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.

Abortion Part 1

2005-11-28T16:44:00.000-06:00

I think I'll do two or more posts on abortion. It's a simple matter to say that God forbids abortion and be done with it. But for those who don't believe in God, or the inspiration of the Bible by that God it's not as simple as this.

So my plan is to present rational arguments against abortion that do not appeal in any way to the Bible. This isn't to say that what the Bible says carries no authority. It's entirely valid to say that I know something is true because the Bible says so. Note that this is not to say that something is true because the Bible says so. Catch the difference there? Things are true or not true based on their correspondence to reality. Nothing is true just because the Bible says so (except for assertions about what the Bible says).

For a Christian, having settled in their minds the question of whether Scripture is inerrant, it's then valid to say they know something is true because the Bible says so. Note that the truth claim is true regardless of what Scripture says, it's just that the testimony of Scripture can be all the evidence someone needs to know it's true.

Enough about that. Let's get on to the topic.

27 States treat the killing of an unborn child as a form of homicide. There are additional states that have some other form of penalty for attacks on women that harm an unborn child. For example, in 1987 in Minnesota, a teenage girl 6 1/2 months pregnant went with her boyfriend in to the woods to commit suicide together. After she shot herself in the head, he decided not to kill himself. He covered up her body and left. He was convicted of "inadvertently murdering the fetus during the commission of a felony". The fetal homicide law carried a stricter penalty than assisting in the suicide. This verdict was upheld on appeal.

A newspaper article about this event said this: "The law makes it murder to kill an embryo or fetus intentionally, except in cases of abortion." Think about that. We have laws that make it illegal to kill a fetus, calling it murder; and we have laws that condone the killing of the fetus, calling it abortion.

What is the basis for the difference? Well, the basis comes down to one thing: the will of the mother. But that's preposterous. The law actually says that if the mother so chooses, the law will view the fetus as a human worthy of protection, and if she so chooses, the law will view the fetus as non-human, unworthy of protection. Do you see how that is logically incoherent?!?

So we have this situation where the legal status of the unborn is not based on some intrinsic quality of that person, but rather on the arbitrary choice of various individuals. This truly is anarchy.

Consider the parallels to institutionalized racism. We've had a time in the past in our country when a person's legal standing wasn't based on any intrinsic traits of that person but rather on the arbitrary will of another. During the era of slavery, slaves were considered property. Their legal standing was arbitrarily tied to their owners.

Consider Nazi Germany where the legal standing of Jews was determined by those in power.

My contention is that this schizophrenia in the law is proof positive that on some level people know that killing fetuses is wrong. They simply care more for personal autonomy than justice for the weak.

A Short History Lesson

2005-11-23T08:41:00.000-06:00

The year is 1621. 102 of you had sailed from Holland the year before. You arrived in New Plymouth after 66 days' sail. You arrived late in the year and set up a village as quickly as you can to survive the winter.

After arriving, but before leaving the ship, you created a charter for your new town. The Mayflower Compact said this: "undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith."

It was a bad winter. 47 of you died. What would happen next winter? Had God abandoned us? You spend a lot of time praying earnestly for God to save you. What are the odds that in March you would meet an indian not only speaking excellent English, but who is a follower of Christ? Squanto stayed for the next 18 months and taught them how to build warmer shelter, how and when to plant crops, and helped broker a treaty with the local indians that lasted 50 years. No pilgrim was ever harmed by an indian.

Squanto is the genesis of the Thanksgiving holiday. William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, proclaimed the first official day of Thanksgiving in October of 1621. It must be noted that they were thankful for the provision of Squanto, and that they were thankful to God.

I think it's entirely appropriate to consider Squanto a miracle from God prepared for the specific purpose of sustaining the Pilgrims, and thereby the origins of American civilization. William Bradford wrote about Squanto: " ... special instrument sent by God for their good beyond their expectations ..."

Let's trace the unlikely course of events that prepared Squanto for this purpose.

Squanto was a member of the Patuxet tribe who's village was near the site of New Plymouth. There he encountered his first white men (somewhere between 1605-1610). Squanto hung out with them and learned their language. They treated him well and gave him clothing to wear. When it was time for them to head back to England, they invited him along. He accepted their invitation.

Once back in England, he lived with the family of Charles Robbins. For a while he was part of an Indian exhibit on stage in London.

He eventually became homesick and arranged to head back to America. He got passage back to America by Captain John Smith. Squanto travelled with Smith for a while after reaching America, providing assistance as a translator. Finally he was given permission to go home.

On his way home he encountered another ship commanded by Captain Hunt, whom he was familiar with. Hunt tricked him aboard the ship and along with about 20 other indians sailed for Spain and sold them in to slavery.

Somehow Squanto ended up at a Catholic monastery. They freed him and taught him about Christianity. Squanto converted to Christianity. It was about 1616 when the friars booked him passage on a ship to England.

Squanto spent the next 3 years in England working as a servant in the home of John Slanie. Slanie located a ship and got Squanto passage back to America.

When Squanto finally arrived back where his village should be after about 10 years away, he found the village gone. He learned that the entire tribe had been lost to disease and that he was the only one left. He was then invited to live with a nearby tribe which is where he was when he met the Pilgrims.

A year later Squanto died of an illness.

I can be thankful for all that I have, but I bet I'll never feel the gratitude felt by Bradford and the Pilgrims on that first thanksgiving.

The Faith of our Founding Fathers

2005-11-22T11:52:00.000-06:00

I just read an excellent transcript of a radio commentary by Greg Koukl. If you don't know Greg, he's one of the best examples of a clear-thinking, clear-speaking Christian.

One disconcerting trend I see in secular culture today is the attempt to redefine the religious convictions of the Founding Fathers. Greg takes a recent example of this and sets the record straight.

This not only has implications in a vague, historical sense. But I believe it should be a big part of the discussion over the struggle over separation of church and state. You see, it is true that activist judges have revised the interpretation of the establishment clause to disallow any religious (primarily Christian) influence in the affairs of our Government, or any governmental support for religious institutions (ie. public prayer in schools).

