Vulcan's Mercy

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 renowned economist and staunch advocate of the free market, died yesterday at the age of 94.  Although I got my first introduction to capitalism as something other than a plutocracy exploiting the downtrodden from Ayn Rand in the late '70s, I acquired a rigorous understanding of economics, hence why capitalism is what happens when people can freely exchange goods and services, from Friedman.  That started with the book he wrote in 1980 with his wife Rose, Free to Choose.  I even mastered his Monetary History of the United States to obtain a sound concept of money, inflation, deflation, and the folly of central banking.  Indeed, my long years in business have only confirmed Friedman's monetarist theory.  I learned a great deal from the man.  At the moment of passing, it is appropriate that I acknowledge my debt to him.

THE DANGERS OF APPETITE

Yesterday I rambled long in "The Inauthenticity of Authenticity" about the postmodernist embrace of appetite and impulse as the path of self-discovery that is in fact the route to self-destruction.  David Klinghoffer in a recent "National Review" article touches upon my theme, but, among other useful insights, frames it more as a perennial struggle of man to transcend his animal nature to become fully human as God intended him to be.  Quite true, as I will later explain how the postmodern man's virtue of authenticity is related to Original Sin.

DARWINIST DEAD ENDS

The Maverick Philosopher has a good critique of the primary argument that Richard Dawkins makes against theism in his new book The God Delusion.  Check it out here.  Meanwhile the Real Physicist reports back from a conference of the American Maritain Association at which such notable speakers as Father Edward Oakes and molecular biologist Michael Behe discussed whether or not Darwinist doctrine has been propounded to deny the existence of God.  Check that out here.  And today the Discovery Institute posted a "Human Events" article by John West about the academy's hostility to any challenge of Darwinist orthodoxy and the timidity of those who should be pressing for open scientific inquiry.  Click here for that.  As for the most recent thoughts of yours truly about Darwinism, go here.

THE INAUTHENTICITY OF AUTHENTICITY

In the preceding article I wrote how people who pledge themselves to a standard of conduct are commonly and erroneously derided as hypocrites when they, being all too human, inevitably fail to meet that standard.  This misconception of hypocrisy not only drains it of meaning as a gratuitous entailment of any wrongdoing by people who are otherwise striving to live decently, but perverts the charge of hypocrisy into an assault upon the very idea of moral standards.  This is because hypocrisy has been deformed from a vice against integrity into a vice against authenticity, the cardinal virtue of our postmodern culture.  So let’s examine this virtue of authenticity and the antinomian creed behind it.

The postmodern man is antinomian, regarding no beliefs, principles, or standards as privileged over any others.  The idea of objective standards of morality is offensive to him, for he knows that all such standards are in fact nothing more than arbitrary social constructs designed to empower one person over another.  Hence, to illustrate one example, the postmodern phenomenon of feminism, an ideology dedicated to breaking the patriarchal chains of custom and tradition that enslave women to men.  That some of those customs and traditions may embody generations of accumulated wisdom about the complementarity of the sexes for the betterment of both is absurd to the feminists and their postmodern cohorts.

In this and many other ways, the postmodernists deny the universality of human nature and the human condition.  They deny the commonality of our form, our purpose, and our experience of the world around us.  For them there are no standards of conduct, decency, or morality applicable to all of us.  The only truth is the self, which can be true only to itself.  Therefore, out of this antinomianism arises the virtue of authenticity, the praiseworthiness of the self in pursuit of its true self.  The postmodern man enters this world in Rousseauvian splendor -- as his pure self.  However, he is soon polluted by a Eurocentric culture and the self becomes more and more encrusted with its grime.  But the corruption is not so deep that the postmodernist cannot become enlightened and cut himself loose of the arbitrary conventions of society that have repressed his expression of his true self.  He grasps the virtue of authenticity and begins his pursuit of the only truth he can know:  His true, pure, and unencumbered self.

