Posts filed under 'Science'
You know, so that we can, for once, tackle a non-controversial subject here at Blogs for Victory? Well, then, lets have at it with Michael Novak’s piece over at First Things:
Let’s suppose there is no God. The same evils still exist. Are atheists suggesting that the nonexistence of God and the existence of evil fit neatly together in a logical argument? That, if little children, beaten into submission, sob in the night, it is somehow a telling argument for atheism?
Christopher Hitchens has argued that before our time human beings suffered 98,000 years of disease, cataclysm, bloodshed, and famine without intervention by any Creator. If a human creator had deliberately chosen to put hundreds of millions of his fellow humans in such a parlous state, he would be regarded as a monster. It follows that if God willed that long, bleak, agonizing history, God in his omniscience and omnipotence is an even greater monster.
Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance…
…St. Thomas Aquinas posited the striking thought that for this world to be as good as it is, the existence of evil is necessary. Evil is not a “thing”—no substantial thing at all. Against the Muslims, Aquinas flatly rejected the centuries of Eastern philosophy that divided the world into good and evil, as if they were equal contestants, equally substantial and active and potent.
Not so, Aquinas reasoned. Everything that the Greatest of all Goods has created is suffused with good up to the brim of its capacity. But for the world as a whole to be good, it must be populated by the most beautiful and god-like creatures of all—creatures capable of insight and deliberate choice. It requires the liberty of human minds and wills. Only at this peak of nature can human creation be considered made in the “image of God.”
The Jewish Creator offered every woman and man in his creation his friendship, and in this way treated each as a free person, not as a slave. Such human liberty required God to create a world in which human beings can of their own deliberate choice turn away from the good. This is how Aquinas defined human sin: a considered and willful deviation from the good, an absence of the good, a deficiency.
“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time,” Thomas Jefferson wrote. The leaders of the Anglo-American Enlightenment believed that liberty was God’s underlying purpose in creating human beings, and in shaping the rest of creation accordingly. They believed that in the war between the Americans and the British in 1776, though both worshiped the same God, the God of liberty would favor those who fought for freedom, not against it.
A world in which liberty can flower must be a world of laws, regularities, and probabilities, but also a world of contingency, happenstance, serendipity, surprise, and suspense. All the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and “blooming, buzzing profusion.”
Even the “angelic” light of advanced mathematics (so highly abstract and removed from corporeality) must in a world of liberty be constituted not only by arithmetic, geometry, and deductive reasoning, but also by the statistically random.
In such a world, there cannot be human freedom without the possibility of falling away from the good.
C.S. Lewis observed that God made a world in which the wood from a tree could be used to build a house - or to make a club. Now, God could have set things up so that as soon as someone made a club the material would transform into something which could do no harm…but that, of course, would be to deny us our choice. If we can’t choose to do wrong, then we have no choice at all, and God wants our choice to be voluntary. He’ll take us in if we choose him, and he’ll ratify our choice if we reject him. To say that because there is evil in the world there must be no God is to presume that the only good world is a world in which we’re all automatons doing what we’re programmed to do. As to why God made us this way rather than another way - well, he says it is good, and I’m not going to gainsay God.
To me, the logic of there being a God (outside of the unanswerable argument of there necessarily being a First Cause) rests upon the fact that I can think - that I can reason. No amount of materialist evolution would ever come up with an evolutionary product which could refuse its office. We can choose - we can decide to this, or decide to do that. And while we know what our brain is and a great deal of how it works, we haven’t the foggiest notion or what our mind is or how a thought is generated. You can tell what parts of my brain are working when I think of, say, the football game - but you can’t in the trial of a thousand years figure out why I think the Chargers are better than the Patriots, last year’s records be darned. Itis mind which doesn’t fit into the natural world - and so, in my view, mind must come from outside the natural world (as a side note, I recently read an interesting question: The Universe is expanding. What is it expanding in to?…if the universe is complete and yet growing larger, there must be something outside the universe, greater than it, which allows the universe to grow larger).
Take a First Cause and add a Mind, and what you get is a God who not only creates, but who can act in his creation..alter it and move it towards the goals he designed from the start. While such a belief does not, in and of itself, verify my Christian faith, it does leave aside any thought that we are either the result of random chance, or the result of an uncaring Creator.
