In the context of CAIR's (Council of American Islamic Relations) support of the six imams who are suing the passengers aboard an airliner for reporting the Muslims' strange and frightening behavior to the flight crew, Michelle Malkin discusses the emerging John Doe movement and reprints the John Doe Manifesto:

There's more at Michelle's site.

RLC

While the Democratic congress and its media allies swoon over the faux "scandal" of a president cashiering eight U.S. attorneys, a completely routine and legal move for a president, a genuine scandal has begun to unfold which we probably won't hear much about.

This scandal involves a Democratic United States Senator so we expect it will quickly blow over. Until it does, however, here's the basic story:

Go to the link for more details.

Can you imagine the spittle Hardball's Chris Matthews would be spraying around his desk if this were a Republican senator?

RLC

Sean Penn lowers the bar of political rhetoric right down to the bottom of the cesspool in this unedifying letter to the president which you can listen to here if you have the stomach.

I know. It's gross, sleazy and insulting. And yes, his logic is abysmal and his self-congratulation is grating. He obviously gets a frisson of psychic satisfaction from making himself sound more important and more knowledgable about things in the Middle East than either Bush, Cheney, or Rice.

But he's a Hollywood celebrity, and he's sincere.

Speaking of cesspools of political rhetoric these folk here and here place themselves in nomination for the award for most contemptible political commentators of the year. If you go to the second of these sites be sure to follow the links. It really is sad how low some people will sink just to express a political disagreement.

RLC

National Review says Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez should leave, but we have mixed feelings about the matter here.

Set aside for a moment his inept handling of the firing of the U.S. Attorneys and the evident deceit with which he justified it. As we stated in an earlier post on this matter, his refusal to enforce our immigration laws and his prosecution of border agents who are languishing in prison on the testimony of known felons, is unconscionable, and, by itself, justifies his relieving him of his duties.

Whether he should have been appointed or not, he is no longer, if he ever was, an asset to this administration, and his departure will upset us only to the extent that it gives a victory to those who would seek to destroy him even were he the best AG in U.S. history.

He should go, but not because he fired the eight U.S. Attorneys. He should go because of his lack of enthusiasm for securing our borders and for misleading congress about the degree of his involvement in the firings of the U.S. Attorneys.

RLC

The British Independent explores the question why the 15 British sailors and Marines allowed themselves to be taken by the Iranians. Apparently, their rules of engagement are somewhat different than ours:

However, the warship that dispatched the British personnel was within sight. It could have pursued the Iranians, albeit into Iranian waters, to effect a rescue.

Quite so. Give that round to the Iranians.

RLC

One of the frequent indictments skeptics level at theists is that their belief is irrational. It's all faith and no evidence, the believer is told. If the believer tries to pin down his antagonist and ask him what, exactly, he means by evidence it often turns out that the word is being being employed as a synonym for "proof."

Well, of course there's no proof that there is a personal God, but that is hardly a reason not to believe that one exists. We have proof for very little of what we believe about the world, but we don't hold our beliefs less firmly for that.

The skeptic's claim that theistic belief is irrational founders for a number of reasons, but in this post we'll consider just one argument for maintaining that not only is it perfectly rational to believe, but that it's far more rational to believe than to disbelieve. Indeed, though it may come as a surprise to some readers, almost all the evidence that counts on one side or the other of the question of belief in God rests on the side of belief.

This is because almost every relevant fact about the world makes more sense, and is more easily explained, on the hypothesis of theism than on the hypothesis of atheism. In other words, the conclusion of theism is what philosophers call an inference to the best explanation. I don't mean to suggest that atheism cannot explain these facts at all. I only argue that on the assumption of atheism they are more difficult to explain, in some cases exceedingly so, than they are on the assumption of theism. That being the case, it is more reasonable to believe that the explanation for them is the existence of a personal God.

So what are those facts which are more easily explained on the assumption that there is a God? Here I list fifteen examples:

In past posts on Viewpoint we've discussed most of the above and explained why they are very difficult to explain if there is no God. We won't go through that again here. Rather we'll simply note that the existence of a being such as God is far more likely given these fifteen facts about life and the world than is its non-existence. In modal terms the probability of God's existence, given the evidence adduced, is high, much higher than the probability of God's non-existence given that same evidence.

Note that this argument doesn't constitute a proof in the deductive sense, but it is, in my opinion, a powerful probablistic argument for the existence of something behind the universe which is intelligent, powerful, and personal. That something may not be the God of the Bible, but it's very close.

Getting to belief in God is in some ways like a roller coaster. Just as the hard part of getting the car to the end of the ride is raising it at the very outset from a dead stop to the highest point of the structure, the hard part of getting to theism, philosophically and psychologically, is getting oneself from a state of unbelief to belief in a transcendent, powerful, intelligent, personal, creator. Once the car has been raised to the summit all the hard intellectual work has been done, and although there are many loops, thrills, twists and turns before the car arrives at its terminus, it's a relatively effortless descent. Likewise, the logical distance from belief in a transcendent, powerful, intelligent, personal, creator to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob may seem a long trek, but both pyschologically and philosophically, it's pretty much all downhill from belief in a creator.

Of course, someone will wish to point out that this analysis ignores evidence, such as the fact of human suffering, which must count against the existence of a benevolent and compassionate God. This is an important point and one that will be addressed in another post.

RLC

One of the most well-known critics of Intelligent Design has been Brown University biologist and theistic evolutionist Ken Miller. In the words of Anika Smith:

Those interested in reading some of these rebuttals can find the links to them here.

RLC

My daughter and I went to see Amazing Grace yesterday and came away from the theater both moved and inspired.

The film production is first-rate and the acting is superb. It's possible to wish that the story jumped around a little less for the sake of those not familiar with the historical timeline, but it's not overly difficult to follow, and it offers wonderful insight into the life of a man who deserves far more fame than what he has been given.

I told my daughter on the way that William Wilberforce is probably one of the greatest men that most people never heard of. He was a member of Parliament who, driven by his desire to serve God, employed his exceptional gifts in the service of the fight to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire of the 18th century. The movie gives us a fine portrait of what that arduous struggle was like for Wilberforce and his allies and inspires the viewer with Wilberforce's tenacity and courage.

Amazing Grace is a movie everyone should see, if for no other reason than to witness what true character and heroism look like in a man. If you haven't yet seen it, I hope you will.

RLC

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost takes Jim Wallis to task for what he sees as .... inconsistency in Wallis' willingness or unwillingness to resort to force:

It does seem strange that Wallis would endorse the use of force to stop the genocide in Darfur but condemn the use of force to end genocide in Iraq. Perhaps Wallis, who usually sounds very much like a pacifist, has a reason for this distinction. If so, we'd like to hear it.

Meanwhile, others who are opposed to U.S. involvement in Iraq but in favor of U.S. involvement in Sudan might offer their own rationale for their views via our Feedback button.

RLC

Cornell's Allen MacNeill is an unusual example of an academic Darwinian. He presents interesting courses on the ID/Darwinism controversy in which he apparently gives a relatively fair treatment to ID. His latest offering is titled Evolution and Religion: Is Religion Adaptive. Evidently the seminar will explore the evidence for an evolutionary explanation for the survival of religion. MacNeill writes:

I think it's going to be very difficult to prove that religion confers some evolutionary advantage given the six criteria MacNeill lists for demonstrating adaptation. Even so, and despite the tendentious reading list (see first link), it sounds like a fun course.

RLC

My friend Byron has written to take exception to yesterday's post on John Edwards. He essentially challenges my opinion that Edwards has gotten rich through ethically dubious means and wonders if I'm suggesting that doctors should not be sued if they cause harm.

The answer is that of course they should, if they can be shown to have been negligent or incompetent. Edwards, however, won dozens of huge settlements when it was by no means clear that this was the case, and he knew it wasn't the case.

Anyone who is interested in checking this out might read this 2004 Washington Times piece by Charles Hurt.

RLC

Defying a veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Senate voted today on their plan for Iraq:

The vote, which passed 50-48, means little since the president has vowed to veto it, and there are not enough votes to override his veto. What today's vote will do, however, is guarantee that money our troops need to prepare them to face the enemy will be slower in coming and troops needed for the surge in Iraq will find their deployments delayed.

It'll be interesting to see which side caves on this. Will the president, in order to get the needed funding, eventually agree to the timeline for troop withdrawal which is attached to the funding bill, or will the Democrats, in order to avoid responsibility for insisting on withdrawal at precisely the moment when things appear to be turning around, drop their demand for a timeline?

RLC

Former Senator John Edwards has declared he will stay in the race for his party's presidential nomination despite his wife's illness. She suffers from a cancer which can be treated but not cured.

Mr. Edwards is a very wealthy attorney who made his fortune suing doctors. I wonder how Mrs. Edwards' physicians feel about treating her, knowing that the slightest misstep will probably cost them everything they've worked all their life to obtain.

It's interesting to compare how Edwards made his fortune with how physicians make theirs. Doctors charge us for bringing their skills to bear to improve the quality of our lives. Edwards made millions by persuading juries to take the money we pay doctors from them and give some of it to him.

And he wants to be president. Yikes!

RLC

This post is the culmination of our series on the statement by the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in which they categorically condemn any and all resort to the use of torture. Previous posts in the series can be found here: Part I, Part II, and Part III.

The drafters of the NAE document state that:

This is a very odd assertion. Remember that the NAE, following the Geneva Convention, includes in its proscription of torture any humiliating or degrading treatment which, as we argued in part III, could include almost anything from yelling at the detainee, to employing a female to interrogate him, to placing him in prison. Even if the detainee had information that would save lives the NAE would prohibit us from obtaining that information if doing so was demeaning to the prisoner. But let's set that aside for now.

Let's talk just about inflicting physical distress. As we have said in previous posts this is a great evil when done under almost all circumstances in which it usually occurs in this fallen world, but it is simply fallacious to argue that therefore it is always a great evil.

