Vulcan's Mercy

WHERE HAVE ALL THE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS GONE?

A few days ago I pulled an interesting fossil from my library, Leo Rosten’s Religions of America.  It is an early Seventies almanac of the most significant religions practiced in the United States.  As such it preserves the era’s zeitgeist of religious belief, like an ancient insect in amber.  Rosten’s almanac captures the zenith of that giddiness of liberation from what every thinking man or woman understood to be the musty dogma, mean-spirited morality, and docile faith of that dank, cramped, fearful religion of yesteryear.

It was a cocksure giddiness blind to the re-awakening of orthodoxy, evangelicalism, and pentecostalism in Christianity, the resurgence of traditionalism and mysticism in Judaism, and, darkly, the jihadism in Islam that would envelope the world only a few years later.  It was a short-lived giddiness of the sudden lightness of being born of cutting loose from the ground that had frustrated flights of fancy but also rooted one in the nourishing earth of reality, and so once deracinated soon shriveled.  Indeed, it was a misbegotten giddiness as the subsequent decline of the now rootless mainline Protestant denominations and their liberal Catholic fellow-travelers in the wake of the revitalization of traditional religious beliefs attests.

The vanguard of this liberation from old-time religion is best exemplified in Rosten’s almanac by the Unitarian Universalists.  Here are some of the responses by a Unitarian Universalist representative to Rosten’s survey:

On faith:  “[We] are agnostics, humanists, even atheists, as well as nature worshipers, pantheists, and those who affirm a personal God.”

On hope:  “For Unitarian Universalists, prayer is less a matter of who is listening and more a concern with the aspirations expressed.”

On social justice (i.e., charity):  “Unitarian Universalists have pioneered in movements to eliminate restrictive laws regarding abortion.”

On sin:  “Unitarian Universalists reject the traditional Christian idea [of] original sin … They believe in the importance of virtue and virtuous living and doing for its own sake, and not out of some hypothetical ‘salvation’ or ‘reward’ in the future or the ‘hereafter’.”

On divine judgment:  “Heaven and hell are states of mind, created by human beings.”

On authority:  “Many Unitarian Universalists have a concept of a ‘loose-leaf’ Bible, that is, they find inspiration in many writings, the scriptures of many religions, the philosophers of many times, the literature of many cultures.”

On creed:  “A Unitarian Universalist is one of a community of religious persons whose beliefs and ethics are freely chosen … They rely upon their own reason and personal understanding.  … All know there is no special virtue in being able to declare, ‘I believe in God.’”

As to that declaration, perhaps not by itself.  But then it is religion that brings meaning to that declaration and so makes possible virtue in the belief in God.  So why would a person who feels no need to make that declaration feel any need for a religion that affirms that feeling?  Absent that foundational belief, what can a religion meaningfully affirm?  As the expressions of Unitarian Universalist sentiment above show, not much but the endorsement of antinomian willfulness, which is the mark of the appetite-appeasing clever beast in us and not the purpose-seeking spiritual being.  Religion nourishes the latter and frustrates the former.  Hence, the vapidity of Unitarian Universalism and its near-extinction today.

Unfortunately, too many Protestant denominations and Catholic bishops over the past three decades have not heeded the cautionary tale of the Unitarian Universalists.  They have lost many in their flocks as they have drained religion of its meaning, all too often to put into the service of secular agendas.  For some once-prominent Christian communities, especially Anglican and Reformed denominations, this has become a clear and present danger.  They are riven between the liberals who are marching head-long, like the Unitarian Universalists before them, toward nihilism and the traditionalists who are resisting the destruction of their churches in a black hole of meaninglessness.  Yet other denominations have become de-spirited carcasses for vultures to feast upon and twist individual congregations to their own perverted ends – as recently exemplified by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, who has transmogrified the faith of the Puritans into an orgy of hatred against all, even God, opposed to his plan for Heaven on Earth.

Fortunately, Catholics have the Magisterium, which has maintained the integrity of Church doctrine in the face of assaults as vile as that of “liberation theology”.  (Although lesser threats from liberals who would “liberate” the Church from orthodoxy remain insidious.)  In addition to the renewal of orthodoxy among large segments of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, there has been a great flowering of religious enthusiasm over the past few decades, especially in the form of evangelicalism and pentecostalism.  Without making light of the profound theological differences in these various re-awakenings, their common vigor resides in a full-throated institutional commitment to articles of faith.  Unlike the Unitarian Universalists and the liberals following their dead-end path, the re-awakened are not scandalized by certitudes in religious belief.  This is because in that certitude they have embraced a transcendent meaning for their lives that the liberals have traded away for a mess of hedonist pottage at best and nihilist at worst.

So where have all the Unitarian Universalists gone?  Nowhere.

HUMAN DIGNITY

No credible system of ethics exists without accounting for why we must not defame, defile, and destroy each other.  That account starts with the dignity each and every one of us possesses.  Today Fr. Neuhaus of First Things puts forth a fine definition of human dignity:

In this view, the dignity of the human person means at least this: A human being is a person possessed of a dignity we are obliged to respect at every point of development, debilitation, or decline by virtue of being created in the image and likeness of God. Endowed with the spiritual principle of the soul, and—however healthy or impaired—with reason, and with free will, the destiny of the person who acts in accord with moral conscience in obedience to the truth is nothing less than eternal union with God. This is the dignity of the human person that is to be respected, defended, and indeed revered.

Amen.

Unfortunately, this eludes so many of us in this nominalistic age of ours in which we have discarded the hard-won knowledge of human essence, thus purpose, and so have let Will triumph over the Word written on all of our hearts.

THE NEW ATHEISTS: SO NINETEENTH CENTURY

Recently I ran across this excellent article by Mark Shea, Padding the Case for New Atheism.  He skewers the so-called New Atheists -- namely, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens -- who, despite their pretensions as rational freethinking "Brights" unfettered by the dusty dogmas of oppressive churchmen, are so benighted as to not even know that all their allegedly devastating arguments against religious belief have been resoundingly countered by theists for centuries.  Worse yet, they can't even recycle in modern garb the arguments of their atheist predecessors to good effect, because they barely understand, if at all, those religious beliefs they so vociferously damn.  Indeed, they have made the New Atheism an embarrassing hash of contradictions, question-begging, and stolen concepts.  All of this I came to understand about today's militant atheists in my own plodding way back to the Church, but Shea boils it down to a fine polemic against the fellas who are better described as the New Fundamentalists.

AN EXCHANGE ON HUME, POSTMODERNISM, AND LOST KNOWLEDGE

A favorite correspondent of mine, Regi Firehammer of “The Autonomist”, began writing about how Hume wrecked philosophy in the 18th century and laid the foundation for postmodernism.  Firehammer is a student of Objectivism, the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand, and has done considerable work of his own in ontology, epistemology, and ethics.  So Firehammer indicted Hume from a generally Objectivist perspective.  I found much to agree with in what he had to say about the woeful legacy of Hume on modern thought.  However, I had a key disagreement with Firehammer about Hume and postmodernism.

Firehammer views modernism as the unblinkered embrace of objective reality that the Enlightenment epitomizes.  Thus, the postmodernist rejects modernism by wading into a subjectivist swamp of whims, contradictions, and outright mendacity.  Hume blazed the trail for postmodernism by a queer rationalism in empirical disguise that undermined the certitude by which anyone can claim to know anything beyond the raw experience of the senses.  There is much to be said for this take on postmodernism and Hume.

But on my view postmodernism is not a rejection of modernism but the completion of it.  Modernism is a radical reductionism that pigeonholes all of reality as the effects of a single principle – i.e., nature, or in the extreme, matter.  The modernist project began with stripping Aristotelian formal and final causes (essence and purpose) from ontology, leaving only the material and efficient ones (matter and mechanics) to explain everything.  Postmodernism completes the project by reducing reality to whatever the individual makes of his subjective experience of the world.  Indeed, postmodernism is a black hole into which reality disappears.  Hume’s role in this radical reductionism was to formulate a skepticism of objective knowledge which is logically man’s epistemic limit in a universe devoid of essence and purpose.

Thus, in this edited series of exchanges over the past few weeks I responded to Firehammer’s critique of Hume …

THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE MODERN AGE

[T]he hallmark of modernist thought is the primacy of the material and efficient causes over the formal and final ones.  Often that primacy is to the complete exclusion of the formal and final causes as real, thus physicalism.  Otherwise, it may be a subordination of those causes to the material and efficient ones, which results in a soft physicalism.  Or the formal and final causes may be an epistemological, rather than an ontological, issue for the modernist:  They may be real, but they are not knowable to man.

Therefore, what is common to all modernists is the belief that man cannot apprehend any fundamental order or purpose to existence.  That is because either the modernist, in a physicalist fashion, declares they are not real or he says, whether or not they are real, they cannot be known.  While this mode of thought does not greatly impair a deep understanding of what is physical, it cripples any understanding of the mental (broadly construed) realm of existence.  This is because matter and mechanics are insufficient for a sound grasp of human nature.