Knowing that our Founding Fathers were overwhelmingly Christian in their beliefs, and seeing them apply their Christian values to the running of the Nation in the past really should put to rest the idea that the establishment clause is really a banishment clause.

For those of you that are hostile to Christianity, you will appreciate the evenhanded way that Greg deals with the subject.

http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5097

Educational Malfeasance - Biology Texts

2005-11-17T07:29:00.000-06:00

A few years ago there was one of the now commonplace brouhahas over the teaching of Biology in the public school system. This was in Texas, and despite (or maybe because of) all of the protestations of a creationist agenda, the Texas standards were simply changed to include a prohibition against factual errors in school textbooks (Texas Education Code, § 31.023).

Who could possibly be against correct facts being taught to our impressionable youngsters?

TEA Chief Deputy Commissioner Robert Scott pledged that all remaining biology textbook errors and alleged errors would have to be addressed by publishers before the textbooks were finally certified by his agency.

The Discovery Institute reviewed Biology texts that were in use in Texas and provided a list of factual errors to the TEA. These errors have gone largely unaddressed.

Let's cover some of these errors:

Bogus Embryology. Three textbooks (Holt, Prentice Hall, and LeBel) incorrectly state that vertebrate limbs develop in the same way
in all vertebrate embryos. Three textbooks (LeBel, Prentice Hall, and Thomson) also wrongly imply that vertebrate embryos are the most similar in their earliest stages of development and only become different later. The actual pattern of vertebrate development is (i) early dis-similarity followed by (ii) similarity midway through development, followed by (iii) later dis-similarity. This pattern is a anomaly from the standpoint of Darwin's theory, not a confirmation of that theory. Extensive documentation refuting these incorrect textbook claims about embryology has been submitted to the TEA, but the TEA has disregarded the documentation.

Peppered Moths. Two textbooks (LeBel and Thomson) continue to present outdated claims about microevolution in peppered moths. Other textbooks have either dropped or qualified their discussions of peppered moth research.
But the TEA has refused to make the two hold-out publishers bring their textbooks in line with current research.

Miller-Urey and the Origin of Life. Two textbooks (Bedford Freeman Worth and Thomson) continue to mislead students into thinking that the Miller-Urey origin of life experiment was based on current beliefs about the earth’s early atmosphere. In fact, the Earth's early atmosphere was probably quite different from the mixture of gases used in the experiment. Again, other textbooks now provide this information, but the TEA refuses to make the remaining publishers update their texts.

Flat earth myth. The LeBel text perpetuates the myth that Europeans prior to 1500 believed in a flat earth and wrongly claims that Columbus’s belief in a round earth “caused considerable controversy.” The TEA’s own consultant agrees with Discovery Institute on this point, but the TEA still won’t make LeBel make the correction!

Killing of Scientists myth. The LeBel text also falsely claims that “some scientists were executed for teaching that Earth and other planets orbited the sun.” Again, the TEA’s own consultant agrees with Discovery Institute on this point, but the TEA won’t make LeBel make the correction.

Dating the Cambrian Explosion. One text (Holt) continues to wildly misstate the standard dating of the Cambrian Explosion. Holt originally claimed that the Cambrian Explosion took "160 million years." Then it claimed that it took "30 to 160 million years." Now it is willing to state that "most estimates range from 10 to 100 million years." In reality, the best standard estimate is probably 5-10 million years. [note: the latest evidence is now pushing it down to < 1.5 million years]

The Texas standards for textbooks are the most rigorous in the nation. The textbooks adopted by Texas are largely adopted across the US. The issue of these errors is huge. How can kids come to a knowledge of the truth if the facts they reason from are false? Why would someone steadfastly cling to the teaching of false facts? The only reason I can come up with is that there is an evolutionist agenda at play here. Some day the house of cards will fall, and for centuries the theory of evolution will figure prominently as the latest/largest scientific failure probably in much the same vein as we now view the geocentric solar system view.

Educational Malfeasance

2005-11-11T10:07:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I queried my 12 year old daughter about her day at school. Getting her to say anything about school is quite a victory, so it's a little unusual that I was able to get her to indicate that she enjoyed her Social Studies class.

It turns out the reason she enjoyed it so much is because they watched a movie. What movie did they watch, you ask? They watched "The Day After Tomorrow". The reason they watched this movie was to educate the kids about global warming. Well, you can already tell from the title that I find something wrong with this. So let me assert what's wrong and then follow up by supporting that assertion.

The reason this is wrong, is that it uses pseudo science and extreme alarmism to indoctrinate the kids in to a certain political viewpoint. By using a dramatic presentation (ie a Hollywood movie) the communication bypasses the typical filters of the intellect (as underdeveloped as that would be in a 12 year old) and shoots it right to the emotions. That medium makes it a very effective tool of indoctrination. In addition, the facts being presented are fallacious.

As a result, I needed to undo some of the damage done to my daughter's worldview. I had to explain to her that global warming doesn't happen that fast. That global warming won't be that cataclysmic. That global weather patterns have always oscillated over eons. That so far, the average temperature of the Earth has risen 1 degree this last century. That besides humans producing greenhouse gasses that there are other natural sources such as volcanoes and cows. See here for correct information.

Now the movie could be a valuable teaching tool to get students engaged in the topic and then correct information can be layed out there. But this isn't happening. The film seems to be used as the teaching. There are really two distinct problems here, as I see it. The first is that the children are being taught pseudo science, or in general, they are being taught false facts. When the facts you are given are false, how are you to come to correct conclusions? The second is that children are being indoctrinated and not taught. The difference is that they are being taught what to think not how to think.

Granted, global warming is real. I think the science is conclusive. We do know the main contributor at this point is carbon dioxide emissions from internal combustion. Steps should be taken, and in fact they are. The big questions are:

what sense of urgency should there be?
what are the ramifications/risks?
what are the solutions?
what must I do personally?