Consider the classic scenario in which a terrorist has planted a suitcase nuke in a major city set to go off in a few hours. The authorities have captured the terrorist and he has admitted as much, but he refuses to say where the bomb is located. Tens of thousands of people will die in the blast and subsequent radiation fallout. Many more will be gravely sickened. The economy of the nation will collapse if the city is a financial hub and millions will be made destitute. The entire nation may collapse if the target city is Washington, D.C.

It is known that there is a form of physical coercion called waterboarding which actually does no harm to the subject but induces the sensation of drowning which results in panic. No one has been able to endure it for more than a minute or two without breaking and talking. The terrorist could in a matter of minutes be made to produce the location of the bomb, but the NAE would absolutely prohibit obtaining the information in that manner. They say that we would be "communicating to the world and to our own people that a human life (the terrorist's) is not sacred, that it is not a reflection of the Creator, that it is expendable, exploitable, and disposable, and that its intrinsic value can be overridden by utilitarian arguments that trump that value."

I would suggest that the NAE is communicating that exact same message by refusing to save the lives of tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children simply because it would entail subjecting their murderer to extreme discomfort until he provided the information necessary to save them. I suggest that the NAE statement places greater value on the life of the terrorist than it does on the lives of innocent Americans. It is a case of moral inversion that is so bizarre as to be literally incredible.

But let's set aside the question of the justification of torture and ask why we should think that this particular technique, waterboarding, constitutes torture. What are some possible answers to that question that the NAE might give?

Perhaps they'd say it's torture because it's painful.

But apparently there's not much pain involved, and if there were it would only be brief since people only hold out for a few seconds when subjected to it.

Perhaps it's torture because it does lasting harm to the detainee.

Evidently not. The individual is no doubt shaken but none the worse for the experience. In fact, interrogators have had it done to them just so they know what it feels like.

Perhaps it's torture because it's done to punish.

But it's not. It's done to elicit information. Once the subject cooperates the treatment ceases.

Perhaps it's torture because it's unpleasant.

Surely, though, an unpleasant experience is not ipso facto torture. If it were, then putting someone in restraints or feeding them institutional food would be torture.

Perhaps it's torture because it frightens the terrorist.

Indeed, it does frighten the terrorist, but so does the prospect of being executed for their crimes or being put in prison for the rest of their life. Should they not be threatened with these possibilities? Why must we be so squeamish that we are reluctant even to scare people who are trying to murder our children?

Perhaps it's torture because it elicits information against the detainee's will.

It certainly does motivate the terrorist to divulge information, but the fact that they don't do so willingly is hardly reason to think that the method is somehow tainted. If it were then phone taps, etc would be torture since they are means by which we obtain information from people who would not otherwise willingly give it.

Perhaps, it's torture because some men are exerting power over another.

Yes, but so is a cop who stops you for a traffic violation, and we don't consider that torture.

The fact is that the suspect has complete control over how long the process lasts or whether it will even begin. This is an important point. The terrorist is essentially in total control of what, if anything, happens to him. He's no more damaged when it's over than when it started. He experiences no sensation other than panic and though he's frightened, he knows that he really is not drowning. So why would waterboarding be considered torture but, say, lengthy imprisonment, which may do some, or even all, of the things mentioned above, is not?

I really have no answer to the question. It simply makes no sense to me to ban this technique, but if someone can point out something that I'm overlooking I'm certainly willing to reconsider. Meanwhile, the NAE should rescind their document in order to recraft a statement which is more rigorously thought out and which does justice to the complexities of the issue.

RLC

Is there anyone more petty or childish than the self-important Brahmins who staff university faculties? The University of Florida has taken the unprecedented step of denying an honorary degree to one of the finest governors the state of Florida has ever had. We are left to guess at the reasons, but we're going to assume, while we speculate, that those reasons have little if anything to do with the ostensive rationalizations offered by committee spokespersons:

Any of our readers who think that maybe Bush was denied this honor not because he was "not a friend of UF" but rather because he is a Republican named Bush should just be ashamed of themselves for thinking that.

RLC

How do Darwinian professors show their students that Intelligent Design is bad science? They demand that ID presentations on campus be shut down. If students don't hear the arguments, their profs evidently believe, then they won't find them persuasive.

Free speech in the marketplace of ideas is okay for Marxists and Vagina Monologuers, but when students start holding conferences that seek to inform people about current controversies in the philosophy of science, well, that's just going too far, at least at Southern Methodist University:

In other words, the other side must not be allowed to speak lest someone, somewhere realize that there is an intellectually compelling alternative to Darwinian materialism. The pretense of illegitimacy must be maintained so that students not be tempted to think for themselves.

SMU: Branch campus of Indoctrinate U.

RLC

Here's a passage from Great Cloud of Witnesses in Hebrews Chapter 11 by E.W. Bullinger pp. 176-7. I just love this guy. He presents his position on how we should conduct ourselves that should be considered not just by those who wallow in a guilt-induced neurosis from obsession about sin and spiritual failure, but all of us.

The context follows his discussion of "Faith-obedience", "the obedience which proceeds from, and is produced by, a living faith in the Living God. In other words, it is the acting as if what we heard were true."

Written about 100 years ago, parts of it are so refreshing, so revolutionary yet some, I suspect, will find them controversial. I'll try to finish the article next Sunday.

To be continued...

WSC

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, currently on the griddle for his role in the perfectly legal dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys, should indeed resign, but not for the reason that the Democrats are squawking about.

The sad thing is that in failing to arrest illegals Gonzalez is simply doing George Bush's bidding. Bush has been great on taxes, the economy, supreme court nominees (except Harriet Meiers) and the war on terror, but his border policy has been an abject disgrace.

RLC

From time to time we hear Darwinists claim that among the fruits of evolutionary biology is the great success of modern medicine. The claim is usually accepted with a knowing nod and very little curiosity about how accurate it is. Neurosurgeon Michael Engor would have us know, however, that there's not much accuracy to it at all. He explains why in this brief but punchy essay.

RLC

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, offers us a marvelous example of how the post-modern disdain for "truth" has begun to infect the practice of science. It's no longer objective facts that matter, at least for some scientists, but rather what has purchase with the reader, what resonates with him or her, what he/she discerns to be the truth from his/her perspective. Thus the near panic over global climate change regardless of what the facts of the matter might be is an example of what one advocate calls "post-normal" science.

Phillips begins with this:

Read the whole thing to see how "post-normal" science works. Here's a preview: It has nothing to do with truth.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Bernard Lewis is a highly respected expert on the history of the Islamic world who has several fine books on the subject to his credit. He was invited to deliver the 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture earlier this month and gave a very interesting speech. It should, in fact, be read by everyone who desires a deeper understanding of the conflicts between the Western world and Islam. You can find the speech here.

RLC

A site called Indoctrinate U. is fighting the good fight against overbearing political correctness and ideological homogeneity on campus. Go see their three minute film trailer here. It, ahem, rocks.

We'd be interested in anecdotal evidence of the kind of suppression of free speech they talk about on the trailer. If you have first hand knowledge of such repression at a public university or college, let us know. We'll run your story.

HT: Uncommon Descent

RLC

Bill sends along this news about North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong:

Mr. Nifong apparently sought to advance his political career by destroying the lives of several young Duke students. Disbarment is perhaps the least of what he deserves. Too bad that the sundry North Carolina race hustlers and the Duke administration, which pusillanimously threw the students to the wolves almost as soon as the accusations were made and which punished the whole lacrosse team by canceling their season, can't also receive the equivalent of "disbarment."

RLC

This post is the third in our series on the National Association of Evangelicals' statement on torture. See also Part I and Part II of this critique.

The NAE document states that:

This raises very difficult problems however for anyone serious about trying to survey the moral boundaries of the war against terrorism.

At first glance it would seem that the proscription of humiliating and degrading treatment is a prohibition that every nation, including ours, should respect. But in fact it's meaningless and dangerously restrictive. It is little more than a feel-good clause that allows the signatories to present themselves to the world as humane when in fact, if taken seriously, it's virtually impossible for any nation to abide by.

What determines whether an act is humiliating or degrading, after all, is more the individual's reaction to the act than the act itself. Most people would probably feel humiliated if yelled at or insulted. Many Muslims would feel humiliated if placed in a subordinate position to a woman. If we are to take the Geneva article seriously, which the NAE insists we do, then we should never allow a Muslim detainee to be interrogated by a woman if he would find that humiliating. Most of us would find prison both humiliating and degrading. Suppose the Muslim jihadis do as well. If so, 3:1c would, if strictly followed, forbid us to incarcerate terrorists. In other words, the sensibilities of the prisoner must determine what measures we can take against him, but this is an absurdly untenable position to place ourselves in.

Perhaps the NAE would reply that I exaggerate when I claim that 3:1c would effectively proscribe incarceration, but how could it not? Are some forms of humiliation, like imprisonment, acceptable to use against detainees but others not? If so, how are we to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of humiliation? Who decides what's humiliating for a detainee and what isn't? The interrogator? The secretary of defense? The detainee?

Even if the military would be arbitrarily permitted to "degrade" terrorists by confining them to a cell and depriving them of their freedom, there are lots of things they would not be allowed to get away with: Shouting at prisoners, for example, or questioning their manhood, long-term solitary confinement, the use of deception to get information, giving the prisoner Western food, shackling, limiting trips to the restroom to whatever number. In short, anything the prisoner found demeaning would be proscribed by a serious reading of the clause to which the NAE would have us fully submit.

Perhaps they would respond that we must not take 3:1c so literally, but if not then how do we ascertain how it should be understood and how can it be binding if we don't know what it means?

