Scotsman.com Heritage & Culture - Loch Ness Monster - A picture of Nessie? Well, yes and no…: “AFTER decades of blurred photographs, snatches of wobbly cine-camera film and centuries of myth, tourists cruising Loch Ness aboard the Royal Scot could scarcely believe their eyes when a 16ft plesiosaurus reared out of the water in front of them.”

This is an amazing story. It is not what you think. . .but more about what counts as knowledge in our culture.

This is a sophisticated assault on common sense and the belief in eye witness testimony in the case of the extraordinary.

Are people supposed to doubt their own eyes because they “know” (on authority?) that science has shown that there is no monster in Loch Ness?

Good question. The evidence against Nessie is pretty great. The chance of a hoax in the Loch is also great given past experience. It seems, therefore, that there is good reason for not thinking an eye witness account is good enough.

The danger is when people move from this to dismiss all miracles or eye witness accounts of the extraordinary. There are some circumstances under which a theist expects a miracle (given her world view) and where an eye witness report of that miracle (where there is no reason to anticipate fraud) is good enough to adopt belief in a miracle.

The reason believing in Nessie just based on this “sighting” is not rational is that many frauds of exactly this sort (though not as sophisticated) have been practiced in the past.

In the case of a family member dying of a disease and answered prayer, where is no reason or motive to suspect fraud, an theist would be in her rights to see a “healing.”

Are miracles extraordinary? I think not, if by extraordinary one means “rare.” Yes, if one means “out of the normal course of nature.”

Common sense answers are usually right. . . and your eyes do not usually deceive. For some reason, some in our culture are intent on making people place the burden of proof on the obvious and not the less obvious.

Michael was the younger son. His brother was given the family business since that was the way things were done. The oldest would run the firm while the rest were to contribute. In the early twentieth-century that was already a very old-fashioned notion, but Michael benefited in terms of prestige and wealth from the business. He could have left the firm, but he chose to stay.

Michael was in many ways better suited to management than his quieter older brother. However, he could not seem to settle down. He moved from one in inappropriate love to another finally falling in love, deeply in love, with a married woman. In that era, such a deed could only alienate him from the rest of his family. His older brother was deeply hurt. Given the health of his own son, the eldest brother had to count on his younger brother to manage the family firm after his own death, but now his brother had created a scandal. His own wife did not feel she could tolerate a woman in the family who had two previous husbands.

Eventually the time came when the firm began to falter. The older brother had a wife who frequently interfered in the running of the business. She was a disaster with not even a vague notion of the modernization needed.

Tough words needed to be spoken and as the officer most likely to assume control, Michael was sent to deliver the bad news. His older brother could not hear him, however. Michael had given up his moral authority when he had chosen “love” over duty. Now Michael was asking his brother to hurt the woman he passionately loved and do his duty. He was not heard for he lacked the standing to make his case.

The family was ruined.

And so it is in our lives when we choose great passion apart from our duty. Love is not enough or better love that defies our duty and hurts others we love cannot be great love. Even if it is a passion that never leaves, that burns an entire lifetime more brightly with the years as did that of Michael and his wife, it is not enough. Real love lays down love itself for others. It refuses to place the satisfaction of itself over the needs of others.

Michael failed in his duty, his love, for his family. No matter how great the passion he felt there was no justification for such selfishness. He wanted the benefits of a conventional life, the life of duty, with the liabilities of duties hard call.

Grand Duke Michael weakened the House of Romanov when he pursued his Natasha. It left his brother Tsar Nicholas II with one less support for the throne. It left the Tsar with one less respected voice of moderation and no example of the sacrifice of great love for the good of the many. Michael got the wife he wanted, but the end was misery and death.

It always is. We are not heirs to great Empires. Nothing seems to ride on our choices. Passion calls and it seem easier to answer it, to seize the immediate happiness of love, than to do our duty. We just want happiness and do not care about the misery we create. What difference does it make? No dynasty hangs on our deeds.

God help us, but we are all of us sons and daughters of Almighty God. We are brothers and sisters to King Jesus. Though the eternal Kingdom can never fall, we can weaken it in our own day and time. God have mercy on us. We seize for love and miss the greatest love of all. We do not allow the pain of denial to purge our souls and make us ready for a higher love. Like greedy children, we cannot believe that what would follow denial could be better than the bright bauble of the passion we so desire.

Someone reading this might be at a cross roads. Duty seems hard and dry. Passion seems exciting and enlivening. Sacrifice, the cross of virtue, seems a pain that will never end. Do not get off that cross! Dare to do your duty! Do not fail as a mother or a father.

The man who works daily and trades grand adventure for homely affection will find what he has lost. The woman who trades career for hearth will find what she has lost. Great good deeds will be done, are always done, by the sacrifice of what seems greater to pursue what seems less but is right.

Michael got Natasha but helped lose Russia and his entire family. May we never do the same in our own time. May we follow the hard path of duty and so find the greatest love of all.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

The very worst college student, the one most hopeless, is the student who comes to college to recreate himself. This young man decides that he will no longer be John Mark, but J.M. The new J.M. will ditch his old wardrobe and get all new togs. No longer will he be his parents’ child, instead he will be College Man with a beard and new opinions. If his parents were Republicans, he joins the Green Party. If his parents were socialists, he becomes a monarchist.

Why is he so hopeless? His “old life” is part of who he is. Until he comes to grips with his past, he will never be able to make positive change in his present. He will always be reacting to what he was without thinking about it.

Nations are similar to people in this respect. They have histories and cannot escape the past without coming to terms with it. This is especially true of nations that try to change quickly through revolutions. The revolutionary believes he can change his nation quickly. The new and improved country will make up for all the sacrifice required to get to this Promised Land. Just like the young man in college, the sacrifice is never worth it and history comes back to haunt the nation.

First, the old remember. Even after one hundred years pass the old remember the stories their grandparents tell them of the time before the revolution. Second, the monuments of the old order are almost always preserved. Russia is full of buildings, art, music, and literature from tsarist days. Third, the scars of revolution last for generations. The great-grandparents are displaced. The grandparents struggle to survive. The parents finally fit into a culture they have been taught to have ambiguous feelings toward. The children, now that they are part of that culture, are free to despise it. The antipathy of the great-grandparents finally has the social space in which to flourish.

Is there blood guilt for a nation? If we accept that there is a spiritual dimension to reality, then Holy Mother Russia murdered tens of millions of her children. She starved children and worshipped strange foreign gods. Her rulers were butchered for their mistakes and their virtues. No person took care to condemn the first and laud the second. As often happens, she embraced the vices and forgot the virtues.

Repentance is the only possible answer and repentance involves not words but real return. Is it an accident that England repented of her regicide and thrived? Perhaps, but many Englishmen thought it important to change organically. They worked hard, even in their glorious revolutions, to make the old order part of the new. Whether because of a spiritual dimension, as Shakespeare argues in Richard II, or merely because it is what is best for men it worked.

Russia has never come to grips with the horror of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed. The wreckage of the old order is all around the visitor as Hugh Hewitt recently pointed out. Russians are still capable of great bravery as the Second World War attests, but she has never returned to the robust growth and dynamic culture of the Silver Age before World War I. If that war had never happened, we would face a vigorous Orthodox state fully modern in its economy and culture.

Russia cannot pretend the Soviet Union did not happen. That evil empire scarred the soul of the nation of the lifetime of an entire generation.

Sadly, Russia cannot pretend that the Tsarist order was without fault and simply “go back.” The world has changed and the Tsarist order was no utopia.

It was the old order that managed to be sucked into the hell hole of the Great War. It was the old order that become impotent in the face of the need for great change. No person would wish to go back to things exactly as they were. One thinks especially of the pogroms and official anti-Semite attitudes of the government as one such vice. Repentance must be made here as well. However, there must be a going back to the virtues of what was with an accounting for the vices.

I believe that Russia is dying. She is producing few children and fewer great deeds. Her government is corrupt enough to compare with the worst Tsarist ministers, the Protopopovs, venal and mad oldsters. Only there is no virtue at all at the center of the government and no patriotism. Nicholas II would die for his country however foolish his plans. He was an excellent head of state if a dreadful head of government.

