Generations of biology students have been taught that life originated in a primordial soup of simple organic molecules that gradually combined to form amino acids, nucleic acids and ultimately proteins and DNA. The exact pathway for this miracle was never very clear which may have been because it turns out that it probably didn't happen that way in the first place.

Based on new research reported in Science Daily researchers inform us that we must now throw out the primordial soup and look instead to chemical reactions occurring around hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans for the conditions under which the first life was spawned:

Well, maybe so, but isn't it a bit disconcerting that just about everything that scientists have told us over the years about evolution turns out to be either untrue or questionable? Everything from the importance of natural selection and genetic mutation, to Haeckel's phylogenetic law, to the proof provided by finch beaks and peppered moths, to the crucial importance of the gene, to the junkiness of junk DNA, to the primordial soup, to who knows what next. The only belief about evolution that's remained undiminished over the decades is the dogmatic certainty that it happened, even though at the rate we're going everything we believe about it will be proven wrong by 2020.

This is not to say that organisms haven't evolved or that life didn't begin in some warm little vent. Rather it's to say that the details of evolutionary theory are a lot less settled than the confident pronouncements of the theory's advocates would have us think. And if the premises of an argument are uncertain how can anyone be expected to have any confidence that the conclusion is assured?

RLC

The Wall Street Journal features a column by Mackubin Thomas Owens in which he makes a case against rescinding the ban on open homosexuals in the military. At one point in his column he writes:

President Obama has promised on numerous occasions that he will work with Congress to overturn the ban and the media and gay organizations are holding him to that promise. Congress, though, has to pass the legislation and it's not clear what they're hearing from their constituents. Nevertheless, they'd do well to keep in mind Owens' concluding paragraph:

Congress should think long and hard about the effects overturning the ban would have on unit cohesion and the ability of our military to carry out its mission as effectively and as efficiently as possible. That should be the overriding consideration. The decision should certainly not be based on considerations of political correctness, sociological fashion, or "equal opportunity."

RLC

Democrats, the WaPo's Charles Krauthammer observes, analyze their dismal performance in recent elections in the light of two guiding axioms:

Krauthammer goes on to put flesh on these presuppositional bones and shows, in so doing, that Democrats seem to be completely wanting in the ability to see in themselves the faults they discern so clearly in others. He writes, for instance, that:

The whole op-ed is worth reading, but let's tarry for a moment over the main implication of his column: Democrats are becoming increasingly divorced from reality. They'd sooner demonize their political opponents and disparage the intellectual abilities of the voters than to contemplate the possibility that maybe there's something wrong with themselves.

When Scott Brown won in Massachusetts Democrat spokespersons were all over the airwaves claiming with straight faces and apparent sincerity that this should be seen as a signal to Democrats to put the public option back in health care reform. Brown's election against a Democrat progressive candidate was interpreted, with an astonishing indifference to common sense, as a protest against the Democrats for being too timid, for not spending enough money, for not driving the deficits even higher.

President Obama, as Krauthammer points out, assures us in the wake of electoral setbacks in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Virginia that he's not an ideologue. Yet he insists that Democrats double down and get his agenda passed over the objections of the people no matter what the political cost. Isn't that exactly what an ideologue would do?

I'm reminded of Martin Luther's extraordinary affirmation of how, in his view, a Christian's faith should be impervious to evidence. He wrote that:

Substitute "progressive ideology" for "the Gospel" and Luther could have been talking about the modern Democratic party.

RLC

It's a matter of entrenched conviction, I suppose, that religion has no place in science, but I wonder how it can be possible that the two be separated. I can see how Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam or any specific religion can be denied any role in scientific theorizing and data gathering, but what I can't see is how religion simpliciter could be excluded without the whole enterprise collapsing.

When we think of religious belief we almost always think of a belief in some sort of supernatural being, but religious beliefs need not be limited to supernatural entities for at least two reasons:

First, the meaning of the word "supernatural" is unclear. Usually it's intended to refer to that which transcends the laws and boundaries of our space-time world, but consider this possibility: Suppose there are other universes besides our own with different laws and even different forms of life, including intelligent life. This is the state of affairs scientists and philosophers who embrace the multiverse hypothesis believe is the case. These universes, and their inhabitants, would fit the definition of supernatural, but would we regard belief in their existence to be a religious belief? If so, should the multiverse hypothesis be excluded from science? Most scientists would say no.

