Terry Mirll Writes

Killjoy, P.I. -- Dial 'D' for Darwin

2011-10-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

It took a while to create the cover art (many thanks to Rene at www.thecovercounts.com), but Killjoy is now ready. The link to Smashwords is: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/99296. The upside is, the book will only cost $4.99. Downside, you'll need an ebook reader like Kindle or Nook (Smashwords makes the book available for a wide variety of e-readers) to access the manuscript. All in all, though, I'm quite pleased and feel like I'm off to an auspicious start.

Obama the Pooh

2011-09-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

Written entirely by Obama the Pooh himself, with exception of the 95% written by Bill Ayers.

One fine morning in the Sixteen Hundred Pennsylvania Wood, Obama the Pooh woke up thinking about jobs. This surprised him, because, as any Pooh may tell you, thinking comes very hard indeed for a Pooh. What was all the more surprising was the realization that the thinking had begun before Obama the Pooh had even thought about thinking in the first place. Yet, perhaps the greatest surprise of all was the simple fact that whatever Pooh was thinking about was most definitely NOT about taking another $50,000-a-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, which, as any Pooh knows, is very much all a Pooh ever really thinks about.

Still, Obama the Pooh reasoned, if he had woken thinking about jobs, then thinking about jobs must be a very important matter, so he rustled himself out of bed and went outside to sit upon the old tree stump to think some more.

And so, as he sat, he began to tap with his stuffed-with-fluff Pooh paw upon the stuffed-with-fluff Pooh crown of his stuffed-with-fluff Pooh head, whilst to himself he muttered, “Think. Think. Think.” After a moment, he added, “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.”

This, and little else, went on for quite some while. So ponderously did he sit thinking about thinking and thinking about thinking about jobs that he scarcely realized that Christopher Mainstreammedia had approached him and was watching him most curiously.

“My goodness, Pooh!” Christopher Mainstreammedia gasped. “Whatever are you doing?”

“Thinking,” replied Obama the Pooh.

“And what are you thinking about?” asked Christopher Mainstreammedia.

“About thinking, of course,” Pooh said. Then, after a long moment, he added, “No.” And then, after even a longer moment still, “I’m thinking about jobs!”

Christopher Mainstreammedia smiled delightedly. “And what is it about jobs that you are thinking?”

“That they must be very important,” Pooh responded. “Else why would I be thinking about them?”

Christopher Mainstreammedia thought for a moment. “Then they must be frightfully important,” he said.

“Frightfully,” replied Obama the Pooh.

Obama the Pooh felt quite pleased with himself after this exchange. If Christopher Mainstreammedia could so readily grasp the gist of this thought, then his surely his thoughts had to be very…gisty.

“Pardon me, Christopher Mainstreammedia,” Pooh said. “But all this thinking makes me think I should think some more,” and so with little more ado, Obama the Pooh turned around and resumed tapping his Pooh head. As he did, he again muttered quietly to himself, “Think. Think. Think. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.”

And after what seemed to him as hours and hours, which to an outside observer would have seemed like weeks and weeks, and which Christopher Mainstreammedia would later report was only a second or two, Obama the Pooh opened his eyes, which now gleamed in the light of revelation.

“Oh, Christopher Mainstreammedia!” he exclaimed. “I have it!”

“Oh, Pooh!” Christopher Mainstreammedia exclaimed in return, his voice raised in a delighted squeal. “What is it that you have?”

“I know what to do about jobs!” he said.

Christopher Mainstreammedia clapped his hands together gleefully. “And what is that?” he asked.

“I’m going to throw another $450 billion at the problem and hope it goes away!” replied Obama the Pooh.

“Oh, Pooh!” gushed Christopher Mainstreammedia. “That is indeed a very clever thing to-do!”

“Yes, I know,” said Obama the Pooh. “And now that I have finished thinking about thinking about jobs, I think I shall reward myself with another vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.”

“Silly old bear,” Christopher Mainstreammedia replied with a giggle.

Democratic Underground Gone Wild!

2011-08-23T16:44:00.000-07:00

I have stated elsewhere that atheism is not a rational proposition. Rather than the end product of a series of logical propositions and inferences, it seems rather to be an auto da fé to which the atheist first assents because there is something he finds impalpable about mainstream religion (that bit about going to hell, most likely), which he then props up with whatever excuses he can devise, however implausible or desperate.

Mind you, I am not saying that atheists are stupid. I’m saying that they may as well be stupid, because they have the ability to use their brains but don’t. Of course, I could say the same thing about quite a number of people. Our ability to rationalize far exceeds our ability to be rational.

As you may recall, this past December my local newspaper published a letter I had written in response to the American Atheists Organization regarding their silly “You KNOW It’s a Myth” Yuletide billboard. The gist of my letter was that their admonition “This season, celebrate REASON” was an exercise in pointlessness, since reason neither leads us to atheism or precludes us from accepting the Nativity as real. Since then, I have written two posts explicating my position regarding atheism’s religious nature, laying out my rationale as logically and methodically as possible.

For no reason in particular, I Googled my name the other day (if you don’t do this from time to time, you should--you find all sorts of dandy stuff that way) and came across a discussion board hosted by the Democratic Underground website (www.democraticunderground.com) in which a member calling himself “cleanhippie” took no little umbrage with my letter, which he reproduced in its entirety. His post may be found here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=214x267422#267422.

Democratic Underground, bièn sûr, is a gathering place for left-wing moonbats to reinforce their pre-existing worldviews, carping about right-wing extremism (which, of course, is anything to the right of their left-wing extremism), and which is about as democratic as the German Democratic Republic, where one in three citizens were Stasi informants. I say this not because cleanhippie disagrees with my letter, but because DU’s masthead is rife with moonbatisms, for example:

• Elect Democrats
• Defeat Rick, Scott
• Save Florida
• Texas’d enough already!
• It all traces back to Nov 22, 1963
• DU DU DU what you’ve done done done before.
• In memoriam Martin John Bobby.
• Defeat the criminal Murdoch empire.

I really don’t mind if people want to align themselves with the Democratic Party, but is it really too much to ask that they try to make sense in doing so?

For example: What, in Heaven’s name, traces back to Nov 22, 1963? The date, everyone realizes, is JFK’s assassination. And? Is there some tie-in between JFK’s murder and a clarion call to join the Democrats in defeating the criminal Murdoch empire? If so, what is it? Kennedy, though a Democrat, was a right-wing Democrat, strong on national defense, an avowed anti-communist, and a fiscal conservative who, after declaring “a rising tide lifts all boats”, fought for and won one of the largest tax cuts in American history. Modern Democrats think the military should be shrunk if not disbanded altogether, hate free enterprise, love centralized government, cherish the nanny state, worship Keynes as Gawd-Almighty, and think tax cuts are evil. A modern-day JFK wouldn’t be elected assistant ombudsman if he ran as a Democrat.

Further, Kennedy wasn’t assassinated by a Republican. Lee Harvey Oswald was as left-wing an ideologue as they come, who thought the Soviet Union was just the bee’s knees, and who shot JFK because he was anti-communist. Nov 22, 1963 is a date rife with significance, but absolutely none of it would lead a thinking person to suppose that Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi must therefore have their heads on straight.

If Democratic Underground’s masthead is any indication whatsoever, I’d say DU is a collective of ninnies who think thinking is unthinkable.

And if you read cleanhippie’s objection to my letter, I think you’ll agree. What follows, not including his reproduction of my letter, is his objection: “The stupid..it BURNS! Let’s play a game: How many strawmen and fallacies can you find in this one letter?”

That’s it--not one assertion as to why he thinks my letter is stupid, not one clarification about what aspect of my letter “burns,” not one identification of any straw men, not a single hint as to what he finds fallacious. There is only the assertion, a blunt opinion confused for a brute fact. Ipse dixit. Just so.

Worse yet, though no less than fifty comments follow, no one bothers to participate in his game of find-the-straw-man. Are we then to assume that because no one sees a straw man, the straw man therefore does not exist? After all, that’s often what atheists say about God.

But, no. This is DU, where what’s sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. Please check your brains at the door.

Instead, the comments that follow either simply echo cleanhippie’s assertion that something in my letter (whatever it is) burns (whatever that means) or is just plain stupid, without any elaboration as to what is stupid about it; or else the discussion turns on the precise meaning of “atheist”. The first eight or so comments are of the first type; the majority are of the second.

In other words, there is no rational analysis of my letter whatsoever, merely the contrary assertion that they’re right and I’m wrong.

As I have written elsewhere, atheism is the belief in the lack of a god; the lack of belief in a god is agnosticism. This is not simply my opinion, but what the words actually mean:

• a “without” + theos “god” = without a god.
• a “without” + gnostos “known” = it is not known

So, an atheist is one without a god, that is, one who believes that there is no god. An agnostic is one who does not know whether there is a god. Big difference. If you ask someone “Does God exist?” the atheist says “No” whereas the agnostic says “I don’t know.” Keep that clear in your head, and it’s easy to tell the one from the other.

Trouble is, the atheist generally doesn’t keep his head clear. Otherwise, he’d have to admit that he’s generally full of baloney. My experience has been that most of the atheists I’ve talked to about God are mere agnostics who call themselves atheists. There’s nothing particularly bad when someone calls himself an atheist (other than that he’s wrong about God’s non-existence), but I think there’s something altogether inappropriate in calling oneself an atheist when one is merely skeptical about God’s existence. Moreover, it’s worse to claim that atheism is true or that it’s a rational proposition if one doesn’t first have a clear idea as to what atheism really means--if you can’t say what the word means, how can you say that you believe in it? And what, for crying out loud, is rational about that?

But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s what another DU poster, one “Speck Tater” has to say: “Two kinds of atheism: 1. Belief in the non-existence of God. 2. Non-belief in the existence of God. I’m a type-2. I do NOT believe that God exists, and I do NOT believe that god does not exist.”

There is it--confusion between atheism and agnosticism (erroneously identified as a form of atheism). He says he’s of the second type but then immediately contradicts himself by saying he doesn’t believe God exists, which, by his own assertion, is type 1. After all, “I believe in the non-existence of God” and “I don’t believe that God exists” mean the same thing. It is a tautology, and it is utter delusion to pretend that by saying the same thing twice one has proffered two separate definitions. To repeat, the atheist says he KNOWS that God does not exist; the agnostic says he DOES NOT know. “Belief in non-existence” and “Non-belief in existence” is a false contrast.

And even cleanhippie seems to understand there is something fundamentally incorrect about Speck Tater’s claim, though he of course gets it all wrong as well (demonstrating the common Democrat fallacy of asserting that because the one with whom you disagree is wrong, you are therefore right). “Strongly disagree,” he replies. “The word atheist literally means ‘without belief’. Saying that an atheist is one who BELIEVES there is no god is, by definition, not an atheist.”

This, children, is your brain on drugs. Any questions? Cleanhippie actually thinks “theos” means “belief.” Hmm. Left-wing, and doesn’t know what words mean. He must teach at Harvard.

But what else should we expect? The ponce thinks “atheist” means “without belief.” Small wonder, then, that he should think that the very definition of “atheist” is not the very definition of “atheist.” Then again, he seems to think that hippies can be clean. IMHO, “clean” hippie is a Taoist imponderable, like the sound of one hand clapping. Every hippie I’ve met has been a solipsistic moron who equates bathing with capitalist oppression.

The one--and only--commentary that doesn’t adhere to the two types adumbrated above comes from a poster identified as “KaoriMitsubishi,” who asserts “Dictionary definitions and pedantry aside…As one prominent atheist put it, if atheism is a belief/faith/religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby. Try with the same zeal theists use in their atheism=religion hooey to convince the stamp non-collector that not collecting stamps is still a hobby and she'll think you need to quit talking to your crack pipe.”

This is a weak example of the appeal to authority, the assertion that the claim must be right because “one prominent atheist” has made it. Thus it has the Prominent Atheist® Seal of Approval. In the real world, this is called putting a shine on a turd.

It doesn’t matter who makes the assertion; the assertion is either right or wrong based on its merits (or lack thereof) and on the soundness (or lack thereof) of its reason.

First, there is no “if atheism is a belief/faith/religion.” Atheism is a belief, and there is no sense in denying this. That’s why, after all, the word ends in -ism. The word belief is derived from a Germanic word related to the modern term beloved. It is an idea or proposition to which one has surrendered one’s allegiance. Atheists ally themselves with the notion that there is no god. It’s what they believe, pure and simple.

Second, KaoriMitsubishi misquotes the assertion: it is not “if atheism is a belief/faith/religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby,” but rather “atheism is not a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is not a hobby.” (Quibble with my formulation all you wish, but the very nature of the if/then construction is not to assert what atheism is but what it isn’t. After all, KaoriMitsubishi isn’t trying to claim that atheism is a religion, else why call it hooey?) In my post “Atheism is a Religion - No, Really!” I demonstrated the fallacy underpinning the Prominent Atheist® assertion, which I’ll repeat here:

The claim fails in this way:
1. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby.
2. To collect coins is also not to collect stamps.
3. By substitution, collecting coins is not a hobby.
4. But collecting coins IS a hobby.
CONTRADICTION

Third, atheism can be shown to be a religion if we can: 1. Identify the fundamental characteristics that all religions share, and 2. Demonstrate how atheism displays these characteristics. I have done exactly so in “Atheism is a Religion - No, Really!” so KaoriMitsubishi’s point stand refuted, without a single reference to crack pipes.

Still, rather than argue the meaning of “atheist” we should discuss the meaning of “stupid.” Cleanhippie seems to think that stupid means “whatever cleanhippie doesn’t agree with.” He calls my letter stupid and makes no attempt whatsoever of justifying his claim. There is only the weak and addled train of thought: My letter to the editor says atheism is a religion; he does not agree; therefore my letter must be stupid. This doesn’t even rise to the dignity of an argument.

My definition of stupid, in contrast, is this: a stupid person is one who says that something is stupid simply because he doesn’t agree with it; reasons don’t matter.

To quote Forrest Gump: “Stupid is as stupid does.” And no one does stupid like cleanhippie.

Huckleberry Thumps His Chest—and Gives Himself an Ouwie

2011-06-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

I’d like to post just a few more words concerning our favorite Hyperexcrementalist, Huckleberry Black, though at this point there seems little to add. He is an idiot and misogynist who has all the subtlety of a ball-peen hammer but only half the intelligence. This has been verified any number of times by both his words and actions, but Huck continues to make a complete ass of himself. The Schadenfreude of watching him eviscerate himself is oh-so-creamy-yummy-delicious, but such repeated performances really can be too much of a good thing. Perhaps we should leave the poor boy to flounder in his stupidity. There’s no helping a fool who refuses to be helped, and no need in telling him to go to Hell if: a) that’s where he’s already headed and b) nothing will sway him from his path.

So, I’ve decided—for the time at least—to leave him wallowing in his ignorance. If ignorance is bliss, Huckleberry Black has to be the most blissful shit-for-brains who has ever lived.

That being said, there are just a few more items of interest vis-à-vis our dispute. So, with your kind indulgence, we’ll proceed.

Binkie in mouth and a Huggies diaper around his scrawny pelvis, Huckleberry Black is convinced there is a conspiracy afoot to make him look childish.

I said, did I not, that all I ever really need to do is call him stupid? That any evidence of his stupidity would be supplied by Captain Stupid himself?

No sooner said than done, because it only took Huck a few hours to supply two major pieces of evidence. And by “major” I mean they are whoppers!

The first is that he has no more respect for the rules of intellectual property than he does for the rules of English grammar. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Huck’s reactions are always visceral, never the product of reflection. He always leaps before he looks. [Note to Huck, doing my best “Foghorn Leghorn” impression: that means, I say, that means ya don’t think, boy! Yer not using yer brains but for, I say, but for keeping your ears from rubbing together! (Aside) Boy’s got no better sense than a tree stump what’s been struck by lightning…]

Thus it is that, after reading my post, “A Tribute to A.J. Black, Vista’s Number Two Writer,” Huck copied and pasted it in its entirety to his own website (Ajblackink.com) under a post entitled “Into The Wild: Perspective Is A Funny Thing.” (The excessive capitalization is not my fault). He neither asked my permission to reprint my commentary, nor did he give me proper credit for it. At the very least, he should have written something like, “I found this on www.mirll.blogspot.com, so I told him GFY.” He didn’t—his plagiarism is yet further indication of why he is a Huckleberry. (By the way, another example of his penchant for redundancy is provided here, because he used the exact phrase “perspective is a funny thing” in a post at www.UCO360.com on February 25, 2011. In this instance, he was replying to another female who called him on his lies and hypocrisy regarding my daughter’s case. He responded with, “I am not sure you have the slightest clue as to what you are talking about.” I assure everyone that she had all her facts perfectly straight, and I defy anyone to find someone who is Huckleberrier than Andrew J. Black.) Not even Anthony “I’m not sure if that’s a photo of my crotch” Weiner can out-Huckleberry our boy Huck!

As I said, isn’t A.J. the Huckleberriest?

The only direct response I’ve had from him to “Tribute” has been the one I quoted in “The Huckleberriest of All.” He demonstrated his lack of reading comprehension and love of redundancy by once again offering GFY’s definition when I’d already explained that every sentient being in the entire universe had already figured it out. However, there have been a number of responses to my post as plagiarized on Huckleberry’s website, some of which I would now like to address.

The first response comes from one Mindi Duncan. I don’t know her, and we’ve never met, but I’m told she’s Huckleberry’s sister—which I think explains a lot, not the least of which is the same abysmal reading comprehension as demonstrated by Huck himself. She writes:

Well, what can I say???? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, or unless you call her daughter fat. I waited days to comment on this so I could stop laughing at the sheer hysteria of the one Terry Mirll. The sad truth is that I knew this was a woman, I knew this was the girls' mother. I don't ever recall a time when my mommy fought a battle for me while I was in college or any other time for that matter, unless of course it was when I was wronged by some bully on the elementary school playground!!!!!! Unfortunately ms. mirll's daughter has no hope whatsoever of producing anything that the general public would be remotely interested in reading. She herself hasn't amounted to much, and she has many years on you. It must be a sad day to realize her dreams will die with her as her no talent daughter won't be carrying on her legacy. It clearly explains the outright vomitous nature of her frantic rantings aimed at someone who needs no introduction, no excuse, etc. How gut wrenching it must be for her to see someone like A.J. excel where her poor daughter falls 'fat' on her face, I mean flat......So Ms. Mirll anytime you would like to dump on someone with more talent than you or your daughter, please by all means, write away, I could sure use the laugh!!!! Oh, and by the way, Ms. Mirll, GO FUCK YOURSELF. It may make you less angry and give you a new perspective on life!!!! To my HUCKLEBERRY MASTER, bring on the Ms. Mirll's of the world for without them we wouldn't be able to laugh or have an example of someone completely lost and delusional and void of anything worth a damn.......Light it up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, I ask my readers: Isn’t it just oodles of fun, watching hop-heads try to be profound? And Miss Duncan admits it took her several days before she was able to compose this misguided, muddled tripe? I don’t know the “Ms. Mirll” she is referring to, but my own wife and daughters are infinitely more talented than either Mindi or her troglodyte brother. She also must think her brother’s victim will express overt concern at being referred to as “Fat” by members of her family. To explain it for the umpteenth time: only morons use appellations like “fatty”; it’s childish, stupid, and irrelevant.

I previously furnished a copy of the official UCO rules regarding student conduct, which dictates that baseless, malicious attacks and other such boorish behavior by students is simply not condoned. A.J. broke the rules by cursing a classmate, and he was called on his actions, something he certainly did not appreciate, but deserved. Yes, his actions directly affected his life, but I ask the reader, which is more egregious--holding a classmate accountable for despicable behavior, or behaving despicably? In Huck’s mindset, it should be the police’s fault if he gets sent to prison for robbing a bank.

But let’s get back on track. Mindi’s post is wrong on so many points that it has provided quite a source of entertainment for myself and my entire family. Let’s begin, shall we?

At which point in any of my posts have I ever said that I was my daughter’s mother? In point of fact, I have been quite clear on the matter. To quote the relevant comment from my previous post (the comment was directed at Huck, but even someone with the tragic misfortune to be Huck’s sister can catch my drift), “I’m the father of the young woman you shouldn’t have fucked with.” What part of “father” would lead anyone other than a Huckleberry to conclude that I was someone’s mother?

Note also that Mindi displays the same bully mentality as her hopelessly dopey brother. A bully is intrinsically a coward; after he attacks someone, he begins crying “Hey! Fight your own fights!” should anyone come to his victims’ defense. Certainly, my daughter can fight her own fights. I know, because she bested A.J. But she wasn’t the one who started the current ruckus—Huck was. So, his dimwittedness makes him fair game to anyone who wishes to join in the fray. I personally chose to participate so I could provide an object lesson that his assertion “shut your mouth, pull your skirt over your head, sit down, go cut yourself, and wait for Jesus over there…Call the cops honey, no one is coming to save you” was incorrect. NO ONE, Huck? To date, a minimum of seven people, and at least four of your victims, reported your reprehensible behavior to the campus police or spoke with Chris Snoddy about you.

By the way, Mindi, daaaaahling, that’s also why the police popped in on your idiot li’l brother. Coming to save people is kind of their job.

Yes, my daughter fought for justice. She used proper UCO procedures and lawful means. Her two sisters, my wife and I, and numerous friends and family also stand ready at any moment to rise to her defense, particularly when she is verbally attacked by a crybaby who can’t tolerate having one of his stories critiqued in, of all places, a writing workshop. My daughter conducted herself as expected and instructed by her professor, which, by the way, earned her yet another A. In contrast, Huck’s bratty, crybaby response was to fling “Go fuck yourself” at her from the safe and cozy distance of cyberspace. (I rather suspect that the reason he didn’t do it in person was because he was afraid of getting his ass kicked by a g-i-r-l, which is a creature for which he seems to hold nothing but contempt, and so the mere prospect of being pummeled by one was more than his coward’s heart could bear.) And then, to add injury to insult, he used his position as a writer for the Vista to paint himself as the victim rather than the offender, saying, “If you send me a nasty e-mail attacking me as a person, then don’t go crying to the professor about my response.” At that point, he made this whole affair a matter of public record, and so no one, let alone Mindi or Huck, should act surprised that the public began to cry foul.

Strange, I would think calling someone “fatty” is attacking someone as a person. The clear facts, once and for all, stand as follows: My daughter critiqued Huck’s paper, as did other students in the class they shared. She also received critiques on her own work, as that is the format used in a creative writing workshop-style course. Huckleberry Black resented her daring to criticize his work. Huckleberry Black intentionally looked her name up on the roster and Facebook. Huckleberry Black then sent her the hateful message, not vice-versa. Her only contact with Huck prior to his infantile attack was to critique his story. The assessment, I think, is abundantly clear: A.J. Black is a crybaby who can’t take the hard knocks of life. He is also a coward and an idiot. These are not simply names that I choose to foist on him--they are a correct evaluation of his behavior. If I’m wrong, tell me how. But do it with reason and not emotion. And the use of a single “Go fuck yourself” means only that you’ve lost the argument.

Huck, you’re either too cowardly to admit to your hypocrisy, or too stupid to realize it. Which is it?

Getting back to Mindi’s silly rant, she asks rhetorically, “Well, what can I say?” (I refuse to reproduce her excessive punctuation. Extra question marks or exclamation points are a poor substitute for posing a valid argument, and are usually a sign that no real argument has been made, nor is one forthcoming.) To respond to the rhetorical with the factual: apparently, she can say absolutely nothing coherently or which could even remotely be considered substantial, although this didn’t stop her from continuing. (She’s just got to be Huck’s sister!)

She accuses “Ms. Mirll” (whoever this is) of “frantic rantings.” Surely, then, she can’t be talking to me, as there has been nothing frantic about any of my statements. Sure, there’s been some name-calling, but my invective has been entirely justified by Huckleberry’s boorish behavior. In my analysis of both Huck’s skills as a writer and his overall value as a human being (to remind one and all, his score on both categories is zero), I have continuously and meticulously fashioned my arguments in the classical logical formation of two premises followed by a rational conclusion.

For example:
First Premise: “Huckleberry” is a euphemism for “pathetic loser.”
Second Premise: Andrew J. Black says “I’m your Huckleberry.”
Conclusion: Andrew J. Black is a pathetic loser.
QED

And again:
FP: Only a complete moron thinks “Go fuck yourself” is a suitable rejoinder.
SP: Huckleberry Black uses “Go fuck yourself” as a rejoinder.
C: Huckleberry Black is a complete moron.
QED

And yet again:
FP: People who can’t tell “write” from “right” or "then" from "than" or the "a" from the "u" key do not deserve to be writers for a school newspaper, and have no right to complain if they get fired. Those who complain about being justly fired are crybabies who can’t take the hard knocks of life.
SP: Huck Black has proven he can’t tell “write” from “right” or "then" from "than" or the "a" from the "u" key and yet has the nerve to complain about losing his post with the school newspaper.
C: Huck Black is a crybaby who can’t take the hard knocks of life.
QED

See? 100% logical and rational. There’s absolutely nothing frantic about it.

Rather, what is illogical and frantic is Mindi’s response. Who, for instance, in her right mind would ever assert that Huckleberry “excels” at anything? “Excel” connotes excellence, and there is nothing that a rational person would ever ascribe as excellent in a total dunderhead like our Huck. Should I cite examples? Let’s see. Huckleberry:

• Can’t tell “write” from “right”
• Can’t tell “then” from “than”
• Doesn’t understand how a semicolon is used
• Gets the “a” confused with the “u” key
• Thinks 5.9 billion people are one idiot
• Practices lyrical witchcraft (whatever that is) on one’s mustache
• Praises his rambling, run-on sentences as a “verbal head lock”
• Thinks having his drivel reproduced on a singularly idiotic blog constitutes “being published”
• Has multiple complaints lodged against him with the UCO conduct office, along with the campus and local police departments
• Quits his post with the school newspaper because he can’t stand being edited (see, “Letter of Resignation” Vista, March 8, 2011)
• Says that “life experiences” are more important than having a diploma in hand (Tell that to a prospective employer!)
• Got two Fs during his senior semester at UCO, but claims he graduated “with distinction” after earning a 3.87 G.P.A.
• Calls classmates “fatty” while bemoaning being attacked as a person
• Thinks “Go fuck yourself” is a suitable reply in any polemical dispute
• Thinks “Go fuck yourself” is the ONLY reply he ever needs to offer critics

This list hardly begins to address his poor life choices. Whatever success he has attained has been obliterated by bad behavior. The only place he claims for publication has eradicated any record of his existence. His excursion into Las Vegas to become the next Hunter Thompson seems to have fallen flat-—I have been informed that A.J. lost all his money gambling and now relies on the kindness of his family in Houston for his survival. I wish them all the best, as I sincerely doubt our boy Huck has been able as yet to secure a job, or has the talent or good sense to keep one.

What is “excellent” about any of this—-other than the claim that “Huckleberry” is indubitably an excellent euphemism for “pathetic loser”?

Maybe someday Huck’s taunts will actually evolve from an elementary schoolyard level to at least the junior high level of “Yo Mama,” but there are only two possible conclusions to draw regarding Mindi’s reply. Either she is allowing her affection for her brother to cloud her judgment, or else she is a Huckleberry like him. I don’t know the girl and am willing to give her the benefit of any doubt, but the latter conclusion already appears more likely than the former. Like her brother, she seems to think that “Go fuck yourself” is somehow relevant as an intellectual rejoinder-—which is always a sign of Hyperexcrementalism. Further, she not only confuses me for my wife when I have indicated most clearly that I am my daughter’s father, but also believes excess punctuation somehow adds weight to her argument.

And did you notice Mindi’s attempt at being clever? My daughter, or rather this mythical Ms. Mirll’s daughter, “falls ‘fat’ on her face, I mean flat,” followed by the super-extra-weighty-double-long ellipsis. *Sigh.* Haven’t I already established enough times that epithets like “fatty” are only cast by morons? Behold, the She-Huck. As the saying goes, “Der Äpfel fällt nicht weit vom Baume ab,” which in the current context means roughly “Sheesh! Aren’t Huckleberries just the dumbest creatures on the planet?”

And what about that “my master Huckleberry” comment? I must admit, I’m completely stumped as to what Mindi means in uttering it. Huck is her master? Huck is the MASTER HUCKLEBERRY? Is this some sort of sadomasochistic code? Note also, she herself calls her brother “Huckleberry,” as good an example as any of people who are so stupid they don’t know when they’ve been insulted.

Ok, I’ll try one more time, just for you, Mindi. To make myself absolutely clear, maybe it will assist you in comprehending what I’m trying to explain if I raise my voice a bit by typing in all caps. Ready?

MINDI DUNCAN, HUCKLEBERRY MEANS "PATHETIC LOSER"! CALLING YOUR BROTHER A HUCKLEBERRY MEANS YOU’VE CALLED HIM A LOSER!

(By the way, isn’t it ironic that "Duncan" is a brand of yo-yo?)

Mindi posted her comment to her brother’s blog on May 31st at 3:48 p.m. Then, at 3:49 p.m. of the same day (this demonstrates just how much thought Huckleberries give themselves before blurting out their next Hyperexcremental diatribe), she added (in all caps and terminated by many, many, manymanymany exclamation points, bièn sûr), “Number 2 is still a contender!”

Indeed. But as “contender” is the predicate nominative, it is on equal grammatical footing as the subject, which means this is simply another way of saying, “The contender is still number 2!"--and that has been my contention all along. So, thank you so very much, Ms. Mindi, for agreeing with me.

But let’s return to the primary object of our derision, ole Huck himself.

I previously mentioned two major whoppers which Number Two Writer, Huck Black has provided us, clearly indicating his thick-headedness. The first pales in comparison with this next one. Here are some preliminary details…

Someone—honestly, I don’t know who, as neither I nor anyone in my household wrote this—posted a comment to A.J.’s blog on June 2nd, at 3:42 a.m. It wasn’t me, I promise. I’m usually in bed at 3:42 a.m., because, unlike Huck, I work for a living. At any rate, some anonymous blogger said (and excuse its graphic coarseness):

Really, mindi? Were you sucking Huckleberry's dick as you typed your response? Obviously you are as moronic as he is. It seems that the only good thing that has come from this situation is that now the huckster is no longer protected by the guys in the big fluffy chairs at UCO. He is out there in the real world where if he acts like he has in this situation he will, hopefully, be held accountable. Oh and by the way, I believe that the author of the post you are responding to is a man. You are clearly not as brilliant as you think, but the you proved that when you unmarkedly showed you allegiance for the "huckleberry master." I wonder if you are smart enough to figure out that by calling him that you have insulted him further? I'm gonna go with, yeah... probably not.

I repeat most emphatically, it was neither I nor anyone in my household who made these comments, but my family would like to extend their kudos to whoever posted these worthy sentiments. Besides the fact that I was most assuredly in bed at 3:42 a.m., I would have capitalized “Mindi,” and I hope I wouldn’t have made the “but the you proved that” editorial slip-up. Nor would I have suggested that Mindi must have been performing fellatio on her brother as she typed her message. (Although Mindi’s “Master Huckleberry” comment does give one pause...)

Be that as it may, in his paranoid state of mind, Huckleberry must have almost immediately assumed that I was the anonymous writer. He may have thought it was my daughter, but she has not given him any serious thought since she realized he had missed enough creative writing classes to earn an F. And so, at 5:05 a.m. (an early riser, our Huck, no doubt catching the preschool programming offered on Houston television channels, while pretending to scour the employment ads in the local paper to keep his sister from grousing at him to go find a job), A.J. graced us with these comments. I quote:

Dear Anonymous Myrll,
Allow me to reiterate. G.F.Y. stands for Go Fuck Yourself. I don’t speak Russian or German, but I do speaka da Spanish, and cuidado con loque diga conmigo, porque soy peligroso! I actually did graduate with distinction and a G.P.A of 3.87 at U.C.O. to be exact.
It is unfortunate that we have never met; however, I am looking forward to it. Because I would enjoy wrapping my tan hands around your fleshy white throat and choking the life out of your pathetic type-2 diabetes infested soul. Keep it coming. Your affirmations are like momma's homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches.
For the record: I didn't apply for the paid position at the vista. I was sought out and recruited. Almost as if it were fate. Tell cupcake I said hi.

Oy, gewalt! Where to start? Where to start?

Firstly, there is the mystery behind the spelling of the anonymous contributor’s name as M-y-r-l-l. There’s no telling whether this is another example of Huck’s atrocious skill at spelling or if this is some sort of deliberate dig to addle me or any member of my family. If the former, well, that’s a Huckleberry for you; if the latter, he’s hardly the first knucklehead to misspell my name, and he won’t be the last. As Huckleberry himself wrote, “90 percent of the human race is an idiot.” (And 100% of the idiots are Huckleberries; though I repeat, there's no Huck like our Huck!)

Secondly, he included his pointless reiteration of GFY. Stooping to redundancy myself even to write this, I have said that everyone knows what GFY means. I have reminded Huck of this, and more than once. I have added that he may as well fling Nerf balls at me. And still he feels the need to reiterate. Therefore, allow me to reiterate as well: “Huckleberry” is a euphemism for “pathetic loser.” It is, however, also synonymous with: brain-dead moron, pseudo-intellect, poop-hurling sheygets, fool, blowhard, useless blowhard, crybaby, misogynist, woman-hating jackass, jackass, sociopath, lying sack of shit, and, oh yes, of course, Andrew J. Black, persona non grata for the Vista at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Thirdly, he must have assumed the “anonymous Myrll” was me, as he referred to my previous usage of expressions in both German and Russian while insulting him. While admitting he didn’t understand my German or Russian, but trying to express himself in a language other than English, he offers up the utterly derisable “I do speaka da Spanish,” which must impress the utter frijoles of our amigos south of the border. Huck, I’ve got to be painfully honest with you here, mijo. As a native Texan, ten-year resident of Oklahoma, J. William Fulbright scholarship recipient, and well-educated holder of several university degrees, may I say that your attempt at being impressive is less than impressive? Do people really "speaka da Spanish"? I could have sworn they say “Yo hablo Español.” And did you really mean to type, “porque soy peligroso!” Huck? Surely you meant, “por soy un pendejo con una cabeza de mierde!” Cabron! (“Cabron” is Spanish, roughly, for “Scheisskopf,” which is German, roughly, for “Durak,” which is Russian, roughly, for “dumbass,” which is English, absolutely precisely, for “Huckleberry,” which is an excellent euphemism for “pathetic loser,” which is a synonym for Andrew J. Black.)