Putin is drifting into becoming merely a Protopopov in a business suit pushed up by gangsters and the darkest forces of the Soviet regime. The mob rules Russia and is draining her dry sending her treasure and future to Monte Carlo and Las Vegas. There is no patriotic core and no head of state.

What is to be done? We cannot hope Russia will muddle through. In her history, there are periodic dark times when the people cannot stand anymore folly and rise up. Such revolutions are bloody, useless, and leave the nation ever weaker. It also will be dangerous for the world community since a Russia in chaos will still be armed with nuclear weapons. A weak Russia will be even less ready to protect those weapons and a chaotic Russia might be tempted to use them on herself (Is any war worse or more brutal than a Civil War?) or others.

Russia must return in an organic way to her past. She must pray that Putin can give way to a Juan Carlos as the aging Franco did in Spain. She must hope that her Orthodox churchmen have the wisdom of the Spanish clergy to allow change and freedom of thought. Unlike Spain, she must reject becoming merely a vacation ground for New European values and business. Russia needs leaders who will break the mob and bring in constitutional government.

Where will such leaders come from? They cannot come by right-wing revolution. Revolutions from the “right” are as bad as revolutions from the left. Is there no person in the Duma who can move above party politics and press for a Russian constitution and a new head of state? Can England become a better model for government and Ireland for economics? Is there a patriot who will give this change an organically Russian feel? Can the Patriarch shake off years of service to brutal, evil men in the Soviet era to speak as the Byzantine churchmen would speak to bad rulers? Can the village priests resist the worst abuses of the tsarist regime, while restoring the glories of the faith?

If not, then what hope is there for Russia? Some great crisis will come, internally or externally, and the criminals will flee. Who will be left to rule?

We know the answer and it is the thriving Islamic community. Some of them have embraced the extremism of the Taliban perversion of Islam. The Islamic extremists within her borders have a plan, a world view, and believe they have a mission from their god. No Russian Mafia can stop them only an alternative vision of reality worth a man’s life.

A few of those college students who try to change who they are do so. Those are the ones most to be pitied. Cut off from who they are, they fade away. Having rejected who they are, they become nothing. God help Russia. God save her from such a fate.

Here is a jolly little article by an ID critic who has dispensed with actual argument and has gone straight for personal attacks! In good junior high fashion, serious intellectual issues are getting boiled down to: “ID is stupid! ID is dumb! ID is so uncool! All the cool kids are Darwinists!”

Let’s be clear. If you are an American who thinks any deity or non-material force exists in the Universe and that you can tell it, then these folk dislike you. Don’t fall for the divide and conquer strategy that tries to paint ID as the preserve of “fundie Christians.” (Of course, you should ask yourself if your views of fundie Christians aren’t media creations themselves . . . part of the soft bigotry of the establishment.)

My comments, as usual, are in italics.

WASHINGTON DIARIST
Creations
by Leon Wieseltier
Post date: 08.12.05
Issue date: 08.22.05

The cunning souls who propound intelligent design are playing with fire, because they have introduced intelligence into the discussion. It is a standard to which they, too, must be held.

When you grow up, you are no longer allowed just to say, “Suzie Smith is a stupid, stupid, stupid!” You must develop good, passive voice ways of saying it. Otherwise everyone will know that you just don’t like Suzie Smith and all that college education will have been wasted.

The theory of intelligent design must itself be intelligently designed. I cannot judge the soundness of their science, but that is not the only standpoint from which they must be judged. Their science, after all, is pledged to a philosophy.

We could question a literary editor’s ability to do philosophy, but let’s not quibble.

Philosophically speaking, I do not see that they have demonstrated what they congratulate themselves for demonstrating. The “argument from design,” the view that the evidence for the existence of God may be found in the organization of the natural world, is an ancient argument, but philosophers have grasped, at least since the sixth section of the third chapter of the second book of the Critique of Pure Reason, that it may establish only the wisdom of a creator, and not the existence of one.

Someone should have told Al Plantinga, William Lane Craig, Edward Wierenga, and the hundreds of modern theistic professional philosophers that the whole philosophic debate on this topic was finished by Kant. Here is a good rule of thumb: philosophical debates improve over time (good intelligent selection!), but they are hardly ever “over.” Super-philosopher X may have wiped out one version of an idea, but a new X resistant strain is almost surely on the way.

Some versions of the argument to design have been defeated. Other versions are under discussion. Outsiders may view all this discussion as futile, but progress is made! The version of theism now defended by philosophers is far more robust than that defended by even such greats as Aquinas, because we stand shoulder to shoulder with the many philosophers that have come since.

It isn’t ID folk who are not up to date in philosophy, but their critics.

It is impossible, of course, not to marvel at the complexity and the beauty of the natural order; but marveling is not thinking. The mind may recoil from the possibility that all this sublimity came into being by accident, but it cannot, on those grounds alone, rule the possibility out, unless it is concerned only to cure its own pain.

However, it might motivate a person to do hard philosophy to see if what seems to be true is. Writers like this one seem to think that just saying a thing could be true, or could be contrary to what seems to be true, is enough to show that it probably is the case! Amazingly, what seems true, usually is. The burden of proof is on the person who thinks the watch is not designed not on the rest of us who think it is. There is nothing wrong with siding, at the first, with common sense.

Of course, someone will point out things can go against common sense. Well and good. Show us, my dear Darwinist, why we should assume it in the case of life. The burden of proof is on you to show why a thing that you agree appears to be designed cannot be . . . and give us a widely agreed on naturalistic mechanism to produce it. That is unless you simply want us to assume naturalism of the metaphysical sort is true, force us to be methodological naturalists in science, and leave it at that.

(Cosmic accident is also an occasion for awe.) Intelligent design is an expression of sentiment, not an exercise of reason. It is a psalm, not a proof.

No. It isn’t. Dembski’s book may be wrong for all I know, but it is not a psalm. One could point out; however, that awe can be awful. The fact that theism produced modern science, great psalms, music, art, and philosophy points to the usefulness of the idea. Atheism has not managed to produce much culture worth thinking about outside of very narrow fields.

Intelligent design was conceived as the solution to a religious problem, not a scientific one.

We will wait eagerly for the writer to give us a way to demarcate religious questions from scientific ones. If he cannot, and he cannot, then we might next wonder what happened to trans-disciplinary study as a good goal. Why is religion the only field not allowed to interact with science?

The problem is that the cosmogony in Genesis does not resemble what we know about the origins of the world.

Someone should have told Plato this when he was writing his design argument in Laws X. We are about to get a conflation of “design theories” with creationism. Now as a matter of fact, I think the Bible account truer than most of the modern myths that educated people believe today. I am a creationist and I believe in design.

However, when I had rejected Christianity, I was still a design person (though not a creationist) on neo-Platonic grounds. I would have been (and was) just as hostile to the position of this article at that time.

The author is conflating two different things. Creationists are likely to believe that God left evidence of His creative act, though in fact not all creationists believe that to be true. They are likely to believe that design will be needed to explain all the workings of the cosmos. So most theists are creationists and most creationists are design folk.

However, one could believe in design without believing in creation. Not all design theorists believe in God. Neo-Platonists might believe merely in the World of Forms that actualizes our own order by its mere existence. (See Timaeus, second creation account.) In the US most people are theists and Christians (close to 80%). Therefore, it is not shocking that almost all US design theorists (though not all!) are theists and even Christians.

Which is to say, intelligent design was prompted by the consequences of literalism in the interpretation of Scripture.

This is just a lie. Of the ID scholars I know, few fit this religious description.

This fact is so obvious that it should not need defense. To give but one example: Prominent design theorist Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic. That Church is not known for “literalism” when it comes to Scripture. Behe is certainly no fundie.

Some ID folk are “literalists.” However, one must define the term literalist as well. The author of this piece is very mistaken about even those folk. Those who believe the Bible without error adopted this statement. Read it and see if you recognize what is about to follow.

Now, there is no more primitive form of monotheistic religion than this. If you believe that the world was created by God in six days because the Bible says so, then you must also believe that the Israelites saw God’s hand, because the Bible says so, and that Moses spoke to God face to face, because the Bible says so, and that God’s feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, because the Bible says so, and so on.