So, what exactly is this authentic self that the mores of society, that of Western civilization in particular, have repressed?  Strip the postmodern ideologies of their rationalizations, and at bottom is the quest to unleash our carnal and visceral impulses without suffering any consequences from acting upon them.  Thus, feminists demand an unlimited abortion license so that women, like men, can sever sex from bearing children.  Gays demand the facsimile of marriage so that homosexual relationships are not just tolerated by society but given the stamp of approval.  Libertines demand the approbation of gratifying appetite as the highest good.  Civil libertarians demand absolutism not only in freedom of speech but also of conduct so that no form of expression, however vulgar, obscene, or profane endures any restraint.  Welfare statists demand the transfer of wealth from the productive to the unproductive so that no manner of living, however dysfunctional, is stymied by a lack of means to sustain it.  Multiculturalists demand no adverse judgment of street thugs, illegal aliens, and Gitmo detainees whose lawlessness is justified by our alleged oppression of them.  And we have yielded to the demands of the postmodernists.  We have done so, because we have uncritically accepted their claim that the authentic self is the true self.

But is that so?  No.  If it were, we would have to come to grips with the fact that a human being is a very ugly thing.  After all, we have loosed the postmodernists from our allegedly arbitrary conventions of social intercourse and let them indulge their carnal and visceral impulses for a generation now.  We have even joined them to a greater or lesser extent.  Yet, in all this celebration of authenticity, where is the beauty that the pursuit of the truth, therefore the good, should have discovered?  Nowhere, because there is none to be found by reducing ourselves to our “authentic” selves.  Strip us of our garments of rationality, decency, and morality, our garbs of civilization, we are grotesque creatures, mere beasts, clever enough to know how to indulge our appetites and impulses but lacking in the will to free ourselves from them.

The postmodernist virtue of authenticity is a falsehood.  That is because the so-called authentic self in not the true self.  A human being is more than his raw urges.  Even though he is born into this world as a clever beast ruled by his appetites and impulses, he possesses the reason that enables him to learn of the good that can come of refusing to gratify his urges today in order to work towards a desire that can only be satisfied tomorrow – and the will to do just that.  What he learns is the moral code requisite to creation.  By conforming to the objective standards of morality necessary to repress his raw urges and then direct himself to engage in the work of creation does a person become more than a clever beast.  Only as a creator can a person become fully human.  And it is this human self, once achieved, that is the true self.

Therefore, the human self does not exist except as a moral being.  It is that moral being, who chooses to repress the appetites and impulses of the “authentic” self that at best distract him from the work of creation and at worst lead him to destruction, that constitutes the complete self and so the true self.  An example of this is Mel Gibson and his recent drunk driving arrest.  Obviously intoxicated, he hurled anti-Semitic slurs at the police officers detaining him.  Many made the argument that in doing so Gibson revealed his true self as a bigot, for in vino veritas.  No doubt that in his drunken state, Gibson did reveal something true about himself.  He has some ugly ideas.  Yet, it is also true that when he is in full possession of his faculties, he represses this ugliness embedded in his “authentic” self and conducts himself honorably in regard to Jews.  Because a person’s will is a key component of his self, how he exercises that will is a better indicator of his true self than when he has lost control to his impulses.  It is a person’s moral standards that determine how he will exercise his will, and so only by taking account of a person as moral being can we understand his true self.

The authentic self, the clever beast shorn of its civilization, as the true self is a postmodern canard.  It is an inauthentic caricature of human nature.  By enshrining it as the only truth, it isolates a person by denying his commonality with his fellow man.  By giving rein to his appetites and impulses, he is enslaved by them.  By invalidating all objective standards of morality, he loses the only means to emancipate himself.  Thus, the postmodern virtue of authenticity is a black hole for the human soul.

THE RESCUE OF HYPOCRISY

I like words to be useful, so I've been long wary of the reduction of hypocrisy into meaninglessness by charging as a hypocrite everyone who fails to adhere to a moral standard he advocates.  That charge has the effect of making hypocrisy a wrong collateral to every instance of wrongdoing by a person who professes that the good life is a morally decent life.  Because no one is perfect, then by definition that charge makes every morally decent person a hypocrite.  If so, then hypocrisy becomes a muddy word blurring any useful distinctions, except perversely for the postmodern antinomians who despise all moral standards except their cardinal virtue of authenticity against which hypocrisy denotes the gravest vice.

Indeed, the widespread misuse of the word hypocrisy in general discourse these days is part and parcel of our unreflective, though probably not deeply held, acceptance of the antinomian's virtue of authenticity.  A common example of this is the disdain for etiquette as a masquerade that represses a person's true feelings.  After more than three decades recording the folly of the let-it-all-hang-out hippie culture, it still surprises me how many parents refuse to teach their children to say "thank you" unless the little monsters genuinely feel grateful for what they have received.  This, of course, misses the point of etiquette.  It is a set of manners precisely designed to give our actions the form of courtesy to others whether or not we feel courteous, because we are supposed to value benevolence to others more than giving rein to the impulses of our "authentic" selves.  Yet, too many of us dispense with the standards of etiquette as the hypocritical sin of repressing authenticity.