Fourthly, as for Huck’s G.P.A., I’ll believe his claim when I see it. If he can provide an official transcript indicating the conferral of a degree and a record of his supposed 3.87 G.P.A., I’ll gladly admit to the entire blogosphere that I was tragically wrong on both counts. Otherwise, I say to my readers, please carefully consider the source. He’s proven himself a liar, consistently; therefore, there is no reason to suspect he’s not lying about graduating from UCO. This May was to have been his senior semester, and his name failed to appear on the list containing all his former classmates who had been approved for graduation. Besides, I have it on good authority that Huck managed to earn himself failing grades in at least two of his classes during his final semester at UCO. While a single B will drag down a 3.87 G.P.A., two Fs will absolutely wreck it. And, to my knowledge, the only "distinction" he graduated with was that of Grand High Huckleberry with the reputation of a poop-hurling sheygets.

Fifthly, his claim that we never met is untrue. Fate has brought us together on two occasions, as we’ve actually shared two classes together. The one night he attended a creative writing class at the downtown campus in Oklahoma City, he arrived late. Then, when prompted by the professor to share an original storyline for discussion, he began describing the storyline and plot to the George Clooney film “Up in the Air.” After our instructor called him on this, A.J. left class at the break and never returned. He later told other UCO classmates that he’d dropped the class, because he’d already learned everything he needed to know about publishing a novel from the instructor’s brief introductory outline that first night. The second occasion occurred in February, when A.J. and I then sat next to each other during the Thursday night creative writing class he and my daughter shared. After Huck verbally assaulted my daughter, I gained approval to attend the class. That night, I sat between my daughter and Huck. We did not speak to each other, but he continued his pattern of non-active participation in the class by contributing not one word. However, I noticed him suspiciously eyeing the copy of my second novel I had brought with me. So, yes, I’ve seen Huck in person. Allow me to describe him: roughly 5’ 7” or 8” with a haggard, emaciated frame and arms like toothpicks. He’s also covered with a number of tattoos, with the one on his left elbow featuring a bird’s nest with prison bars across it. (Now, that's classy!) After that evening, Huck stopped attending the workshop entirely. For a number of weeks, I remained a guest until Huck's professor assured me that he had dropped the class and would not be returning.

Sixthly, and finally, the meat and potatoes of our boy Huck’s message was:

Because I would enjoy wrapping my tan hands around your fleshy white throat and choking the life out of your pathetic type-2 diabetes infested soul.

Mind you, I was more aghast at his bad grammar and moronic imagery than his little tirade’s actual content. I doubt the non-existent “Myrll” would believe him- or herself threatened either. (As entertaining as his mindless blustering may be to me, however, several people have already suggested, given Andrew’s past actions, generally misanthropic attitude, and sociopathic reputation that his latest cyber-generated threat be reported to local law enforcement officials. I’ll think about it.)

Let’s just point out a few problems, shall we? His comment has no main clause and is therefore a sentence fragment. Souls, being non-material, cannot have the life choked out of them by any pair of material hands, nor can they be infested with anything, let alone Type II diabetes. Further, diabetes (whatever the type) does not infest its victim like a virus or bacillus; it is, rather, a condition that results from the pancreas supplying insufficient levels of insulin. (And what was that totally extraneous crapola about tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches? WTF? Or, as our favorite Huckleberries Dork and Mindi might put it: What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuck???????????????????????????????????????????????????????)

As for his taking pleasure at throttling his anonymous critic, whether male or female: Would he, now? And I suppose I or anyone else would simply stand there and take it? Or-—O sudden, effervescent, and tantalizing thought!—-would anyone being assaulted by him perhaps offer some sort of personal defense? Why, yes! Yes, I certainly would! And if Huckleberry suspects even for a moment that I wouldn’t, boy, is he EVER a Huckleberry! Act like a Huckleberry, get your ass kicked like a Huckleberry. That’s what I say.

For one, Huck, your hands aren’t tan. Those are tobacco stains, aided by the fact that you never wash. For another, my throat is neither fleshy nor white—-it is robust, solid, and far too thick for any Huckleberry to wrap his scrawny fingers around it. And, lastly, I don’t have Type II diabetes. My blood sugar is understandably high, as I’ve always considered Dr. Pepper one of the major food groups. But my cholesterol is only 59, when the normal level is 120. I won’t live forever, not physically anyway, but I’m willing to bet I’ll outlive you, given your dopey (no pun intended) lifestyle choices. Now go threaten someone who’s afraid of you, you yapping Chihuahua!

One really has to wonder what sort of skittering, arachnid thoughts blurb through a Huckleberry’s brain to cause him to make verbal threats such as these. I suppose he’ll try to deny that he has actually uttered one—-he’ll likely say that he was only making a statement of what he would enjoy doing, not that he would actually do it. Tell it to a judge. I know of people who have been sent to prison for the subtlest of veiled threats, and Huck wouldn’t know subtle if it came up to him wearing a “Hey, I’m Subtle!” t-shirt and offering him a free membership in the Subtle of the Month Club.

Still, perhaps like his sister, he may have had me confused with my wife, and so figured he had an easy female target. Boy, he sure doesn’t know my wife! Nope. Sorry, A.J., no luck attacking women without being outmatched once again. My wife worked as a Correctional Officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice-Institutional Division and for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. She has been highly trained in the use of firearms. Virtually able to thread needles with her shots, she has qualified using a Smith and Wesson revolver, a Glock 17 (9 millimeter for those who don’t know its patent number), a shotgun, and an AR-15. This last one is a rather loud and messy weapon, yet eminently effective. It’s her favorite.

Though, please, Huck, don’t assume that you are being threatened here. Although my wife has exhibited fine marksmanship skills, your brain is appreciably SMALLER than the eye of a needle, so she might just miss. Besides, she wouldn’t want to waste good ammunition or firing time on such a worthless target. You’ll be perfectly safe.

For my fellow readers who have expressed concern about the plagiarism or threatening comments posted by one Andrew J. Black, I would like to reassure everyone that I contacted the legal department of Godaddy.com (legal@godaddy.com) and asked for their position on Go Daddy subscribers who use their websites to issue threats. They have assured me that Godaddy.com does cooperate fully with law enforcement officials attempting to thwart illegal activities being conducted on their sites.

As I stated before, I intend this to be my final posting dealing with the cretinous, knuckle-dragging troglodyte named Andrew Joseph Black, formerly affiliated with the University of Central Oklahoma’s Vista. I will post further updates only if events warrant such action.

So, adieu, Number Two. You were fun to have around as our favorite Huckleberry, but my family and I have grown tired of you. We’ve had our fun, and now we’re finished. Did you hear that sound? You, Number Two, have just been flushed from our collective memories. Good-bye, and good riddance.

The Huckleberriest of All

2011-05-31T20:01:00.000-07:00

First, a few handy terms to know:
Huckleberry: Andrew J. Black; pathetic loser
Schadenfreude: the act of taking pleasure in another’s misfortune.
Gravamen: the main thrust of an argument or position
Hyperexcrementalism: the act of being A.J. Black, and therefore full of shit.

"Hyperexcrementalism" is admittedly a term coined by Yours Truly, but fully applicable in this instance. Feel free to use the term yourselves, but please see that I am given proper credit for it.

At the risk of sounding overly Zen here, allow me to point out a truism: There is no man so ignorant as the one who thinks he has nothing else to learn. In my previous post, I showcased a particularly ignorant pea-brain, one Andrew J. Black of www.Ajblackink.com, for whom this truism seems tailor-made. In fact, the only part of it that doesn’t seem to apply to A.J. is “man.” Men can take criticism (or at the very least can compose a suitable defense against it)—A.J. can’t. Or, as he would state the matter: “A.J. cunt.”

As I stated in my post, if A.J. is truly concerned with identifying crybabies who can’t take the hard knocks of life, he need look no further than the nearest mirror. By this I meant to say that A.J. is a crybaby who can’t take criticism. Obvious, one would think, and one would be right, provided one gives the matter the barest modicum of thought. However, as A.J. never seems to think before opening his mouth (actually, he never seems to think at all; how the poor lad manages to wipe himself is one of the great mysteries of the universe), it is sometimes necessary to spell out the patently obvious so that even the perpetually clueless (here I mean A.J.; whoever is reading this post to him should point this out) can participate in the discussion.

And no sooner said than done, A.J. has now proffered his two cents’ worth. To my sheer delight, A.J. caught wind of my comments (I don’t recall using “Brain-dead moron” as a keyword, but, hey…) and posted the following reply, which I now reproduce in its bombastic and inglorious entirety:

G.F.Y stands for go fuck yourself. I tried to quit the Vista prior to writing I'm Your Huckleberry and was aggressively encouraged to reconsider. Teddy Burch, the faculty advisor, also encouraged me to write about your daughter. The article was read by several people several times, including the faculty advisor before being published. Your daughter left out a few things from her side of the incident. Even though you attempted to have me fired, expelled, arrested, and defamed, I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere. So, G.F.Y -A.J. Black Ajblackink.com P.S. I could sue you, the school, and the vista, but it would be like stepping on dog shit instead of walking around it...

The reply is over. Please return your cerebellum to its full and upright locked position. Thank you for flying A.J. Black Airlines.

Did I not say that “Huckleberry” was a euphemism for “pathetic loser”? And as Huckleberries go, isn’t A.J. just the Huckleberriest?

I mean, you hear of these types—people who are just so insufferably and irretrievably stupid they can’t even understand when they’ve been insulted; for example, the idiots that appear on MTV’s “Scarred”—oafish dimwits who stupidly make a taint-first dive onto an iron rail and then post the video for all the world to see, completely unaware that everyone is laughing at them rather than with them. But to actually meet one, to encounter one in the flesh, still living and (somehow) breathing—it simply boggles the mind.

In fact, I don’t need to say anything apart from calling him stupid. Any gravamen to the claim will be stupidly supplied by Captain Stupid himself. It’s the legendary battle of wits with an unarmed opponent. Honestly, it feels like I’m taking a pillowcase full of horseshoes to the face of some snotty six-year-old—hardly what one would call a fair fight. I almost feel bad, verbally abusing such a pseudo-intellect.

Almost. I must admit, the Schadenfreude is just so yummy delicious! So, with the reader’s indulgence, I’ll proceed.

Question: What did A.J. Black get on his I.Q. test? Answer: Drool.

I ask the reader-—no, I beg the reader—-to take a moment and examine A.J.’s reply. Doesn’t his prose have all the charm of a dead Halibut rotting on the floor? The commas and periods seem to buzz around like so many flies, one lifeless, dull eye peeking up inertly and uncomprehendingly as we stand over it in horrified fascination. (Our boy Huck has actually convinced himself that he can make a living with this lackluster style of writing. Oy!) Forget the need for proper punctuation (Vista should be in italics; “I’m Your Huckleberry” should be in quotes, etc.) and just examine his missive from a conceptual standpoint for a moment. It reads like a miscellaneous collection of statements, with no apparent rationale as to why they should belong together, kind of like one of those experimental “found” poems amassed from a pile of clippings lying around an editor’s desk.

In fact, allow me to take his reply apart, piece by piece. Pardon my manners, but at this point, I’ll speak directly to Huck, since apparently I need to have a little chat with the boy, man to crybaby.

G.F.Y stands for go fuck yourself.
As I stated in my previous post, there is no great difficulty in figuring out what GFY stands for, so there's no need for you to tell me what it means. Of course, you would have known this, had you actually bothered to read my post; however, as that would have required you to actually bother to READ, I can understand your failure to grasp what to normal folk is painfully obvious. To repeat myself, I said, “There are amoebas scurrying about the moons of Jupiter that must know what it means.” Though hyperbole, it makes my point rather clear. Everybody already knows what GFY means; since I am included as a subset of the category “Everybody,” it follows that I, too, know what GFY means. Mind you, I’m not sure what good repeating myself will do—you didn’t bother to read my comment the first time, so there’s no reason to suspect you’ll read it the second time it comes around. (Note to whoever is reading this to A.J. right now; you REALLY need to point these things out as you go, otherwise our boy Huck is bound to misspeak. Of course, if he speaks at all, he’s bound to make a complete jackass of himself-—but you already know what I mean.)

I tried to quit the Vista prior to writing I'm Your Huckleberry and was aggressively encouraged to reconsider.
You tried to quit the Vista? What? And they wouldn't let you? The brigands! Didn't you explain that the Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery? Did you contact the ACLU to complain that you were being forced to write crappy, vacuous, misogynistic, third-rate newspaper columns against your will? Didn’t you at least explain that you can’t tell the “a” from the “u” key?

And you were "aggressively encouraged" to reconsider? Did they threaten to break your legs? Leave a severed horse head under your “Spongebob Squarepants” bedsheets? Show you a copy of the contract, signed in your own feces, obliging you to produce a dumb/dumber/dumbest series of articles? (In that case, you could have wormed your way out of your contractual obligation by posting just one well-written article, and they would have dropped you like a hot potato. But, hey, let the past be the past!)

I think you overstate your value to these people. In fact, I’m sure of it. Since your departure from UCO and the Vista, the comically misnamed “Opinion Laced with Fact” seems to have dropped into a quantum wormhole, blinking out of our universe into an alternate universe where the hopelessly brain-dead rule the world (and where you would be king). There’s no mention anywhere of any A.J. Black ever having written for the Vista. Your past columns aren’t even archived. And yet, somehow, you’ve gone from being “aggressively encouraged” not to leave the Vista to persona non grata, all in a mere four months. That’s an impressive feat, even for a Huckleberry. Why, it’s as if YOU NEVER EXISTED! (Cue “Twilight Zone” Theme, with the ghost of Rod Serling puffing dourly upon his cigarette and growling, “Consider for your approval, one Huckleberry Black, whose poisoned pen was once the Excalibur of collegiate journalism…”)

And speaking of kings, I noticed on your website that you are now President of www.Ajblackink.com. Congratulations on what surely must have been a hard-fought electoral campaign. However did you manage to stuff the ballot boxes? (And what did you stuff them with?) Though I admit I’m curious as to why you settled on the rank of mere President. Why not Lord High Grand Poop-Hurling Poobah?

Teddy Burch, the faculty advisor, also encouraged me to write about your daughter.
Funny, in my previous post I NEVER SAID that “I’m Your Huckleberry” (or, for that matter, any of your moronic posts) was about my daughter. I merely alluded to “a classmate—-an honors student slated to graduate summa cum laude this May” who “stated in a critique of one of his stories that she had considerable difficulty identifying with his main character,” whom you then attacked on Facebook. I never identified her, and yet you seem to know all about her. Even if it’s true that Teddy Burch encouraged you to write about my daughter (and I seriously doubt it—-but, hey, I have his e-mail address, so I’ll send him a quick query to see if he’ll back up your claim), then why did you tell Chris Snoddy of the Department of Student Conduct that "I'm Your Huckleberry" was categorically NOT about my daughter? Your appreciation for the truth is on the same level as your appreciation for English grammar. (Translation for the hopelessly dopey, aka, Huck Black: I'm saying you're lying. You’re either lying now about Teddy Burch, or you lied to Chris Snoddy, or, as I highly suspect, both.)

Further, even if there is some morsel of truth that Teddy Burch “encouraged” you to write about my daughter, I seriously doubt he gave you carte blanche to compose the misogynistic tirade you foisted upon the UCO readership. Seriously, your anti-female jeremiad “shut your mouth, pull your skirt over your head, sit down, go cut yourself, and wait for Jesus over there…Call the cops honey, no one is coming to save you”—regardless of who the object of your animus happened to be—-was not only inappropriate and stupid, it was sick. Only a moron of the lowest order would make such a statement. You made the statement; therefore, you’re a moron of the lowest order. I am aghast not only that I should have to point this out, but that the editors of the Vista, females no less, seem not to have realized it themselves. Which leads us to your next dopey comment:

The article was read by several people several times, including the faculty advisor before being published.
Apart from the impossibility for “several” people to read an article only ONCE (and NOT “several times”), the POINT, Huck, is that as vapid, misogynistic, and sociopathic as your article was, the muttonheads at the Vista PRINTED IT ANYWAY. It was bad enough that you bothered to write such drivel; it was journalistically irresponsible and reprehensible of the Vista’s editors to approve its publication. Free Speech is not simply the right to say whatever cruel and sick comment that bursts out of your brain like pus from a cyst. One tailors one’s thoughts to take an intellectual position. One argues that a given position is valid. One urges the reader to agree. You didn’t do any of this BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT CAPABLE OF IT.

Comments like “Go fuck yourself” are pointless and useless, and only a complete fool uses them. This is not to say you can’t use GFY at all, but only that it has no bearing on whether you’re right or wrong and is thus irrelevant. That you avail yourself of such a comment so readily is bad enough; worse yet, you use it unreservedly, not because it’s your weapon of choice, but because it’s the only weapon in your verbal arsenal. So, you’re a double fool, so stupid that you don’t know that you don’t know. And you think you’re going to use words to make your living? You can’t be serious!

Moreover, there’s nothing special about “Go fuck yourself,” because anyone can use it. You can use it. Your granny can use it. The aforementioned Jovian amoebas can use it. I can use it, and in more than one language. The Germans, for instance, prefer the phrase Leck mich am Arsch! Literally, it means “lick my ass,” but conveys the same meaning. And the Russians say Yob tvoiyu mat’, which means “I fucked your mother.” Same difference. Now explain to me how any of this refutes the notion that you’re a moron. It doesn’t?

Moron.

Your daughter left out a few things from her side of the incident.
It’s no real surprise that you would claim my daughter “left out a few things,” without even the slightest mention as to what those “things” might be. Would you care to elaborate? (And no, “Go fuck yourself” is not a form of elaboration, so let’s nip that buffoonery in the bud right now!)

Y’see, Huck, real writers don’t just make claims stated as brute facts. Real writers back up their arguments with supportive elements. People who make such charges without bothering to support them are mere blowhards. People who can only back up their baseless claims with “Go fuck yourself” are useless blowhards. People who are useless blowhards are called "Huckleberries." “Huckleberry” is a synonym for A.J. Black. (Note to whoever is reading this to A.J.: this is simple syllogistic train of thought, but doubtless it’s got our boy Huck completely flummoxed. You may have to use a chalkboard. In which case, grab him by the back of the head and slam it multiple times into the chalkboard until he understands. Don’t worry—-he seems to like it rough.)

But, for the moment, let’s suppose that there are indeed any number of “things” my daughter left out of the incident in question. Which of those “things” justified: 1. Deliberately looking up her name on the UCO class roster; 2. Finding her profile on Facebook; 3. Acting like a six-year-old and calling her “Fatty”; and 4. Telling her to go fuck herself? And, once justified, explain to me how any of this refutes the notion that you’re a useless blowhard. It doesn’t?

Useless blowhard.

Even though you attempted to have me fired, expelled, arrested, and defamed,
None of this, of course, is true. (Tell me, what’s the deal with you and the truth? Are you allergic to it? Or does it burn like holy water splashed on a vampire? Mind you, in comparing you with a vampire, I’m not trying to say you suck. Though you do, come to think of it.) But to address each of your participles in the order in which they appear:

Fired
In order to be fired, one first must be hired. Tell me, were you employed with the Vista? Did they pay you a salary? Of course, the greater question is: Does a brain-dead moron who can’t tell the “a” key from the “u” deserve having his insipid and vulgar nonsense published by the school newspaper? Or, should he, maychance, be fired? Consider, for instance, this letter submitted to the Vista’s editors (I have graciously been given permission to reprint it here), written by an honors student who graduated summa cum laude this May (I’ll leave you to guess who):

A.J. Black is completely oblivious to the difference between “than” and “then,” as well as how to use a semicolon properly. I am horrified that a group of “w-r-i-t-e-r-s” allowed him to misspell “w-r-i-t-e” as “r-i-g-h-t” in his final article. Publicly displaying his bad grammar and spelling only reflects poorly on the Vista’s editors. When I corrected his grammatical and punctuation mistakes in our Thursday night class, Black sent me a vicious hate message on Facebook, calling me “fatty” and saying, “Go fuck yourself.” Apparently because his lackluster editors never pointed out his typos, he now believes he is a writing god, too perfect for errors. Therefore, hearing otherwise from me caused his delusions of grandeur and narcissism to kick into full gear. Thank you, Vista editors, for never correcting him. My only question: How can Black possibly consider himself a “w-r-i-t-e-r” if he can’t even spell it?

NB: I’m no mind-reader, but I suspect her gratitude to the editors is not sincere.

At any rate, her critique is valid. I don’t want a brain-dead imbecile who can’t tell “write” from “right” submitting opinion columns for the school newspaper any more than a doctor who can’t tell an enema from a pre-frontal lobotomy. (Though if he’s performing it on you, Huck, I suppose exceptions can be made.) If you deserve to be fired, you should be, and only a crybaby balks at getting what he deserves. Now explain to me how any of this refutes the notion that you shouldn’t have been fired. It doesn’t?

Crybaby.

Expelled
I did nothing of the sort. I merely pointed to the UCO Code of Student Conduct, Sec. IV, Paragraph A (and I quote, with the pertinent phrases highlight in bold):

Each student is expected to engage in all academic pursuits in a manner that is above reproach. Students are expected to maintain complete honesty and integrity in the academic experiences both in and out of the classroom. Academic dishonesty includes, but is not confined to: plagiarizing; cheating on tests or examinations; turning in counterfeit reports, tests, and papers; stealing tests or other academic material; knowingly falsifying academic records or documents of the institution; accessing a student’s confidential academic records without authorization; disclosing confidential academic information without authorization; and, turning in the same work to more than one class without informing the instructors involved. Any student found responsible of academic dishonesty will be subject to disciplinary action. Violation of these expectations, as specified above and in sections III, IV, and V, may result in penalties up to and / or including expulsion from the University.

I don’t think that any reasonable person would consider “Go fuck yourself” to be above reproach—-especially considering the steps you pursued in uttering it. Further, using the Vista as a forum to lie about the incident (painting yourself as the victim was untrue; you knew it was untrue; therefore, you lied) demonstrated neither honesty nor integrity. Your vulgar responses to your detractors on www.uco360.com were unethical in the extreme. My daughter was not the only student to lodge a complaint against you; at least four students contacted Chris Snoddy’s office regarding your misbehavior. UCO would have been amply justified in expelling you.

Arrested
This, too, is entirely false. My daughter, upon reading “I’m Your Huckleberry,” realized she was dealing with a sociopath and so took the appropriate measures to protect herself. She contacted the campus police as well as the Edmond police and made a report of the incident. I would have expected any young woman to do the same. In fact, other young women have done the same. But you already know this, I’m sure; it’s only part of your narcissistic mindset that you pretend that I called the cops on you-—as if you were standing at a bus stop, minding your own business, when I purportedly made the call, because persecuting poor little A.J. Black is just soooo important to me. Besides, the police reports were not made in order to demand your arrest, but merely to establish a pattern of behavior for the police to consider should you continue to behave like a woman-hating jackass. Now explain to me how any of this refutes the notion that you’re a woman-hating jackass. It doesn’t?

Woman-hating jackass.

Defamed
Defaming you is only possible if I’ve said anything that’s untrue. Further, appellations like “brain-dead moron” are mere conjecture and therefore only matters of opinion. Certainly, if you had a reputation for being something other than a brain-dead moron, you might have a point. But I’ve spoken to quite a few people about you, and absolutely none of them have had anything nice to say about you at all. None. Of. Them.

I'm still here, and I'm not going anywhere.
Au contraire, tȇte du merde. Last time I checked, “here” was UCO. If your recent post is to be believed (and, yeah, there’s that little got-a-bad-problem-with-telling-the-truth thing, so ya got me there!), you were wending your way to sunny Las Vegas in order to become a professional writer. Or was that “righter”? At any rate, LV isn’t here in Oklahoma, it’s there in Nevada. Says so on Mapquest.

I agree with you that you’re not going anywhere—though I’m probably using the phrase with a different meaning than what you have in mind. (Say! How can you have a mind when you don’t have a brain? Another oddity of nature, I guess.) By “not going anywhere,” I mean “going nowhere,” which is the point of disembarkation for most Huckleberries in general, and for you in particular. Please send me a card when you don’t get there.

So, G.F.Y -A.J. Black Ajblackink.com
I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I don’t remember the grade-school reply to this grade-school taunt. Something about a mirror and glue, wasn’t it? Please remember, it’s been over forty years since I was in grade school, and I’ve never been a moron. I’ll only repeat what I’ve said heretofore: people who use abbreviations like GFY are fools. You may as well fling Nerf balls at me.

Fool.

P.S. I could sue you, the school, and the vista, but it would be like stepping on dog shit instead of walking around it...
Spoken like a true crybaby who can’t take the hard knocks of life. As I have stated elsewhere (see my post “Hosed for the Holidays”), the beauty of American jurisprudence is that you can sue anybody for anything. You don’t have to have a reason. You could sue me. You could sue UCO. You could sue the Vista. You could sue Cartoon Network because “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” just isn’t funny anymore. You could even sue yourself. Just don’t represent yourself in court, because, as we all know, the man who represents himself has a fool for a client. Of course, an attorney who represents you has a fool for a client, too. But I digress.

Anyway, the greater issue is whether you could sue and prevail. (That means “win,” Huck.) I very much doubt that you could. What I would expect is that you sue and prove yourself a vapid, sociopathic, misogynistic, brain-dead, clueless, hopeless (but not dopeless—-right, hah, right? Wink wink, nudge nudge!), two-bit, loaded up with the dumbass from the tippity-top of your pointed head to your eleven toes, lying sack of shit (dog or otherwise). And to see you do this in a court of law would give me no end of satisfaction. After all, why keep all this delicious Schadenfreude to myself? There’s plenty to go around!

And though you could indeed sue me, I have to wonder: On what grounds? I’m guessing (on the basis of that silly “defamation” claim), you would accuse me of slander or libel. However, in my case, a tort of libel simply isn’t actionable. In order to prevail (again, this means “win,” Huck) in a libel suit, each of three conditions must be satisfied:

First, you have to establish that what I’ve said is untrue. Remember, it’s not libel if it’s true. For instance, the statement “A.J. Black is a lying bucket of monkey spit” is not actionable as libel, because: a. I have already established above that you’re a liar inasmuch as you lied either to Teddy Burch or Chris Snoddy, or both, and b. “bucket of monkey spit” is obviously conjecture, meaning that no reasonable person would actually believe that you are literally a bucket, whatever it might be full of.

Second, you have to establish that I knew what I said is untrue. But I have said the things I have said about you because I believe them to be true. I have made it abundantly clear in all my writings that I am merely offering my opinion and thus am only exercising my constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech. As one brain-dead, vapid, woman-hating opinion columnist once said (I believe it was his last column before parting ways with the Vista), we may as well enjoy the First Amendment while we still have one.

Third, once you successfully establish the first two conditions, you have to demonstrate how my statements unjustly harmed you. For instance, if you had a $100K job that had a strict policy against lying buckets of monkey spit and were fired as a result of my claim, you could then sue me for damages. But you voluntarily quit your post with the Vista, you suffered no defamation of character (you had—-and have-—zero character), nor did you receive any wounds to your reputation (because your reputation was in a pretty sorry state before you began opening your fool mouth).

The key word here is unjustly. Any actions I took against you were both appropriate and lawful. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind you got what you deserved. In fact, I’m willing to bet that, all things considered, you got off easy. If I did anything that caused you and Oklahoma to part ways, I’m glad for it. Let’s see if Nevada cares for your nonsense any more than Oklahoma did.

Besides, by your own admission (true or not), you left the Vista because you were given an “ultimatum” that you couldn’t abide, and so elected to drop your column. And after writing about how you were going to graduate with a “diploma of distinction,” you said that you decided to skip the diploma because what mattered were the “life experiences.” And no one has chased you to the Oklahoma border. You chose to follow the setting sun towards Nevada to pursue a career in writing.

In other words, the events that have unfolded in your life since February have ALL been of your own making. My daughter didn’t pick your name out of a hat in order to file a bogus police report; you couldn’t take criticism and chose to act out, and my daughter was forced to take steps to protect herself. The Vista didn’t drop your column; they gave you a choice and you chose to quit. UCO didn’t expel you; you fed yourself that “life experiences” malarkey and chose to leave on your own. And I never said a single thing about you that was untrue or undeserved; I quoted you, and if quoting you makes you look bad, answer me honestly, Huck-—JUST WHO BEARS THE BLAME FOR YOUR REPUTATION? You did all these things on your own, so spare us the self-pity. If you’re going to sue anybody, sue yourself. Heck, I bet you’ll win, because, so I’m told, the opposing council has a fool for a client.

One last comment: On your Facebook page, you recently posted this question: “Who the fuck is Terry Mirll?”

Do I really need to answer that question? I’m the father of the young woman you shouldn’t have fucked with. I’ll be glad to elaborate on that answer, any time, any place, any venue.

The question you really need to ask, Huck, is: “Who the fuck is A.J. Black?” In all honesty, I don’t think you have an inkling of an answer.

By the way, I noticed a misspelling of your website. It should read: www.AJBLACKSTINKS.com.

A Tribute to A.J. Black, Vista's Number Two Writer

2011-05-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

What follows is a guest editorial I submitted this past February to the University of Central Oklahoma student newspaper, the Vista, regarding the—shall we say—boorish behavior of one of its writers, one Andrew J. Black. The Vista’s editors elected not to print it. This is perfectly understandable, given the overall harshness of my critique; no one, student newspapers included, likes to be held to public scrutiny, however much it is deserved. Not even real newspapers, let alone student publications, like having their dirty laundry aired for all to see. (And, no, my use of “real” is not to be construed as a slight against the Vista. It is simply being realistic; there is a vast difference between a newspaper that has to compete and survive in the real world, and a group of college kids trying to learn one’s journalistic ropes.)

That being said, some acts are simply too egregious to allow to pass unanswered. I have waited until the end of the spring semester for the Vista and its staff to drum up the journalistic integrity to acknowledge the wrongdoing of one of its writers. That they won’t do so is their problem, not mine. It is now time to speak.

I should add that the editorial I am posting has been altered from its original form. Additional details have arisen that were unknown to myself when I first contacted the Vista, and these have been added. Further, Andrew J. Black no longer writes for the Vista and has since left UCO. If his current webpage is to be believed (and I advise one and all to take anything he has to say with a grain of salt--honesty is manifestly NOT one of his qualities), he is now on his way to Las Vegas to become "a professional writer." Not exactly what I would call a delusion of grandeur, more like a delusion of Hunter Thompson, or, at the very least, of the Johnny Depp portrayal in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

I wish him well, though I suspect that success will elude him.

As always, what follows is merely my opinion. If the editors of the Vista have a problem with anything I say, they need only remember I am exercising the same First Amendment rights they elected to hide behind when this affair began. TLM.

A Tribute to A.J. Black, Vista’s Number Two Writer

In the wild, apes oftentimes display displeasure by flinging their poop at one another. Proud of his evolutionary heritage, the Vista’s own Andrew J. Black keeps this custom alive in his two blogs “Ask Andrew” and the comically misnamed “Opinion Laced with Fact.” Online, his posts may be found at www.uco360.com, and, more recently, his blog www.ajblackink.com (another fine internet publication of the “Go Daddy” franchise).

I say comically because, though opinion abounds, the only facts extant in his blogs are those to which he seems wholly oblivious: that effective writing consists of far more than merely having an opinion; that, in a free and egalitarian society, his opinion is no more valid than that of anyone else, thus there is little reason for paying him any attention whatsoever; and that, facts being what they are, they are only helpful if first one is not completely full of excrement. That is why I call him Vista’s Number Two writer, for that is what he is, through and through.

This, of course, is just my opinion, though I, too, will attempt to lace it with facts. I am an adult quite capable of articulating myself in a mature and professional fashion; however, I am also quite capable of stooping to Mr. Black’s level, so that he may better understand my meaning. This is what I will attempt while expressing my opinion concerning the overall poorness of both his personal behavior and writing. I am told that he has friends. Excellent. Hopefully, he has one reading this letter to him right now, with sufficient vocabulary to define some of the longer words for him, pronouncing them slowly and pho-net-i-cal-ly, or who may at least show him how to use a dictionary, provided he may remove the finger from his nose long enough to turn the pages.

However, this is not to say that his blogs are not instructive. To the contrary, the scatological quality of his writing notwithstanding, I was amazed to learn that “Huckleberry” was a euphemism for “pathetic loser.” (For a demonstration of this term in action, please see his recent post “I’m Your Huckleberry,” Vista, Feb 24th edition, or check out www.ajblackink.com under his “Publications” tab. That’s right—that’s no typo—“I’m Your Huckleberry” is listed as one of his publications.)

For instance, he opines “If you send me a nasty e-mail attacking me as a person, then don’t go crying to the professor about my response.” To which I respond: Physician, heal thyself. For those who do not know the true story, he referred to an actual event. As responses to his blog reflected, this poop-hurling sheygets actually tried to portray himself as the victim in this affair; however, those of us who know his actual victim are outraged. To call his behavior unprofessional or boorish is to understate the matter considerably. His warped perspective in this case is simply astounding.