[Consequently] there is no foundation for modernist beliefs about man and the universe once the formal and final causes are denied, either ontologically or epistemologically, as objective knowledge of what is real. … As to the fundamental order of the universe (its formal cause), science offers no answer and cannot offer any answer.  That is because science must presume order to explain order, as I explained in this forum recently in my article "Argument from Order: God Exists".  I can also offer a non-theist argument that science is incompetent to explain the fundamental order of the universe.   To account for that order which brings forth all of the order we observe in the universe, a formal cause of the universe must be identified.  The formal cause is the principle of organization of each and every entity.  In the case of an organism, the principle of organization is specifically the principle of life.  However, the principle of organization is qualitative and not quantitative.  It is not subject to measurement and so identification other than through its effects upon matter.  Science by definition is restricted to knowledge that can be obtained through quantification and measurement, and so is restricted to that which is physical.  Because a thing can only be quantified or measured if it has order, science must presume its order to explain it.  For this reason science cannot account for the fundamental order of the universe.

Regarding the fundamental purpose of the universe (its final cause), I agree that requires the existence of a being responsible for the existence of the universe.  That being is God.  As we covered this territory before, including the definitions of "existence" and "universe" that are peculiar to Objectivism, I won't get into your objection regarding my use of the word "existence" other than to say I should have been more careful and wrote either "our existence" or the "existence of the universe".  I'll rely upon my previous statements in this forum to support my claim that a being requires extension -- i.e., physicality -- only if he exists within spacetime, which God as the creator of spacetime -- i.e., the universe -- does not.  But I will say that the denial of a fundamental purpose of the universe is a hallmark of modernist thought, which is evidenced by the frenzy of utopianism and nihilism that has plagued the modern era.

POSTMODERNISM COMPLETES MODERNISM

Hume's skepticism is the quintessence of these deficiencies of modernism.  The denial of the validity of formal causes means the denial of any genuine knowledge about nature.  The denial of the validity of final causes means the denial of any basis for an objective morality.  He made invincible ignorance about man and the universe respectable, and by the twentieth century we reaped the whirlwind filling the vacuum of that invincible ignorance with monstrous utopian schemes, the nihilistic assault upon objective morality by Neitzsche and his postmodernist progeny, and an Orwellian reduction of knowledge that denies most the vocabulary to comprehend the problem -- and so formulate solutions for recovery.

[So] I am persuaded that modern philosophy went off the rails when the final and formal causes (i.e., essence and purpose) were jettisoned from ontology.  I think this occurred primarily because the scientific method proved very successful in explicating the material and efficient causes of physical entities; indeed, so successful, that modernists came to think all things should be comprehensible by the same means.  Because knowledge of the formal and final causes cannot be obtained by the scientific method, modernists have rejected them as real, or at the very least as objectively knowable.  Thus, the modernist fallacy has been to let a particular means to knowledge determine all that can be knowledge – broadly speaking, scientism.

Hume’s skepticism is the product of taking the modernist rejection of the formal and final causes to its logical conclusion.  I agree with you that postmodernism is rooted in this skepticism.  However, I don’t see postmodernism as a falling away from modernism.  Rather it is a continuation of the corruption of philosophy that began with modernism, the first glimmer of which was Ockham’s nominalism.  And so over the past half-millennium the modern age has been in a way a dark age, because of the lost knowledge of essence and purpose in all things.  Without this knowledge, morality is loosed from its objective moorings and floats in the currents of those wielding power.  Little wonder then that the extraordinary scientific and technological advances of the modern age resulted in the means to corrupt, oppress, maim, and murder on scales unimaginable in prior “unenlightened” eras.

Also without knowledge of essence and purpose, reason is cut off from knowledge of God.  So if the modernist holds a belief in God, he does so through fideism.  Therefore, modernist epistemology is plagued with the rationalisms of scientism and fideism – and so the false dichotomy of reason and faith.  All this said, it is not my argument that an ontology that incorporates all four of the Aristotelian causes must lead to the conclusion that God exists.  As I have written before, an atheist can be a hylomorphist (in fact, I believe there are Randians who are).  What the loss of this knowledge of essence and purpose does entail is the severing of fact from value.  “Is” and “ought” are torn asunder, and morality is no longer grounded in what is real but rather in what is wished.  This is the breach in modernist thought that all of the intellectual pathologies of our age have swept in to fill.

THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE

Regi Firehammer a.k.a. The Autonomist: “Quite seriously, Bill, I do not see how believing in either final or formal causes makes any difference one way or the other to science.”

Because it doesn't.  We are all Baconians now when it comes to science.  Modern science by definition restricts itself to observation and explanation of the material and efficient causes of things -- i.e., matter and mechanics.  The formal and final causes -- i.e., essence and purpose -- are beyond the ken of science.

So when you ask, "Can you think of anything in science that has been discovered that required them?", the answer is no.  Similarly, I don't rely upon mathematics to spell words correctly.  The scientific method can only produce knowledge about matter and mechanics, because it restricts itself to the collection and analysis of physical properties.  Physical properties are the effects of an entity's extension in space and time -- e.g., size, duration, mass, structure, chemical composition, and interaction with other physical entities.  Those effects are what make an entity objectively identifiable because they are reducible to quantitative data such as measurement or enumeration.  This is what makes scientific knowledge so reliable and relatively indisputable.

So science is our best tool for understanding that which is physical.  Of course, there is more to what exists than the physical.  Therefore, it should be clear that science has its limits as a means to knowledge.  Yet, one of the great follies of our era is to believe that if something cannot be identified and understood through science, then it must not exist.  Like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail, the modern man of science sees everything in terms of matter and mechanics (material and efficient causes).  Thus, for him there is no need to account for the essence and purpose of things because such principles (formal and final causes) do not exist -- at least not in any manner that permits objective knowledge of them.

Metaphysically this error is scientific naturalism (physicalism or materialism in its extreme form) and epistemologically it is scientism.  It conflates a means to knowledge with knowledge itself.  As powerful a means to knowledge as science is, it is only a means and not the only one.  There is more to what exists than the physical, and we all know from our experience that we can have knowledge of the non-physical -- i.e., the mind.  So we should know that science is not the end-all of knowledge.  Indeed, a hallmark of the human mind is consciousness.  There is simply no scientific means by which I can objectively identify the consciousness of any other human being, yet I have no doubt that all other human beings are conscious.

Is my lack of doubt merely a matter of faith?  Or does it rest solely upon reason?  If the latter, then there must be a means of knowledge other than science by which I can know that the minds of others objectively exist.  That means is philosophy, through which I can identify and understand that which is not physical (in addition to employing science properly as a method of knowledge of the physical).

The problem that arises with a philosophical examination of the non-physical is that the mind, for example, is not reducible to quantitative data.  There is nothing to measure; there are no parts to analyze.  (To argue that the electro-chemical activity of the brain can be measured and analyzed, thus the mind is quantitatively reducible and so subject to science, begs the question.  That activity is the physical effect of the mind and not the mind itself.)  So the quantitative data that makes us confident of the objectivity of scientific knowledge is absent.  In other words, there is more room for dispute when it comes to the philosophy of mind because there are far fewer hard points of indisputable data.

That doesn't mean the truth about the mind is inaccessible, only that there is a much greater probability of (honest) error being made with the only means of knowledge of the mind -- i.e., philosophical inquiry.  As I have argued, one of the profound errors of the modern era has been to jettison the principles of essence and purpose (the formal and final causes) from ontology in favor of a scientistic view of the nature of existence.

Firehammer:  “No scientific description of any physical thing is ever complete.”

Indeed.  So what is it about a thing that science cannot describe?  The answer lies in its formal and final causes.

Also, a quick note on purpose ...

Firehammer:  “The only things to which purpose has meaning are beings capable of having goals and ends, that is rational beings, i.e., men.”

I agree except that I would have written, "The only things to which purpose has meaning are beings capable of having goals and ends, that is rational beings, e.g., men."  When I speak of a thing having a purpose in itself, I speak of its God-given purpose.  How can I discover what that is?  How do I learn of anything that I do not directly perceive?

Finally, a short comment about science ...

Firehammer:  “What science restricts itself to is what can be objectively observed, directly or indirectly, whatever it is. It excludes nothing. What else would you have a science that has the world that we are directly conscious of study?”

If you want to define science in the Quinean sense that encompasses all objective knowledge, that's fine.  That doesn't change the distinction I have been making between the physical and the non-physical -- i.e., the physical is reducible to quantitative data and the non-physical is not.  Moreover, if science is to be defined as objective knowledge, then science must be open to the study of both the natural and the supernatural.  To say that it cannot include the supernatural begs the question.  So again, Regi, I'm not sure how defining science as you do refutes my argument that the formal and final causes of an entity are as real as its material and efficient ones.

THE END RESULT:  SEVERING FACT FROM VALUE

Firehammer:  “I gave a very long explanation of what I meant by, 'no scientific description of any physical thing is ever complete,' and it had nothing to do with formal or final causes. I think your statement both ignores (no intention implied) my explanation and interjects what cannot be justified based on my argument. Scientific descriptions must be incomplete because science is open-ended, and however much we learn about anything there will always be more to learn. Science can only address the physical attributes conceptually and since concepts are by nature discrete, and physical reality is 'analog' (think continual verses continuous), no scientific description can ever be complete (for the same reason not digital image can ever capture everything, no matter how small the pixels are).”