Tags: creation, Evolution, Philosophy of Life
July 30th, 2008
From NRO’s The Corner:
A friend on the Hill writes:
Today marked a new low for the way congressional Democrats deal with national security. This morning, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a joint hearing on a “National Intelligence Assessment” on global climate change. This analysis was ordered by the Democratic Congress last year and was issued a few weeks ago. Some highlights (or low-lights) from the hearing:
1) In response to a question by Global Warming Committee member Greg Walden (R-OR), the Intelligence Community admitted they had “low to medium confidence” in the accuracy of this estimate because intelligence officers lack the expertise to write such an estimate (it was mostly contracted out to other organizations) and climate change science is so uncertain. As Walden started to ask about why an analysis of such low reliability was issued, Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA), the Global Warming Committee Chairman, cut him off and told him he was out of time even though Markey let all the previous Democrats speak substantially past their time limits.
2) Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Peter asked what intelligence was used for this estimate and whether intelligence collection requirements were prepared. National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar said no clandestine intelligence was used and that intelligence officers extrapolated what would happen if the “mid-level estimates” by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were correct. When Hoekstra asked why the U.S. Intelligence Community would write an major analysis of low to medium confidence that contained no intelligence, Fingar answered, “because you [Congress] told us to.”
3) Hoekstra noted that intelligence assessments of high confidence have proven to be wrong and he wondered why an intelligence assessment of low to medium confidence would even be published. In an attempt to dispel the debate over confidence, Intelligence Committee member Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) responded by noting that the 2002 Iraq WMD NIE had high confidence in its findings. Some Republicans thought Rep. Eshoo’s statement actually made their case about the futility of issuing an intelligence assessment that intelligence officers cannot fully back.
If Obama gets in, we can expect mountains of nonsense like this - a whole slew of laws, hearings, regulations and campaigns which sound like they’re about something, but are really about liberals burnishing their own self-image. One of the many problems with liberals is that their ranks are heavily laced with bureaucrats, lawyers, judges, activists, community organizers…people who, in short, don’t actually do anything in the sense of actually producing an end product usable by Joe Average. Of course there is an intelligence estimate on global warming…because it is the biggest threat we face, and we’re going to really go after it, including the CIA! And liberals who thought this up will pat themselves on the back and thing they’ve done something - just as they do after they recycle, or vote for a guy who will increase government spending.
The irrationality here is astounding, but not actually surprising - given that the Democrats (who absurdly call themselves “the reality based community” on the strength of their rejection of Christian teaching on abortion and sexuality) have cut themselves off from the source of reason and are adrift on a sea of inconsequential, mental cobweb spinning. The more one thinks about it, the more silly the whole concept of allowing a Democrat to run the show becomes - they just don’t have what it takes to run a government…heck, they don’t have what it takes to run a boy scout troop (that does take some personal responsibility, ya know?).
Tags: Climate Change, global warming, liberal lies
June 26th, 2008
After years of propaganda even more relentless than that we’ve had in the United States, turns out that most Brits still doubt the enviro-whacko global warming narrative:
Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that ‘many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change’, and that four out of 10 ’sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say’. In both cases, another 20 per cent were not convinced either way. Despite this, three quarters still professed to be concerned about climate change.
Those most worried were more likely to have a degree, be in social classes A or B, have a higher income, said Phil Downing, Ipsos MORI’s head of environmental research.
‘People are broadly concerned, but not entirely convinced,’ said Downing. ‘Despite many attempts to broaden the environment movement, it doesn’t seem to have become fully embedded as a mainstream concern,’ he said.
The common sense of the average person just doesn’t swallow this sort of nonsense - as Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. Average temperaturs - as far as we know, and to call our data “incomplete” is to over-state our knowledge - have rise, but over the past 10 years they’ve been stable, which is something absolutely impossible if the anthropogenic global warming theory is correct. And yet there go the environmentalists and various cheerleaders saying it is real and we must act fast. Its gotten so bad that even President Bush and John McCain have signed off on this, though I wonder if part of the motivation for this would be a desire to get past an un-winnable debate (we long ago lost the global warming debates to the enviro-whackos - only time and the actual fact that we don’t all die will prove them wrong) and move forward on to environmental clean up on the perfectly reasonable position that its good to clean up messes and, meanwhile, if we GOPers stay in charge of it we won’t get regressive, impoverishing, anti-human laws and regulations as the left fanatically desires.
Tags: Climate Change, global warming
June 22nd, 2008
‘Cause there’s ice in them thar hills:
The existence of ice on Mars was confirmed today by NASA scientists, the first time frozen water has been sampled on another planet. Water in liquid form is an essential ingredient for life.