This is wrong and can be proven wrong with Google in moments. No person who is an orthodox Christian believes God has a physical hand. All take account of the literary genre of the books of the Bible.

I quote from the Chicago Statement of scholars who believe the Bible is without error:

We affirm that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historicaI exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture.

Of course, none of this has the first thing to do with intelligent design. Design theorists have been pre-Christian pagans (Platonists), Christians who were not literalists (Thomists), non-Christians (Islamic philosophers), and Eastern (some Indian philosophers). Given US and Western demographics most design theorists here are Christians, some traditional Christians who think the Bible without error.

The intellectual integrity of monotheism depends upon the repudiation of such readings. Sanctity is not an excuse for stupidity. But once the legitimacy of figurative reading is admitted

Which every group involved in the discussion does.

. . the fabled dissonance between science and faith, the fundamentalist melodrama, evaporates.

If the trouble with Darwinism were this way of reading Scripture, than my entire church (Orthodox) would have no problem.

The question is: how should Genesis be read in its literary context? Just because one can use a figurative reading (and we all agree you can), does not mean you should.

In fact, I personally think Darwinism is not compatible with a careful and literary reading of Genesis. I have good, traditional Christian friends who disagree. If I wished, I could adopt their view. My faith is not on the line here.

The problem is that I do not think the evidence for Darwinism (minus its philosophical props) is compelling. I don’t think it true. I don’t have a harmony problem to begin with . . .

Was the world made in six days? Then “days” must not mean days, and may mean many millions of years.

It might shock the author to note that this very view is that of the “Fundamentals” published out of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles in the early part of the twentieth century. This is the book that helped give fundamentalism its name.

The problem with Darwinism is not the age of the earth. Google Hugh Ross. Philosophically the problem (as men like Hodge pointed out in the last century) is that while Darwinism does not entail atheism it seems naturally have flow from it. Since atheism appears to be false (given theistic arguments and experience), as does naturalism and materialism, a theist must ask what the evidence for Darwinism actually is. Is it true stripped of the desire to get rid of a god?

The answer for a divine theorist in philosophy is, “No.”

The scientist is also allowed to say, “This appears designed. I can use normal ways of telling designed objects from those not designed. It does not seem to be the sort of thing that is likely produced by nature alone. That is where the evidence has led me.” Otherwise, scientists must be forced to wear naturalist blinders and keep looking for the naturalist answer . . . even when she does not think there is one there.

(Naturalists are of course free to keep looking . . . perhaps forever . . . for a way that design can be reduced to material causes.)

Was man “formed … of the dust of the ground”? Then “formed” must not mean whole and at once, and “the dust of the ground” must refer to some unspecified variety of physical origination. Otherwise Scripture is wrong–but according to the believer Scripture cannot be wrong. And so the believer may turn comfortably to science, without the dread of heresy. Truth is never heresy, except for those who make their religion vulnerable to truth.

If religion is not vulnerable to truth, then it has no use. Religions make claims. Some are shown to be false. People who believe stupid things about the Bible (because they read as the author suggests they do) are wrong. They should adopt a broader religious view.

Sadly for the author, design theorists do not adopt his view nor for that matter do Biblical literalists. Things are not so easy.
It is just an insult to say that design theorists cannot turn to science without the “dread of heresy.” I love Socrates. I want to follow the truth where it leads. I would reject God, the Bible, and my faith if best reason, evidence, and experience told me it was false.

Instead, best reason, evidence, and experience have brought me back to faith in Christ and to His church.

I don’t think all atheists are stupid, just wrong. Why must atheists in mainstream publications go on insulting us? Why is there such a double standard? Ill educated theists who think atheists are just evil or stupid are not given the prestige of publication in “middle brow” journals. They are fringe and deserve to be so. Ill educated atheists are the leaders of their movement at the moment it appears.

I hope my thoughtful atheist friends can begin to become the public face of atheism and not folk like this. It is not good for our democracy.

I do not mean to gloat. If you were raised on Scripture as a child, if the Bible was your first enchantment, then it is not an easy matter to pull slightly away, to confer upon your improvising intellect so much power over its significations.

It might also be hard as an adult, in an enclosed community that all “knows” the Bible or traditional Christianity is nonsense to pull away from the adult toys and honors and follow truth.

I remember my torments, in the holy and walled city of Brooklyn, on the subject of dat u’madda, religion and science; but I recall them also as the philosophical characteristics of adolescence. There really is something childish about the notion that everything is exactly as the Bible says it is: this is the spell of fairy tales. I was eventually released from my anxiety about the freedom of my mind by a startling passage in Maimonides, who is not for children. Almost perversely, he wished his students to know that his belief in the creation of the world was not owed to the Bible’s account of the creation of the world. This is how he denied them a fundamentalist satisfaction: “Know that our shunning the affirmation of the eternity of the world is not due to a text figuring in the Torah according to which the world has been produced in time. For the texts indicating that the world has been produced in time are not more numerous than those indicating that the deity is a body. Nor are the gates of figurative interpretation shut in our faces … regarding the subject of the creation of the world in time. For we could interpret them as figurative, as we have done when denying His corporeality.” If science could prove that the world was eternal, then the eternity of the world would by some hermeneutical means accord with Scripture. If science can prove that man evolved over millions of years from other species, ditto. The gates of figurative interpretation were opened in my face, and I grew up.

And since then, from the looks of this article, “I have never had another thought about religion, the Bible, and science again.” It is true that one moves from childhood faith in just about every area. Dad says is no more a good reason for an adult in science than in religion. We mature and stand on our own feet. This process should NOT stop.

I keep following the dialectic and it has led me back to a faith that is much more like that of my childhood than the “mature” faith of the author of this article. Perhaps he shook off childhood’s ways only to be stuck as a perpetual teen ager? Has he ever been skeptical of his (appropriate) teen angst or his superficial readings of a great philosopher?

He is so sure . . . but nobody pursuing the divine is that sure. I think God is real, the Bible true, and the Christian faith His path . . . but I could be wrong and I live in the exciting knowledge that around any corner some evidence may make me change my mind. My joy in the journey is great . . . and so I move forward with what I have, but hold it with a loose hand in the face of the greatness of the Divine Other.

There are things I think I know . . . and they turn out (splendor of truth!) to be the things I lisped as a child. The fairy tales were closer to truth than Isaac Asimov! The Bible, even read in a careful “literal” way, more true than the New York Times . . . and much less biased. This journey has been shut off by the writer of this article as if all grown ups must go his way.

On July 7, The New York Times published an article by Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna. It was submitted to the paper by the public-relations firm that represents the Discovery Institute, a hotbed of intelligent design in Seattle. Denouncing materialism, the cardinal wrote to register a doctrinal disagreement: “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense–an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection–is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.” This is scholastic smoke.

Earlier we were told that the whole problem was Biblical literalism. Schönborn is no literalist. Instead of changing his mind about the nature of ID, however, the author now accuses the massively well read Cardinal of “scholastic smoke.” We know now that the first part of this article was false, the second part dealing with Schönborn proves it. ID is not all about Genesis as Schönborn has no problem with Genesis literalism (if that is a problem). How can we trust the rest of it? He has misread the Cardinal as badly as he has misread Biblical literalists.

An unplanned process may also be God’s plan, an instrument of providence. God’s will may take many forms.

Well, that could be true in some areas, but is it in this area? Why might Aquinas think it is not? What about souls or life might be different from lightening or other natural events?

The cardinal seems to have resurrected the old Islamic idea of “occasionalism,” known in its Western version from the writings of Malebranche, to get in on the anti-Darwinist action. This was the view that the belief in natural causes is an offense to God’s omnipotence, and the acknowledgment of such causes a descent into the pagan worship of nature.

No. That is not what he has done. He is giving a sophisticated Thomistic reading of causes.

I had thought, in my Judaic innocence, that Aquinas had gloriously secured natural causality for the Church once and for all.

Why yes, so he did. However, it might be that Schönborn understands Thomas better than you and the fact that some things can be natural caused does not mean all things can be.