If Huckleberry Black is really concerned with identifying crybabies who can’t take the hard knocks of life, he need look no further than the nearest mirror. Huckleberry was the aggressor in this case, not the victim. In one of his writing classes, a classmate—an honors student slated to graduate summa cum laude this May—stated in a critique of one of his stories that she had “considerable difficulty” identifying with his main character. Apropos to his Huckleberrian temperament, Huckleberry Black responded by deliberately seeking out her profile on Facebook (though he was never one of her friends on her page) and then posting the following billet doux, which I quote verbatim: “Nice cupcakes, fatty. I can’t relate to your profile pic because I myself have been physically fit and handsome my whole life. I found your critique amusing. Go fuck yourself.”

Fatty? Black is either a Huckleberry to the core, or else UCO has begun matriculating second graders. Does he post his blogs in crayon? Drink beer from a Playtex nurser? And what, exactly, is his major—Nappy Time, with a minor in Bed Wetting?

Really, Huck! “Fatty” was the best animadversion your fetid brain could produce? This stands as the single most insipid example of vituperative invective since Martin Luther called the Pope “der groeszte scheiszhausfeger.” On the other hand, Luther could at least write a coherent sentence, without run-ons, and in German, no less. The only language Huckleberry seems to have mastered is largely limited to words of no more than four letters, which he uses so often that he simply resorts to abbreviations to make himself understood.

As for physically fit, his leanness may be just as easily ascribed to malnutrition or chemical abuse as to exercise or athleticism. And handsome? Surely he is aware that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Take a closer gander at his picture. I’ve seen better-looking faces floating in a bowl of fish-head soup.

Then there’s the coup de grâce of his missive, the one concerning autocopulation. Surely, the student body at UCO must stand in awe that such an intellectual giant walks among them, knowing that he is ready at any given moment to reach deeply into his verbal arsenal and produce such finely-crafted retorts to anyone with the effrontery to critique his stories honestly. Normally, one would have to travel as far as a locker room at UT Austin to find such a perspicacious polemicist. Way to go, Huckleberry! That’ll teach literary critics not to identify with your story’s character! After all, just because's he's a misanthrope, that's no excuse for the rest of us not to hang on your every word.

After that, of all things, he offers up this penultimate rejoinder: “I’m already published,” and then, as in afterthought, “Stick to Harry Potter.” Absolutely, Huck! Why in the world would anyone wish to emulate J.K. Rowling, the world’s first billionaire author? After all, money can’t buy happiness. Still, it can buy lots and lots of drugs, which, one would think, would be of interest to all Huckleberries. Surely this is why he ends his every column with “Light it up.” (Unless, of course, he’s talking about his farts. There’s no telling.)

As for his claim to having been published, I Googled his name, but the only publications I could find were the two UCO blogs in the Vista and UCO360.com, and that oozing-with-quality “Go Daddy” cyberpublication, which I’ve already mentioned. Far be it from me to disparage anyone who writes for the Vista, but isn’t it a bit of a stretch to crow about how one has been published when one means the college newspaper? If I write “For a good time, call A.J. Black” on a men’s room stall, can I say I’ve been published too? If so, then prepare for a spate of publications from myself. I’m told Oklahoma City simply teems with gay bars!

But this is what makes him a Huckleberry, and thus the Vista’s Number Two writer: a complete inability to take responsibility for his actions, coupled with utter contempt for anyone who would dare disagree with him. For a thorough series of examples, the reader may log on to his blog at UCO360.com and read the many pejorative and disparaging replies he offers to those who, strangely enough, don’t think the sun shines at his ass. Almost immediately, a pattern emerges—the men who disagree with him are just idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about; the women are not only stupid (cherchez la femme), but fat and ugly as well. He tries to present himself as a cutting-edge journalist joyriding atop the First Amendment and speaking truth to power, come what may; yet, his tone is that of a narcissist who, upon breaking wind, can’t understand why those nearest to him don’t immediately whip around and sniff the air.

Do I exaggerate? Hardly. Consider his oh-so-cerebral comment to the allegedly fat and ugly female who dared ask rhetorically “Is there anything you can do?” He replied with a terse, “No,”—and I remind one and all I’m quoting here—“I cunt” [sic]. This is a pointedly curious misspelling of “can’t,” mind you. Further, it is difficult, to say the least, to fathom how he could have inadvertently made such a typographical error. Normally, the “a” is typed with the little finger of the left hand; the “u” with the index finger of the right. (Perhaps he was typing with his feet. He is, after all, a Huckleberry. Or, as the object of his attention was a woman, perhaps he was using some other appendage. This, too, is in the realm of possibility.) Still, I am curious to know what the Women’s Studies program at UCO thinks about his polemical brilliance. Perhaps they already have contacted the Vista’s editors; as of this writing, his original posting has been altered, the offending “u” now replaced with an “a”. (Note to the Vista's editors: You still forgot to include the apostrophe. Nice editing, dweebs!)

But perhaps I simply misunderstand him. He likely sees himself as a journalistic maverick, casting aside the stifling conventions of the less gifted writer, those wholly subjective notions like “correct” spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, or, for that matter, making a lick of sense. Hence his propensity for darting off into unexpected and seemingly unrelated territory: a tirade against those he perceives as online crybabies suddenly turns into a screed against America’s involvement in Iraq, and then just as suddenly morphs into an attack on Jesus freaks. What’s next? No one knows, because all seven of the neurons in his brain are firing at once. Anything is possible—except clarity or cohesion.

Worse yet, he has nothing to say. His analysis of world events belies only the depths of his ignorance. For example, he offers his readers this bit of political pseudoanalysis, a convoluted run-on sentence which I dare anyone to read aloud and finish in one breath: “If you use the false intelligence of one incompetent Iraqi as an excuse to invade a country for non-existent W.M.D’s, then don’t saturate the Internet with the ridiculous story as if it somehow justifies the malicious lies you crooked politicians told the American people in order to send ignorant children half away across the world to be killed spreading democracy and freedom because it isn’t free.” *Gasp!* That light-headedness you feel is not the result of an “intellectual head lock,” to use Huckleberry’s vapid phrase; it is simply from a lack of oxygen, exacerbated by attempting to follow Huckleberrian logic. Do not try this at home.

Whether “false intelligence” necessarily constitutes a lie is a matter of debate. What isn’t debatable is that an opinion is not quite the same thing as an informed opinion, and Huckleberry’s analysis seems little more than a regurgitation of whatever nonsense he is likely to read in the Huffington Post. (My best guess is that his only reason for logging onto the HufPo in the first place would be he saw “Huffing” and mistook it for a recreational website.) Worse yet, this sort of dopey analysis of political affairs is actually one of his strengths. Until recently, he was president of UCO’s Socialist Club. This gives a whole new meaning to V.I. Lenin’s phrase “useful idiots.”

Then, at other times, Huckleberry thinks he’s a poet, wherein he warns us, “Don’t be surprised when I proceed to practice lyrical witchcraft on your mustache.”

Come again? If, by some metaphorical stretch, we can conceive of witchcraft as lyrical, this still does not explain why one would practice it upon another’s mustache. Why not some other portion of his or her anatomy? The spleen, perhaps? Or maybe that flat space some two inches down from the nape of the neck? Later, he explains that what he was trying to say is that he has no qualms against offering his opponents a verbal punch in the face. Why he didn’t just say what he meant forever remains a mystery.

Huck tries to be cryptic but only manages to come across as pretentious and unoriginal. On at least three separate occasions in his replies, he uses the abbreviation “G.F.Y.” against his detractors. Surely every schoolboy on the planet knows what “G.F.Y.” means. For that matter, there are amoebas scurrying about the moons of Jupiter that must know what it means. It’s not difficult to decode.

Speaking of pretense, here’s a doozy: “90 percent of the human race,” Huck writes, “is an idiot.” Got that? A full 90 percent of 6.5 billion people, roughly 5.9 billion humans, comprise just ONE idiot. However does the 5.9-billion-body idiot manage to change his underwear? (And, speaking of underwear, isn’t it about time Huckleberry graduated from Huggies to “big boy” briefs if he plans to continue writing for the Vista or submitting any more stories to classmates in writing workshops? Or would this interfere with the aforementioned minor in Bed Wetting? Forget I mentioned it.)

Further, by what criterion does Huck ascribe himself to that upper ten percent of knowitalldom? What makes him so special? Do the Intelligentsia really use appellations like “fatty”? Don’t they at least say it in French?

No matter, I suppose. Whether misunderstood genius or mere Huckleberry, Andrew J. Black is what and who he is. He says superior intellect; I say pompous fool who thinks he’s a Pulitzer because the Vista actually publishes his drivel. How can we tell who is right? Why, by his behavior, of course: Does he behave like a superior intellect, or more like a fool? (Hint: Superior intellects don’t use abbreviations like G.F.Y. Fools do.)

That being said, I have a few questions for the Vista in general, and for Huck’s editors in particular, who, incredulous as it may seem, are female. (Yes, that’s right—females have approved his sexist temper tantrums. This is a bit like tigers eating their young, isn’t it?) To those who approved his misogynistic tirade for publication in the Feb. 24th edition of the Vista:

• Do school newspaper editors normally do nothing but rubber-stamp the offerings of their bloggers?

• Did anyone actually read A.J.’s column before it was forwarded to the readership at UCO?

• Did his use of “shut your mouth, pull your skirt over your head, sit down, go cut yourself, and wait for Jesus over there…Call the cops honey, no one is coming to save you” not send up a single red flag to anyone on staff? Or did it receive accolades for its supposed journalistic daring and brilliance?

• Did no one interpret his comments as reflecting a possibly disturbed, latently sociopathic attitude?

• Am I really supposed to understand that no one on the Vista staff considered it, at the very least, the teensiest bit inappropriate?

• Did no one consider his use of the school’s paper as a forum for launching personal diatribes against his detractors even a bit unethical or ill-advised?

• Is “open mouth; insert foot” the Vista’s creed?

• And, finally, is the Vista a student newspaper or merely a front for verbal terrorists? (And I mean terrorist, in every right and proper sense of the word.)

I’m just asking.

Light THAT up, Huck!

Atheism is a Religion - No, Really!

2011-01-14T15:19:00.001-08:00

Perhaps over the past few weeks you’ve seen news reports concerning the billboard posted by atheists in New Jersey telling everybody “You KNOW it’s a myth” and featuring a traditional Nativity scene.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s a copy:

Look, if you think that atheism is actually a viable world view and is true, feel free to believe whatever you want. Quod volumus facile credimus. But the irony here is palpable. Atheists have told me they don’t like religious people disparaging them for their atheism. I’m willing to bet that atheists in New Jersey feel the same way, so what makes them think they have a right to disparage religious people for not being atheists? And, clearly, their tone here is derisive. Posting their derision on a billboard is sheer hypocrisy, to say the very least. Had some sect of New Jersey Christians bothered to post a billboard reading “Atheists are in for a big surprise once they go to Hell,” I little doubt the Jersey atheists would rise up in a snit fit the likes of which haven’t been seen since Chris Matthews was asked by Michelle Bachman after the 2010 elections if he could still feel the tingle up his leg.

Worse yet is their addendum: “This Season, Celebrate REASON!” Their train of thought seems to be: We atheists, who are certain that the Nativity is a myth, have reason on our side, so those who celebrate the myth must do so for some reason other than reason, and that reason is faith. Further, reason is reliable and therefore truth, while faith is a mere illusion. Since truth is superior to illusion, we who are reasonable would do well to shock the faith-holders out of their illusory state by posting a billboard reminding them that not only is their cherished Nativity a myth, but that they really KNOW it’s a myth as well. While they may take such a declaration as an insult to their religion, it’s not, because religion is faith and faith is illusion, and so it’s impossible to insult an illusion. In fact, we’re actually doing them a FAVOR, the poor, misguided, unreasonable myth-holders, by reminding them of the error of their ways and inviting them to join us over here under the warm, convivial light of reason.

Then there’s the utterly laughable slogan at the end: “American Atheists. Reasonable since 1963.” Reasonable? Wanna bet?

Hoo-boy!

Now that’s the sort of pinheaded sophistry that really raises my dander, so I penned a quick letter to the editor of my local newspaper, which was published on December 17th. If you care to read it, here’s the link:

http://newsok.com/atheism-is-a-belief-based-on-religious-faith/article/3523646

Mind you, my local paper prescribes a limit of 250 words for letters to the editor, so I had a lot to say with very little room to say it. Fortunately, I impose no such limitation on my blog, hence this post; my intention is to explain in further detail just what’s so wrong with the billboard in Jersey, as well as to expound a bit on my contention that atheism is a religion.

First, ignoring for the moment what atheists know we know, is the Nativity really a myth? My handy-dandy American Heritage Dictionary defines a myth as: “A traditional story originating in a preliterate society, dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serve as primordial types in a primitive view of the world.” Though I’m hardly one to ascribe supreme definitional authority to a mere dictionary, this definition seems to encapsulate most of the right elements. Applying the definition to the Nativity, however, is not quite so cut and dried—certainly, over the past two millennia, the story of the Nativity has worked its way into tradition; and there are putatively supernatural beings involved in the tale (the angels who herald the birth of the Savior to the shepherds, as well as God, who impregnated the Virgin Mary). However, the story itself is part of tradition not simply because it has been told over and over again, but because it is believed to be true, an actual event that occurred in an actual city (Bethlehem), in actual recorded history (due to an error when the Gregorian calendar was made, Christ is believed to have been born in 4 B.C.), and was witnessed by actual people (one Joseph of Nazareth and his betrothed, as well as wise men from the East, and any number of awed shepherds). Further, the personage of Christ is well attested in historical documents, which implies the simple intuition: if he lived, and if he was human, he must have been born sometime, so the when of it all doesn’t matter.

But even if the Nativity were a myth, that’s still not to say that it’s untrue, because truth or falseness is not a defining characteristic. It’s a common misconception that a myth must by definition be untrue, though this seems to be what the Jersey atheists have in mind. However, to equate a myth with falsehood is an oversimplification. Many myths are untrue, but not all. The real question is: Did the events as ascribed to the Nativity actually take place? This implies a further question: What aspects of the Nativity are known to be true and which are known to be false?

So, let’s run down the checklist: Was there a Bethlehem in 4 BC? Yup. Was it part of the Roman Empire? Also yup. Did the Empire have an emperor, and was he called Caesar? Yup as well. And did he issue a decree that every man return to the city of his birth so he could be taxed? Another yup. These are all events and personages which can be historically verified.

However, there are a number of particulars that can’t be verified in this manner, nor than they be refuted. Our only recourse here is to identify which particulars are at least plausible. We can easily presume that in those days, babies were born in stables all the time; further, there must have been plenty of Josephs and Marys hobbling to and fro, so the Nativity can’t be considered a myth on that account.

The only events which can be argued as implausible are the ones involving the supernatural aspects of the story, but even if their implausibility can be agreed to (and, by the way, they can’t, because some people do not consider an event implausible merely because it can be cast as supernatural), this hardly means they can be considered impossible, and there is no means at our disposal for disproving them. Did a host of angels actually appear before a shocked assemblage of shepherds and begin singing “Gloria in excelsis Deo?” Was Mary really impregnated by the Almighty, and was she really a virgin when she gave birth to Christ? Did an angel speak to Joseph in a dream, telling him to take his wife and newborn son to Egypt? The simple fact is, there’s no way to answer this question definitively, either yea or nay. Both the yea as well as the nay are answers that must be taken on faith. So, unless our atheist pals in New Jersey are in possession of a time machine and have traveled back to 4 B.C. Bethlehem to lay witness to the veracity of the tale, they’re in no better position than any of us to say what’s what.

As for what atheists know about what we know: Just who are they kidding? As I stated in my letter to the editor, the Jersey atheists must possess some special clairvoyance, one that the rest of us don’t have. It must be nice, knowing what other folks “really” believe, that all of Christendom is nothing more than a bevy of chuckleheads laying claim to what they know is a lie. I wonder, if I try really, REALLY hard, I might be able to develop the kind of clairvoyance that Jersey atheists possess.

Let me give it a try: Umm… atheists are… a bunch of nincompoops so fearful of the reality of God that they claim He doesn’t exist EVEN THOUGH THEY KNOW HE DOES, and, despite the fact that they are clearly in the minority in their claim (some 90% of people across the globe believe in God, or a god, or gods, or some other higher power), they’re so oblivious to their idiocy they feel compelled to make idiots out of the rest of us as well. Wow! This clairvoyance stuff is DA BOMB!

Obviously, I’m being a wee bit sarcastic here, but it’s to make a greater point: Atheists do not have a monopoly on reason, neither are they immune from making irrational claims. Further, posting their irrational claims on billboards merely displays (at best) hypocrisy or (at worst) sheer foolishness, and thus cannot exactly be construed as reason-in-action. So their advice “This Season, Celebrate REASON!” merely warrants the reply: “Hey, atheists! You first!”

But forget monopolies on reason, because, as I said in my letter, atheism is fundamentally a contradiction, the antithesis of reason. Anytime I’ve ever talked with an atheist about why he says there’s no God, the answer invariably alludes to an objection about God’s nature rather than his entelechy. God doesn’t exist, so says the atheist, because He is: uncaring, because He fails to intervene in moments of human suffering; or incompetent, because He tells His chosen people at one moment “Thou shalt not kill” and then sends them off to slaughter the Philistines the next; or stupid, because every living being He ever created has died or will die (this last objection comes from George Carlin, who was not so much an atheist as merely an unbelievably bad comedian, which, one may argue, all atheists are at heart).

Yet to examine these claims with even minimal scrutiny brings a glaring contradiction to the fore:
• God isn’t, because He is (uncaring)
• God isn’t, because He is (incompetent)
• God isn’t, because He is (stupid)

It’s a contradiction because in order to be uncaring, to be incompetent, or to be stupid, first one has TO BE. The claim therefore presumes God’s existence in attempting to deny God’s existence, so whatever objection the atheist cares to offer is in most cases simply a slightly refined way of saying “God isn’t, because He is”, or, as I put it in my letter, “God doesn’t exist because He could do a better job at being God.” At best, it is an objection to God’s character. It fails to demonstrate that God does not exist because it doesn’t even address the topic at hand, namely the ontological question of whether or not there’s a God to HAVE a character in the first place.

Now it’s certainly possible to live one’s life despite a glaring contradiction in one’s world view. People do this all the time. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of this nation’s founding fathers, and an outspoken proponent of democracy and libertarian government, was also a slave owner. And the atheist George Bernard Shaw once famously defended his vegetarian lifestyle by saying: “Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends!” All well and good, I suppose, but I really have to wonder what that implied about what he DID eat. Were vegetables his enemies? And what exactly did they do to piss him off so?

But a contradiction is one thing; atheists wrapping it in the cloak of reason and pawning it off to the rest of us as the One True Way is downright farcical. Celebrating REASON since 1963? To this, let me proffer a short response, followed by a longer one:

Short response: Ah-Hahahahahahahaha!!!

Longer response: I’ve pointed out the contradictory foundation of atheism to as many atheists as I meet, but more often than not the only response I ever get, if I get a response at all, is an erudite “Nuh-UH!” without any qualification as to why they’re right and I’m wrong. This should hardly be surprising: Having lied to himself about the reality of God, the atheist compounds the lie by lying to himself about the contradiction barking at him at the base of his philosophy, and so despite my claim tells himself that atheism is nonetheless reasonable, and so that therefore there must be something wrong with my argument, even though what exactly is wrong with it never seems to come to mind. In other words, the atheist takes it on faith that his philosophy is on sound footing, despite my objections.

And faith is supposedly a characteristic of…? Anyone, class? Bueller? Bueller? I’ll give you the same hint they get on “Wheel of Fortune”—R, S, T, L, N, and one vowel, E:

R E L _ _ _ _ N

That’s right: religion. And that’s because—all together now—ATHEISM IS A RELIGION!

Now, this too is something the atheist vehemently denies, in the same sort of snit-fest as from the aforementioned Chris Matthews, but I’ve yet to meet an atheist who states his denial in the form of a cogent, rational chain of thought. More often the atheist responds with some blunt bit of sophistry claimed as fact, without any supporting argumentation as to why the claim should be believed.

For example, I recall a blog post in which an atheist claimed: “Atheism is not a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is not a hobby.” This was his entire argument, verbatim.

And mere sophistry. It makes for a good sound bite, I suppose, but immediately begins to unravel upon examination. Allow me to demonstrate. We can’t really say that not collecting stamps is not a hobby; it is merely the opposite of collecting stamps, which IS a hobby but is not the ONLY hobby. “Collecting stamps” is not a synonym for “hobby” but only an example of it, a subset within a larger semantic field. If not collecting stamps is not a hobby, what does that imply about, say, collecting coins? Collecting coins is ALSO not collecting stamps. And if not collecting stamps is not a hobby, and collecting coins is not collecting stamps, are we then to claim that collecting coins is therefore not a hobby?

The claim fails in this way:
1. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby.
2. To collect coins is also not to collect stamps.
3. By substitution, collecting coins is not a hobby.
4. But collecting coins IS a hobby.
CONTRADICTION

We can easily understand, then, ceterus paribus, why the comparison with atheism falls apart: atheism is not the opposite of religion; it is merely a world view that attempts to answer religious questions in a way that is contrary to that of most other religious viewpoints. Atheism is the antithesis of theism; theism is a word that bears a relationship with religion but is not synonymous with religion, in exactly the same way that not collecting stamps is not synonymous with hobbies but only an example of one. So, atheism might still be a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps might still be a hobby.

A further example comes from Steve, one of my dearest friends in all the world—and best man at my wedding. After reading my letter, Steve posted this curt reply on my Facebook page: “Saying atheism is a religion is like saying bald is a hair color.” This, like the blog post above, was the entirety of his rebuttal to my claim that atheism is a religion. The rest of his response consisted of an irrelevant excursion into to whether or not I believe in Santa Claus. But there was absolutely nothing in his reply explaining why calling atheism a religion was akin to calling bald a hair color—only the brute assertion without any explanatory rationale as to why it might be true. And never mind, apparently, that the comparison does nothing to justify itself, nor is anything close to self-evident.

Here’s what’s wrong with his logic: To say that bald is a hair color is to commit a category fallacy; that is, “Hair color” is a term that simply has no meaning within the context of baldness, and vice versa. However, there is no such category fallacy inherent in the claim that atheism is a religion—provided it can be demonstrated that atheism bears certain characteristics commensurate with religion (and since I have done that very thing in my letter to the editor, we have the evidence in hand that such a thing can be done) . In fact, to deny as self-evident that atheism is a religion may be to commit a logical fallacy of another sort:

1. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are religions.
2. Atheism is not Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.
3. Therefore, atheism is not a religion.
BUT COMPARE
4. Fords, Chevrolets, and Hondas are automobiles.
5. An Audi is not a Ford, a Chevrolet, or a Honda.
6. Therefore, an Audi is not an automobile.
7. But an Audi IS an automobile.
CONTRADICTION
8. 7 is a contradiction, and if 3 is comparable to 7, then 3 may be a contradiction as well.
SCOTTISH VERDICT: NOT PROVED

But that seems to be the atheist’s mindset: You say that atheism is a religion. I don’t agree. And that’s why you should do as I say. As usual, the atheist expects the rest of us to accept his claims at face value; they’re true because he says they’re true. Ipse dixit. To which I reply, “Keep the faith, baby.”

Yet one more example is to be found in another letter to the same newspaper, issued in response to mine, from one illustrious Thomas Mackiewicz of Chandler, Oklahoma. Here’s the link:

http://newsok.com/all-believers-are-atheists-regarding-other-peoples-gods/article/3524540

Now, I don’t know the guy, nor (I presume) does he know me, but his response comes across as familiar and expected, like an old friend. The brunt of his argument is that in my letter I have used a straw man—as he puts it, “making false claims against atheism and then arguing against the false claims.”

This is a common response. I have been accused of creating straw men many, many times. This, however, is not to say that the accusations are justified. As I said earlier, the logic that atheists often use to confront me is that because I say things they don’t like hearing, there must therefore be something wrong with my argument, even if they can’t quite identify what that something is. Under atheism, opinions rule—facts are hardly germane.

In this case, the “straw man” claim serves as a generic, all-purpose reply. When in doubt, bark “Straw man! That there’s a straw man argument you got!” A parrot could do as much. While it is true that making false claims and then beating them up is the essence of a straw man argument, note that Mr. Mackiewicz cites no examples whatsoever from my letter as to precisely which claims I have made that are supposedly false. In fact, since the arguments I used in my letter were from my own personal experiences, I know they are true, and since Mr. Mackiewicz knows absolutely nothing about me (other than I write letters with which he does not agree), and since he was never present at any of the discussions I have had with atheists, he has no means whatsoever of assessing even the accuracy of my accounts, let alone decreeing them false.

But what I said in my letter is true: I HAVE spoken with atheists. I HAVE talked with them about God’s existence. And their preferred argument HAS BEEN to say that God doesn’t exist because He does such a lousy job at being God. I know. I WAS THERE! Mr. Mackiewicz, I am quite certain, was not.

Certainly, this is not to say that the “God is stupid” argument is the atheist’s ONLY argument. Sometimes atheists do engage in the “there’s no evidence” argument that Mr. Mackiewicz alludes to, but my experience has been that the “no evidence” claim is made only infrequently; if Mr. Mackiewicz is correct that “the majority of atheists actually come to atheism by way of realizing that there's a complete lack of evidence for the existence of any gods,” why then do so many atheists feel so drawn to the “God is stupid” argument, like flies to a cow patty?

The majority? Really? Is this an empirical fact, drawn from a double-blind survey of atheists, and if so, what were the percentages? Just how many claimed to have come to atheism via the “lack of evidence” route, and how many claimed other routes, and what routes were they? How exactly did the data break down? Is there a spreadsheet available that Mr. Mackiewicz can point to, where he can say “See? Right there! Over 78.9 percent of atheists surveyed said they became atheists because of realizing there’s absolutely no evidence for God’s existence. Five percent said they became atheists because of realizing that God is stupid. Two percent said they were born that way. And the rest all became atheists because they didn’t want to be the object of derision on billboards in New Jersey.” And if such data were available, could Mr. Mackiewicz have at least cited it in his letter? After all, out of a 250 word limit, he used barely 120, leaving a good 130 words available for SOME mention of supporting data. And if he fails to supply any evidence of supporting data to his claim, does that mean such data does not exist? I mean—that IS his argument for why there’s no God, isn’t it? Or is what’s sauce for the goose somehow NOT sauce for the gander?

Otherwise that leaves open the possibility that maybe “the majority” is not a statement of fact, but of opinion, more akin to wishful thinking than any aspect of reality. But I guess it’s a good thing that atheists have a monopoly on reason.

Still, having made one unsupported assertion, he is unhesitant in making more. Per Mr. Mackiewicz, atheism is simply “a rejection of the claim that there is a God — nothing more, nothing less.” If that were so, one might ask just what compelled the New Jersey atheists to erect their billboard. That was no mere rejection of the claim that God exists; it was an assertion that God does NOT exist, and moreover that Christians “know” that the Nativity is a myth, and additionally that instead of celebrating the Nativity, they should celebrate REASON with all the enlightened minority claiming membership with the “reasonable since 1963” American Atheists organization. As is apparently his wont, Mr. Mackiewicz makes his claim about what atheism “really” is, stated as a brute fact rather than merely his opinion. Ipse dixit, end of story.

Worse yet for Mr. Mackiewicz, even if he is right that atheists come to atheism due to the realization that there’s “a complete lack of evidence” for God, once again we find the unsupported opinion stated as a brute fact. Is it true that there’s absolutely NO evidence for God’s existence?

Perhaps he does not realize that the very word “evidence” is meaningless except in the context of the very issue being debated. A bit of data is not “evidence” until it is argued as “evidence for” or “evidence against.” It is not intrinsically evidentiary, but must be interpreted as evidence in light of additional contextual details. A man is dead. A knife is found near his body. Is the knife evidence that the man was murdered? There’s no possible way of knowing without further investigation. Otherwise, all we have is the data: the dead man, the nearby knife, and nothing to show how they might be related.

Nor does he realize the great gaping hole in his logic: By what logical sequence of thought can he say a) data is available for inspection and interpretation, but b) none of the data is evidence for God, and c) the lack of evidence is absolute and complete so that d) no evidence will ever be forthcoming? For one, it is impossible to prove a negative; thus it is impossible to demonstrate the completeness of any purported “lack” of evidence. Only a positive may be proved: one might prove that evidence for God is available by alluding to it or demonstrating it; nonetheless, any failure to present such evidence (or even an inability to present it) does not prove that the evidence does not exist. It might exist but remain unknown at present . Isn’t that what evolutionists claim when they argue for the missing link? Who cares that the missing link is still missing? That doesn’t mean it won’t someday be found! And even if it’s never found, that doesn’t mean that evolution isn’t true!

For another, there IS evidence for God’s existence, a substantial and growing body of evidence that, taken together, provides ample rationale for believing in God; the atheist simply denies that the evidence is valid. Again, to the atheist, facts don’t really matter. Show him the work of astrophysicist Hugh Ross and his “Reasons to Believe” organization, and the atheists brushes him off with an easy “Aww, Ross is a lightweight.” Point to any number of articles and publications supporting the notion that God exists, and the atheist dismisses them with a quick “Aww, they weren’t peer reviewed.” (And after you demonstrate that the articles really WERE peer review, the atheist then claims “Aww, that doesn’t prove anything. The process is flawed.” Never mind that if the process is flawed, there was no reason for dismissing any articles in the first place.) Show him books by Michael Behe, or William Dembski, or Stephen C. Meyer, and he’ll only claim their work has been refuted; by someone, somewhere, at some time or other; or else it is not worth considering. And if you so much as mention the Discovery Institute, the atheist will whip around, point a crooked finger your way, and begin to screech like one of the pod people from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

My! Isn’t reason a wonderful thing? Marvelous are its ways, its mysteries to perform.

The atheist doesn’t come to any rational conclusion that God does not exist. He begins with the idea. It is his starting point, nothing less than an article of faith: Given that God does not exist, there can be no evidence for His existence, either—not because such evidence is not real, but because it cannot be accepted without undermining the Given. Thus any data that comes the atheist’s way is immediately sub-routed to the “Can’t be evidence for God” file. A burning bush? Folktale. A pillar of fire? A metaphor of an ancient phallocentric society. The Star of Bethlehem? Myth. An ordered, lawful universe, despite ubiquitous levels of entropy? An accident. The discovery of DNA, a chemically-based code far more elaborate than any code ever devised by man, containing vast volumes of information, yet smaller than the head of a pin, when any other code we may identify is without exception the product of intelligent design? It made itself, and even if we have no idea whatsoever how it managed to do that, we can state with one hundred percent reliability that You-Know-Who was NOT involved. And if you disagree, we’ll take you to court!

From all this, I say the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that atheism is not based on reason. Its core claims are invariably faith-based, its arguments unreasonable and fundamentally flawed, and yet despite this fact are still held to be true. Further, these claims are not allowed to be questioned, which again undermines the assertion that atheism is based on reason; this is more characteristic of dogma.

No, I am quite certain, and I am more convinced now that I have ever been. Atheism is a religion.

The whole thing hinges, of course, on what we mean by “religion.” It is one of those words that is easy to identify but hard to define. For example, we return to my handy-dandy American Heritage Dictionary, where we find: “Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power recognized as the creator and governor of the universe.”

At this point, the atheist may cry “Aha! Victory!! Atheism claims that a supernatural power does NOT exist, which means that atheism is NOT a religion!” After all, nothing supports atheism better than a good excuse. (And, I would add, nothing else supports it, either.)

But reference my earlier comment about ascribing supreme definitional authority to a mere dictionary. Dictionaries are merely descriptive, not prescriptive, in their approach—the meanings they ascribe to words are only the result of general usage and are purely subjective. And sometimes, dictionaries can be flat-out wrong. In the case of the AHD, the definition seems to center on the notion that religion necessarily means belief in a supreme being. But not all religions display this characteristic. In Animism, for instance, there is no belief in any god or gods, nor even any recognition of the supernatural for that matter. An animist may recognize, for example, some particular stream or pond or rock as having in it some sort of power that other streams or ponds or rocks do not have, but whatever power these things possess, such power is closely associated with the thing in which the power resides. Thus, the distinction between natural and supernatural is never made. Further, there is nothing supreme about the thing’s power—the force resides within the thing but does not rule over all things. So, Animism does not fit the AHD definition of religion, and yet is commonly considered a religion.

Another example would be Buddhism. The Buddha is not a supreme being, nor even a god, but only an enlightened human being. And he has no power whatsoever over the universe. He doesn’t rule, decree, create, or intervene in the affairs of his fellow men—he only advises as to the path to enlightenment and serves as a model for the rest of us to emulate. Buddhism doesn’t fit the AHD definition either, yet is universally recognized as a religion. Thus, the only reasonable conclusion is that the AHD definition is faulty, perhaps too faulty to be valid.

Still, there are other venues. Recently, I had opportunity to take part in a short bit of training sanctioned by the U.S. Air Force on USAF policy concerning freedom of religion. Included in the training was a link to Air Force Instruction 36-2706, which offers this definition of religion: “A personal set or institutionalized system of attitudes, moral or ethical beliefs and practices held with the strength of traditional religious views, characterized by ardor and faith and generally evidenced through specific religious observances.”

Now this is hardly a perfect definition either (mainly because it uses the very word it is attempting to define as part of the definition itself and is thus somewhat self-referential, which is a bit like trying to stand in a bushel basket and lift yourself ten feet into the air), but it is less problematic than the one proffered from AHD. Although Animism still seems anomalous (the only applicable characteristic is faith), at least the definition doesn’t exclude Buddhism.

Nor, I would argue, does it exclude atheism.