Whitish, dice-sized chunks, which were dug from the rocky red soil and warmed in the sun, vanished four days after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Phoenix probe dug them up June 15. They confirm what NASA satellites have suggested for years: Frozen water exists several centimeters beneath Mars’s surface.
Scientists believe ice exists on planets including Pluto, though Phoenix is the first probe to confirm it on the ground. The survey is part of NASA’s theme in Mars exploration: follow the water.
“We’ve hit what we’re looking for,” said Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station and co-investigator on the NASA project. “The job now is to find out what’s mixed in with the ice.” He spoke at a press conference in Tucson, Arizona.
Now that we’ve found ice, I imagine that one day we might even find liquid water out there, and that opens up the prospect of finding life, even if only microbial. Question for the day: Given that it is next to impossible for life to be around at all on any one planet, would the existence of life on two planets right next to each other in one solar system indicate a design in nature?
Tags: Mars, Phoenix probe
June 21st, 2008
Interesting:
The secret of Stonehenge has apparently been solved: The mysterious circle of large stones in southern England was primarily a burial ground for almost five centuries, and the site probably holds the remains of a family that long ruled the area, new research concludes.
Based on radiocarbon dating of cremated bones up to 5,000 years old, researchers with the Stonehenge Riverside Project said they are convinced the area was built and then grew as a “domain of the ancestors.”
“It’s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeology professor at the University of Sheffield in England and head of the project. “Stonehenge was a place of burial from its beginning to its zenith in the mid-third millennium B.C.”
So, all that new age claptrap about it was just a lot of nonsense…not too surprising. Oddly enough, this occured to me not too long ago - that the arrangement of the stones appears similar to Celtic graves which, due to weathering, have become exposed to the open air. Seems our ancient ancestors, mystifed by death, spent a lot of effort on it…the Egyptians being the most famed in this area, but there is no reason to believe that anything else of a similar nature has any different use.
Tags: Stonehenge
May 30th, 2008
By Dave Berg over at NRO:
The highlight of the film features Ben Stein interviewing Dawkins, who concedes that an intelligent being may have created life on earth. But that being cannot be “God.” Instead, he suggests it may be an alien, itself a product of “Darwinian evolution.” Oh, the scientific imagination — there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.
Dawkins has since complained that the interview was set up under false pretenses, and that he didn’t even know who Stein was. It is rather astonishing that it did not occur to the world’s smartest atheist to look up Ben Stein on the Internet, where he might have readily discovered numerous examples of his writings that are critical of Darwinism.
Dawkins dismisses the Emmy-winning actor as having “no talent for comedy.” He believes during the interview Stein is an “honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist.” A lawyer, a law professor, an economist, and a speechwriter for both Nixon and Ford, Stein hardly seems to fit the description “honestly stupid.”
In the end, the film isn’t really about intelligent design as much as about a relentless attack on an authentically free inquiry. As Ben Stein points out, “Freedom of inquiry has been greatly compromised, and this is not only anti-American, it’s anti-science. It’s anti-the whole concept of learning.”
We live in an age of lies - a lot of people believe a lot of things which are either outright false, or heavily distorted. I’m constantly amazed at the amount of sheer nonsense people believe - my favorite example of this is the Kennedy assasination. I’ll bet that if we did a survey of the American people, a very large minority would come back with the opinion that a conspiracy killed Kennedy, and a much larger number of people - perhaps even a large majority - would hold that there are at least a lot of unanswered questions surrounding the event. This belief flies in the face of every single fact which has been discovered about that tragic day - the further anyone investigates, the more clear it becomes that Oswald, a lunatic acting alone, killed President Kennedy. But very, very many people believe otherwise, and no amount of evidence will convince them to change their views.
So it is with a host of issues - in this case, the debate between ID and Darwinism. Its good here to define what we’re talking about - ID is not creationism. Creationism is the belief that the world was created in six literal days approximately 6,000 years ago - many of my Evangelical brothers and sisters believe this; I don’t. ID is the belief that the development of life on earth - heck, the development of anything, anywhere - is only explicable if there is a will guiding the whole process. The chances of even one random accident resulting in anything useful are so small that to believe that we are the result of nothing but a series of random accidents is laughably foolish - and even such a theory (that its all developed by random chance) still fails to explain how the basic matter of the universe came to be. Darwinism is not a belief in evolution, as such; it is the belief that no matter what else is said, there must be no Creator, or at least no Creator which intervenes post-Big Bang in creation. When we say we’re debating “creation vs evolution”, what we’re really debating is ID vs Darwinism.