Your last sentence puts it quite nicely.  You are making my point that science is inherently limited in what it can describe, just as a digital image can never fully capture analog reality, because it is a quantitative method of knowledge.  Oddly, you implicitly appear to agree with me on this, yet you have made explicit objections to my statement that the scientific method is quantitative.  Your objections have not been persuasive for a couple of reasons.

First, some of your refutations are in fact quantitative in nature.  One example you used was that the relationship between the hypoteneuse and legs of a right triangle is not quantitative.  Perhaps you are making a distinction between what is geometric and what is strictly numerical, but surely if that relationship were not quantifiable, there would be no Pythagorean Theorem to generalize it.

Second, your other refutations are not quantitative in nature, but then that's what makes their study art rather than science.  For example, you spoke of how a pharmacological researcher might use a subject's identification of his pain to evaluate the effectiveness of new drug.  There is no objective measurement of that pain, because only the subject of the test can be conscious of it.  His experience of pain is a mental not physical phenomenon, and it is precisely the irreducibility of the mind to quantity that defeats the study of mental phenomena by scientific means.

Now I have no argument with you, Regi, that we can study the mental as well as the physical by rational means, if not always by empirical means.  Objective and subjective observation of particulars allows us to form hypotheses to be tested, either empirically or logically; and if those hypotheses are validated, then they can function as general theories of how the world works.  If all of that goes under your label of "science", OK.  But that doesn't eliminate the fundamental distinction between the physical and the mental.

To wit:  The physical is matter and its effects, the defining characteristic of which is spatial and temporal extension.  Thus, at least in principle, the physical is objectively perceivable and ultimately quantifiable.  The mental is the mind and its effects, and though embodied in creatures, as opposed to God, is only subjectively perceivable and elusive of quantification.  The physical is manifested in our universe through the material and efficient causes, or matter and mechanics.  The mental is manifested through the formal and final causes, or essence and purpose, principles that only a mind can devise.  Whose mind is a key question.  Just as we have discussed the God-given purpose of entities, their essence is the design of their Creator.

Of course, what I have to say about the mental realm of reality probably isn't compelling to the adherents of metaphysical naturalism.  However, they can only account for what appears to be essence and purpose in things as either:  [1] purely human constructs, i.e., nominalism, or [2] epiphenomenal of nature's orderliness which must be accepted as a given without explanation.  As I have said elsewhere, I don't think these are necessarily intellectually disreputable conclusions to draw from one's experience of the world, but consistency with them does ruin to ethics; at least ethics predicated upon an objective relationship between fact and value.

[For the full text of this discussion, click here.]

DEVOLUTION

Rummaging through old pictures of the halcyon days of my youth, I found a couple of photos that illustrate a cautionary tale.  Below are the before and after shots of a cold warrior who didn't get a job after mustering out of the service.  (And no, it's not yours truly.  He is taking the "after" picture, because he did get a job after battling the Red Menace and so could afford a camera.)

 

THE LOST KNOWLEDGE OF THE MODERN AGE

I am a fan of Ed Feser's writing.  I've enjoyed his articles at Right Reason, Tech Central Station, and elsewhere on the web.  Once I broke my hard habit of scientific naturalism some years ago, I apprehended the incompleteness of the modern grasp of the world.  It has been the crisp and clear work of philosophers like Feser that put this incipient understanding into sharp focus.

After the end of the High Middle Ages we began to lose knowledge of two of the four Aristotelian causes, given fullness by Thomas Aquinas, of all that is real.  As Feser says in the introduction of his recent review of philosopher Daniel Dennett's contribution to the "new atheism", Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:

"Aquinas, following Aristotle, held that a complete understanding of any natural phenomenon requires the identification of each of its four causes: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the form or essence that stuff has taken on; its efficient cause, that which brought it into being; and its final cause, the end, purpose, or function it serves.  This doctrine was (and is) central to Scholastic philosophy and theology, but modern philosophy, inaugurated by the likes of Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke, is largely defined by it rejection of two of Aristotle’s four causes.  For the moderns, there are no formal or final causes, no fixed essences or purposes in nature.  The world is rather a gigantic machine, all the diverse phenomena it exhibits being entirely reducible to inherently meaningless causal interactions between material parts."

Whether inadvertantly, perversely, or deliberately, in the six centuries or so since the advent of the modern age, nominalism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and finally the scientific materialism of Marx, Darwin, and Freud discredited the truth that each and every thing that exists has a God-given essence and a purpose (the formal and final causes), leaving us only with matter and mechanics (the material and efficient causes) to explain who we are and the universe we inhabit.  And even when the inadequacies of this scientific naturalism had become apparent to us in the wreckage of the twin catastrophes of fascism and communism, so many of our best and brightest did not look for what was lost in the modern age, but instead took up the assault upon the last two respectable Aristotelian causes under the banner of post-modernism.

In his excellent review of Dennett's book, Feser exposes the feebleness of today's bein pensant intellect that is the result of the modern man's long decadent decline.

MY "MISSION" TO THE DEEPEST, DARK CORNER OF BRIGHT-LAND

Once again, Linz Perigo, host of the Objectivist web forum SOLOPassion, invited me to write an article on Christianity.  And so I did.  I thought I would begin at the beginning with a definition of the God Christians believe in, rather than the God atheists are fond of knocking down with their long discredited arguments.  Below is my article in its entirety, and here is the link to the comments it received at SOLOPassion.  (I'll leave it to you to judge from their comments how bright the Brights are.)

THE GOD WHO ISN'T

In another thread James Valliant posed to me, a one-time Randian and non-believer who is now a practicing Catholic, some issues he had with Christian doctrine. I declined to give James a direct response. My primary reason was that James’s challenge was mired in misconceptions of what Christian religious beliefs and their relationship to Scripture actually are. I suggested to James that he needed to address the best and strongest arguments for Christianity instead of knocking down straw men. Furthermore, James was off-topic and I did not want to hijack the thread.

Linz, the magnanimous host he is, stepped in with some comments of his own and invited me to hijack the thread with a response to James. I told Linz I would give it some thought, and so I have. With this new thread I put forth a preliminary response to James (and Linz also) as to what are the best and strongest arguments for Christianity. I think any reasonable person will agree that it would be fruitless to raise those arguments absent the modest common ground that God’s existence is logically possible. So that’s where I will start.

I understand the arguments Objectivists generally make to deny God’s existence. They have certain quaintness to them, brimming with the certitude of the late 19th-century atheists who first made them to declare science triumphant and religion a relic. Of course, these atheists were oblivious to the centuries of Catholic and Calvinist philosophy that had refuted their arguments before they even made them, and today’s Objectivists are similarly oblivious to the thorough dismantling of those arguments over the past century by theists. But that only adds to the charm of these arguments because of the faith by which an Objectivist must hold them.

Now I know some here will take that last sentence as an insult. It’s not, even though by “faith” I mean it in the Randian sense of fideism or superstition as opposed to the Catholic sense of intellectual assent. I admire this conviction in an age dominated by bien pensant postmodernists who sneer at any belief in absolute truth. Moreover, the Objectivist arguments are correct: The God they deny doesn’t exist.

However, that God isn’t the God Christians know. Objectivists have been busy knocking down a straw man. It is a measure of the obtuseness many of them have regarding religion, and Christianity in particular, that they do not have the least inkling that they are doing so. While an Objectivist may sometimes succeed in befuddling unknowledgeable believers with challenges like who created God, can God create a rock too heavy for Him to lift, and why not believe in a flying spaghetti monster, the very posing of these questions reveals the Objectivist’s befuddlement as to who God is.

Again I know many here will find insult in what I have just written. But none of us are all-knowing. All of us are ignorant in some manner. I am merely suggesting that one exercise care in what he claims as certainly true. Therefore, if you are going to deny the God Christians believe exists, might it not be prudent to know who Christians believe that God is? After all, it does little good to argue that [1] God is X , [2] X is logically impossible, and so [3] God is logically impossible, when Christians know God as Y. Even worse is the foolishness of some Objectivists, when confronted with this response, to then insist that Christians do not know God as Y but as X in a futile attempt to salvage a straw man argument. Now if this sounds harsh, let me acknowledge that Objectivists share some illustrious company in their theological ignorance, including atheist fellow-travelers George Smith, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and, someone who really should know better, Daniel Dennett.

But that should be small comfort, because God is Y and not X. So it matters not how bright the fellas and how brilliant their arguments are in disproving X. All that sparkles is not gold. Nothing is accomplished. You may as well spend time knocking down the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, the flat-earthers, and Bigfoot. Therefore, if you want to point your arguments against God in the right direction, let me give you a crib sheet as to who He really is and how the present arguments against Him go awry.

