From an article by Mano Singham in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the anti-evolution forces in the 2005 “intelligent design” trial.

That was Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District. Eleven parents of students in Dover, York County, Pa. sued over the school board requirement that  intelligent design should be taught in ninth-grade science classes along with evolution. They lost. US District Judge John Jones ruled (inter alia):

We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents. To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

Mano Singham continues:

The new war concerns questions that are more profound than whether or not to teach evolution. Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.

The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world — such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe — allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.

Prestigious organizations like the National Academy of Sciences have come down squarely on the side of the accommodationists.

What? The National Academy of Sciences … ? Pause here for that to sink in.

Then on we go:

On March 25, the NAS let the John Templeton Foundation use its venue to announce that the biologist (and accommodationist) Francisco Ayala had been awarded its Templeton Prize, with the NAS president himself, Ralph Cicerone, having nominated him. The foundation has in recent years awarded its prize to scientists and philosophers who are accommodationists, though it used to give it to more overtly religious figures, like Mother Teresa and Billy Graham. Critics are disturbed at the NAS’s so closely identifying itself with the accommodationist position. As the physicist Sean Carroll said, “Templeton has a fairly overt agenda that some scientists are comfortable with, but very many are not. In my opinion, for a prestigious scientific organization to work with them sends the wrong message.”

In a 2008 publication titled Science, Evolution, and Creationism, the NAS stated: “Science and religion are based on different aspects of human experience. … Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist. … Many religious beliefs involve entities or ideas that currently are not within the domain of science. Thus, it would be false to assume that all religious beliefs can be challenged by scientific findings.”

Those of us who disagree — sometimes called “new atheists” — point out that historically, the scope of science has always expanded, steadily replacing supernatural explanations with scientific ones. Science will continue this inexorable march, making it highly likely that the accommodationists’ strategy will fail. After all, there is no evidence that consciousness and mind arise from anything other than the workings of the physical brain, and so those phenomena are well within the scope of scientific investigation. What’s more, because the powerful appeal of religion comes precisely from its claims that the deity intervenes in the physical world, in response to prayers and such, religious claims, too, fall well within the domain of science. The only deity that science can say nothing about is a deity who does nothing at all.

In support of its position, the National Academy of Sciences makes a spurious argument: “Newspaper and television stories sometimes make it seem as though evolution and religion are incompatible, but that is not true. Many scientists and theologians have written about how one can accept both faith and the validity of biological evolution. Many past and current scientists who have made major contributions to our understanding of the world have been devoutly religious. … Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies have increased their awe and understanding of a creator. The study of science need not lessen or compromise faith.”

But the fact that some scientists are religious is not evidence of the compatibility of science and religion. …  Jerry Coyne, a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, notes, “True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind.”

Accommodationists are alarmed that their position has been challenged by a recent flurry of best-selling books, widely read articles, and blogs. In Britain an open letter expressing this concern was signed by two Church of England bishops; a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain; a member of the Evangelical Alliance; Professor Lord Winston, a fertility pioneer; Professor Sir Martin Evans, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; and others. The letter said, “We respectfully ask those contemporary Darwinians who seem intent on using Darwin’s theory as a vehicle for promoting an anti-theistic agenda to desist from doing so as they are, albeit unintentionally, turning people away from the theory.” …

What people? Why?

Accommodationists frequently brand us new atheists as “extreme,” “uncivil,” “rude,” and responsible for setting a “bad tone.” However, those accusations are rarely accompanied by concrete examples of such impolite speech. Behind the charges seems to lie the assumption that it is rude to even question religious beliefs or to challenge the point of view of the accommodationists. Apparently the polite thing to do is keep quiet. …

Why have organizations like the National Academy of Sciences sided with the accommodationists even though there is no imperative to take a position? After all, it would be perfectly acceptable to simply advocate for good science and stay out of this particular fray.

One has to suspect that tactical considerations are at play here. The majority of Americans subscribe to some form of faith tradition. Some scientists may fear that if science is viewed as antithetical to religion, then even moderate believers may turn away from science and join the fundamentalists.

But political considerations should not be used to silence honest critical inquiry. Richard Dawkins has challenged the accommodationist strategy, calling it “a cowardly cop–out. I think it’s an attempt to woo the sophisticated theological lobby and to get them into our camp and put the creationists into another camp. It’s good politics. But it’s intellectually disreputable.”

Evolution, and science in general, will ultimately flourish or die on its scientific merits, not because of any political strategy. Good science is an invaluable tool in humanity’s progress and survival, and it cannot be ignored or suppressed for long. The public may turn against this or that theory in the short run but will eventually have to accept evolution, just as it had to accept the Copernican heliocentric system.

It is strange that the phrase “respect for religion” has come to mean that religious beliefs should be exempt from the close scrutiny that other beliefs are subjected to. Such an attitude infantilizes religious believers, suggesting that their views cannot be defended and can be preserved only by silencing those who disagree. …

We think religious belief is childish. And we recall that for long ages the religious defended their beliefs by forcibly silencing those who disagreed, and we suspect that many would do it again if they could. (They do in Islamic states.)