The answers to those questions, if you ask a 12 year old who's just seen the movie will be dramatically different than the answers you'd get after a sound instruction on the issue. What kind of education is that?

Perhaps you think that no big deal should be made over this. After all, kids will learn and temper their teaching with the gain of further knowledge and maturity. They won't grow up warped and reactionary. Well, how do you explain the rise in eco terrorism? I think it's a logical outcome of extremism in the information we are being fed. You see, if global warming is really going to end in the destruction of the human race, then isn't civil disobedience, property destruction, and even a few well-targeted assassinations worth it to save all of the world?

My only point here is that ideas have consequences, and the most deeply ingrained ideas or beliefs are those taught to you at the youngest age, and those accompanied by emotionalism. If these ideas are false, then we have a dangerous recipe.

Am I making much ado about nothing? (pun). Well, this problem of educational malfeasance is really systemmic at least in our school district. Just last week I was told how a friend of my daughter (9th grader) has spent hours over the last month watching the Maury Povich show in school. What did they see? "Paternity Tests Revealed...Cheaters Exposed"! Not only is there no educational value in this (wasting our tax $), but it actually does educate our kids. Rather than educating them in the way we'd hope, it educates them in depravity and furthers the impression (however accurate or inaccurate) that this depravity is a cultural norm.

Think that falsehood in school curriculum is rare? I don't. I'm not going to make any promises, but I might try to catalog a few more in subsequent posts.

Could Life Have Arisen Naturally?

2005-11-01T16:29:00.000-06:00

The issue of the origin of life on Earth can be a very complicated matter. The reason, of course, is that the issue invariably requires the analysis of detailed scientific facts derived from the fields of chemistry and biology. This often makes the issue inaccessible to us common folk. I'm no scientist (at least not that kind) but I consider myself very well versed on this issue for a layman.

My informed opinion is that it's been suitably demonstrated by many scientists that there is no reason to think that life could have arisen naturally. But rather than try to demonstrate this via scientific means, which I've tried to do before, I would like to distill the case to the simplest form I can. If I succeed, then this will be a compelling argument against the possibility of a natural rise of life that will be comprehensable to all who read this.

Now if all I do is launch in to the typical argument for IC then I will have mired us in a confusing mess of biology and molecular machines. But I have a much simpler form of the IC argument to lay out here. The IC argument can be very well summed up by saying that it's a chicken and the egg problem. If you have multiple things that rely on each other for function, where all parts are mandatory for functioning, then they must all begin simultaneously.

Here's the simplest example I have found. At the lowest level of biological life, all organisms rely on proteins, DNA, and RNA. This is true for every living organism on Earth. Therefore, it must be true of the first life on Earth (if not, then that life would have no relationship to our life and whatever life is ancestral to us would have to have arisen for the first time anyway). You see, in all living things we have a perplexing interdependency such that proteins only assemble within cells under the guidance of DNA and RNA. RNA only assembles in the presence of protein and DNA. And DNA only assembles via the help of RNA and protein.

To add insult to injury, RNA molecules (and many DNA molecules) are only chemically stable when encapsulated within a biological membrane. Of course, biological membranes only form through DNA, RNA, protein, and RNA complexes.

Of course, the counter argument will be that there is a step-by-step progression from non-life to this form of life. However, it's pretty clear to anyone that isn't grasping at non-theistic straws that this type of interdependency cannot be arrived at naturally. If you think so, then construct me a real-life model of the 'thing' pictured above.

The Christian Perspective On Science

2005-10-13T07:02:00.000-05:00

Our popular culture considers Christians to be unscientific. My earliest indoctrination in to this principle was in late elementary school, or early middle school, when we watched "Inherit the Wind". The movie, based on a play of the same title, completely mischaracterizes the Scopes trial and leaves the distinct impression that Christians derive their science from the Bible and that the reputable scientists (read this as evolutionists) are the honest, rational, impartial people. It took me many years, but I now know that this movie is not anywhere near an honest depiction of the Scopes trial, the causes, the motive, the facts, the participants, or the outcome.

My guess is that most readers of this blog are in the same boat. If you have been in the public school system then you probably hold this misconception.

In fact, I've met a few Christians that do derive their science from the Bible. To be clear, I believe the Bible is true and that it's far more than truth described by men. I agree with the Christian doctrine that the Scriptures are inspired by God such that they are the direct revelation of God, without error in the original text. Knowing that Christianity is true, then there really is nothing wrong with placing this Scriptural knowledge above scientific knowledge. In fact, there is not a whole lot of overlap, hence very little opportunity for discongruity.

But it's very important to note that Christianity's historical view of science is that science itself is simply the process of discovering the truth about the world which was created by God. If Christianity is true (and correct about the inerrancy of Scripture) there is no possibility of a disagreement between Scripture and science.

I'll come right out and say that if there really were a disagreement between the two then there would be a real problem for Christianity.

So what about the disagreements? Well, I think that all disagreements are only apparent ones, not real ones. We humans are very prone to mistakes ("To err is human"). When there is a problem between the two, the right answer is that one of the two is being misinterpreted. Consider young-earth creationism. Even as far back as Augustine in the 3rd century, Biblical scholars have been unable to say with certainty how long the 7 creation days of Genesis really were. Add to that the overwhelming scientific evidence that the earth is old and I'll go on record as saying that the young-earth creationists are wrong. That's not to say that Scripture is wrong, only that a particular meaning has been inferred from the actual words and that this inferred meaning goes farther than the text actually mandates.

History is also full of examples where science was misinterpreted too. To think that this has ended today because science has reached some sort of pinnacle would be naive.

One thing that needs to be said though is that I can't blame a Christian that decides to side with Scripture in an apparent disagreement. There are many great minds that consider direct revelation from God to be more reliable than knowledge gained by human endeavor. I can certainly sympathize with this in principle. And for most of us, the technical details of the forefront of scientific endeavor are beyond our comprehension. I'm not inclined the take someone's word for it when I know (from experience, if not tacit admission) that they make interpretive leaps based on an underlying philosophy that is antithetical to the Christian perspective.