So, maybe I should make a stronger statement about our present common usage of hypocrisy.  It goes beyond misuse to abuse of the word, because so many of us have bought into the virtue of authenticity.  No doubt most of us haven't staked too much on this false virtue, because the realities of social intercourse do not let us forego the acknowledgment of moral standards entirely.  Nevertheless, the abuse of the word hypocrisy in praise of authenticity, however faint, remains a perversion that obfuscates moral knowledge and impedes acting in accord with it.  That is why we need to rescue hypocrisy.

To this end, Robert Miller has written a fine essay in "First Things" last Friday about the fall of evangelical pastor Ted Haggard from his pulpit.  He fights the good fight to rescue the word hypocrisy from its abuse as a sword against norms of decency to return it to its proper function as a shield in defense of those norms.  Miller does more than revitalize the word in terms of the old chestnut, "Hypocrisy is the praise that vice pays virtue."  He effectively demonstrates the gravity of the true hypocrite's sin by illustrating how it is not automatically entailed in every wrong a person does against the standards he voices but instead is a willful and scandalous lie mocking morality.  Read Miller's essay to understand how Haggard is not hypocrite.  Then consider how, ironically, those who gleefully charge him with hypocrisy are themselves guilty of it -- in the rescued sense of the word.

PRAYER OF THE CONFIRMED

God our Father, You have marked us with Your sign.

Christ our Lord, You have confirmed us
Infusing our hearts with the Holy Spirit
To witness the faith in word and in deed.

Let us guard the gift of confirmation
With the power to confess the name of Christ boldly
And the love to never be ashamed of the Cross.

Jesus has told us, “Have good heart; be not afraid.”

Faith can be hard, because we fear our doubts,
We fear rejection, and we fear the spite of others,
So we sometimes lack the courage to profess our faith.

Lord, renew our hearts where the Holy Spirit dwells
To embolden us, to conquer our fears, and to free us
To live in faith as the Father has created us to do.

THE NATURALIST'S ALCHEMY OF THE SOUL

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, posted a short piece yesterday about the folly of substituting a belief in Man for a belief in God.  As the pithy one put it, "[T]he conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid."

I always understood the evil of oppression, but it wasn't until after the fall of the Berlin Wall I began to grasp the horror of utopian projects.  Not just the communist and fascist projects of the collectivists, but also the anarcho-capitalist and secularist projects of the individualists.  They are all predicated upon an impossibility, the perfectibility of human nature.  They all pursue the same delusion, heaven on Earth.  And they all come to the same wretched end as the believers in Man gain the power to hammer the square pegs of humanity into the round holes of a false paradise.

It was at this point I got a glimpse of the wisdom of the Scriptures.  The grace of God touched my reason.  Slowly I saw more and more of the wonder of His creation as I tore away at the blinkers of naturalism that I had firmly affixed to myself.  As a creature who is in part flesh and blood, I understand that I will not ever be completely free of those blinkers in this life.  But I do know that a belief in Man shackles a person to his sins and blinds him to the hope of release that is knowable only through a belief in God.

To escape the despair of his shackles, the believer in Man begins to rationalize his sins away.  He practices an alchemy of the soul to transmute his vices into virtues.  He persuades himself that the transmutation has succeeded by clutching ever more tightly to the philosopher's stone of naturalism.  His faith in Man will not be shaken despite the plain evidence all around him refuting it.  Thus, he keeps his mind behind the wall of a false paradise lest the reality of his shackles intrudes into his awareness.

The irony, of which the believer in Man is oblivious, is that his false paradise is in fact the weight of his shackles grown even heavier.  Their burden will destroy him, unless he finally sees them for what they are.  Only then can he grasp that the philosopher's stone of naturalism, like the mercury used by the alchemists of matter, is a poison that weakens him under the weight of his shackles.  Abstaining from the poison perhaps his mind clears a bit, and he considers what he refused to consider before.  Maybe he allows God's grace to touch his reason.  Then, for the first time in his life, he tastes the freedom that comes of knowing that God alone can and will unshackle him -- if he asks to be released.

This, as a believer in God who was once a believer in Man, I know to be true.