To that end this is the God who Christians know. He is the creator of the universe, Who like all creators did so for a purpose. He is a purely spiritual being Who, as the creator of spacetime and so external to it, requires no extension as matter would provide. He is a fully and perfectly realized being and as such is pure act, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. With this in mind, let us review those qualities of God that atheists most frequently cite as making Him logically impossible (or at least extremely unlikely): Creator, pure spirit, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

God is the Creator. God is the person Who created the universe and everything within it. God’s relationship to the universe is analogous to that of a contractor to a house he has built. Just as the contractor is not a part of the house he has built, God is not a part of the universe He has created. Like the contractor, God is external to, superior to, and independent of His work. So, like the contractor, God is unconstrained by what He has fashioned. That lack of constraint means that, like the contractor, God can carry on without regard to His creation or return to alter it as He pleases.

It should be evident why the common Objectivist objection that the universe means everything that exists and so it must include God if He exists (and so must be subject to the constraints of causation within it) doesn’t wash with the Christian. The word “universe” can be used like that, but to rest an argument upon that idiosyncratic meaning to deny the existence of God is to substitute semantics for logic. By “universe” Christians mean that finite astronomical structure of expanding spacetime we inhabit, and whatever Objectivists want to call that, that is what they must address in a refutation of God as the creator of it.

Because God, as its creator, is external to, superior to, and independent of spacetime, there can be no issue as to what caused God. The infinite regression of causes commonly argued by atheists to deny God has no traction, because causation exists only in relation to spacetime. As a being beyond spacetime, God is eternal and the ground (either directly or indirectly) of all causation in the universe. This includes the physical order of the universe upon which all laws of nature are predicated, but no law of nature can explain because any such explanation must presume the very thing – i.e., order – to be explained. It also includes the mental phenomena which we all experience – e.g., consciousness, rationality, knowledge, free will – but cannot physically identify and reduce in terms of that order just noted. Yet that phenomena, in particular free will, does cause physical effects. This is explicable only if the mental is fundamental to (or independent of) the physical, as God, a purely spiritual being, is to the universe, a construct of matter.

God is pure spirit. Objectivists often cite the impossibility of the primacy of consciousness to deny the existence of God as a spiritual being. They argue that consciousness can only exist once there exists something to be conscious of. Implicit in this argument is that first “something” must be physical and not mental. If asked why a consciousness cannot be conscious of itself, the Objectivist response is that consciousness cannot exist independent of a physical entity. Again, as above, this argument rests upon a definition of the universe that Christians do not accept and begs the question so long as Objectivists fail to address what Christians do mean by the universe as God’s creation.

It is reasonable to argue that which exists within spacetime must have some manner of physical existence, because existence within spacetime means extension – i.e., temporally and spatially identifiable. Matter provides that extension, and so even though human consciousness is not physical, to the extent that it exists within spacetime, it must exist in conjunction with a material body. Thomists have always understood this through their philosophical doctrine of hylomorphism and have not been troubled by the fact that in this world consciousness does not manifest itself separately of the body. So the Objectivist claim that science has never identified such a separation is uncontroversial. (As an aside: Even if such separations do occur, science dependent upon spatial and temporal measurements could not in any case identify that which lacks such extension.)

However, it is unpersuasive to argue that the only possible universe is one that is an infinite expanse of spacetime so that all that exists must be extended – i.e., composed of or directly related to matter. Setting aside that astronomical observations do not support this belief, there is no sound logical basis for believing that the only possible universe is an infinite one. To argue that the universe is what it is and so the only possible universe is this one, as Objectivists commonly do, is not only logically deficient – to wit, a confusion of the necessary with the actual – but brings us back to the empirical evidence of what the universe is – and so far that evidence indicates a universe that is finite in spacetime. So the premise that is impossible for the universe to be anything other than an infinite expanse of spacetime is nothing but unfounded assertion.

Absent that premise, we can conceive of an eternal realm beyond the spacetime of the universe in which God exists as a purely spiritual being. Indeed, outside of spacetime, extension is meaningless. In that realm, with no need for extension and so no need of matter to provide it, only the mental and not the physical exists. There a being unknowable to our senses, although not completely alien to our experience (of our own consciousness and free will), can exist in non-physical form. For example, the purely spiritual being of God. The logical possibility of this appears to elude Objectivists and many other atheists, such as Dawkins with his flying spaghetti monster. They insist upon anthropomorphizing God, a natural human tendency, but to the extreme extent of finding any being but a physical one inconceivable. But the nonsense of equating God to a flying spaghetti monster is only logically consistent with a thorough and unrelenting materialism, and that logic is at the expense of any objective foundation for human morality, happiness, and purpose while doing riot to our experience of mental phenomena like consciousness and free will as something other than illusions.

That is the price an Objectivist must pay to deny God because a purely spiritual being is impossible.

God is omnipotent. Christians know God as all-powerful. Atheists, including Objectivists, frequently counter that is impossible because omnipotence creates logical contradictions as demonstrated by the trite question: “Can God create a rock so heavy He cannot lift it?” Yes, of course, that poses a contradiction, but then omnipotence is the power to do anything that is logically possible. God’s being defines what is logically possible. This is because He is a fully and perfectly realized being and so is pure act. As such He encompasses the Truth in its entirety, which brooks no contradiction. Therefore, for God to do what is logically impossible is to violate His own identity.

God is omniscient. Christians also know God as all-knowing. Objectivists and other atheists often object that God’s omniscience violates human free will, but this would be true only if knowledge of an event is synonymous with the cause of an event. As the bedrock of Objectivism is that what is true is objectively true and so independent of anyone’s knowledge of that truth, it is odd that Objectivists should make this argument against God’s omniscience. Your knowledge that I will take a particular action simply does not entail that you are the cause of that action. Nor does this entailment arise if that knowledge is understood as foreknowledge, as God is often presumed to have of human actions. Knowledge is not causation.

Furthermore, God’s knowledge of all human actions is not necessarily foreknowledge. Once again, Christians know God to exist beyond the constraints of spacetime. What human beings comprehend as the past, present, and future is an eternal present to God. He knows what occurs at all points in spacetime at the same moment. Therefore, if one is insistent upon arguing that foreknowledge of future human actions constitutes causation of those actions, and so God’s omniscience violates free will, God’s existence outside of spacetime does not require that He possess foreknowledge to possess omniscience.

Moreover, the atheist argument here rests upon the premise that free will is genuine and libertarian, as opposed to an illusion propagated by the physical processes of a deterministic universe, lest there be no violation of it by God’s omniscience. And once the atheist concedes the existence of libertarian free will, then he undercuts any arguments against the logical possibility of God as a purely spiritual being Who is the uncaused cause of the universe.

God is omnibenevolent. Finally Christians know God as all-good. He neither embodies nor causes any evil. Evil is entirely the product of human will. Objectivists and other atheists almost always object that omnibenevolence is contradictory to omnipotence, and so God cannot be both. They argue that if God is all-powerful then He cannot be all-good, because He allows evil to occur despite His power to prevent it; or conversely if He is all-good then He is not all-powerful because He cannot prevent evil despite His desire to do so. What this argument fails to do is account for God’s omniscience.

God is both omnibenevolent and omnipotent, because in His omniscience He knows that the human exercise of free will, despite the evil that can cause, makes possible the greatest good. If God prevented all our evil acts, He would extinguish free will. Absent free will no human act can be said to be good for there is no choice in doing so. We would not be moral agents, just automatons. We would not add to the good in the universe. We would just be so many cogs in its machinery robotically functioning according to divine specification. In short, without free will human beings can do no good. Only with free will, even with the risk of evil that permits, human beings can add to God’s goodness to bring about greatest good possible in His creation.

Also, as noted in the previous passage on God’s omniscience, the extent that atheist argument on this score has any strength is based upon his belief that libertarian free will exists. Therefore, pushing hard here necessarily undercuts the atheist argument elsewhere.

While I don’t think the logic of this will escape Objectivists, who acknowledge human free will (volition) as an essential property of human nature, I think the force of it may be elusive. This is because most Objectivists do not understand what Christians believe to be the root of God’s goodness and ours. It is love. Sadly Objectivists routinely pervert the Christian concept of love to mean destructive self-abnegation. That of course is hatred, hatred of the self, hatred of the world, ultimately hatred of God Himself. None of the components of Christian love – eros, philia, and agape – embrace such evil. Indeed, by accepting God’s love for him, a Christian returns it through these forms of love to God, himself, his fellow man, and the world. Through this love the Christian rids himself of falsehoods to see truth and beauty more clearly. Thus, he becomes just, productive, and happy and attains self-respect and self-reliance. He becomes his own man unburdened by false pride and vanity.

I know this is true from my own experience, but I will go no further along this line for the moment. This gets us into the “best and strongest” arguments for Christianity when the task at hand is the modest one of establishing the logical possibility of God’s existence.

THE ATHEIST BOOMLET

Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote about the bevy of new books promoting atheism and decrying the evil of religion in the Opinion Journal yesterday.  His monicker for Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and the rest of the godless gang -- the new new atheists -- is a bit of clunker, but he does a concise job showing what rubbish today's top dogs of atheism are peddling.  I never cease to marvel at the obtuseness of allegedly educated men on this topic.

DOES GOD ANSWER OUR PRAYERS?