Atheists sometime erroneously define atheism as a lack of belief in God. This is incorrect because the lack of belief in God is the claim of the agnostic. An agnostic, by definition, is “one who does not know.” He cannot say that God exists anymore than that He doesn’t. The agnostic lacks the belief. An atheist, by contrast, HAS a belief—he BELIEVES that God does not exist. So atheism is not the lack of belief in God, but rather is the belief in the lack of a God.

Defined correctly, atheism is a belief system. Seen in this light, the religious overtones of atheistic belief become clear.

The word “Religion” comes to us via the Latin religio, meaning “to bind” or “to tie back”. A religion therefore connotes a grouping together, coupled with a restriction. It is the grouping which allows us to say “We are Baptists” or “We are Muslims.” The restriction is normative in some way—it tells us how we should live our lives, so that the Baptist can insist on certain doctrines, like water baptism or eternal security, or the Muslim on duties like restraining from consuming alcohol or pork, or praying five times a day.

To say that atheism is not a religion is, first and foremost, to say that atheism is not normative.

But what, then, are we to make of the New Jersey billboard? The message was not “We atheists do not believe as you Christians believe, but that’s okay, because everyone is free to believe what he, she, or it wants.” Rather the message was “You Christians celebrate a myth even though you know it’s a myth. Instead YOU SHOULD DO AS WE DO, and that is to celebrate reason.” Such a message is clearly normative, in both its essence and in its intent.

Getting back to the AFI 36-2706 definition of religion, what religious characteristics are applicable to atheism?

A personal set or institutionalized system of attitudes: Would participation in an organization with the motto “Reasonable since 1963” qualify as institutional? Does the “dot-org” domain of its website suggest at least the attempt at systematization?

Moral or ethical beliefs: Surely telling people “You KNOW it’s a myth” implies that believing myths is a bad thing. Aren’t bad things supposed to be immoral? Or, if not immoral, aren’t myths wrong things to believe? Surely the admonition “This Season, Celebrate REASON!” is an attempt at encouraging our lost brethren to turn from their wicked ways and enter into the One True Faith, namely, to abandon all this God nonsense and to join all us enlightened atheists. And surely such actions are indicative of an ethos.

Characterized by ardor: Is posting a billboard in New Jersey a sufficient example of ardor in action? After all, someone had to conceive of the idea; someone had to finance it; and someone had to commission it. Or, if one billboard is not enough, how about posting messages on the sides of 800 London buses? Arduous enough for you?

And faith: The atheist holds the belief that God does not exist. Faith tells him so. He says the Nativity is a myth. Faith, again. He says there is zero evidence for God, that any purported evidence is wrong or incorrectly identified as evidence, and that no evidence is forthcoming. Faith, faith, and more faith.

Finally, I should remind everyone that I am not the only one saying that atheism is a religion. For starters, we have this from Michael Ruse, a self-professed atheist, Darwinist, and ex-Christian: “If ‘God exists’ is a religious claim (and it surely is), why then is ‘God does not exist’ not a religious claim?” (“From a Curriculum Standpoint, Is Science Religion?” Chronicle of Higher Education, 22 December 2010).

Per Wikipedia, “There are also online churches that have been created by atheists for purposes ranging from parody, advocacy, education, securing legal rights, to ordaining atheist clergy for atheist weddings.” These include, but are not limited to:

• Atheist Community of Austin (www.atheist-community.org)
• First Church of Atheism
• Christian Atheism
• Church of Reason
• Church of Reality
• Church of Atheism (UK)
• Free Atheist Church
• First Free Church of Atheism
• North Texas Church of Freethought
• Houston Church of Freethought
• The Church of the Apathetic Agnostic
• www.debaptized.com
• Church of the Rebar Jesus
• The Church of the SubGenius
• Church of the Latter Day Dude
• Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
• Church of Humanism
• Society for Humanistic Judaism
• Cult of Dusty
• Church of the Smashing Orangey Bit
• The Church of Google 35
• Church of Atheism (U.S.)

Additionally, we have the First Amendmist Church of True Science, or FACTS (surely, this acronym is more than coincidental; if intentional, it is another example of the false claim that atheism is based on reason). Its founder, Michael Newdow, holds that its members are atheists “whose religious beliefs are specifically and explicitly based on the idea that there is no god.” (See Newdow v. Lefevre, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, No. 06-16344 D.C., No. CV-05-02339-FCD)

In 1997, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared that atheism is protected as a religion “for First Amendment purposes” (under the “free exercise” clause). The court decided that the Orange County N.Y. Department of Probation could not force Robert Warner, an atheist, to attend religion-based alcoholic treatment programs against the dictates of his own beliefs.

In 2005, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in as well. It ruled Wisconsin prison officials violated an inmate's rights because they did not treat atheism as a religion. "Atheism,” the Court said, “is [the inmate's] religion, and the group that he wanted to start was religious in nature even though it expressly rejects a belief in a supreme being.” (See 419 F.3d 678 (2005), James J. KAUFMAN, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Gary R. McCAUGHTRY, et al., Defendants-Appellees, No. 04-1914, United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.) Additionally, in December 2009, the United States Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

The SCOTUS did so because it has been saying for the past 50 years that a religion is not based simply on the belief of a supreme being. In the 1961 Case of Torcaso v. Watkins, the Court stated that “secular humanism” was a religion. In Kaufman v. McCaughtry, the Court affirmed that the practice of atheism was protected under the free exercise clause. It did not directly declare that atheism is a religion, but the precedent has been set: If the federal government is barred from limiting the free exercise of religion, and if atheism falls under that rubric, it will be problematic if not impossible to afford to atheism the full constitutional protection of free exercise afforded to religion, while at the same time holding that atheism is not “really” a religion.

But that’s okay, because atheism “really” IS one.

Thoughts on Philip K. Dick

2010-09-27T17:39:00.000-07:00

For the past few months, I’ve been reading the novels of Philip K. Dick, starting with A Scanner Darkly (after watching the film starring Keanu Reeves), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, and then venturing off with a four-novel set containing his final three novels, VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Ursula K. LeGuin likened Dick to “our own home-grown Borges.” I might agree but for the fact that I’ve never read Borges and likely never will. Still, it’s beyond question that Dick was one nifty novelist. Imaginative, inventive, well-informed, and intelligent—everything that I’ve tried to aspire to as a writer.

Aside: One habit that I’ve tried to develop, largely as a result of reading the über-brilliant and ultra-readable David Berlinski (my hero in all things literary and polemical), has been to read some writer I wish to emulate and make short vocabulary lists from his stuff. Here are some of the snazzier terms I picked up from Dick:

· Phagocytosis
· Hypostasis
· Negentropic
· Armillary
· Plasmate
· Probity
· Vicissitude
· Homeostatic
· Protophasonic
· Atavism
· Sardonic
· Hypnogogic
· Unctuous
· Anamnesis
· Veridical
· Autochthonic

I’ll assume you either already know these, or are willing to look them up in a dictionary and learn them yourselves, or else don’t give a rat’s tokhes WHAT they mean and hence have no need for me to define them for you.

What I find most fascinating about Dick’s work is the extent to which personal experiences influenced his writing, the autobiographical undertones of his work. His novels were almost always centered on the constant conflict between his spiritualism and his mental health (he had attempted suicide a number of times), which was further complicated by lifelong drug abuse, some prescribed by doctors, some purchased from street dealers. He wasn’t particularly religious, but was deeply influenced by his religious studies, which included Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, as well as spiritual excursions into Vedic and Hindu lore, and flirtations with the I Ching. Perhaps his greatest personal influence was James Pike, the Episcopal bishop of California, who served as inspiration for the character Timothy Archer in Dick’s last novel.

Doubtless the single most influential event of his life was what he termed “2-3-74,” a period of some weeks beginning in February of 1974 (2 for Feb; 3 for March). Having undergone oral surgery for an impacted wisdom tooth, during which he was given sodium pentathol, he had phoned his pharmacist for some additional pain-killers. The prescription was delivered by a young woman, who, he noticed, was wearing a gold chain around her neck affixed with an Ichthus character, the traditional symbol of Christianity. Dick asked her what it was; she told him. Not long thereafter he began to have visions which intensified during March and which tapered intermittently throughout the year. At one point, Dick began to claim that a transcendental intelligence had superimposed itself upon his mind, which he identified at times as either Ruah (the Old Testament word for the spirit of God, though to Dick the voice was feminine), Zebra, God, or VALIS (an acronym for Vast Active Living Information System). As the visions intensified, he began to claim a double life, one as Phillip K. Dick, the other as “Thomas,” a first-century Christian persecuted by Romans. He even claimed to have been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah, and believed that one episode from his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was a detailed retelling of a story from the New Testament book The Acts of the Apostles, though he had never read Acts.

At that point, Dick began writing what he called his Exegesis, portions of which he reproduced in the novel VALIS. By the time of his death, Dick’s Exegesis had grown to some 8,000 pages. Here’s a sample, culled from the appendix to VALIS:

12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said, “Eli, Eli, lama Sabachthani,” to which some of those present correctly said, “The man is calling on Elijah.” Elijah had left him and he died alone.

38. From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore we, as parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged.

47. TWO SOURCE COSMOGONY: The One was and was-not, combined, and desired to separate the was-not from the was. So it generated a diploid sac which combined, like an eggshell, a pair of twins, each an androgyny, spinning in opposite directions (the Yin and Yang of Taoism, with the One as the Tao). The plan of the One was that both twins would emerge into being (was-ness) simultaneously; however, motivated by a desire to be (which the One had implanted in both twins), the counterclockwise twin broke through the sac and separated prematurely; i.e. before full term. This was the dark or Yin twin. Therefore it was defective.

Perhaps a more typical (and illustrative) passage, though, is found in the foreword to Dick’s novel A Maze of Death:

The theology in this novel is not an analog of any known religion. It stems from an attempt made by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that God exists. I should say, too, that the late Bishop James A. Pike, in discussions with me, brought forth a wealth of theological material for my inspection, none of which I was previously acquainted with.

In the novel, Maggie Walsh’s experiences after death are based on an L.S.D. experience of my own. In exact detail…

All material concerning Wotan and the death of the gods is based on Richard Wagner’s version of Der Ring des Nibelungen, rather than on the original body of myths.

Answers to the questions put to the tench were derived from the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes.

“Tekel upharsin” is Aramaic for, “He has weighed and now they divide.” Aramaic was the tongue that Christ spoke. There should be more like him.

Though short, the passage clearly encapsulates a number of Dick’s themes: intense intellectual curiosity, spiritualism, substance abuse, and a reverence for certain Judeo-Christian religious figures. Traces of the themes may be found in virtually all of his writing.

One interesting note from VALIS: the narrator, a schizophrenic with two distinct personalities, identifies himself at times as Philip K. Dick (and by this Dick clearly meant himself, even identifying the character as author of a number of Dick’s books), most other times as Horselover Fat. It seemed obvious to me that any writer who goes to the trouble of naming one of his characters “Horselover Fat” does so for a pretty darned good reason, even if that reason isn’t readily apparent. It’s not until towards the end of the novel that Dick reveals where Horselover Fat gets his name, and I have to tell you, as a polyglot I was plenty miffed with myself for not figuring it out on my own. “Horselover Fat” is just another way of saying “Philip Dick.” Dick is the German word for “fat” (Dick uses an awful lot of German in his writing), while Philip is Greek for “lover of horses”—phil from philos, meaning “love”, and ip from hip or hippo, meaning “horse.” Dang it, I shoulda known. Dang it, dang it, dang it!!

I find in Dick something of a kindred spirit. (Ironically enough, “Kindred” was his middle name.) He seems torn between the physical and the metaphysical—or perhaps more accurately expressed, the material and the spiritual—profoundly engrossed with notions of the divine yet deeply committed to intellect and reason. The principal difference between us is that I am willing to cross a line that he is not. For Dick, as he claims in the above quote, God’s existence is an arbitrary postulate; for me, God’s existence is a necessary prerequisite of an ordered, lawful, and surprisingly rational universe in which information is central to its expression, this despite the fact that the universe is also entropic. The claim that an entropic universe ordered itself strikes me as implausible as claiming that you can climb into a bushel basket and lift yourself ten feet into the air—the very structure of immanent reality prohibits it.

In VALIS, Dick makes an interesting observation: the logic of God-denial is insupportable, as it is an example of “the two-proposition self-cancelling structure” (Dick attributes this nomenclature to Sigmund Freud), which goes like this:

1. God does not exist.
2. And anyhow he’s stupid.

The structure is two-propositional because—count ‘em—there are a total of two propositions, and self-cancelling because the second statement does not reinforce the first but only appears to. In fact, the second proposition contradicts the first. Despite the highfalutin terminology, though, the “two-proposition self-cancelling structure” is a simple restatement of my own contention as to the incoherency underpinning atheism: the atheist claims there is no God, because God isn’t as nice as the atheist maintains God should be. A nice God, claims the atheist, wouldn’t be stupid, and therefore God does not exist. (Note that there’s no objective standard as to what constitutes “stupid,” and thus no way of affirming the atheist’s claim that God is as dumb as he says He is, but don’t bother pointing this out to an atheist; you’ll just confuse him with facts.) That Dick and I have hit upon the same observation independently goes a long way, I think, towards affirming that the observation is correct:

1. God isn’t
2. Because God is (just not as nice as I think he should be).
CONTRADICTION
QED.

Dick died in 1982 from a stroke following a heart attack, at the age of only 54, not too much older than I am now. He had never been in particularly good health. For most of his life, his blood pressure was dangerously high; that, and his decades-long use of prescription amphetamines, followed by his experimentation with mind-altering drugs (the guy lived in California in the 60’s—of course he used dope!) and his attempts at suicide, ensured that he was NOT going to live to a ripe old age.

Nevertheless, I seriously doubt that Dick intended The Transmigration of Timothy Archer to be his last novel; it’s just the way it worked out. Archer is indicative of Dick’s mindset in his final days—always on the cusp of that gossamer-thin demarcation between unbelief and belief, but never quite able to cross over. Near the end of Archer, the narrator tells us: “I am a professional student and will remain one; I will not change. My opportunity to change was offered to me and I turned it down; I am stuck, now, and, as I say, know but know not what.” The words strike me as Dick’s assessment of his own life.

Sad, really. To be that close to realizing a transcendent truth, to forever straddle that fence. To see the promised land but not take that short step into it. So miniscule, that distance, and yet so vast. Small wonder, then, that we call it a leap of faith.

2010-05-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

The following is my reply to a post (http://agnostichicagokie.blogspot.com/2010/05/good-time-for-protest.html) made by my friend Damion. As is usual, I got a little carried away with pontificating, and outran the 4K word limit set for replies, so I decided to post my reply here instead. My apologies if this comes across as a public display of what should be a private discussion, but ah gots to say what ah gots to say, despite whatever length limitations the programmers of Blogspot may deem reasonable. Anyway, here goes.

Dude,

Speaking of false impressions:

I have to wonder just whom you have in mind when you speak of “the tea-and-crumpets-and-bigotry crowd.” Perhaps it’s the use of the word “tea” that is throwing me. Do you perhaps you mean those anti-intrusionist protestors who commonly refer to themselves as “tea partiers” (or, if you’re a moron, aka Keith Olbermann, “tea-snicker-snicker-baggers”)?

But if that’s so, why does your post begin with a photo of a moron wielding a “God Hates You” sign? Therein, the false impression: so far as I know, there have been no such signs at any of the so-called Tea Party rallies, nor does Franklin Graham aver to such a thing, nor anyone associated with the National Day of Prayer; “God Hates You” is the rallying cry of Fred Phelps and his mindless drones of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. Fred Phelps doesn’t attend Tea Party rallies, nor does he buddy up with Franklin Graham; he spends the majority of his waking hours making a pest of himself at the funerals of Marines killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, posting placards like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags”. Are you equating all those (the Tea Partiers, at last count, have grown to a million or more) who scruple at runaway government spending and unread 2000+ page health care bills with a handful (roughly sixty or so, most of whom are members of Phelps's family, the rest from his church congregation) of pseudo-Christian whackjobs who can’t see the inherent contradiction between “For God so loved the world” and “God hates fags”? If so, you would be demonstrating a fallacy of collectivism.

Otherwise, I could point out that you have more in common with Phelps than does the average Tea Partier or anyone associated with the National Day of Prayer. Our Boy Fred earned a law degree in 1962 and for a number of years was a practicing civil rights attorney. I don’t suppose you would argue that all those in search of a law degree are likely pseudo-Christian whackjobs, would you? Should I also mention that on at least 5 occasions he ran for public office? As a Democrat? Or are all Democrats mere whackjobs like Fred?

Virtually everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, has nothing but disdain for Fred and his acolytes, so what does the "God Hates You" photo have to do with the NDOP, other than to taint Franklin Graham & Co. with a collectivist smear? The WBC are a small, obscure, and outrageously extremist outfit who make a mockery not only of Christianity, but free speech itself. Tea Partiers are merely expressing their constitutionally-sanctioned right for peacefully assembly for redress of grievances. The NDOP, likewise, is expressing its constitutionally-sanctioned right to practice their religion; this despite whatever hermeneutics you may attempt in your reference (but not exactly reverence) of Matthew 6. Even Ann Coulter, also possesser of a law degree (who, unlike Phelps, has not been disbarred) and an ardent supporter of the Tea Party movement, has nothing kind to say about Phelps. See: http://townhall.com/columnists/AnnCoulter/2010/04/07/god_hates_judges

True, bigotry is an ugly thing. But you seem to forget that bigotry comes in all sizes and flavors. There is, for example, the bigotry of the anti-Christian zealot. You should try harder not to sound like one.

What I find bizarre is your adumbration of what you find bizarre: “Tomorrow we will have public officials preaching piety on public property in the shadow of the seat of state government.” Which prompts the reply: Yeah? So? Anything wrong with preaching? Or piety? Or that it is public? Or in close proximity with a governmental edifice? What, no? Then why whine about it?

And, yes, I mean “whine”. Your next words are telling: “Yes, it is constitutionally protected free speech, but—”

Sorry, but no “buts” are allowed. The Constitution does not automatically shut off at all points you find inconvenient. If the speech is not only free but constitutionally protected, you have no justification whatsoever for bemoaning it, no matter where it takes place, and no matter what motivations you hypothesize are at its foundation. Free speech is the law of the land, not the law of the land at least 100 meters outside of any governmental building, monument, park, and/or other facility except for weekends and holidays, and only with the expressed, written consent of the U.S. Department of Buttinskyness.

And by the way, freedom of religion is also the law of the land, a point all too often missed by our courts. The “longstanding American ideal of keeping the state out of the church” is only that—an ideal. It is not found in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States, nor even in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of Religion, on the other hand, is. The notion of the separation of Church and State has far too long been used as an instrument for curtailing religious freedom, due to an overarching, misguided (and errant) interpretation of the Establishment Clause. When the federal government steps in and bans even the recitation of a prayer at a football game (that, of all things, the players don’t kill each other on the field—oh, the looming theocracy!), it’s clear that the constitutional emphasis has gone from freedom of religion to freedom from it—the polar opposite of what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Separation of Church and State comes to us via a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in his later years, long after his presidency, further still from his years as a revolutionary and author of the Declaration of Independence. His emphasis was not that all governmental functions should be devoid of any religious character, but only that the government shouldn’t be in the business of establishing a Church of the United States in the same way that the British had established a Church of England.

His emphasis aside, it is of note that his comments come to us via a letter, and conspicuously NOT from the Declaration of Independence, or the U.S. Constitution, or from any of the legislation he signed into law as president. One would think that had Jefferson been truly of a mind to keep the Church separate from state, he would have had ample opportunity to do so as a matter of American jurisprudence, and would have made some sort of attempt to formalize his ideas into law. Letters are wonderful source materials for understanding the insights and state of mind of important historical figures, but that’s where their usefulness ends; they are not matters of law and thus have no bearing on its interpretation. Nor, for that matter, do they “definitively” settle questions such as whether to hold national days of religious observance.

There is a problem in ascribing to Jefferson the letter-writer the same sort of intellectual authority we ascribe to Jefferson the Founding Father. The former was a private citizen speaking for himself; the latter was a public figure speaking for us all. The private citizen speaks with less authority than the public figure. Saying otherwise is tantamount to saying that because Nicholas Cage won the Academy Award for his performance in “Moonstruck” his recommendation that wolverines make good house pets should be accepted without question.

Idiot-Proofing the Idiot

2010-05-15T09:34:00.000-07:00

In grad school, I once read a narrative poem in Middle High German (12th century, or thereabouts) concerning a father who has a fool for a son. Deciding that his boy could use a little brainsing up, he sends the lad off to study at the great university in Paris:

Ze schuol sant er in gên Paris:
An künsten solt er werden wîs.
(Lit: To school sent he him to Paris/In the arts should he become wise.)

The son attends school for a number of years, completes his education, and returns home.

Dad, of course, is thrilled at his son’s return. Eager to show off the boy’s new academic skills, he invites everyone from the village to a “Welcome Home” soiree, whereupon he asks his son to impart to one and all some bit of wisdom he picked up at the university.

The lad takes a brief look out the window, where the full moon is shining brightly in the night sky, and says:

Eis dinges mich grôz wunder nint,
Des ich mitvlîz mich hab besint,
Daz der mâne sô glîch ûf gât
Dem mânen, den ich in der stat
Ze Parîs sach, des wundert mich:
Einander sint si gar gelîch.
Er muoz sîn gar ein wîser man,
Der si zwên underscheiden kan.

Loosely translated: “Well, in Paris they have a moon that looks exactly like ours.”

The moral, according to the poem, is that education won’t keep a fool from being a fool. However, a more pertinent lesson might be: Don’t send your kid off to school and expect the professors there to educate him just because you’re paying them to do so. Anyone who doesn’t understand that the moon shining over Paris is the same moon shining over every other city anywhere else is certainly a fool, but one really ought to ask oneself: Just what were those egghead professors in Paris doing while that dopey kid was sitting in their classrooms?

I am enamored with the idea of higher education. Though I haven’t seen the insides of a college classroom in some twenty years, I continue to read, to write, and to study, in a never-ending quest to convince myself that my brain has some greater function than merely to keep my ears apart. It’s a quest fraught with anxiety and frustration, because I never seem to learn half as much as I feel I should have learned, and I constantly find myself forgetting far more than I have a right to forget, but inasmuch as I’ve always believed that learning is a lifelong process, it’s something I’ve never been able to put aside. As Samuel Johnson once noted, soon the night comes wherein no man can work. Until then, I’ll continue to crack the books.

Yet one of life’s great ironies is that the least likely avenue of attaining higher education is oftentimes the so-called institute of higher learning. Just like the 12th century Universite de Paris, the modern college or university is no imparter of wisdom, or, for that matter, even of learning. Those parents who place their trust in any secondary school to educate their young are apt to find their trust—as well as their money—has been seriously misplaced.

There are many reasons why this is so, but perhaps the most fundamental reason is the insular nature of academia itself, a consequence of the “publish or perish” mindset of the tenure system. A university professor’s focus is not on teaching his classes but on demonstrating his scholasticism, which means he must publish. The classes he teaches are but a means to an end—they provide the professor with a salary so that he can pay his bills; his class workload is deliberately kept light so that he has enough free time to focus on getting his name in print.

As a result, a kind of academic myopia sets in. The professor’s world is his area of study, not the world itself. As the adage goes, if the only tool at your disposal is a hammer you tend to see the world in terms of nails. Anything that doesn’t fit that preconceived notion simply doesn’t merit the professor’s attention. It’s not simply that there are things in his world that are un-nail-like; that which is not like a nail is that which does not suit his reality, and therefore doesn’t exist, or is at least not worth noting.

Worse yet, the professor has virtually no incentive whatsoever to examine his it’s-all-nails world view and therefore no likelihood of changing it. His view of reality will continue to be what it is, right or wrong, so long as he continues to publish. It’s also what he will continue to bring into his classroom, hence the charge that the university setting’s main emphasis is on indoctrination rather than education.

Everyday experience tells us there is often a discontinuity between theory and application. The average professor, however, insulated from everyday experience, is oftentimes unaware of the gap. His focus is theory, not application, and so, ironically enough, it is the professor who fails to learn the lessons of everyday life.

There is perhaps no better illustration of this fact than a paper I ran across while researching for Killjoy: “The Metabolic Rift and Marine Ecology—An Analysis of the Ocean Crisis Within Capitalist Production” by Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark (University of Oregon), in: Organization & Environment, Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005, pp. 422-444.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the notion of “metabolic rift,” the giveaway word “capitalist” should clue you in on what sort of focus this paper brings to bear. It’s none other than that of our good buddy, Karl Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto and fictional contestant of the Monty Python quiz show “World Forum.”

Yup, that’s right. Good old Karl “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” Marx. For the rest of the world, Marxism has been formulated, examined, theorized, implemented, found wanting and abandoned; in academia, it not only lives and breathes, it thrives. Nowhere else, with the possible exception of the Obama Administration (though I would argue that BHO & Co. are more Maoist than Marxist), does this queer phenomenon rear its ugly li’l head.

Indeed, Clausen and Clark would give one the impression that the Marxist vision is not only spot-on, it’s the only lens through which a sensible individual would view the world. In their abstract, they write: “We extend Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift to the marine environment to (a) understand the human transformations of the ocean ecosystem, (b) examine the anthropogenic (human-generated) causes of fish stock depletion, (c) study the development of aquaculture in response to the oceanic crisis, and (d) reveal the ecological consequences of ongoing capitalist production in relation to the ocean environment.”

Metabolic rift, must you know, is a term coined by Marx; its central claim, per Wikipedia, is that “the spread of the capitalist node of production results in humans interacting less directly with their natural environment from which they derive their sustenance, which in turn leads to its exploitation.”

And there’s the all-purpose Marxist term of choice: exploitation. Suffice to say, the word appears more than a few times in Clausen and Clark’s paper. We hear of “how the exploited marine conditions” affected the “Cod Wars” fought between Britain and Iceland from 1958 to 1976. “Industrial exploitation” threatens our marine ecosystems with species extinction, the “direct effect of overfishing,” which has created major alterations to marine food webs; this is “the clearest example of capitalism causing a rift in the metabolic processes of the ocean.” Our seas, they write, “are confronting serious environmental stresses that threaten their ability to regenerate… [T]hese ecological conditions must be understood as they relate to the systematic exploitation of nature for profit.”

That’s all commercial fishing is, y’understand, merely exploiting nature in pursuit of the almighty dollar, the “relentless drive to accumulate capital,” as Clausen and Clarke phrase it. Its focus is solely on profit; the idea that capitalist fisheries might fish their stock to extinction and thus fish themselves out of a livelihood never enters their minds. It is the profit motive that has “for the first time made the exhaustion of deep-sea fish stocks a real possibility.” Oh, those—ptooey—capitalists!

This is not to say that Clausen and Clarke’s paper is bad. On the contrary, it’s well-written, thorough, and backed up by a host of secondary sources. At the time of their paper’s publication, C&C were doctoral students; there is not the least doubt in my mind that by now both have received their PhDs, and deservedly so.

But neither can I call the paper good, if only because it's insufferably foolish. It would require volumes to describe what’s bad about Marx’s theory. I’ll suffice with this handy rule of thumb: look at the body count—the greater the count, the worse for the theory. Under National Socialism (a political manifestation of Darwin's theory under the rubric of "social Darwinism"), Adolf Hitler 1) invaded Poland, which started World War II and cost the lives of some fifty million, and 2) murdered some nine million Jews, Czechs, Poles, and Russian prisoners of war in a system of extermination camps; surely this is why we say Hitler was a bad person.

He was not, however, the worst person ever. There are other contenders for this claim, and all of them Marxists. Joseph Stalin, just like Hitler, invaded Poland and started World War II--this, however, under the Marxist mantra of liberating the workers of the world; at the time, he claimed his invasion of Poland was to repel the German hordes, but historians have since demonstrated that Stalin and Hitler were in collusion, the Russian troops no less an invasionary force than the Germans. And while Hitler “merely” managed to murder nine million in his camps, Stalin was responsible for the starvation of over seven million Ukrainians who resisted his attempts to collectivize their farms, ordered the deaths of over fifteen million dissidents and political prisoners, and allowed untold millions to perish in the Gulags of Siberia. Add those millions to the millions that perished under Mao’s People’s Republic and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and we’re talking about the slaughter of easily a hundred million people, all in the name of some Marxist fantasy about uniting the workers of the world and casting off the chains of capitalist imperialism. A hundred million dead is compelling testimony that the proletariat had far, far more to lose than their chains.

But never mind all that, say the professors. At least Stalin meant well.

Further evidence that education is incapable of idiot-proofing the idiot.

Atheistic Incoherency Redux

2010-03-11T17:18:00.000-08:00

I asserted in a recent post that atheism is baseless because of a fundamental incoherency in its principle argument: God doesn’t exist because of the presence of suffering and evil. When pressed to explain what bearing suffering or evil have on the basic ontological question of whether God exists, the characteristic response is that because God does not intervene (or at least appears not to intervene) to prevent or to mitigate the suffering/evil problem, He therefore does not exist. Thus the atheist’s argument reduces to: God doesn’t exist because He’s not as nice as I think He should be. Stated another way: God isn’t because He is (just in a way contrary to how Kenneth Copeland says He is).

Like I said: Incoherent.

Needless to say, there are some atheists who take issue with this claim. One such objector was the blogger David B., with whom I enjoyed an intriguing exchange. I won’t reproduce the entire exchange here (if you’re interested, read the comments attached to my post “Mutual of Omaha and the Marlin Perkins Theodicy,”) but I think there are portions worth highlighting.

His first objection: “Loving fathers don’t starve their children to death if they can avoid it.” Applying this objection to God, we get: “A loving God doesn’t starve His creatures to death if He can avoid it.” Look familiar? It should. It’s the “God isn’t as nice as He should be” argument yet once again. This sort of argument pops up so frequently, you’d think this is the only weapon in the atheist’s arsenal. And, most likely, you’d be right.

What intrigues me all the more, though, is the atheist’s propensity for making unwarranted assumptions in order to support his assertions. Here there are at least three. Can you spot them? I’ll give you a moment.

[Theme from “Jeopardy” plays here.]

Finished? Good. Let’s compare notes.

The first is that when one of God’s creatures starves to death, God is the One causing the starvation. But we have to ask ourselves: Is it that He actively starves His creature to death or that He passively allows His creature to starve to death? Or is there any reason for supposing God should be involved at all? Perhaps starvation is merely a logical necessity, born from the fact that there is a practical limit to the availability of foodstuffs, and that this availability is not uniform.

And perhaps it is not God who is to blame for allowing someone to starve to death, but ourselves. As compelling as the image of a victim of starvation may be, the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing about it; we merely mutter “Oh, isn’t that a shame?” or some such platitude and go on our merry way. We see the ads on television virtually every day: Just thirty cents a day to save the life of a suffering child. Yet—and be honest—do you call the 800-number on the screen and send a donation? Do you even know anyone who does?

The second assumption is the qualifier: “If He can avoid it.” This begs the question: How do we know what God can and can’t avoid?

The answer that springs to mind is that if we define God as an omnipotent being, then there’s nothing he can’t do. But does it necessarily follow that because of God’s omnipotence that when one of His creatures starves to death this is something He could have avoided? To avoid is to take steps to eschew the results of a certain sequence of events. Inasmuch as taking the steps or not taking the steps is a matter of volition, the avoidance of the creature’s starvation is then simply a matter of God’s choice. Whatever reasons God may have to choose to avoid or not to avoid, these are not self-evident, and so are known only to Him. To know what reasons God has in mind to avoid or not to avoid the death-by-starvation of one of His creatures is therefore to know the mind of God, which—unless He actually tells us what is on His mind—is something no one can do, atheist or theist. The only way of knowing for certain what God had in mind when one of His creatures starves to death is if He descends from Heaven and says something like, “Yeah, I could have avoided the guy’s starvation, but I didn’t like him very much, so to heck with him.” This would satisfy David’s objection, but it would also kind of toss his whole “there’s no God” thing right out the window. Talk about your Pyrrhic victories!

Okay, so what’s the third assumption? That death by starvation is a bad thing (that is, an unloving one, and hence a bad one). This assumption is less obvious than the first two, but at its base it’s still an assumption because it’s a claim that is made without any effort expended to show how the claim is valid.

Is starving to death objectively bad? Unpleasant, doubtlessly, since having gone hungry a time or two myself, I have an idea what starvation is like (once, for instance, I fasted for forty days; a thoroughly unpleasant experience, I assure you); further, we need only look into the eyes of some emaciated, swollen-bellied victim of starvation to understand the experience is agonizing.

But are we to argue that what makes starvation bad is its unpleasantness? Surely not all things that are unpleasant are necessarily bad. Like pulling an abscessed tooth, or passing a kidney stone. Unpleasant, yes, but better to be rid of the tooth or the kidney stone. So if not all unpleasant things are necessarily bad, how are we so certain about starvation?

Perhaps, then, it’s the severity of the unpleasantness that makes starvation bad. As agonizing as passing a kidney stone might be, surely the agony is nothing in comparison to that of a prolonged event such as starvation. But how much severity is too much? Is there an objective standard somewhere that determines how much severity of unpleasantness is required to make a thing bad, something on a scale of death-by-sex-with-Dallas-Cowboy-cheerleaders on the “not so bad” extreme and death-by-Sarlacc (the creature from Star Wars that digests its victims over a 1000-year period) on the “really bad” one? And where, exactly, would death-by-starvation fall on such a scale? Isn’t this a matter of opinion, then, rather than fact?

