Much Ado About Something

A Commentary

2006-02-07T09:25:00.000-06:00

I have to admit to not liking Islam. It's not that I don't like Muslims (the individuals), and it's not that I have an inherent dislike for their religious claims (although I believe them false). Rather it's that the greater cultural expression of Islam is evil.

That out in the open, here is some commentary on the ongoing debacle over cartoons.

This morning, I heard on NPR that the violent uproar had been orchestrated in part by some Muslim clerics in Denmark after the cartoons showed up in the newspaper late last year. They wrote a letter to the president asking for a meeting to vent. The President declined, probably because he doesn't see himself as the keeper of the media.

As a result of this 'slight', they embarked on a campaign to orchestrate the uprising by circulating the cartoons through the Arab world. In my opinion, they knew full well what the result would be. To top it all off, they included in the distributed cartoons some particularly incendiary ones that were never published.

That would only be an interesting footnote on the whole event if it weren't for the fact that this is common practice among the Muslim world. It's normal for Muslim clerics to speak to audiences of Muslims and lie. They make silly claims such as "Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attacks to justify a war on Islam!". Or they claim the Holocaust never happened, or any other lie they want to tell about the West, or about America. I've heard of them claiming that certain explosions (either bomb-making accidents, or suicide bomb attacks) were really Israeli or US missile attacks.

All this is part of a campaign to bolster support for Jihad against the West.

Then I see this:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the West’s publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons was an Israeli conspiracy motivated by anger over the victory of the militant Hamas group in the Palestinian elections last month. “The West condemns any denial of the Jewish holocaust, but it permits the insult of Islamic sanctities,” Khamenei said.

On that same NPR bit this morning I was struck with the irony of the fact that one of the cartoons was described as a depiction of Muhammed with a bomb wrapped in his turban. Presummably, they are offended that Muhammed is being equated with terrorism. To express their anger against this unjustified characterisation of Islam, they proceeded to kill, bomb and burn Danish citizens and buildings....Hmmm.

A religion of peace? Clearly not.

God’s Intrinsic Probability

2006-01-25T13:32:00.000-06:00

This is borrowed:

Whenever considering the various arguments for theism, it is worth asking the preliminary question How likely is it that God exists? Our preconceptions on this issue are likely to colour our assessment of whatever evidence for (or against) God’s existence we encounter. It is therefore worthwhile to attempt to establish the intrinsic probability of theism, the a priori probability that God exists.

If we begin with the thought that God’s existence is highly unlikely, then it is going to take very strong evidence to persuade us that he does indeed exist. Whatever positive evidence for God’s existence we encounter, if we begin with a presumption of atheism then we will expect that evidence to be flawed. We may, as a result, view purported theistic proofs with greater suspicion than we otherwise would.

If, on the other hand, we begin our inquiry with an intellectual openness to God’s existence, then we may find persuasive arguments that others would not. Inconclusive evidence may be deemed acceptable on the ground that it confirms a suspicion that we already had. The issue of the intrinsic probability of theism will thus have an effect on the way that we approach any argument on either side of the debate concerning God’s existence. It is rational to take the probability of God’s existence into account when considering such arguments.

The Improbability of God
It is tempting to think that God’s existence is about as unlikely as anything could be. God, if he exists, is infinite in his attributes; in power, knowledge, and love—in his whole being—God is unlimited. Ockham’s razor, then, which tells us that where either of two explanations will do we should always prefer the simpler explanation, recommends that wherever possible we should avoid postulating the existence of God to explain evidence. If there are two explanations of a set of evidence, one invoking God and the other not invoking God, then the explanation that doesn’t invoke God will always be the more economical of the two; it is more economical to postulate any number of finite beings than it is to postulate one infinite being. The hypothesis that God exists, then, seems to be as intrinsically unlikely as it is possible for a hypothesis to be. Prejudice against theism, it seems, is justified.

It might even be thought that the existence of God goes beyond mere improbability, that it is impossible. Certain of the tradition doctrines concerning God’s nature appear to be self-contradictory, while others appear to contradict each other; several of the arguments for atheism seek to exploit this appearance. If this appearance is to be trusted, then God cannot exist--logical contradictions are not just unlikely to be true; they cannot be true--and we can be confidant that any purported theistic proof contains an error even before we examine it.

The Probability of God
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the alleged contradictions in God’s nature can be resolved. If this is correct, and God’s existence is possible, then the theist can offer a counter-argument to case for the improbability of God’s existence set out above. This counter-argument is offered by Richard Swinburne in The Existence of God.

Swinburne observes that it is simpler to postulate an unlimited force than a limited force. If one postulates a limited force then one is postulating two things, the force and whatever constrains it. If one postulates an unlimited force, then one is only postulating one thing, the force; there is, by definition, nothing that constrains an infinite force.

For this reason, scientists constructing theories will, unless there is good reason not to, prefer to use zeroes or infinities in those theories. The speed of light, for instance, was assumed to be infinite until experimental data disconfirmed this. Scientists recognise that an infinite force is intrinsically more probable than any great but finite force.

This methodology, Swinburne suggests, can be generalised; an infinite being, he urges, is the most probable kind of being. Ockham’s razor, if he is correct, far from implying that God’s existence is less likely than any other explanatory hypothesis, implies that it is more likely than any other explanatory hypothesis; the intrinsic probability of theism is relatively high.

Thoughts on Dagoods' Objections

2006-01-24T23:30:00.000-06:00

(A contribution from Paul regarding Dagoods' responses to Jeff's last post)

Dagoods,

Your arguments are good — right at the top of the philosophical game in some instances — and it's refreshing to find an atheist who actually understands Christianity to some meaningful extent. Unfortunately, I do not see any logical defeaters to Christianity here, only some speculation over metaphysical dilemmas that are beyond our resources to resolve with certainty, possible reasons to reject some commonly held characterizations of God's nature, and a whole lot of grudge against the kind of God you think Scripture is portraying. In fact, it looks very much to me like you are assuming certain principles in order to make your case — principles that would be unjustified were atheism true. As Cornelius Van Til would put it, you must first climb onto God's lap in order slap Him in the face. Let me just throw out a few observations on this discussion.

God and time

This is a very interesting topic and I have many ideas as to how God, time, creation, and immutability might be compatible notions. Some might even be compelling to you, but I will predict that you would still find some grounds for dispute. The problem is that we, being creatures of time and material, have absolutely no means for understanding what the possibilities are for being outside, before, or changed by a creation. And you have yourself admitted that a beginning of time leaves you at a logical impasse as an atheist. It is surely a problem, but I at least find that the concept of something "eternal" "outside" of the creation (however that plays out) does more philosophical work for me than the belief that there is nothing at all.

Any scenarios I might suggest would be merely theoretical, or "true" only in an anthropomorphic sense, and the best I could hope to accomplish is to offer a plausible scenario that would be subjectively compelling to you according to the "language" of logic as you understand it (grounding logic is yet another problem for atheism).

God and morality

I see you either unable to make the distinction between objective and subjective morality or you do not believe that it is ultimately meaningful to do so. Let me first simplify it for you as the difference between personally defined morality (inside the box of the cosmos), and morality that is sourced prior to and outside of the box (imposed upon us and/or woven into the fabric of our "selves"). You may not believe in the objective option, or think the word "objective" to be the best term, but the theoretical distinctions should make sense and seem to suggest some rather profound metaphysical alternatives.

Perhaps you believe that an "objective" morality that is ultimately sourced in a deity is really "subjective" after all — God being the subject. So be it, but that is certainly different in a meaningful way from you and I being the final authority on ethical matters. It also is a meaningless point in regard to your relationship and obligations to that external Subject.

Even if one were to affirm that morality was nothing more than what God decreed, what of that? Is it a "bad" thing to be so? Will you say that God has decreed something evil on any given occasion, as though you had some higher moral law at your disposal by which to judge Him? Indeed, you are judging good and evil at every turn, and the majority of your points seem to be dependent upon the idea that God is not actually good and just. But from where are you pulling your moral standards? You must first presuppose objective morality in order for your arguments to have force, otherwise your complaints simply boil down to, "I don't like your God. He doesn't do things like I think they should be done."

Even so, is it not reasonable to think that what God decrees has some meaningful relationship to His own nature and character? Perhaps you may technically see this as taking the divine imperative horn of Euthyphro's dilemma, but it also seems to make sense of the defense that morality comes from God's essence and not simply from a random series of commands serving no purpose. And even if they were random commands, what am I to say against God? Even if I found that I did not like Him, what victory would there be in defying Him?

Nature of evil

Again, debating over a meaningful definition of "evil" is a fascinating (maybe even useful) exercise, but differences in definitions do not negate the existence of it or its philosophical implications. Perhaps you'd like to argue that it really does not exist in any way beyond personal distaste, which seems warranted by your atheism, but that would seem to undermine your recurrent theme of the injustice of God.