In lieu of some clear and meaningful definition of humiliating and degrading treatment, adherence to 3:1c places needless restrictions on our military authorities. Military and civil interrogators, afraid of crossing some invisible line that could get them hauled before a war crimes tribunal, will tend to do as little as possible to elicit life-saving information from terrorist prisoners. In an environment where our children's lives are at constant risk from the machinations of those who will stop at nothing to kill them, it would be irresponsible to insist that our interrogators adhere to such vague guidance as 3:1c offers, much less that something as vague as 3:1c could be morally binding.

The NAE document, by embracing the nebulous imperatives of 3:1c, renders itself irrelevant in the task of determining what, exactly, is morally permissable in attempting to extract life-saving information from a detainee and what is not.

RLC

The creator of the Big Brother Hillary ad has been found out and fired for his efforts.

Don't feel bad for the guy, though. This kind of talent will find a home somewhere in politics. I wouldn't be surprised if Hillary doesn't hire him herself.

RLC

These are the people Michael Moore once referred to as Iraq's version of the American Minutemen:

Here are Moore's exact words: "The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not 'insurgents' or 'terrorists' or 'The Enemy.' They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?"

One thing we all "get" is that, given the facts about the sort of people we're dealing with in Iraq and elsewhere, Michael Moore is either a very uninformed man or he is morally comatose. Yet this is a man whom the left lionizes. It says, I suppose, something important about their standards.

RLC

Philosopher Peter Singer has an essay in The Guardian in which he poses a pair of ethical dilemmas, the responses to which are being studied by some Harvard post-docs:

Why do most people think it right to divert the trolley but not to push the stranger in front of the trolley? It's an interesting question and Singer speculates on some possible evolutionary explanations which unfortunately don't sound very persuasive.

More interesting to me is the question of whether we ever have the right to kill an innocent person who is no threat to ourselves, even if it saves more lives. This is a no-brainer for a utilitarian, perhaps, who would doubtless answer that the right act is always the act that produces the greatest net good (i.e. happiness). In these cases the greatest good would be saving the most lives, but for one whose ethics are grounded in the Gospels it's much more complicated and perplexing.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.

RLC

In his interview with William Crawley, Richard Dawkins offers three counter-arguments to the claim that the extraordinary fine-tuning of the universe points to a cosmic designer.

Dawkins asks first where such a designer comes from. If a designer (let's say God) designed the universe, in other words, then what designed God? Dawkins holds elsewhere that if the extraordinary complexity of the universe makes the universe's existence highly improbable then the designer of the universe, which must be even more complex, must be even more improbable, in fact vanishingly so. So improbable must the desiger be that one is not rationally justified in believing it exists.

We have addressed this argument in a previous post and found it to be very unpersuasive.

His second counter-argument, which he conflates with the third in the interview but which is really a distinct argument, is what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). It says that we should not think it so very special that the universe is as it is for were it not we would not be around to notice it. The fact that we exist means that the universe must be tuned precisely as it is.

Well, yes, but this misses the point. The question is whether the fine-tuning is a dumbfounding coincidence or whether it is intentional. Using the WAP as a counter-argument to the cosmic fine-tuning problem has been compared to the scenario where a man finds himself kidnapped and imprisoned by a psychopathic killer. The kidnapper has placed in the prison cell one hundred machines which are designed to simultaneously dispense a single playing card when a button is pushed. The kidnapper then tells his victim that when he pushes the button each of the one hundred machines wil produce a card at random from a deck that has been shuffled inside the machine. If any machine produces any card other than an ace of spades the prisoner will be automatically gassed and instantly killed.

The kidnap victim despairs of his chances of survival. They seem infinitely slim. The button is pushed. The victim tenses. And nothing happens. No gas. He looks at the machines and every one of them has produced an ace of spades. The man is astonished at his good fortune. How could it be that he is alive? Professor Dawkins would tell him that he shouldn't be astonished that each machine produced the correct card because had it not he wouldn't be alive to to take note of the fact.

This seems like a dodge, and it is. The prisoner has every right to wonder how such an improbable course of events could have unfolded to allow him to survive. He has every reason to suspect that the machines weren't selecting cards at random at all, but that the outcome was intentionally foreordained.

Sensing, perhaps, the absurdity of a resort to the WAP, Dawkins quickly imports a completely unscientific, non-empirical speculative hypothesis called the Multiverse theory. According to this, our universe is just one of an innumerable array of universes each having different parameters, values and laws. Given the existence of so many worlds, the chances are greatly increased that at least one world would be structured the way ours is. Think of it this way: The chances that somebody is going to be holding the winning lottery ticket increase as the number of tickets sold increases. Thus we shouldn't be astonished that our universe is tuned as precisely as it is because, given the number of worlds, at least one has to be suitable for life, and ours is it.

This might be an effective response to cosmic fine-tuning were there any shred of evidence that any other worlds exist, much more a vast number of them, but there is none. The theory is pure speculation invoked for no good reason other than to enable one to avoid the conclusion that our universe is intentionally designed.

Moreover, since the idea of multiple worlds is untestable, it's not a scientific theory. It also violates the principle of Occam's Razor which tells us that the simplest explanation that accounts for the facts is the best (a plenitude of worlds is far more complicated an explanation than the hypothesis that there's just one world plus a designer of that world), nor does it explain where the universes all come from and what creates them.

We have proof, of course, that information, beauty, harmony, etc. can be produced by a mind, but we have no proof that they can be produced by random chance. Yet, in order to evade the force of the evidence posed by the exquisite fine-tuning of the cosmos, we are asked to accept that chance has produced zillions of worlds, one of which has beauty, elegance, and law-like order.

To be sure, Dawkins could be correct. It's possible that the world is one of an immeasurable number of universes, but why believe that unless one is so dead set against the idea that there's a mind superintending it all that one will believe almost anything to escape having to believe that such a mind exists.

Part I of our discussion of this interview can be found here.

RLC

Senator Clinton has her bases covered:

RLC

Students of math and science among our readers will probably have heard of Kurt Gödel, one of the premier mathematicians and logicians of the 20th century. Gödel was brilliant. It also turns out that he was a committed theist. Hector Rosario has an interesting article on Gödel's theism at Metanexus. Here's a part of it:

Rosario concludes the article with a discussion of Gödel's version of the ontological argument.

HT: Telic Thoughts

RLC

American politics has grown exceedingly ugly in the last ten years or so. It is no longer, if it ever was, a contest of ideas about how best to achieve mutually agreed upon ends. It has morphed into a battle to destroy the other side, to destroy as many careers as possible and discredit the other side to whatever extent one can.

Thus we find ourselves mired in perpetual charges of scandal: We are told that the administration lied to get us into war, that the administration illegally eaves-drops on our enemies, that the administration illegally detains enemy combatants, that prisons like Guantanamo Bay are hell-holes, that our troops are less than ideally equipped and outfitted for their mission, that Dick Cheney didn't immediately report a hunting accident, that a CIA agent was illegally "outed" for political reasons, and the current outrage du jour, that federal district attorneys were improperly dismissed.

None of these are genuine scandals. In each case the charges are either trivial, untrue or, if true, there was nothing illegal or improper in the administration's actions. Yet the Democrats and their media mouthpieces daily demand human sacrifice: Destroy Don Rumsfeld. Hang Scooter Libby. Get Karl Rove. Ruin Dick Cheney. Impeach George Bush. It's a mob mentality based on hate and deceit, driven by a lust for power, and it's destroying our politics and paralyzing governance.

Not that there are not genuine scandals in this White House, but the real scandals are ones in which the Democrats are complicit. The biggest is Bush's feckless approach to securing our borders and stopping illegal immigration. His insouciance about this problem is a dereliction of his duty as commander in chief and is negating, in the minds of many Americans, much of the good he has wrought.

The good includes his liberation of more people from tyranny than any other president in history, his steadfastness in the war on terror, the appointment of quality Supreme Court and federal jurists, tax cuts which have given us one of the best economies in the last sixty years, and his resolve to stay the course in the war on terrorism despite the howling and shrieking of his enemies both foreign and domestic.

Bush could have been a great president. Despite the tragic mistakes that were made in the post-invasion phase of the Iraq war, he could have emerged from his tenure in the White House with Reaganesque stature, but his handling of illegal immigration is a disgrace that will be very difficult for him to overcome no matter what happens in Iraq. His failure is sad for what it will do to his legacy, and it could well be calamitous for the country.

RLC

Any teacher who has ever been evaluated by his or her students will find much that sounds familiar in these student evaluations of Socrates' teaching abilities.

HT: No Left Turns

RLC

Goodness. Somebody on the Democrat side has put together an anti-Hillary ad that, in terms of political image-making and propaganda, is just devastating. It plays off of George Orwell's vision of mind-numbed, lobotomized citizens forced to watch a droning Big Brother on a large theater screen.

Obama denies any connection to the ad even though the tag line implicates his supporters.

Watch it here.

RLC

This news will not be welcome in many ideological quarters of the nation but it seems as if things are not as bad in Iraq as the administration critics in Congress and the media keep telling us they are:

And here we thought the whole country was in flames, chaos and confusion just as John Murtha and Chris Matthews have been telling us. Wonder what they'll say now.

RLC

With this post we continue our examination of the National Association of Evangelicals' statement on torture. See here for Part I of this critique.

The NAE takes the position that torture, or any treatment which degrades another human being, is categorically wrong. It is our position at Viewpoint, however, that while torture is grossly immoral to the point of evil when used as a means of punishment or revenge, or almost always when used in interrogating prisoners, or when done simply to entertain and amuse the torturers, as apparently was the case at Abu Ghraib, there are nevertheless circumstances in which torture is not only not wrong, but morally incumbent. Indeed, the NEA drafters admit as much, albeit inadvertantly, when they write that:

This is certainly true, but the weak and vulnerable are often the intended victims of brutes and thugs. If in order to carry out our mandate to defend the weak and vulnerable we find that the only way to keep them from harm is to use coercive force against someone who has information that would save the victims, whose rights, those of the victim or those of their would-be killers, should we regard as paramount? Just as in the case of a policeman defending himself or a bystander from an aggressor, when someone is an active (or a passive threat) to another their right not to be harmed is no longer in effect.