Second, according to one popular text in the philosophy of religion (Reason and Religious Belief, Peterson, et al.) a religion is a "set of beliefs, actions, and experiences, both personal and corporate, organized around the concept of an Ultimate Reality which inspires worship or total devotion."

Based on this definition, is science itself, or at least scientific naturalism, a religion? The naturalist holds that nature is the ultimate reality and certainly many scientists are totally devoted to it.

In his Myth of Religious Neutrality, philosopher Roy Clouser identifies the crucial belief characteristic of all religions. This is the belief that there is something, some entity, that does not depend upon anything else for it's existence and upon which everything else depends. This is another way of saying that there is something which possesses necessary being. For the Christian this is God, for the materialist it's matter or the laws of nature.

But if this is true then naturalism, materialism, humanism, indeed every form of atheism found among modern scientists, is, in fact, religious, and any attempt to banish religious assumptions and influence from science would be like cutting out a vital organ. It would deprive it of its meaning and possibly entail the dissolution of science altogether. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to practice a meaningful science while somehow leaving one's total devotion to whatever constitutes one's ultimate reality at the door of the lab.

Attempts to exclude religion from science are as futile as attempts to exclude ideology from politics. Religion can no more be isolated from science than it can from morality. Indeed, the demand to banish religion from science is, in reality, an attempt to banish one kind of religion, theism, while privileging materialism and shielding it from all competition.

RLC

I remember as a boy growing up in the post-WWII years that it just seemed unthinkable and impossible that the same hatreds that led to the Holocaust would ever rear their ugly head again. How wrong I was. Mark Steyn gives us a glimpse of the recrudescence of anti-semitism that's infecting much of Europe today:

He writes:

In the United Kingdom, "Record Number Of Anti-Semitic Attacks":

Of course, hatred of Jews is rife in the Muslim world, but in Europe? Why? It seems so irrational. It's as if there's something buried deep in human DNA that programs people to hate the Jews. Like a cat which can't resist attacking a dangling string, for reasons it surely doesn't understand, human beings often seem unable to resist their compulsion to hate Jews. Why is that?

It's not irrelevant, I think, that this new wave of anti-Jewish hatred seems to be occurring in the one part of the world that, more than any other, combines a well-educated public with a determinedly secular worldview. This is significant because it suggests that prejudice is not just a function of ignorance - even the educated have their hatreds. The problem is that secular man has no particular reason to stifle his animosities toward those who are different from himself. On a continent full of people who absorbed relativism with their infant formula there's no reason to think anti-semitism is actually wrong.

Only a Judeo-Christian society has the moral and theological resources to suppress the soul's darkest impulses, and although historically Christians and Jews too often failed to live up to their calling, it's nevertheless only a Judeo-Christian society in which any minority can expect to be accorded the same rights and respect everyone else has, because it's only Christians and Jews who are under a moral obligation to treat others justly.

RLC

The other day we linked to two remembrances of the late historian Howard Zinn. One was a paen to the man's benevolent influence and the other was an acerbic dismissal of Zinn as essentially a fraud. Which you think he was will depend largely on your ideological point of view, but what cannot be gainsaid is that the man exerted great influence on several generations of American students. His People's History of the United States is the most widely used history text in American public schools and colleges, having sold over two million copies.

I wanted to bring Zinn up again because I've come across a column at National Review Online which explains in more detail why conservatives see his influence as pernicious and leftists see it as salutary. Roger Kimball argues at NRO that the People's History is filled with distortions and misstatements of fact that give a very misleading impression of the history of the United States. In Kimball's words, reading People's History is like offering to take someone on a tour of Versailles but stopping at a ramshackle shed on the outskirts and saying, "See? Pretty shabby, isn't it?"

Anyway, read Kimball's essay. It's important.

RLC

The lefty blogosphere and its media arm at MSNBC were all aflutter this past week over the results of a Daily Kos poll of Republicans that finds, astonishingly, that many of them hold views that Democrats don't. This, some commenters are saying, is proof that Republicans are, by and large, crazy extremists.

Bruce Bartlett, for example, says that, "I can only conclude from this new poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans nationwide that between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid."

Chris Matthews on MSNBC calls these Republicans "lunatics" and "whack jobs."

Politico's Ben Smith writes, "A new poll from Research 2000, sponsored by DailyKos more or less with the goal of making Republicans look extreme, does a pretty good job of that."