Now I must suppose that the Church’s unsophisticated new construction of God’s will is a manifestation of God’s wisdom.

Of course the Cardinal is not unsophisticated philosophically; I would match his reading list with that of the author of this article any day. He may be unsophisticated in the sort of social circles in which this literary critic moves. There is little doubt that being a multi-lingual, Austrian Cardinal is not cool. My guess is that if invited the good Cardinal would not make good chat at a wine and cheese with the author’s friends. He does not share their worldview and has probably never even heard of the Daily Kos or TNR! His global ministry has not left him time for parochial sophistication.

ID can survive that lack of sophistication.

For His agents on Earth have cultural uses for anti-Darwinism. They think it will make us good, because Darwin makes us bad. No doubt this is why President Bush wants “to expose people to different schools of thought,” and have intelligent design taught alongside evolution: to retard our corruption. But isn’t the idea that morality is founded in nature itself a sin of materialism? And are we to teach other false ideas alongside other true ones? I do not want my son to waste his time on phlogiston. I mean, what is truth? The question is begged yet again, this time by the pomo of Crawford.

I think the author’s anger with Bush has gotten the better of him. Bush may be many things, but the old Texan is not post-modern. Old fashioned? Medieval? Perhaps, but then we should not make arguments using a clock! Just because an idea is old does not make it bad.

The rest of this makes little sense. If Darwinism is false, then it would be bad for humans to believe it.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of TNR.

I would like to invite Mr. Wieseltier to present this argument at my honors college. The faculty will simply listen. Instead, he is invited to dialectically engage with my undergraduate students. Perhaps he will teach them something. Perhaps they will teach him what well read “literalists” actually look like. He should be warned: many of them voted, thoughtfully, for Bush. Many have read from Homer to Dawkins and still believe in intelligent design.

Good luck Mr. Wieseltier.

The worst paper topic at Torrey Honors is the freshman paper “Our God is Greater than Zeus.” As a reflection of careful reading of Homer and the Old Testament, it just does not justify the four units of credit the eager student is trying to earn. After all, it is obvious. Who would confuse the wicked Zeus, more super villain than Divine, with the God of Genesis?

It turns out quite a few people. In recent discussions on Intelligent Design, many other wise well educated people keep telling me that “Zeus was a god and “Yahweh” is a god. . . and I don’t believe in Zeus. . . so there!”

Well, that shows Christian theism!

The obvious response is that if theism is true, it does not imply that all forms of theism are true. Second, even if Zeus is real, philosophers would want to ask if he is worthy of a free man’s worship. The whole Trojan War episode would seem to remove him from consideration! Finally, the Greeks did not claim that Zeus was an all-mighty creator god. If he did exist (and I am agnostic about whether demonic activity was part of the religion of Zeus worship), then he is not in the same category of “god” as the Christian god.

Our god could beat up their god. He is also good, loves us, and does not abuse us.

The internet atheist position that “all gods are created equal” is absurde. . . but common. Maybe this term I will go easier on those freshman.

As might be expected after appearing on the radio one gets a good number of supportive and challenging emails. There is no need to post supportive email. Heaven knows it is appreciated, but readers of this blog don’t need me to post it. The critical emails are much more publicly important. Of course, a few are so insane that one is tempted to post them for fun, but since the person rarely gives permission that chance is denied me.

By contrast with the insane critic, some posts are so sane and sensible that one wishes to reply with the joy of a chance at Socratic dialogue! Such discussion allows one to clarify and expand views. The “blog rule” comes into play of course. This means it is “no fair” to expect someone to write a book or paper explaining their views.

Below is an example of a sane and sensible response that does not agree with my opinions.

My first point to the writer would be that the “back and forth” in such a discussion is not likely to produce a winner. We will merely mirror the discussion the “big kids” are having at the highest levels of philosophy. This discussion would have very clever and well read persons who agree with this letter writer. It would have defenders of the general point of view that I would take. This is a real academic debate.

Since we know students are talking about these issues, and since many science classes contain a “chapter one” on “What is Science,” we know that this is a good and appropriate subject for school discourse. Let’s have an Al Plantinga compose an essay for students arguing for a more open approach to science and have someone else of equal stature compose an essay defending the standard “text book” approach to philosophy of science. Let’s also up date the view of science taught to scientists so that we are not accidentally picking on a straw man. Text book writers sadly do not have the reputation for keeping up!

This is the true “middle of the road” position in this debate. School boards will often say, “This debate belongs in philosophy class or some social science class.” Are they unaware that many of their science classes contain sections that can be described as nothing less than philosophy of science applied? Where are these wonderful public school philosophy classes? Most schools I know of can hardly afford state mandates . . . so an important inter-disciplinary discussion cannot be had fairly if it is pushed off into imaginary philosophy classes while philosophy is taught in chapter one of science books (only badly).

When Michael Shermer, whose main day job is running a Skeptic advocacy group, is allowed to frame the debate no good can come of it. Shermer is not a scientist. . . his main job is promoting a religious (or anti-religious?) world view. Would NPR hire Greg Koukal to be their resident expert every week on ethics? Greg is at least as erudite as Shermer who is more the Pat Robertson of the secular community.

When folk like Shermer are allowed to control the rules or given “neutral” jobs where they often get to make the rules regular folk will recognize their position is not being treated fairly and react. These reactions will often be too strong. Why not ask a respected open-to-ID scholar like USC philosopher Dallas Willard to write a piece for high school students to stimulate debate? We could then ask a foe to write a piece. Allow the two to interact in print about “the nature of science.”

What is the possible harm of this?

Instead, for some reason, some ID-foes have adopted the brittle policy of trying to define away the discussion. Even if we assume ID is NOT science, then it is an interesting idea with a long history in thought. ID persons (think Plato in Laws X) frequently inspired folk to create science. Ideas like the Razor have a theological pedigree. Demarcation of science and other disciplines is simply not that easy. When a theist goes to work in a lab and expects certain things based on his theism, and they happen, is that science? If not, what is it?

In any case, on to the letter. My response is, as always, in italics.

Rondam Ramblings: Is Intelligent Design science?: “I listened with interest to your appearance on Larry Mantle’s Air Talk this morning.

You kept making the point that adhering to methodological naturalism (MN) was somehow holding science back from certain kinds of progress.

Actually, I would argue that there is a possibility (if theism and psychological dualism are true), that science is held back by dogmatic adherence to ID. Of course I cannot be sure that this is true.

You also made the point that there is debate about what science is, and that philosophers are the ones best equipped to make this determination. You are mistaken on both counts. This can be demonstrated (somewhat ironically) with an elementary philosophical argument, to wit:

What distinguishes science from other arenas of human intellectual endeavor like drama, religion, law, etc. is that it produces certain kinds of results that these other arenas do not, e.g. antibiotics, semiconductors, nuclear weapons, etc. (One might go out on a limb and say that science seems uniquely suited among all arenas of human intellectual endeavor to produce results that allow humans to manipulate the physical world according to their desires, and that indeed this is the reason that people care so much about science and that we are even having this discussion. But this is not necessary to make the argument. All that is necessary is to agree that science produces results of a particular character, that these results ‘matter’ in some sense, and that they are not generally produced by non-scientific endeavors.)

I do not agree that this is the sole reason folk care so much about science. Science, at least partly a product of Christian theism, has had great success in manipulating the physical world. We are all thankful for that. If science were only about this, then there would be much less controversy. Science frequently claims to explain reality or even to exhaustively explain reality. Is reality limited to the physical? If one wants to explore all of reality, then does one have to leave science by definition?

Of course, if one is a Naturalist one knows all the answers to these questions. Reality is reduced for these “scientists” (doing philosophy without training) to those things that can be explained by science.

Of course, almost everyone pressed on this agrees that this is an abuse of science. (A vocal minority does not agree, but I shall not argue against them here. Their position (Philosophical Naturalism is just Science and Science is just Reason) is unappealing enough that I feel like it is arguing against a straw man.) Let us agree that science then is limited to providing explanations of the physical (natural?) world.