But see how far the religious have had to retreat as science demolishes dogma after dogma. We do not hear their advocates talking nearly as much or as loudly as they used to of the seven days of creation, of a virgin giving birth to God in Bethlehem, of God dictating commandments. (Okay – of the Angel Gabriel dictating the Koran we still hear too much.) Mano Singham informs us that they’re not even insisting on “intelligent design” as much as they did. Backs to the wall, they’re only begging us to concede  that, because of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and continuing conjecture about the Big Bang (for example), we “must allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected” by science. And if we don’t, we’re being rude. “Be nice to us”, they’re implying, “let us nurse our fantasies. If you don’t, you’re just a lot of rationalist bullies.”

Let them put their thumbs in their mouths and sulk. We’re winning!

We like this article by Andrew Klavan, both what he says and how he says it:

The true test of a philosophy is not what it promises to make of the world but what it makes, in fact, of its adherents. Human nature is remarkably recalcitrant, but ideas do affect people over time, for good or ill, and the societies people make will ultimately bear the image of those effects and thus of the ideas. … Our beliefs arise from who we are and we become what we believe …

Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.

This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves. 

Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil? Leftists call conservatives hateful… I would answer “Read the papers!” but the papers lie because our journalists are leftists and they know down deep what they’re like, who they are. Compare instead the rhetoric and honesty — not of those selected by the media, or those quotes they’ve selected — but of those in equivalent positions at equivalent times. The gracious and open-hearted George W. Bush versus the divisive, self-serving, and dishonest Barack Obama, just to take one example.

Every one who sympathizes with the Occupy movement should take a good look at them — not as they will be in the paradise of their aspirations but as they truly are this minute. Look at them, and understand that that’s what tomorrow will look like if they have their way today. 

As a perfect illustration of what Andrew Klavan is talking about, here’s Roseanne Barr:

We quote from a column by Walter Williams at Townhall, which can be read in full here.

I believe that there’s little prospect for Arabs ever being free and that Western encouragement and hopes for democracy are doomed to failure and disappointment. Most nations in the Middle East do not share the philosophical foundations of the West. It’s not likely liberty-oriented values will ever emerge in cultures that have disdain for the rule of law and private property rights and that sanction barbaric practices such as the stoning of women for adultery, the severing of hands or beheading as a form of punishment, and imprisonment for criticizing or speaking ill of the government.

What should the West do about the gross violations of human rights so prevalent in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere? My short answer is to mind our own business. The only case in which we should interfere with Middle Eastern affairs is when our national defense or economic interests are directly threatened. That is, for example, if Iran were to meddle with Middle Eastern oil shipments or if we discovered good evidence of its building nuclear weapons, then we should militarily intervene. What they want to do to one another is none of our business.

We agree with him. Certainly the West should not be so culturally insensitive as to interfere with the Arabs’ colorful customs, such as oppressing and mutilating women, stoning adulterers, hanging homosexuals, amputating the limbs of thieves, routinely torturing prisoners, keeping and trafficking slaves, using children as living bombs and training them to saw people’s heads off.

But we shouldn’t hesitate to act when our national defense or economic interests are under threat. If an Arab tyrant blows up an American plane in flight, he should be punished. Arab states that train terrorists pose a threat to every nation, with the US top of their wish list, so they should be promptly discouraged by fleets of well-aimed drones. And as the West needs the oil that lies under Arab feet, the despots must not be allowed to price it at extortionist levels. (To prevent that, the oil fields of the Middle East should have been taken under American control decades ago.) The best policy would be to keep them in constant fear that America might strike them without warning at any moment. Only an occasional salutary demonstration of American wrath would be necessary. Bring back that old Shock-and-Awe. Judiciously but zealously inflicted, it could obviate the need for long and costly wars.

And the UN must be destroyed.

The pretense continues that “the rebels’ – a crowd of untrained Libyans dangerously armed – achieved the conquest of Tripoli and now the defeat of Gaddafi’s last defenders in Sirte and his capture.

Here is a report from the Telegraph in which the writer tries to uphold the internationally agreed lie, while yet supplying the information that a US drone guided from the Nevada desert, and French bombers, and British “advisers” – actually strategists and leaders and, probably, effective fighters in sufficient number – ended Gaddafi’s forces’ last stand and flushed out the man.

Deep in the lunar landscape of the Nevada desert, American specialists trained to their computer screens spotted unusual activity at around 7.30am in District Two. From their windowless bunker, lit by constantly flickering computer screens, the analysts directed their unmanned Predator drones to zoom in on the convoy [of trucks] as it picked up speed and headed west. Nato’s eyes were suddenly trained on Gaddafi’s convoy. …

Around 40 miles off the Libyan coast a Nato AWAC early-warning surveillance aircraft, flying over the Mediterranean, took control of the battle and warned two French jets that a loyalist convoy was attempting to leave Sirte.