If there is one thing we should never see in the scientific community, it is the phrase “rigid orthodoxy” - but that is precisely what we have these days, and not just in the debate over origins. Such orthodoxy also reigns supreme on such matters as global warming and the genesis of homosexuality, as well as other subjects. To say that there is a “consensus” about a subject means only one thing - no one has really looked at it or been able to explain it, so the herd of science has arbitrarily decided that “X” shall be considered true about a subject. Scientific advance, of course, has always rested on those who ignore consensus - and one does wonder how many bits of sciece lie submerged beneath the waves of ideological purity which have taken over so much of the scientific community. A true scientist is not someone who asks, “what does everyone else say”, but “what evidence do we have to form an opinion?”.
Stein’s new movie might just be the thing to break this logjam - to expose to a mass audience just how purblind a great deal of our higher educational establishment has become, and thus move people to demand changes. We should not fear truth - and we should go where ever truth leads…time to stop consigning vast areas of research to the trash heap simply because we’re afraid to buck trends.
Tags: Ben Stein, Creationism, Darwinism, Evolution, Expelled, Intelligent Design
April 19th, 2008
We shot down that satellite:
WASHINGTON (AP) - A missile launched from a Navy ship successfully struck a dying U.S. spy satellite passing 130 miles over the Pacific on Wednesday, a defense official said. Full details were not immediately available.
It happened just after 10:30 p.m. EST.
Two officials said the missile was launched successfully. One official, who is close to the process, said it hit the target. He said details on the results were not immediately known.
The goal in this first-of-its-kind mission for the Navy was not just to hit the satellite but to obliterate a tank aboard the spacecraft carrying 1,000 pounds of a toxic fuel called hydrazine.
U.S. officials have said the fuel would pose a potential health hazard to humans if it landed in a populated area. Although the odds of that were small even if the Pentagon had chosen not to try to shoot down the satellite, it was determined that it was worth trying to eliminate even that small chance.
Tags: Satellite shoot-down, SDI
February 20th, 2008
Here’s a link to the video.
Ron Paul says:
I think its a theory. Theory of evolution and I don’t accept it, you know, as a theory. I think the Creator that I know created us…
Interesting. Libertarian. Doctor. Specialist in obstetrics/gynecology. Non-believer in the theory of evolution.
Discuss.
Tags: Ron Paul
December 28th, 2007
While the Truth shall, indeed, set you free, our leftwing leaders have decided that a fat paycheck is worth a lot of lies and arrogance:
Al Gore has come under fire for making personal gain from his mission to save the planet – after charging £3,300 a minute to deliver a poorly received speech.
The former American Vice-President was also accused of being “precious” at the London event, demanding his own VIP room and ejecting journalists, despite hopes the star-studded gathering would generate publicity for the fight against global warming.
Many of the audience at last month’s Fortune Forum summit were restless as Mr Gore, who has won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for his campaigning work this year, delivered the half-hour speech that netted him £100,000.
The glittering fundraiser was held in The Royal Courts of Justice and attracted world leaders, entrepreneurs and celebrity activists including Bob Geldof, Darryl Hannah and Jerry Hall, who was there as “a Special Ambassador of The Alliance for a New Humanity”. Guests had paid between £1,000 and £50,000 to attend.
But a source told The Mail on Sunday: “Many guests looked tired and began to talk among themselves during his speech. Heads began to twitch with tiredness.
“Al uses his position for great personal gain. He goes from event to event delivering a similar speech, earning a large fee, and a lot of the time he doesn’t actually inform the audience.
I wonder how long it will take before the rank and file lefties realise that each of their icons has been a con artist living a high life off of them? As I’ve noted before, if I were a man willing to be quite dishonest I could gain wealth and fame if I were to merely change my blogging name and, by using fictitious reports and studies, were to start writing anti-Bush/anti-American/anti-Christian polemics. It wouldn’t matter what I said provided I blamed Bush/America/Christianity - no lefty would actually examine anything I asserted as fact and when conservative bloggers and writers would start to demonstrate conclusively that I’m lying, the lefties who bought my initial BS would rise to my defense rather than admit they were fooled.
One of the greatest ironies of modern times is that our lefties stoutly assert that they are part of the “reality based community” - this a sly dig at both religious believers and the supposed lack of intellectual curiosity on the right in general. It is easy to make a list of BS the left believed - Mumia, Farenheit 911, Tawana Brawley, Joe Wilson, October Surprise, Florida 2000, torture at Gitmo…as each and every leftwing story is proven not just false, but laughably false, the left just ignores the facts - the reality - and MovesOn as if nothing had changed. A constant refrain of mine here on the blog is my asking of lefty critics to think about things. Just think - consider everything in context and ask the question: Is there anyone advocating this who is gaining personally from it?