The question then becomes: What parts of reality are parts of this merely physical world? Is human personality? Is God? Is there a Person (divine?) that did work in that cosmos? In that case, science would be limited (if an active God is true) in what it could explain even in the material world. That is: It could be the case that not all caused events in the material world have (at their base) physical causes. At their base are human actions subject to merely physical or functional explanations? Is a psychological dualism possible?

Real arguments can be made on both sides. They are being made. If Ron will limit science to “physical explanations” of “events caused by physical objects” then that would properly exclude ID from the realm of science. Let’s write the science books and start the classes with this interesting “what is science” debate. Let the chips fall where they may. However, nobody is allowed to stack the deck and just argue in circles.

One cannot just proclaim: “Science is what scientists do.” (as Shermer did on the radio) for when otherwise normal looking scientists begin to think about intelligent causation, Shermer decides they are not scientists. He has a MN limitation to his definition not often stated.

Why accept such a limitation, however?

If we do limit science, then interesting questions will still be examined, just “outside of science.” All that will happen is that certain real things (perhaps psychological phenomenon) for example will be removed from “experimentation” in what we call “science.” There will of course be experimentation in meta-science or some such “new” field.

Of course, this limitation did not exist until late in the history of science. Scientists frequently make statements with philosophical assumptions bulging out from them. My own position is that this is fine. . . and that everyone should get to present their point of view about “what is science” to students.

We have to accept that for years the prestige of science gained in one area has been used (in a bad argument) to support Naturalism or scientism. Most folk find the two hard to keep apart (what we might call Ron-science and scientism). Why not help them do so?

The *reason* that science is able to do these things is its adherence to MN. MN does not hold science back; quite the contrary. MN is an *empowering* constraint. It is the reason that science produces the results that it does. Science without MN is like drama without conflict. It is eviscerated. It has been robbed of its essential character.

This is a strong statement and requires strong evidence. Many scientists may believe it, but is it true?

Two important tools of science are language and maths. Both may (or may not) depend on the existence of non-physical objects. If they do, and the case is very strong in math, then science is explaining things (often) using non-physical objects.

What of math modeling? Sometimes persons in the maths do work that could described as “math for the sake of math.” It has not been created to do “physical” work, but then it turns out to have explanatory power in science. It seems hard to imagine that MN (adopted or rejected) would impact this at all.

Is this science? Do numbers exist? If they do exist, they are not physical, so what is to become of MN while we are doing math?

Why does math do work in science if MN is the whole story?

This is not a deduction; it is an empirical observation. When one adheres to MN one produces ’science-like’ results. When one rejects MN one fails to produce such results.

If one defines science as control of the physical world by physical means, then one is likely to do science “best” when one looks for physical means to control nature. This argument smacks of vicious circularity.

Suppose my own view prevailed. If the “new” ID scientists wanted to make a contact lenses (a physical object) he would (using his non-physical mind) look for a physical means to do so.

One need not be dogmatically MN to simply say: “Most of the time it is sensible to use proper means to achieve proper ends.” If one wishes to control the physical world USING physical means, I know of NO PERSON in the ID camp who would go for anything other than physical means. MN is not necessary and MIGHT restrict thought. In medical science and psychology, to cite but two cases, one might look at the evidence and decide that “physical explanations” are not adequate and begin to deal with “persons” as NOT “computers made out of meat.”

In any case, I would recommend an initial read of J.P. Moreland’s “Christianity and the Nature of Science” for a more sustained discussion of these issues at a popular level.

This is why all scientists (including Feynman, to whom you appealed to support your position) agree: science is the proposition that experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth (Feynman’s words). Inherent in this definition is the MN assumption. That is what the word “experiment” means.

Agreeing with a philosopher on one thing is not agreeing with him on everything. The notion that “truth” is best found by experiment is (it need not be said) a philosophical prejudice. It may be a good one and it may be a bad one, but it is not itself a statement of science. As such following the simplistic Shermer rule (Only science in science class!) it could not be taught in science class. But of course, it is taught and this is why parents (sometimes inarticulately) are mad.

The fact that all (or almost all) scientists make bad or crude philosophical assumptions is not surprising. Most people do. However, as Moreland points out in his book that is not in fact how scientists always behave.

After all: What counts as an experiment?

We cannot prove God exists physically, but we could devise ways of making His existence more or less probable.

In any case, saying “experiments are the way to the truth” is a good slogan, but leads to many, many questions.

What will count as an experiment is one of them!

However, even if assume that this slogan is right, we could still do experiments without the MN assumption (contra RF). In fact, such experiments in the history of science were foundational to science.

In the present day, one could go to the lab open to both physical and personal causation (as an archeologist does) without resorting to MN at all. Rejecting MN would not demand a scientist stop looking for physical answers. . . nor make much practical daily change in many fields. In systems, at a cosmological level, or in biology or psychology one would be tempted to look for the non-physical. . .though even here physical answers would still be on the table.

Just because MN is false does not mean it is always (or mostly) false in a vicious sense. Some false ideas are useful or mostly useful. Given a sophisticated notion of causation (some things are caused by physical objects, some by non-physical) MN would not impact any search for billions of physical causes in the cosmos for the billions of physical events.

Must one swear to only find “naturalistic” answers to find some natural/physical answers? No or Newton would have failed! One could simply swear to follow the evidence where ever it led!

To suggest then that science would be well served by philosophers who wish to “free” it from the “constraint” of MN is rather like a non-lawyer suggesting that the law be freed from its dependence on legal texts. After all, textual law often offends our intuitive notion of “justice”, just as MN often offends our intuitive notions of self or soul. Why not instead appeal to “intuitive justice” (as an analog to “intelligent design”)?

Or the natural law? Great plan!

Natural law prevents war criminals from excusing their actions by saying, “It was legal in our state.” It can be abused, but it is (and always has been) useful in legal theory. This is all in Aquinas!

I take an “open philosophy of law” (as they did in Nuremburg) where the law of the texts and the law of nature are both part of the legal system.

This is not a bad thing to wish for. Indeed, the law (and science) has many shortcomings when measured according to how well they fulfill all of mankind’s needs. And indeed if you strip the text from the law you may actually end up with something worthwhile, but it will no longer be the law. Likewise, if you strip MN from science you may end up with something worthwhile, but it will no longer be science. It will be something else.

If science no longer is about “truth,” but about “finding physical answers” to “physical questions” let’s make that clear. Let’s also NOT assume publicly or in scientific writings that all possible questions (What is the soul?) are therefore subject to scientific answers. Let’s limit the scope of scientific investigation hubris. . .

Or just say, “If non-physical objects exist (God, souls) and act, then they might leave traces. These traces would not be subject to physical explanations. It is o.k. for scientists to see those traces.”

From the perspective of the post this is tracing the “limits of science.” It would be science finding the “wall” at the end of the method. If this could be said in public school, I would be content. Though I want to open up science, the core of the debate is still about who defines for our kids what “truth” is and how it is best found.

When we manipulate the physical world is the “we” part of the equation part of MN or is the MN advocate smuggling in a non-physical object and pretending not to do so?

Of course, I don’t think the MN-Only Rule is a good definition of science. . . and would expand science to include more styles of investigation. . . but if scientists want to limit themselves (MN), then they should allow scientists to say, “Look! We’ve reached the limit of MN’s usefulness.” Philosophical naturalists of the Shermer sort will say, “Don’t give up! Keep doing science!” since they “know” that MN driven science will explain everything. However, we need not punish the scientific soul who using MN finds the limits IN HIS OPINION.

Instead, let’s say: We don’t know what is physical and what is not. We are open to all truth. Some things are best understood by experiment. Other things are not.

I would close by observing that if you (or one of your philosopher colleagues) succeeds in making an actual contribution to human intellectual endeavor by rejecting MN then your names will be remembered with the likes of the greatest philosophers that ever lived.

Well, I am more a teacher than a philosopher. Some of my colleagues argue that many scientists do not use MN now. . . they just proclaim it when asked. (They are like some Baptists who are for things that they do not live!) Seem Moreland.

Powerful ideas like MN (or textual law, or conflict in drama) do not come along every day. There have probably been less than half a dozen ideas of such power in all of human history.