As the convoy sped west, a Hellfire missile was fired from the Predator and destroyed the first vehicle in the convoy.

By now, the NTC troops had realised that the loyalists were escaping and a small number of lightly armed rebels began to give chase.

To me it seemed like a wild, chaotic situation. But we now know that it had, in fact, been foreseen by the British SAS and their special forces allies, who were advising the NTC forces.

British military sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that small teams of SAS soldiers on the ground in Sirte, armed but under strict orders not to get involved, had warned them throughout the siege to be alert to the fleeing of loyalists.

Assisted by other special forces – in particular the Qataris [put in because they’re Arabs which makes it okay if they have “boots on the ground”? – JB]  with whom the SAS have a long relationship dating back 20 years – the SAS tried to impress on the Libyans the need to cover all escape routes.

But despite the advice, the breakout seems to have taken the rebels on the Zafran front completely by surprise.

In the previous two weeks I had repeatedly seen the militiamen fail to hold forward positions at night as they fell back to their encampments. Again and again loyalists had used cover of darkness to surprise the militiamen and manoeuvre into new firing positions.

Once more their surveillance was lax, and one rebel fighter confessed to me that in the early hours of Thursday they had failed to keep proper watch on the western front and they were surprised by the convoy. …

At this point the SAS urged the NTC [National Transitional Council] leaders to move their troops to exits points across the city and close their stranglehold.

After the Hellfire missile struck its target, the convoy changed direction, possibly hoping to avoid a further strike, before heading west again. It had begun to fracture into several different groups of vehicles.

The French jets were also given permission to join the attack.

By now a group of 20 vehicles in the convoy had reached a point around three miles west of the city. The shattered streets had been left behind, and the convoy had halted next to a walled electricity sub station, in arid farmland dotted with breeze block compounds and trees.

Just then, the French pilot began his bombing run, seconds later releasing two 500lb GBU-12 laser-guided bombs, into the centre of the convoy.

The bombs unleashed massive force. Arriving at the site, a few hours later, their devastating power was clear to see: at least a dozen vehicles were shredded and burned out, while I counted more than 25 bodies, some lying twisted and charred inside the vehicles and others lying in clumps nearby.

The air strike marked the end of any attempt at an ordered retreat and the convoy’s remnants scattered. …

Col Gaddafi had survived the air strike, but was apparently wounded in the legs. With his companions dead or dispersed, he now had few options.

He and a handful of men … appeared to have made their way 300 yards north from the devastation and taken shelter in a drainage culvert running under a dual carriageway. …

Members of the Al Watan revolutionary brigade who had been following the convoy at a distance witnessed the explosion, but at that point still had no idea who was in the vehicles.

Saleem Bakeer, a rebel fighter who said he was among those who came across Gaddafi hiding in the pipes said they had approached on foot.

“One of Gaddafi’s men came out waving his rifle in the air and shouting surrender, but as soon as he saw my face he started shooting at me,” he said.

“Then I think Gaddafi must have told them to stop. ‘My master is here, my master is here’, he said, ‘Muammar Gaddafi is here and he is wounded’.”

“We went in and brought Gaddafi out. He was saying: ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s going on?'”

The initial astonishment [on the part of the rebels] appears to have quickly switched to jubilation, and then rage.

“I don’t think that anyone thought he would be there, we all thought that he would be in the south, or maybe across in Niger or Algeria. We were as shocked as he was at first,” said Abdullah Hakim Husseini, one of the band of men who found him. “We were so happy when we knew it was him. I thought, ‘at last, it’s all over’.”

Mobile phone footage shows Col Gaddafi alive but weak and bloodied, with blows raining down on him from frenzied fighters. At one point he was hauled onto the bonnet of a pickup truck, then pulled down by his hair. His weighty golden gun, intricately engraved and decorated with the words “The sun will never set on the Al Fattah revolution”, was snatched by one of the revolutionaries. His satellite phone was seized, and it was later discovered that he had made one last call to Syria.

Omran el Oweyb, the commander who captured Gaddafi, said that he only managed to stagger ten steps before he fell to the ground. …

One rebel was heard screaming in his face: “This is for Misurata, you dog.”

Gaddafi – confused, bloodied, stumbling – can be heard to reply, in what could be his last, laughably philosophical words: “Do you know right from wrong?”

What happened in the next minutes is the subject of intense controversy. Sometime in the next hours or minutes he died of a bullet wound to the left temple. The official NTC account says he was caught in crossfire as he was being driven to hospital. …

However the ambulance driver who ferried him said Col Gaddafi was already dead when he was loaded into the ambulance, around 500 yards from his point of capture.

One NTC member, who did not want to be named, admitted that this version of events was likely. “They beat him very harshly and then they killed him,” he said. “This is a war.”

So British SAS soldiers directed the last battle on the ground.

A Hellfire missile and bombs released from French planes hit the truck-convoy in which Gaddafi was trying to flee from Sirte. Gaddafi and at least one of his men sought shelter in a large drainpipe. And only then the Libyan savages moved in for the kill.

