonder when we'll start seeing huge demonstrations on behalf of the dozens of police who are murdered every year by killers, many (most?)of whom are black. Or doesn't anyone care about the lives of police officers?

Even as the African American community expresses it's outrage at the death of Eric Garner, black kids continue to die by the hundreds at the hands of other black kids in cities across our nation, and no one is organizing protest marches on behalf of these anonymous young men. Why is that? Do "all black lives matter" or do only politically expedient black lives matter? Do all lives matter or do police officers' lives not matter?

Reading the news about these protests, and reflecting on the relative silence when a black man is killed by another black man, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that at least some of the people who are venting their rage are angry not so much because black men have died but because these black men died at the hands of white men. If so, one wonders why. It is, after all, far less likely that a black man in the United States will die at the hands of a white man than that a white man will die at the hands of a black man.

Maybe you think I'm missing the point. Maybe you think that the protests are in fact directed against the kind of police brutality and overreaction on display in the Eric Garner case. I'm sure this is what animates many, maybe most, of the protestors, but ask yourself a hypothetical question: Do you think that there would be any organized protests at all, any media coverage at all, had Michael Brown and Eric Garner been white, or, alternatively, had the cops who killed them been black?

Neither do I.