One of those ideas is theism. . .which made modern science possible. The Razor is just one example of an important idea to the development of science almost entirely motivated y Christian theism in its early stages.

To embark on such an endeavor requires certain hubris.

One feels like sighing here. It is not hubris to follow Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Bacon et al in looking for intelligent design in the universe. It is not hubris to suggest that a rule many scientists do not even know how to coherently explain (MN) and do not practice is not necessary. The real hubris is in anyone who claims that their discipline is the ONLY way to truth or that they have a corner on it by definition. It is also hubris to suggest that one of the most fruitful ideas in the history science (ID) now CANNOT be used and we KNOW that we have outgrown it. How? Simply by defining it away. . .

I point this out not to discourage you (all human progress has been predicated on the hubris that such a thing as “progress” is even possible) but merely to point out the magnitude of what you claim to be doing, and why some scientists might take offense at the suggestion that philosophers wishing to discharge the MN assumption are contributing something to science.”

I am not being picky when I say we are making a point in philosophy of science which has implications on the practice of science. There is a difference. We are suggesting that an idea that scientists hold to fiercely may not do what scientists think it does.

I will be discussing Intelligent Design in schools today at 11:00 PST on89.3 FM with Larry Mantle and Michael Shermer.

First, the film June Bug is dynamite. Second, it deals with the white, poor South.

It does so at first by playing to upper class stereotypes of the sort of person most have never met. Loud laughter filled my theater as the Chicago art dealer with the cunning English accent first confronted the rubes of her new husband’s family. Just the sight of a white woman in shorts was enough to draw gales of laughter.

Don’t blame the film, however, By the end of the movie the theater was silent. Even though the stereotypes were relentless and never really stopped (nobody in town appears to have gone to college), the inner strength and values of the community eventually began to break in on the hostility of the audience.

And I mean hostility.

There is scene set in a typical Evangelical Church social hall. It includes a hymn being sung by the male lead. You could feel the tension in the film audience when they saw white people in Church. Here was the Religious Right they so dreaded. (You knew the nature of the audience when an employee of the theater tried to steer us away from one film by saying it was “bourgeois trash.”) I have never been in a theater with a greater sense of discomfort.

Evidently from the reaction of the audience the mere sight of a heavy white person in Church is comedy. When the very young pastor (one of the few attractive Southrons to appear) began to pray for the family, the tension was as great as if someone began to use the “f-word” in a Baptist church. Some tittered. Others moaned. Nobody seemed to know what to do with an experience millions of Americans share every week.

In fact, the limited profanity and sexuality of the film drew no similar response nor did some of the bizarre and edgy content of the trailers. After all, in the right neighborhoods the F-word is part of daily discourse. The word “Jesus” spoken with a Southern accent is evidently still a word of power in Hollywood as it causes a sense of dread to fill the room. Black spirituality is o.k. (Of course it is only acceptable if kept to strict cartoon like images.)

White spirituality that does not impact life outside of narrow boundaries is o.k. A group of people living, however inconsistently, as if Jesus is real is not o.k. At least not to the audience that watched June Bug with me.

Again don’t blame the movie. It is complex and shows the flaws in all of its characters. You are not left thinking the secularist(s) in the film are good and the religious bad. In fact, the values of the South seemed more attractive to me than those of an art dealer who would ignore family to pursue the crude drawings of a mad anti-Semite in the neighborhood. The people of the area ignore him. Only the educated would bother to try to make sense of his “spiritual ravings.”

Like the best of films June Bug challenged the audience (including me) to think outside of stereotypes. Even people you wanted to dislike were shown to have the image of God within. The film used stereotypes to break stereotypes and I think it worked with the audience in the movie house. Still it was hard for me to experience the prejudice I know exists.

I know that my beloved West Virginia roots are the subject of either pity or disgust by much of the cultural elite. (I have never been introduced as being from West Virginia without some offensive joke . . . so in the end like many from the South you cut them off by making them yourself and attempting thereby to show their folly.)

How does this prejudice work? The nice bigots feel sorry for you. The nasty ones wonder if you have basic social skills. One school leader told my parents when we came North that he was worried (without any evidence) that I was “culturally deprived.” The fact that my Dad had more formal education than he was inconsequential since it never dawned on him that it might be true.

Bill Clinton understood this and his anger at those who dismissed his Arkansas roots and those who could not stop with “trailer park” jokes were one of the few things about him that I understood.

However, it is one thing to know it in the abstract and another to sit in a room of people who think women who look like your recently deceased grandmother are funny just because of their culture. There is such ignorance in the “educated” elite that it sometimes boggles my mind.

To cite but one example, folk not from the mountains make no attempt to understand conversational style in that region. Southron folk like to fellowship. They do so by establishing common ground. This will often begin with a statement of the obvious (the weather is always good) which can allow every person to affirm what has been said. This sort of conversation can extend for some time and only gradually evolves into something deeper. By the time the heart of the discussion is reached (in my family difficult doctrinal issues!), there is common ground and every person feels part of the dialogue. If you have not grown up with this long (and it can go on for hours) conversational style, then it sounds contrived and often foolish.

How could someone just state something everyone else has already decided is true? “Yes. It is very hot.”) Are they dense? Are they slow? Such a cultural conversational style is easy to parody and make foolish. (Compare the sympathetic portrayal of this front-porch talk on the old Andy Griffith show, which got it mostly right, to more modern renditions.)

Of course, religion and race are never far from the minds of those elite who hate the hill folk. Our religion is base, only our music (a real art form) is allowed any place. We are allowed to be sad and to sing. We can drive a man to pity, but never to envy in most film.

Race usually consumes every film on the White south. Racism is real and I heard soft and hard forms of it as a child from folk in West Virginia. However, I did not hear it often and no more frequently than I heard polite anti-Semitism in educated secular circles in the North. Race relations seemed no better in Rochester than Charleston. When my wife and I lived by choice in a dominantly African-American neighborhood for a time, we were no more the norm in Up State New York than we would have been in Appalachia.

Race is not what the Mountain people are all about. It is not what defines the experience of at least my part of the South. When Virginia left the Union, we left Virginia and like most West Virginians I can say with pride that all my male ancestors fought with Mr. Lincoln to save the Union and free the slaves.

Our religion is routinely portrayed as ignorant. Anyone holding a Bible in a film is widely assumed to be a fool. It is also easy to see that the lightly educated have never actually read a King James Bible and soaked in its linguistic and philosophical profundity. How else could they get away with misquoting it so often?

There is a deep cultural problem when the male lead of the film begins to sing an old film about Jesus Christ and the audience first reacts with confused laughter, groans, and confusion. An old childhood hymn, in a non-political or controversial context, is offensive. All of the elite are confused. They ask: “How should we react to this thing? Should we laugh? Or will these people turn out to be bigots so we can safely hate them?”

June Bug allows neither option and leaves the audience thoughtful.

The nearly ubiquitous soft religious bigotry of Hollywood was not a feature of June Bug, but the director was able to assume the attitude of his audience. On a previous night, good friends were forced to listen to a director rant about Christianity after a film in Hollywood the night before we saw June Bug. The director could assume full agreement to unsupported and outlandish claims about conservative religion. The audience at June Bug thought they knew what to make of the Southron folk in the film: stupid or racist or to be pitied or all three. They fell into the trap and then felt conflicted when the Church people were more loving and had better communitarian values than themselves.

This soft bigotry by our elite, which includes much of the Republican elite that tries to lead Southern folk, has consequences.

One wonders how much of the “George Bush is an idiot” idea comes from his Texas background and accent. Clinton was allowed to be smart because he rejected most of the ideas of his culture. Southrons are allowed to “grow” by rejecting their folk ways. Even Clinton, however, was never really allowed into the “club” and the only winning Democrat of my political life gets amazingly little respect from “high brow” leftist web sites.

If we are to be one nation, let alone one nation under God, those who claim to lead us need to get over these stereotypes. They need to break free of their condescending pity and learn from millions of Americans who live good and decent lives.

Everything is not perfect in mountain culture. On the whole, however, there is more to be learned than rejected in it. Government “help” is rapidly destroying the best of it. Educators who despise the values in it are re-educating the mountain children to despise it. The media we are drowning in sometimes leave us with a sense of anger and inferiority.