As to why Gore got into environmentalism, I don’t know - and for all I know, he got into it with the purest of motives. Whatever the initial motivation - and whatever Gore tells himself when he looks at himself in the mirror these days - the plain fact of the matter is that he’s milking the issue of global warming for personal gain. And, beyond that, he’s either been convinced or convinced himself that he’s a superior being on the strength of his advocacy of the theory of catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming. While he still might have interesting things to say on the subject, anyone with any sense at all knows that anything he says must be taken with a grain of salt - his whole public persona and a very large amount of his yearly paycheck is dependent upon his being right about what he advocates. This means he’s unlikely to even listen to anyone who has a contrarian point of view - Gore, unless he’s a man of extraordinarily strong character, is unlikely to ever admit he’s wrong on global warming; he owns “doom and gloom” on it, and a reversal would be humiliating and only a man who has freed himself entirely from the sin of pride could bear to admit he’s wrong - and demanding a special VIP room is not the act of a humble man.
You know, I know - the guy down the street knows. Our lefty friends, however, don’t know - and they don’t want to know. Since Gore says what they want to hear about the isse of global warming and just so long as he keep singing out of the lefty hymnal on the subject, the leftwing rank and file will defend him against all comers. Not only conned, but quite happily conned; that is our modern left. Its easier than thinking, I guess.
Tags: Al Gore, Environmentalism, global warming, Lefting Ideology
December 10th, 2007
A long and contentious debate:
WASHINGTON - Scientists hoping to study the ancient skeleton known as Kennewick Man are protesting efforts that they say could block them from examining one of the oldest and most complete set of bones ever found in North America.
For the third time in four years, the scientists oppose a Senate bill that would allow federally recognized tribes to claim ancient remains even if they can’t prove a link to a current tribe.
They also are contesting draft regulations issued by the Bush administration on disposal of culturally unaffiliated remains.
Both measures could end up with the same result, scientists say: preventing an improved understanding of North American history and the role of the continent’s first inhabitants.
If adopted, the proposed changes could “result in a world heritage disaster of unprecedented proportions” and “rob our descendants of the unique insights concerning the shared heritage of all people that physical anthropological studies of culturally unidentifiable human remains can provide,” the American Association of Physical Anthropologists said in a statement.
Supporters call such concerns overblown. They say the changes are intended to clarify the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, also known as NAGPRA, to ensure that federally recognized tribes can safeguard the graves of their ancestors.
As regards Kennewick man - from what I have gathered over the years, the tribes fighting the examination of the bones are doing so in the service of various politically correct myths about the people living in the Americas when Columbus came ashore. It seems that Kennewick man isn’t related to anyone currently living in North America, and thus might represent the real first inhabitants of North America, thus making all that kerfuffle over “Native American” rather academic, because no one living today could claim descent from the first - and thus indigenous - people of the Americas. A lot of effort has been invested in the bogus story that the people here when Columbus arrived lived some sort of idyllic life completely in harmony with everyone and everything. Given that the people living here then were, well, people, anyone with the sense that God gave little, white mice knows that such a story isn’t just false, but laughably false…but never let it be said that the people who enforce political correctness are cleverer than little, white mice.
As for the scientists who want to study the remains - well, they’re just being science types and they want to poke and prod these remains in order to discover everything they can about them so that they can then get a really cool Nova documentary done about them.
Both sides are being rather foolish about the whole issue - no person can have rational objection to a scientific study of remains which cannot be identified and tied to persons currently living. Kennewick man lived many thousands of years ago, he appears to not be genetically related to anyone currently living, so a thorough study of the remains is entirely within bounds. On the other hand, Kennewick man was, after all is said and done, a human being - a unique and uniquely valuable creation of God, and thus his remains must be treated with proper respect. What that means is that once the science types have got a good look at him and taken some samples for study, the remains should be re-interred as close to the original burial place as is practical. This way the claims of science and the claims of humanity are both satisfied. There is, in my view, something just horribly wrong in putting a human being on display in a museum - who ever buried Kennewick man wasn’t thinking strange people in the future would put him on display.
Discover, exhume, study, re-inter. That is the way to do it, in my view. What do you think?
Tags: Archaeology, Native Americans
December 2nd, 2007