The "genocide" of the Amorites (well, some of them anyway) seems to be the main fly in your ointment. But you load the dice in the very word you use to describe it (like "suicide" for the atonement). I could just as well say that the deaths of every human in history constitutes "murder" on God's part. Why isolate this to one small population of people who happened to depart in a programmed fashion by the chosen agency of the Hebrews as opposed to floods, hail of fire, plagues, and cancer? It seems to me that this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of life and death on this earthly existence.

Might I suggest that your context for understanding these things is as a gnat on a marquis, and you have loaded your judgment down with a hundred presuppositions? You are presuming something about the Amorites, something like innocence. You are presuming that dead children are more tragic than dead adults in a world where life itself is often called "tragic." You are assuming that a work of art that is conscious somehow makes the creator subject to the rights and feelings of that creation. You are assuming that you have enough data about humanity, history, morality, and the plans of God to make a right judgment about this or anything. You are assuming that your own distaste for the elimination of a small group of pagans is even meaningful in the context of a worldview that has only an arguable foothold for the concept of morality.

It may be difficult to determine the broad scope and boundaries of good and evil, but this is why we would necessarily be dependent on God, who must ground it, to tell us Himself. Interestingly, Scripture portrays a God who is very keen for us to trust him and to assure us of his good intentions. I thought on this simply as a young Christian ("of course God is good, why would I doubt that"), but with more life experience and further study of the Scripture I realized there was cause for question, just as you did. This makes it all the more meaningful to find those assurances and evidences of the great lengths He has gone to on my behalf in Christ. He has won my trust and respect, not just commanded it; and He assures me that all things will work for the good of those who love Him, even though He reserves the full knowledge of that plan for Himself alone at this time.

Dagoods, I have good reason to believe the Scriptures on many accounts not covered here. My belief in them is not based on my ability to squeeze every action of God into a category of my own likening. Indeed, the very concept of a God who stands over me in authority is not to my "liking." But if I believe in this God, then I must take what He has revealed as the only possible authority and rescue from what must otherwise be epistemological chaos.

A Logical Attack Answered

2006-01-23T11:43:00.000-06:00

Dagwood has a closet full of objections to Christianity (and Theism in general). Since the comment section of his blog has gotten too cumbersome for me I'm responding here. It's going to be hard for me to clearly articulate his challenge here because I hadn't gotten around to getting clarification on his objection seen here.

, if God did change his nature? 1) How would you know? And 2) How could you enforce it not happening? Is the “doctrine of immutability” a greater law than God?Question, Jeff. What could God do that is unjust and why is it unjust?

To be fair, I don't know for sure what he means here and will be guessing as best I can. So Dag, please correct me.

If this is taken as an honest question it deserves an answer. If it's somehow meant to be a challenge then I don't see the logical coherence except in the last sentence. So let me take that one first.

The charge is that the doctrine of immutability is logically incoherent. This could be claimed, also, of God's omnipotence (ie. Can God create a bolder too big for Him to lift?). The simple answer is that God cannot do anything that is logically incoherent. God is logical in His nature — He may be said to be "logic" just as He is "love" — and He does not do anything inconsistent with His nature. Indeed, the very idea of doing something logically incoherent is incoherent. One may say incoherent things (like, "I have a non-existent diamond in my pocket"), but producing instances of them is another matter.

Some examples would be:

God cannot kill himself
God cannot create a round square
God cannot change in essence
And on...

Do these limitations themselves negate omnipotence? The answer is "No". This is because the concept of divine omnipotence was never understood to mean that God could do the logically impossible.

The first two in the example above are logically incoherent, but why would the third one be so? That takes explaining. The Christian concept of God is that He is the greatest conceivable being. In fact, this formulation of God is relied upon by Anselm in his Ontological argument. Since God is the greatest conceivable Being, to change His essence would necessarily entail becoming less than perfect. Therefore, it's logically incoherent for God (and only God) to change His essence.

Of course there is a Biblical argument to support the concept of immutability, but non-Christians don't want to hear those arguments.

So on to the question: Can God do anything that is unjust?

My answer will be two-fold. First, the answer must be no. The charge from Dagwood (I think) is that this makes God subject to the laws of justice. To say yes would make God less than Just. This puts us on the horns of a dilemma, it seems (also known as the Euthyphro dilemma). Perhaps some would be content to say that it's OK for God to be subject to the laws of justice. But if so, where did these come from? Did they preceed God? Are they more powerful than God? Clearly this raises some issues that would cease to have God being God (remember the definition of 'greatest conceivable Being'?).

The answer is that this is a false dilemma. In Dagwood's own words: "I have to tell you. Whenever I see claims of dichotomies, all my red flags go up. There are too many variables in life." Seems he doesn't want to take his own advice and consider a tertium quid solution.

I prefer the answer given by Aquinas and C. S. Lewis. God is subject to a moral code (God cannot sin) and He does NOT define righteousness any way He pleases. God's immutable nature is that of righteousness. The moral code that He must follow is an essential part of His nature. Therefore, there is no dilemma. He cannot act contrary to His nature, yet He's not subject to something outside of Himself. Righteousness is God, and God is righteous. The laws that then proceed from Him are not arbitrary, but are consistent with His will and nature. Dilemma solved.

Some would argue from there that this constraint to act according to His moral nature constitutes a limitation that is inconsistent with omnipotence. Augustine answered this charge by arguing that 'evil' has no ontological value in itself. Evil is simply the absence of righteousness. Like a donut hole isn't a thing...it's the absence of donut. A shadow isn't a thing, it's an absence of light. Therefore you cannot say that since humans can sin, we can do something that God can't (that's true) and that we are therefore, in some ways, more powerful than God (our sin is only a weakness or a lacking, never a strength or capability).

Now on to the questions that were asked. Dagwood, if there is a proper challenge embodied by these, let me know and I'll try to address it.

First: If God did change His nature how would we know? Well, we loosely addressed immutability above, as well as the reason it must be so logically. Beyond that we have His revelation in the Bible attesting to it. But if the logically incoherent did happen and God changed His nature, I assume He would reveal it to us in the way that He revealed past points of change. The main covenants (Adamic, Noahic, Abrahamic...) were periods in time where God changed the rules by which mankind was to operate and men were notified of this. This would not necessitate a change in His own nature or the overarching moral principles, only a further unfolding of His temporal plans for humanity. The only way that God's intimate laws for mankind would remain static is if His purpose and plans for mankind were fulfilled and fixed at our creation.

Second: How could we enforce it not happening? Obviously mankind doesn't enforce anything in regard to God. I suspect something was meant that escapes me and that I can expect an elaboration soon.

There is an important note to add here in regard to God's justice. Dagwood likes to point out Biblical narratives that demonstrate inconsistency in God's behavior. I am not willing to say that on every point of God's behavior that I can subjectively justify it. This is because God has so much more knowledge than I do that I'm incapable in all cases of understanding.

However, it's possible in many cases. So here is a stab. Moral imperatives are not as low level as "Don't punch anyone in the nose". They are more general such as "Don't harm people". Well, what if someone is trying to punch me in the nose? Am I justified in punching their nose first to stop them? Most of us would agree it's justified in self-defense. Why? Because there are two competing morals. There is the moral cost of him hurting me and the moral cost of me hurting him. Which one is worse? I'd argue that him trying to hurt me without sufficient provocation makes his moral transgression worse and the overall moral cost of me hitting him first, is less than if he succeeds in hurting me.

That may not have been a great example, so I'll give another one. What if I could take $10 from my friend, and with that money I could provide a starving child with enough food to live for a month. Furthermore, let's assume that this child's starvation is such that she needs food within the next hour to survive. I'd steal the money, but the total moral outcome is far better than if I don't steal the money, thereby allowing the girl's death.

Now imagine that I'm the only one that knows about the girl because I have knowledge you don't. All you see is the theft of the $10 from my friend. You would assume that I was an immoral person. What if, unbeknownst to you, my friend owed me $10? This analogy is ideal for the claim of injustice against God. He's working to bring about the absolute best end result for eternity. He knows the future outcome of actions taken today (or not taken today) and does things that would appear to a finite being as being immoral (say commanding the death of all Canaanites). To top it all off, He owns this world and all the life in it (ala the $10).

Which brings me to a point that needs stressing in regard to the charge that God is unjust. Why is it wrong for us to kill? Is it because human life is precious in some sense? Well, yes. But is this human life precious in a way that is outside of God? (creating a bit of the Euthyphro dilemma again). The primary justification for the value of man is that man is God's creation.

Imagine an artist makes a beautiful sculpture. Now imagine 2 acts: Me walking in his house and destroying it; or the artist walking up and destroying it. The first act is immoral, the second act isn't. It's about dominion. Since God holds dominion over all of creation, He has the right to take human life without the charge of murder.