As much as we might wish to agree that death-by-starvation surely can’t be considered a good thing, we’re still stuck if there’s no proper rationale for determining what, if anything, makes it bad in its essence. Is it bad in an absolute sense, always bad in all times and in all places? Is it generally bad but maybe sometimes good, depending upon circumstances? Is it merely bad in a relativistic sense, that is, bad in one man’s opinion and good in another’s? Again, how do we know for certain?

Perhaps, though, it’s not the starvation that’s bad but the dying. Maybe it’s bad because death is bad. But this, too, is only an assumption—that death is the end, and when you’re gone, you’re gone. After all, the finality of death is a matter of some debate; just put an atheist and a theist into the same room and listen to them argue about it.

A fortiori, it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether the atheist is right that death is the end or the theist is right that death is only the beginning. If the atheist is right, death can only be bad if living mattered in the first place, but it’s hard to see how living matters if life is only the accidental offshoot of an accidental universe, which is the only means at our disposal for explaining our existence if there’s no Creator. A living being starves to death—so? Did he matter? Who says? And when the atheist retorts “I say he mattered!” this only begs the question: How do we know the atheist matters? He’s only an accident, too. Are we to assume that life matters, even if we can’t explain how it does? Another unwarranted assumption. Or, if the theist is right that death is only the end of our physical existence and not the end of our spiritual existence, then death might actually be a good thing, regardless of whatever horrors might enjoin to bring it about.

Mind you, I’m not arguing that death by starvation is okay. Maybe it isn’t. I’m just asking how for certain we know it’s not only not-okay, but genuinely bad. Additionally, I would ask how we know that because God is surely capable of intervening to prevent the death-by-starvation of one of His creatures, He should intervene to prevent it. Is God morally obliged to prevent the death-by-starvation, and if so, how do we know?

The logic underlying this assumption is flimsy, because, as assumptions go, it’s not particularly well-thought out, being a reaction on an emotional level rather than a rational one. There’s nothing wrong with emotion per se, but I find its presence here rather ironic, considering the argument comes from someone who thinks atheism is a rational enterprise. Perhaps it’s only an emotional one; that certainly seemed to be my state of mind in those days when I was telling myself I was an atheist.

Very possibly, there’s even a fourth assumption: Should we even concede that God is to blame for the starvation or that starvation/death is inarguably bad, there remains one further question: Does this demonstrate that God is unloving?

Consider, for instance, that in certain parts of the Muslim world, when a 14-year-old girl is attacked and raped, not only is her rapist executed for committing the rape, the 14-year-old girl is often executed as well, for the sin of fornication. Oftentimes the means of execution is death by stoning, and even sometimes one of the participants in hurling the stones at her is the girl’s own father.

Please understand that I am not defending this practice. Personally, I find it beyond outrageous—particularly from those who purport to worship a god who is wise, just, compassionate, and merciful. In my view, executing a girl whose only crime was her failure to fight off her attacker is the antithesis of wisdom and a bastardization of justice; it is neither compassionate nor merciful, and manifestly so. But I am not a Muslim. The ones hurling the stones, to say the least, see the matter differently.

But what of the father who participates in his daughter’s execution? In such a case, is he a loving father, or an unloving one? Perhaps he would argue that he indeed loves his daughter, but that he loves his religious faith more, and thus has a higher moral duty to participate in his daughter’s stoning rather than to prevent it. Perhaps, as he hurls the stone towards his child, he reassures himself that this is the right and proper thing to do; that his daughter’s death is the correct atonement for her sin of fornication; and that by participating in this way in his daughter’s death he is actually ushering her into Paradise. Does his heart, then, keen in joy for his child’s deliverance? If so, then, perhaps we should argue that loving fathers actually do allow their children to die, under certain circumstances. However visceral our reaction that this sort of thing simply does not happen, are we stating a fact, or only in our opinion?

But it’s not merely the unwarranted assumption that makes the atheistic world view untenable; there’s also the bad logic. And there’s plenty of it.

One such example comes from baptistmessenger.com, in which an atheist identifying himself as William offers up the following absurdity qua metaphysical claim: “Atheism IS the default position, my friend. Theism is the belief in a god or gods. Add the suffix ‘a’ to the root word and you’ve added ‘without’. So (a) theism means (without) belief in a god or gods. An infant doesn’t believe in a god or gods, so they are atheists.”

Hooboy.

(And never mind that “a” is a prefix, not a suffix. Far be it from me to argue that bad grammar is bad logic.)

Honestly, though, I have to wonder: do atheists really think this sort of nonsense is reasonable, or do they just stop at the first bit of sophistry that comes their way and refuse to consider the matter any further? I suspect the latter. After all, atheism is incoherent because the arguments that support it are incoherent.

Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t grasping at straws to hold onto our belief systems can easily see what’s wrong with William’s argument: While it is certainly true that babies are born without the belief that God exists, they are also born without the belief that two and two make four, without the belief that wolverines make good house pets, and without the belief that Parkay has the taste of real butter. Babies don’t believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Yahweh, Zeus, Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, you, me, William, or that natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation is all you need to change a cow into a whale. The reason why babies don’t believe in these things is because babies are born without any beliefs at all.

The problem for the all-babies-are-atheists argument, however, is that atheism is itself a belief, and so is one of the things babies don’t believe in. To say that one particular belief that babies don’t have should be our default position—over all the other beliefs that babies also don’t have—is an arbitrarily selective argument, and is thus absurd; there is simply no conceivable reason for choosing the one sort of belief over all the others. There is only the good excuse: William wants to claim that atheism should be our default position, and it doesn’t really matter to him what argument he chooses to warrant the claim. Perhaps God doesn’t exist because Parkay doesn’t have the taste of real butter, and if God were real, it would, and since babies don’t believe in the great buttery flavor of Parkay, maybe that is why all babies are atheists.

What is at fault here is a poor definition: atheism is not the lack of belief in the existence of God; it is the belief in the lack of a God. The atheist does not simply lack the belief that God is; he believes that God isn’t.

This, in turn, leads us back to my discussion with David, who apparently takes some issue with my definition of atheism. “We atheists,” he says at one point, “are almost never absolutist in our nonbelief in God. I do not claim certain knowledge that there's no God. Nor do most atheists.”

University of Texas philosopher J. Budziszewski comments in his essay “The Second Tablet Project” that the reason it is so difficult to argue with an atheist is that he won’t even be honest with himself, let alone be honest in the philosophical underpinnings of his world view. David’s comment is a case in point: William’s definition of atheism notwithstanding, or David’s, any atheist who is not absolutist in his belief is not an atheist. Anyone who only thinks that God may not exist is not an atheist, and is only kidding himself by saying otherwise.

Our discussion on this point is worth repeating in some detail:

Yours Truly: And all atheists are absolutists, as are all theists. To the question: Is there a God? There are three possible answers: Yes, absolutely (the theist's position); No, absolutely not (the atheist's position); and I don't know (the agnostic's position). Any atheist who is not an absolutist is not an atheist, but an agnostic who only thinks he's an atheist.

David: Maybe that how YOU define atheism. But it’s certainly not how people who call themselves atheists generally use the term. But I'm not interested in arguing semantics with you. Feel free to think of me as an atheist-leaning agnostic or simply a non-theist if you like.

Yours Truly: I agree. By and large (and this seems to have been the case in my own flirtation with atheism), atheists do not generally use the word 'atheist' to mean someone who says unequivocally that there's no God, but only that there's probably no God. But that's agnosticism, not atheism. I suspect that most people who call themselves atheists are really only agnostics. There's nothing particularly wrong in doubting that God exists (other than that He does), but I do think there's something altogether wrong with calling oneself an atheist when the word does not apply.

This is one of the many reasons I finally decided atheism is wrong. It is a not particularly well-thought-out philosophy. So when guys like Richard Dawkins tell us that Darwin allowed him to become “an intellectually fulfilled atheist,” they're only kidding themselves—and us as well.

This is a crucial point, so it’s worth repeating. An atheist does not say that God probably doesn’t exist, any more than a theist says that God probably does. The theist says “God is”; the atheist replies “No, he isn’t.” These are absolutist positions. The probably-does/probably-doesn’t positions fall under the domain of agnosticism. To borrow William’s strategy of pointing out the meanings of words one root at a time, “agnostic” is derived from the Greek a “without” and gnosis “knowledge.” Therefore, an agnostic is someone who lacks the knowledge to answer the question definitively, hence his use of words like “probably.”

To repeat, atheism’s principle weakness is that its philosophical underpinnings are incoherent. I’ll end this post with a lengthier quote from the Budziszewski essay:

[Both theist and atheist assume] that the universe is causally and rationally patterned: this causes that, that explains this, such-and-such is a reasonable explanation of so-and-so. But what right has the atheist to this assumption? Why should there be any patterns whatsoever? If the universe just is, then why shouldn’t the things in it just happen? There is no reason to expect them to yield to reasoning, no explanation of why they should even have an explanation. Moreover, we are not out of the woods even if we do find patterns in the universe, for if these patterns too just are, then there is no warrant for assuming that they are more than local, accidental, superficial, inconsistent, and ephemeral. The sun may not rise tomorrow morning. Fire may not burn this afternoon. Two plus two may equal now four, now six, now one. For me, conception may not be caused by sexual intercourse (that seems to be how some teenagers think). Even if today I am myself, next week I may be someone else (that is how postmodernists think). So why should the natural law have even the force of prudence, much less oughtness? Why should there even be logic? Why should I “watch out” for anything? How could I?

How, indeed?

Evolution of a Simpler Sort: Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True

2010-03-02T18:21:00.000-08:00

Given all the carping I’ve encountered on the Dembski/O’Leary webpage Uncommon Descent concerning Jerry Coyne, I decided it was high time for me to stop reading about Coyne and to start reading Coyne himself, so when a friend offered to loan me a copy of Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, I accepted. After all, secondary sources are fine and dandy, but the only true way to examine a man’s ideas is to hear from the man himself. To get it straight from the horse’s mouth, as the saying goes. Or, if not horse, then from some other form of braying pack-animal.

My takeaway: the carping is well justified. If you already believe in evolution and your object is simply to reinforce your preexisting world view, if you’re already a member of the choir to which Coyne is preaching, then by all means, have a read. If, on the other hand, you simply wonder whether evolution is true and are curious if there might be a rational means of answering in the affirmative, supported by keen observation and empirical evidence—to wit, supported by science—keep looking. I’m highly doubtful that such a thing even exists, but if it does, I’m positive Coyne hasn’t written it.

Why Evolution is True is about as misnamed a tome as one might expect, given that with such a title one might expect Jerry to get around to a discussion as to why evolution is an objective fact rather than an allegedly scientific opinion. This, of course, is something he never does. He offers little more than an object lesson in, to paraphrase Jerry Fodor, the problems inherent in attributing to adaptationism all the creative power of an intentionalist system such as a mind. In Coyne’s case, the creator-god is our well-known friend natural selection, who can do absolutely anything if given sufficient time, opportunity, and resources. Evolutionary Mythmaking for Fun and Annoyance would have been a far better title, provided that by “fun” we mean Jerry’s and by “annoyance” we mean mine.

Albert Einstein once stated that any viable theory should be one that is as simple as possible, but not simpler. By that he meant that the best theories were those that explained a system without being overcomplicated or oversimplified. State the bare minimum of what is required to formulate the theory—but make sure not to leave out anything that’s required, either.

Coyne’s view of the theory of evolution, however, is clearly of the oversimplified sort; it is the simpler variety of evolutionary theory. In his mindset, there are two and only two camps: those who believe in evolution, and creationists. Those who believe in evolution have logic and reason on their side; those who are creationists have only fear and superstition on theirs. And every one of us, from rich to poor, old to young, mighty and weak, falls into one camp or the other—and never into both. That someone might believe in evolution and creation is not even within the realm of possibility, and is never discussed in any of his book’s 300 pages. Nor is there any discussion of the very real possibility that our current formulation of evolutionary theory, aka the neo-Darwinian synthesis, is in real need of some serious re-thinking. No, Coyne’s position is that evolution is settled science, being “as solidly established as any scientific fact,” and that “scientists need no more convincing” (p. xvi).

This, for instance, fully explains that little debacle in Kansas you may have read about, and concerning which Coyne opines: “Some religious members of the [Dover] school board, unhappy with the current text’s adherence to Darwinian evolution, suggested alternative books that included the biblical theory of creationism” (p. ix). He sums up the matter with: “For those who oppose Darwinism purely as a matter of faith, no amount of evidence will do—theirs is a belief not based on reason” (p. xii).

The statement readily encapsulates Coyne’s oversimplified rationale:

Religion is the reason why some school board members object to Darwinism.
The only alternative to Darwinian evolution is biblical creationism.
The objection to Darwinism is purely a matter of faith.
Darwinism is based on reason.
Religion is based on faith.

Simple. Or, rather, simpler. Mind you, this nonsense is to be found in the book’s preface. Coyne begins his book with these thoughts in mind. I have to wonder—if his premises are so bad, what good are his conclusions?

More to the point, he couldn’t possibly be more wrong:

Perhaps one of the reasons why some school board members object to Darwinism is because our schools teach it as settled science, when, in fact, it’s not. Coyne’s principle objection to the Dover resolution is not that it would have encouraged the discussion of creationism in science classes, but that it would have suggested that students might question the very science Coyne has convinced himself is settled. Hence, the wording from the offensive resolution which the Dover school board wanted its students to read: “As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.” Horrors!
It’s possible for evolution to be true without being Darwinian.
The objections to Darwinism have been what they’ve always been—if science is supposedly based on reason, then there’s no reason to believe in something there’s no evidence for. As Stephen J. Gould, himself no Bible-thumping creationist, once put it: “[T]o preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study” (“Evolution’s erratic pace,” Natural History (1977), 86:14).
Darwinists routinely refer to natural selection or random genetic mutation as the causal mechanism underlying new speciation, without a shred of evidence to underpin their claims. And what do we call “the evidence of things not seen”?
“Come, let us reason together, saith the Lord.”

Incidentally, Coyne devotes considerable space to Dover v. Kitzmiller, in rapt glee at Judge Jones’s decision to bar the Dover school board from allowing intelligent design to be discussed in its classrooms, under the patently mistaken assumption that the courts never, EVER err in their adjudications (as President Obama will surely confirm), and then broadsides himself with this glaring contradiction: “But scientific truth is decided by scientists, not by judges” (p. xi).

Apart from the obvious objection—if judges don’t decide these things, why involve a judge at all, or, for that matter, devote pages and pages of text praising him for making the right call?—there’s a more basic observation. Truth isn’t “decided” by anyone, let alone scientists. A thing is either true or it’s not. Scientists routinely identify this notion as scientific realism—that truth is objective, that all truths are universal, and that a scientist’s job is to identify whatever truths he can. That’s “identify,” not “decide.” If gravity holds, it’s not because a bunch of scientists got together and decided it should.

But never mind all that, says Coyne. We’re at war here, and so all’s fair, even when one resorts to glaring contradictions and circular reasoning to support one’s assertions. “The battle,” he says, “is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition. What is at stake is nothing less than science itself and all the benefits it offers to society” (p. xi).

That is, science as Coyne defines it, but not as Stephen C. Meyer defines it or as Hugh Ross defines it or as Michael Behe defines it or even as Frances Collins defines it. And absolutely not as Newton, Keppler, Copernicus or Galileo defined it, either. In Coyne’s oversimplified dichotomy, science = rationality, religion = superstition; the separate definitions are absolute in their application, and there’s no overlap whatsoever between the two. To phrase it another way, “Four legs rational; two legs superstitious.” Now bleat and re-bleat until the creationists give in, says Coyne.

Apart from the manifest falsehood inherent in the notion that science and religion are at war with one another (this is an idea that has only been around since the nineteenth century, conceived principally by the anti-religious nitwits John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White), it is profoundly paranoid. You see, Coyne says, people who doubt Darwin not only want to shove their pathetically irrational religious superstitions down your throat, they want to rob you off all the benefits of science. Which surely must mean: they want to take away your shiny iPods and MP3 players and GPS navigators and all the other do-dads we use to make life more convenient. Just why religious folk are motivated to do all this, Coyne doesn’t say; nevertheless, the warning is clear: Doubt ye not the True Faith as Our Lord Darwin Proclaimed It, or within weeks we’ll be living in caves and all our women will be wearing burqas! Such are the inherent dangers of telling students to keep an open mind.

And, once again, notice the oversimplification: the benefits of science, as if science has no downside. Never mind that science and technology can be (and have been) used for any variety of purposes, beneficial or otherwise. Consider, then, this short list of some of the other “benefits” of science (from David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion): “Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, it was not the Vatican.”

Further, “benefit” is not a statement of fact but rather a matter of opinion—what some view as beneficial others view as detrimental. Consider for example the internal combustion engine. While I see it as largely beneficial, there those who hold it as mankind’s bane, spewing copious amounts of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and poisoning our planet. So, who’s right? Actually, both are (though not to the same extent, the potential benefit of the internal combustion engine considerably outweighing its potential downside)—something that Coyne’s oversimplified analysis is fully unprepared to consider.

By far, however, the most glaring oversimplification is in Coyne’s use of “evolution,” the very focus of his inquiry. Time and again, he uses the word first one way, then another, with no apparent understanding of any inconsistency or equivocation on his part.

There are any number of ways to use the word, though there are three basic types. These are:

Evolution as change over time. This is the least controversial definition. It is a simple expression of the everyday observation that as time proceeds, things change. We should note that not even the most adamant biblical literalist, who views the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis as an account of actual historical events, disagrees with this notion. After all, whether Adam and Eve were both white, or black, or whatever hue of the human spectrum (or even presuming that Adam and Eve were of different races), our Earth is presently populated by over six billion people of multiple races and ethnicities. So, things change. Call this E1 evolution.
Evolution as new speciation emerging from parent species. This is a slightly more controversial claim than the E1 sort. Under this claim, not only do things change over time, but one of the changes that can occur is that the offspring of one sort of species can become differentiated from their parent species in such a way that a unique species appears. Further, this new species crosses some sort of genetic boundary so that the members of the new species are no longer able to interbreed with the species that produced it. Call this E2 evolution.
Evolution as new speciation caused by natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation. This is the definition of evolution as used in most biology textbooks, and is by far the most controversial of the three. Call this E3 evolution. When Coyne tells us that evolution is “as solidly established as any scientific fact” (p. xvi), he means evolution of the E3 sort.

Note that each definition of evolution can be considered a proper subset of the definition that follows it: E1 evolution is change over time; E2 evolution is E1 evolution incorporating new speciation derived from parent species; E3 evolution is E2 evolution incorporating natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation. (For the purpose of brevity, from now on I’ll call the natural selection/genetic mutation criterion NS+RM.) So, E1, E2, and E3 evolution all adhere to the notion of change over time; and E2 and E3 adhere to the notion of new speciation; but only E3 entails the NS+RM criterion.

It is for this reason that E3 evolution is the most controversial of the three definitions. While Coyne is adamant that evolution is undeniable, and despite all the imprecations he is prepared to hurl at anyone who dares disagree with him, there are nonetheless those who steadfastly deny it. As just one example, there can be no greater contrast than this comment from David Berlinski: “I say it’s controversial, because I think it’s false. Not only do I think it’s false, I think it’s overwhelmingly false” (from the DVD "The Incorrigible David Berlinski"). The question, then, is: is the NS+RM criterion sufficient to make E3 evolution viable, and, if so, is there evidence to support it?

Needless to say, Coyne answers in the affirmative. His problem—and the great failure of his book—is that in trying to support his claim that E3 evolution is true, he can only cite evidence for the E1 or E2 sort. The efficacy of NS+RM has to be imagined into the picture.

Consider, for example, his discussion of the emergence of the wooly mammoth: “Mutations in the ancestral species led to some individual mammoths… to be hairier than others… This enriched the population in genes for hairiness. In the next generation, the average mammoth would be a bit hairier than before. Let this process continue over some thousands of generations, and your smooth mammoth gets replaced by a shaggy one” (p. 10).

And once again, the fabled Darwinian anecdote rears its ugly head, the kind of speculative narrative that Stephen J. Gould once derided as a “Just-So” story a la Kipling; instead of a preposterous tale of how the giraffe got its long neck or how the camel got its hump, the reader is treated to a children’s fable of how the mammoth got its wooly coat. And provided that Coyne’s reader is only a child, he can sidestep the flurry of questions that immediately pop up following his mythmaking: How is it that we know that the mammoth’s shagginess is the result of a fortuitous mutation of its hairiness gene? And which gene was that precisely? Did paleontologists unearthing a frozen mammoth carcass in the arctic examine the dead mammoth’s genetic code, whereupon they suddenly exclaimed “Hey! Look at the gene for hairiness—it’s different from the hairiness gene of the precursor species!!” And how many lucky mutations are we talking about here over those thousands of generations? Have any of these mutations been identified by examining the mammoth’s genetic code? Did a fortuitous mutation to hairiness lead to a more fortuitous mutation to greater hairiness which lead to an even more fortuitous mutation to shagginess? And, given the fact that genetic mutations do actually occur but that every mutation ever identified has been determined to be either completely deleterious to the organism or to have absolutely no effect, while no beneficial mutation has ever been observed in the wild or the laboratory, doesn’t this undermine the notion that any given genetic mutation could ever be beneficial? Why claim as true something there’s no evidence for? Isn’t a beneficial mutation just another way of appealing to miracles and magic?

Never mind that, says Coyne, here’s more proof. And so he proceeds with citing example after example of the same sort of evidence, the kind which demonstrates—at best—E2 evolution and leaves the E3 sort completely unaddressed. Clearly, his strategy is quantity over quality. Citing one source which he claims “documents over 150 cases of observed evolution,” he decrees: “We see fruit flies adapting to extreme temperatures, honeybees adapting to competitors, and guppies becoming less colorful to escape the notice of predators. How many more examples do we need?”

But more is not the issue. We can examine all the instances of microevolution we want. What we need is one demonstrated instance of macroevolution, other than some evolutionary fairy tale underpinned by the erroneous assumption that macroevolution is just microevolution extrapolated over time. I’m not asking for a demonstration of a microbe turning into a blue whale, just one demonstrated instance of a uniquely new species being derived from a progenitor species in which NS+RM has been clearly and unassailably identified as the causal mechanism differentiating the two. If that sounds like a lot to ask (and it is), then it suggests there is something patently wrong in the assertion that the theory of evolution—by which we mean E3 evolution—has been vindicated over and over again. It hasn’t, and highlighting examples of E1 and E2 evolution repeatedly will never accomplish that.

Neither will citing examples of evolutionary adaptations which undercut rather than support the notion of Darwinian gradualism. One such example, which Coyne cites as “one of the cleverest devices” is the “penis scoop” of some damselflies: “When a male mates with an already mated female, he uses backward-pointing spines on his penis to scoop out the sperm of earlier-mating males. Only after she’s despermed does he transfer his own sperm” (p. 165). Naturally, Coyne offers not one word of speculation as to the likely evolutionary pathways in which such a device might come about on its own. We’re only to marvel that mysterious are the ways of evolution, its wonders to perform. This is no real surprise, considering that in order to hail the penis scoop as an example of E3 evolution, two separate processes have to be clearly explained: the evolution of the backward-pointing penis spines (a morphological development) and the evolution of the behavior (a phenotype development) for scooping out rival sperm; and in both cases the causal factor NS+RM has to be outlined, else it’s not E3 evolution. Darwin argued that complex structures arose as the result of “numerous, successive slight modifications.” It is difficult, to say the least, to identify the convoluted process that must have taken place if the penis scoop (both in its morphology as well as its functional behavior) is to be described in terms of slight modifications, let alone to speak of the disbelief which must be suspended if we are to argue that such a process categorically did not have the penis scoop in mind as an end product. And as Coyne himself demonstrates, it is next to impossible even to cite the penis scoop as evidence of E3 evolution without appealing to the phraseology of the design theorist: “clever,” “device.”

But all Coyne can really do is cite his examples and hope the True Believer will take him at his word. When forced to offer a viable explanation to a serious question, all he is ever able to produce is a half-hearted evasion or an admission of ignorance. Concerning experiments on the African long-tailed widowbird, for example, he muses: “This raises a question. If males with 30-inch tails won more females [when widowbirds in the wild do not normally grow tails of such length], why haven’t widowbirds evolved tails that long in the first place? We don’t know the answer, but it’s likely that having tails that long would reduce a male’s longevity more than they would increase his ability to get mates” (p. 167). This is why evolution is true? Because having a long tail “likely” reduces longevity?

And again: “Why hasn’t the cost of sex led to its replacement by parthenogenesis? Clearly, sex must have some huge evolutionary advantage that outweighs its cost. Although we haven’t figured out exactly what that advantage is, there’s no shortage of theories” (p. 169). Yes, and all of them true, no doubt.

Thus, in order for evolution to be true, Coyne must paint all those who might disagree with him with as broad a brush as possible (to wit, “the creationist”) in order to parade his opposition as even dumber than himself. “Creationists often claim,” he pronounces “that if we can’t see a new species evolve during our lifetime, then speciation doesn’t occur. But this argument is fatuous: it’s like saying that because we haven’t seen a single star go through its complete life cycle, stars don’t evolve, or because we haven’t seen a new language arise, languages don’t evolve” (p. 199). Actually, what’s fatuous is Coyne’s comparison of novel speciation with a star going through its complete life cycle or with the emergence of a new language. For starters, stars don’t evolve, not in the E3 sense that Coyne is trying to defend, but only the E1 sense he oversimplistically conflates with all evolution. At best we can see the telltale signs that new stars are being born from the projected waste of old stars, but no astronomer yet has ever identified a new star in some point of space where just days or months or years earlier only the collected flotsam and jetsam of space had been there. This is not to say that new stars aren’t born in this way, but only that such an event has yet to be empirically observed. Just like speciation. Or evolution.

Ditto for languages, which, like stars, only “evolve” in the E1 sense. Sure, an Englishman says “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth” when his Anglo ancestors a thousand years ago would have said “An angenom gesceop God heofanan and eorthan.” But to argue this fact as something comparable to the idea that human beings are the descendants of apelike forebears is absurd in the extreme. If human beings evolved in this way, it is because the DNA of the ape-men slowly changed into the DNA of modern men. Languages, last time I checked, don’t have DNA.

And surely even Coyne can fathom that language is the by-product of intelligence? A fortiori, whatever processes occur to create new languages out of old ones, surely even he can understand that absolutely none of those processes can be identified as our old friend NS+RM? (And, at the risk of making a nebulous point, we have seen new languages being created, and within our lifetimes. They’re called Swahili, Esperanto, Fortran, ASCII—and there are hosts of others.)

Besides all that, no one so far as I know (other than Coyne’s straw man creationist, the product of his feeble imagination) argues that speciation doesn’t occur. The argument, rather, is that if you can’t identify NS+RM as the creative causal factor responsible for new speciation, then you can’t say unequivocally that it is the creative factor, nor do you have any basis whatsoever for saying that science has now settled the matter, that evolution is true beyond all reasonable doubt, and that all creationists (whereby you mean doubters of the True Faith) should now shut up or you’ll set Judge Jones on their sorry behinds. This is by no means a way to establish the truth quotient of evolutionary theory.

But it’s the best Coyne is able to deliver. Evolution is true because it’s true. Creationism is bad because it’s bad. Science is right because science is right. Religion is wrong because it’s wrong. And we know this because Jerry Coyne tells us so, and so it must be true, else he would be talking out of both sides of his mouth. So when he tells us that “supernatural explanations always mean the end of inquiry: that’s the way God wants it, end of story” (p. 245), we should accept his asseverations as gospel. There’s simply no need to pause and reflect: “Always? Without exception? And supernatural explanations do this, when naturalistic explanations don’t? If that’s so, why did Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin once say ‘The Darwinian theory has become an all-purpose obstacle to thought rather than an enabler of scientific advance’?” Don’t wrack your brain over it; just keep reminding yourself that evolution is true.

Or, in other words, keep the faith, baby.

Hosed for the Holidays

2010-02-10T15:41:00.000-08:00

Just a quick word to proclaim the joyous news to one and all: Over the holidays, my dad got sued.

Now the reasons for this are many, but at the risk of oversimplifying the matter, I’ll say that the basic reason why this happened is due to the core principle of American jurisprudence: any idiot can sue anybody for any reason that pops into his fetid little brain. Don’t have a case? Doesn’t matter. Don’t have the cash to hire an attorney? Doesn’t matter. Don’t have the ability to formulate a cogent argument in front of a judge? Doesn’t matter. Don’t even have the foresight to watch an episode of “Law & Order” in order to get an idea of how to state a case in a courtroom? Shucks, folks, it just doesn’t matter. Just haul yourself and your pea-brain to the county courthouse, fill out the necessary paperwork, and voyla! (as they say in gewd Frainch), you’re suing somebody!

First, the details leading to litigation: For years, my dad ran a 10-minute oil change in my home town (admittedly similar to the one detailed in my book, Wonderboy and the Black Hole of Nixvy Veck). Once he reached retirement age, however, he sold the business in exchange for some cash and about 155 acres of farm land, which he now leases to local farmers to raise crops of guar and peanuts.

However, he’s always been the type who needs to keep busy. After a month or two of hanging around the house, he found he had completed his honey-do list, and was soon itching for something else to fill his time.

This he found in an old, long-defunct gas station, which he bought and re-opened as Alvin’s Sticker Station, where he did safety inspections for the state, as well as the occasional car wash or minor auto repair. After a few years, he decided it was high time to re-retire and so hang up his hat for good.

At this point, enter the litigator, whom I’ll call L.T. Gator (L.T. for short) to safeguard his identity and spare him any further public embarrassment. Not that he deserves my sympathy or charity.

L.T., seeing that my dad was about to leave a reasonably thriving business, offered to buy it. True, he lacked the cash to buy the place outright, so he asked my dad if he could pay monthly installments until reaching the purchase price. My dad said, sure, but if L.T. were to fall behind on the payments, the deal was off and the sticker station would revert back to his possession. L.T. agreed to this, provided that my dad would also promise not to open any new businesses that would compete with him. All parties agreed, hands were shook, and that, as they say, was that.

Mind you—and perhaps I’m showing a bias here—the primary reason why Alvin’s Sticker Station was a reasonably thriving business was not because of any pressing need for safety inspections or any congeries of filthy automobiles in manifest need of a good wash, but because of the guy sitting behind the counter and smoking pack after pack of cigarettes. My dad is a truly fine auto mechanic. He’s the kind who can listen to an engine over the phone and tell you what’s wrong with it. He’s also fair, honest, and charges reasonable rates.

And this characterization—and once again I may be guilty of displaying a bias—is most assuredly not one I would ever attribute to Mr. L.T. Gator. I’ve known L.T. since high school, and the guy’s always given me the impression that he’s perpetually two bricks shy of a load. Not evil, mind you, just merely squirrelly.

In point of fact, I remember that when we were in high school, L.T. decided that his car needed a new paint job, and because he lacked the cash (this is a perennial theme in tales of L.T.), he grabbed a can of spray paint and vandalized his own car in hopes of getting his insurance to pay for it. He told his insurance adjustor that the vandals had been a bunch of football hooligans from a neighboring town. Why the hooligans should pick out his car and no one else’s, especially considering that L.T. was not nor had ever been a member of the football team, he didn’t say. Nor did he care to speculate why the hooligans had suddenly got themselves swept up in football fury when such an event had never taken place in that town either before or since the attack in question. Just a one-time thing that clearly no one could ever deny wasn’t a one-time thing.

The insurance adjustor, after inspecting L.T.’s car briefly, asked then if this were so, why did the hooligans misspell the name of their town’s football mascot?

I’m not sure what L.T.’s reply was, or even if he ever managed to get the paint job, though I recall for months thereafter he could be seen driving the streets of my home town in his spraypaintmobile, its gold commands of “Go! Team!” and the like in stark contrast to the spotty, pale blue of its body. I tell the tale only to suggest a particular aspect of L.T.’s general character—he’s the type who sometimes wants something for nothing, is at times willing to fabricate a story in order to get it, and, as far as his plans go, does not exactly look before he leaps. “Machiavellian” is never a word that arises in any conversations about him.

More to the point of this particular story, he’s not the type to run a business particularly well. In a few short months, he had driven away much of his clientele, and the prospects of going into default on his agreement with my dad loomed large.

But now the plot thickens: As fate would have it, the 10-minute oil change that had been bought from my dad had been re-sold, re-bought, and re-vamped as a tire/brake/muffler center, and the new manager, not himself too keen on how to run a business, contacted my dad for advice, offering to hire him on a short-term basis as consultant. My dad could show him how to keep his books, how to run the payroll, and introduce him to a variety of contacts for parts, supplies, and services.

So, for about two months, my dad showed him the ropes. Each morning, he drove his pickup down to his former place of business, and stayed for about four hours each day, helping the new manager in whatever way he could. After a time, he billed the manager and collected his fee. That was, so he figured, the end of it.

Well, not quite.

Imagine my dad’s surprise, then, when the local sheriff approached him some days later and served papers full of wherewiths and pursuant tos and henceforths, announcing that L.T. had elected to sue him for breach of contract and was asking for $5000 in compensation for damages incurred.

The breach? That in hiring out as a consultant he had reneged on his agreement not to open up any new competition. The damages? Well, $5000 of course! Why $5000? Well, it’s a number, ain’t it?

This, apparently, expresses the depth of thought L.T. had given the matter. Be that as it may, my dad found himself in court shortly after New Year’s Day.

At this point, it becomes necessary to describe the court proceedings, though I think it safe to say it wasn’t exactly an episode of “Perry Mason.”

After reading the complaint, the judge asked my dad for his side of the story. My dad recounted the particulars of the agreement with L.T., stating that he didn’t see how his actions could warrant a claim of breach of contract; he hadn’t opened any new business, only contracted for consultation work for a business that had already been established; further, the “new business” was for a tire/brake/muffler shop, which is not the sort of business readily construed as being in competition with an inspection sticker/car wash center.