Consider the case of a terrorist named Rauf, captured last August by the Pakistanis. It was information obtained from interrogating Mr. Rauf that uncovered the plot to simultaneously blow up ten airliners last summer using liquid bombs. Suppose now the following circumstances obtained at the time: The authorities knew that something terrible was in the works and that Mr. Rauf knew what it was. Imagine, too, that Mr. Rauf could not be enticed to yield his knowledge of the plot through any means other than being subjected to pain, fear, or humiliating treatment. Finally, imagine that your spouse and children would have been aboard one of those planes. Would you maintain that, these hypotheticals notwithstanding, if you had your way the Pakistani intelligence service would not have been permitted to employ the methods they apparently did employ to persuade Mr. Rauf to talk? A simple yes or no will suffice.

If you answered yes, try this: Imagine looking your loved ones directly in the eyes and telling them that.

Or consider a case similar to that of John Couey who kidnapped nine year old Jessica Lunsford, tortured and raped her, and then buried her alive and left her to die. A similar crime occured in Florida some years ago where the victim was buried in a box that had enough air to allow her to live for about a day. Suppose, counterfactually, that the kidnapper had been apprehended, admitted that he had abducted the girl, told the police that she was in the box with only a few hours left to live, but he refused to tell them where she was.

Suppose further that the girl is your daughter. Finally, suppose that one cop, against all regulations, applies excruciating coercion against the kidnapper until he yields the information, resulting in the rescue of your daughter. Subsequently, you discover how her rescue was achieved. Would you register disapproval with the authorities? Would you insist that the cop be prosecuted for his violation of the rights of the kidnapper? Would you feel that the police officer's act was morally inexcusable or repugnant?

If not, then you do not agree with this statement in the NAE document:

As we suggested in part one this is a very bad argument. What are these unalienable rights? Surely they include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But if these rights are unalienable, as the NAE insists, then not only is it always and everywhere wrong for policemen and soldiers to use deadly force, it is also wrong to incarcerate criminals. If one were to protest that criminals and enemy combatants forfeit their rights, at least so long as they are a threat to soldiers, police officers or to society, then it is being conceded that the rights in question are not "unalienable." They are rights we possess as human beings until such time as we become a threat to the welfare of others.

The NAE continues:

But surely the NAE understands that these are prima facie rights. That is, a person has them until such time as they become a threat to society or otherwise disqualify themselves from possessing them. A man whose religion calls for him to behead infidels, for example, surely does not have the right to practice his religion freely.

The NAE document also says this:

Now the NAE is contradicting itself. Having declared human rights to be absolute they set out in this statement to qualify them. Apparently a just taking of a life is permitted by the NAE, but if so, why could not similar qualifications be imposed on the following:

It is acceptable, in fact obligatory, for the state to detain people, deprive them of their right to freedom, as long as it is not "arbitrary," but then what is happening to the absolute proscriptions that the NAE insisted upon earlier on. In other words, no right is unalienable or absolute. Whether someone can be deprived of life or freedom or any other property depends upon why these things are taken from the person. The NAE, however, disagrees:

Perhaps, but so are the people whose lives and well-being hang in the balance. Why should the terrorist's life be regarded as of greater worth than theirs? Why should the terrorist's rights count more heavily than the rights of your family aboard that plane or your nine-year old daughter suffocating in that box? If subjecting the terrorist to harsh treatment offers the only possibility of saving innocent lives it is morally incumbent upon us to do that. To stand by and do nothing when we could possibly have saved peoples' lives is immoral.

It is also absurd. If the terrorist succeeds, even though he's in custody, and innocent lives are lost, he can be executed according to the NAE's reasoning. But until he succeeds he cannot be in any way treated harshly even though it is reasonably certain that apart from harsh measures he will cause the murders of innocents and consequently be put to death. It's better to allow the innocents to die and their killer to be executed, according to the NAE's logic, than to prevent all that death by causing the murderer to suffer temporary discomfort or pain. It's hard to see how this makes any sense at all.

More on the NAE's argument later.

RLC

Consider for a moment these passages from the Gospels where Jesus offers assurance in no uncertain terms that prayer will be answered...

Yet is there anyone who can honestly say that they experience such reliability and consistency of God granting that which they ask for? And if not, then why not? There are too many passages to support the belief and expectation that God will, in fact, answer prayer as promised.

I can think of two possible answers and there certainly may be others. First, it may be that the Gospels and perhaps the book of Acts belong to a different dispensation than the one we are living in now. Just as the Old Testament or Old Covenant is a different dispensation, a dispensation of the law which has been superceded by the New Testament or New Covenant - a dispensation of grace. If this is the case, then the passages above applied specifically to those Jesus spoke to and not to future generations of believers. This would explain why I don't move mountains.

While this may be the case, I'm reluctant to believe it is so as otherwise I'm hard pressed to understand the point of prayer for contemporary believers including Paul and his exhortation and example as found in the epistles (also belonging to the present dispensation). The second possibility is that there is a relationship that exists between the degree of one's spirituality, that is, the degree to which they are indwelled by the Holy Spirit and, as a result, the faith they possess, and the reality of God answering their prayers. Interestingly, I believe we are blessed with the presence of the Holy Spirit through sincere and constant prayer to the Father in a total, selfless desire to be possessed by His Spirit.

If this is so, then I suspect such individuals, rare though they may be, are so in tune with the will of God that the passages above are a reality for them. Less blessed folk simply wouldn't recognize it. But even this thought seems to be contradicted by the first verse quoted above from Matthew 6:6

Of course, if any of our readers have another answer to this question, feel free to respond via the Feedback page.

WSC

Henry Waxman personifies the dispassionate search for truth in his polite and probing questioning of the woman who wrote the law concerning what constitutes "outing" covert agents. When the witness responds to his questions the congressman takes the opportunity to sit back and learn and to let the nation be edified by the witness' expertise ....

Okay, I'm fantasizing. Check out the video for yourself at HotAir.

RLC

Someone named Michelle Cottle at The New Republic argues that Dick Cheney is losing his grip, probably because of his heart disease. Cottle's article is the typical mean-spirirted stuff we've come to expect from the administration's critics, marinated, however, in faux compassion.

If you read it then you have to read Charles Krauthammer's devastating reply. In fact, just read Krauthammer's essay. It's a masterwork of polemical rebuttal. If Cottle reads it she might be ashamed to ever write anything so silly again.

RLC

Physicist Paul Davies, the author of many fascinating books on cosmology and the origin of life, has come up with a novel explanation for how the universe could be so exquisitely fine-tuned for life without having to invoke the dread concept of a Creator God. Davies hypothesizes that the precise calibrations of dozens of cosmic parameters were set during the Big Bang by a phenomenon called "retrocausality":

In other words, since causality is not limited by the laws of physics to only one direction, it's theoretically possible, Davies argues, that sentient life was able to somehow reach back to the Big Bang and calibrate the forces of physics and the expansion rate of the universe and a host of other values. Billions of years later intelligent beings would arise which had the ability to retroactively create their own universe.

This sounds bizarre even for a cosmologist, suggesting as it does the notion that the universe is the creation of its own inhabitants. Davies' theory is interesting, however, for what it implies. First, it's a tacit admission by Davies that the universe is inexplicable apart from having been tinkered with by an intelligent mind, and second, it illustrates the philosophical contortions some people will put themselves through in order to avoid the conclusion that the intelligent agent responsible for the universe is God.

HT: Telic Thoughts

RLC

As American and Iraqi pressure mounts in Baghdad insurgents and al Qaeda fighters are fleeing the city for other refuges. One such destination is a city named Diyala, but coalition forces are not permitting them to find a haven there. Bill Roggio gives us an update on the Battle of Diyala.

RLC

William Crawley of the BBC conducts an excellent interview with Richard Dawkins. Anyone wishing to get an idea of what the controversy surrounding Dawkins' views is all about will find this session to be a useful introduction.

In the course of the interview Dawkins makes some interesting claims. For example, there's this one:

So much for efforts by those who believe that one can be both a Darwinian and a theist to find common ground with the anti-theist Darwinians. For people like Dawkins there is no common ground. One is either a complete naturalistic materialist or a superstitious ignoramus.

It should be mentioned that the word "Darwinism" isn't strictly synonomous with "evolution." Darwinism is the metaphysical belief that materialistic, natural processes and forces are adequate by themselves to account for all aspects of life. It is possible to be both a theist and an evolutionist, but I agree with Dawkins that it is very difficult to be a Darwinian evolutionist and a theist.

Dawkins then wonders:

In other words, as long as you don't give the question of purpose too much thought you can avoid the depression and despair that seeps into the psyche when it begins to dawn on people that their lives are merely "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Dawkins seems to recognize that materialism strips life of any real meaning or purpose and leaves us to try to find some reason for getting out of bed in the morning. For Dawkins meaning comes from trying to prove there is no God, but as I think C.S. Lewis pointed out, there's something peculiar about making it one's purpose to prove that there is no purpose.

He adds that:

Precisely. Which is why it's somewhat beside the point to insist, as so many anti-IDers do, that ID is bogus because no top scientists believe it. This is a diversion and a fallacy. What's important is not whether a majority of scientists believe something but rather the reasons why they believe it or don't beleive it. In many cases Darwinism is embraced because it is a necessary crutch to sustain a materialist metaphysics. In other words, as Dawkins has said elsewhere, Darwinism makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

In response to the extraordinary fine-tuning of the universe Dawkins offers three counter-arguments:

He first raises the question of where the designer comes from. If God designed the universe, he asks, then what designed God?

His second reply, which he conflates with the third but which is really a distinct argument, is what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP). It says that we should not think it so very special that the universe is as it is for were it not, we would not be around to notice it. The fact that we exist means that the universe must be tuned as precisely as it is.