I know that last statement will make Dagwood tremble with anger. But there's no logical contradiction there, at least as I see it.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

2006-01-23T10:36:00.000-06:00

Christians are fond of using the argument from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to argue the impossibility (or to be exact, the near impossibility) of evolution occurring naturally.

Over and over again we see evolutionists correcting us by saying that the law only applies to closed systems. Earth is not a closed system because we have energy constantly being applied to the system in the form of sunlight. Earth, therefore, is an open system which isn't subjected to the 2nd law.

The problem is that our intuition SCREAMS at us that order doesn't come from chaos, even if you apply energy from an outside source. So are we simply idiots for continuing to argue from the 2nd law? I don't think so. And neither does this mathematician from Texas A&M.

See Here.

An Observation

2006-01-17T09:05:00.000-06:00

If you read headlines or listen/watch the news then you've probably heard about California executing its oldest death-row inmate. Why is this newsworthy? Well, I suppose it's nothing more than the fact that he's old and has one foot in the grave already so people see him as the old man in front of them rather than the murdering scum-bag that ordered the murders of 4 people.

Here's the reasoning behind the appeal of his lawyers. He's 76, he's blind, he's nearly deaf, he's confined to a wheelchair and suffers from diabetes. Therefore, putting him to death constitutes 'cruel and unusual' punishment. In fact, they argued that keeping him on death row itself constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Now, can anyone explain to me why putting someone to death in this condition is cruel and unusual when putting a healthy man to death in the same situation isn't? It's natural that we'd feel more sympathy for this man than we would for a 30 year old tattooed, scary-looking gang-banger. The problem is that the appearance of a man isn't a valid basis for legal pronouncements.

Now, it can be really hard to pigeon-hole people. But it strikes me that those who oppose this man's execution either because they oppose the death penalty, or they oppose it in this case, will be largely left-leaning. It's just a common position on the 'left' of the political spectrum to be against the death penalty.
It's also a 'left' position to be for the right to die. I mean the physician assisted suicide of those who are terminally ill, depressed, or in great chronic pain.
So it stands to reason that there are a large number of people on the left that both support the right to die (euthenasia) and who oppose this death penalty case precisely because the man was so old and so close to death. (note: he had died and been revived in September)

It seems to me that a consistent liberal would actually have to oppose this man's execution somewhat less than they oppose the execution of a healthy, younger man.

No Freedom to Choose in Education

2006-01-12T16:53:00.000-06:00

Again, borrowed from the Family Research Council.

Lebec, a small town in California, is named for a 19th century pioneer who died in a fight with a grizzly bear. Residents should not be surprised, then, to find themselves in the middle of another bear fight. When the local school board voted to allow a one-month course in Intelligent Design to be taught as an elective, and under the heading of philosophy, some dissatisfied parents called in Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and went to court. They are trying to block any teaching of Intelligent Design under the auspices of a public school. They oppose it even when students freely choose it. They oppose it even when it's labeled philosophy, not science. "It's scary," says teacher Sharon Lemburg, "I just want to teach. I'm not out for big publicity." It's interesting, isn't it, that liberals defended John T. Scopes in the name of academic freedom and his right to teach Darwin, but are willing to sue to silence Sharon Lemburg?

I find this particularly interested in light of the recent court decision in Dover, PA. In that case the issue was said to be that it was attached to a science class. If it had been attached to a humanities class, or philosophy class it wouldn't have been a problem (or so the detractors claimed). They also said that it wouldn't have been a problem if it had been an opt-in thing...So much for honesty.

Islam and the Forgiveness of Sins

2006-01-12T13:01:00.000-06:00

I lifted this from James White's Blog.

The Associated Press is carrying the story of the death of over 300 pilgrims outside Mecca. Note the description of the hajj in this secular report:

Thousands of Muslim pilgrims rushing to complete a symbolic stoning ritual during the hajj tripped over luggage Thursday, causing a crush in which at least 345 people were killed, the Interior Ministry said.
The stampede occurred as tens of thousands of pilgrims headed toward al-Jamarat, a series of three pillars representing the devil that the faithful pelt with stones to purge themselves of sin.
Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki said 345 people were killed. More than 1,000 people were injured, said Dr. Abbasi with the Saudi Red Crescent.
Footage from the scene showed lines of bodies laid out on stretchers on the pavement and covered with sheets. Ahmed Mustafa, an Egyptian pilgrim, said he saw bodies taken away in refrigerator trucks.

Pelting rocks with stones purges you of sin? And this from the religion that has spawned the modern generation of apologists who mock the cross? The article likewise notes that similar stampedes took place in 1990 (1,426 people dead) and 2004 (244 dead). Thousands dying in a mad rush to throw stones at the devil? The contrast again is tremendous: in Islam you throw stones at the devil; in Christianity the very Creator enters into His own creation and gives Himself as the sacrifice that brings forgiveness to all those who are vitally united to Him.

Confirmation Hearings

2006-01-10T06:29:00.000-06:00

Well, in honor of the ongoing confirmation hearings on Judge Alito, I thought I'd throw in here a little bit written by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. If you follow these at all, watch for logical fallacies coming from the opposing camp. One of them is mentioned below.

The long-awaited confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr., opened on time today with the sharp rap of Chairman Arlen Specter's gavel. Sen. Specter (R-PA) has been battling cancer for a year, but he has come back looking strong. We don't know yet how Specter will use his great power. For now, we can hope that he will rein in committee liberals when they go over the line in their attacks on Alito. Specter failed, however, to bring that gavel down today on the vicious opening remarks of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). Sen. Kennedy's ad hominem attack on Alito and clear falsehoods about the judge's record were shameful, even if expected.

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) spoke for the liberal view when he said, in homely terms, "before we give you the keys to the car, we want to know where you will take us." Here, in a nutshell, is the gaping flaw in the liberal view of the Supreme Court and its powers. They really do think the Judiciary runs the country. They seem to think their only role as lawmakers is to turn thumbs up or down on federal judges--who they admit have the keys to drive the car. Last night, we heard the AIDS activists chanting outside Philadelphia's Greater Exodus Baptist Church: "Under Alito/Our Rights are finito [ended]." That's the rub, too. Note their word: under. In Judge Alito's view we are Under God and Under the Constitution, but we are certainly not under the judges. I believe that is the correct constitutional view. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) politely reinforced that point when he cited the great Chief Justice John Marshall. Marshall was a tremendous jurist, but he limited his powers to the idea that judges "shall say what the law is." They don't write the laws. They don't execute the laws. That's because, as even Franklin D. Roosevelt's friend and appointee Justice Felix Frankfurter noted, the courts function best when they function "within narrow limits."

Second to Ted Kennedy in offensiveness was New York's Chuck Schumer (D). Schumer said his intense questioning of Alito would be fair because the courts will decide "where we pray, how we live, who shall live, and who shall die." Schumer said the Supreme Court gives the "final judgment" because there is "no appeal." Of course, there is an appeal. The American people render a judgment on the role and the record of the Supreme Court. They render that judgment when they elect a President of the United States and when they elect Members of the U.S. Senate. The liberal minority has shown little but contempt for the American people--and for the judgment of American voters--in all they have said and done in these proceedings. All that Judge Alito has ever argued is that elected legislators may make laws on the controversial issues-- provided that they do not violate the U.S Constitution. But in making that judgment, Judge Alito tells us he is a strict constructionist. He offered a brief, simple statement to the Judiciary Committee to close the proceeding for today. He reminded the senators that when he became a judge, he ceased to be an advocate. He was not an attorney, fighting for a particular result for his client. Instead, he said, he took an oath only to interpret the law. That, of course, is why some liberals loathe him.

Back in April 1990, when Alito was nominated for the position he now holds on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Sen. Kennedy said to him during his confirmation hearings, "You have obviously had a very distinguished record. And I certainly commend you for your long service in the public interest. I think it is a very commendable career and I am sure you will have a successful one as a judge." Alito has done so. Senator Kennedy was right the first time.

Evidence Contrary to Evolution - Information Theory

2006-01-09T09:53:00.000-06:00

Absolutely everyone agrees that biological systems give the appearance of being designed. In fact, there's agreement that 'design' requires a designer with intelligence. The disagreement comes in when we discuss the question of whether or not biological systems really are designed.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was an objective scientific measure of what constitutes 'design'? Well, there is. It's found in the discipline of Information Theory. William Dembski is perhaps the most well-known proponent of using information theory to judge whether biological systems are the product of an intelligence (it's universally assumed that information content only comes from intelligence).