The judge then turned to L.T. “State your case,” he said. So it was now L.T.’s time to shine, and shine he did, like a 5-watt bulb in a thick fog.

Rising before the bench, L.T. offered evidence for the court’s consideration, at which point he pulled out a thick wad of Polaroid pictures. Each morning, as my dad showed up for his consultation work, he had parked his pickup behind the shop, and each morning, without fail, L.T. had managed to swing by with his trusty camera and took a photo of dad’s pickup parked behind the shop, proving beyond all reasonable doubt that my dad’s pickup was in the parking lot!!

The judge, a thoughtful representative of our legal system, looked at each photo. Each bore a clear, unblemished image of my dad’s pickup, and each was annotated with the date the photo was snapped.

“Yes,” said the judge assiduously. “That is indeed a photograph of the defendant’s pickup. What does it prove?”

“Well, your honor,” L.T. replied respectfully. “It proves the defendant was there.”

“As I recall,” said his honor, “the defendant has never denied being there. In fact, he has openly admitted to have been there, doing what he describes as consultation work. The question is, is this in any way germane to your claim of breach of contract?”

“The goddanged Germans got nothing to do with it!” L.T. screeched. (Actually, this never happened. I’m merely repeating the only good joke from “Smokey and the Bandit.” What really happened, incredibly enough, was that L.T. was unable to show the connection to how my dad’s pickup being in the parking lot of a tire shop constituted breaking a promise not to open up a new business in competition with L.T.)

At this point the judge deigned to point out why L.T. was unable to make the connection: a photo of a pickup in a parking lot only demonstrates that a pickup was parked in the lot; it does absolutely nothing to confirm or even to suggest what went on inside the shop. The defendant could have been there breaking a verbal contract, or he could have been there talking about sports or politics, or he may not have been there at all; whether the court’s verdict hinged on proof beyond a reasonable doubt or on the lesser requirement of proof implied by a preponderance of the evidence, a photo of a pickup is insufficient for either when the pickup is not the one being sued.

Fine and dandy, L.T. figured. Time to pull out his big guns. Drop the bomb, as it were. So, he reached deep down in his hip pocket and produced with a flourish—ta-dah!—one of those miniature tape recorders, the kind Norm MacDonald used for his Saturday Night Live Weekend Updates. The difference, of course, being that MacDonald was actually trying to look a fool.

And in true L.T.-not-quite-thinking-things-through grandeur, he actually presented before a court of law a taped recording he had secretly made of a conversation he had had with my dad, in which my dad, having now been informed of L.T.’s intention to sue him, denied having committed breach of contract and flatly stated that he didn’t owe L.T. one red penny.

One recalls the old adage: truth is stranger than fiction. If you ever need an example, remember this tale.

The judge, who I have to admit strikes me as one of the most level-headed guys I ever heard tell of, listened to the recording, paused a moment, then softly asked “When you made this recording, Mr. Gator, did you mention to the defendant that the conversation was to be recorded?”

Uh, no, Judge, stated the erudite L.T.

“You do realize, don’t you, Mr. Gator, that a recording made without an individual’s knowledge, is not permissible as evidence in a court of law in this State? In fact, in many States, including this one, such an act is illegal?”

A reply was grunted, more or less along the lines of “Well, I guess I know that now!”

“And even if such evidence were permissible, do you realize that the only thing established by your recording of the conversation is that the defendant does not believe that he committed breach of contract and therefore does not owe you any money?”

Grunt, op cit.

“And perhaps you also realize, don’t you, Mr. Gator, that the reason we are assembled this day in this courtroom is because the defendant continues to believe that he did not commit breach of contract and thus still feels no obligation of remuneration in your favor? Can you understand, then, that the only accomplishment of your recording, even if—and I feel I should stress this—even if such a recording were admissible evidence—and, again, I should stress this all the more, it is not!—is to confirm what the defendant has already declared to this court? Namely, that he doesn’t concur with your charge? I mean, that’s what courts are for, to settle disagreements, and so far you’ve only managed to prove that the defendant disagrees with you—and this is something everyone, yourself included, already knows.”

Grunt, op cit, amended to include shuffling of feet.

“Is there any further evidence you wish to submit to this court?” the judge asked, the tenor of his voice strongly hinting that any further evidence had really ought to be of the evidentiary sort.

Actually no, coughed the Sir William Wilberforce of the inspection sticker industry.

“So, allow me to sum up,” the judge suggested judiciously. “You’ve provided no affidavits, no testimony from witnesses, no evidence either direct nor indirect that the agreement you entered into with the defendant was ever broken, nor have you demonstrated any injury, either physical, emotional, or financial, nor any reason to indicate why said injury should be worth $5000 to you. Is that it?”

I have no knowledge of any reply made, but as the question was largely rhetorical, we can forgive L.T. for any failure to respond.

“In that case,” said the judge, “I think I may have to find for the defendant.”

As they say in legalese: quod erat demonstrandum.

Which means “that which was to be demonstrated.” And what was to be demonstrated? Like I said: Not evil, just squirrelly.

Mutual of Omaha and the Marlin Perkins Theodicy

2009-12-15T16:03:00.000-08:00

An atheist once proffered what he thought was a valid objection to the existence of God: In the arctic, he noted, polar bears face a sere environment; there’s not a lot to eat, and due to the polar bear’s size, it needs to eat a lot. Worse yet, a female polar bear has to find not only enough food for herself but for her cub as well.

So, imagine, said my atheist acquaintance, a polar bear on the hunt for food. Suppose she finds a seal pup. If the polar bear is successful in her hunt, she and her cub will eat, but the baby seal will die. If the baby seal manages to escape the polar bear, then both she and her cub will starve. Why, oh why, said the atheist, would such a thing ever happen in a universe created by a loving God? What kind of God would allow it?

Atheists seem to revel in this kind of argumentation. With a big “Aha! Gotcha!” grin on their faces, they lay it out before the theist, ready to deride or otherwise tear apart any response the theist might make. After all, they figure, there’s no way to formulate a defensible response—either the theist will argue that Got thinks it’s okay for baby seals to die or that He thinks it’s okay for a polar bear mama and her cub to starve to death. Either way, it’s a lose-lose situation, and either possibility undermines—so says the atheist—the notion that God loves His creation.

I try not to characterize people as stupid simply for saying things I disagree with. As one who at one time had his own flirtation with atheism, I know that it’s not stupidity that underpins the atheist’s world view. As Ron White said, “You can’t fix stupid,” and the fact that I went from theism to atheism and back to theism suggests that at one point or other, my world view went from broke to fixed. Thus, stupidity was never a relevant issue. It most certainly didn’t apply to my atheist acquaintance. Still doesn’t.

That being said, the God-doesn’t-exist-because-either-bears-or-seals-end-up-dead ploy is just so insufferably brain-dead stupid that it doesn’t even qualify as an argument. Ontologically speaking, it is incoherent.

What kind of God allows the bear/seal scenario? There’s the obvious answer: the kind of God Who would allow such a thing.

Virtually every argument against the existence of God I’ve ever come across—no, strike the “virtually,”—the question posed concerns itself with God’s nature, not His existence. The very question itself, “What kind of God…?” presupposes that there IS a God; it is merely a question of the kind, to wit, the kind that allows suffering to exist, as opposed to the kind that would prohibit it.

So if Kenneth Copeland or Jesse Duplantis or Creflo Dollar, Jr., preach that there is a God who loves us, the atheist is only kidding himself when he offers the lose-lose scenario to suggest that God is merely a figure of their imaginations. The scenario has no bearing whatsoever on whether GOD loves us, but whether God LOVES us, and even if the scenario were in any way valid, the atheist still hasn’t said one word as to whether the presence of suffering necessary negates the possibility that God loves us despite whatever suffering we endure. Isn’t it at least possible that God loves us anyway?

This simple intuition is, in point of fact, empirical. The idea that one might love without intervening in suffering is part of our daily experience. For example, when my kids were learning to ride bikes, I did my best to teach them the how, but as any father knows, there comes a point when dad has to let go of the bike and let the kid proceed on her own, knowing full well that she might topple over and hurt herself. And in my case, that’s exactly what happened, and more than once (I have three daughters). For anyone who argues that because I didn’t dive head-first under my kid so she wouldn’t scrape her knee that I didn’t (and don’t) love her, I can only say that he and the horse he rode in on know exactly what he can do about it.

I know for a fact: I love my child, and yet there were times when I didn’t intervene to prevent her suffering.

Oh, yeah? says the atheist. Well, I’ll bet you at least picked your kid up from the ground. You hugged her and put a bandage on her knee. You at least showed signs that you love your kid. Why doesn’t your all-loving God ever do anything like that?

So the atheist’s argument subtly shifts (as all atheist arguments are wont to do, by the way); from God’s existence, to why He allows suffering, to why He doesn’t mitigate suffering. Asking an atheist to make up his mind about why he says there’s no God is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, and oftentimes just as messy. But I digress.

The answer, of course, is that sometimes He allows suffering and sometimes does not. Sometimes He doesn’t mitigate suffering, or at least appears not to, and sometimes He does. So God does mitigate suffering, at least at times, just never in a way to satisfy an atheist. (This, of course, is the atheist’s problem, not God’s, for the simple fact that whatever answer is given, the atheist will elect not to be satisfied with it.)

From the theist’s perspective, however, God sends comfort, often and in many ways. He is rest for the weary. He is a cool spring for those who thirst. He is a right good help in times of trouble. He is my shepherd, Who makes me to lie down in green pastures, Who leads me beside the still waters, Who restores my soul, Whose rod and staff comfort me, and Who, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, is with me. Therefore, I will fear no evil, which, as near as I can tell includes suffering. (Really, someone needs to write all this down. Oh, wait, someone already has.)

The atheist simply denies all this, not because he must, but because he wants to.

“WANTS” to? the atheist sneers testily, at the insinuation that his wholly arbitrary worldview is wholly arbitrary. I could say just as easily that you believe in God for the same reason. You just WANT to believe in God, and so “see” His handiwork all around you.

Perhaps, I reply. But just as it’s possible for one to love without preventing suffering, it’s also possible for one to love without mitigating it either.

Don’t believe me? Here’s my handy-dandy two-word response. It not only answers the question regarding mitigation, but suffering in general, and even refutes the aforementioned incredibly stupid bear/seal scenario. Ready? Okay, here goes:

Marlin Perkins.

I’ll give you a moment to let that sink in.

Yup. Good old Marlin “Just as the tigress protects her cubs, Mutual of Omaha provides you the security you need through life’s uncertainties” Perkins.

For those of you too young to remember such things, there was a time when television was broadcast over analog airwaves rather than digital signals. There were no satellite dishes, nor even cable. For that matter, there was barely any TV—just two channels, plus a third if you had a UHF converter box. On Sundays, after the football game (yes, singular), there was a nature program called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, hosted by the curator of the St. Louis Zoo, Marlin Perkins.

“Welcome,” Marlin Perkins would say. “Today we’re headed down to sunny Venezuela to observe the mighty anaconda.” And off the camera crew would go, jiggedy-jig, where they would find a hungry anaconda resting quietly in the crook of a high tree branch, waiting for lunch to come ambling by.

“Uh-oh!” Marlin Perkins would whisper. “Here comes an unsuspecting capybara, and the hungry anaconda has him in his sights.”

A capybara, must you know, is the largest member of the order Rodentia, roughly a 130-pound hamster. Good eats, according to the anaconda. And so, as Marlin and company sat with baited breath, the capybara would titter into range, and the anaconda would slump off the tree branch and fall on top of the capybara, wrapping its massive coils around the capybara as it struggled to escape, slowly and brutally crushing it to death before swallowing it whole. Rather a nasty way to die, one would suppose.

Yet, during the entire episode, Marlin Perkins never once bothered to call out a warning to the capybara that it was about to be eaten. He never rushed to its rescue. He did absolutely nothing to intervene. Nor did he bother to whip out his tranquilizer gun (he almost always seemed to have this handy) and anesthetize the poor capybara to ease its suffering while the anaconda cruelly crushed it to death. He never sent flowers to the capybara’s widow, either. Nope. He just sat there, never even lifting a finger.

Question: Do you suppose that Marlin Perkins failed to prevent the capybara’s demise because he didn’t love animals? Let’s see—reptile curator of the Saint Louis Zoological Park in 1928; director of the Buffalo Zoological Park in 1938; director of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago from 1944 to 1962; director of the St. Louis Zoo from 1963 to 1970; host of Zoo Parade, 1963; host of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom from 1963 to 1985; founder of the Wild Canid Survival and Research Center, 1971, a wolf sanctuary instrumental in breeding wolves for eventual re-placement into their natural habitats. Oh, yeah, there’s a guy who clearly had no love whatsoever for animals. He only devoted sixty years of his life to them.

But the fact remains: the anaconda killed the capybara, and Marlin Perkins did not intervene, nor did he do anything at all to lessen the capybara’s suffering. Despite this fact, I never once heard anyone accuse Marlin Perkins of not being an animal lover. No one decried him as indifferent. No one ever characterized his inaction as reprehensible. Most importantly, no one—absolutely no one—ever, EVER, speculated that maybe Marlin Perkins didn’t exist.

Now see here! cries our snarky atheist in outrage. There are at least TWO problems with that argument. For one, Perkins never intervened because he wasn’t SUPPOSED to intervene. His job was to observe animals in the wild, and his function as a naturalist was specifically NOT to intervene so he could see and record how animals interact with one another. Are you saying that God is only some divine naturalist, sitting in a director’s chair behind a camera crew, merely observing when the polar bear kills the baby seal or the anaconda eats the capybara or when the school bus full of eight-year-olds rolls off a cliff killing everyone on board? That’s ridiculous! Why does he even NEED to see something like that, anyway? Isn’t he supposed to be all-wise and all-knowing? That means he supposedly already knows whether the anaconda will eat or starve, so why does he bother making an observation for an outcome that he himself has already foreseen? As for the second problem, no one ever disputed the existence of Marlin Perkins because Marlin Perkins was a real person! SOMEONE was director of the zoo in Buffalo in 1930. SOMEONE hosted Wild Kingdom. And that someone was Marlin Perkins. No one in his right mind would claim that Marlin Perkins never existed!

Well, to answer the first objection first, no, I am NOT saying that God is just an impartial observer. I am merely pointing out that when someone chooses not to intervene in the suffering of others, there are other possible explanations than to say he just doesn’t care or that he doesn’t exist. Maybe, as you point out, it’s his job NOT to intervene. Or maybe he has other reasons that are unknown to the rest of us. In any case, the Marlin Perkins theodicy demonstrates that it is still possible for someone to love the very individuals whose suffering he chooses not to prevent or mitigate. Marlin Perkins loved animals, yet did not stop the anaconda from killing the capybara. What I AM saying is: I do not know the specific reason, if any, why God might not intervene to prevent suffering at any given moment; what I DO know is that the atheist does not know the specific reason, either. Maybe God has a reason not to intervene. Maybe He has already intervened, but in a way that I don’t recognize or that the atheist chooses to ignore. Or maybe God just doesn’t care—despite the myriad attestations throughout the body of revealed scripture that He does.

As for the second objection, I should point out that Wild Kingdom went off the air in 1985. Since then, millions of people have come along who have never in their lives seen or heard of Marlin Perkins. None of those people have any empirical evidence whatsoever that Marlin Perkins was real. Despite whatever personal testimony that any of us who have seen Marlin Perkins can give to assure them that the man did actually live and breathe, at the end of the day their only real option is to take our word—or not. Being in their “right minds” has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Pshaw! dissents our atheist. For anyone who doubts the existence of Marlin Perkins, let him Google the name. Why, I’ll bet there are .wmv links galore for Wild Kingdom out there, and bios aplenty for Marlin Perkins. Given the wealth of evidence that is available on the internet alone, one would have to be a completely out of one’s gourd to continue to disbelieve.

Not exactly. Whatever evidence one may find concerning the existence of Marlin Perkins, for anyone born after 1985, the evidence is not empirical, but merely historical. In that case, their only recourse is abductive reasoning; they infer his past existence not by traveling back in time and observing him directly, but by inferring his existence from a study of artifacts and records.

And what’s so wrong with that?

Absolutely nothing. Abductive reasoning is perfectly legit. I’ve never met Napoleon, yet I believe the man existed, because I’ve seen paintings of him and have read history books recounting his accomplishments and have seen documentaries on television describing the events of his life in vivid detail. Still, at the end of the day, I CHOOSE to believe that Napoleon was a real person but am not COMPELLED to do so. I “know” that Napoleon existed because, as St. Augustine observed, all knowledge is an assent to belief. One simply observes some bit of data and makes the choice to believe it or disbelieve it. Again, being in one’s “right mind” is not germane to the process. Not all “right-minded” people (whatever the term actually means) believe or disbelieve the same things.

So what’s your point?

My point is that in order to believe in the existence of Marlin Perkins, there is no prerequisite requirement that you should first have to meet him eye to eye. The testimony of others will suffice, as will the historical record, provided you feel the testimony or the record is reliable. Note, however, there is absolutely no standard anywhere as to what constitutes “reliable.” What is reliable for one may seem unreliable to another.

But, like I said, no reasonable person, seeing all the available evidence, would try to deny that Marlin Perkins existed.

Because there are so many people who say they saw him with their own eyes.

Right.

And all the historical records attesting to his existence.

Right.

So only a closed-minded dimwit stubbornly denying the evidence before him would say absolutely that Marlin Perkins didn’t exist.

Right.

You do realize that many people believe in God—millions who claim to know Him on a personal basis. You do realize that over ninety percent of all people believe in God or in some other higher power. You do realize there are documents and artifacts and records galore all attesting to God’s existence.

Not at all. If there were valid evidence for the existence of God, I would believe in him, but there’s not, so I don’t.

Or maybe you’re only a closed-minded dimwit stubbornly denying the evidence before him.

Hey! What about all that “I don’t call ‘em stupid just because I disagree with ‘em” nonsense?

Fair enough. I’m only discussing the possibility.

Besides, you’re forgetting the crucial point.

Which is?

No one’s ever seen this God of whom you speak. I would think that would support the notion that there’s no God at all.

We established that the face-to-face isn’t necessary. But even if it were, history tells of eyewitness accounts. You say you’ve never seen God, but there have been—and are—scores of others who say they have. Like Moses. Or Elijah. Or Christ, who claimed to be His very son.

Get real! Those are reliable sources, however you construe the word? How do you know that Moses or Elijah or Christ ever existed?

By the same abductive inference that leads me to believe in Napoleon.

Are you serious? The source materials attesting to Napoleon probably outnumber all references to Moses, Elijah, and Christ together, a hundredfold or more.

But it is not the quantity of sources that matters, but their quality, their reliability—and “reliable” is a relative term, solely a measure of how one “feels” about the data in question.

So?

So we’re back at square one. Fact is, we never left it. Whether one believes in the existence of Marlin Perkins, or Napoleon, or Moses, or Elijah, or Christ, or even God—it is a matter of what one chooses to believe, as all belief ultimately is. It is a matter of accepting certain data and of rejecting certain other data. There is no more basis for saying that God does not exist than for saying that Marlin Perkins did not exist—it depends upon what data set one chooses to ignore or to accept.

Yet note, there is a disproportion in reciprocity: although there is no basis for the non-existence position, there IS a basis for the pro-existence position. Abductive reasoning allows us to “know” that Napoleon existed, and this knowledge is just as reliable as our knowledge of Marlin Perkins.

Furthermore, abductive reasoning is only one sense in which we have knowledge of God. There is another, more fundamental sense in which we may know God, most commonly subsumed under the tradition of Natural Law. It is the sensus divinitatis, the spontaneous awareness of the reality of God, which each and every one of us has, including the atheist. Unlike the bear/seal scenario, such awareness constitutes an ontologically coherent argument.

Thus my atheist acquaintance can only make the observation: in the wild, sometimes bears eat and seals die; other times, seals escape and bears starve. What does this have to say about the existence of the One who created both the bear and the seal, and what does it have to say about His nature? Absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Which, by the way, is atheism’s entire stock and trade.

On Raging Controversy and Trivial Pursuit

2009-11-06T15:29:00.000-08:00

About this time a decade ago, the Big Fuss of the Day concerned New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2000. Two camps quickly came to the fore: one, ready to “party like its 1999” (to borrow the hook from the song by Prince), claiming that 01/01/00 represented the first day of a new century; the other, apparently not big fans of pop tunes, steadfastly maintaining that the year 2000 was the last year of the Twentieth century, not the first year of the Twenty-First.

Interestingly, no little controversy was stirred up over this notion. Discussions became heated. “December 31, 1999 is the last day of the Twentieth century,” claimed the one camp. “So put on your dancing shoes and party down already!”

“Hold on, Bojangles!” cried the other camp. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. Look at the calendar. We went from 1 BC to 1 AD. There was no Year Zero. If the First Century began with the year 1 AD, then it ended in the year 100 AD. So every century begins with a year ending in 1 and ends with a year ending in 00. This century ain’t over yet!”

“What are you, some sort of killjoy?” screeched the first camp. “The dance halls have already been reserved. The tuxes have been rented. The bands have been hired and are tuning their instruments even now as we speak!”

“Not my problem!” countered the second camp. “We have a New Year’s celebration every year, so we’ll just have a normal celebration like always. Then we can have the big shindig next year, when the Twentieth century actually comes to an end!”

“It’s ending NOW, butt-monkey!”

“No, it’s ending a YEAR from now, pillow-biter!”

“No it’s not!”

“Yes it is! Didn’t you hear what I said about there being no Year Zero?”

“Who cares? 1999 begins with a 1. 2000 begins with a 2. That means a new century, as well as a new millennium!”

“Then why do all the years in the Twentieth century begin with a 19?”

“Distractions! Distractions!”

“Not at all! Why is the Twentieth century called the Twentieth if it’s full of years like 1905 and 1947 and 1981? Because its LAST year begins with a 20. The First century began in the year 1 and ended in the year 100. 100 begins with a 1, so it was the end of the First century. The Second century began in the year 101. And the Twentieth century began in the year 1901.”

“The Twentieth century began in the year 1900!”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because the Twenty-First century begins in the year 2000! Idiot!”

“Horse’s ass!”

And on it went. I remember reading scads of hastily-written, angry letters to the editor of my local newspaper, each camp decrying the other for its ignorance and pig-headedness. One letter claimed that those who claimed that 2000 was but the last year of the Twentieth century were wrong, for no other reason than that they were “arrogant” about it. If I’m lying, I’m dying—the fatal flaw to their argument was their arrogance, not their logic.

For purposes of full discloser, I was one of those who said that the new century would begin in 2001. Now it is certainly true that I seem arrogant. To quote my own brother, who loves me dearly, “You, sir, are a pompous ass!” To which I replied, “Sure, but what’s that got to do with the facts?”

Indeed, what at all?

Once, I even sat down with one of my co-workers and showed him, on paper, how, according to our calendar, the year 2000 was the last year of the Twentieth century. We went over it, step by step, carefully and methodically. I even talked about why Arthur C. Clarke entitled his novel “2001” (because it was the first year of the immanent century), and I even referenced, of all things, a question from a game of Trivial Pursuit I had once played, which asked for the date of the first day of the Twenty-First century (the correct answer, according to Trivial Pursuit: January 1st, 2001). When I finished, I was absolutely certain that my logic was iron-clad, irrefutable. No reasonable person would ever have disagreed with me, and only an insufferable dunderhead would state otherwise.

My co-worker looked at all I had shown him. He closed his eyes, deeply in thought. He crossed his arms, took a deep breath, and sighed. Then, he calmly shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Why? I asked. Had he disagreed with any point I had made? Was there something wrong with my logic?

No, he said.

Then what?

I don’t know, he said. But something.

I don’t think the matter was ever resolved. Here we are in 2009, and the only thing we can say for certain is that we’re in the Twenty-First century now, and that it began sometime ago, either in 2000 or 2001.

So, what’s my point?

First, I think it demonstrates something about the human condition, namely, that people don’t reason so much as rationalize. As a general rule, we DON’T look at all the facts and then draw our conclusions based upon them; most of the time, we seem to start with what we want to believe and then try to formulate a pathway towards it, using selected facts as supporting cobblestones and ignoring those facts that don’t fit our ready-made pathway.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, since, as St. Augustine pointed out, all knowledge is really a mere assent to belief. We look at some fact or factual assertion and then elect to believe it or not to believe it. Not cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) but opto ergo sum (I choose therefore I am).

Take, for instance, the assertion that dodos are extinct. Is this a fact that we know or a thing we believe? Sure, I can look around, and I don’t see any dodos anywhere; I can read in books that dodos went extinct sometime around the Seventeenth century. I can go to the local zoo and ask the zookeeper where the dodo cages are, and he’ll say “There aren’t any. Dodos are extinct.”

But does that mean that dodos really ARE extinct? Maybe there just aren’t any dodos where I happen to look. After all, I’ve never seen a baby walrus, but I’ll bet they exist. And maybe the books are wrong. It’s happened before. My fifth-grade history book said that Columbus set out across the Atlantic to prove that the world wasn’t flat; my college history book said he was trying to reach India. They can’t both be right. And maybe the local zookeeper is lying to me. These, too, are within the realm of possibility.

So, how do I KNOW that dodos are extinct? Because I don’t just look in a few places. I look in many places. Because I don’t just read in one or two books about the extinction of the dodo, but in many books. And because I can see no reason why the zookeeper would lie to me about the animals he cares for in his zoo. So, these things, taken together, give me a reasonable certainty that the statement “Dodos are extinct” is far more likely grounded in fact than in falsehood.

Still, it’s not a thing that I know, but a thing I believe. Knowledge is never absolute. This is why the Apostle Paul wrote about us seeing “through a glass, and darkly.” It’s reflected in Plato’s famous cave analogy. Heck, for that matter, it underpins Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle!

My second point about the 2000/2001 debacle concerns what it teaches us about another longstanding debacle, namely, the old Evolution/Shmevolution debate: if we can’t even come to agreement about something as simple and easily demonstrable as when the Twentieth century ends and when the Twenty-First century begins, JUST HOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD ARE WE EVER GOING TO COME TO AGREEMENT ABOUT SOMETHING AS COMPLEX AND INTANGIBLE AS EVOLUTION?

Obviously, we aren’t.

How do I know? Some time ago, I bought a copy of David Berlinsky’s book “The Devil’s Delusion,” in which he tears apart the bare (and false) assertion from materialists that evolution “has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt.” No surprise here, but I thought the book was brilliant.

After I had finished, I loaned the book to a friend, another co-worker. A really sharp guy, this friend. He has a Master’s Degree in physics. He’s also an agnostic (or atheist, depending upon his mood), who staunchly adheres to fully naturalistic evolutionary theory and who steadfastly claims that Darwinian descent with modification is the best explanation for the complexity of life on earth. Later, when he returned the book, I asked him what he thought about it.

I couldn’t find much to agree with, he said.

Why? I asked. Something wrong with Berlinsky’s logic?

Naw, he said.

Then what?

He’s too arrogant.

Materialism and Morality: If the One, Then How the Other?

2009-10-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

At today’s Uncommon Descent, attorney Barry Arrington posed a couple of intriguing questions in his post "Child Rape in a Materialist World ":

Here’s today’s question: “Is it wrong in all times and at all places (even Hollywood) for a 44 year-old man to drug, rape and sodomize a 13 year-old girl?”

For our materialist friends who answer “yes” to the question (as I hope you will), I have a follow-up question: “How can you know that you are right and Polanski’s defenders are wrong?”

In no short order, he received a number of responses (65 as of the time of this post). Most respondents simply got themselves distracted with the wrong question, namely, whether or not such a thing is wrong, which only answers the first question and ignores the second, such as in this response:

Even if the legal age of consent was 13, rape is still rape and a violation of the victim’s right to liberty. I don’t see how anyone could defend Polanski of the young woman was 20, never mind 13!

To which I reply: of course it’s wrong. That’s not the issue. The issue is whether a materialist—that is, one who believes that the universe can be explained strictly in terms of the matter which comprises it, and that appeals to supernatural forces such as God are at best unnecessary and at worst completely false—having answered “yes” to the first question, can adequately explain how he KNOWS he is right and that Polanski’s defenders are wrong. In other words, can the materialist come up with an adequate rationale for saying that the rape of a 13-year-old is absolutely wrong without making an appeal to any non-materialist force such as God?

The answer is: Nope. He can’t, no matter how hard he tries or how refined his argument.

Here’s BA’s assessment:

After reviewing nearly two dozen comments, the response from the materialists was exactly as I predicted: When confronted with the ethical poverty of their worldview, they instinctively attempt to change the subject. I will not allow it. Some of the braver materialists [including a functional materialist who claims to be a diest], have attempted to defend their ethics. However, NOT ONE OF THEM has even attempted to answer the last question I posed. Their silence speaks volumes.

Never mind that he misspelled “deist.” His assessment is 100% spot-on correct. No one ever answered the question.

Instead, all they had to offer were various rhetorical strategies, such as:

1. Pretending the question is invalid:

How many times can you ask an atheist “where do you get your ethical guidelines if you have no ultimate moral framework (ie the Abrahamic god)to hang them on??” before you get tired of it and move on.

[Answer: we’ll keep asking until either we get an answer or the materialist realizes his ethical guidelines are illusory, in which case he has no adequate response even for the first question, let alone the second.]

2. Answering with a non-sequitur (in this case, proffering a legal, emotional, or teleologic (ends-oriented) rationale rather than a moral or ethical one):

Because the society in which I and Polanski (at the time) live in define it as such. Had Polanski lived in 6th century Arabia, he probably would have been treated differently, no?

[Anyone who responds “yes” to the first question has already acknowledged that raping a child is bad “in all times and at all places.” The 6th century and Arabia are not germane to the second question.]

or

1. US laws are very clear on this. He broke laws. I think it’s sick how people are defending him and wanting to let him off the hook.
2. Empathy. I have a daughter, a mother, a wife and a sister, etc. Something like this would have ruined their lives, so it’s easy to assume this made the 13 year old’s life very hard. (not to mention how her parents must have felt)
3. Logic. His actions had negative consequences toward himself and a non-developed human. (a child)

[If rape is always bad, then the issue is one of morality, not of laws or ethics or even logic. Laws can be changed. One person may feel empathy to the rape victim; others not (the rapist, for example). What is logical to one individual may not be logical to the other. “Wrong at all times and in all places” means always and everywhere, without exception or a differing point of view.]

3. Begging the question:

because, by acting without consent, he violated her liberty.

[The theist can say the girl has liberty because it is an unalienable right endowed to her by her Creator. The materialist, however, can't use that argument; he has to explain how liberty is something that she HAS intrinsically, given a material universe. Saying that she has liberty is simple bluster, which begs the question of how the materialist KNOWS that Polanski’s defenders are wrong.]

or

Lets say I’m a atheist materialist that favors property rights. No god, I just like my stuff. The first and foremost property is one’s own body. Violations to that right (and particularly minors who are less able to defend their right) should be prosecuted.

[Uh-huh. And by what materialistic principle can we claim that the first and foremost property is one’s own body? How can we, as material entities, “own” ourselves, or, for that matter, any part of the universe? One sort of material owns another sort of material? By what logic? And how does the one sort of material have property rights, while the other sort of material doesn’t? Doesn’t the other sort of material have a right NOT to be owned? Human beings claim that right, so why can’t a waterfall or a grassy meadow?]

or

In practice we cope by appealing to common grounds such as fairness and compassion. If we tried to solve ethical problems by agreeing the fundamentals [sic] of morality then no ethical disputes would ever get settled.

[Well, in that case, no ethical disputes ARE ever settled. We just think they are. So maybe we just think that Polanski did a bad thing, and maybe we’re wrong. And, by the way, how does matter explain the existence of fairness and compassion?]

4. Changing the subject:

I have followed the ongoing discussion, spread now over 4 blog posts, and I never saw any of the materialists supporting sexual slavery or pedophilia.

[Any materialist who supports sexual slavery and pedophilia has already answered “no” to the first question and therefore is not being asked to answer the second. It’s those materialists who DON’T support sexual slavery or pedophilia that concern us here. At any rate, the question is NOT whether materialists support slavery or pedophilia; the issue is: can the materialist formulate an argument showing that Polanski's defenders are wrong? It's a red herring to say you've never seen materialists supporting slavery.]

or

Given that the Bible has this piece of advice…

[Just because you think the Bible is wrong, that doesn’t mean you’re right. Answer the question, please.]

or

May I remind you that Mohamed…

[Just because you think Mohammed etc, etc.]

5. Fluffy non-answers:

I struggle to think of extenuating circumstances. I guess it depends on what happens if he doesn’t. Imagine a scenario if an evil tyrant will nuke New York if doesn’t.

["Guess?" That's an argument? Secondly, even if you truly believe that someone might choose to rape a child in hopes of preventing some evil tyrant from nuking New York, that’s only saying that the end justifies the means. The question is not whether the rape may be justified; the question is whether the rape can be considered absolutely immoral. Even to save a life, the rape itself is still bad. And then there's the more telling point, to quote Inspector Sidney Wang from “Murder by Death,”: “Is stupid. Is most stupid theory I ever heard! HA!]

or

My answer is that most people have a natural moral compass that helps them decide, and there seems to be considerable overlap between the compasses of different people from a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds.

[“Considerable overlap” is no means of establishing an ethos.]

or

Since morality is a subjective term…

[Ditto my previous reply.]

or

When we refer to an action as good or right we are blending an implied description of the facts of the case with an exhortation to others to do similar things and applause for the doer – plus other elements.

[Exhort all you want. I’m sure, had Roman Polanski been on the phone with his attorney while raping a 13-year-old, his attorney would have exhorted him to cease and desist. It’s still up to Polanski to heed the exhortation or to ignore it. Are you saying Polanski’s rape of a child was permissible, so long as no one exhorted him not to? Otherwise, how is the exhortation even relevant to the moral issue of whether rape is ever permissible?]