The media has recently reported on a scientific study that calls into question the efficacy of intercessory prayers for the sick.  When I heard about that, I wonder how such a study could even be controlled to produce reliable results (beyond the obvious problem of dealing with God's inscrutability).  The American Phoenix has written a fine piece on just that topic and notes some of methodological issues to be considered, among other things:

There are also, of course, several scientific limitations to studies of this type that should not be ignored, including:

• The difficulty of obtaining "pure" control groups in such research.  For example, in prayer studies, particularly those involving very ill patients, the controls who are not being experimentally prayed for or sent healing intentions as part of the study are likely to nonetheless receive prayers and positive mental intentions from friends, loved ones, and others. The same is also true for the prayer group, in addition to the control group.
• Insufficient sample sizes in the studies to date.  Most of these studies have been conducted with only a few hundred volunteers.
• The lack of controls for psychological factors such as depression, anxiety, sense of control, and self-efficacy which are known to be factors in physical outcomes.
• The lack of an appropriate objective measure to determine the degree of a person's religious convictions.

In addition to the scientific limitations, there are also philosophical/theological limitations to such studies.

• It cannot be known how or even whether God will act in a particular situation.  If we assume that God answers every prayer, aren't we turning God into some automaton who does our will and not His own?
• A negative outcome may not necessarily mean that a prayer has not been answered.
• The assumption that a benevolent God would respond only to the prayers of or on behalf of persons in the treatment group, when many persons in the control group will probably pray for themselves and will be prayed for by friends and loved ones.  Most Christians don't believe that God cares only for those who pray.
• The assumption that a compassionate God who intends the well-being of all humankind responds only to the needs of those who pray or are prayed for.  In the Christian milieu, atheists are also children of God.  God's grace is not distributed only to Christians.
• These studies only concern intercessory prayer - prayer as a request.  They do not cover the prayer of the Eucharist, prayers of adoration, prayers of thanksgiving or any other type of prayer.  Thus, notions of prayer as contained in these studies are extremely limited.

Read the entire article.  It's well worth it.

SCIENCE ISN'T EVERYTHING

Science gulls us into trusting it as the only explanation we need of the world because that part which it does explain, it explains brilliantly.  So brilliantly in fact that we have come to ignore the rest of the world that science cannot explain.  Or if we can't quite ignore it, we dismiss it as either nonsense that only the ill-educated or feeble-minded take seriously or a black hole of subjectivity that permits only opinion and no knowledge.

The Real Physicist, Lawrence Gage, argues in this essay for us to remove the blinkers that we have let our love affair with science blind us to the full realm of causation in the universe.  He points out how by common sense we should recognize that the ancient Aristotelian four-fold scheme of causation more completely explains our world than modern science's reduction of everything to matter and mechanics.

Gage concludes with this sound advice:

"It strikes me that today's Christians shouldn't fall into the trap of letting the secular world dictate the terms of discussion. Instead of letting God be boxed into the Enlightenment's one-dimensional notion of causation, modern Christians should reclaim their ancient patrimony in which God (through Jesus Christ) is the atemporal cause of all that is temporal, the reason by which anything is intelligible, by which everything is, and for which it exists."

Indeed.

DOMESTIC LIFE

First thing this morning ...

The wife: "Did it rain last night?"

Me: "Yes."

The wife: "Are you sure?"

Me: "Yes."

The wife: "It doesn't look like it rained."

Me: "Look at the sidewalk and the driveway.  They're still wet."

The wife: "How do you know they're wet from rain?"

Me: "Starting at a quarter-to-four this morning about a half-inch of rain fell over the next hour or so."

The wife: "I don't think it rained last night."

Translation: "Be sure to water the lawn this weekend instead of goofing around."

THE SCANDAL OF A NON-SCANDAL

This flap over the Bush Administration firing eight U.S. attorneys is mind-boggling.  Why?  The mendacity of congressional Democrats who will say anything to manufacture a scandal, and the incompetence of Bush and his minions in letting them get away with it.

U.S. attorneys are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president.  The president can fire any U.S. attorney at any time for any reason.  The only legal restraint upon this power of the president is that the purpose of his dismissal cannot be to obstruct an investigation, prosecution, or civil action.  Even then his purpose has to be malign.  The president has the authority -- indeed, the duty -- to curtail law enforcement actions he thinks are improper, ill-founded, or otherwise not in the public interest.  Because, in the absence of any credible allegations, Bush fired no U.S. attorney to obstruct justice, there was nothing afoul in the law in doing so.

In want of a smoking gun, the Democrats are howling to moon that the firings are political.  Of course they are!  Because U.S. attorneys are political appointees, by definition their coming and going is political.  More than that, it is well within the prerogative of the president to boot a U.S. attorney who is not adhering to his law enforcement priorities.  After all, the president is elected by the people.  That gives political legitimacy to his law enforcement policy and the management of the officials he appoints to execute it.  If the president says, for example, that the prosecution of drug lords is a top priority and one of his U.S. attorneys ignores that directive to pursue inside traders instead, there is nothing improper in the president booting him.

So there is no scandal.  Yet, Bush on down act like they are guilty of something.  Only belatedly and with little force has Bush defended his right to fire the eight U.S. attorneys.  He hems and haws on cooperation with the Senate investigation.  He talks as though he really didn't have much to do with the decision.  He regrets that mistakes were made.  Attorney General Gonzalez follows the same line, while his staff counsel says she'll take the Fifth Amendment in her appearance before the Senate.  While the Democrats fabricate a scandal, the Bushies fabricate a guilty response to it.  This is not just lousy gamesmanship.  It is irresponsible.  We're at war, and Bush doesn't have the luxury of squandering his administration's credibility in sideshow spats with congressional Democrats.

Indeed, Bush is obligated to make the Democrats pay a heavy political price for inventing a scandal when there is deadly serious business to be done.  What he had to do in response the Democrats' ill-willed gambit to undermine his presidency was to call their bluff:  [1] Tell them to go to hell, there will be no cooperation from his administration in a pointless and frivolous congressional investigation; [2] clearly defend to the public his power to fire the U.S. attorneys; [3] articulate the refusal or inability of these appointees to carry out his agenda as the reason for doing so; [4] chastise the Democrats for wasting time over nonsense when the country has a war to fight; and finally [5] put the challenge to them to stop him from running the country to play partisan politics.

That would have put the onus on the Democrats to either drop the matter or escalate it in the face of their likely ultimate failure to accomplish anything concrete.  If they did escalate, they risked appearing like soulless partisans whose only objective is destruction of a political opponent for no reason other than his destruction.  Instead Bush and his administration have waffled for fear of drawing a clear line in the sand between his agenda for the country and the Democrats'.  Why should that be?  I must wonder if the reason is that Bush and his advisors are so confused as to think that drawing a line to marshal a defense against a purely partisan assault is itself a purely partisan ploy.  If so, a president who aspires to be a nice guy would never want to appear so venal.  However, by playing to appearances in this sorry non-scandal, Bush has cast the worst appearance upon himself and his administration.

WHY NICE GUYS MAKE BAD PRESIDENTS

The back-slapping George Bush is often denigrated as a “frat boy” suggesting that he lacks the intellectual seriousness a president requires.  Compared to the men he defeated in two presidential elections, whose grave demeanors were the only heft they supplied to essentially frivolous political posturing, this criticism fails.  Indeed, Bush demonstrated early on that he understood that the West was at a crossroads in meeting the Islamist threat to civilization, the crisis of the day; a fundamental matter that his detractors who label him as a simpleton still don’t get five years after Islamic jihadists slaughtered thousands on American soil.

However, Bush’s back-slapping style is indicative of a major deficiency in his leadership.  He’s a genuinely friendly and gregarious man who likes people and likes to be liked in return.  While there’s nothing wrong with being a nice guy, it is not a quality that makes a man a good president.  Granted, Bush’s ability to inoffensively cajole the Democratic opposition in the Texas legislature during his six years as governor served him well, but Texas Democrats generally don’t suffer from the ideological derangement of leftist Democrats on the national scene who view common human decency as a character defect in the pursuit of power.  Nothing in his experience as governor of Texas prepared Bush for the vileness of politicians like Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer, or Jack Murtha.

Fair enough, but how long should it have taken Bush to figure out leftist Democrats, especially when they have been persistently obstructing the war against the jihadists to the point of brooking our defeat?  What other than Bush’s indefatigable desire for collegiality has stopped him from making these obstructionists pay a heavy political price for undermining the pre-emptive defense of our country against an enemy who has the will to attack the “Great Satan” with atomic weapons once they have the means to do so?  Who other than a nice guy pulls his punches to embrace dangerously disloyal politicians as “patriotic Americans”?  This disloyalty runs deeper than the recent passage of a resolution and an emergency appropriation cravenly calculated to frustrate the war against the jihadists without taking accountability for the defeat these bills would countenance.  It is likely that congressional staffers for obstructionist Democrats leaked to the national media information about the Bush Administration’s covert operations against the finances and communications of the Islamic jihadists and jeopardized those effective efforts against the enemy.