Well, maybe, but what is it, exactly, that so many of these slobbering, lunatic extremist Republicans are believing these days? Here are the poll's results:

At the risk of being called an extremist whack job myself I have to say that I don't find these numbers all that surprising.

Progressive pundits are astonished, for example, that so many Republicans think President Obama is a socialist, but why is that surprising? What more would, say, Bernie Sanders, a real live socialist, have on his agenda were he President that Mr. Obama does not? Besides, why is it goofy to think that Mr. Obama is something that a majority of Democrats regard favorably? According to a recent Gallup poll 53% of Democrats and 61% of liberals overall have a positive opinion of socialism, so why should Democrats think it somehow weird that Republicans think Mr. Obama does, too.

The pundits are shocked that Republicans would think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be president than Mr. Obama, but that seems obvious, don't you think? Palin had administrative experience as a mayor and a governor of a state. Barack Obama brought no such experience to the White House. Unlike Mrs. Palin, he never ran a business, never met a payroll, never had to manage an administration of any sort. He never did anything that qualified him for the role he now finds himself in. He was a community organizer, a college instructor, an undistinguished state senator for a few years, and a U.S. Senator for less than two years before he began campaigning for president. What exactly was it about Mr. Obama that would lead anyone to think that he was more qualified to run the country than Governor Palin?

The pundits are dismayed that so many Republicans are unsure about where the President was born, but how can an intelligent person be anything but non-committal on the matter? No dispositive documentation of Mr. Obama's birth has been brought forward, and he refuses to allow the state of Hawaii to release the long form birth certificate that would set concerns about this matter to rest. This, despite the fact that similar questions about John McCain's status were submitted to court adjudication, and he was required to produce the necessary forms. Until Mr. Obama does likewise the most anyone can say is that they just don't know where he was born.

In any event, a couple of years back polls were showing that 61% of Democrats believed that George Bush knew ahead of time about the attacks on the World Trade Towers and nevertheless let them happen. Barack Obama even appointed a man who believed this, Van Jones, to a position in his administration. Surely, that's wackier than Republican agnosticism on Mr. Obama's place of birth.

The pundits are incredulous that so many Republicans would think that ACORN stole the last election, and, of course, that does seem a little paranoid. It also shows a failure on the part of the surveyed Republicans to draw the fine distinction between actually stealing the election and merely trying to steal the election.

The pundits are also outraged that so many Republicans think Mr. Obama wants the terrorists to win, and here I sympathize with the pundits, but, on the other hand, the numbers may reflect exasperation with the fact that Mr. Obama throughout his younger years hobnobbed socially with terrorists and seems of late to have made some very dubious decisions concerning how captured terrorists should be handled. This, of course, does not warrant saying he wants terrorists "to win," but those who say they believe he does may simply be venting their frustration with what many believe to be the President's poor judgment on the terrorism issue.

Finally, the pundits are angry that so many Republicans want President Obama to be impeached. I wonder if those who find this absurd were similarly angered by the incessant calls for the impeachment of President Bush, even from the highest echelons of the Democratic party. I doubt it.

In any event, impeachment is entirely inappropriate unless the President has been found to be engaging in illegal activity. Mr. Obama may be in over his head, but that's not yet illegal.

RLC

I suppose anyone can mispronounce a word, and I only allude to the President's gaffe at a speech at the Prayer Breakfast not to nit-pick over his lack of familiarity with the word but to ask a serious question: How much sneering and derision would George Bush or Sarah Palin have had to endure had either of them pronounced "corpsman" as "corpseman," not once but three times, and how much do you suppose Mr. Obama will have to endure? Probably about the same amount as he was forced to absorb for his claim to have campaigned in "57 states with one left to go."

What's that you say? You never heard him say that? Well, you've just made my point:

I wonder if the news and entertainment media don't sometimes think that it's just a teensy bit unfair of them to laugh uproariously at Palin and Bush as though they're complete dolts while giving Obama a pass on the not infrequent occasions when he makes his educational attainments seem somewhat overrated.

RLC

I love Sarah Palin, but I'm afraid she's may be starting to sound like a politically correct speech nazi. I understand why she would not appreciate the way people use the word "retard" or "retarded," and I agree with her that "crude and demeaning name calling at the expense of others is disrespectful." I would add that it's also often cruel, but once we start calling for public figures to be fired for using such language where does it end?