The genetic code itself is ideal for the study of informational content. The code is made up of a long sequence of 4 repeating nucleotides very much like a short alphabet. In information theory, there are two attributes that both must be contained by some pattern to be considered to contain information. These 2 attributes are complexity and specificity. Here is an example of a string of highly complex symbols:

lkaklsfdoiuwernlkjnahiasvfoias

Notice that this string of data is complex in that the number of different combinations that could occur here (using a 26 character alphabet and 30 characters) is huge. So this fits the complexity test. But what about specificity? Is there anything specified about the seemingly random string of letters? No. A bunch of letters layed out this way randomly does not contain information.

Here is something that is very specified, yet not complex:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

There is no reason to assume information here because, although highly specified there is nothing complex about a recurring string of characters.

This on the other hand:

once upon a time there lived a

Is both complex (huge number of different possible arrangements) and specified (the arrangement is far from random). Now in this case, the specificity is defined by English grammar. If you were to see an apparently random string that was the result of an encryption algorithm, how could it be distinguished from random characters? Well, even an encrypted string of data can be detected to be informational via information theory. There are algorithms that can detect specificity even in the absence of understanding the rules of that particular specification. For instance, when an encrypted transmission is received by the NSA, they can first analyze it to determine if the message is actually meaningful before embarking on the task of trying to break the code.

Now, when applied to the genetic code that drives all living things can we say this is information? Does it contain the property of specified complexity? The answer is yes. There is definitely complexity. No one denies that the genetic code is huge in terms of the number of different possible codes available. Each living organism since the beginning of time (forgetting Dolly and other cloning experiments) has had a unique DNA signature.

The real question is whether the DNA code is specified. Well, that's hard to deny since we know that there is really a very small subset of possible DNA codes that would result in a living creature. For example, take the DNA of an egg and randomly scramble it. What are the odds you could fertilize it and get a living chicken (or living anything)? Very nearly zero.

Since DNA can be proven to be highly complex and highly specified, the debate is really over the premise of information theory. Can 'information' arise naturally? The burden of proof lies with the evolutionists because there is no example known to man. It would be committing a logical fallacy to look at life on Earth as an example since it would be begging the question.

According to William Dembski, this problem is intractable in that future scientific knowledge cannot change the outcome of the answer. He says it's an ontological rather than an epistimological issue.

Evidence Contrary to Evolution - Irreducible Complexity

2006-01-05T16:24:00.000-06:00

You've been living in a cave the last few years if you haven't heard the term 'Irreducible Complexity' (IC). IC, in a way, is a revival of the hundred year old Watchmaker argument introduced by William Paley.

What Paley said, using the analogy of a watch found on the beach, is that certain things are obviously the product of a designer. The argument consists of more than that, but that's the best one-sentence synopsis I can come up with. Atheist David Hume, a contemporary of Paley's, was generally credited with successfully discrediting the Watchmaker argument. The weakness is that it's an argument from analogy. The analogy isn't valid, Hume argued, because living organisms are not machines.

Well, fast forward to the last ten years and the great leaps made in the relatively new field of microbiology. We now know exactly how some living organisms work, down to the sub-cellular level. We've seen cells and found that they are machines! This is no analogy anymore. The revival of this design argument stems from this new information.

IC is often described by the analogy of a mousetrap. You can design a wide variety of mousetraps, but if you were to design the simplest mousetrap possible you'd end up with those very cheap traps that consist of a wood platform, the bar that springs shut, the spring that gives it tension, and the latch and trigger. If you were to take away any one of those things then you would have a mousetrap that is not functional. It's irreducible in the sense that if you reduced it even one more step it would be non-functional.

Since we know that biological systems, at their lowest level, really are machines; and since we know that these machines are built component by component via sequences of DNA; and since the neodarwinian model of evolution works through the accumulation of successive mutations, we can conclude that if there are any irreducibly complex biochemical systems found in any living creature anywhere that this is an example of tweaking by an intelligence.

Simply put, if you took the mousetrap and started with a platform, spring, and bar alone you'd have a mousetrap that doesn't work and wouldn't be selected via the evolutionary process. This is a case where, in theory, multiple independent and random mutations would have to accrue without being selected out before you'd have the functioning system.

The problem is even worse in fact. In many systems the intermediate steps not only are non-beneficial, but immediately fatal. I won't go in to the detail (you can find it on the web) but the best example may be blood clotting. Clotting operates through a rube-goldberg type of system of steps with checks and balances. If any one gene in the blood-clotting process doesn't work, it doesn't create the necessary protein and the organism is immediately dead. Gradualism cannot explain blood clotting (at least the blood clotting we see in nature).

This argument is logically sound. The real debate is whether or not anything we see in nature is truly irreducibly complex. What the evolutionists hang their hats on is the idea that genes can originally do one thing, get accidentally copied to a redundant, non-active gene, then undergo mutations in the inactive gene site, then later in the evolutionary process accidentally get activated with the mutations in place operating with a new function.

Beyond this general sketch of how the process might work, NO specific testable theories have been proposed to explain the development of any of the IC structures identified.

The debate won't be over for a long time, but as it stands, regardless of what each side claims, the IC challenge has not been satisfactorily answered. It currently appears as though there are irreducibly complex biochemical structures in nature. And as William Paley said over a century ago, these structures are the hallmark of design. And design requires an intelligence. It's a proven case that nature doesn't produce complex designs (except of course in evolutionary biology...or so they say).

Evidence Contrary to Evolution - Repeated Evolution?

2006-01-04T08:05:00.000-06:00

Another piece of evidence contrary to evolutionary theory is repeated evolution. Since the engine driving evolution is random mutation we should expect the outcomes of the process to be unique.

Gould has said:

“…No finale can be specified at the start, none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages. Alter any early event, ever so slightly, and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.” Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

This makes sense if we draw an analogy. Consider writing a book with a random word generator. Say you want to rewrite the story of the Tortoise and the Hare using this random word generator. To do so, at each point in the writing process you go to the generator and get a word. If the word is grammatically correct and flows the story properly, then you take it and begin the search for the next word. If not, you throw it out and ask for another random word. Your selection process is much like natural selection and the word generator is like mutations.

You can see that using this analogy we would end up with thousands or perhaps millions of grammatically correct stories that do convey the meaning behind the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. In our analogy, being correct grammatically might equate to having a genetic code capable of biological life and telling the story sufficiently might be analogous to having survivability in the ecosystem.

You can see how each of these 'stories' then would be distinct and no two people doing this exercise would be expected to end up with the same story word for word.

This is how evolution is said to proceed and so Gould's pronouncement is correct. A prediction of evolutionary theory is evolutionary uniqueness.

Now some would give more credit to natural selection than is warranted and would claim that the same ecosystem demands one and only one evolutionary pathway and would therefore end up with the same adaptation resulting over and over again. I don't see these claims being made by serious biologists, but rather Internet pundits so perhaps it doesn't need to be refuted. However, this analogy should serve as a refutation of that position. We can find any number of anecdotal examples that show vastly different creatures surviving in the same ecological niche.

In the last 10 or so years there has been a revolution occurring in evolutionary biology. Genetic sequencing has allowed for an objective way to measure the similarity and dissimilarity of species. Rather than using the mistaken approach of homology (visual similarity) scientists can now determine the closeness of organisms in evolutionary terms by looking at the 'programming' of these organisms.

What has resulted is an anomaly that can't be explained by evolutionary theory. We have a large and growing set of examples where similar species were assumed to have common ancestry based on morphology who are now known to have no common ancestry to speak of.

What this means is that, somehow, we have the same designs showing up repeatedly even though the supposed mechanism is said to be random and unrepeatable.

Consider this picture. These are various species of cichlids from two lakes in Africa. At first glance you'd assume these species come from common ancestry when the two lakes were somehow attached. You'd be wrong. According to genetic analysis all of the fish from their respective lake are more genetically similar to each other than their look-a-like counterpart from the other lake.

I once debated this point with a PhD evolutionary biologist. He did NOT question the assertion that evolution should be unrepeatable. Rather, he took issue with one particular example. If you read the article linked to in the title, you may have noticed the example of Mangabeys. This scientist had worked (I assume during his PhD thesis) on primates. He said that the morphological similarities between drills, mandrills, and baboons could be accounted for if they had shared a common ancestor that exhibited the trait (which could have gone recessive in their immediate ancestors).

I conceded that with Mangabeys his counter argument was plausible. This claim could be tested, of course, by sequencing the DNA of these various species and identifying whether they are close enough to be related by a common ancestor. Also, those closer relatives should show the gene(s) that code for the common trait being non-coded.

Also, this response doesn't solve the problem for all species. You can't claim that wings were a trait shared by the common ancestor of bats and birds and that this common ancestor gave rise to rodents that lost the wings.

Even back before we could sequence DNA, this evidence was staring us in the face. What about marsupials? Either this form of reproduction evolved independently many times (unthinkable) or the forms exhibited by them did. Consider the marsupial wolf, the marsupial lion, marsupial bear...and what about possums and all the other marsupial 'rodents'?