Even worse is that Bush the nice guy has not kept his own administration in line when it comes to the serious business of war.  In the wake of the devastation of 9/11, no heads rolled.  Bush held no one accountable for the breakdown in national defense.  With no one brought to heel, the bureaucrats got the message:  Failure is an option, even when it comes to war.  So, for example, the State Department remained wedded to the misbegotten policy of Mideast stability which had perversely fostered Islamic jihadism.  Bush’s secretary of state at the time, Colin Powell, should have put an end to this institutional inertia.  However, Powell had provided the critical counsel a decade earlier in the Gulf War to not topple Saddam Hussein in the name of Mideast stability; bad advice which led to the present Iraq War.  Unwilling to acknowledge his error, Powell never mustered the State Department to gain the cooperation of critical but fair-weather allies, such as Turkey on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Similarly the Central Intelligence Agency had a history of poor performance in the Mideast to polish up and so undercut our intelligence efforts to assess the jihadist threat.  The most notorious incident was when the CIA sabotaged the Bush Administration’s request for confirmation that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Western Africa by sending an ex-ambassador on an amateur spying mission.  When this “agent” later revealed his mission to the media and lied about what he had learned in an attempt to blacken Bush in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, the full weight of the Justice Department didn’t fall on his head but rather a Bush Administration official who tried to discredit the agent with reporters.  An Alice-in-Wonderland outcome that would make for great satire if not for the fact that our premier intelligence agency made bureaucratic infighting a priority over collecting intelligence on the nuclear weapons program of a dangerous regime.

Bush the nice guy seems constitutionally incapable of bringing down the hammer of those who out of venality, perversity, or incompetence obstruct his policy of eliminating the jihadist threat.  As a consequence he has invited unconstitutional intrusions upon the president’s authority as commander-in-chief.  For example, in last year’s Hamdi decision the U.S. Supreme Court claimed the jurisdiction, relying upon international law of all things, to review military tribunals of unlawful combatants waging war against the United States.  Instead of declaring the high court’s decision a dead letter, as his duty to the Constitution required, Bush meekly acceded to its unconstitutional demands and asked Congress for the authority to convene military tribunals of Gitmo detainees.

Likewise, in his current request for an emergency appropriation to fund the “surge” campaign to pacify Baghdad, Bush has tussled with congressional Democrats over additional provisions that would restrict his command of military operations in Iraq as though Congress had the authority to do so.  All Bush would have to do is let the Democrats pass the appropriation laden with those restrictions, sign the bill into law, take the money, and then announce that he is ignoring the restrictions as an unconstitutional encroachment upon his power as commander-in-chief.  No president is obliged to enforce or comply with unconstitutional legislation.  And if Congress finds such defiance outrageous, they have the constitutional prerogative of impeaching the president for his political offenses.  In turn, they can face the voters for doing so.  Instead, Bush helps his congressional opponents, acting in bad faith, maintain the pretense that a legitimate battle over legislation is going on.

Maybe none of this would be so dire if the subversive efforts of congressional Democrats, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Supreme Court, and others had no material affect upon Bush’s war-making against the Islamic jihadists.  However, it is now clear that between a brilliant conquest of Iraq and now only in extremis the current offensive against the jihadists there, Bush stayed his hand for four years hoping that patrols by U.S. forces, as opposed to an active campaign of hunt-and-destroy, would vanquish the enemy.  To avoid offending the obstructionist bureaucrats and politicians at home, the Iraqi factions stumbling towards some semblance of self-governance, and even the Iranians and Syrians arming the jihadists, Bush put our servicemen in harm’s way as cops reactively keeping the peace instead of as soldiers actively pursuing and killing the enemy.  Because Bush wanted to be a nice guy between the conquest four years ago and today's surge, more than two thousand of our servicemen lost their lives in Iraq and several thousand more severely wounded.

As I wrote at the outset, Bush, unlike those who disparage him as a “frat boy”, understands that we are in the midst of an epochal crisis.  He understands that we must meet a threat to our civilization that will not be easily or quickly eliminated.  However, that is not the same thing as having the will to do what is necessary to end that threat.  What is necessary is war.  That much Bush has understood and has had the will to undertake.  However, war, justly and effectively conducted, does not offer the luxury of being conducted inoffensively.  The lines between allies and enemies, loyal and disloyal opposition, dissenters and traitors cannot be blurred to make nice with everyone.  Doing so confuses the rationale for war, allows the just causes for it to be called into disrepute, undermines the popular mandate to carry it out, weakens the will of war leaders to make the hard decisions, escalates the cost in blood and treasure, and delays victory or even brings about defeat.

Let us hope that the “surge” campaign is evidence that Bush has found a new will to finally destroy the jihadists in Iraq, end the fomenting of violence in that country by Iran and Syria, and so make it a haven for peace and prosperity in the Mideast.  If not, then we face defeat in Iraq by prematurely withdrawing our forces and inviting new jihadist assaults upon us.  Should that come to pass, it will be proof that nice guys make bad presidents.

THE LEFT'S WAR ON REALITY

Over the years I have become impatient with the Left's war on reality and its partisans' increasingly hysterical screeds against the tyranny of the Bush administration.  I hold no brief for the president.  He has been a profound disappointment.  However, the Left's denunciations of Bush as a schemer who is provoking war to divert attention from his fascist or theocratic designs upon America is lunacy.

Moreover, it demonstrates a moral obtuseness among the sanctimonious sorts who populate the left end of the political spectrum.  Unhinged comparisons of Bush and his administration to the monstrous regimes that plagued the twentieth century is a frivolity devoid of any decent regard for the hundreds of millions who did suffer and die at the hands of real tyrants.  The fact is, despite the corrosiveness of the welfare state, America remains a land of liberty where the Left's war on reality can rage on without fearing any retribution from the government.

It was in this frame of mind I enjoyed columnist Mark Steyn's recent exchange with one of the loony left ...

AMERICA IS SO TOTALLY FASCIST

I was watching you [Mark Steyn] on C-SPAN this morning and you seem to think that this country hasn't fallen into fascism. Let me educate you a little. Here is what Lawrence W. Britt has determined as the fourteen signs of fascism.

1.” Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.” Does "stay the course", you're with us or against us, WMD's etc. ring a bell with you? What about all those little flag pins conservatives are so proud to be wearing at the most shameful era of American history?

2.”Disdain for the importance of human rights.” One need only look back on the drowning people in Hurricane Katrina while our government elected officials refused to cut their vacations short to do anything about  this crisis.

3.”Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.” The axis of evil. We must kill them all.

4. “The supremacy of the military/avid militarism”. One need only look at the budget to see what is spent on military.

5. “Rampant sexism.” Yes, lets criticize Nancy Pelosi for the price of what she wore to the SOTUS. I notice none of the men got the same criticism.

6.”A controlled mass media.” Since the majority of our media is controlled by six major corporations who all want to emulate Fox News, need I say more. The news is biased and unprofessional. Did you know there was a major revolution going on in Oaxaca, Mexico that could directly have an influence on our immigration problem, yet there was hardly a whisper in the news?

7. “Obsession with national security.”  Wiretapping of citizens without a warrant and no habeas corpus anymore and an emerging police state with people already being disappeared, the undocumented workers caught in an INS sting that no one knows where they went.

8.”Religion and ruling elite tied together.” Where do I start. Creationism being taught in public schools. Rev. Moon being crowned the Messiah in a public building in Washington with members of Congress attending. The Terri Schiavo circus led by political conservatives and the President's brother, Jeb Bush.

9. “Power of corporations protected.” Yes, more and more corporate welfare. All those profiting from the present wars at the expense of taxpayers. The prescription drug benefit for the PHARMA industry at the expense of seniors and the taxpayers. The upcoming universal health care plan at the expense of taxpayers and for the benefit of the insurance industry. Boy, you wanna talk about welfare queens in cadillace, how about those guys in corporate jets?

10. “Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.” Union busting started with Reagan and goes on today. Jobs are allowed to be outsourced to third world countries at the expense of middle class working Americans. Expoited document workers at the expense of the domestic work force. Homelessness becoming institutionalized.

11.”Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.” The marginalization of the other voice the liberal voice, since Bush took power in the media and in the mainstream. Anyone who doesn't follow in lockstep is called unpatriotic. Michael Moore being demonized for his opposition to the GOP party line particularly when the Bush administration fell down on the job before the 9/11 attack. Of course emerging evidence would suggest that they liked the attack. It was their Pear Harbor that would give them the green light to conquer the Middle East and bring it's oil under USA and British control.

12. “Obsession with crime and punishment." I only need to say AbuGhraib and Guantanamo. You know that no rules or Geneva conventions were honored in those places not to mention many other lessor known venues of incarceration and torture.

13. "Rampant cronyism and corruption". The Bush administration seems to be staffed by cronies from Reagan and Poppy's administrations. Then there is Brownie, Condi, Karl, Kenny boy and this list just grows and grows.

14. “Fraudulent elections.” It's pretty much been proven that Gore won election 2000 that the Supreme Court, stepping out of its jurisdiction handed over to Bush. There is also emerging evidence that Kerry actually won 2004.

(See here for more on Lawrence Britt.)

Now as a conservative you strike me as a little more clever that the rest of the sycophants supporting this festering administration, well you did until you bold-faced lied about Bush's reading material. Even a third grader knows when a fellow classmate hasn't done his homework. Please stop thinking that the average American is that stupid.