Will the use, or misuse, of words like "moron," "idiot," and "imbecile" and all their permutations be the next reason to cashier someone? What about words like "crazy," "insane," and "nuts" which also describe mental disabilities? How about "lunacy" and "lunatic" and probably dozens of others we could think of?

It reminds me a little of the Newspeak in Orwell's 1984 where the language was pared down to the absolute minimum number of words needed to communicate. Orwell said of Newspeak that it was "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." One of his characters, a man named Syme, says admiringly of the shrinking volume of the Newspeak dictionary: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

Despite her personal hurt when she hears people use the word "retarded" as an insult she really needs to ask herself where the logic of her position will take us should we start heaping social opprobrium on anyone who uses words we don't like in ways we think are rude. Better, says I, to simply point out the person's shameful lack of character and class and let it go at that.

For the record, I do think it was tasteless and vulgar of Rahm Emanuel to use the word in the context he did, just as I think it's usually tasteless and vulgar to use the "n-word" and the "f-word." Even more, it's often, depending on the context, moronic.

RLC

My friend Mike comments that he recently read a quote by physicist Stephen Barr in response to Darwinians like Richard Dawkins who think that because Darwinism can explain (they believe) how things like an eye evolved that they have thus refuted the argument from design. You may recall that William Paley back in 1802 suggested that the existence of a complex device like a watch implies an intelligent watchmaker and that, by analogy, a complex device like an eye also implies an intelligent artisan.

Not so fast, says Dawkins. The processes of chemistry and physics and natural selection and genetic mutation can cooperate to produce an eye. These are, in Dawkins' famous phrase, a blind watchmaker.

Barr observes:

Quite so. Dawkins thinks he refutes Paley by pointing out that there's a fully automated watch factory (the world) that churns out watches so we need not seek an intelligent explanation for the watch. As Barr notes, however, it's at least as difficult to imagine how such a factory, capable of producing information-rich artifacts, could have sprung up as it is to imagine how a watch could have arisen by chance.

Philosopher Angus Menuge uses a different metaphor to make the same point. He observes that one has hardly explained the complex pattern woven into a carpet by pointing to the loom upon which the carpet was fashioned.

What critics of the design argument seem to ignore is that the fact, if it is a fact, that the universe is the sort of place that could produce complex life and biological information is a state of affairs which itself cries out for explanation. When a naturalist like Dawkins, however, is asked how such a thing can be he offers little more than a shrug of his shoulders.

RLC

Daniel Pipes argues that there's one way President Obama can rescue a presidency that looks everyday more like the swirling funnel of water about to descend down the drain. The move Pipes suggests would probably unite the country, unite Congress, and cause people to forget the bumbling, fumbling first year of Mr. Obama's term. It would also make the world a much safer place and forestall unimaginable future horrors.

Pipes advises that the President order the military to take out Iran's nuclear weapons facilities.

Will he do it? It's an order that he would seem psychologically incapable of issuing, an order that would gain him the enmity of his most ardent supporters on the left, just as LBJ gained their enmity by going into Vietnam. Yet he just might choose to do it because the alternatives of our failing to act are so unthinkable.

Read Pipes' essay to see why he thinks Obama should give the order.

RLC

The Democrats are still determined to get health care reform passed by hook or by crook, and it's not hard to understand why. If they fail to get legislation on this they're not likely to get legislation on anything else - at least nothing else that's significant. If that happens they'll go down in history as perhaps the most ineffectual custodians of power in the history of the nation, having control of the executive and, until last month, a filibuster proof majority in the Senate and a huge majority in the House and unable to do anything with it.

The problem for the Democrats is that what they want to do is make our health care system more like that of the Canadians, but those Canadians who can are fleeing their system in order to use ours, as this article at National Review Online illustrates:

If the Canadians, who theoretically have access to free care, would rather incur the expense of using our system why on earth are we trying to make our system more like theirs? Are any Democrats out there asking that question?

RLC

There's a fascinating interview with atheist writer Christopher Hitchens at The Portland Monthly. Hitchens, you will recall is the author of the book God is Not Great, an antiChristian polemic noteworthy more for its hostility toward religious faith than for its logical coherence.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the interview are the responses to Hitchens' attacks on Christian belief by the interviewer, a Unitarian minister named Marilyn Sewell. She seems to concede throughout that, well, Hitchens is right, but she's still going to be religious in some vague sense anyway, and wouldn't it just be nice if Christopher were, too.