In summary: In every case, no materialist was ever able to answer the question adequately. The reason is: a materialist CAN’T answer the question adequately, because the only possible way of answering it is to speak in terms of moral absolutes; to say ABSOLUTELY that the rape of a 13-year-old is wrong and is ALWAYS wrong, regardless of whether society condones such a thing, or our laws forbid it, or what the Bible or Mohammed have to say, or if we have a "natural moral compass" (whatever that is). Appeals to legal codes or social mores are inadequate precisely because of their fluidity: what is legal or socially acceptable in one part of the world can be illegal or socially unacceptable elsewhere, or in other times in our history. A prime example would be slavery. Is slavery right or wrong? The legalist can only say that slavery is wrong because at present it is illegal. But slavery WAS legal in the United States in 1832. Was it right then? Oh yeah, who says?

And poor Roman Polanski! Had he only drugged, raped and sodomized a 13-year-old in some society where that sort of thing is acceptable or there weren’t any legal codes forbidding it. Then he’s be off scot-free.

Materialists can’t appeal to moral absolutism, because this implies the existence of You-Know-Who (or some other cosmic, supernatural entity like Wotan or Baal or Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster), a supreme authority of what is right and what is wrong. As Norman Geisler put it in his essay “Any Absolutes? Absolutely!”, “Only an ethic rooted in a Moral Law-Giver can be truly prescriptive in any objective sense of the word. A descriptive ethic is no ethic at all.”

Score one for Norman Geisler. Zero for the materialists.

Ricky Gervais and His Pants Afire

2009-10-05T15:29:00.000-07:00

Went to see "The Invention of Lying" yesterday. Wife liked it; I hated it. She thought it was a rather cute romanitic comedy about a luckless sap who finally manages to win the girl of his dreams. I found it mildly humorous but not nearly as funny as it could have been, and was mostly put off by the story's clear anti-religious theme. Ricky Gervais is a funny guy, but he's also yet another smug atheist dimwit trying to sell the other 90% of us in the world that we're wrong to believe there may be more under Heaven and Earth than is dreamed of in his philosophy—and he KNOWS that we're wrong because... well, just because. Ipse dixit.

Gervais started to lose me before he even appeared on screen. In the opening narration, he begins to tell us that the story is set in a world "where humanity never evolved the capacity for lying." Hooboy, that old chestnut again. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is a result of evolution. Evolution is why men chase after women, especially blonde women with huge knockers. Evolution is why humans can swim and why apes can’t. And, mais bien sur, l’evolution is why there is conceivably a world in which people tell the 100% truth. Evolution simply makes it so. Never mind that a theory that explains everything is really a theory that explains nothing.

And, prithee, just HOW is evolution able to produce a society that in all other respects in identical to our own, with the only principal difference being the inability to lie? Seems to me, lying is just a manifestation of our ability to think in abstractions. If you only have $300 in your bank account and you need $800 to pay your rent (as RG depicts in his film, which, by da way, he co-wrote), you can still CONCEIVE of having the $800 you need; you can imagine yourself in that abstract world in which you actually have your $800; you can share that abstract idea with others; and you can even—evolution forefend!—pretend that your imaginary world is the ACTUAL world, and should you share that pretense with others… Behold, the lie.

But if human beings were unable to lie, they would be equally unable to think in such abstractions—mental constructs that do not harmonize with imminent reality. In such a world, human beings would be unable to envision, say, yesterday’s mammoth hunt and depict it in two-dimensional characters on a cave wall. They would be unable to watch a bird’s flight and wonder if man could imitate it. They would be unable to watch an apple fall from a tree and envision gravity. They couldn’t even anticipate the harvest available from planting a field of wheat. For that matter, they wouldn’t be HUMAN, just a bunch of forest-dwelling apes rutting around amongst the trees in search of food—most definitely NOT the sort of creatures capable of building roads and huts and war machines and pop-up toasters—oh, and civilizations.

So if we lack the ability to lie, and if lying is contingent upon our ability to think in abstractions, just how does evolution drive us from the trees and into cities? Short answer: it can’t.

But never mind all that, says Little Ricky. Let’s naught ge’ owl cought oop in deet-els (you have to imagine him saying this in that quirky li’l British accent). Gor! Whu are you on aboot, anyway?
All right, so give him his premise. Let’s not be distracted by the fact that evolution not only wouldn’t produce a world like he depicts in his film, but COULDN’T produce one, even if evolution were real. Give him his ball, and see where he runs with it.

All over the field, actually. Had he simply stuck with the aforementioned romantic comedy in which the hapless shmuck wins the girl of his dreams, that would have been enough. But no, he had to play the smug atheist dimwit, as all smug atheist dimwits are wont to play. Put a smug atheist dimwit in front of a camera, and he won’t be able to resist the urge to speculate as to why all the rest of us aren’t smug atheist dimwits like himself. Just what’s WRONG with the vast, vast majority of you? Why, it’s like you’re all crazy but for me!

So, midway through the film the story comes to a screeching halt so that RG can speculate on that very question.

Thus, he is called to the hospital, where he finds his mother dying. He takes her hand, and she trembles in fear of dying, saying “Ooh! An eternity of nothingness!”

Remember, now—this is a woman who is INCAPABLE OF TELLING A LIE, so “an eternity of nothingness” has to be the unblemished truth. And never mind just how a person incapable of lying would be compelled to believe in the absolute finality of death. At any rate, for whatever reasons, she is afraid. And so our Hero, in an attempt at assuaging his mother’s fear and making sure her last moments are peaceful and happy, “invents" the notion of an afterlife. “Naw, Mum,” he tells her, “ye go’ it all wrong. It’s naught an eternity of nothingness. You actually go to a wonderful place, where you live in a mansion, surrounded by everyone you’ve ever known and loved!” Riiight. That's all Heaven is, y'know—just a lie we tell ourselves because we're afraid of death.

Though what most smug atheist dimwits fail to realize is that Heaven is only a lie if it's untrue that there's a Heaven somewhere. If there's really a Heaven, then saying there’s a Heaven is not a lie. But in true smug atheist dimwit fashion, RG is certain he knows better than the other 90% of us. And he knows with one hunnerdmillion percent certainty there’s no Heaven, because otherwise he might have to admit to himself that he doesn't really know. And that ain't NEBBER GONNA HAPPIN!

Unfortunately, for our Hero, he neglects to see all the hospital staff listening in on him, and since any human being without the capacity to lie is, by extension (according to this film), also gullible and stupid, everyone believes him. So, to cover up his lie about there being an afterlife, he concocts a tale about there being a Great Big Man in the Sky, one you can’t see but who made everything and is directly responsible for every little thing that ever happens to you.

And if you think I don’t have a problem with this notion, you don’t know me at all.

First, there's a BIG difference between saying you have $800 in the bank when you know you only have $300, and saying there's a Great Big Man in the Sky when you can't say for sure that there's NOT a Great Big Man in the Sky. If there’s a God, the only thing you could ever prove is that He IS; you can’t prove that he ISN’T because it’s impossible to prove a negative. If you know for certain you have only $300 and you say you have $800, that’s a lie. Lying, by definition, is intentionally saying something you know isn’t factual, and, by extension, excludes the saying of things whose truthfulness hasn’t been established. If I were to say that the last thought going through anyone’s mind just before he dies is “Corn and cotton are two crops indigenous to North America,” even if it’s untrue, it’s not necessarily a lie because it would be something impossible to prove or disprove.

Second, presuming there is a Great Big Man in the Sky who made everything, just how does it follow that if you get cancer that he is the one who gave it to you, and that if you’re cured of cancer then he’s the one who cured you? This is just bad logic, borne from an inability to distinguish primary from secondary causation. Sure, God created planets and meteors, but if a meteor crashes into a planet, it MIGHT be because God woke up that morning and said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to crash a meteor into that planet over there?” But it might also be because God created gravity and physics which, working together, caused the meteor to crash into the planet. In this case, the primary cause would be gravity and physics; God would be secondarily responsible. If you rob a bank, do the police arrest your parents, because if your parents hadn’t conceived you, you wouldn’t have been around to rob the bank?

Third, even presuming that there could ever be a society composed of human beings who are incapable of lying, how by what logic do we presume that such a society would be devoid of religion? For argument’s sake, let’s suppose that in this society’s history, there was a guy, let’s call him, oh, “Moses.” Suppose one fine morning this “Moses” character is walking along and finds a burning bush that tells him “I am the LORD Thy God!” Let’s further suppose that he relates this event to a bunch of people—call them, oh, I don’t know, “Jews.” If he tells them the whole truth about what he saw and heard, and since no one would ever have a reason to doubt him, once the story got out, religion would take hold. And even if what actually happened were that this Moses guy drank some soured goat’s milk for breakfast which caused him to hallucinate a burning bush claiming to be God, he would still THINK he saw what he only imagined seeing and would still truthfully relate his encounter as he perceived it; in either scenairo, you’d get religion.

This movie isn't so much about the invention of lying as about the invention of saying things that are contrary to one's own beliefs—which isn’t necessarily lying, as anyone has the capacity for believing something which isn’t true. Darwinism, for instance.

And, to my thinking, it demonstrates—contrary to what RG thinks it demonstrates—the scads of nonsense you have to make yourself believe if you want to tell yourself that God doesn't really exist. When the Psalmist says "The fool says in his heart there is no God," he's not saying the fool's a fool for SAYING so, but for telling himself something he knows in his heart of hearts isn't true.

Ricky Gervais is a fool. And that's no lie.

The Controversy Rages

2009-07-24T17:07:00.000-07:00

What follows is from an exchange I recently took part in on the ID website Uncommon Descent. The topic at hand was a post introduced by Denyse O’Leary, “Darwinism and Pop Culture Attempts to Pretend that Darwin Did Not Extend His Theory to Human Society.” A frequent topic of debate is whether Darwinism necessarily implies Social Darwinism. Darwin’s defenders often try to deny the link between the two isms. Pay particular attention to the comments from “Mr Charrington.”

1
tsmith
07/21/2009
8:03 am
the darwnists cannot allow their icon, yea verily their god, darwin, to have his holy name profaned. their devotion to him is just further proof that evolution is a religion. atheism posing as ’science’

2
Terry Mirll
07/21/2009
6:29 pm
Actually, the god is naturalistic materialism. Darwin was only its prophet.

The attempt to divorce Darwin from Social Darwinism comes from the innate realization that if darwinian theory implies that human beings are mere animals like any other species, then there’s no reason why we SHOULDN’T try to cull the weak, the infirm, the inferior from the human herd. After all, inferior strains of humanity, what Darwin called sub-species, are a drain on our limited resources and threaten our very survival. The trouble is, such a notion has led us to the greatest horrors of the 20th century: eugenics, euthanasia, and the Holocaust.

But, of course, its difficult for Darwin’s defenders to pretend darwinism is true if its end-product is a bunch of brown-shirted knuckleheads shoving Rabinowicz into an oven for no better reason than he’s Rabinowicz. So, they deny the link between their prophet and Social Darwinism.

The problem is, the link is still there.

3
Mr Charrington
07/21/2009
6:35 pm
Terry
“then there’s no reason why we SHOULDN’T try to cull the weak, the infirm, the inferior from the human herd. After all, inferior strains of humanity, what Darwin called sub-species, are a drain on our limited resources and threaten our very survival.”

But in that case there is no reason to cull the weak, etc. Why would mere animals care about their species survival?

Why does it follow that if darwinian theory implies that human beings are mere animals like any other species, then there’s any reason that we SHOULD try to cull the weak?

How can “mere animals” care about such things?

4
[Deleted to save space]

5
Terry Mirll
07/22/2009
5:43 pm
#3 Mr. C
But in that case there is no reason to cull the weak, etc. Why would mere animals care about their species survival?

Land o’ Goshen! You HAVE read Darwin, haven’t you? According to Our Lord, PBUH, nature instills the drive to survive in all creatures, great and small. Any organism is innately concerned with its own survival, demonstrating its fitness by reproduction; the more it reproduces, the greater its fitness.

Why does it follow that if darwinian theory implies that human beings are mere animals like any other species, then there’s any reason that we SHOULD try to cull the weak?

Again, per Our Lord, PBUH, all living creatures compete with one another for survival, in a constant struggle brought about by our environment’s limited resources. In the Descent of Man, Our Lord, PBUH, argued that man uses his intellect to shape our own evolution (which is why, Our Lord argued, women are just so gawsh-darned inferior to men; men have made them that way). In allowing the weak, etc, to survive, we share with them the limited resources we would otherwise use to feed the healthy and strong, and thus ultimately endanger the survivability of our species.

So, since 1) we are acutely concerned with our own survival, and 2) use our intellect to shape our evolution, knowing that allowing the weak to thrive threatens our survival, we would have every reason for eliminating the weak so that the strong would have greater access to limited resources (and, similarly, no reason whatsoever for tolerating the weak); the strong would then display their fitness by reproducing more of their kind, and thus enhance our survival.

The only trouble is, once people get this idea into their heads, eugenics and die Endloesung aren’t too far off.

6
Mr Charrington
07/22/2009
5:50 pm
Mr T
“knowing that allowing the weak to thrive threatens our survival”

Does it? Why?

Also, please define “weak”.

7
Terry Mirll
07/23/2009
6:28 pm
Mr. C.
I think I’ve sufficiently explained how, according to Darwin, allowing the weak to thrive threatens our survival. If you’re asking me to defend that notion, I won’t. I’m not a Darwinist. If you don’t really believe that allowing the weak to survive actually threatens the survival of the strong, then I’d say you don’t really believe in Darwinism.

As for “weak”–it can’t be defined. This is one of the (many) reasons why I am not a Darwinist. Darwinism rests on precisely such tautological constructs, which is why I feel Darwinism fails.

The “weak”, according to Darwin, are those who aren’t identified as the “strong”, according to Darwin. The “fit” are those that survive; the “unfit” the ones who don’t. They just are. Ipse dixit, says the prophet. Now, either accept that without question, or PZ Myers will forever brand you a Bible-thumping creationist bent on dragging science back into the Dark Ages.

(End)

And now some observations:

Note how the Darwinist is unable to address the topic. Is there or isn’t there a link between Darwinism and Social Darwinism? Mr Charrington won’t say. He merely attempts to refute my assertions by asserting contrary assertions, without proffering any commentary whatsoever as to why he feels he’s right. Is this guy even listening? I doubt it. He’s more like John Cleese in the old Monty Python “Argument Clinic” sketch, ready to gainsay automatically anything someone else says.

Note what he has to say in (3). I say there’s no reason why human beings shouldn’t try to cull the weak from our midst, according to Darwin; I back up this assertion with the typical Darwinian caterwauling about competition over limited resources. Mr Charrington’s response is to counter “But in that case there is no reason to cull the weak, etc.” Never mind that the limited-resources argument is PRECISELY the reason why we should cull the weak, if Darwinism is true. Somehow, the very reason why we should eliminate the weak is also the reason why we shouldn’t.

Instead, he counters with this bit of nonsense: “Why would mere animals care about their species survival?”

Never mind WHY. DON’T animals care about the survival of their own? Don’t rabbits try to escape being chased down by coyotes? Don’t lionesses defend their cubs when a jackal gets too close to the pride? Isn’t self-preservation an instinct? The fact that these things occur is self-evident. But I guess if your goal is to do anything in your power to deny that Darwinism implies Social Darwinism, there’s no limit to whatever facts are to be ignored, no matter how obvious.
Note also in (6) that rather than engage the topic, he simply reiterates his musings from (3). Anybody who simply restates a question that’s already been answered isn’t really looking for answers, anyway. But this precisely the sort of gyrations the Darwinist has to go through to ignore the holes in Darwinian theory.

Circular Logic is No Logic

2009-07-10T18:47:00.000-07:00

What is so very frustrating about arguing with a materialist is that there is simply no argument one can make that will rationally compel someone else to accept a position or viewpoint he is unwilling to take. There are no magic words that will make anyone believe you, regardless of how well your argument is formulated or how solid your logic. This is because human reason, whatever its merits, is still human reason, the inevitably fallible product of fallible human beings, who, when logic forces them into a rational corner, will almost invariably try to rationalize their way out of it rather than concede the point. This is the reason why philosophers can debate for centuries about any given philosophical notion and never come to any resolution, and why some people never seem to change their minds, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that their viewpoint is a house built on sand.

Most people, it seems, are like the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Arthur slices the Black Knight’s arm off, and the Black Knight proceeds to argue that the severed arm now lying on the ground isn’t his, and no amount of pointing at the bloody stub at his shoulder will convince him otherwise.

Rational compulsion towards an idea is hampered by two facts:
1. Any truth, however unassailable, can be denied.
2. Any falsehood, however unbelievable, can be believed.

At first, such a notion seems counterintuitive. You’d think that there are at least some things about which we can all agree. Who, for instance, doesn’t believe the Earth is round? Surely no one in his right mind would disbelieve such a thing, especially when we’ve all seen photographs of the earth, taken from space, which clearly show a round Earth. Game, set, and match, right?

Yet, go to California, where you’ll find the Flat Earth Society. I once saw an interview with a member. He not only steadfastly maintained that the Earth is indeed flat as a pancake, he even had an explanation for the photos: As Einstein demonstrated, space is curved; and thus any photo of the Earth shot from space would doubtlessly show a round Earth due to the curvature of space. Never mind that this is not at all what Einstein meant when he said that space is curved. Never mind that we have lots more evidence as to the shape of the Earth than just a pile of photographs. Never mind that science has corroborated time and time again that the Earth is round. It’s flat, dammit, and that was that.

Mind you, the man was no nut-case wearing aluminum foil on his head, warning of the coming apocalypse and spouting nonsense like “Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy.” Other than in his assertion that the Earth is flat, he seemed like a calm, thoughtful, temperate individual.

And if the sphericity of the Earth can be denied, how easy is it to deny that the universe is a product of Intelligent Design? Quod volumus, facile credimus—we easily believe what we want to believe.

Take, for example, the notion that science has to be naturalistic. While it’s true that science begins with the material world in undertaking any scientific investigation, there’s no reason at all why science must be limited to the material world in generating its answers or formulating new hypotheses and theories. In fact, scientists churn up ideas all the time that have nothing to do with the observable world—multiverse theory, extradimensionality, wormholes to other universes, directed panspermia, etc. Oddly enough, these same people will often maintain that the difference between science and religion is that science is based upon fact and observation, while religion is based on faith—despite the fact that there is not one shred of evidence that there is more than one universe or that ancient astronauts seeded life on our planet.

But, posit that the universe is best explained by the existence of an inscrutable designer who created it ex nihilo, and you’ll be deafened by all the scientists harping that you’ve somehow crossed the bounds of science. And yet note: all they will ever do or can ever do is make the claim; they can never, by any reasoned argument, establish what these bounds are and what has to occur to constitute crossing them. It’s not because they’re incapable of formulating the argument, but because no such argument can possibly be made. There is no philosophical support whatsoever for the notion that science has to be naturalistic. Such a notion is a mere second-order proposition about science rather than a first-order proposition coming from science itself.

Try sorting out their logic. What is it that makes multiverse theory scientific but makes the God hypothesis unscientific? We’re often told that scientific formulations are testable. So what test has any scientist ever conducted—or could ever conceivably conduct—that leads him to suppose the existence of multiple universes? (Hint: answer is “none.”)

Okay, then, the materialist says. Real science is also falsifiable. But that simply leads to the same obstacle as before: how is multiverse theory falsifiable, even in theory? You could only verify the notion by demonstrating the existence of at least one other universe—but you could never prove that there aren’t any more universes than our own, because it’s impossible to disprove a negative.

And even if the materialist concedes that there is no way of testing or falsifying multiverse theory, he’ll merely conjure up some “Yeah, but…” strategy to obscure the weakness of his position. Yeah, but, he’ll say, that doesn’t mean we have to believe the universe came into existence because G*d said so. This, of course, is a mere non sequitur, which doesn’t address the notion of the multiverse at all, but only seeks to turn the discussion into some altogether else—namely, whether there’s a God. And if the non-materialist takes the bait, the materialist will simply counter with That’s a non-issue. Talk about G*d is religion, not science.

This, of course, merely begs the question: Does science have to be naturalistic? Only if we accept as a given the very point the materialist is arguing can we say that talking about God is unscientific. Again, this is a second-order proposition about science.

Rather than being fundamental to science, the notion that science has to be naturalistic is so subjective, there’s difficulty in hashing out just what the term even means. Ask a materialist to define “natural.” He’ll say something like, Well, natural means it’s found in nature, what we can see all around us. And God? Well, God isn’t found in nature. How do you know? Well, because you can’t see him. And you can see other universes? Well, no. So you do you know God isn’t found in nature? Well, he’s supernatural. And what do you mean by “supernatural”? Well, that’s anything that isn’t natural.

And this is nothing more than a tautology, a fancy way of saying the same thing twice—which is to say: it says nothing at all. A simple mathematical substitution demonstrates this:
1. Natural = that which belongs to nature.
2. Supernatural = that which isn’t natural.
3. So, Supernatural = that which isn’t that which belongs to nature. In other words, “supernatural,” whatever it is, is that which we don’t identify as “natural,” whatever that is. The distinction is wholly arbitrary.

The discussion continues: Yes, but why don’t we identify God as natural? Because he isn’t. Yes, but why not? Just because. So, how do we distinguish the supernatural from the natural? Because the supernatural isn’t observable in nature. And the multiverse is? No, but at least the multiverse is scientific. Why? Because the multiverse is natural, while God is supernatural. How do you know? Never mind about that. I just know. We’re no closer to finding the answer than when we started.

Similarly, we’re supposed to exclude God from any scientific discussion, because “that isn’t scientific.” And why isn’t it scientific? Because God is supernatural. And why is God supernatural? Because otherwise we couldn’t exclude God from scientific discussion. And ‘round she goes!

And that’s the real reason why entertaining notions like God is considered unscientific, while untestable and unfalsifiable notions like the multiverse are acceptable. The multiverse, directed panspermia, and the like are all in the anything-other-than-God category, and so are allowable. We must exclude God from scientific discussion, because otherwise we can’t exclude him. Rrrrright…

Why, then, does the materialist say that all science has to be naturalistic? Answer: just because. Ipse dixit.

Thus, the materialist’s position isn’t supported by reason at all, but by simple bluster. How does the materialist know he’s right? He simply has faith that it is so. It is the evidence of things unseen, like the multiverse.

But I thought that science is based on fact and observation, while religion is based on faith. If it is, the materialist needs to turn in his lab coat for a surplice and cassock. If it isn’t, he needs to wise up.

But he won’t. Quod volumus, facile credimus.

A Quick Word from My Inner Monologue

2009-07-03T09:38:00.000-07:00

As I started work on Killjoy, I took time to read some of Mickey Spillane’s “Mike Hammer” novels (I, the Jury; My Gun is Quick; and Vengeance is Mine). I had various reasons for doing so. Mainly, though, I wanted to mimic Spillane’s terse style as closely as possible, in order to give a more realistic feel to the narrative and to give a solid characterizational foundation to Killjoy himself.

I’ve always admired Spillane. He was a wonderfully prolific writer, churning out novel after novel, furiously pounded out on a manual typewriter. I’ve been told that he rarely took more than three weeks to write a book, from start to finish. Me, I take that long just to compose my first sentence.

Now that I think of it, maybe that’s the essential difference between Spillane and me. Spillane writes. I “compose.” Just maybe that suggests a differing sense of self-confidence.

That is to say—Spillane actually had self-confidence. I’m so full of angst and self-loathing, I’m absolutely convinced that whatever I write will be utter crap, with each successive word setting a new standard in utter-crappiness, forming an infinite regress of crap supporting crap. Why, it’s crap all the way down!

Just why this is so is difficult to explain. Most everyone who knows me thinks I’m some sort of Wyle E. Coyote, Supergenius, ‘cause I can watch old war movies and tell you what the Germans are really saying, or because I can quote Chaucer at length in Middle English or because I can read Old Norse. Yet, I can say without any hesitation whatsoever that I’m dumber than a sack of hammers—and no amount of books that I read, or disciplines I follow, or ideas I ponder, will ever convince me otherwise. My mind is made up, so don’t bother trying to talk me out of it.

Perhaps it’s due to my upbringing. My parents, neither of whom ever sought to educate themselves beyond the high school level, had only one goal in having kids: to have someone they could forever be smarter than, wiser than, and better than. My brother and I were never allowed to have our own opinions. We were expected to mirror mom & dad’s Weltanschauung in every way imaginable, and any break on our part with what M & P considered the True Way was frowned upon as some form of insolence. Thinking for myself was always viewed as my first step ‘pon the Road to Hell.

In short, I was raised to believe that my opinion didn’t matter. Everything I needed to know, believe, or say had already been written down centuries ago in scripture, and every thought that came to me that didn’t adhere to what had already been said was probably the Dark One trying to lead me astray and was best ignored. That notion plagues me every second I write.

And yet—and here’s the wiggy part—despite all that, I write anyway. Despite the firm, resolute conviction that whatever I say is worthless and forgettable, I still feel the need to write it down, to see it in print, and to share it with one and all.

Imagine, if you will, a tiny, impish editor-in-chief, dressed all in motley and sitting on my shoulder. I write: “The night was…”

“Hold it,” he says. “Every two-bit hack since Shakespeare starts off with ‘The night was.’ Try something else.”

So I tap the delete key a few times and then write, “It was a…”

“Hold it,” he says. “WHAT was a? Gotta make yourself clear.”

“Well,” I answer. “The NIGHT was a.”

“Okay, so say that then.”

So I delete some more and then write: “The night was…”

“Pathetic,” he grumbles.

So on it goes. Around 150,000 words later, I type: “The End.”

“Stinks,” he says.

And that’s how I write.

Thoughts on Hall

2009-06-20T19:48:00.000-07:00

Doubtless, the most important question concerning any discussion of the philosophy of religion is: Can we formulate a cogent, solid argument proving the existence of God? In his video course “Philosophy of Religion”, Professor James Hall of the University of Richmond offers a careful, methodical analysis of this question, lucidly articulating the various arguments that philosophers and theologians have made over the centuries—the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, etc.

Hall’s conclusion, at the end of thirty-six half-hour lectures, is a straightforward one: the Scottish Verdict—neither proved nor disproved. No argument for God’s existence is ever able to reach closure. All, in some way or other, fall short. Although some demonstrate that a god or gods might exist, the sort of God as claimed by most of the major religions of the world, namely the God of ethical monotheism, never quite manifests Himself.

Though Hall is also quick to point out that the atheist’s claim is just as unproved as the theist’s. Surely, then, according to Hall, the only reasonable stance for anyone to take is that of the agnostic. Maybe God is, maybe God isn’t. We just don’t know. This viewpoint is readily reflected in Hall’s own background and personal history: Born in a small town in Texas and raised in the rural Southeast and Midwest, Hall was the son of an evangelical Protestant minister who oftentimes preached fire and brimstone; at one time, Hall even seriously considered entering the ministry, earning a Master’s Degree in Theology before receiving his PhD. Currently, Hall describes himself as an “agnostic Protestant Episcopal.”

Got that? He goes to church, but is unsure whether the object of that church’s worship really exists. This is the same sort of thinking behind the claim of some post-modernists that although morality is subjective, it is still morally reprehensible to eat meat. It is a viewpoint that is inconsistent at best and contradictory and hypocritical at worst.

Still, I myself have often made the same claim, that as far as the question of God’s existence is concerned, the only truly honest assessment is to take the agnostic’s stance. After all, atheism and theism are simply opposite sides of the same coin. The atheist answers the question of God’s existence with a no, the theist with a yes. It is in this respect that atheism is just as much a religious contention as is theism, because either position incorporates a leap of faith. The rational thing to do is to decide not to decide.

What makes agnosticism rational is that there is simply no argument that anyone can possibly make to compel someone to believe that God is or that He isn’t. I have atheist friends (one was best man at my wedding), with whom I have argued long and hard about God. I have tried to convince them that God exists. They have tried to convince me that God does not exist. Despite our many discussions, none of us have budged an inch. Most likely, we never will. It is because of the weakness of the arguments we make? Or is it because neither side wants to concede to the other? In either case, it seems to me, the default position should be that we just don’t know. After all, the Is/Isn’t debate is hardly new. Philosophers have debated it for millennia, just as cogently as I and my atheist friends have debated it, even more so, and in far greater detail, without having ever reached closure (to use the term Hall prefers). Doesn’t that suggest that a definitive answer to the question is not forthcoming?

Yet, hearing that very same assessment from Professor Hall, I find myself suddenly doubting the doubter. Why?

For one, regardless how we look at the question or try to answer it, there is an underlying reality, over which we simply have no control: either God is, or He isn’t. If He is, then those of use who argue for His existence are right, and those who argue against His existence are wrong. Conversely, if He isn’t, then the theists are wrong and the atheists are right. Somebody’s the winner and somebody’s the loser, whether or not we can sort out which is which.

Secondly, even if it is true that despite our best efforts we find no definitive answer, there’s no reason for supposing that our best efforts are in any way good enough to solve the problem. Perhaps it is not philosophy’s shortcoming, but our own, limited by a human intellect that is woefully insufficient for sorting out a reliable answer. After all, it’s impossible for a gorilla to read Life on the Mississippi and understand it, but not so for a human being. Might there not be some brainier race on some far-off planet that has finally figured out the answer? If they’re from the Planet of Atheists, maybe they’re the goofballs piloting all those UFOs and sadistically probing the anuses of innocent humans. Or if they’re from the Planet of Theists, maybe they hang out with God and run errands for him from time to time—what we mere mortals call Angels. Surely there are other possibilities as well, ones that I’m either too stupid to think of or you’re too stupid to refute.

Thirdly, two things can be equally possible and yet remain unequally probable. Consider a coin toss. Most people would say there are two possibilities: the coin lands heads, or it lands tails. Actually, though, the two possibilities are: the coin lands on its side (either heads or tails) or it lands on its edge. The coin landing on its edge is just as possible as landing on either of its sides (that is, just as valid a possibility), but far less probable. If you don’t believe me, toss a coin a hundred times onto a flat tabletop and see what you get.

Likewise, when I look at the universe, I see two possibilities: it came about all on its own, or it didn’t. If it did, a creator is unnecessary. If it didn’t, it had help. The question then becomes: are these two possibilities equally probable, or is one more probable than the other, and if so, which?

I certainly can’t rely on direct experience to answer the question any more than I can rely on Dr. Hall’s philosophy course. I haven’t seen new universes popping into existence on their own, but, on the other hand, I haven’t noticed anyone constructing new universes, either. What I have seen, though, is that the universe is ordered. It has structure. And, if the Anthropic Principle is to be believed, it has a purpose—that we can be here to see it.

Taken together, then, these considerations (and others that I haven’t bothered to enumerate) lead me to feel that it is far more likely to suppose that the universe had help in its creation rather than being an example of self-creation. If so, what sort of help?

Why, a Right Good One, seems to me.

More later…

Introducing Jake Killjoy

2009-06-10T17:58:00.000-07:00

So far, so good. I’ve finally finished the first draft of Jake Killjoy, P.I. in: Dial D for Darwin, and at the risk of appearing braggadocious, I don’t think I’m too far from the finished product. Speaking from experience, I’ve become a big fan of the three-draft strategy for novel-writing. The goal of the first draft is only to get the manuscript together from start to finish. It can be total garbage from a literary standpoint, so long as it’s relatively cohesive and has a beginning, middle, and end.

The second draft is where you iron out all the wrinkles in the story. It’s at this point where you flesh out all the characters and make the imagery more vivid. The goal here is to make the text readable.

Then, after that’s been done, you’re ready for the third draft, where you check all your spelling and punctuation, and unify your formatting. A common mistake among inexperienced writers is to try to produce the finished product all in one draft. If you do that, you run the risk of over-editing, which interferes with what you need to do creatively to develop the narrative properly. The result is that a writer takes far too long to finish his book, if ever. The truth is, it’s difficult if not impossible to write and edit at the same time. Best to write first and edit later. (I found this out while writing Children and Fools, which took me the better part of ten years to finish. This first draft of Killjoy, in contrast, has taken only about 8 months—and it’s over 142,000 words, nearly as long as CAF.)

I’ve also found that it’s better to put the first draft away for a few months once it’s been completed. Don’t look at it, don’t even think about it. Then you can start the second draft, when you can look at the manuscript with fresh eyes and make a more effective evaluation of what the final product needs to look like.

So that’s where I am right now. I’ve written a detailed synopsis of the story, plus a one-page query that I can send out to literary agencies and publishers. In the interim, I’ll try to look for a agent to represent me, someone who can find me a top-notch editor and who knows the ropes for marketing a novel and getting it onto the bookshelves.

For those of you who’ve read my other two books, I should warn you that I’ve taken an entirely different tack with Killjoy. Instead of humor, Killjoy is satire, due to the more serious overtones of the subject matter, which is the worldview implied by radical Darwinism. In Killjoy’s world, the only law is Survival of the Fittest. Trying to be funny about it struck me as trite, and the message I wanted to convey deserved some degree of respect. So Killjoy will be my first satire.

Believe me, as a humorist who takes humor very seriously (and yes, I understand the irony of such a statement), I had plenty of reservations with setting my usual format aside and bounding off into new territory, but now that I’m done with the first draft, I know I made the right choice. The narrative itself is Spillanesque—Jake Killjoy representing a surly, tough-as-nails, twenty-sixth century P.I. Call him a cross between Buck Rogers and Mike Hammer. There’s action, adventure, more than a few bare-brawling fistfights, and, gawrsh darn it all, even a little romance.