Sensing perhaps, the absurdity of the WAP he quickly imports a completely unscientific, non-empirical speculative hypothesis called the Multiverse theory. According to this, our universe is just one of an innumerable array of universes each having different parameters, values and laws. Given the existence of so many worlds it becomes more likely, even probable, that one world will be structured the way ours is.

Think of it this way: The chances that somebody is going to be holding the winning lottery ticket increase as the number of tickets sold increases. The more tickets/universes, the more likely one of them will have just the right sequence of numbers.

I'd like to consider these three arguments in another post.

RLC

This article contains some important good news:

And this with only two of the five brigades called for by the surge tactic currently in place. Perhaps we might ask a question of those of our friends who opposed George Bush's troop increase: If the murder rate continues to decline in Baghdad or to remain at low levels, was the Presidents' tactic the right thing to do?

Perhaps congressman Murtha might like to entertain the question.

RLC

Things are getting very curious in Iran. Now come reports that yet another high ranking Iranian military officer has disappeared along with his family. Whether he has defected or whether he has been eliminated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard for unknown derelictions is not known, but a lot of people in Iran, from the top on down, must be wondering whom they can trust. This whole article is fascinating, especially the last several paragraphs:

I'd like to think that somehow the good guys are behind all these defections and disappearances and that we are reaping an intelligence bonanza from it.

HT: HotAir which has more on the story.

RLC

According to Drudge when LIFE recently asked comic Chris Rock if America is ready for an African American president, Rock told LIFE: "It's ready for a retarded president, why wouldn't it be ready for an African American president?"

Well, now. Perhaps in liberal salons there are nuances punctiliously limned and fine distinctions carefully drawn between calling a politician a "faggot" and calling a president "retarded." Indeed, we might conclude that they must be different sorts of attributions altogether since we heard all about Ann Coulter's insensitivity and coarseness when she referred to John Edwards as a faggot, but we haven't heard a peep of liberal criticism of Chris Rock for calling George Bush retarded. Nor, of course, do we expect to.

The difference between the Coulter and Rock episodes is telling. Coulter's slur made news primarily because it is in fact so unusual to hear a highly placed conservative indulge in such unseemly rhetoric. Rock's insult, however, is not news, at least not on the left, because such rhetoric is almost de rigueur among liberals. It's so commonplace and so widely accepted that it scarcely gets noticed.

RLC

There is a civil war simmering in the Democratic party and this will not help soothe the hostilities:

The Democrats have been proclaiming since last November that they have a mandate from the people to end the war and repeal the Bush tax cuts. It turns out the leadership is inclined to do neither. Lots of folks in the rank and file, however, are incensed at what they see as a massive betrayal by the people they elevated to power in November. We expect that pretty soon there'll be open warfare on the left. It'll be fun.

RLC

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) has released an 18 page document laying out the theological, moral and legal basis for its opposition to any resort to torture. It is in many ways a fine document and in some ways an unfortunate one. The document is commendable for its affirmation of human dignity and human rights grounded in divine revelation and the imago dei, but it really does not grapple convincingly with the matter of torture. It's biggest failing, though not its only failing, is that it absolutizes its proscription of torture and makes no allowance for the motive or reason for which torture is employed.

It is certainly true that for Christians subjecting someone to torture for the purpose of punishment, revenge, or the amusement of the torturer is absolutely and heinously wrong, but there are circumstances in which, in our opinion, a ban on torture makes no moral sense.

Over the course of several posts we'll critique the reasoning in the NAE's document and try to show why we think it to be inadequate. We begin with this claim:

There is of course for the Christian a prima facie right of all persons to be secure and safe in their person, but that this right can never be forfeit is obviously false. We do not feel that a policeman is violating someone's rights when he kills an attacker in self-defense, for example. In other words, no human right is absolute, inviolable, or inalienable. My right to life and liberty does not confer upon me a further right to commit crime with impunity. A man's right not to be harmed is surrendered the moment he sets out to harm another.

All of this is, of course, entailed by Jesus' command to love our neighbor. It does not follow, however, that a commitment to "the preservation of their lives and protection of their basic rights ... [and] to the flourishing of every person's life" is absolute. If it did then we would be enjoined by such a commitment to abjure always and everywhere the use of force in defense of ourselves and in defense of others. There are some who strive to make the case that Scripture enjoins this degree of pacifism upon us, but I find their arguments to be in direct conflict with the law of love and the command to do justice.

It is not loving to permit an aggressor to harm one's family when the harm could be prevented by using force against the attacker. It is foolish to insist that police not use force to restrain criminals. It would be suicidal, given the world in which we live, to do away with our military, and it is unjust to refuse to punish criminals. Yet were we to follow the logic of the NAE's argument we would have to renounce the use of force in every situation and bend to the will of the criminals in our midst, suffering their depredations, rapes, and murders while refusing to take up arms to prevent them.

If we hesitate to follow the NAE logic this far, as I think all but a few would, then we must acknowledge that there are times when force against another human being is legitimate. The question then is what kinds of force are legitimate and under what circumstances may it be employed?

We'll take up those questions as we continue to examine the NAE statement. Meanwhile interested readers may want to peruse the document at the above link.

RLC

Is there unanimity among scientists about global warming?This British program answers with a very firm "no."

The feature is over an hour long but if you watch just the first six minutes you'll get the feeling that a lot of what you've been told about global warming is probably not true. This is an important documentary for anyone who wants to hear a side of the story not often publicized in the MSM.

RLC

It seems that when Arab Muslims can't kill Jews or Americans they content themselves with killing each other. Killing in the Arab world is a sport much like soccer or basketball in the civilized world. Take Palestine, for example. Fatah and Hamas were at each other's throats for months until they decided to attempt a rapprochement. This triggered a rebellion among those Hamas members who wanted to destroy Fatah. These malcontents are now killing other Hamas as well as Fatah.

Then the local branch of al Qaeda decided to join in the fun and has declared that it wants to kill all of them, both Hamas and Fatah, and has proclaimed itself at war with both groups. DEBKAfile gives us the play-by-play:

It'll soon be every man for himself in Gaza as the aborigines take to the streets to see how many heads they can lop off before they themselves are killed. I guess you have to be an Arab to appreciate the attractions of such sport.

RLC

The Secular Coalition for America has done some investigating and come up with this:

There is only one member of Congress who is on record as not holding a god-belief.

Given the number of congresspersons who seem to be completely bereft of any sense of ethical obligation or conscience I suspect that Ms Brown's estimate is a little low.

RLC

Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, seems determined to confirm the opinion of those who think him to be little more than a knave and buffoon. This statement which he delivered last weekend suggests that the future of Venezuela is in the hands of a man completely oblivious to modern economic realities:

"Those who want to go directly to hell, they can follow capitalism," Mr Chavez said in the town of Trinidad in Bolivia. "And those of us who want to build heaven here on earth, we will follow socialism," he added.

Which country, especially in the Spanish speaking world, has ever followed socialism to heaven on earth? How many times does the left have to relearn the lesson that attempts to coercively establish socialist paradises almost always end in firing squads, tyranny and dystopia.

On the other hand, though their achievements are certainly more modest than the establishment of "heaven on earth," the greatest engines of high standards of living for all its citizens have been capitalist societies: England in the 19th century, the U.S. in the 20th century along with Asian economic successes like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. Historian Rodney Stark makes the point exceptionally well in his book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success: Everywhere free markets and private property are protected there is prosperity, at least until governments can no longer resist the temptation to levy onerous taxes and kill the goose laying the golden eggs.

Socialism deadens economic growth because it sucks wealth from those who produce it and thus provides not only a disincentive to produce (why create if the state is going to take it), but it also prevents businesses from investing in improvements and research and development because the funds needed for these projects have been siphoned off by a parasitic state. Socialist governments kill off wealth production in other ways by burdening businesses with heavy regulations, onerous paper work, litigation and other barriers to success that businessmen find too difficult to surmount. Often they just give up, sell their businesses, and get a government job so they can live off the tax revenues imposed upon their former colleagues.

Socialist countries are often economically moribund, as we see in large swaths across Europe, and although there may be some people, usually state employees, who do well, most who live in socialist societies would dispute Chavez's characterization that they are heaven on earth. When socialism is combined with despotism, as it was in the communist world, and as it appears it may soon be in Venezuela, it becomes a literal hell.

Chavez aspires to be another Castro. No doubt he hopes to turn Venezuela into another Cuba. We should keep the Venezuelan people in our prayers.

RLC

Stephen Weinberg, a brilliant cosmologist, makes some very puzzling assertions in his favorable review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Indeed, if Weinberg weren't such a brilliant scientist I'd almost think some of what he says is kind of dopey. Take this excerpt for instance:

Well. Which commands would Dawkins and Weinberg wish to weaken, I wonder. The command not to murder? The command not to commit sexual infidelity, or steal, or lie? The command to honor our parents? Maybe it's the command to love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves that Messers. Dawkins and Weinberg find offensive.

Maybe these two prominent atheists want to weaken all of God's commands the better to facilitate the creation of an atheist paradise. Of course, should they manage to bring such a utopia about they'd have to build a Berlin wall to keep people from trying to escape it.

Weinberg goes on to meditate on the mass retreat from Christianity he sees reflected in the high degree of religious tolerance he finds everywhere in the U.S.:

How does it follow that suppressing unbelief would follow from a conviction that unbelievers are eternally lost? Why not think instead that Christians recognize that a belief that is not freely accepted is not genuine belief and that the suppression of dissenting views does nothing to change the hearts of those inclined toward unbelief.

Weinberg has more:

Of course there are people in the church who say that it doesn't matter what you believe, and of course religious toleration is rampant in America, but why conclude from that that there's a massive retreat from Christianity going on? It could be as easily assumed that professor Weinberg's Christian friends pray for him often and believe his salvation is in God's hands, not their's. It might also be the case that professor Weinberg's friends are only nominal Christians.