This is also from the Telegraph:

In Benghazi, on the main square where it all started, they were slaughtering camels in celebration. … They daubed their hands in the camel-blood, and gave the V-for-victory sign with dripping fingers. …

In the cafes, people were watching TV pictures – more graphic than any shown in Britain – of a bloodied Gaddafi dragged along and beaten, feebly protesting, before a gun was put to his head.

The picture then cut to the dead ex-leader being rolled onto the pavement, blood pooling from the back of his skull. …

Gaddafi’s death is already showing up some of the weaknesses of Libya’s new rulers.

The claim by the interim prime minister, Mahmoud Jibril, that he was killed in “crossfire” looks ever more false with every new piece of video.

Both he and his son Mutassim were alive when captured, and dead soon after. A statement by an anonymous NTC source that “they beat [Gaddafi] and they killed him” seems closer to the mark.

But Mr Jibril angrily rejected demands by the United Nations and some in the West for a proper investigation into the circumstances of Gaddafi’s death.

“People in the West don’t understand the agony and pain that the people went through during the past 42 years,” he said.

The dictator’s treatment – before and after death – underlines that Libya does not have a government, or a state with functioning standards, only a collection of militias.

After he was killed, his [torn and bloodied] body was taken by the Misurata militia and put on display in a shopping centre, where yesterday the corpses of his slain son Mutassim and Gaddafi’s army chief, Abu Bakr, were placed alongside.

Libyans from hundreds of miles away came to queue up and, some wearing gloves and masks, view the three bodies. …

The various militias are quarreling over who should take possession of the corpses. It is a harbinger of fiercer quarrels to come. Trouble looms.

Most of the militias are based on a particular town, financed and commanded largely autonomously. Gaddafi’s death means that the main thing which united them – the war against him – is over. Now, the many rivalries and disputes between them, and between them and the NTC, may come to the fore. …

The NTC is indeed going to vanish: Mr Jibril, along with the rest of the council, have already said they will serve only until elections in eight months’ time, and he repeated that yesterday. Eight months is quite enough time for political disputes to fester and harden into something more serious.

Such as more civil war?

This comes from DebkaFile:

[National Transitional Council leader] Mustafa Abdul-Jalil will be little more than a figurehead. Even now, he is confined in Benghazi by three strongmen, who control most parts of the capital, and have not given him permission to move the seat of the interim government to Tripoli. …

The regime taking shape could not be further from the Western ideal of a free democracy.

Behind the grisly images of Muammar Qaddafi’s last moments spilling out since Thursday, Oct. 20, a quiet contest is afoot between the US and at least two NATO allies, France and Germany, over who deserves the credit for his termination and therefore for ending the alliance’s military role in Libya.

American sources are willing to admit that US drones operated by pilots from Las Vegas pinpointed the fugitive ruler’s hideout in Sirte and kept the building under surveillance for two weeks, surrounded by US and British forces.

Both therefore had boots on the ground in breach of the UN mandate which limited NATO military intervention in Libya to air strikes. …

According to the London Daily Telegraph, his presence in the convoy was first picked up by the USAF River Joint RC-135V/W intelligence signals plane, which passed the information to French warplanes overhead who then carried out the strike on Qaddafi’s vehicle.

The German Der Spiegel reported Monday, Oct. 24, that the tip revealing Qaddafi’s last hiding place came from German BND intelligence agents. Although Chancellor Angela Merkel was dead against German participation in the NATO operation in Libya, the BND nonetheless played an important role in intelligence-gathering.

It is increasingly obvious now that without the active intervention of the US, Britain, France and Germany, the anti-Qaddafi rebels on their own would never have beaten Qaddafi or been able to end his life.

As usual, however, the foreign offices of all the NATO countries involved in the operation will follow a long established custom of the Western powers and allow the Arabs to lie.

The lie will be that the people of Libya overthrew a tyrant. The truth will be that they’ll instate an Islamic regime in his stead; and the West, for all its talk of helping Libya become a free democracy, will not raise a finger to prevent that from happening.

There is an old British saying … “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.” The idea, of course, is that when a crisis arises, a leader will also arise to show the way out of it.

So Andrew Klavan writes at PajamasMedia, in an article titled Mitt Romney versus The End of Western Civilization.

He goes on:

But those of us who feel the upcoming presidential election represents a crossroads of sorts are starting to find this faith in providential leadership somewhat shaken. We’re starting to think that if the man is cometh-ing he better hurry-eth up and geth here already.

Because Mitt Romney ain’t the guy. While he may win the Republican presidential nomination by default — and while he may indeed win the presidency due to desperation — it is clear from every word he says that he understands neither the peril nor the needs of the present moment. …

The professionals and money guys in the Republican establishment don’t seem to mind that. As always, they feel that they are the old pros who take care of the all-important business of electability while we children in the base worry about such nonsense as principle and the preservation of the republic. It’s these establishment types who have traditionally delivered the truly electable choices like Bob Dole and John McCain while staunchly protecting us from extremists like Ronald Reagan. On Fox News’ Journal Editorial Report this weekend, the Wall Street Journal‘s Dorothy Rabinowitz … seemed to give voice to that establishment opinion when she said that “reason is going to have to prevail” among conservatives and that they’ll ultimately have to abandon the likes of Herman Cain and “all of the alternatives that are warming their little hearts, that they’re playing with,” and learn to live with Romney as their guy.