WHEN SCIENCE IS NOT SCIENCE

My wife Bridget and I run a newsite called “The Local Area Watch”.  We provide news and commentary on matters in the Grand Rapids area that the local mainstream media ignores.  A few weeks ago we reported that the Michigan state board of education made a ruling that public schools must not only teach Darwinism in biology classes but that they must teach it as the scientific theory of evolution to the exclusion of all other explanations of how life evolved on Earth.

Young Earthers, Darwinists, and Lysenkoists

We objected to the state school board decision.  We did not oppose their restriction of biology curriculum to established scientific knowledge.  In fact, that makes sense.  There are a lot of strange ideas out there about evolution, starting with the “young Earth” creationists who misread the sacred writings of Genesis as a science text.  They confuse the infallibility of Scripture with literalism and end up with ideas about the paleontology of our planet that are flatly contradicted by the facts of geology and astronomy.  This sort of creationism is not science and has no place in biology instruction.

By the same token, neither does Darwinism.  The state school board’s ukase that Darwinism is not only science, but so well established as science that it constitutes the theory of evolution, is a profound error – and not an innocent one at that.  Their decision was explicitly designed to preclude any mention of Intelligent Design as a possible explanation for the origin and evolution of life.  No doubt the political motivation for this was a weak-kneed reaction to the notorious Kitzmiller decision late last year when a federal judge in Pennsylvania outlawed the instruction of Intelligent Design in public schools.  Whatever one thinks of the merits of Intelligent Design, the ruling should concern all friends of liberty.  First, the judge abused his federal authority to interfere with what is properly a local matter.  Second, his mandate as to what the government will permit to be discussed as science in the public square, in this case a public school classroom, stinks of Lysenkoism.  So, the Michigan state board of education pre-emptively surrendered to the federal judiciary and enshrined Darwinism as the one and only scientific explanation of evolution.

An Epistemology of Science

However, Darwinism doesn’t hack it as science – at least not as a scientific theory of evolution.  Scientific knowledge consists of facts and explanations of the facts.  Those explanations are constrained to what is quantifiable, which distinguishes scientific knowledge from aesthetic knowledge.  (For more on that, click here and here.)  Furthermore, not all scientific explanations are equal.  They are categorized by level of certainty, namely:  Theory, hypothesis, conjecture, and speculation.  A theory is the most certain explanation science has for a given set of facts.  It is an explanation verified by irrefutable observation (of which, experimentation is a highly controlled form of observation).  Einstein’s theory of general relativity is a good example.

A hypothesis is a proposed theory for which verification is, in principle, possible but not yet accomplished.  The Big Bang explanation for our universe is a hypothesis in this sense.  Astronomers and physicists have yet to make all of the necessary observations to verify the Big Bang, but have a clear idea of the further observations required to elevate it to a theory.  Then there is conjecture.  This is an explanation based upon some evidence that can be expressed in terms of falsifiable statements, but lacks any clear means of verifying those statements.  So-called string theory is conjecture.  It offers a fascinating account of what the basic constituents of the universe may be, but there is presently no practical way of testing it.  Finally, there is speculation, which puts forth an explanation uncontradicted by fact but lacking any evidence.  The multiverse concept is an example of speculation about the origin of our universe.

Evolution is Science, Darwinism is Not

So, how does Darwinism fit into this scheme?  Obviously it is not a set of facts.  It is an explanation of facts, specifically the fossil record and the biology of life now present on Earth.  That brings us to what sort of explanation Darwinism is for these facts.  First we need to define evolution.  It is the hypothesis that explains the fossil record and the present forms of life as an unbroken chain of generations which over time changed from simple single-celled creatures into the complex flora and fauna that now populate the biosphere.  Thus, evolution is, in a phrase, common descent with modification.  It is contrasted with serial independent origins of life in which no common ancestor exists for all creatures, past and present, on Earth.  Charles Darwin was one of the first to put forth evolution as an explanation for the fossil record and the present forms of life.  While a sound hypothesis, evolution does not rank as a theory because of the lack of sufficient observation, in either the fossil record or present forms of life, to verify that one species can evolve into another.