There are several illuminating exchanges in the interview (illuminating in the sense that they show how utterly vacuous liberal Christianity can be), but this is perhaps my favorite:

Hitchens is exactly right, of course. As the interview unfolds Sewell practically trips over herself in her attempts to convince Hitchens that she's not like those benighted Christians who take the Bible seriously and who are the object of his scorn. Like someone suffering from a kind of religious Stockholm Syndrome she sounds almost desperate to gain his approval. She insists that she has no real religious beliefs except that the Bible has some good stories and hopes that she will thus find favor in Mr. Hitchens' eyes.

It'd be comical were it not so sad. One wishes that The Portland Monthly had sought the services of an interviewer more willing and able to challenge Hitchens (see here, for example) and less inclined to be obsequious.

RLC

A few weeks ago we posted a report on some amazing breakthroughs in stem cell research. Reader Kyle responds to that post with a link to an article put out by the American Association for the Advancement of Science that elaborates on this theme and catalogs some of the diseases that stem cells have the potential to meliorate or cure:

Here are some of them:

Kyle adds that:

I'm not one to gush about the future, but the current generation of twenty-somethings could well be looking at therapies that will within their lifetimes render many of today's most dread diseases as treatable as antibiotics rendered infection.

RLC

My friend Andy is a missionary in Haiti and has been sending us regular updates since the earthquake. Here's his latest:

If you'd like to help Andy meet the needs of these suffering people you can send a check to Andy Stump c/o Christ Lutheran Church, 126 West Main St., Dallastown, PA 17313. Our church sponsors his work.

RLC

The recent passing of far-left historian Howard Zinn reminded me, in a circuitous sort of way, of a piece Mary Eberstadt wrote a year ago for First Things. I thought it'd be worth sharing. The article was titled The Will to Disbelieve, a take-off on philosopher William James' famous essay The Will to Believe.

Eberstadt begins by reminding us of the willful imperviousness of the intellectual left (e.g. Zinn) to the evidence of the crimes of communism in the twentieth century and goes on to compare that will to disbelieve with the cultural elite's similar refusal to see the evidence of the tragic effects of the sexual revolution. She writes:

Eberstadt proceeds to lay out her case, a case which would seem to be obvious, to quote Pascal, to anyone who is not dead set against it. Here's part of her argument:

The whole essay is very much worth reading whether one is concerned about the consequences of the tectonic shift in our sexual morality since WWII or is interested in trying to understand how anyone could possibly have been sympathetic to twentieth century communism, or both.

RLC

Comes word that some atheists are in a snit because the U.S. Postal Service is going to put Mother Teresa on a stamp:

Well, that's true enough. What one does with one's life is often inseparable from what one most deeply believes, which is, I suppose, why there are no atheist charitable organizations to speak of. Nonetheless, it's asinine to think, as Ms. Gaylor evidently does, that because one is inspired by religious beliefs to live a life of altruism that that life should not be recognized simply because of the motives which inspired it.

Indeed, when Ms. Gaylor was asked why her organization didn't oppose stamps honoring Malcolm X and Martin Luther King she gave a very puzzling reply:

Perhaps the most gracious thing to do here would be to politely avert one's eyes from such a towering display of embarrassing fatuity. Surely Ms Gaylor doesn't intend to be taken seriously. Has she never read the Biography of Malcolm X and how his conversion to Islam shaped his subsequent life? Has she never read the writings of Martin Luther King, who, be it noted, was almost always referred to as "Reverend" King (not to mention that he carried the name of the great protestant reformer)? Is she oblivious to how both his sense of justice and his courage were rooted in his faith in God? If she hasn't, I urge her to pick up a copy of his I Have a Dream speech or his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

But the deeper question is this: Since when do church/state considerations make it somehow illicit for the government to honor people who do great things from religious motivation? Would Ms. Gaylor have opposed the issuance of the stamp in 1948 which honored the four chaplains aboard the torpedoed USAT Dorchester - one of whom was a priest and presumably bore the honorific of "Father" - who, motivated by their mutual love for God, gave their life vests to others as the boat sank?