In any event, the most interesting part of his statement is his use of the phrase "loss of certitude."

It's not at all clear what he means by this. Is Professor Weinberg claiming that American Christians are less sure today than in earlier times that God exists? Does he think that Christians are losing their confidence that there is an afterlife? If so, I doubt very much that he's correct. I don't think that Christians are any less convinced of the truth of these beliefs than they ever were.

Perhaps what Professor Weinberg means is that Christians are not as certain about the fate of non-Christians as they once were, but if they are (and I think they are)that's hardly indicative of a massive retreat from Christianity. For an atheist to take hope that Christianity is weakening because Christians are not as soteriologically exclusive as they were in the early 20th century is to doom oneself to a frustrated hope. It'd be like a 16th century atheist hoping that the Reformation's challenge to the doctrine of papal infallibility would result in the collapse of the Christian faith.

Since we're talking about hopes, I hope Weinberg's Christian friends haven't given up on him, but I have to admit that it'd take a miracle to bring him to belief.

RLC

You have doubtless heard by now of the unfortunate confrontation between House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) and some anti-war folks in the hallway outside his office. Unaware that he was being taped, Obey candidly demonstrated the disdain our public servants sometimes have for their constituents who pay their salaries. It appears that liberals cannot even be civil to each other. Michelle has the video and the transcript at the link.

A little background: Obey is trying to end the war in Iraq through a piece of legislation that will remove the president's authority to wage the war. The citizens he encounters in the hallway are apparently anti-war activists who want him simply to vote to defund the war. Obey doesn't want to do that because it will put the troops in the field in jeopardy and take resources away from veterans' programs and hospitals.

Obey quickly grew impatient with the woman, who is evidently the mother of an Iraq war vet in his third deployment there, and acts pretty much like the south end of a north-bound horse in this intramural squabble among opponents to the Iraq war. In the process he offers some choice descriptions of those groups who are pressuring congressional Democrats to take more radically decisive action to end the war - at one point calling them "idiot liberals."

The incident reminded us of Peggy Noonan's quip that elected officials of both parties are contemptuous of their base but that Democrats tend to think of theirs as "barking mad."

Obey later apologized when he learned that his whole ugly performance is now on YouTube.

RLC

The following exchange took place in the course of an interview with Mike Huckabee, formerly Republican Governor of Arkansas and likely Presidential candidate. Huckabee articulates a view one wishes all conservatives shared:

We could vote for a guy like that.

HT: Prosthesis

RLC

Those who wish a vivid reminder of how the war against terrorists is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are invited to watch this video of a recent action against enemy combatants who made the mistake of firing on American aircraft. R.I.P.

RLC

I just finished reading Beginning at Moses by Michael P.V. Barrett several weeks ago. It's about finding Christ in the Old Testament. Mr. Barrett is talking about Psalm 22 on page 312.

Well, it would be silly of me to try to add anything to that.

WSC

How can the President get the media to pay attention to all the important things going on in the world? Perhaps the best way, maybe the only way, would not be popular with GW. At least Ramirez doesn't think it would:

RLC

George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center thinks that the new generation of atheists is angrier and dumber than their intellectual forbears. I don't know about dumber, but they certainly are angrier.

RLC

The blog Conscious Entities has an interesting post on Idealism and also one on the moral, intellectual, and phenomenal gaps between animals and humans.

Idealism is the view that everything we encounter in the world is ultimately reducible to ideas in minds. There is no material substratum to reality.

It was given its most notable expression by George Berkeley (1685-1753) in Principles of Human Knowledge where he argues that all we can experience are sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, sound, etc. But these sensory phenomena exist only in minds, thus all we can have experience of are ideas in our minds. It follows that if knowledge is a product of experience then all we can know are these ideas. A material "stuff" that generates the phenomena of experience is not only absurd but unknowable.

Since Berkeley was an empiricist and believed that all of our knowledge comes through sense experience, he concluded that we can know nothing of anything other than these ideas in our minds. We have no experience of, and therefore no knowledge of, matter. The notion that there is a material world behind the phenomena of our senses is superfluous and should therefore fall victim to Occam's Razor.

All that exists, according to Berkeley, are ideas in minds, and for Berkeley the entire world exists as idea in the mind of God. The world is a virtual reality generated by God, which may be one way to read Hebrews 1:3 and Colossians 1:13.

RLC

So why do American kids find school boring? Is it because of poor teaching as the No Left Turns guys say? Probably to some extent, but there's more to it than that, as many of our readers have pointed out.

American kids are jaded by affluence. It takes a lot to excite young people surrounded by stimulants that appeal to their hedonism and materialism. Having never wanted for anything, many students find any kind of intellectual work unappealing and unnecessary. They do enough to get by, but any glimmer of concern for the life of the mind is easily extinguished by social and extra-curricular concerns.

Schools minimize academics. In many schools today only lip-service is paid to the importance of academics. Everything else the school does implicitly sends students the message that the least important thing they do in their school day is what they do in the classroom. At the school at which I taught for thirty-five years a student could be taken out of an academic class for almost any activity imaginable, but a teacher of an academic subject dare not insist that the student remain in class nor could he take the student out of another activity to do academic work. For instance, if the band needed to rehearse, or the swim team had a meet, or the student council had an activity students could leave class to participate, but a classroom teacher was not permitted to take the student out of band class, or swim practice, or student council to tutor him/her on what was missed.

In other words, every activity trumped the academic program in my school, and, I suspect, the same situation exists at most schools. When the school administration tacitly communicates to the student the lesson that academics are the school's lowest priority, only the exceptional students can be expected to take a particular interest in them.

Modern culture devalues great literature, art, history, and philosophy. The value of these disciplines is intrinsic, not instrumental. One studies them for the intellectual satisfaction and enrichment one gains from them, not because they'll enable the student to one day buy a new Lexus. Our culture, however, tacitly disdains any curriculum which is not oriented toward a career or the making of money. Subjects which are pursued for their own sake are deemed less important than those which are more utilitarian. Students realize this and take such classes only because they are a state requirement, and they embark upon it with the attitude that they'll put forth the minimum effort necessary to get whatever grade they feel they need.

Finally, many kids in many schools come from homes and neighborhoods which are so dysfunctional that the student starts out way behind and can never catch up. He/she has no idea what's going on in the classroom and tunes it out. This starts in the earliest grades and continues all through school. By the time the student is in tenth grade he/she is often languishing at a second or third grade level. Understanding nothing of what's going on in the classroom it's little wonder they're bored.

So, to Peters Lawler and Schramm at No Left Turns, yes, there are too many teachers in classrooms who are uninspiring and apathetic, but that situation certainly exists in schools in India and Asia. It's in fact probably worse there than it is here. So why do those kids do so well and ours perform sub-optimally? Look at the affluence, look at the importance placed on academics and the life of the mind, and look at the culture.

RLC

This young man is perhaps the most astonishing human being you will ever see. I started watching the documentary about him (at Telic Thoughts) and couldn't stop. It's 48 minutes long, but it only takes about five minutes to realize that you're watching something that is both incredible and spooky at the same time.

At the end of the film one man observes that he wonders what abilities are latent in the human mind that most of us cannot use. I wondered the same thing as I watched the video, and wondered, too, if perhaps we will ever be able to access those capacities.

RLC

Rick Pearcey offers a very clever analysis of the Ann Coulter contretemps in light of contemporary thinking and concludes that there's really nothing wrong with what she said. Pearcey is being satirical, of course, but there is a truth implicit in his essay that should be teased out.

The only people who have any basis for criticizing Coulter for her specific remark are Christian conservatives. There are several reasons for this, but let me focus on just one: If one believes, as liberals do, that there is nothing wrong with being gay then there's no reason to be upset that Coulter calls someone a "faggot"? Sure she meant to be insulting, which is kind of insulting all by itself, but the insult is akin to a secularist calling a conservative Christian a "fundie." The term is meant to be insulting since it connotes a certain lack of sophistication, but a lot of conservative Christians would be only mildly irritated by the epithet and a lot of them would simply laugh at the idea.

People who believe that homosexuality is a deviant lifestyle, however, see a much deeper insult in Coulter's words and are upset that one who speaks for conservatives and for Christians would engage in that sort of discourse. But, and this is the point, it is only those who see homosexuality as deviant who have reason to find her language offensive.

Meanwhile, compared to the vicious rhetorical felonies the left commits everyday (Remember Alec Baldwin saying that people should stone Henry Hyde to death, along with his entire family?) against the people they hate, which is about everybody to the right of George McGovern, Coulter's words, as bad as they were, are a misdemeanor.

As Pearcey observes, there are lots of others who have no reason to take umbrage in her words. Read his piece titled "Faggot" Easy to Defend.

RLC

A number of people whose heritage is Muslim but who may or may not themselves still be Muslim met recently in St. Petersburg to proclaim their intention to contend against the brutes and thugs who dominate the Islamic world on behalf of fundamental human rights. Here is the declaration that resulted from their convocation:

God bless those who signed off on this document, and may God protect them from those who will inevitably seek to kill them for their heresy.

RLC

A terrible story nears its end:

This case raises two questions which might be asked of those who oppose the death penalty. First, does John Couey deserve to be executed or doesn't he? Second, if he does deserve it what good is served by not doing it?

By refusing to execute a man such as this for the horrific crime he commited we send the message to society that Jessica Lunsford's life is not worth executing her murderer over. A society which refuses to execute people like Couey sends the message that it just doesn't value innocent life very highly, at least not highly enough to make taking a life punishable by the most severe penalty.

To allow him to live is a bit like assessing a rapist a $50 fine. The penalty sends the message that the crime isn't very serious and that women really aren't worth protecting.

Justice is served by nothing less than the execution of John Couey. It's better than what he deserves.