However, my point is your denying that we have descended into fascism and how serious it is since none of us have ever lived in fascists regimes. Isn't this a rather naive statement on your part? Many of us Americans have lived overseas in fascists regimes and many have immigrated here from fascist regimes and we know one when we see one. But I thought I would send you the fourteen signs of fascism just in case you never saw them. I'm sure you have but you are again making the assumption that many conservatives do that all Americans are as dumb as the people you brainwash with your giibberish on a daily basis.

You can dismiss me if you like, but recent polling would suggest that the majority of Americans pretty much know the truth about what is going on and it's not the picture that conservative media people like you would like us to believe. We can't do much about it except to protest and I think noticing the trends these days from those who are disenfranchised at the moment should give you pause before you tell your next lie. You are carrying the water for a rogue party and administration who are globalists only loyal to the corporations they represent. They are unpatriotic and one of these days will be regarded as traitors and war criminals and you and all those who supported them will go down with them too.

Laura Sheehan

STEYN REPLIES:  Hey, thanks for “educating me a little”. For a start, I’m not really interested in what Laurence W Britt has “determined” are the “14 signs of fascism” because I wasn’t aware he had proprietorial rights in the concept. And reading through the “14 signs” they seem to be little more than semantic sleights-of-hand. Whether or not you approve of, say, a creationist school board, in the real world it has no meaningful equivalence with Fascist Italy or the Iron Guard’s Romania. None. Nor do “flag pins”. And let me say again what I said on C-SPAN: there are many people around the world who have lived under Fascist regimes, and every time you apply that word to the Bush Administration or Republican Congressmen you are insulting millions upon millions who know what it really means. You dislike Bush, you disagree with his policies, you think Fox News is biased, star-spangled bumper stickers creep you out. None of that makes America Fascist. It makes it a free country of different viewpoints freely expressed. Grow up.

GOD EXISTS: THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDER

When it comes right down to it, there are only two metaphysical accounts for the universe and our presence within it.  The first is that God created the universe.  The second is that nature is fundamental.  The first account, theism, explains the existence, order, and purpose of the universe.  The second account, naturalism, takes the existence of the universe and its primary order as axiomatic and denies any purpose to it.  The theist attempts to answer why our world came to be, whereas the naturalist objects to the validity of the question.

However, for that objection to have merit, the naturalist must have a basis for it.  It is not enough for the naturalist to declare that the existence of the universe is a brute fact.  The theist does not dispute that it exists.  An unadorned assertion that it does, period, is a proclamation of ignorance as to why it does.  Ignorance permits the naturalist to be agnostic as to theism, but offers no basis for invalidating it.  So he must go further.  Regarding the existence of the universe, he must go to where the dispute lies with the theist.  What is fundamental to the universe?  God or nature?  What comes first, mind or matter?  In other words, is the universe created, a work of intelligence?  Or are the undirected matter and mechanisms of nature the foundation of the universe?

By arguing that nature, not God, is fundamental to the existence of the universe, the naturalist begins to raise a legitimate objection to the validity of the question the theist wants to answer:  Why does the universe exist?  To wit, if nature is fundamental to the universe, and nature by definition is undirected and purposeless, then the question of why the universe exists is meaningless.  And so, the naturalist dispenses with the need to explain either the existence or the purpose of the universe.  But that still leaves him on the hook to explain the order of the universe.  If he doesn’t, then he cannot close the door on the theist’s contention that the existence of the universe requires an explanation and that explanation entails a purpose for the universe.  Thus, the naturalist’s objection to the validity of theist’s question of “why” would fail absent a hypothesis for order.

To say that the universe has order is to say that it is not a cauldron of unstructured chaos like the quantum flux.  Matter is organized into atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and organisms like us.  Of course, the naturalist can point to the discoveries of science to describe the order exhibited by these things.  Physics, chemistry, and biology describe their structure and their interactions – i.e., causality.  Indeed, we have boiled this knowledge down to laws of nature to mathematically describe the uniformity of causality.  Yet none of this addresses the primary order of the universe.  How is it that nature gives rise to the order that makes laws of nature possible in the first place?  It cannot be yet another law of nature, because that begs the question by presuming order.  While the naturalist can consign primary order to brute fact, that at best – as discussed above – permits him to be an agnostic.  It does not provide a basis to object to the validity of the question that the theist seeks to answer.

It would appear that the naturalist has a serious problem if nature cannot explain order.  But is the failure of nature to explain the primary order of the universe epistemological or metaphysical?  Do we fail to understand how nature gives rise to order because of our ignorance, whether passing or permanent?  Or do we fail to understand because nature cannot, in fact, give rise to order?  If it is the former, then belief in naturalism is not unreasonable, but it is not possible to refute theism as unreasonable.  If it is the latter, can we know that?  If we can, then naturalism is refuted.  To examine this further, we need to take a closer look at how the universe is ordered.

The universe has order because of the sameness of the properties of its basic building blocks, sub-atomic particles.  Although these particles come in different classes, particles of the same class have identical properties.  Furthermore, without regard to their class, these particles have the same properties of interaction; for example, two particles may not have identical masses, but the effect of their masses when they interact will be proportionately the same.  In this way, we can speak of the sameness of the properties of all sub-atomic particles in the universe.  Upon this primary order the universe has been built.

It might be said that this sameness of sub-atomic particles can be attributed to the laws of physics.  However, that puts the cart before the horse.  These particles are not the same because of the laws of physics.  We have laws of physics because these particles are the same.  In other words, the sameness of sub-atomic particles is a metaphysical fact.  In contrast, the laws of physics describing their sameness are epistemological constructs we use to reduce that sameness to a method of knowledge, usually mathematics.  This is akin to the difference between:  [1] An apple and a stop sign both having the property of red color (a metaphysical fact), and [2] abstracting from particular instances of red color a concept of redness (an epistemological construct).  The former exists as discrete and particular physical instantiations and the latter as mental generalizations of those instantiations.

So we are faced with a marvel:  The trillions upon trillions upon trillions of sub-atomic particles in the universe all having the same properties.  Because no law of nature can account for this extraordinary sameness, we are left with two possibilities for the existence of this primary order in the universe.  It was either accident or intention.  While the naturalist can claim it was an accident, the coincidence of this sameness is so improbable as to be impossible.  Therefore, it is not unreasonable to look to an intentional act having caused this sameness in each and every sub-atomic particle of the universe.  If so, that would be an act of God in the creation of the universe.  Just as a manufacturer makes every widget coming out of his factory the same, God made the individual building blocks of the universe the same.  He did so by imposing form, His principle of organization, upon the prime matter of the universe to create each and every sub-atomic particle, thus providing the universe with its primary order.

Because we know that this primary order exists, we can know God exists.  If God did not exist, then we would have to explain the order of the universe either in terms of a law of nature or as an accident.  Because a law of nature presumes order, it explains nothing.  Because an accident that all of the countless sub-atomic particles of the universe have the same properties is nigh impossible, it is profoundly deficient as an explanation even if it does not logically close out nature as fundamental to the universe.  For these reasons, we can reasonably conclude God exists because order exists.

[Note:  Click here for an extended discussion I have had with Regi Firehammer, The Automonist, and his comrades on this subject. - 5/31/07]

LIGHTING A LAMP

A fellow under the monicker of "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz" is shining a light in one of the dingy corners of the Internet.  At Joe Rowland's intellectually anemic "Rebirth of Reason" Objectivist website, Mr. Leibniz has, with great patience, been discussing Catholic theology with the village atheists there.  His expositions of the Faith are models of clarity.  Anyone with only a bit a familiarity with philosophy can follow what he has to say.  Let us hope that Mr. Leibniz has opened the minds of some of the denizens of Rowland's site to ideas that they had carelessly excluded from consideration in the past.

CLARIFYING A FEW DEFINITIONS

To make clear what I had to say in "Certainty and Objectivity" I posted "A Few Definitions".  Upon reflection I should say a little more to clarify the use of those definitions.  First, these definitions are the specific meanings of certainty, objectivity, and knowledge used in the first article.  I do not want to suggest that other uses of these words are invalid.  I simply wanted to be precise in this particular instance.  This precision helps to explain why I made no distinction in "Certainty and Objectivity" between, say, true knowledge and false knowledge.  My precise definition of knowledge therein made "true knowledge" redundant and "false knowledge" a contradiction.

Second, in "A Few Definitions" I could have done a better job of making the distinction between knowledge and belief.  What I had described as a fideistic error is a belief devoid of knowledge, although the way I put it appeared to label all beliefs as purely fideistic.  However, what I know I also believe.  Knowledge is belief even if not all belief is knowledge.  I sidewiped the fact that belief encompasses knowledge when I wrote, "[F]ew beliefs are entirely devoid of knowledge."  A bit more needed to said for the sake of clarity.  Hence today's post.  Of course, the subject of knowledge and belief merits much more attention, and so it will get it in the future.

A FEW DEFINITIONS

In the preceding article “Certainty and Objectivity” I used words that can be elastic in meaning, which isn’t helpful when precision is needed.  So let me nail down a few definitions.