And I fear she — and all those she speaks for — may be right. …  Cain seems like a terrific fellow but he has no foreign policy knowledge and his 9-9-9 plan is a mistake — a new tax that will never go away and will grow bigger than he imagines. Michele Bachman is wonderful on the economy, but her social policy is ill-informed and out-of-date. Perry can’t think on his feet, Huntsman’s a bore, and Ron Paul is a better cult leader than candidate. So far, Romney is, in fact, the best candidate actually in the race. I’m sorry, but there is something to be said for realism when you’re dealing with, you know, reality.

But he’s still not the guy. And just for the record, just to explain, the problem is not that he’s a moderate per se. It’s not that he has changed his mind from time to time. It’s not even his failure to renounce Romneycare, so similar to the disastrous Obamacare. … The problem is that Romney doesn’t understand that we — America — the west — are in crisis: a crisis of debt, a crisis of confidence, a crisis of identity and ignorance wherein journalists, professors, politicians, and priests have become one with the moral idiots occupying Wall Street.

Go on Romney’s website. Look at his proposals. There’s nothing wrong with them, for the most part. They seem intended to repeal the Obama administration and set us back on the path we were on before. That would be fine if Obama were the cause of the crisis, but he’s the symptom of the crisis, its incarnation as it were. Obama and his ideas are the creation of 40 years of moral error and political failure drip-drip-dripped into the consciousness of the country through our schools, news media, and culture. He could never have won our highest office if the electorate had not been bred by that error to foolishness, and then spurred to an act of panicked stupidity by a crisis that had already come.

It’s not Obama’s presidency that needs to be repealed — not just Obama’s presidency — but all the ideas that made Obama’s presidency possible.

To do that, we need a man not just of policies but of vision, not just of proposals but of high ideals. A mere Romney might — might — take us back from the brink to which Obama has sped us, but that would only delay the fatal catastrophe. Worse, it would perforce recreate the exact same set of circumstances that got us into this mess in the first place.

Could Romney be made to understand the nature and depth of the crisis that Western civilization is in? If he could be made to understand it, would he then see how to save it? And if he saw how, would he have the cunning and mettle to do it?

If not – and we agree with Klavan that Romney is “not the guy”, that he doesn’t have it in him  – is there a man or woman anywhere in America who could and would? Who has the depth and completeness of understanding, the power of leadership, the moral strength, the resourcefulness? Is there a potential political giant, greater than has ever existed before, waiting in the wings?

Failing such a genius, it seems we’ll have to make do with a Romney.

Interesting to atheists but ultimately disappointing is this interview at NewScientist by Alison George with Stephen Law, author of Believing Bullshit: How not to get sucked into an intellectual black hole.

You describe your new book, Believing Bullshit, as a guide to avoid getting sucked into “intellectual black holes”. What are they?

Intellectual black holes are belief systems that draw people in and hold them captive so they become willing slaves of claptrap. Belief in homeopathy, psychic powers, alien abductions – these are examples of intellectual black holes. As you approach them, you need to be on your guard because if you get sucked in, it can be extremely difficult to think your way clear again.

But isn’t one person’s claptrap another’s truth?

There’s a belief system about water to which we all sign up: it freezes at 0 °C and boils at 100 °C. We are powerfully wedded to this but that doesn’t make it an intellectual black hole. That’s because these beliefs are genuinely reasonable. Beliefs at the core of intellectual black holes, however, aren’t reasonable. They merely appear so to those trapped inside.

You identify some strategies people use to defend black hole beliefs. Tell me about one of them – “playing the mystery card”?

This involves appealing to mystery to get out of intellectual hot water when someone is, say, propounding paranormal beliefs. They might say something like: “Ah, but this is beyond the ability of science and reason to decide. You, Mr Clever Dick Scientist, are guilty of scientism, of assuming science can answer every question.” This is often followed by that quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. When you hear that, alarm bells should go off.

But even scientists admit that they can’t explain everything.

There probably are questions that science cannot answer. But what some people do to protect their beliefs is to draw a veil across reality and say, “you scientists can go up to the veil and apply your empirical methods this far, but no further”. Behind the veil they will put angels, aliens, psychic powers, God, ghosts and so on. Then they insist that there are special people who can see – if only dimly – through this veil. But the fact is that many of the claims made about things behind this veil have empirically observable consequences and that makes them scientifically testable.

How can science test these mysteries?