See the article linked to the title for more examples of repeated 'evolution'.

Punctuated Equilibrium

2006-01-03T06:49:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd make a post on the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (PE). This is a theory that was proposed by Gould and Eldridge to explain the fossil evidence. According to evolutionary theory, evolution proceeds slowly and gradually. The problem is that the fossil record shows repeated bursts of novelty happening instantaneously in geological terms.

I think it's important to point out that the fossil record is one of the failed predictions of evolutionary theory. Does the revised theory of PE solve this conundrum?

Well, the thought is that evolution tends to occur when a somewhat smaller group of a certain species becomes isolated from the larger group. This isolation could be due to a few reasons, but the simplest to conceptualize is their becoming isolated by geography. During this isolation (on the order of millions of years), speciation occurs due to the evolutionary process. This 'new' species is more capable of survival and reproduction than the ancestor species was. Something then happens to release this new species in to direct competition with their parent species resulting in the extinction of the parent species.

This spread is thought to occur so fast in geological terms that it makes it appear as if the old species died and the new species replaced it very rapidly.

While being logically sound, this theory has a few problems.

One problem, perhaps minor is that a smaller, isolated breeding population does make it easier for speciation to occur. That is, a beneficial mutation can spread throughout the population faster. But at the same time, mutations are happening less often because there are fewer individuals to have mutations. So the length of time for the population to have a single occurrence of a beneficial mutation increases. And need I mention that beneficial mutations are outnumbered by detrimental ones by such an obscene amount that mutations guarantee the extinction of a species? But that's not a beef specific to PE, so I'll drop it.

Another problem, is that evolution has never been seen in the fossil record. Don't you think that just one species, in one location, at one point in history would have had their little isolated evolution hole fossilized for analysis? But no, evolution was always happening somewhere else.

What about the difficulties of having isolated breeding populations in the ocean? This is where all early life was evolving anyway. How do you keep fish in the ocean isolated? And during the paleozoic and Mesozoic periods we had one supercontinent. This doesn't preclude the possibility of isolation, just makes it far less likely than we might think.

Of course there is the snowball event that preceeded the Cambrian which completely rules out PE or any evolution preceeding the Cambrian Explosion.

And now for what I consider the logical defeater of PE. Keep in mind that evolution is proceeding at a constant pace. By this, I mean that mutation rates are somewhat constant. I'm aware they vary from species to species, from location to location (within the genome), and they vary by locaiton on Earth (due to more and less radiation from radioactive decay in the crust) and I could name a few more, so I'm not ignorant of this subject. However, when figured over Earth's history, mutations are always happening and it's a simple statistics game to say evolution is always proceeding at some average rate.

We can also say that the factors that result in isolation of a group are randomly spread over Earth in both space and time. So if PE were correct, we would see a new species suddenly burst in to the fossil record, but we'd see this happening at a constant rate (with random fluctuations). You see, a certain fish might become isolated in an inland sea, a certain marsupial might become isolated in a mountain valley...a few million years later and wham! A new species of fish hits the fossil record, or a new marsupial hits the fossil record.

But how can we explain what the fossil record actually shows? The fossil record shows hundreds, or thousands of new species hitting the fossil record all around the Earth at the same time. Punctuated Equilibrium cannot be used to explain why new species are unleashed on Earth all at the same time in such large batches. To reiterate, this cannot be so because the conditions that result in isolation will be randomly distributed over time and space, as well as the mutations themselves, as well as the conditions that unleash these isolated populations back in to the world.

Punctuated Equilibrium stands defeated by the fossil record.

Evidence Contrary to Evolution - Abiogenesis

2006-01-03T06:43:00.000-06:00

Since I'm cataloging evidence that runs contrary to evolution, I didn't want to leave out the biggest challenge there is. In fact, this challenge is so big, that I will boldly proclaim that this one alone is functional proof that something/someone started life on Earth.

I don't need to cover the issue of abiogenesis because my friend Paul just did so in a series of articles. So please refer here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Conclusion

Evidence Contrary to Evolution - The Cambrian Explosion

2005-12-31T13:39:00.000-06:00

Well, I thought that it would be a decent idea to overview some of the strongest evidences against evolution.

Why? Is it because I'm an irrational crusader for the ignorant Christian Right? Well, I do lean right and I am a Christian but I am not irrational and really did start with an open mind before I began to gain knowledge of this subject and found the evidence to be compelling enough to confidently proclaim Neo-Darwinian evolution to be falsified.

This would be a good time, in light of the previous post on logical fallacies, to point out that my Christian beliefs are irrelevant to the truthfulness or veracity of my anti-evolutionary claims. If you disagree, you are committing the genetic fallacy. :)

OK, first up is the Cambrian Explosion (note the disclaimer about errors in this article). The Cambrian explosion refers to a period of time about 540 million years ago. Before this explosion (pre-cambrian) there were only single-celled organisms and non-differentiated multi-celled organisms (say sponges). Then, over a period of less than 5 million years something like 69 of 71 phyla ever to exist on Earth 'suddenly' appeared. Some things to note about that statement:

You will often see that period of time listed as 10+ million years, but the latest scholarship seems to be saying it's down perhaps to as short a time as 1 million years. I say 5 to be safe. The best 'resolution' for the dating comes from recent study of a fossil bed in Hunan province in China. References to the Burgess Shale site in Canada is old data.
'Suddenly' means in geological or evolutionary terms.
Sometimes you will see the number of discovered phyla being listed as around 20. I think the difference is whether you count sub-phyla in the number.

This raises two problems for evolutionary theory. The first one is the length of time for the introduction of all of these new life forms. First, evolution can only move at a certain pace. Many evolutionists will say that the speed of evolution will accelerate and decelerate depending on environmental factors. While this is plausible, it's not supportable by evidence. Firstly, they usually mean that periods of greater stress drive faster evolutionary speeds. While this might be intuitively sound, the fact is that environmental stressors that increase the rate of mutation always result in widespread extinctions (this is borne out by the fossil evidence, and laboratory testing). If they are referring to an increased rate of natural selection, then it still doesn't answer the issue of the speed of mutations which is the 'engine' that drives the car. Mutations just are not interjected in a rate fast enough to drive the evolutionary explosion we see in the Cambrian.

For this reason, many scientists have historically claimed that evolution had been happening for hundreds of millions of years prior to the Cambrian explosion and that the 'explosion' is only an explosion in fossilization rates due to the right circumstances for fossilization, combined with the fact that earlier life forms were smaller, softer organisms that just aren't prone to fossilization.

This line of reasoning has been ruled out by the fact that we have an unbroken chain of fossilization throughout history prior to the Cambrian and we are adept at identifying single-celled fossils. In addition, any possible hope of this is precluded by the global snowball event that immediately preceeded the Cambrian. This snowball event covered the Earth's oceans with a layer of ice about 1 kilometer thick all the way down to the equator for a period of about 10 million years. The event was so catastrophic that none of the multi-cellular creatures seen in the Cambrian could have any multi-celled ancestors. As it stands now, after years of resistance to the snowball theory by evolutionary biologists, it has finally been accepted and is even now being called the catalyst for the Cambrian explosion!

Darwinian theory would predict that life would progress much more slowly than we see in the fossil record. It would predict that life's progression would not only be slow, but fairly methodical (ie. consistently happening too slow to see all around, much like the way a tree grows). This 'prediction' of evolution has failed.

Another prediction of evolutionary theory is that life's complexity would proceed in stepwise fashion. We should see the introduction of one species which eventually gives rise to a second related species, then a third until you eventually get a species that barely crosses the line and becomes the first member of a second genus. This would continue until you have a second family, then a second order, then a second class, and then a second phylum.

When this is depicted in a top-down manner (phyla containing classes containing orders...on down to species) you get this:

The problem is with what's been termed the Inverted Cone of Disparity. This refers to the observation that the fossil record, beginning with the Cambrian explosion, shows the vast spread of distinct phyla that then diversified in to various species rather than the other way around.

Darwinian evolution holds that all new species are descended from a similar ancestor. It is then absolutely inexplicable why so many phyla appeared in the Cambrian (practically every one ever to have existed in the history of the Earth!) and then for species to have diversified within those phyla. Over the course of the history of the Earth, scientists tell us that only one or two new phyla have been introduced outside that period of time less than 5 million years during the 'explosion'.

I cannot find the quote, but I have heard that Stephen J. Gould has called this the greatest mystery known to evolutionary biology. If anyone is able to confirm that quote, please throw a comment in here.

In my opinion, the Cambrian explosion falsifies Neo-Darwinian gradualism. None of the alternative explanations I've ever heard offered for this have any merit.

Note: in searching the web for "Inverted Cone of Disparity" I can only find references that originate with me (well, one other). I did not coin the term and have no idea why it's not all over the web. If anyone knows where the term comes from, or knows an alternative term for the phenomenon, please comment that in here too.