In conclusion, the Christian perspective is not at all one that is unscientific. Science, in principle, is given very high regard because this is demanded by our philosophy, and is actually taught by Scripture (a point I make in the article I linked to above).
And giving science it's proper respect does not mean putting aside our faith to do science and then putting away our science to do faith.

What's Wrong with Intelligent Design?

2005-10-05T10:55:00.000-05:00

Any time a Christian tries to talk publicly about the science of the origin or development of life they get shot down with the assertion that it's patently unscientific to even consider a non-material force (God). "Science only postulates and tests physical processes", they say.

In a nutshell, they are saying that the very definition of science is that endeavor that follows the rules set forth by the philosophy of science known as methodological naturalism. You see, many people claim that such theories (theories that include a ‘creator’) can not, in principle, be considered scientific because they invoke special divine action as part of their explanatory framework. Many scientists consider a scientific theory of creation to be “self-contradictory nonsense”. The argument goes like this...true science is delineated from ‘pseudo’-science by certain necessary features. These features are:

Falsifiability
Observability
Repeatability
Law-like explanation
Predictive ability

These are the types of charges usually leveled against the scientific theory of Intelligent Design (ID). Many Christians agree with this assessment too. Over and over again, from Christians and non-Christians alike I hear the claim that ID is not science and can never be considered a scientific theory because it’s not falsifiable, and/or not repeatable. How can science proceed if it postulates miraculous, one-time interventions in the physical world? Well, this is methodological naturalism speaking. Who controls the whole of scientific endeavor and gets to define the ‘right’ philosophy of science? Is methodological naturalism really the best (or even a suitable) rule book for science? This process of creating a set of rules for distinguishing science from non-science is called ‘demarcation’.

Let me quote one of the foremost philosophers of science:

As the philosopher of science Larry Laudan has shown, such contradictions have plagued the demarcation enterprise from its inception. As a result, most contemporary philosophers of science regard the question 'what distinguishes science from non-science' as both intractable and uninteresting. Instead, philosophers of science have increasingly realized that the real issue is not whether a theory is scientific, but whether a theory is true, or warranted by the evidence. As Laudan puts it, "If we could stand up on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like 'pseudo-science'. . .they do only emotive work for us." As Martin Eger has summarized, "[d]emarcation arguments have collapsed. Philosophers of science don't hold them anymore. They may still enjoy acceptance in the popular world, but that's a different world." Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D. Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith: The Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 46, no. 1

The ‘demarcation enterprise’ speaks of the attempt to create criteria that separate real science from ‘pseudo’-science. Notice that the philosophers are saying exactly what makes sense to the average person; namely that the real issue is “whether a theory is true or warranted by the evidence”.

Interestingly, Meyer goes on to explain exactly what problem this demarcation approach introduces. You see, if true science is defined by any of the criteria I mentioned before, then well established scientific theories must be thrown out as rubbish alongside the theory of ID! Here’s an example:

Consider, for example, falsifiability. As Imre Lakatos has shown some of the most powerful scientific theories have been constructed by those who stubbornly refused to reject their theories in the face of anomalous data. On the basis of his theory of Universal Gravitation, Newton, for example, made a number of predictions about the position of planets that did not materialize. Nevertheless, rather than rejecting the notion of universal gravitation he refined his auxiliary assumptions (e.g. the assumption that planets are perfectly spherical and influenced only by gravitational force) and left his core theory in place. As Lakatos has shown, the explanatory flexibility of Newton's theory in the face of apparently disconfirming evidence turned out to be one of its greatest strengths. Such flexibility was emphatically not a token of "non-scientific status" as the Popperian model would suggest.

Many examples of this sort are available. For instance, any critique leveled against ID can be leveled against evolution. Is evolutionary theory falsifiable? No! Just look at all of the anomalous evidence that is perpetually overlooked. What about predictive ability? I’ll grant that the theory of evolution has generated a few simple predictions (the same predictions that design theory makes), but it has failed many more such as the expected gradation in the fossil record, or the inverted taxonomy tree from the Cambrian, or junk DNA. So if we follow the rules of the methodological naturalists we’d have to do away with the theory of evolution just to be fair!

Really, the problem is often that people are lumping origin of life science in to the wrong basket. It’s really a case of historical science. The historical sciences are different from other sciences. Consider forensics---think CSI. By definition they are investigating events that include the action of an outside agent (usually the murderer). These events are also not repeatable, nor are they observable. In fact, is there any predictive ability involved in postulating a cause of death to be murder? This is the nature of historical events. So shall we call the geeks in the crime lab unscientific religious nuts? Of course not. They are using the physical evidence to arrive at the best conclusion. This is what ID is doing. Nothing more and nothing less.

At this point I have to point out that ID does not ever attempt to use science to talk about God. ID is finished at postulating only what is warranted by the evidence and applying logic. Would it really be analogous to teaching religion to teach ID? Not if it’s done right. Yes, there would be religious implications, but there are certainly religious implications in the theory of evolution too. I think it is proper to draw a direct analogy between the people who are religiously opposed to Intelligent Design theory today and those that were religiously opposed to the teaching of evolution 60 years ago. If you oppose the mention of ID in schools, then you are a hypocrite. At least that’s my take on it. The Scopes trial won school boards and teachers the right to teach dissenting scientific opinions.

Observations on the ID debate in Dover

2005-10-03T11:48:00.000-05:00

Check out the above linked article. I'd like to make some observations about the article itself and the views expressed in it.
Here is the opening paragraph:

The Dover school board showed a clear bias against teaching Darwinian evolution before it voted to require students to be exposed to “intelligent design” in science class, a former board member testified Tuesday.

By placing the "a former board member testified Tuesday" at the end of the statement it starts by placing the statement in the mind of the reader as a solid conclusion rather than as an assertion by a witness in the trial. If that statement had preceeded the paragraph it would have helped to cement in the minds of the readers that it was simply a witness's testimony.