The elite of this nation, sometimes sadly even the Christian elite, stood by while First-American culture was mocked and destroyed. Often we woke up to cultural loss from our bigotry only when it was too late. Shall we do the same with the values of the mountain South?

Perhaps films like June Bug are a first step in the right direction.

(The film June Bug contains rough language and is for adults. The limited sexuality in the film was, refreshingly, between a married couple.)

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: St. Oswald: “Oswald was slain on 5 Aug., 642, and thus perished ‘the most powerful and most Christian King’ in the eighth year of his reign and in the flower of his age.”

Too little known. . . in the image of Arthur.

His life is encouraging in these dark days.

It is worth checking out the Huffington Post from time to time. This morning it actually made me laugh out loud.

I am pretty sure that copies of this article widely distributed will not help Hillary (!) Rodham Clinton carry West Virginia.

My guess is that those Mountaineers will react badly to it. It will not be any help at all.

I cannot imagine why as this article is both reasonable, written by an expert (Sam Harris!), and couched in friendly language. Remember: the secular left is tolerant and smarter than you. This is not their fault.

Really Sam Harris is a precious throwback to the nineteenth century village atheist. There are few enough of them left and friends of Sam might look to apply for federal protection for his habitat.

His opinions come with the endorsement of Richard Dawkins who is intent on doing to American society what the secularists have nearly completed in Britain. That genial old academic star must not be looking outside of his window to see what his ideas have done to England. Sadly for our intellectual curiosity, secularists will never finish their task since their culture can no longer support such outlandish practices as having babies.

My comments are in italics within the story.

The Huffington Post | The Blog: “Sam Harris
The Politics of Ignorance

President Bush has now endorsed the pseudo-scientific notion of ‘intelligent design’ (ID) and declared it to be a legitimate alternative to the theory of evolution.

What makes it pseudo-scientific? Is it because religious ideas motivate it? Ah, but the founders of science were often motivated by religious points of view. Should the neo-Platonism of Kepler remove his work from consideration? Should Newton’s faith and his confidence in divine order disbar his work?

Or is it just that pseudo-science is any science not fitting the philosophical naturalism of the majority of scientists? Perhaps the problem with Mr. Harris and Intelligent Design is that it tends to support a world view he does not like?

Fair enough. I am not fond of a world view that denies free will, the right to own property, or refuses to look at the facts regarding the spiritual realm. However, our fondness for our point of view should not close our minds to the other side.

Atheism is not foolish. Naturalism has some great strength as a world view. I think it wrong, indeed seriously wrong, but my position cannot advance if I do not respect my foe.

This is not surprising, as he has always maintained that ‘the jury is still out’ on the question of evolution. But the jury is not out — indeed it was well in before President Bush was even born — and anyone familiar with modern biology knows that ID is nothing more than a program of political and religious advocacy masquerading as science.

I am unsure how Mr. Harris knows this. ID is a big movement. The majority of people in the United States, indeed the vast majority, believe in some form of it. In a republic some of them will take political steps. I am not fond of this strategy, but it is (after all) a free country.

However, when I am sitting down (as I am today) to study Plato’s Laws X, a pro-ID argument, I am not aware of doing anything other than philosophy.

The question is whether Darwinism is true. The second question is whether religious ideas can count as knowledge in some sense. The third question is who will determine what science is and what it will be allowed to do. These are interesting philosophical and scientific questions that require careful philosophical and scientific thought. Thinking people on both sides of the issue know that this is not an “over and done” question.

It is for this reason that the scientific community has been divided on just how (or whether) to dignify the spurious claims of ID ‘theorists’ with a response. While understandable, I believe that such scruples are now misplaced. The Trojan Horse has passed the innermost gates of the city, and scary religious imbeciles are now spilling out.

Google Al Plantinga, scary religious imbecile. Google J.P. Moreland, scary religious imbecile. Google Bill Dembski, scary religious imbecile. Read their qualifications. Read their arguments. You may not agree, but do they sound scary? Do they sound like imbeciles to you? What has a movement come to when it must resort to this sort of language instead of argument?

According to several recent polls, 22 percent of Americans are certain that Jesus will return to earth sometime in the next fifty years. Another 22 percent believe that he will probably do so.

Notice this idea is mocked without any argument. It is self-evident to Sam Harris that this is wrong. How does he know? Has he examined the reasons people might believe this idea? Or is he just demonizing his foes?

This is likely the same 44 percent who go to church once a week or more, who believe that God literally promised the land of Israel to the Jews, and who want to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution.

News flash to Mr. Harris: Faithful Orthodox and Roman Catholics do not fit your stereotypes about religious beliefs. They go to church every week or nearly every week. What kind of use of statistics is this? How could Richard Dawkins endorse it?

As the President is well aware, believers of this sort constitute the most cohesive and motivated segment of the American electorate. Consequently, their views and prejudices now influence almost every decision of national importance.

Nearly half the voters have influence in American politics? Oh the horror!

Political liberals seem to have drawn the wrong lesson from these developments and are now thumbing scripture, wondering how best to ingratiate themselves to the legions of men and women in our country who vote mainly on the basis of religious dogma.

Mr. Harris is going to suggest that the left write off, forever, essentially half the electorate and anyone else who believes in God. In his view you are all morons. I don’t know anyone who votes “mainly” on the basis of religious dogma. I know quite a few people who think their religious views true and vote based on their well thought out (Aquinas, Calvin, Lewis) views.

More than 50 percent of Americans have a ‘negative’ or ‘highly negative’ view of people who do not believe in God;

Given the tone of this article, and the atheists who interact with me on campus, I cannot imagine why! “Why do those morons have a negative view of us!” Sam Harris cries.

70 percent think it important for presidential candidates to be “strongly religious.” Because it is taboo to criticize a person’s religious beliefs, political debate over questions of public policy (stem-cell research, the ethics of assisted suicide and euthanasia, obscenity and free speech, gay marriage, etc.) generally gets framed in terms appropriate to a theocracy.

That seems a wee bit overblown. I don’t know anyone who wants the Church to rule America. When the American revolutionaries said, “No King but King Jesus” they were not talking about a theocracy, but the fact that no state could demand a free man’s worship.

My family was here when America got started and I am pretty sure they, all of them, never wanted the Church to govern the state. In fact, they seemed highly motivated to get rid of state churches and shrink government in every part of their lives.

It is true that my relatives who left Virginia and formed a new state to free the slaves were motivated by religion and they did impose their religiously motivated ideas about freedom on the slave owners of Virginia. Sam Harris should read Lincoln and his Second Inaugural Address to get the Christian way of thinking about such things as God and government for most of American history.

Is Lincoln a theocrat Mr. Harris?

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States — in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

According to Sam Harris to believe what C.S. Lewis believed is ignorance. and to agree with Mr. Harris is not.

It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum.

Now we see that even if you buy the entire agenda of the left Mr. Harris will not accept you if you are religious.

There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality.

Even if you agree with Mr. Harris about evolution, it is really religious thinking he is after.

Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of “non-overlapping magisteria” served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium. Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts.

Facts? Facts are cheap. The question is: “What framework will we use to interpret the facts?” So three cheers for never denying the fact, but three bigger cheers for developing a world view that accounts for all of them, including evidence for personal reality (God and the soul).

Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn’t; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn’t.

That seems true enough. I think best reason points to a Christ born of a virgin. I see no evidence for a God who despises homosexuals. However, it will be hard to have discourse with Mr. Harris when he acts this way.

It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort.

Excellent.

The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can “rule out” the existence of the biblical God.

I would put it this way: You can never prove a negative, but you can develop positive evidence for an idea. Can science look at positive evidence that points to design and by implication a designer? My argument is that folk like Mr. Harris rule theism, or personality (note that he does not like your having a soul either) without argument. He makes a rule and says we cannot talk about positive evidence for our position in institutions we pay for.

There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not “rule out,” but which no sensible person would entertain.