More Logical Fallacies

2005-12-27T12:32:00.000-06:00

A while back I posted about some common logical fallacies. You can find that entry here. I'd like to cover a few more now. I find this important because recognizing these is critical to sorting out truth from falsehood in our society. If a person's argument for or against something contains logical fallacies, it should be a warning to you that their position might be wrong (having a flawed argument doesn't necessarily indicate their position is actually false). These can be classified as follows:

Appeals to Motive. These would include such things as:

Appeal to Force - You are threatened to agree
Appeal to Pity - You are persuaded by sympathy (consider the abortion question and rhetoric of rape or incest or inability to provide financially)
Consequences - You are warned of unacceptable consequences of holding the a contradictory position. Not to be confused with a valid argumentum ad absurdum.
Prejudicial Language - The terms used in the debate create an unjustified bias.
Popularity - The proposition being argued for is true because it's popular.

Changing the Subject. These would include:

Attacking the person (Ad Hominem) - Attacking the person's character, claiming them a hypocrite, noting their circumstances.
Appeal to Authority - When the 'authority' isn't one, when experts disagree, when the authority is misrepresented, or the authority is anonymous.

Inductive Fallacies would include:

Hasty Generalization - Extrapolating from a sample size that is too small.
Unrepresentative Sample - The referenced sample isn't representative of the group as a whole. This mistake is made very often when doing polls and 'scientific' studies.
False Analogy - Drawing an analogy between 2 things that are different in a critical way.
Slothful Induction - A valid inductive argument is denied despite the evidence.
Fallacy of Exclusion - Evidence that would change the outcome of an inductive argument is not presented. I see this done often in regard to the evolution debate.

Causal Fallacies include:

Post Hoc - Because one thing follows another it is held to be causal. This is often done in 'scientific' studies too. One recent example is that a researcher claimed that the more religious a nation, the more social problems it has. All he showed was that among industrialized nations, the level of religiousity coincides with social ills. The Cause/Effect link was never established.
Joint Effect - One thing is held to cause another when the truth is they are both caused by the same underlying cause.
Insignificant - One thing is said to cause another (which it does) but that effect is insignificant compared to others. ie. Having guns causes murder...There is a much stronger causal relationship between narcisism and murder (ie. guns don't kill people, people kill people).
Wrong Direction - The cause/effect relationship is reversed.
Complex Cause - The cause identified is only one part in the cause/effect.

Well, that's enough for now. What I'd like to do is ask that my readers chime in with real-world examples of any one of these fallacies, especially when the example comes from public life such that we might all have seen the fallacy in action.

The Ruling On Intelligent Design

2005-12-21T07:39:00.000-06:00

Well, I've written a couple of times about the court case over Intelligent Design in the Dover, PA school district. The final ruling was handed down yesterday. Because the original school board was voted out since the case began, there won't be an appeal since there's no one willing to appeal now. That's really a shame, and I think the judge took that knowledge to heart when he ruled.

I don't say that because I disagree with his ruling (which I do), but because he actually did things a judge shouldn't do. One of which is that he made a prejudicial statement (grounds for appeal itself). The judge said this:

To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

What is the judge's rationale for calling Intelligent Design 'grounded in religion'? Well, it was his observation that the school board members that enacted the policy were Christians. In fact, they were quoted by witnesses as saying that they considered Intelligent Design to be compatible with the Bible.

The problem with this, is that this commits the genetic fallacy. It's common knowledge in philosophy and logic (and should be in the legal system) that a person's personal beliefs have no bearing on the merit of their arguments. Either ID is a neutral scientific position, or it's not. And for this determination the testimony of the scientists about the theory itself are at the heart of the matter. Finding out that the people supporting ID believe in Santa Claus would not matter here.

You see, we could apply this same reasoning to evolution. It can be demonstrated, and has by many philosophers of science, that Darwinism as practiced by many scientists (and school board members) is a religious perspective. That means it's unconstitutional to teach Darwinism in schools...at least according to a consistent application of this judge's logic.

How about the idea that ID is unscientific and untestable? Well, I've written before (somewhere) that the same criticisms fall on Darwinism yet no one seems to care. You see, it can be readily established that Darwinism is untestable and provides the inability to make meaningful predictions in just the same ways as ID. There is definitely a double standard here.

The judge also said something I find interesting: This policy "singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment...". It seems the judge doesn't like the fact that the policy explicitly states that Darwinism fails to answer some things. He even admits this in his quote above, yet for the policy to admit the same thing amounts to some unfair singling out of the theory? I don't get his logic. How does suppressing the teaching of absolutely any alternative not itself constitute singling out the theory of evolution for special treatment?

This ruling amounts to censorship.

Note: Before you get all wadded up about this, realize that I do not advocate banishing evolution from the classroom. It should be taught, even if it's wrong, in the best possible light. It's a viable competing theory with incredible social importance. I just think the other alternative should be taught too. And even though I've not addressed it directly, the scientific evidence for ID is huge.

The Real History of the Crusades

2005-12-20T12:47:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the most common attack made against Christianity goes something like this: "Christians suck because they want to kill everyone, look they tried in the middle ages! And you are a Christian and you suck too! You blood thirsty murdering scum!"

Ok, maybe the typical objection doesn't go quite like that. But with a bit of hyperbole I wanted to imply that attacking Christianity based on the crusades is really irrational. First, we should all remind ourselves that the truth of a proposition has nothing to do with the behavior of it's adherents. I could just as easily mention Hitler to an evolutionist or Stalin to an atheist.

I could even go on to point out that protestant Christianity shouldn't be blamed for the actions of Roman Catholicism.

I could stop there, but I won't. I won't because the truth of the matter is that we have all been indoctrinated with a politically correct historical revisionism. I'm going to quickly attempt to set the record straight by borrowing from Thomas F. Madden, author of The New Concise History of the Crusades .

The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman’s famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

How often have you heard an Arab decry the western aggression that was the Crusades? It's interesting that they forget that these were Christian lands before they were conquered by Muslim agression.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

Shortly after Mohammed's death Islam began to conquer the region. For centuries they continued until the 11th century when the only remaining portion of the Byzantine Empire was Greece. In desperation the Emperor of Constantinople sent word to Christians in the west asking them to come to their aid.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

Pope Innocent III wrote this:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them?...Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?

This is just a taste of the true history as far as the best scholarship has been able to uncover. Remember this the next time you are made to feel guilty for what your religion has perpetrated against the peaceful Arab people...or the next time you are tempted to criticize a Christian, or Westerner for that matter, for the Crusades.

More Comments About Crossan

2005-12-15T06:41:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm almost done listening to a debate between Crossan and William Lane Craig moderated by William F. Buckley.

This debate is very informative in regard to Crossan's theology. He couches himself in a postmodern use of language such that he spends a lot of his time affirming the same assertions we would make about Christianity, yet he means something completely opposed to historical Christianity.

For instance, he was pressed by Buckley to explain on what authority he has redefined the term 'Christian' such that it applies to him. His dancing around the issue confirmed that he has redefined the term in a way that it's never been defined before. He is not a Christian except by his own assertions.

He also tried his best to avoid being pinned down by Mr. Craig when asked if he believed God was a real being. Crossan will say that God is real, but means he's a real construct of our own minds. When asked if God was a real, operational being during the Jurassic period of Earth's history Crossan simply replied that the question was "nonsensical". This belies the truth that Crossan sees 'God' as a construct of the human mind.

It's very interesting to delve deeply in to Crossan's perspectives. It seems to me that he's got a new age religion that he's calling Christianity. He talks about 'faith' healing people, but doesn't mean that they are healed by the object of their faith (God). He really means that there is some psychological-physical link that allows a person's beliefs to actually heal them of certain illnesses (an idea that I don't discount).

One contradiction that I've noticed in his position is that he claims that the disciples never intended their claims of the miraculous (namely the resurrection) to be taken literally by the readers. He wants to avoid calling them liars, and gets around this by stating that they meant to be taken figuratively and that the original readers understood this.

The contradiction comes in when talking about the origin of the 'resurrection' idea. He claims that the idea that Christ 'resurrected' originated out of the Jewish belief in a bodily resurrection (read that 'literal'). He even goes as far as to confirm that in Jewish culture, the idea of resurrection ONLY consisted of the idea of a physical, bodily (literal) resurrection. (See Sam's blog for a series on the resurrection).

Crossan and Divine Consistency

2005-12-12T07:12:00.000-06:00

Last week I listened to a debate between Dr. James White and Dr. Dominic Crossan pertaining to the reliability of the Scriptures. Specifically, the thesis was "Is the orthodox, Biblical account of Jesus of Nazareth authentic and historically accurate?" Dr. White took the affirmative while Dr. Crossan took the negative.