This witness (and others on that side of the debate) are asserting that the Dover school board members have a bias against evolution. What's interesting to note is that this form of argumentation commits a logical fallacy called the genetic fallacy. The fact is that the personal beliefs of the school board members on this issue should not be in dispute at all. Rather the issue of the school board's decision should rest on the basis of their justifications for doing so and not at all on their motivation for doing so.

The statement says Darwin’s theory is “not a fact” and has inexplicable “gaps,” and refers students to an intelligent-design textbook for more information.

The fact is that the theory of evolution is NOT A FACT and does have inexplicable gaps. This can be proven via the scientific evidence. It is this issue that the court case should revolve around. The court should require the school board to substantiate this fact. When they succeed in this substantiation then the statement should be allowed to be read to students. In fact, parents shouldn't even be given the option to pull their kids out of the class during the reading of this statement...since it is scientifically true.
If all you've ever read on this controversy is the biased reporting in the media, then you need to read this to see exactly what it is that the Dover school board has enacted.

Eight families sued, saying that the policy promotes the Bible’s view of creation, violating the constitutional separation of church and state.

First, if you read the Dover policy linked to above then you see that it's a mischaracterization to say that the policy "promotes the Bible's view of creation". What is also untrue is that teaching Christianity in schools would even be a violation of "the constitutional separation of church and state". How can I say this? First, the constitution does not guarantee what we understand to be "separation of church and state". We've come to understand, only through a biased mischaracterization of the facts, that "separation of church and state" means that the government must not be involved, in any way, with the idea of religion. That's patently false. In addition, the establishment clause and the first amendment ONLY say that the institutions of the government and the church may not be organizationally intertwined.

In a separate development Tuesday, two freelance newspaper reporters who covered the school board in June 2004 both invoked their First Amendment rights
and declined to provide a deposition to lawyers for the school district.
Lawyers for the school district have questioned the accuracy of articles in which the reporters wrote that board members discussed creationism during public meetings. Patrick Gillen, an attorney with the Thomas More Law Center, said the defense would ask U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III on Wednesday to issue a contempt citation.

This is interesting in that it seems not only has reporting on this issue been biased, but actual facts have been fabricated. We should see some legal consequences in this example.

Miller also backed off a statement in a 1995 biology textbook he co-wrote that said evolution was “random and undirected.” Miller said he missed that reference by a co-author and that he did not believe evolution was random and undirected.

This is very interesting. You see Miller is being described as a "theistic evolutionist". I'll just mention here that in my opinion this is an oxymoron (read this). I'm sure he was chosen over other prominent atheistic evolutionists because his supposed belief in a god somehow makes him a more credible witness for the plaintiffs in this case (again giving homage to the genetic fallacy). But having read Kenneth Miller, I can say that when he "backed off" the statement in the 1995 biology textbook that he was simply playing a semantic game. You see, Miller simply defines natural selection as something non-random...a form of 'direction'. So while I will say that mutations are random and therefore evolution is mindless and undirected, Miller would say that natural selection, by 'picking' the most survivable organisms, is a 'directed' process.

On Monday, Miller said the policy undermines scientific education by wrongly raising doubts about evolutionary theory. “It’s the first movement to try to drive a wedge between students and the scientific process,” he said.

Notice that Miller here has equated a scientific critique of a certain theory (evoltion) with driving a wedge between students and science. How disingenuous! Nowhere do I see, in the Dover policy, that an anti-scientifc appeal is being made. The school board doesn't substantiate the statement that there are "inexplicable gaps" in evolution, but I'll bet that if they took the time to lengthen the statement to actually include detailed data in defense of that statement the evolutionists would be even more irate! You see, that statement (that there are inexplicable gaps) is absolutely, 100%, defensible via only the scientific process.
And finally:

In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools must not balance evolution lessons by teaching creationism, on the grounds that such moves would represent state establishment of religion.

Hmm. Above, I think I established that even teaching creationism (if it were done) wouldn't in any way violate the constitution's establishment clause. I'm not familiar with the details of the 1987 Supreme Court ruling, but I have no doubt that to rule as they did they had to reinterpret the constitution in a way that no one had done for the first 200 years. Which brings us to the subject of judicial activism...but I won't go there.

Reading this, you can see that I have definite opinions in regard to evolution, intelligent design, and separation of church and state. However, those really aren't the issue in the Dover case. One small statement is questioning the 'fact' status of the theory of evolution (on good scientific grounds) and nothing more. ID is not being taught and certainly NOT creationism. Nor is the school advocating a religion. There is only one issue here: How scientifically sound is the theory of evolution?

Time after time I see this sort of mischaracterization of the facts included in the media's coverage of this issue. Next time you see an article like this, take the time to think about the reporting.

Snowball Events

2005-10-03T07:34:00.000-05:00

I recently gave a presentation to the Hunstville chapter of Reasons to Believe. The title of my presentation was "A Snowball's Chance In Hell". It dealt with the evidence that there have been up to four global glaciations in Earth's past history. The most recent one being the period immediately preceeding the Cambrian explosion around 600mya.

I won't rehash all of the information here, as it was an hour long presentation. But suffice it to say that there is a plethora of evidence from a variety of scientific disciplines that very strongly establishes these snowball events.

The last one is the one that I'm most interested in. It is one of the handful of evidences against the theory of evolution (ToE) centering around the Cambrian. In summary, the conclusion of the multiple lines of evidence is that the entire world, even at the equator, was well below zero for at least one million years immediately preceeding the Cambrian. In fact, this snowball event is the event that separates the proterozoic from the cambrian epoch.

What this means is that the Cambrian explosion isn't just an artifact of poor fossilization of prior evolution. Rather all the Cambrian fauna are certainly showing up as quickly as the fossil evidence indicates (@ 3 million years at the longest).