Psychologist Christopher French at Goldsmiths, University of London, ran an experiment into the effects of crystals to explore claims that holding “real” crystals from a New Age shop while meditating has a powerful effect on the psyche, more so than just holding “fake” ones. But French found no difference in participants using real and fake crystals. This was good evidence that the effect people report is down to the power of suggestion, not the crystals. Of course, this study provoked comments such as: “Not being able to prove the existence of something does not disprove its existence. Much is yet to be discovered.” This is just a smokescreen. But because the mantra “it’s-beyond-the-ability-of-science-to-establish…” gets repeated so often, it is effective at lulling people back to sleep – even if they have been stung into entertaining a doubt for a moment or two.

Do you think mystery has a place in science?

Some things may be beyond our understanding, and sometimes it’s reasonable to appeal to mystery. If you have excellent evidence that water boils at 100 °C, but on one occasion it appeared it didn’t, it’s reasonable to attribute that to some mysterious, unknown factor. It’s also reasonable, when we have a theory that works but we don’t know how it works, to say that this is currently a mystery. But the more we rely on mystery to get us out of intellectual trouble, or the more we use it as a carpet under which to sweep inconvenient facts, the more vulnerable we are to deceit, by others and by ourselves.

In your book you also talk about the “going nuclear” tactic. What is this?

When someone is cornered in an argument, they may decide to get sceptical about reason. They might say: “Ah, but reason is just another faith position.” I call this “going nuclear” because it lays waste to every position. It brings every belief – that milk can make you fly or that George Bush was Elvis Presley in disguise – down to the same level so they all appear equally “reasonable” or “unreasonable”. Of course, you can be sure that the moment this person has left the room, they will continue to use reason to support their case if they can, and will even trust their life to reason: trusting that the brakes on their car will work or that a particular drug is going to cure them.

Isn’t there a grain of truth in this approach?

There is a classic philosophical puzzle about how to justify reason: to do so, it seems you have to use reason. So the justification is circular – a bit like trusting a second-hand car salesman because he says he’s trustworthy. But the person who “goes nuclear” isn’t genuinely sceptical about reason. They are just raising a philosophical problem as a smokescreen, to give them time to leave with their head held high, saying: “So my belief is as reasonable as yours.” That’s intellectually dishonest.

You say we should also be aware of the “but it fits” strategy. Why?

Any theory, no matter how ludicrous, can be squared with the evidence, given enough ingenuity. Every last anomaly can be explained away. There is a popular myth about science that if you can make your theory consistent with the evidence, then that shows it is confirmed by that evidence – as confirmed as any other theory. Lots of dodgy belief systems exploit this myth. Young Earth creationism – the view that the whole universe is less than 10,000 years old – is a good example. Given enough shoehorning and reinterpretation, you can make whatever turns up “fit” what the Bible says. …

What else should we watch out for?

You should be suspicious when people pile up anecdotes in favour of their pet theory, or when they practise the art of pseudo-profundity – uttering seemingly profound statements which are in fact trite or nonsensical. They often mix in references to scientific theory to sound authoritative.

Only at the end of the interview does Stephen Law say something we profoundly disagree with:

Why does it matter if we believe absurd things?

It can cause no great harm. …

He could not be more wrong. It can, it has, and it does. The harm that the absurd beliefs of religious faiths have done to humanity is so vast and terrible as to be beyond calculation. To pick only the most obvious examples: consider the long darkness Christianity brought down on Europe after it became the state religion of the Roman empire; the millenia of religious wars; the relentless persecutions by the Inquisition and the equally cruel heresy-sniffing of the Protestant sects; the suppression of scientific discovery by the Catholic Church; the savage advances of Islam, for the most part successful, from the time of its inception to the present.

Bullshit beliefs called religion have soaked the earth with human blood.

Professor Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University.  As one might expect of a professor of religion, he makes unwarrantable assumptions.

He does so in a column he’s written for USA Today titled You can’t reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus.

Who’s trying to?

The Tea Party, he assumes.

The Tea Party protests against the Obama government’s economic policies of redistribution, deficit spending on ever-increasing entitlements, the robbing of “the rich” and the enforced dependency of “the poor”, resulting in high unemployment and a load of debt on future generations.

Ayn Rand would be sympathetic to such protest. Some Tea Partiers carry signs quoting her.  So  – Professor Prothero reasons – the Tea Party is inspired by her philosophy.

“But hold on a mo!”, he says to himself, figuratively scratching his head. “Everyone in the Tea Party is conservative – and aren’t all conservatives religious? Aren’t most of them evangelical Christians?  Sure they are. So they’re in deep confusion. Ayn Rand was an atheist. I must straighten them out. Make them see that they hold contradictory views. Explain to them that they cannot be both for Jesus and for Ayn Rand.”

For what Jesus? We surmise that everyone who thinks about Jesus, whether or not he’s a Christian, has his own Jesus in his head. Stephen Prothero’s Jesus is a lefty.  He quotes the biblical Jesus as saying: “Blessed are the poor”. Lefties have reason to bless the poor every day of their lives, and hope they never go away (ie become rich), for in the name of that imaginary caste lefties pursue their egalitarian cause, believing the pursuit to be so ennobling that they can be as nasty as they choose to real people without losing a drop of their moral pride.