Here's the irony in Ms. Gaylor's position, however: In a world in which people acted consistently with their assumptions about ultimate reality there's absolutely no reason an atheist would have for acting altruistically. On atheism acts of great personal sacrifice are utterly inexplicable. People may engage in them, as does Dr. Rieux in Camus' The Plague, but the choice to do so is non-rational. Atheism leads to an egoistic ethic. Great sacrifices for others are incomprehensible in a world without God. People like Mother Teresa, on the other hand, and the four chaplains were motivated by their love for, and gratitude to, God and the conviction that God wanted them to give of themselves for others whom He loves. Grant Ms. Gaylor her Godless world and all we're left with is a life in which no one has any reason to do anything other than look out for his own self-interest - a Hobbesian war of every man against every man.

The Postal Service would struggle in such a world, the world Ms Gaylor would have us live in, to find anyone worth honoring with a stamp.

RLC

Jason writes to urge readers who may have visited the links to the remembrances of Howard Zinn to be sure to check the Update at David Horowitz's site. Horowitz (and Jason) was afraid that readers might construe his contempt for Zinn's ideas as contempt for Zinn the man, and he clarifies his position at the Update.

Indeed, Howard Zinn was by all accounts a fine man.

RLC

Jon Stewart wearies of the relentless name-calling by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and does a masterful parody of Olby in this skit. This'll be especially funny for anyone who has ever watched Olbermann for more than five minutes:

An eager readiness to personally insult another individual is a good indicator of what sort of character a man has. In Olbermann's case his disagreements over politics often degenerate quickly into the vilest sort of attacks on his opponents' very humanity. Dehumanization has been Olbermann's hole card for a couple of years now, but his ratings may reflect that his viewers, all but the hardest core, perhaps, are getting tired of it. Certainly when entertainers like Jon Stewart, who are on Olbermann's side on just about every substantive policy matter, begin to ridicule his persona, it's time to rethink the persona.

After this edition of the Daily Show it'll be awfully hard for Olbermann to insult anyone without reminding his viewers how creepy and silly Stewart made him look, and when viewers start thinking of a public man as a joke he very quickly loses his ability to influence their opinions.

RLC

You've no doubt heard that President Obama has decided that trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York City was a political albatross he didn't need hanging around his neck going into the 2010 elections and has overruled his Justice department's plans for a Manhattan media spectacle. The White House insists that KSM will still be tried in civilian rather than military court although the venue has yet to be determined. Bill Burck and Dana Perino at National Review Online give eight reasons why, on the contrary, the trial will indeed be held before a military tribunal and will be held in, of all places, Guantanamo Bay.

Meanwhile, it seems likely that Attorney General Eric Holder will soon "resign" from his office. Overruling his decision to hold the trial in civilian court in NYC will surely be received by him as a slap in the face and an expression of no confidence. Indeed, the man has been a constant source of distraction and embarrassment to the Obama administration since he took over the post. Burck and Perino remind us of some of his most infelicitous decisions:

To these I would add his decision to not prosecute, against the advice of top Justice officials, the New Black Party thugs who were intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place in the 2008 election. I might also add his impolitic accusation that we are a nation of cowards about race, a claim that won him few admirers among the general public.

Eric Holder is a liability to the administration and patience with his missteps and pratfalls will, I think, soon run out. The last thing the Democrats need going into November is yet another Holderism sucking up media oxygen and forcing Democrat candidates to defend the indefensible. It certainly has been difficult for the White House to project an air of competence with Eric Holder running the Justice Department.

RLC

As if the proponents of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hadn't suffered enough damage to their credibility of late, now comes word of even more bad news. You might have heard that predictions of glacial retreat in the Himalayan mountains were based on rather tenuous evidence, and had to be retracted. Now we read a new revelation in the Telegraph U.K.

Here's the lede:

Perhaps it's time for the world's climatologists to restore some respectability to their science and explain exactly what the empirical, rather than the anecdotal, data is for man-caused global warming, and exactly how that data has been attained, and precisely how they have arrived at their conclusions.

It would also be inexcusably irresponsible of us to pass any legislation, like cap and trade, that would jeopardize our economic well-being until we know exactly what's going on in the earth's atmosphere. That the glaciers are retreating seems pretty clear - I've seen it myself in Alaska. What's not at all clear is what's causing that retreat.

I know Al Gore has said that the science is settled and the debate is over, but a student's Master's thesis and a mountaineering article are not the sort of thing most people think of when they think of settled science.