Here is a quick rundown of the conditions during the snowball event:

Average earth temp -40C for 1 million years (at least)
No photosynthesis occurring in the oceans
No oxygen in the oceans
Iron levels in the oceans at toxic levels
It all ended violently in a period of @ 100 years with the average temp ending up much higher than today and with carbon dioxide levels many times higher than today

So the big spoilers I see for evolution that stem only from the Cambrian explosion are these:

The 'explosion' happens too fast to be the result of evolution (mutation rates and population models prove this).
We cannot accept that evolution was happening somewhere, just not fossilized. (both the nature of the fossil record, and the snowball events preclude this).
The inverted cone of disparity. (to explain this is a post in itself)

Here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/snowballearth.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2000/snowballearth_transcript.shtml
http://www.eps.harvard.edu/people/faculty/hoffman/snowball_paper.html

Augustine and 20th Century Cosmology

2005-09-29T07:33:00.000-05:00

I found this fascinating (click title to see). Some might argue, but it seems as though it's a victory for Christianity. How big? Don't know.

This is from the author's intro:

...Augustine had presaged the entire body of 20th century cosmology in 400AD, as he point-by-point refuted the materialist metaphysics of his day. His contributions lasted 1500 years, but were ultimately rejected by 19th century physics, who viewed his defeat as a defeat for Christianity. However, 20th century physics vindicated Augustine point-by-point, making physicists very uneasy. This leaves 21st century physics in a crisis, unable to stand on materialism, and unwilling to accept Augustine.

It reminds me of another quote:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. For the past three hundred years, scientists have scaled the mountain of ignorance and as they pull themselves over the final rock, they are greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (Robert Jastrow)

Apparently one of these theologians is Augustine!

If you are interested in philosophy you'll like reading this article. It has a pretty interesting overview of the applicable philosophers through history. The truth is that Augustine is a remarkable man. Certainly one of the world's greatest philosophers and arguably the greatest christian philosopher.

Upon reflection, I wonder if Augustine's cosmology can be viewed as a prediction that comes from a Biblical creation model. As you know, one of the traits of a strong scientific theory is its ability to generate accurate predictions. So perhaps this is the first 'prediction' made by a Biblical Creation Theory? Does the fact that the prediction came 1600 years before the confirmation give it more veracity?

School Fee Update

2005-09-29T06:13:00.000-05:00

A few posts below I described my heartburn over mandatory school fees in our local school district. I wanted to give an update.

Yesterday I was able to get the principal on the phone and we talked for a good few minutes. One of my primary goals was to keep things pleasant. That was probably my 2nd goal, the 1st being to find out her stance on these fees and figure out what I might need to do next to resolve the issue.

Well, both goals were met. I left a few things unanswered because the question was really one for the school board to answer, not the principal, and because I wanted to keep the discussion pleasant so I chose not to be my normal analytical self and do a lawyer-style cross-examination. So what was the outcome?

She readily admitted that it was illegal to charge mandatory fees. After some explanation as to the need for the funds, she told me that I could decide whether to pay or not pay. I was impressed with the principal's candor. She all but admitted that she hoped that word wouldn't get out and everyone stop paying fees because it would put the school in a budget crisis (worse than it already was).
She also talked about the budget squeeze, teachers paying for supplies with personal funds, overcrowding...
Note that none of this information was germaine to the question at hand: namely the legality of the fees.

She was adamant in assuring me that there was no penalty to the student for not paying. Apparently her teachers don't know this because I do know that they have threatened my kids with this (that could be dangerous for her to admit because it would be grounds for legal action or disciplinary action). Also, she was somehow aware of the fact that my child had been made to circle the parking lot during gym class (I never brought it up, she did) and indicated that this was not punishment, but the result of overcrowding. However, my daughter was one of only 3 doing so and it was the result of not having her uniform, so the principal must have been unaware of what the teacher was doing.

Apparently this had been put to a stop last week anyway. So it might be a case of fixing the problem before the complaint then declaring it to not be a problem.

The school district just to the north of us assesses school fees too (much less than ours, perhaps because of a larger tax base?). This district sent home a note indicating that the fees were not mandatory and hoping that parents would choose to pay so that the educational experience at the school could be improved. I like this approach far more than the underhanded approach of our district which gives every indication that a voluntary fee is mandatory (even going so far as to threaten the kids with consequences).

So what to do? Well, now that she's admitted that I have the choice I'll consider paying as a charitable contribution to the school but I don't know yet.
I'm still going to follow up with their teachers on the next parent night and ensure that the kids haven't been penalized grades as a result.
I know the school board is the one that authorizes these fees, but the State Board's policies don't allow local boards to do this without permission. I am assuming they violated that policy but don't know for sure.

I'll consider talking to the local newspaper to see if they are interested in writing a story. I think it would be best to approach them next summer so that the story would hit before next year's fees are charged.

Oh, I might also decide to buy a gym uniform for one or both of my kids. Assuming they are not mandatory (despite their 'mandatory' status it's not legal to force their purchase), it might still be a good idea for my kids to avoid sweating up their school clothes.

Lawyers lay out arguments in evolution trial

2005-09-27T07:22:00.000-05:00

For my students...read this article about a court case going on over Intelligent Design (ID). Post comments with the following observations (click the title to link to the article):

How are issues of worldview forming the opinions and comments in this article?
See any fallacious argumentation?
What presuppositions can be seen in the arguments on either side?
Do you detect any bias in the reporter writing the story?

Note that you'll need to read this to get some important details by which to evaluate the article.

How to spot flawed logic

2005-09-26T09:20:00.000-05:00

There are a number of logical fallacies that are committed regularly by those who endeavor to defend a position or debate a topic. These errors of logic can be seen especially around election time as political candidates use their whit to try to convince people of the truth of their claims. Being able to discern good arguments from bad arguments is necessary in the quest for truth.This skill is all the more important when wrestling with the big social issues of the day. ie. the debates over abortion or homosexuality.