RLC

Mark Skousen commemorates Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged 50 years later in the Christian Science Monitor. Rand's work is not literature, exactly, but it is, according to a 1991 poll of American readers, the second most influential book ever written. Only the Bible was voted more influential.

I'm not sure about this assessment myself, since back in the late fifties and early sixties everyone was reading Rand, and then shortly thereafter we suffered our national, wrenching lurch to the left which represented in many ways everything Rand deplored.

In any event, Atlas Shrugged is a book of philosophical ideas about morality, economics, and collectivism set as a novel. Her ideas are both good and bad. When they're good they're very good and when they're bad they're very bad. Skousen's essay sorts them out.

RLC

John Edwards seeks political traction with Christians by invoking Jesus on behalf of the poor, but either he's tone deaf to how evangelicals regard Jesus or he's just not as articulate in talking about Christ as he is when he's appealing to a jury to award a huge settlement to his client and thus to himself:

What exactly does Edwards mean when he says that "Jesus would be appalled"? Does he mean that if Jesus only knew about the plight of today's oppressed masses He would be appalled by it? Does he think that Jesus doesn't know about it, but would be outraged if He did? If so, then Edwards has a long theological road to travel before he rests in evangelicalism's good graces. Most Christians believe that Jesus was divine, that He is alive today and quite aware of everything that happens in this world. It's Christologically incongruous, in other words, for Edwards to speak in hypotheticals.

Edwards failure to fire his two potty-mouthed anti-Christian bigot bloggers didn't do much to endear him to Christians, and he certainly won't score any points by using clunky rhetoric that suggests that Jesus is purely past tense or otherwise oblivious to what's going on in the world.

But setting all that to one side, what might appall Jesus even more than the plight of today's poor is the hypocrisy of people who live in opulent extravagance and ostentation while invoking His name to criticize others for their alleged lack of concern for those who live in hovels.

RLC

Here's an interesting development in the deteriorating state of affairs concerning Iran. An Iranian general with much knowledge of his country's espionage efforts and weapons programs has either defected or been kidnapped:

In either case, it seems that there will be an intelligence bonanza for the U.S., unless, of course, the guy is a double agent out to plant disinformation.

RLC

More readers have weighed in on why school is boring on our Feedback page and have between them said much of what I wanted to say, so I've postponed my response to tomorrow.

RLC

Here's another example of the difference between liberals and conservatives, at least in the media and in the blogosphere. Ann Coulter calls John Edwards a "faggot" and conservative commentators, if not everyone in the rank and file, have been quick to condemn the insult and to all but require Coulter to do penance in sackcloth and ashes. Her mean-chick schtick has run its course and worn itself out in the minds of many conservatives. They'd rather leave that kind of rhetoric to the Maureen Dowds of the world.

Meanwhile, Bill Maher suggests that the world would be better off if the Taliban had succeeded in assassinating vice-president Cheney last week, and there has been utter silence from the libs. I have seen nothing in any liberal news media about this dreadfully cruel remark.

Name-calling and hateful speech is considered despicable by most conservatives no matter who does it, but, judging from their silence, liberals have no problem with it, at least if it comes from one of their own. Indeed, they scarcely seem to notice it unless it has a conservative provenience.

The silence on the left causes one to fear that this kind of vicious, ugly thinking and speech has simply become part of how many contemporary secular leftists see the world and part of who they are.

RLC

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article by Robin Marantz Henig which explores current scientific thinking on the question of why people are religious. What is the best explanation, scientists are asking, for the fact that belief in God or gods is almost universal? Henig writes:

I think Reformed philosophers would reply that of course we're "hard-wired" to believe in God. That's almost precisely the point Paul was making in Romans 1. It's what John Calvin meant when he wrote about the sensus divinitatis, the sense of God that everybody seems to have as long as they don't squelch it.

Of course, this isn't what many scientists have in mind when they talk about belief in God being a product of our evolutionary past. Their agenda is to discredit belief in God by showing that it's nothing but an illusion foisted upon us by our genes to equip us for life in the paleolithic epoch.

This little parlor game can be played as well by theists, however. I wonder, for instance, if next these scientists are going to take up the question why many people don't believe in God. Are atheists actually genetic mutants intellectually maladapted to their environment and doomed to be eliminated by natural selection? Is atheism simply an evolutionary aberration, like Down's syndrome, such that the person who suffers from it really can't help holding the beliefs he does? If so, then the rationality that atheists enjoy claiming for themselves is an illusion. Their belief, or lack of it, is a completely non-rational, genetically determined state of mind.

Isn't this fun?

RLC

University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers has gained some reknown and much criticism from both supporters and adversaries alike for his acidulous attacks on anyone who is skeptical of the Darwinian paradigm. He advocates humiliating and firing school science teachers who want to teach both sides of the intelligent design/materialistic evolution issue and considers ad hominem abusive to be the pinnacle of intellectual discourse:

Anyway, it's ironic that Paul Myers, an avowed atheist (if one didn't know it would be apparent from his total rejection of the idea that one should treat one's opponents with dignity, respect, and kindness), claims himself to be on the side of reason and human rights. Perhaps no one has told him as yet, but atheistic naturalism offers its devotees absolutely no grounds for either stance.

In other words, both his devotion to reason and to human rights are arbitrary, non-rational commitments somewhat akin to one's devotion to oreo cookie ice cream. Now one may be passionate about oreo cookie ice cream, of course, but to establish a blog and to spend one's time excoriating those who have a different view of oreo cookie seems at least a little perverse.

Perhaps professor Myers might spend a few moments reflecting upon why he believes that reason is a reliable guide to truth or why he believes that human rights are rooted in anything more than an arbitrary preference. If he gives these questions just a few moments of serious attention he might realize that he can only argue for the trustworthiness of reason by using reason, which is irrational.

Given his view that matter, or nature, is all there is, neither his trust in reason nor his devotion to human rights is grounded in anything more than his own personal taste, bias, or prejudice.

RLC

Christianity Today gives Amazing Grace a pretty good review. The film hasn't arrived at our little backwater yet, but we're looking forward to seeing it when eventually it does. William Wilberforce was an impressive man, motivated, as were so many abolitionists throughout history, by his sense that Christ wanted him to do what he could to fight the injustice and inhumanity of the slave trade.

Rodney Stark, in his excellent historical work titled For the Glory of God, points out that had it not been for Christians and the Church, slavery would not have been eradicated in Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, and when it rose again after the discovery of the New World, it was both the Church and the work of Christians like Wilberforce which eventually got it abolished in the Western Hemisphere.

There is nothing in any other religious tradition, and certainly nothing in the philosophies of naturalism or materialism, that affords grounds for condemning slavery. Indeed, Islam's founder, Mohammed, himself owned slaves.

To the extent that slavery, which has been practiced all through history and all throughout the world (and still is today), has been meliorated or abolished, it has been because of the efforts of people operating out of a Judeo-Christian worldview which teaches that men are made in the image of God and are loved by Him. As such they have individual dignity and are all equally precious in God's eyes. Each man is the property of the Creator, and it is therefore an affront to God to treat as one's own property a man or woman who is one of His children.

If, though, we abandon this worldview we must also abandon the notion that man has any special dignity or worth or rights. If there is no Creator then if one has the power to enslave another there can be nothing morally wrong with doing so. In a world without the Christian God might makes right, and owning people is no different, morally speaking, than owning horses.

RLC

There's an interesting response to our post on students being bored in school on our Feedback page.

I'll share some thoughts on this on tomorrow's Viewpoint.

RLC

An intriguing series of events unfolds in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Vice-president Cheney visits Pakistan, a senior Taliban leader is arrested right after he leaves, and an attack on a "high value target" takes place on a terrorist compound in Afghanistan. Is this all a coincidence or are the Pakistanis throwing us a bone by arresting the Taliban guy and persuading him to give up some of his confreres? Allahpundit has the details and a few caveats.

RLC

Social conservatives in the Republican party find themselves in a real bind as they prep for 2008. They're pretty sure Senator Clinton will be their opponent, but there is a sense that only candidates whose social conservatism is suspect or absent altogether are in a position to beat her. The genuine social conservatives like Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter are scarcely a blip on the voters' radar screen, at least at present.

There are Republicans who doubtless could defeat Hillary - John McCain, Rudy Guiliani, Mitt Romney - but none of these excite conservatives who see each of them as personally or ideologically problematic. One person who does get conservative juices flowing and who might be able to at least give Hillary a run is Newt Gingrich, but he's not a candidate at this point, and he's carrying an awful lot of personal baggage.

Peggy Noonan summed up the Republican plight when she quipped, that of the major Republican contenders - McCain, Guiliani, Gingrich, and Romney - it is ironic that the only one who has only one wife is the Mormon.

My friend Jason linked me to this article which delves into this matter in a little more detail.

RLC

This story reports that a big study has found that most students are bored in school most of the time. I'm not sure that that they needed a study to find this out or that it's news, but apparently some people think it is.

No Left Turns has some interesting commentary that blames teachers (both in high school and college)for this state of affairs. Pete Schramm writes:

Students in high school are bored. We can argue all day why that may be so, but, in general it is my considered opinion that it has to do with the massive fact that students aren't asked to do enough, and are not exposed to interesting things well enough. They are given much busy work, and not enough poetry or beauty or something good or high or noble to consider and think about.

There was a very big international(UN funded?) study that came out of the Netherlands maybe ten years ago that compared students from dozens of countries. In general we didn't fare too badly in the early years of schooling, but the US fared worse the longer the students stayed in school. So, by the time our students were in high school, they were at the bottom of the pack.

This was also not surprising to me, but what was surprising is that for the first time in any study they gave a reason why: American students were more bored than students in other countries; the more they were in school (through high school), the more bored they became. That is an important fact. I regret that I am unable to find that study. My experience confirms this fact. Almost all students think their education in high school was boring.

And Peter Lawler responds:

There is much to say about all this, and I'll have some thoughts to offer on a future post.