RLC

A former student, Anthony, links us to an interesting promo for a class on ethical issues related to the doing of justice. The class is being offered at Harvard by Michael Sandel, and interested readers can watch any or all of Professor Sandel's classes at the link:

It looks like this would be a very stimulating class for undergraduates, but I wonder whether Prof. Sandel ever asks his students the really important questions: Why, exactly, do they hold the opinion they do on any of the matters they discuss? What is the ground of their moral opinions? Do they have one or are their opinions purely arbitrary preferences that are no more rooted in anything than is their preference for pepsi over coke?

The fundamental ethical questions are these: Do ethical judgments stand on anything or are they simply matters of personal preference? Is there moral obligation or duty and, if so, what is it that obligates us? What is it that makes an act morally right or obligatory?

Until these questions are settled talking about what's right to do in a particular situation is like speculating about whether blue is prettier than green. It's not really worth debating. Moreover, these are questions for which naturalism, at bottom, must answer: Personal preference, No and Nothing, and Nothing. If we are, after all, simply the effluvium of blind, impersonal forces then it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that, as atheistic philosopher Michael Ruse puts it, ethics is just an illusion, an evolutionary ploy to suit us for survival in the stone age.

Remember Ruse the next time you hear an atheist or secularist make a moral judgment - for example, when they insist that we have a moral duty to help the poor. What they're telling you when they say that "X is right (or wrong)" is nothing more than "I like (or don't like) X." to which the appropriate rejoinder is, "So why should anyone care?" Ethics is pretty much literal nonsense unless there is a transcendent, personal, moral authority who serves as a source of objective moral obligation. The atheist who denies the existence of such an authority is only speaking gibberish when he proclaims that "we should do X" or that "X is a moral duty."

Hopefully, Professor Sandel points all this out to his students, but since he's at Harvard I suppose I shouldn't count on it.

RLC

Howard Zinn died last week at age 87. Most readers have probably never heard of Mr. Zinn, but he was a man of some consequence in the ideological struggles of the last half century. A historian and far-left activist he had many admirers on the left and many detractors on the right. In the wake of his passing two remembrances are worth checking out. From the left there's Bob Herbert's piece in the New York Times, and from the right there's a column written by converted radical leftist David Horowitz at Front Page Mag.

Check them out and decide for yourself whether Zinn's life and work merits praise or regret.

RLC

In the course of a review in First Things (subscription only) of Richard Dawkins' latest book theologian David B. Hart tarnishes an otherwise estimable critique with an unfortunate characterization of intelligent design (ID). He writes:

It was hard for me to get past the fact that this muddled paragraph came from the same mind which penned Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, a book I deeply admire.

Let's take Hart's assertions in order:

The best argument against ID theory, when all is said and done, is that it rests on a premise - "irreducible complexity."

This is simply false. ID rests on much more than irreducible complexity. It is based upon the concept that complex specified patterns, i.e. information, fills the biosphere and yet never have we ever seen such information generated by anything other than a mind. We've certainly never seen it produced by random natural forces. ID is also based on the exquisite fine-tuning of the forces, constants, and parameters of the universe. Dozens, perhaps more, of these had to be set to values so precise that had they deviated by, in some cases, the mass of a single atom relative to the mass of the universe, the universe would not have existed much less have given rise to life. To claim that ID rests solely on irreducible complexity is to reveal a grave lack of undertstanding of the matter about which one is writing.

[ID] can never be logically demonstrated.

This is true but what of it? Science is not about logical demonstrations, it's about coming up with the most plausible explanation for the available facts. To criticize ID because it doesn't lend itself to some sort deductive proof is, by extension, to criticize virtually the entire scientific enterprise.

[T]he mere biological complexity of this or that organism can never amount to an irrefutable proof of anything other than the incalculable complexity of that organism's phylogenetic antecedents.

Hart seems to be saying that unless a scientific theory can be proven beyond any possibility of refutation it is somehow unworthy of consideration. If this were true then all of Darwinism would have to be thrown on the scrap heap. Scientists do not seek proof, they seek explanations that account for a lot of data and which can resist falsification. Proof is left to mathematicians and logicians.

I trust that since Professor Hart's article was published in FT last month a lot of people who know better have quietly informed him that in this paragraph, at least, he dabbled in matters he would have been better advised to leave alone.

RLC