False Dilemma: A false dilemma is when a person sets up an either or distinction that really isn't one. One example common to the evolution/creation debate might go like this:
Christian: "Evolution has been shown to be impossible, therefore you've got to admit that God created life."
Evolutionist: "That's a false dilemma, if evolution is impossible then why can't I believe that aliens created life on earth?"
Or it could go this way:
Evolutionist: "Since the Bible has been discredited then evolution is obviously the mechanism by which life came to exist"
Christian: "That's a false dilemma! Even IF the Bible were discredited, God could still be the creator of life"

Argument from Ignorance: This is arguing that something not yet proven to be true, must be false or something not proven false must be true. Christians are often accused of this one when we argue that God created life because scientists haven't been able to show how life began. In this situation it's often called a 'God of the gaps' argument because we are arguing for the existence of God based on gaps in current scientific theory. This criticism has merit unless evidence is being put forth that actually does support special creation (such as the irreducible complexity argument). Here's how an exchange might happen:
Creationist: "I know that God created life because science has no idea how new body plans emerged via genetic mutations"
Evolutionist: "Just because science hasn't answered that yet, doesn't prove it's true. That's a God of the gaps argument."
(note: here the creationist's error was concluding creation was proven by science's failure. It would have been fine to criticize evolutionary theory as being incomplete and not worthy of being called 'fact' but going further commits the fallacy in question).This fallacy is really a special case of the false dilemma because it's really saying: "either X is proven or X is false" rather than allowing for X to be true, just not yet proven.

Slippery Slope: This is a logical fallacy that uses if-then logic. This occurs when a person argues through a list of increasingly unlikely events to a logical conclusion. How about an example?
"If evolution isn't taught as fact, then biology classes will be teaching religion. Then it won't be long until we have a theocracy in our country and our freedoms are taken away."
You can find this reasoning everywhere these days in regard to the debate over evolution in biology textbooks. Christians use it too in regard to abortion.
"If we allow abortion, then partial birth abortion, soon they'll allow the killing of babies up until they're brought home from the hospital. Then they'll allow the killing of anyone who's inconvenient."
It's important to note that these statements may be true, they just aren't NECESSARILY true. They might be a valid prediction, but they are a logical fallacy simply because they MIGHT NOT be true. For example, is it automatically true that teaching evolutionary controversy will result in teaching Bible in biology classes? Of course not (although it could possibly happen in some...).

Complex question: This is when two propositions are joined together inappropriately. For example:
"Do you support freedom and the right to bear arms?".
Basically the question is phrased in a way that requires you to either agree or disagree with two separate statements as one unit. An interesting example of this is the old stand-by party joke:
"Hey Jack, yes or no...have you stopped beating your wife?"
Yes implies he used to, and no implies he still does. In effect the question being asked is:
"Did you beat your wife? and do you still beat her?"
You will often see this one in campaign slogans: "Vote for Mr. Jones and save our economy".

Mandatory School Fees

2005-09-23T07:04:00.000-05:00

This year two of my children went back to public school after 4 years of homeschooling. Back when they attended originally I remember there being incessant fundraisers and school supplies lists. But this time around there are actual cash fees to be paid.

For as far back as I can remember, I have always understood mandatory fees to be incompatible with the concept of a public education. The 'public' refers to the fact that the public at large pays for it via taxation, and that education is made available to all people regardless of their economic situation (our country's taxation laws accomodate various economic situations). Therefore, a mandatory school fee would result in making a public education unavailable to some who are underprivileged.

I don't claim to be underprivileged in the least. My beef with fees has nothing to do with my ability to pay, rather it has to do with the basic principles underlying the public school system in our country. You can argue that it's not fair for families without children to pay, via taxes, for my kids education. You aren't logically or morally wrong to do so, but you must realize you are then advocating a private system of education, not the public one that our country has chosen to implement. Our system is what it is, and unless our society wants to revisit that choice, then a public education is incompatible with mandatory fees.

In fact, Tennessee state law agrees with me. It's actually illegal in our state for schools to charge mandatory fees. Yet, it is currently pretty much universally done. Why would schools all across Tennessee be flagrantly violating state law? I suppose it's because many people are unaware of the law, and they can get away with it.

Let me prove my case that it's illegal. Here is a memorandum put out a few years ago to all local school boards: http://tennessee.gov/education/locfinstdfeeintmemo.htm. There is also a legal opinion published by the state Attorney General's office: http://www.tennessee.gov/education/locfinagstdfee.pdf. And I just completed an email discussion with the General Counsel to the State Board of Education that confirmed my understanding of these documents.

To try to collect these mandatory fees, which I'm resisting paying on principle, my children have been publically singled out as non-payers, publically verbally ridiculed, threatened with non-graduation, penalized grade points, and prevented from class participation.

I'm about to contact the principal about the issue and don't know how that will go. I'll post back again with a follow-up.

Theology

2005-09-23T06:15:00.000-05:00

Everyone has a theology. Your theology is intertwined with your worldview. It informs your worldview and is often informed by your worldview. Even an atheist has a theology (that He doesn't exist). It can be argued that part of the atheist's theology is also what they substitute for God in their worldview. My contention is that every worldview has placeholders for God. For instance, every worldview answers the question: "How did we get here"? This is the placeholder for God (at least in some loose sense). An atheist fills this with Nature.

Is theology important? Many people would say no. And here are some reasons that come to mind:

Certain knowledge of God is unattainable (Agnosticism)
Language is too imprecise to derive theology from the Bible (Deconstructionism)
God isn't interested in our minds, just our hearts (itself a statement of theology)
Theology divides people, and this is a bad thing (again a theological statement)
And the big one: One person's truth isn't another person's truth (postmodernism, which makes theology pointless, ultimately by assuming no God)

Yet, we can plainly see the importance of theology all around us. For, even when someone claims to have no theology, they do have a round-a-bout one. Consider those contentious issues of politics and morality. A person's theology informs every one of those contentious issues. Theology matters in the following areas:

Politics (your view on the gulf war is derived in large part from your theology...many layers down perhaps)
Your basic ideas of fairness and morality (how about gay marriage?)
Right to life legislation (what is a human, and what intrinsic value do we hold?)
How to spend tax $ (will better education solve the crime problem? drug problem?)