Therefore evolution, properly understood, is not controversial.  It is solid science, and there is no good reason why common descent with modification should not be taught in a biology class.  However, Darwin and his successors have made additional claims about evolution to bolster an a priori philosophical naturalism that precludes all supernatural explanation for the existence of life and its multitude of forms over the ages.  By smuggling into these claims a naturalistic metaphysical assumption, the Darwinists depart from science with their account of evolution.  Thus, the restricted claims of evolution keep it within the scope of science, whereas the broad claims of Darwinism boot it into the precincts of philosophy.  To wit, the claims of Darwinism are:  [1] The chemical origin of life (i.e., non-life begat life), [2] generation of all life from that first life down to the present (i.e., common descent), [3] modification of the forms of life during that descent (i.e., speciation), and [4] natural selection as the mechanism of speciation (i.e., survival of the fittest through random mutations).  Evolutionary biologists hotly dispute the details of speciation and natural selection, but these four claims remain the basic principles of Darwinism.

Darwinism is Philosophy

Together these claims go beyond the hypothesis of common descent with modification to state how that occurred.  To that extent, the first claim, the chemical origin of life, is gratuitous.  Furthermore, it is rank speculation for which absolutely no evidence exists and increasingly severe challenges against it do, such as William Dembski’s concept of specified complexity and Michael Behe’s application of that to microbiology called irreducible complexity.  This claim is a part of Darwinism only because of the Darwinists’ prior commitment to philosophical naturalism.  At this point, nothing is known in terms of science about the origin of life, other than it appears to have happened only once, to make the subject part of a public school biology curriculum.

The second and third claims of Darwinism are sound as science for the reasons stated previously.  The problem comes not when Darwinists simply state that common descent and speciation happened, as evidenced by the fossil record and the present forms of life on Earth, but go further afield to state how it happened.  That brings us to the fourth claim of Darwinism, natural selection or any of the permutations of that concept that have developed over the years.  Fundamentally Darwinists claim that speciation was driven by blind forces acting upon random mutations in one generation of life to the next to eliminate some mutated creatures and to favor the survival of others.  In terms of philosophical naturalism, that is an appealing explanation for the mechanism of evolution.  However, in terms of science, it is nothing but a conjecture.  Evidence does exist that is consistent with natural selection.  We observe small-scale changes in real time in species that currently exist.  But we have no scientific basis for extrapolating these observations as proof that small-scale changes result in large-scale speciation.  There is a complete disconnect between the observation of molecular biological phenomena in present species that account for small-scale changes (i.e., microevolution) and the observation in the fossil record of large-scale changes in anatomy marking the extinction of old species and the advent of new ones (i.e., macroevolution).  In short, we cannot verify natural selection by scaling up changes in the chemistry of life into changes of anatomy that define new species.

When Science is Not Science

Consequently, the Michigan state board of education was flat-out wrong to dictate that all biology instruction in public schools must teach natural selection (and its variants) as the one and only mechanism of evolution.  Science has not established it as such.  Natural selection, along with other competing explanations including Intelligent Design, is only conjecture.  It is certainly not the theory of evolution, which itself is only a hypothesis explaining the fossil record.  To demand that the key claim of Darwinism, natural selection, be taught as the truth is to demand acceptance of the metaphysical assumption underlying it.  That assumption is naturalism, which by definition precludes the supernatural from any explanation of our universe, the existence of life, and the nature of man as a rational being.  This, of course, is squarely at odds with orthodox Christian and Jewish belief (and that of other religions too).

The government assaults religion when it mandates instruction in naturalistic beliefs as the truth.  It does so perniciously when it allows naturalistic beliefs to masquerade as the objective knowledge of science.  It erodes our liberty with a perverse establishment of an anti-religion by prohibiting any discussion in the public square of the classroom that is contrary to naturalistic beliefs.  Such is the rotten fruit of science that is not science.

REAL PHYSICS

Today I found Lawrence Gage's blog called "Real Physics".  (Hat tip to the folks at Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex.)  His introductory piece explains the title with an excellent short essay on the incompleteness of science to explain reality.  The Real Physicist notes how the scientific method has been a very successful means of gaining knowledge of those aspects of reality that are quantifiable.  He then explains that not all that is real is reducible to measurement.  Beyond quantity there is quality, and quality is as objectively real as quantity even if it cannot be comprehended with the same certainty.  By failing to understand the reality of quality, he warns how we risk stripping ourselves of our human dignity.  This idea, well expressed by the Real Physicist, is what I was stumbling around with recently in making the distinction between scientific and aesthetic knowledge.  So check out his blog.  Well worth the visit.