I agree. However, religious notions seem a bad candidate. First, there are many religious people, well trained in the sciences, who disagree with Mr. Harris. There is a very large group of theists in philosophy. I can see no similar intellectual heft to Scientology or Big Foot theorists. Serious people do believe in god just as serious people deny His existence.

I am not a theist because atheism is silly, but because I think (based on best experience, reason, and evidence) that there is a God.

The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe — that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.

Now we get to the deep contradiction in much of anti-ID rhetoric. According to Mr. Harris, science evidently shows there probably is not a designer. (You cannot prove a negative of course, but Harris would be within his rights to say that science makes a god highly implausible.). This is theological statement from science that Mr. Harris wants science to make. Now earlier Mr. Harris dismissed ID out of hand because he believed it had theological implications. However, Mr. Harris has now made a theological claim about his view of science.

I think Mr. Harris should be allowed to show (though I think it unlikely) that science shows god implausible. However, that should allow ID persons to show that science does no such things. Other people may make what argument they wish as long as they play by the rules of rational discourse. Let’s have a free market of ideas, yes?

Imagine President Bush addressing the National Prayer Breakfast in these terms: “Behind all of life and all history there is a dedication and a purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful Zeus.” Imagine his speech to Congress containing the sentence “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war, and we know that Apollo is not neutral between them.”

This would be fine if we had good reason to believe in the goodness of Zeus and Apollo as Hesiod described them. What serious philosophers are defending ancient paganism Mr. Harris? I can list hundreds who defend Christianity. Harris is comparing two different things. It would be as if I demanded that Mr. Harris defend the worldview of Lucretius, an ancient naturalist with odd ideas. Just because some theistic notions are wrong does not mean theism is wrong.

Clearly, the commonplaces of language conceal the vacuity and strangeness of many of our beliefs.

Mr. Harris should sit down and read some of the work of a former prof of mine Edward Wierenga. Religious language has received powerful mainstream defense in the last fifty years.

Our president regularly speaks in phrases appropriate to the fourteenth century, and no one seems inclined to find out what words like “God” and “crusade” and “wonder-working power” mean to him.

Mr. Harris an argument, or word, should not be evaluated by calendar.

Not only do we still eat the offal of the ancient world; we are positively smug about it. Garry Wills has noted that the Bush White House “is currently honeycombed with prayer groups and Bible study cells, like a whited monastery.” This should trouble us as much as it troubles the fanatics of the Muslim world.

What is the use of calling the ideas that inspired Bach and Michelangelo “offal?” I don’t know.

Why should we fear prayer groups?

Are fanatics of Islam troubled by Bush praying or by secularism? Who cares what they think?

I am troubled by people who are fanatical. . . and I don’t see only the religious fitting that mold of thoughtless dismissal of others points of view.

If Mr. Harris, and Mr. Dawkins, were religious and made similar claims about their faith in similar tones they would receive a professional drubbing by the secular elites that run the nation.

The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts.

Amen. Let’s us follow the evidence wherever it leads!

Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us. Nothing guarantees that reasonable people will agree about everything, of course, but the unreasonable are certain to be divided by their dogmas. It is time we recognized that this spirit of mutual inquiry, which is the foundation of all real science, is the very antithesis of religious faith.

I am for openness to evidence and Socrates is my hero. Religious people can hold their “dogmas” (misuse of a religious word by Harris) lightly subject to investigation, modification, and change.

Just as secularists can.

In this debate over changing marriage our own side can often do more harm than good. That is not the case here where the traditional side makes a rational and articulate case. The other side gets their chance, but since we know their point of view (the secular media makes sure it is heard) the impact is much less. I also think the arguments of the radicals less effective.

Frank Beckwith is a national treasure.

This debate should also disabuse traditional Christians that there can long exist any half-way house called “evangelical feminism.” I have mentioned the scandel of the level of scholarship in the movement previously. The fact that it is taken seriously at some Christian colleges (though no place else) is also sad.

“Evangelical feminist” groups consistently drift leftward as a reading of their material in chronological order on the web makes clear. The problem, as one of the speakers demonstrates neatly, is that feminism and traditional marriage just do not fit well together. While individual Christians may resist the logic of their own opinions, the next generation will not and does not. We do not have to guess at this for we have groups like the Anglicans to instruct us in the process. Traditional marriage and sexual ethics will soon be under constant pressure in feminist groups however evangelical they sound at the start.

A kind and clever reader got this email from the Times. Now we know that the Times went on a fishing trip through the adoption record of little kids to see if there was anything wrong. There was no evidence there was anything wrong with the adoptions. . . somebody decided that little children could be subject to the quest to “get” Judge Roberts.

Note the key part of the Times defense:

In the case of Judge Roberts’s family, our reporters made initial inquiries about the adoptions, as they did about many other aspects of his background. They did so with great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue.

The Times seems to think it appropriate to check up on your six year old with no evidence of wrong doing. Adoption is tough enough in this nation without having it subject to witch hunts by political foes with no scruples.

Pehaps next they will see if the Roberts’ tykes have any views on abortion? I am sure they could ask the children these questions in a sensitive manner.

Perhaps they have checked to see if Roberts is really married to his wife? Was it a Church wedding with a traditionalist priest?

Have they run his library card yet? Perhaps Roberts read Conscience of a Conservative one too many times?

Let’s be clear. If the Times had no reason to think there was a problem (and it would take very strong evidence even then), people’s little kids are off limits to investigation in a civil and decent society.

That was true for the Clintons and should be true for Judge Roberts.

Whoever approved this story should apologize to the Judge now.

I pass it on to you as the reader sent it to me:

Dear Reader,

Thanks for writing to us.

While the public editor does not usually get involved in pre-publication matters, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the paper, told us that he would not stand for any gratuitous reporting about the Roberts’s children.
He said that as an adoptive parent he is particularly sensitive about this issue.

In addition, a senior editor at the paper wrote, “In the case of Judge Roberts’s family, our reporters made initial inquiries about the adoptions, as they did about many other aspects of his background. They did so with great care, understanding the sensitivity of the issue. We did not order up an investigation of the adoptions. We have not pursued the issue after the initial inquiries, which detected nothing irregular about the adoptions.”

Sincerely,
Joe Plambeck
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times

Note: The public editor’s opinions are his own and do not represent those of The New York Times

Poll Says GOP Wins in ‘08: “The two Republicans each received 50 percent of the vote in a trial match-up with Sen. Clinton, who received 45 percent.”

Everyone knows her. She is still at the Democrat base vote. Can anyone tell me the last Democrat to get more than fifty percent of the vote?

No modern Democrat can do it, certainly not Hillary (!) Rodham Clinton. Does anyone believe she will do better than Bill did in a general election, as incumbant, against Bob Dole?

How will she carry West Virginia? What Democrat can win without carrying West Virginia?

The only worry in the future for Republicans would be a Bill Casey type Democrat. Imagine a pro-labor, anti-abortion, pro-marriage Democrat. Imagine he is from a big state that is usually in play. Imagine he is tough on immigration and terror.

Imagine the Republicans nominating a soft-on-social-issues “moderate.”

That is how the Republicans lose. The good news for Republicans (and perhaps the bad news for the nation) is the Democrats will never do it.

Hugh Hewitt: “
What editor approved this inquiry? Did Bill Keller say: ‘Sounds good to me?’”

I will bet Hugh Hewitt (Lord of the Free Blogs) the adult beverage of this choice that in the next twenty-four hours a major figure on the media left will argue:

1. The story makes them “uncomfortable.”
2. The new media (blogs!) make such stories part of life.
3. Did I mention blogs made them do it?
4. The NY Times has the right to print the story. What is wrong with free speech?

Up Date: Hugh has taken the bet!

DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2005®: “
One top Republican official when told of the situation was incredulous. “This can’t possibly be true?”"

A free CD of one of my talks of your choice to the first alert reader who hears someone/reads someone saying, “The New York Times has a right to do this in a free country.”

Not every imprudent, dangerous, or disgusting action is against the law, allowing Massachusetts to continue to seat her Congressional delegation, but that does not make it right.

The point: If the NYT is doing this, then they are wrong, imprudent, and disgusting. . . a rare trick for even the NYT.