Whether you recognize it or not, theology is important to you (even if you're an atheist). But I'm primarily writing to the professing Christian here. Theology is important to us because we need knowledge of God and His requirements of us. One of the foundational theological ideas is that God is a moral judge. He makes moral demands of us. We must know right from wrong. We therefore must be about understanding His requirements. How about the commandment to have no other gods before Him? It can be argued that believing a falsehood about God is tantamount to believing in a different God.

A christian without theology is like a football game without a rule book. A christian with bad theology (false beliefs about God) is like a football player not following the established rules.

Where does our theology come from?

Theology is derived from revelation. General revelation is that revelation that is 'general' in 2 ways. It is generally available to all people, and it's content is general (as opposed to specific). General revelation does tell us some things about God (ie. that He exists (cosmology), that He has some purpose for us (teleology), and that He's personal, intelligent and powerful). General revelation comes from two sources. The most obvious one is the physical universe which is understood via science. The not so obvious one is the internal 'universe' of our mind and conscience. This is understood subjectively; and I suppose objectively through logic.

Special revelation is what most people think of immediately when 'revelation' is mentioned. This refers to God's revealing specific information and revealing it in a targeted manner (to His chosen people).

Theology uses these 2 forms of revelation (mostly the 'special' variety) to develop knowledge of God. This would be impossible unless you could trust that the Bible is true information about God (we do have this evidence, which I won't cover now). It also presupposes that language is a reliable conveyor of information. This idea is challenged in our culture today. You can see why deconstructionism is not compatible with the Christian worldview. If meaning couldn't be objectively communicated through words then we couldn't trust the Bible to tell us anything true about God which leaves us unable to be christians.

Another problem is the confusion between objective and subjective claims. For a truly subjective claim it's rather pointless to speak of true or false. If you say that chocolate is the best flavor there is, I wouldn't argue with you that you are wrong. It's a subjective statement. Preference is a subjective thing. However, religion is not subjective. Yes, there is a personal experiential aspect which is subjective. But there are numerous objective truth claims included. By this I mean things that are true for all people at all times regardless of their belief about them. This is the type of thing that religion is (at least most...perhaps less so for Hinduism). It's pointless to say that christianity is true for some, but false for others. It's either true for all people or false for all people.

Another problem with theology is that many people don't realize that there is an objective methodology to be used in interpreting and understanding the Bible. Hermeneutics is the name for this methodology. There are a few hermeneutical approaches out there, but there seems good reason for christians to rally around the grammatico-historical method.

When applied correctly and consistently this actually results in a high level of agreement among scholars as to a text's actual meaning. Disagreements can often be resolved via a compelling argument, nearing the level of 'proof'. It's really not true that we must be content to sit by in a climate of theological confusion, never believing things about God with certainty. If this were so, then I have a hard time explaining why God took the time to reveal the information anyway. Revelation is pointless when devoid of meaning.

World View

2005-09-22T18:08:00.000-05:00

What is a world view? Well, simply stated, it's the overall philosophical framework through which you interpret or filter all information. It consists of beliefs layered on presuppositions.

According to Colson it's a foundational set of beliefs or understandings that answer the 'big' questions such as (note: synthesis from past memory):

Where did we come from?
What is wrong with the world?
What will 'redeem' the world?
Where are we going?

The Christian world view then is the overall philosophical framework (noetic structure) that is derived from an understanding of the revelation found in the Bible.

One necessary trait of a world view is internal consistency. This means that all of the ideas held, as well as the ideas derived from them must all fit together nicely like a jigsaw puzzle. If you are missing pieces, have too many pieces, or they just don't fit together, then you can be sure that you are either missing pieces or have too many pieces, or have incompatible pieces. Following this analogy just a bit more, if each piece of the puzzle represents a belief then if you fail the test of internal consistency then you can be sure that one or more of your ideas are false. This can be painful for some. One term used for it from the field of psychology is cognitive dissonance. If your ideas are not all consistent this is the hallmark of falsehood. It could be that your worldview is almost perfectly consistent and you find that something like the major catastrophe that just occurred in New Orleans really rocks your world. You might find that one or more of your beliefs about the nature of the world, or the nature of God can't be reconciled with the destruction and suffering.

Some people operate in a post-modern haze and suppress these feelings of cognitive dissonance. I say suppress because I believe everyone is aware of them on some level but just choose not to engage these deeper issues. They may even believe that the world around them (ala postmodernism) is not one that should be rationally examined for consistency. So they ignore the dissonance just as I ignore pain when training or competing in a sporting event. It's there and I know it but I ignore it. I could choose to believe the pain isn't real (some new age trickery) but it's still perceived, just ignored. Of course this act of ignoring can only be done when something else is taking our attention. My pain tolerance trick is to focus completely on the sensation I feel in a body part that's not hurting. If I concentrate hard enough on my pinky for instance I really can ignore, for a time, the pain somewhere else. So is it any wonder that our culture is full of substance abuse, hobbies, sex, media and entertainment...often these are psychic pain relievers.

Many people become Christians because they have examined carefully all of the various worldviews out there. I believe it's true that there is only one that corresponds correctly to the perceived world and has internal consistency. This is the Christian worldview. And many flavors of the Christian worldview either don't correspond to the real world, or they are NOT internally consistent. This leads us in to Biblical theology, and I'm not going there right now. But suffice it to say many christians end up having their faith shaken, and sometimes lost (nevermind the issue of perseverence for now) simply because their bad theology was misinterpreted as a bad religion.

Really then, when someone decides to become a christian just by reading the Bible without spending months and months pouring over the evidence is it valid? Well, I respect someone who pours over the evidence, but I won't malign the person who doesn't need to. Consider it this way: if ALL other worldviews have been considered and found to be internally inconsistent except for one then isn't it justified to adopt that one? Many great thinkers have arrived at christianity in the distant past long before we had most of the evidence we have today. Internal consistency isn't proof of truthfulness, but lack thereof is proof for falsehood. If only one option is left after examining and ruling out all others then you are justified in accepting it as truth.