Certainty:  Knowledge absent rational doubt.  Absolute certainty is not the ken of mere human beings, for it requires knowledge of every fact that touches upon the subject, which in turn requires knowledge of every fact that touches upon those facts, and so on.  In short, absolute certainty requires infinite knowledge, which is an impossibility for our finite minds.  However, we can know things with a certainty that makes anything to the contrary nonsense.  For example, I know that my mind is finite and that the universe objectively exists with such certainty.  (See below about “objectivity”.)  The term “virtual certainty” has been applied to this level of knowledge, and that strikes me as a useful epistemological term of art.  There are also scientific, mathematical, and logical certainties, such as the Earth revolves around the Sun and 2 + 2 = 4, most if not all of which are virtual certainties.

Objectivity:  The independence of existence from knowledge.  In other words, the universe and every object and occurrence within it exists whether or not I or anyone else knows it.  Bluntly, what is true is true, period.  Granted, some things occur that I cannot help but know.  For example, I have an idea.  However, the fact of that occurrence is not dependent upon anyone else’s knowledge of it, and it is still a fact that it occurred even if I later forget I ever had the idea.  Because I objectively exist, the effects of my existence also objectively exist.  So the truth is not, in any manner whatsoever, dependent upon knowledge of it.  Therefore, the objectivity of knowledge is not dependent upon its certainty.  Though it is possible to rationally doubt the knowledge of “X”, that lack of certainty does preclude the objectivity of “X”.  For example, I may lack the virtual certainty that God exists, but my knowledge that He does is no less objective.  God exists whether or not I know He does.  Conversely, certainty entails objectivity.  A certainty cannot be false.  Of course, I can be psychologically certain of a falsehood, but a false belief, no matter how dearly held, is not knowledge.  Knowledge, certain or not, is always true, and so always objective.

Knowledge:  Awareness of the truth.  We can have beliefs that are true, but they do not constitute knowledge if their foundation is fideistic rather than rational.  By rational, I mean the application of reason to the data of the senses, both internal and external.  Therefore, knowledge must be empirically grounded.  A belief is fideistic because it lacks this ground; it is the acceptance of a proposition “as-is”.  There is no awareness of the truth of the proposition.  There is only the desire that it be true.  For example, the knowledge that God exists is predicated upon observation of human nature, the human condition (i.e., the relationship of man to the universe), and the universe and the rational conclusions drawn from those facts.  A belief in God is no more than wanting Him to exist.  In this particular case, that want is wholesome.  It can drive firm belief, that psychological certainty noted above.  However, it is insufficient to produce an awareness of God.  That said, few beliefs are entirely devoid of knowledge.  For example, if I believe that God exists because my parents had told me He does, and it is my long experience that my parents have been correct in what they have taught me, then my reliance upon the authority of my parents is not without reason.  I can do better than that, but I do at least have a bit of knowledge of God.  So, when I have sound reason grounded in experience for accepting a true proposition, I have awareness of its truth however inadequate that reason and experience may be towards giving me certainty of it.  Certain or not, I have knowledge of it.

CERTAINTY AND OBJECTIVITY

I have often remarked upon our analytic penchant in the modern era to reduce things to basic elements.  We do so not without reason.  Breaking down physical objects, phenomena, and systems into their bits and pieces has yielded a great deal of knowledge about our world.  We begin to learn why the order we perceive in the universe is not illusion but real by busting matter into atoms, molecules, and cells.  With this method of reduction we have built the sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology.  This has been a boon.  We know fundamental truths about our world with a great deal more certainty than we did before the advent of modern science.

But not everything about our world is explicable through science.  Moreover, not everything in science is knowable through methods of reduction.  Even so, we are seduced by the scientific certainty that reductionism has brought forth where it has succeeded, and so we desire to use it everywhere in the quest for the truth.  Like the man with a hammer who sees everything as a nail, we of the Age of Science tend to see every problem as a subject whose components have been inadequately analyzed.  All we need to do is take that subject and break it down into its basic elements, and we will learn the solution to the problem.  That’s fine, so long as it is so reducible.

Not everything is.  The physical realm of our world – the stuff of matter and energy – is, but not the mental realm.  For instance, a person’s mind, consciousness, and will either exist or don't exist.  Either they are or aren't.  They cannot be broken down into basic bits of mentality.  They are indivisible.  They are characterized by simplicity.  Yes, they have properties, but not components.  Either they each exist as a whole or exist not at all.  Therefore, these things do not submit to reduction to obtain the certainty of analytical knowledge about them.  They are not even reducible to measurement.  There is nothing to count, weigh, or quantify.  They simply are and so knowable only in their elusive entirety.

Furthermore, the mind, consciousness, and will do not submit, as matter and energy do, to deterministic laws of nature.  In other words, even as wholes they are not reducible to their causes and effects with relationships that can be defined with the mathematical certainty of physical laws like Newton’s F = ma or Einstein’s E = mc^2.  That doesn’t mean in absence of such certainty we cannot know things about the mind from its effects, like ideas.  Indeed, what we can know, we know objectively if not certainly.  While the certain entails the objective, the converse is not true.  For this reason certainty is to be prized, but it is not always possible.  However, knowledge that is less than certain is no less objective.  In fact, even though certainty absolutely requires objectivity, objectivity is completely independent of certainty.  What is true is objectively true whether or not we are certain of it .

This is important to understand when we seek knowledge that inherently will not be certain – that is, scientifically or mathematically certain.  Only knowledge of the physical realm of our world can be so, yet the mental realm is just as fundamental to our existence.  From it flows the complex of moral principles that inform aesthetics, ethics, and politics and make possible human happiness.  No small thing in our lives.  So it is a serious error to dismiss knowledge of the mental realm as mere belief, opinion, or superstition – that is, unobjective – because that knowledge lacks the certainty of science.  We must not deny ourselves knowledge of the truth because it is uncertain.  Doing so takes us down the path to the subjectivist swamps of utilitarianism, skepticism, and post-modernism in which rots the fabric of tradition and custom that embody the objective principles of morality.  In that quagmire we are left with our naked self to either learn through hard experience to resist our base impulses by rediscovering those principles or drown in purposeless carnality and cant.

Likewise, it is a serious error to claim certainty of knowledge of the mental realm that is not possible.  This would seem obvious.  Nevertheless, we do it repeatedly with our modern enthusiasm for reductionism.  We inappropriately apply the analytical methods of studying the physical realm to the mental realm in the false belief that we can understand the whole from parts that do not exist.  We then proceed to build edifices of rationalism and ideology upon the fantasy foundations of those non-existent parts.  For example, Marx preached that the mind was reducible to economic calculations in the pursuit of material gain.  Upon that foundation he devised the political doctrine of communism to harness those supposed basic elements of the mind to direct people to establish a utopian society.  Of course, the mind is not just an economic calculator, which is why people did not naturally create the workers’ paradise when totalitarian dictators put communism into action.  Instead they died.

So it serves us well to not confuse certainty with objectivity and to value objectivity even when certainty is not possible.  Some may not care for the humility before the truth that this understanding of knowledge cultivates, but it is good to keep in mind the paradox of this humility.  Knowing that the human mind is finite and so what one can know with certainty is limited is itself a profound piece of certain knowledge that enables one to understand more.

THE MYSTERY OF THE INCARNATION

Over the past few days I have been participating in an interesting conversation with Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, and others about God's incarnation as Jesus Christ.  Specifically, the Maverick raised the issue of whether or not there is a contradiction in Christ being a person who is both mortal and immortal.

Christian, in particular Catholic, teaching is that the Incarnation is a mystery.  In other words, full knowledge of the Incarnation is beyond human reason, so belief in its truth ultimately requires faith.  However, for a mystery to theologically pass muster, it cannot be refuted by reason.  Hence, the Maverick's query as to whether the mystery of the Incarnation embodies a logical contradiction.

Your humble correspondent has argued that Christ is a divine person -- i.e., God -- who had appeared on Earth in human substance -- i.e., with a human body and soul.  So long as it is possible for God to manifest Himself with human substance, there is no contradiction with that substance being mortal while his divine person remains immortal.

Check out both the Maverick's articles on this topic and the comments following them here, here, and here.

THE MONSTER'S HIRELING

Last week Judith Regan of ReganBooks, a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers, defended her decision to publish O.J. Simpson's book If I Did It, an account of his brutal murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, under the gimmick that it is only a hypothetical account of how it would have happened if he had done it.  Regan said that we all should be glad that she got Simpson to finally confess to the murders.

Well, sure, a confession from Simpson would be good.  However, he doesn't do that in If I Did It.  Indeed, the conceit of the book is that he didn't do it.  Granted, no one is falling for this ruse, but then no one but the willfully ignorant has doubted Simpson's guilt.  So Regan's publication of If I Did It does not advance the truth at all.  And even if Regan successfully persuades a lot of people to suspend disbelief and accept this book as a genuine confession from Simpson, it is morally void as it is unaccompanied by his repentance.

So this whole venture is nothing but a money grab.  The monster Simpson will have profited from his evil deeds, and so will his hirelings Regan and the other bottom-feeders in the media who are promoting his piece of garbage.

MILTON FRIEDMAN, R.I.P.

Milton Friedman, world re