I've been told that in at least one other debate, Dr. Crossan (an ex Catholic priest) conceeded that he does not believe in a personal divine being. What's really interesting about his brand of liberalism, to me, is that in spite of this he claims to be a Christian and talks the talk while all the while undermining the truthfulness of the Scriptures.

There were two things about Crossan's position in this debate that really struck me that I'd like to comment on here. The first is that he made a distinction between 'facts' and 'truth' which is quite artificial and I've heard from another liberal Christian that I've been dialoging with lately. The second is his concept of 'Divine Consistency'.

In regard to the first, Dr. Crossan will assert that the Bible is 'true' in that all the stories are designed to teach spiritual truth. For instance, the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 (click this twice to make it work) is designed to teach the truth that God has the ability and desire to feed our hungry souls (yet, this 'God' that Crossan speaks of must be the god within us even though he's not forthcoming in admitting this). That's all fine and dandy, yet he denies Jesus actually ever fed 5000 people. He says that this, and all other accounts of the miraculous are simply parables. This is where he makes the distinction between 'fact' and 'truth'. The story contains truth on a deeper level, but is not factual in that these events never actually transpired.

To this, I'd simply ask him to list the literary clues used in that time period to distinguish between factual, historical accounts and parabolic literature. You can do this for yourself by contrasting that account with an explicit parable such as the parable of the Sower. A few notable differences are that the parable doesn't have names or places.

If you concede the possibility of a God, then you should concede the likelihood that this God can orchestrate an actual event (factual) that conveys spiritual truth so that it's both of these things at the same time. In fact, doesn't this make the account all the more powerful?

The second thing, his idea of 'Divine Consistency', is a presupposition that God always acts the same way. This might seem logical considering the doctrine of immutability. This doctrine is found in Scripture, but can be supported simply via philosophical argumentation too. So Crossan has decided that an unchanging God can never act differently during one period of history than He does at another. So, since we don't see God performing miracles today, He must not have done them earlier. He seems to miss the distinction between essence or nature (which is part of immutability) and behavior.

During the debate, White and Crossan agreed that this was a presupposition that Crossan operated under. Crossan even admitted that there is no evidence that he could ever accept that would convince him that God had performed miracles in ancient history. So is 'Divine Consistency' a valid presupposition? I say no. As a presupposition it's not defendable. As a conclusion, perhaps. Yet Crossan never attempted to support this conclusion via a rational argument so for him it really is a presupposition. A presupposition must be valid without evidence. A valid presupposition would be the belief in the reliability of what we perceive with our senses. Divine Consistency would only be a valid presuppostion if it were applied to a non-personal force such as gravity. When applied to a personal force it would be as nonsensical as assuming that you will always be reading this blog (because you are now).

In fact, using the cosmological argument which proves that God created the universe from nothing at some time in the relatively recent past (recent relative to eternity), then we actually have irrefutable logical proof that 'Divine Consistency' is a fallacy in regard to God.

So Crossan's radical anti-supernaturalism is pretty easily refuted.

Ethics - and Your Daddy Kills Animals

2005-12-02T15:57:00.000-06:00

Check out this fine publication by PETA. Your Daddy Kills Animals

I found it hillarious, but what's perhaps more funny is that PETA didn't mean it as a joke. They claim they actually used focus groups made up of middle schoolers and found this a very effective means of communicating their ethical claims.

Want to read something else funny? Well, I found it funny anyway, and again, this isn't at all funny to members of PETA so my apologies if any of you who wander across this are members. It's a transcript of 'The Situtation' with Tucker Carlson taking on a PETA spokesman on this ad campaign. You should make sure to read this because Tucker Carlson takes on a lot of the fallacies in their logic that I don't bother with below.

What I find particularly ironic is that PETA is, at the bottom of it all, making an ethical claim. They are saying that animals are of equal value to humans. Basically, they see humans as distinct only in that we've been lucky enough in the evolutionary crap-shoot to have gotten smart (plus we have those opposable thumbs...Oh, and we walk erect too...Oh, and there's speech..wow, maybe that's a lot of coincidences...but I digress). So they would label someone who disagrees as a 'speciesist'.

I can understand why they claim that humans are of no more value than animals; it just follows from naturalistic evolutionary theory. What I find ironic, is that they are making an absolute type of moral claim. They aren't just saying "we think this is wrong, but you are free to decide for yourself" (a claim I'll bet most of them would make about abortion), which would be an ethical perspective called personal relativism. They aren't even making the claim of cultural relativism that our society should define what's right and wrong. I say this because, after all, this ethical perspective leaves you to define morality by concensus and all the polls will show that most people support killing animals. By the way, cultural relativism would make these PETA folks immoral by definition.

No, these people are making an absolute moral claim: namely that it's wrong for anyone to murder animals. The problem is that their naturalistic/evolutionary perspective doesn't allow for any objective moral values!

PETA's philosophy self-destructs.

On another note; it's interesting how this issue has many common themes with the abortion issue that we've just covered. PETA defines fish, in this case, as being valuable beings because they feel pain and exhibit intelligence. These two qualities mean, in PETA's reasoning, that fish experience horror and suffering. This happens to be the criteria that Peter Singer uses to define the value of life (sort of).

They even use science (poorly) to support their claims. I haven't dug in to any of the studies they purport to show that fish learn, but I would pay careful attention to the methodology used. For instance, they say that some fish 'learn' to avoid fishing nets by watching their 'friends' get caught. If they aren't careful, they could simply be measuring natural selection selecting out the fish that instinctively zig when they should have zagged. This leaves only the fish that zag and it looks like the remaining fish have learned to avoid nets.

And as for feeling pain; that doesn't necessarily tell us anything about how the fish perceives that pain. We have no way to know if they are suffering anxiety as a result. Of course we know that some higher order animals do. Consider a dog. You can tell that pain causes it existential suffering because of the way it cowers when expecting or fearing more pain. I don't advocate cruelty to animals, but even if they can suffer, it doesn't follow that their lives hold moral value.

PETA needs to go back to college and study philosophy.

Abortion Part IV

2005-12-01T14:06:00.000-06:00

Location:

There are those that would say that life or personhood doesn't begin until birth. These people defend abortion up until birth and defend the practice of partial-birth abortion. It's almost not worth arguing because it's almost universally agreed that nothing about that person changes in the last few moments as it moves 7" down the birth canal.

Despite what the extremists say (those who support partial-birth abortions) there are very few people in American society who support this procedure. But here again we have a property that has absolutely no ontological value. A person's location alone can not in any conceivable sense determine their status as a human being.

My guess is that most people who defend abortion up until birth do so because they have some other criteria for determining valid human life than the fact that it's in a uterus.

Dependency:

I think that most would try to use the fact that the baby is still dependent on its mother for life as some sort of justification that the baby isn't yet alive. The baby is receiving oxygen, even up until birth, through the mother's lungs and blood via the placenta.

Can this possibly work as a valid determiner of someone's status as a human being? Well, there are differing degrees of dependence. I have trouble seeing how one can be chosen without them all. When a child needs a parent to survive in terms of food, clothing, shelter we don't say that the parent is justified in killing them, or worse yet, claim they aren't really living humans.

And, of course, this would result in the problem that laws would have to change such that if someone were dangling helplessly from a rope that I own, I have the right to kill them since they are dependent on me.

This idea will allow for the killing of disabled people, or people on life support.

Consider for a moment Christopher Reeve in the years after his accident. He was immensely dependent on people and machines for survival. I'd say at least as much as an infant in a mother's womb.

Would you be prepared to hold consistently to this ethic and say that his caregivers would have been justified in killing him? Or more precisely, in stating, for the record, that he was no longer a human worthy of legal standing?

A wrapup:

My guess is that most who support abortion won't read everything I've written and really argue that a fetus isn't human (check the DNA), or that it isn't living (it's got metabolic processes going on). In the end, what they will try to assert is that the life has less value than the convenience of the mother.

If you read the comments on the previous posts, one of the common sentiments is that it would be more cruel for a child to live unwanted than to be killed. Is this true? Certainly it's cruel to grow up unwanted. But if this is your position, please do me a favor and put a comment here explaining how you justify one person deciding for another whether their life is worth living. I've known some kids who were unwanted by their parents. I don't know any of them who wish to die, or wish they'd never lived, or who say their parents should have had any say in their status.

What about the idea that having an unwanted child leads to child abuse? Well, how can you say it's more abusive to neglect and beat a child than it is to kill them? This is just plain screwed up. If this is your position, then please be consistent and admit that you support killing 5 year-olds for the same reasons.

Abortion Part III

2005-11-30T08:16:00.000-06:00

Another criteria that some like to propose we use to determine personhood is the level of development. Of all the proposed criteria this one seems to me to be the most likely delineation to use.