RLC

The American Psychological Association has adopted a resolution opposing the teaching of intelligent design as science.

After having adopted the position they released an unfortunate statement which offers rhetoricians everywhere a textbook case of muddled thinking:

This statement suffers from a number of shortcomings. The truth of the second clause of the first sentence, for instance, is by no means obvious. It's easy to say that science and religion occupy different domains of human experience until you try to define the boundaries of those domains. Once you embark upon that project you find that there's much overlap and that the overlap is unavoidable. In other words, the difference between science and "religion" is not as clear-cut as the APA would have us believe. Indeed, for many materialists science is a religion.

Roy Clouser explains in his book The Myth of Religious Neutrality that what all religions share in common, maybe the only thing they share in common, is the belief that there exists something which does not depend upon anything else for its existence but upon which everything else depends. For theists this is God. For atheistic materialists it's matter. The point is that religious belief is inescapable. Everyone has it. The only questions are what specific religious beliefs are to be excluded from science and why those and not others?

There is, then, a sense in which ID is religious, since it holds that there is a designer upon which all else, at least in our cosmos, depends. But so, too, is Darwinism religious in that it holds that matter and energy are the ultimately necessary existants. So where is the line between science and religion to be drawn?

The second sentence of the APA statement has the unintended consequence of ruling neo-Darwinism out of science. The fundamental premise of NDE (Neo-Darwinian evolution)is that natural processes, chiefly natural selection and genetic mutation, are sufficient to account for all biological phenomena. But precisely how does one go about testing or disconfirming that claim? What empirical evidence would bear upon its truth or falsity?

If that claim is indeed scientific then its contrary, i.e. the claim that natural processes by themselves are not sufficient to account for all biological phenomena, is also scientific, and that's the fundamental premise of ID.

Here's another problem: Many scientists are of the view that there are other uiniverses besides our own. Articles on this exotic hypothesis can be found all through the scientific literature. So evidently at least some people in the field believe this to be a legitimate topic for scientific inquiry despite the fact that it is neither testable, supported by empirical evidence nor subject to disconfirmation. But if the idea that there are many worlds is legitimate science why is the possibility that an inhabitant of one of those worlds designed this world considered to lack a basis in science? Why is it considered "religious" to think that the designer of our cosmos may dwell in some other universe when the existence of those universes is not considered to be religious speculation?

Perhaps the APA needs to reanalyze their opinions on this issue and attempt to think a little more deeply about it than they evidently have.

RLC

Ramirez pokes a little fun at Hollywood's limousine liberals:

Living large while telling the rest of us to carpool. That's Hollywood ... and Al Gore.

RLC

One of the most fascinating problems philosophers wrestle with is the problem of consciousness. What exactly is consciousness? How is it produced? What is its relationship to the brain? Etc.

Usually we think of consciousness as a state of being aware, but how does awareness arise from inanimate matter? How can atoms and molecules make us aware of ourselves and of the world external to ourselves? How does this all happen? How, for example, does an electro-chemical reaction in the brain generate the sensation of red?

Peter at Conscious Entities has an interesting discussion of what he calls the Three and a Half Problems of Consciousness.

The problems he discusses are the problems of Qualia, Intentionality, Morality, and Relevance. The article is a good primer on what is one of the most cutting edge fields in contemporary philosophy and also one of the most vexing because the problems seem so intractable.

Qualia are the sensations that we experience as part of our conscious awareness of the world. The sensations of color, sound, emotions, etc. are the qualia of our experience.

Intentionality refers to the fact that thoughts are about things. How is it that a particular flow of atoms, chemicals, and electricity can be about something.

The problem of moral responsibility concerns, among other things, the question of how we can be responsible for our actions unless we somehow cause them, but if we are bound by the laws of physics then in what sense is it us who causes our actions rather than the laws of physics which constrain us?

Anyway, read what Peter has to say on these things and you'll be well on your way to a Ph.D. in the philosophy of mind.

RLC

Dennis Miller instructs the ladies on how to be an American. HotAir has the video.

RLC

John Leo at City Journal explains why one can't be too careful when reading or listening to the news:

Evidently, race, religion and ideology are only important to a news story when identifying them can make white male Christians look bad.

Leo's whole piece is worth reading.

RLC

I've written several times about the viciousness that resides all too comfortably on the left and how it is almost a uniquely left-wing phenomenon in contemporary politics. I say "almost" because from time to time someone on the starboard side of the ship will let go with something that's just plain gratuitously mean. It doesn't happen often, but it shouldn't happen at all, and it would happen a lot less often if Ann Coulter would just stifle herself when she feels the need to step over the line of "edgy and witty commentary" into the realm of just plain meanness.

Alas, she doesn't stifle herself often enough, and so conservatives are made to wince at episodes like this one reported by Hot Air:

Coulter's penchant for the gratuitous insult is why we rarely cite her commentary anymore which is unfortunate because she is bright, usually right, and often funny. This sort of "joke," however, just confirms her reputation as a cheap-shot artist. She owes Edwards an apology.

RLC

Books and Culture features a review by philosopher Alvin Plantinga of Richard Dawkins' much talked about anti-theistic book The God Delusion. Plantinga's essay is a bit longish, but every paragraph rewards the reader with wonderful insights into both the shortcomings of Dawkins' book as well as the shortcomings of the metaphysical naturalism upon which the book relies.

An example of what Plantinga has to say about the latter comes toward the end where he recaps an argument that he's been making for years and which no one seems able to refute:

Plantinga spends time throughout the review analyzing Dawkins' argument that God had nothing to do with the appearance of living things. The argument distills to this:

In other words, because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:

Dawkins' most talked about anti-theistic argument in The God Delusion is one which reasons that since the biological world is very complex, and since the more complex something is the more improbable it is, and since the Creator of life would have to be even more complex than what He created, the Creator must be an extraordinarily improbable being - so improbable as to be not worth believing in.

Plantinga explains why this argument is essentially nonsense, but there's one reason for rejecting it which Plantinga doesn't delve into very far. When we say that the complexity of the living world is improbable we mean that it is improbable that it could arise solely by unguided processes. The processes that produced it must have been purposeful. It is highly improbable that a stick would appear to be whittled to a point if only mechanical forces ever acted upon it, but it's not at all improbable that the stick takes on this appearance given the existence of a boy with a knife.

In other words, complex living things are only improbable on the assumption that they arose by happenstance. They're not at all improbable if there's an intelligent creator.

Moreover, although it's improbable that complex things will be produced by purely mechanical processes, God is not something which is produced. God is a necessary being which does not depend on anything else for His existence. Thus it is a category mistake to talk about the improbability of God coming to be. God is not the sort of thing which "comes to be."

Dawkins either doesn't understand the concept of necessary and contingent being or he simply confuses God with contingent entities, which is perhaps why Plantinga observes that Dawkins is no philosopher.

RLC

Denyse O'Leary has an excellent series of posts on the New Atheism and its accompanying neuroses at The ID Report.

Links to each of the posts in her series can be found at the bottom of the post linked to above.

RLC

Our highly esteemed staff of professional foreign policy experts here at Viewpoint have been cautioning us for over three years now that the biggest threat we face from our enemies may be a scenario something like this: A terrorist organization manages to smuggle a single suitcase nuke into a major American city. They publicly announce, falsely, that they have numerous such weapons planted in cities around the country and demand that we get out of the Middle East, abandon Israel, and impeach the current president or they will begin to detonate these bombs.

The nation is hurled into crisis. Everything shuts down because people are afraid to go into our cities. The economy begins to plummet and chaos reigns in our urban centers. The administration stands firm, however, and refuses to bend to the blackmail. The terrorists tell us that we asked for it, and set off their one bomb killing tens of thousands of Americans and destroying, say, Manhatten.

They then announce that we have one week to comply with their demands or they will detonate another. No one knows, of course, that there isn't another. So panic ensues. The pressure on the White House to capitulate would be irresistable. The United States would almost have to yield and the door would swing wide open to the Islamofascists who would sweep the world imposing Islam on every nation on earth.

That's the scenario that causes our greatest anxiety. Now Michael Crowley of the New York Times Magazine writes an article on former Senator Sam Nunn that says that his greatest nightmare is a scenario very similar to the one we've outlined above. It's really quite disconcerting.

Even moreso since despite the Islamists' stated determination to destroy us, the Democrats' biggest concern seems to be preventing the president from eavesdropping on terrorists' phone calls and otherwise acting as a president should when our very existence is under assault. For some of the president's opponents, the most frightening threat to our future is not the likelihood of nuclear terrorism on our shores, but rather that the average mean temperature of the planet has gone up almost a degree in the last century.

As if to illustrate the unseriousness that exists in some precincts of the left in the face of the most serious threat to our national survival since the Cuban Missile Crisis, a television person named America Ferrera recently delivered herself of the opinion that America won't be free until George Bush leaves office. This empty-headed nonsense was boffo with her audience, of course, but it's positively moronic given the nature of the real threats that face us.

RLC

Here's a must-read plea in the Wall Street Journal from Senator Joe Lieberman, perhaps the only Democrat in the Senate with a sound understanding of what's at stake in Iraq. I've edited out some of the essay for the sake of brevity:

Senator Leiberman is absolutely right, and his Democratic colleagues know it. Perhaps that's why they've had second thoughts about trying to slow-bleed the troops to force a halt to our involvement.

RLC

Alyaan Hirsi Ali, a woman who has been placed under a death fatwa by Islamic mullahs for her impertinence in telling the truth about Islam, instructs Bill Maher's audience, guests, and Maher himself on the nature of dhimmitude.

Maher's understanding of Christianity is regrettable, but the chance to hear Ali makes it worth putting up with his arrogance for a while. The movie critic spoof at the end is pretty funny, too.

If you're interested in learning about who Ali is check out at Slate by Anne Applebaum. RLC