Professor Prothero will remember that the biblical Jesus is reported as saying not only “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20), but “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:6), which lefties plainly are not.

But let’s go to the professor’s own words (you can read them all here if you care to):

In Rand’s Manichaean world, it is not God vs. Satan, but individualism vs. collectivism.

Right. And we too see the great political divide as being between individualism and collectivism.

He goes on:

While Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” she sings Hosannas to the rich. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged (which, alas, is only slightly shorter than the Bible) are captains of industry such as John Galt. The villains are the “looters” and “moochers” — people who by hook (guilt) or by crook (government coercion) steal from the hard-won earnings of others.

The professor’s sympathies are all with the moochers. He praises Jesus for being “a first-class, grade-A ‘moocher’.”

He proceeds, scornfully and sarcastically:

Turning the tables on traditional Christian morality, Rand argues that altruism is immoral and selfishness is good.

Our argument is that selfishness is essential to our survival, though it doesn’t preclude generosity or even altruism (which is very rarely practiced). See our post Against God and Socialism, April 29, 2011.

Moreover, there isn’t a problem in the world that laissez-faire capitalism can’t solve if left alone to perform its miracles.

Of course there are problems that cannot be solved, but individuals left free to innovate profitably can and do solve a lot of them. Collectives cannot and do not.

The solutions that capitalism facilitates are not claimed to be miracles. Miracles happen only in the minds of the religious and the gullible.

Ayn Rand was as much against religion as we are. “Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life,” Prothero quotes her as saying, without comment. To him her words are shocking, and he expects them to shock his readers. We, however, agree with her. Our pages provide ample evidence that religion has always done and continues to do immense harm.

He himself, Prothero half confesses, was a bit of a fan of Ayn Rand when he was in his adolescnce. But, he implies, her appeal can only be to the adolescent mind:

I first read Atlas Shrugged and her other popular novel, The Fountainhead, while festival-hopping in Spain after graduating from college, so I can attest to the appeal of this philosophy to late adolescents of a certain gender.

“A certain gender”? What gender would that be? And why only that one? He doesn’t say.

As an adult, however, Rand’s work reads to me like a vulgar rationalization for greed lying on top of a perverse myth of the right relationship between individual and community.

Now we don’t recognize the sin of greed, but we do recognize the sin of envy. Socialism – or “redistributionism” – is the politics of envy.

The obvious tendency of Prothero’s argument is that Jesus is right and Rand is wrong. Towards the end of his column he claims, however, not to be trying to win readers from Rand to Jesus, he’s only trying to point out that the two contradict each other. “You cannot worship both the God of Jesus and the mammon of Rand,” he says. Choose one or the other,  “or say no to both. It’s a free country. Just don’t tell me you are both a card-carrying Objectivist and a Bible-believing Christian. Even Rand knew that just wasn’t possible.”

That’s his message to Tea Partiers who display Rand quotations, and to Republicans, who also, he assumes, are guilty of trying to reconcile Ayn Rand and Jesus.

Any Republicans in particular? He names Paul Ryan:

Among Rand’s adoring acolytes on Capitol Hill is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who at a Library of Congress Symposium held in 2005 on the centenary of the Rand’s birth called her “the reason I got involved in public service.”

We are delighted, and not at all surprised, to hear that Paul Ryan learnt from Ayn Rand. If we had nothing else to be grateful to Ayn Rand for, her getting Paul Ryan “involved in public service” would put us hugely in her debt. His capitalist convictions and economic know-how is already doing good for the Republican Party, and would do good for America (and therefore to the world) if he were to become president. We see him as the desperately needed leader under whom the United States of America would again embody the great idea of individual freedom on which it was founded.

(Hat tip to our reader George for bringing Stephen Prothero’s column to our attention.)

Note added in 2020: We sure were wrong about Paul Ryan! But we still like both the Tea Party and Ayn Rand. Not Jesus.

Walter Williams writes a short, perfect essay titled “Who owns us?” Here’s a substantial part of it:

I am my private property and you are yours. If we accept the notion that people own themselves, then it’s easy to discover what forms of conduct are moral and immoral.

Immoral acts are those that violate self-ownership. Murder, rape, assault and slavery are immoral because those acts violate private property. So is theft, broadly defined as taking the rightful property of one person and giving it to another.

If it is your belief that people do not belong to themselves, they are in whole or in part the property of the U.S. Congress, or people are owned by God, who has placed the U.S. Congress in charge of managing them, then all of my observations are simply nonsense.

Let’s look at some congressional actions in light of self-ownership. Do farmers and businessmen have a right to congressional handouts? Does a person have a right to congressional handouts for housing, food and medical care?

First, let’s ask: Where does Congress get handout money? …

The only way for Congress to give one American one dollar is to first, through the tax code, take that dollar from some other American. It must forcibly use one American to serve another American.

Forcibly using one person to serve another is one way to describe slavery. As such, it violates self-ownership.