So which type of development do we use? Some possibilities up for consideration could be:

cognitive development
viability
ability to experience pain or fear
complete development of all organ systems, or a particular one
how about brain waves? we use this to determine a person's legal status at the end of life

Unlike the size question, these items have the possibility of being valid qualitative criteria. This is why I believe the level-of-development appeal is the most promising for pro-abortion people. I've noticed that this is the most common criteria proposed for defining personhood.

How about cognitive development? Is this qualitative or quantitative? Can we say that self-awareness makes someone human? The obvious answer is no because self-awareness is possessed by many animals and it's also not possessed by people in comas. How about level of reasoning ability, or intelligence? For instance IQ? If this is to define humanity we must choose an IQ level that is higher than the smartest dolphin or dog. It's clear that there are many people who live lives protected by the laws of the land who have IQs that are a bit too low to fit this criteria. Also, again back to the coma situation there's certainly no IQ being expressed there...but then again we do tend to kill those stuck in comas too long don't we? It seems clear that cognitive development is on a single continuum and must be labeled quantitative; after all, a human is still fully a human whether they possess more or less intelligence.

What about viability? Many like to define humanity as beginning at the point of fetal viability. This is tough because what does it mean to be viable? An infant needs the mother for food. The baby would also die of exposure (in most climates) without the care of the mother to either protect the infant from the sun, or the cold. Most people don't consider normal motherly care as counting in viability. They like to say that if the fetus could come out today and survive with the mother's normal nurturing that it is then viable and human. The problem here is that we have many clear cases of humans born with birth defects that cause them to fail this qualification so we'd have to allow a blanket killing of the disabled. And more than that, we'd first have to say the disabled aren't human. What happens when I go to have surgery for my heart disease? If I'm having a bypass surgery, then for a period of time during that surgery I'm not viable. So I'm not human while under surgery and anyone should be able to pull the plug on me without being guilty of murder. This doesn't even mention the problem that viability is nearly impossible to pinpoint in a fetus. It changes from year to year with medical advances and always varies from baby to baby. I contend that viability is also quantitative not qualitative. Is one person more human than another as a result of being more viable, or survivable than another?

As for the ability to experience emotion or pain, that's a tough one. I know that to throw a golden retriever in to a ring with a pitbull will be cruel to the golden retriever. This dog will experience a lot of fear and pain. But when you throw two pitbulls together, they both experience glee. I know their brains are receiving pain signals yet they don't seem to find it unpleasant. Most pitbulls that I've seen fighting on TV documentaries or newscasts are wagging their tails. They really find glee in fighting, yet I contend that it's still cruel precisely because of the outcome, not how they view the experience. Likewise, as a martial artist I've gotten used to the idea of violence (somewhat) and don't think it's any big deal to be beat up and experience pain. However, does the law recognize it's OK to attack and beat a brave man with higher pain tolerance, but not right to do this to a timid, scared man? Well, I can agree that there seems somehow to be more guilt when the crime is perpetrated against a terrified child vs. a courageous adult, but can this be taken so far as to say that personhood can be defined by our ability to experience fear or pain? Certainly not physical pain, because again, that's shared by animals and not shared by people sleeping or under sedation. So we're only left, perhaps, with the ability to use fear. Too bad that a 3 week old infant isn't any more fearful than a 24 week fetus. If it matters, psychologists say that the only fear an infant possesses instinctively is the fear of falling. If it matters, we have video of half-term fetuses crying in the womb in response to sudden loud noises. This one fails the test too.

How about the complete development of organ systems, or just one such as the beating of a heart? Well, the problem here is that the heart begins beating way too early in fetal development to allow practically any abortions. However if we did use this, it might be the most rational of any criteria (along with perhaps brain activity). Again, if we define personhood by this standard then those with artificial hearts, or in the process of receiving a transplant, or a stopped-heart surgery are not human either. And what happens in the future when we figure out how to engineer artificial organs for various functions? If we place a functioning organ in the role of determiner of human life then we deny humanity to people receiving artificial organs. Besides, what qualitative difference is there between a liver and an arm? So do we have a problem to address in regard to amputees?

Brain waves? Well, here I can't say a lot. I don't know when brain waves begin in a fetus. Since brain waves are used as a harbinger of life in dying adults, should they be used as the harbinger of life in developing fetuses? I say no for a simple reason: the loss of brain activity in a dying person is used because it is assumed that almost no one ever recovers from that condition. A fetus, if left alone to continue developing will become a productive member of society. This is the key difference and actually an important point to make in all of this. A fetus, regardless of what traits it does or doesn't yet possess, WILL, if left alone, continue to develop. Yet, it's not this development that makes him qualitatively human.

Now for something lighter...

2005-11-29T16:17:00.000-06:00

Let me ask you a question. If I said, "The sky is blue, water is wet and moose don't fit easily into coin slots," would you call for my dismissal?

Well, then, why did Air Force football coach Fisher DeBerry get pure hell when he explained a bad loss to TCU by saying, "[They] had a lot more Afro-American players than we did, and they ran faster than we did...It's very obvious to me [black players] run extremely well"?

Did DeBerry sneeze into the flag or put out a kitchen fire with a bunny? Besides butchering the phrase African-American, what exactly did the 67-year-old DeBerry say that was so wrong?

Hellllooo? In football, if you're looking for speed, 99.9% of the time you'll find it in a black athlete. All but one of the last 100 wide receivers taken in the first round of the NFL draft were black. Of the last 50 All-Pro cornerbacks, only one was white. Only 48 men have broken 10 seconds in the 100-meter dash, and they're all black. You think that's a coincidence?

I have no clue why this is true. I just know it is true. Running fast is not the only thing these athletes are good at. Not by a million miles. But it is one thing.

And yet knees started jerking instantly. DeBerry was called into the athletic director's office for a tongue hammering. He had to apologize. A sanctimonious Colorado state senator called for his immediate firing.

But get this: Almost no black people were upset! It was all PC whites freaking out for blacks. All my black friends were like, "Many blacks run fast? Duh!" Bill Johnson, a black columnist for Denver's Rocky Mountain News, couldn't understand the furor. "Was I missing something?" he wrote.

If I were DeBerry's boss, I'd have screamed at him, too. "You've been coaching here 22 years and you're just now realizing black guys run fast? No wonder we suck!!!!"

DeBerry didn't insult blacks. If he'd have said, "Blacks are fast, but they can't grow orchids," or "Blacks are fast, but they stink at the accordion," then we'd have something.

Look, the only way we're ever going to deal with real racism is to throw out all the dumb crap that isn't racism---the stuff that gives racists ammo to toss at us.

Take it back? The only thing DeBerry should take back is his apology.

Abortion Part II

2005-11-29T07:58:00.000-06:00

Some people try to justify abortion without making the case that the fetus is not human, but rather by elevating the rights of the mother over that of the baby. I won't spend much time dealing with this approach because it's easily refuted. Just quickly: if the baby is a human deserving legal protection, then our legal system already arbitrates situations where there are competing legal rights. When this happens our legal system says that the higher value should prevail. For instance, I have the right to get somewhere quickly, but because driving at 100mph endangers human life, the greater value of life wins out and the law restrains my driving speed. The same applies, if the mother's right to various freedoms and conveniences and/or social standing is impinged upon by a pregnancy that is outweighed by the baby's right to life. That is, if the baby is a human. So enough on that point.

As to the question of whether the fetus is human I'd like to discuss a few of the criteria that people like to use to argue that a fetus is not a human. Well, some people make the distinction between 'human' (which they would say is genetic) and a 'person' (which they say is some higher state of being that bestows moral imperatives).
Either way, my argument here will work. My argument is that there is no sufficient qualifier that we can use to draw the line between human/nonhuman or person/nonperson that applies to a developing fetus.

Size:

Many would propose to use the size of the fetus as a determinant in granting the legal protection of personhood. Since growth is more analog than digital, where is the line drawn? Do we propose to pick a size, perhaps 1 lb? Perhaps 2 lbs? Since we have many cases of premature infants born in the 1 lb range, and they are granted personhood rights (meaning you can't go to the NICU and kill a 1lb baby sitting in an incubator), then we'd have to set the weight below the lowest weight ever survived by an infant.

Yet if we do that, what is it really that we are saying? Since growth is gradual and continual, aren't we really saying that there is a continuum of personhood? If we draw a line in the sand and say personhood begins at a certain size, then doesn't it also follow that there are degrees of personhood and that it's based on size?

If so, it would follow that I'm more of a person than my wife. If my rights were ever in conflict with hers then I'd win out. If I drive too fast and t-bone a car, I'd luck out and get off scott free if I weigh more. Ok, that was cheap argumentum ad absurdum, but it works.

Notice that my preceeding comment about where to draw the line used fetal viability in the argument. Later I'll cover that point all by itself, but it was natural to use it in the discussion of size. Most people don't try to hinge their arguments on size, but I still wanted to address it to try to close an avenue of escape.