Government immorality isn’t restricted only to forcing one person to serve another. Some regulations such as forcing motorists to wear seat belts violate self-ownership. If one owns himself, he has the right to take chances with his own life.

Some people argue that if you’re not wearing a seat belt, have an accident and become a vegetable, you’ll become a burden on society. That’s not a problem of liberty and self-ownership. It’s a problem of socialism, where through the tax code one person is forcibly used to care for another.

These examples are among thousands of government actions that violate the principles of self-ownership. Some might argue that Congress forcing us to help one another and forcing us to take care of ourselves are good ideas.

But my question to you is: When congressmen and presidents take their oaths of office, is that oath to uphold and defend good ideas or the U.S. Constitution?

When the principles of self-ownership are taken into account, two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress does violate those principles to one degree or another as well as the Constitution to which they’ve sworn to uphold and defend. …

If we accept the value of self-ownership, it is clear that most of what Congress does is clearly immoral.

Read all of it here,

It’s simply true.

It’s a libertarian conservative’s delight.

On the initiative of Consvltvs, to whose website Respvblica there’s a link on our blogroll, a group of SKEPTICAL CONSERVATIVES has been formed. (See the badge in our margin.)

The websites associated with us are:

Conservative Tendency

Respvblica

Secular Right

Sub Specie Aeternitatis

All of them may be found on our blogroll, and there is a Skeptical Conservative website here.

Applications for website membership may be sent to any of the existing associates for consideration by all of us.

Perfect agreement on politics and religion is not necessary among the members, but they must be conservative as opposed to “progressive”, and they must be skeptical about religion.

We (for example) are more robustly anti-religion than others, and probably less conservative and more libertarian.

We can’t predict how the association will be useful to its members, but there is a good chance that it may extend our respective readerships at a time when there seems to be a growing audience for anti-religious opinion. Books on atheism by famous writers – Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins in particular – are big sellers. Hitchens is witty and incisive. Dawkins is a brilliant exponent of evolution. But Dawkins has naive political opinions, and neither of them is even moderately well informed about religion in general or the precepts and histories of particular religions. We try to be well informed on both politics and religion, and hope to interest conservatives in general as well as the skeptics among them.

*

This video is by Consvltvs of  Respvblica, expressing his own skeptical conservative views. We like the music – Pachelbel’s Canon – and the pictures, and we think the subject is presented with dignity and grace.

In an article for the Washington Post, Charles Murray writes about a “new elite”, and what the Tea Party thinks of it.

That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans.

He finds “some truth” in the Tea Party view:

There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. …

Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody’s business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn’t intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn’t get America, there is some truth in the accusation.

We think there is a lot of truth in it. That this elite is isolated and ignorant as charged, could not be better demonstrated than by the vicious calumnies and petty sneers that its members (see the Murray article for who they are) direct at Sarah Palin (for examples go here): they are characterized by snobbery.

A point on which we wholly disagree with Murray is the very point which he says is not controversial. We do not agree that the elite he writes about is essentially new. He is speaking of an intellectual elite, a grandly educated elite. They marry among themselves so that they bequeath to their progeny not only money but also their superior genes. He gives figures to show that most of its members are planted firmly in the political left, but does not say that their leftism defines them: he names conservatives that belong among them too. The fault he finds with them all is that they are out of touch with ordinary people.

There have always been just such elites, and – with individual exceptions – they have probably always been out of touch with ordinary people. (Did Plato socialize with hoi poloi?) And they have always married among themselves.

What’s particularly dangerous about the present elite is precisely its predominant leftism. And that danger in such a class is not new. The important Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his book Socialism, which was first published in English in 1936:

The intellectuals, not the populace, are moulding public opinion. It is a lame excuse of the intellectuals that they must yield to the masses. They themselves have generated the socialist ideas and indoctrinated the masses with them. … The intellectual leaders of the peoples have produced and propagated the fallacies which are on the point of destroying liberty and Western civilization .

The intellectuals alone are responsible for the mass slaughters which are the characteristic mark of our [20th] century.

But he also writes that –

They alone can reverse the trend and pave the way for a resurrection of freedom.

Not mythical “material productive forces”, but reason and ideas determine the course of human affairs.

And he concludes with a statement that goes to the heart of our present predicament:

What is needed to stop the trend towards socialism and despotism is common sense and moral courage.

Both of which are plentifully possessed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

There’s nothing wrong with an intellectual elite. We could not do without one. What is wrong with the one America’s got is that it is holds wrong opinions. Its members, or most of them, have not learnt the lessons of the 20th century. And that means that intellectuals though they be, they are not intelligent – a distinction which Thomas Sowell makes at the start of his book Intellectuals and Society:

The capacity to grasp and manipulate ideas is enough to define intellect, but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges.

Socialism was empirically tested for decades in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, and is still being tested in impoverished Cuba and hungry North Korea, and if socialists (or “progressives”, or “redistributionists”, or “community organizers”) cannot draw a lesson from its utter failure to better the lot of mankind, they are  proving themselves not just unintelligent but dimwitted, or intentionally evil, or both.