Another major difference is in language. In my other books, I drop more F-bombs than Richard Pryor on a cocaine bender, but in Killjoy I’ve toned the language down considerably. To put it in the vernacular of the peasantry, I decided not to cuss so much. A certain blueness of language is fine when you’re trying to be as funny as possible, but becomes a distraction when your goal is to point out the logical implications of radical Darwinism. I’ve never been one to buy into the sociolinguistic notion that there are words you just can’t say, but, on the other hand, there’s no sense in alienating a major portion of my potential audience just because they’re more easily offended than I am. **Grumble. Wimps.**

Science & Religion, Draper & White, Redux

2009-05-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I cited some of the ideas discussed in Dr. Principe’s course on Science and Religion. My friend (and, no I don’t mean this ironically or facetiously—I know the guy and consider him a good friend) at Agnostic Popular Front (http://agnosticpopularfront.blogspot.com/) took some issue with Dr. Principe’s assertion that science and religion use the same overall strategy, prompting this reply:

(Begin post)
It seems to me that science and religion have strategies for achieving knowledge which are so different as to be quite nearly diametrically opposed, and this is fairly obvious whenever they both attempt to answer the same questions, such as:

* What are rainbows? (faith http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%209:12-15;&version=31) < > (reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Scientific_history)
* What are thunderstorms? (faith http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2036:26-37:16;&version=31) < > (reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderstorm )
* What is the nature of man? (faith http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201:26-27,2:7;&version=9 ) < > (reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens#Origin)
* How can we cure mental illness? (faith http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%205%20;&version=49) < >
(reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders
)
* How can we cure physical illness? (faith http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%205:14-15;&version=31 )
< > (reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine#Basic_sciences)
* Why are the planets arranged just so? (faith http://books.google.com/books?id=gNVB0QnZlXgC&pg=PA163&vq=%22intelligent+and+powerful+being%22&source=gbs_search_s&cad=0#PPA163,M1 ) < > (reason http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System )

I've drawn faith-based answers from my own faith tradition, no doubt other faith traditions have created their own answers. Answers yielded up by the scientific method, by contrast, are cross-cultural and useful regardless of whether one speaks Arabic, Basque, Castilian, Dutch, English, or Finnish, and regardless of whether one prays to Allah, Bhagavan, Christ, Deus, Elohim, Freya, or whomever. In every case, faith-based answers get about as far as "magical immaterial mind mediating by means most mysterious" and pretty much leaves it at that.

Even the great Isaac Newton, when stymied in his investigation of the origins of the solar system, decided to chalk it up to an intelligent designer and ceased doing any more research on the question. Meanwhile, methodological naturalists are busily arguing amongst themselves, refuting each other, testing out new theories, refining old ones, and generally getting on with the business of adding to humanity's understanding of the world. It is because scientific knowledge is considered provisional that they are allowed to keep moving forward and learning new things.
(End post.)

Seems to me, Damion makes the mistake of confusing strategy with tactics. While it is certainly true that the question “What is a rainbow?” will likely have a different answer from our pals at Biblegateway.com than the answer proffered at Wikipedia, that is not the point I was making: rather, the point is that in answering the question, both the scientist (I use this term loosely—I DON’T consider the Wikipedia the compendium of All Things Truly Scientific) and the theologian (again, used loosely—Biblegateway is A religious viewpoint, not the representative of all religious viewpoints) use the same fundamental strategies: a rainbow can be looked at by a simple, FALLABLE human being, and a reliable statement about an overall fundamental objective TRUTH can be adduced from it; further, this objective truth is an accurate representation of an overall objective reality—the truism is true, regardless of whether anyone actually believes in it; likewise, the truism remains valid universally. These strategies are all underpinned by various ASSUMPTIONS: that rainbows ARE knowable in any reliable sense; that our observations are reliable; and that truth isn’t one thing in this corner of the universe and another thing somewhere else. These assumptions are and must be accepted as axiomatic, without any basis for proof of their validity. They are simply taken ON FAITH.

Or, to put it another way, if the difference between science and religion is that science is based on reason and religion on faith, knowing full well that the very concept of objective truth must itself be taken on faith, doesn’t that mean that science is just another form of religion? And doesn’t that make them the same rather than different? So the difference between them is that there is no difference between them. Uh-huh…

Note also that in his reply, Damion goes little further than to cite the Wikipedia and Biblegateway to support his argument. His point, seems to me, is that in arguing that science and religion are diametrically opposed to one another in strategy, one need not look very far to find evidence supporting this position. Perhaps so. But not going any further also commits (or, at least, borders on committing) the logical fallacy of COLLECTIVISM—the identification of some viewpoint proffered by a member of some larger group and then conflating that viewpoint as representative of the entire group. An example would be to say that because some people in Nashville like Country music, all people in Nashville like Country music; thus, all people in Tennessee like Country, and since Tennessee is part of the US, so do all Americans.

The point is, not all religious people will explain rainbows in the same way that the folks at Biblegateway do. Religion is a vastly complex and often delicately nuanced human activity, oftentimes difficult NOT to oversimplify. As is, frankly speaking, practically ANY human activity.

I could, for instance, find examples of people saying incredibly stupid things in the name of science. Like this one: Eric Pianka, a biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, says the entire world would be just oh so much better off if 90% of human beings were suddenly wiped out. Disease, he told the Seguin Gazette, “will control the scourge of humanity. We’re looking forward to a huge collapse.” Dr. Pianka has speculated that an airborne Ebola virus would be an ideal killing medium.

Looking forward, indeed. And once again the epistemic superiority of scientific pronouncements crushes the silly speculations of all those religious folk. Is Dr. Pianka’s assertion another example of, as Damion puts it, the cross-cultural and useful answers provided to us by the scientific method?

Surely not. Surely it simply demonstrates that only SOME answers provided by the scientific method are cross-cultural and useful. True. As are SOME answers provided to us by religion.

The Bible, for instance, evinces certain truths. These truths are as real as any truths uncovered by science, “regardless of whether one speaks Arabic, Basque, Castilian, Dutch, English, or Finnish, and regardless of whether one prays to Allah, Bhagavan, Christ, Deus, Elohim, Freya, or whomever.” For instance, there is this truth:

In German, it goes like this: Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde.
In Old English, the same truth is expressed as: An angenom gesceop God heofanan and eorthan.
I have Bibles in German, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Ukrainian and Bulgarian, and each one expresses that same real, objective, reliable truth: In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. That truth is not dependent upon any language used to express it, nor does it hinge on to whom we offer our prayers. Go ahead, pray to Freya all you want—the universe is still what it is, the product of the God who made it.

Lastly, we have this comment: “It is because scientific knowledge is considered provisional that they are allowed to keep moving forward and learning new things.”

This comment gives in to two myths: the myth of the scientific juggernaut, and the myth of the recalcitrant religious zealot. The first of these myths says that scientific knowledge advances monodirectionally and purposefully. We learn a new thing and move on to learn the next new thing. However, history does not bear this out. Sometimes, in gaining some new bit of scientific knowledge, scientists are compelled to revise or even toss out various ideas previously held as true. One example is phlogiston, which scientists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries used to explain how fires burned. However, once oxygen was discovered, phlogiston—and all the scientific advances made under phlogiston theory—had to be abandoned.

Furthermore, some scientific advances become lost technology. How, for instance, did the ancient Egyptians erect 150-ton obelisks, a thousand years or more before the invention of the pulley? Although attempts have been made at re-inventing the technology capable of doing such a thing, the fact remains that we still don’t know for certain how it was done.

The point is, science doesn’t move ONLY forward. Sometimes it moves backwards, sometimes it flounders. Sometimes it returns to ideas long ago abandoned. Seen this way, the history of science has been a history of being WRONG about one thing or another.

The second myth, that of the recalcitrant religious zealot, holds that religious people reached their conclusions about the state of the world a long time ago and obstinately resist any new ideas that come along for fear of angering some higher power. Such a view is, to use the theological term, a bunch of hooey. Theologians for centuries have tweaked and refined their views of God, nature, and religion, and, (just like scientists) continue to do so. They adhere to whatever truths they uncover (vis-à-vis my comments about Genesis 1:1), and seek to uncover new ones. Read St. Augustine of Hippo, and compare his views with those of Moses Maimonides, and then do the same with St. Thomas Aquinas. Theologians learn new things, just like scientists do, and so we’re back to where I started: the differences between science and religion are not as quite clear-cut as we often presuppose. And the notion of diametrical opposition is illusory.

Science & Religion, Draper & White

2009-04-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

To my chagrin, I noticed only yesterday that I haven’t posted in over two months. The reasons for this are many, but the main reason is that I’ve been working hard and fast on Killjoy, my next novel. At present, the manuscript is over 123,000 words, and so I’m not far from finishing up. A bit of dialogue here, a plot revelation there, and I’ll be done.

Additionally, I’ve been studying. Recently, I got a catalog in the mail from a group calling itself The Teaching Company, which markets a series of college-level lectures on a variety of subjects, from mathematics, to physics, history, and philosophy, either in CD or DVD format. So, I bought a couple of courses, one on the history of science and religion, and another on the philosophy of religion. I’ll get the one on the philosophy of science later on.

All in all, I’m quite pleased with my purchases. I finished the course on science and religion a few weeks ago, but I decided to go through the lectures once more, this time taking copious notes and doing a bit further research on my own. The course is taught by Lawrence M. Principe, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who holds PhDs in Chemistry and the History of Science. No dummy, this guy. Anyway, I thought I’d share some of the takeaways I got from the course.

First, Principe identifies the central characteristics of science. They are:
1. Science is a body of knowledge claims. Such claims are held to be objectively true or at least probably true.
2. Science is a practice. By this he means a set of methods for gaining, assessing and augmenting the sum total of knowledge claims that science holds.

Then he turns to the central characteristics of religion:
1. Religion (by this we usually mean theology) is a body of knowledge claims.
2. It is also a practice.

Got that? In other words, though there may be some difference in the kinds of knowledge claims that science and religion make, both science and religion use the same overall strategy. The claim that religion works by faith and that science by reason is too sloppy. Science must often depend on faith statements even though it uses reason extensively; likewise, theology relies on the exercise of reason. Science and theology share considerable commonality. Both faith and reason are methods for generating knowledge claims.

Further, this notion that science and religion represent wholly separate domains that are (and have been) in conflict with one another is demonstrably false. It is a fiction composed in the nineteenth century, principally by two men: John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. These men had specific political and social purposes when arguing their cases, and the historical foundations of their work is almost totally unreliable. Draper’s work, Principe notes, represents “some of the worst historical writing you are ever likely to come across.” And those of you who, like myself, went to public school and were told that Columbus set out across the Atlantic to prove that the world was round when everyone else, including the Church, maintained that the Earth was flat, need look no further than White to find the culprit. (In fact, White’s “historical” source for his claim was actually Washington Irving’s fictional account of the event, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.) But such is the power of myth-making.

In fact, even the word “science” is an invention of the nineteenth century. In previous times, what we would today describe as scientific inquiry would have been called natural philosophical inquiry. Much of the conflict we see today in the evolution/shmevolution debate is the result of fundamentalism—both from religious and well as scientific viewpoints. Christian fundamentalism is one very small part of Christianity; scientific fundamentalism (call it scientism or materialism) is just as real as the religious kind, and just as unrepresentative.

Principe concludes his lectures with this statement: “[Some] fundamentists’ depiction of the scientific establishment as aggressively and inherently atheistic is an example of the error of collectivism; but in reading the Haeckels, the Hoyles, the Sagans, the Dawkins, the Drapers and their tribe, one can see easily the foundations of this depiction and why it causes justifiable anxiety. There are today notable and high-profile scientists who use op-ed pieces, popular books and programs and other public pulpits to proclaim the gospels of materialism, atheism, and scientism… Too often the claims are philosophically naïve and clothed in arrogant sarcasm and dismissive disdain. That’s no way to carry out a discussion.”

No way, indeed.

There's a Bright, Golden Smokescreen on the Meadow

2009-02-14T09:13:00.000-08:00

My friend DR, from his blog Agnostic Popular Front (http://agnostichicagokie.blogspot.com/), posted a link concerning SB320, a proposed senate bill from the Oklahoma legislature, which reads, in part:

"The Legislature further finds that the teaching of some scientific subjects, such as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy, and that some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such subjects."

He concludes:

All this bluster about helping "students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories" is so much smokescreen, designed to obscure an intelligently designed wedge which starts with "scientific weaknesses" and ultimately widens out to the first verses of someone's favorite holy book. If you doubt this, just go back and look at the campaign propaganda of the legislators sponsoring and vocally supporting this bill.

So, I posted my reply, to wit:

Dude, whenever anyone starts talking about the "overwhelming evidence" of evolution, I can't help from rolling my eyes. I've seen the evidence for evolution, and it's far from overwhelming. What I've seen is evidence that seems to support evolutionary theory, provided we assume it supports evolution and nothing else, and which seems to support other theories, provided we don't first assume that it's evidence for evolution. In other words, it's evidence for whatever we say it's evidence for. That does NOT suit my definition for "overwhelming."

To say that the debate is between evolution and creation is to oversimplify the matter entirely. If our choices are only 1) evolution and 2) creation, where is there room for anything like theistic evolution (to which I am an adherent), creation science, or intelligent design? Instead of framing the discussion purely in either/or terms of evolution and creation, it is far more reasonable to frame the matter in terms of intelligent versus unintelligent causation. Then, the discussion concerning evolution becomes: is evolution the result of blind, purposeless forces, or can it be understood in terms of an intelligence driving it in particular directions? This is far more interesting than the old Evolution/Shmevolution rigarmarol.

Besides, if we claim (as you seem to) that religion is purely a matter of faith, we undermine scientific inquiry itself, for this, too, is often requires a faith commitment.

One example, among many, is multiverse theory. This requires a greater faith commitment than most religions. Ockham's razor becomes impossible to follow. Tell me which idea is unnecessarily overcomplicated: that there are millions, billions, or even an infinite number of universes out there (for which we have not only zero evidence, but cannot prove by any devisable means), and our universe just so happens to be the one conducive to the random formation of living matter; or that the one universe we see around us appears designed, perhaps because it IS designed.

You claim that "All this bluster about helping 'students understand, analyze, critique,
and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories' is so much smokescreen." This is only an opinion, not a fact, (and, in MY opinion, incorrect, as demonstrated by your failure to back up the statement with any kind of evidential support, other than the simple ad hominem that we need only look at the Bible-thumping schlubs sponsoring the legislation to know what is "really" going on here).

I could just as easily submit that the real smokescreen here is from the evolutionists, who are so wary of the lack of substance within their own theory that the only way they know of keeping it intact is to insulate it from all criticism and to prevent it from being reasonably questioned. So, which one of us is right?

Well, ME, of course! ;-)

Klaatu to Earth: You're Not as Nice as Us, So We're Going to Kill You

2009-01-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

Over the holidays, I found myself on my own while the wife and kids were out doing their last-minute Christmas shopping, so I decided to go to the movies. Wintertime, as we all know, is a rough season for the theaters. All the summer blockbusters have come and gone, leaving pretty slim pickings for moviegoers. In my case, I ended up unenthusiastically buying a ticket for the Keanu Reeves remake of the 1950s classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

To those who haven’t bothered to see the film yet, let me say: Don’t.

The film is less a remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” than a rehashing of “Plan 9 from Outer Space” with better special effects. I’m serious. In P9, the aliens were out to destroy us all because we had snubbed their attempts to reach out to us. In TDTESS, the aliens want to destroy us because we don’t take better care of our planet. “Environmentalist Whackos from Outer Space” would have been a better title.

What’s most surprising is just how little the film has to do with the original. Sure, there’s an alien named Klaatu, and there’s a big, scary robot, and the alien announces he has a message for the UN, but, apart from that, the remake has absolutely nothing to do with the original. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the original wasn’t all that great a film, even by 1950s standards. But the purpose behind making a new version of an older movie really ought to have something to do with improving the original or restating and enhancing its central theme, not simply slapping any old piece of garbage up on the screen just to make a buck, which is all that TDTESS ever sets out to do.

Instead, what we have is ninety minutes of cinematic muck that in many ways is even dumber than the original. Anyone expecting the film to hinge on the famous line “Klaatu barada nikto” is likely in for a shock.

In a nutshell, here’s the story: It begins in the 1920s, when a mountain climber (played by the illustrious Keanu R), camped for the night in his tent on some Himalayan mountain, has an encounter with a strange, otherworldly object—a large spherical device shimmering with an eerie glow. He touches it, which sets off a blinding flash. He awakens to find the object gone, but with a circular scar on his hand. Cue mysterious, suspenseful music.

Cut—don’t ask why—to the present day. A scientist, played by the lovely Jennifer Connelly, gets a phone call one evening from a stranger, who, in typical cinematic aplomb, says her presence is urgently needed. Before she can even hang up the phone, the FBI is already at her door, who whisk her away to some secret governmental command post. Ms. JC, along with a rather eclectic group of scientists (JC is a biologist; there’s even a linguist among them), are told that a mysterious object from space has been sighted, on a collision course with Earth, and that if it strikes, all life on the planet will be wiped out. (If that’s so, one wonders just what the Govt expects a biologist and a linguist to do about it.) At this point, the rest of the story unfolds like a series of randomly flipped cards: The object from space doesn’t collide with Earth, but instead slows and lands in Central Park; a spaceman (Keanu R) climbs out, announcing that his name is Klaatu; he is immediately shot by a trigger-happy soldier (the idea that soldiers are merely a bunch of thugs hell-bent of shooting first and asking questions later seems to be one of the central themes of the film—no kidding); Klaatu is captured, where he is quickly carted off for emergency surgery, followed by—mais bien sur—governmental interrogation; Klaatu escapes the secret governmental facility; biologist JC finds him, where she discovers his secret: he hasn’t been sent to deliver a message, but to destroy us all. Why? Because we, the dominant species of the planet, are at risk of wiping out all other species, and, according to the aliens who have sent the harbinger Klaatu, that just ain’t kosher.

Biologist JC then sets out to convince Klaatu not to destroy the human race. To do this, she calls for assistance from a Nobel prize-winning scientist, played by, of all people, John Cleese. Yes, that’s right. John “this parrot is most definitely deceased” Cleese, who manages to win Klaatu over to our side with this little tidbit of evolutionary fancy: in order to evolve, mankind needs a moment of crisis that will force us to take the next step up the rung of evolution; the aliens have given us that moment of crisis—now what they need to do is give us the chance to evolve. Just how making an evolutionary advance will make us more moral creatures (the kind that aid our fellow species rather than drive their extinction), the film doesn’t say. But it doesn’t need to—or, at least, it doesn’t bother. The ninety minutes concluded and the moviegoer sufficiently scalped of his nine bucks, the film ends.

Such is the Hollywood variant of evolutionary theory. Evolution is reactive. It occurs because some event makes an evolutionary advance necessary. Consider Kevin Costner’s wonderfully awful “Waterworld,” which depicts an inundated Earth, presumably as a result of global warming having melted the polar ice caps. Humanity survives afloat on ships, buoys, oil tankers, and whatever else they can find. In such a world, wouldn’t people get around much more easily if they developed thicker webbing between their fingers and toes? And wouldn’t they be able to swim more efficiently if they developed gills behind their ears? Enter Kevin, who has acquired just those characteristics. The environment triggers the need, and the need affects our evolution.

A more extreme yet equally insipid example is “A Sound of Thunder,” starring, I kid you not, Sir Ben Kingsley. A time-travelling explorer hunting dinosaur in the Jurassic inadvertently steps on a butterfly. When he returns to his own time, he finds the Earth completely changed. The environment has been completely altered, and human beings, rather than evolving from apes, evolve from some other species, and look like giant mole rats with long legs, slit eyes, and Fu Manchu mustaches. Reactive evolution strikes once again.

Which is, of course, utter nonsense. Even if evolution is true, that doesn’t mean evolutionary advancement occurs because environment necessitates it. Faster cheetahs don’t develop because faster okapi appear; faster cheetahs develop because the faster ones have a biological advantage over the slower ones in as much as they are better capable of catching okapi. The slower ones catch fewer okapi, which over time causes them to breed less and ultimately to die out.

What’s ironic is that those who say they believe in evolution often end up arguing for the reactive sort. Recently, I saw a program on the Discovery Channel about wooly mammoths, which actually argued that the cool climate of the Ice Age is what caused the mammoth to develop its shaggy coat. Sure. And that’s how the camel got its hump, too.

An Early Halloween Treat

2008-09-30T16:28:00.000-07:00

My daughters, who are students at the University of Central Oklahoma, asked me to submit a short story to a university publication for a special Halloween edition. I was told only that the submission had to be "Halloween-themed" but other than that, there were no restrictions.

So I did, and here it is, which I have decided to share with you. As always, my work is my work, which means it is the sole property of Terry L. Mirll. Any unauthorized reproduction is thievery, and I just won't tolerate it, dang it all!

Other than that, please read. And enjoy.

Udder Swine
by Terry L. Mirll

Dr. Studmuffin P. Frankenstein—absolutely no relation whatsoever to that pinhead made famous by Mrs. Shelley, to this he quite adamant—looked down upon his creation and smiled the satisfied smile that only the truly satisfied could make. It was a satisfaction both in his creation and in himself. And in science itself, of course.

His hunchbacked assistant, Igor-Bob, slowly approached both his employer and the odd creation standing innocuously in the makeshift pen beside which Dr. Frankenstein stood. Igor-Bob, who was foreman at Hawg Himmel Biofarms, a wholly owned subsidiary of Studmuffin P. Frankenstein Enterprises Unlimited, which is to say he was Dr. Frankenstein’s sole employee, parked himself casually beside his employer, or rather, to the left and one step back, as called for in the employer/hunchbacked employee protocols, for which Dr. Frankenstein was a stickler of the you-just-would-not-believe-it sort.

“Well, Igor-Bob,” said the good Doctor, the unparalleled genius—of this he was now completely certain. “What do you think?”

“Master,” Igor-Bob replied with great tact. “You know as well as I that I am not paid to think. That’s your job, a fact that you have no hesitation in reminding me, and for which you have often taken great pains in so doing.”

“Absolutely, Igor-Bob,” Dr. Frankenstein said, pursing his lips in even greater satisfaction than before, if such a thing were possible. “Still, I would like to hear your opinion. What do you think of my handiwork?”

Igor-Bob made a slow survey of the creature in the pen, not wanting to appear overly hasty in judgment. After a long moment, he announced with firm resolution: “Looks like a pig.”

Dr. Frankenstein jumped, just a bit, as if barely able to contain his glee, and let out a small squeal. “Ah, Igor-Bob!” he said, after regaining his usual composure. “As the saying goes, appearances are oftbetimes not what at first glance would not warrant a second one.”

A look of befuddlement slowly etched its way across Igor-Bob’s face. “My great master,” the hunchback said, “do you not perhaps mean, ‘Appearances are deceptive’?”

“Oh, yes. That, too.”

“And by that, you imply that this thing that looks like a pig is not really a pig?”

“With all certainly. Have a look underneath.” Dr. Frankenstein made a brief gesture at the pig-thing’s underbelly.”

Igor-Bob, still uncertain as to where all this was leading, leaned forward a bit to give the creature further examination. After a moment, he got down on all fours and placed his head low to the ground, an enormously difficult task for someone with a huge hump on his back, to be sure. He held his head there for a long while. He looked. Then, he looked some more. And, just to make sure he had given the job sufficient attention, he looked even more. Slowly, he righted his head, and with reprise of difficulty, got up, dusted himself off, and calmly and resolutely clasped his hands together.

“Oh, dear,” he said quietly.

Dr. Frankenstein beamed triumphantly. “What do you say? Isn’t that, like, THE most amazing thing you’ve ever seen?”

Igor-Bob tried to think of something appropriate to say. All he could manage was to repeat himself. “Oh, dear.” And then he added, “Dear me.”

“And?”

“It—” Igor-Bob began.

Dr. Frankenstein leered expectantly. “ ‘It’ what?”

Igor-Bob took a moment to compose his thought. “It’s a pig, but it has an udder like a cow!”

“To be precise,” said Dr. Frankenstein, with upraised index finger for added emphasis, “it’s a pig—WITH A COW’S UDDER!” This only served to confuse Igor-Bob all the more, who simply could not see just what it was about Dr. Frankenstein’s turn of phrase that was any more accurate than his own.

“Yes,” Igor-Bob said after a long, addled moment. “But why?”

“Hm?”

“Why make a pig that has a cow’s udder?”

“Why ask why? Oh, that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

With a gnarled hand, Igor-Bob pensively scratched one of his chins. “No. Seriously,” he said resolutely. “What on earth would inspire you to construct a pig with an udder like a cow—er, a pig with a cow’s udder?”

The question served only to spoil Dr. Frankenstein’s otherwise ebullient mood. “If you’re going to be that way, I’m sorry I ever broached the subject with you,” he said testily.

“Far be it for me to rain on your parade,” Igor-Bob replied. “Still, I think it’s a fair question.”

“You’re not PAID to think! That’s MY job!!” Dr. Frankenstein cried indignantly.

Igor-Bob demurred. “Absolutely. That certainly goes without saying,” he said, in as soothing a manner as he could muster. “Still, you DID ask me for my input, and surely you would not blame me for posing the question. I’ve heretofore heard no outcry from the general public of the “Why, oh why, can’t someone with a very, VERY big brain help us all out and invent a pig that has cow udders?” sort, so it simply stands to reason to examine why in the world someone as bright and inventive and unquestionably brilliant like yourself would bother with such a thing at all instead of inventing something that the public really seems to be in earnest for, like a diet pill that actually works, or beer-flavored chewing gum, or a supermarket shopping cart that doesn’t mysteriously jerk itself to the left or right down the aisle, or an automobile that runs entirely on illegal immigrants? I am simply saying in my humble way that it would be helpful if you could enlighten me as to your motivation for wanting to put a cow’s udder on a pig. So be a pal—er, Master, and answer my question, as only the unquestionably brilliant like yourself can do.”

This seemed to calm Dr. Frankenstein down. “Very well,” he said. “As long as you admit that I’m just WAY smarter than you are!”

“Always, Master.”

“Fine. The idea came to me only last week, when I was at the do-it-yourself center looking for spare body parts. I overheard a conversation in the paint department. A customer had been pushing his cart down the aisle, when the contraption suddenly jerked to the right and plowed straight into a display stack of paint cans, knocking the whole thing down and spilling gallons and gallons of semi-glossy off-white exterior enamel paint all over the floor.”

“See what I’m saying?” Igor-Bob interrupted. “You could have prevented that.”

“Don’t get distracted. Anyway, the paint department’s assistant sales manager demanded that the customer pay for the damage. To which the customer replied, and I quote: ‘When pigs fly!’ unquote.” He paused, making a meaningful glance at Igor-Bob, who, so he hoped, would readily see the significance of the customer’s retort.

The hope had been in vain. Igor-Bob furrowed his brow so that it looked like a freshly-plowed cotton field. “So the phrase ‘When pigs fly’ inspired you to create a pig with an udder like a cow?”

“With a COW’S UDDER, you fool!” the good Doctor bellowed. “And no! Don’t be a fool! The phrase, as any idiot could surmise, inspired me to create a pig that could FLY!”

This did absolutely nothing to ease Igor-Bob’s confusion, which rose to levels not felt since the Bush-Dukakis debates.

“Master,” he said, with great trepidation and most careful selection of words, “perhaps it’s my weak intellect, which is clearly and unquestionably inferior to that your own, but I’m having just the teensiest bit of difficulty understanding how an inspiration to create a pig that can fly would culminate in a pig with a cow’s udder—and not merely with an udder like a cow—inasmuch as, so far as I can recall, udders have more to do with the production of milk than with functions such as flight.”

“Well, clearly, you idiot, my intention was to create a pig with WINGS—or maybe some other means of propulsion, like propellers or maybe even a gas turbine engine.”

“But instead of wings, you got—”

“Udders!!” Isn’t that amazing?”

Igor-Bob coughed weakly. “Yes, Master, but it’s not exactly what you had set out to do. If the goal is to put wings on a pig and instead all you manage is to modify the animal’s mammary glands, shouldn’t one see such a thing as more of a disappointment than a triumph?”

Dr. Frankenstein scoffed. “Just shows what YOU know,” he garbled. “Why the history of scientific advancement is replete with tales of geniuses like myself who set out to create one thing only to accidentally create another, and by so doing making themselves not only famous but filthy stinking rich as well. One scientist was TRYING to create a better super glue, but wound up with a glue that would never quite set. At first, he thought he had failed, but when he applied the glue to a piece of yellow paper, he found he could post it, take it down, and post it again, and thus the yellow sticky-note was born!! And another scientist accidentally dumped an array of chemicals into a beaker and very nearly poured the concoction down the drain, when he realized that the substance was developing rubber-like qualities. This substance became known as LATEX, to the unbridled joy of condom-makers and fetish shops all across the globe!!”

With a bemused sigh, Igor-Bob took in his master’s commentary and thought a bit. “Yes,” he said at long last, “but in each of the cases you cited, a scientist began with an idea, thought initially that he had failed, but ended up succeeding because the thing he had unintentionally created was nonetheless useful, albeit in some unexpected way. In one case, the end product is a yellow note that can be tacked anywhere and removed. This is useful for people who want to leave notes. In the other case, the end product is a thing that comes in handy if you want to prevent the spread of STDs. This is useful to sailors or professional basketball players or even freshmen of any given university in central Oklahoma. But what I still fail to see is just how—marvelous though such a thing may be—a pig with a cow’s udder might be in some way any more useful than, say, a pig WITHOUT a cow’s udder.”

Dr. Frankenstein scowled, his high spirits completely crushed. “Igor-Bob, you are an utter fool.”

“Master, is that some sort of pun?”

The blow with which Dr. Frankenstein hammered his foreman and assistant was brutal and without restriction or remorse. Its force was so great that it immediately straightened the kink in his back, the ultimate result of which—once Igor-Bob was released from intensive care, of course—was to remove all trace of a hump from his back and to morph his posture into something far less hideous than what it had been before. Soon thereafter, Igor-Bob left his job at Hawg Himmel Biofarms, a wholly owned subsidiary of Studmuffin P. Frankenstein Enterprises Unlimited, and found employment modeling men’s underwear for J.C. Penney’s.

Happily, Dr. Frankenstein’s faith in the unintended advances of science turned out to be well-founded after all. Not too soon after Igor-Bob’s departure, Studmuffin P. Frankenstein Enterprises Unlimited was able to establish Hawg Himmel Biofarms as one of the premier cheese makers of Southern Transylvania, known in particular for its hearty, semi-soft cheese—an aromatic, mellow variety with a smooth aftertaste of crisp, smoky bacon. It works particularly well with eggs.

Dirk Gently Meets Jake Killjoy

2008-09-22T18:10:00.000-07:00

I took the opportunity the other day to read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. I’ve also started Adams’ The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the second Dirk Gently adventure.

Sad to say, it’s taken me this long to get around to reading anything of Adams’ work other than the four books of his Hitchhiker trilogy. Adams, rest his soul—presuming, of course, that he was wrong about evolution in that he actually had a soul to rest—was a brilliant humorist and observationist, and I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of his work. His greatest strength was his ability to create an absurd event—say, a sofa impossibly jammed up a staircase—and develop it as a thematic element foreshadowing epic consequences.

Where Adams and I part company, however, is in our general outlook concerning religious faith. Clearly, Adams was a secularist who viewed religious faith as mostly harmless (to use the phrase from Hitchhiker) but ultimately silly. A case in point from DG is the Electric Monk, a being created by aliens for believing all the nonsense the aliens were to busy to be bothered with. In the early chapters of the novel, the Electric Monk sits atop his horse, staring down at the valley below, rapt in his belief-du-jour, in this case that everything is pink. This is, Adams suggests, what believers do. They believe. Some believers believe that the universe was created by an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent creator. Other believers believe that everything is pink. Not a great deal of difference between the two, really. Also, note that the Electric Monk is a monk, and not an electric politician or electric dentist or electric scientist or electric assistant director of sales for the Atlantic seaboard not including Hoboken. “Electric monk” is just another way of saying “religious nutbag.” Seems to me, Adams would look upon such a term as needlessly repetitious.

However, this oversimplifies the nature of belief. Some beliefs are arbitrary, sure. But some are not. Some beliefs come about through experience and observation. For anyone who says that belief is wholly arbitrary, allow me to suggest they poke their fingers into the whirling blade of a running lawnmower. I believe they’ll come off.

It is true, though, that some beliefs defy all good sense. What my own comic detective, Jake Killjoy, will attempt to demonstrate is that there are lots of really looney, whack-a-mole beliefs out there—but these are paraded as scientific, and anyone who dares express doubt about them can find himself subject to attack, whether verbally, academically, professionally, or even physically.

Echoes of Provine

2008-08-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

Columnist Dennis Prager has posted an interesting column in the 19 Aug 2008 issue of Town Hall (www.townhall.com), entitled “If There Is No God.” In it he cites some fourteen consequences of living in a godless universe, though he confuses two separate but related topics: what it means if there is no God, and what it means if there is a God but people stop believing in Him.

In roughly abbreviated form, these are:

1. Without God there is no good and evil; there are only subjective opinions that we then label "good" and "evil."

2. Without God, there is no objective meaning to life. We are all merely random creations of natural selection whose existence has no more intrinsic purpose or meaning than that of a pebble equally randomly produced.

3. Life is ultimately a tragic fare if there is no God. We live, we suffer, we die -- some horrifically, many prematurely -- and there is only oblivion afterward.

4. Human beings need instruction manuals. This is as true for acting morally and wisely as it is for properly flying an airplane.

5. If there is no God, the kindest and most innocent victims of torture and murder have no better a fate after death than do the most cruel torturers and mass murderers.

6. With the death of Judeo-Christian values in the West, many Westerners [are] unable to confront evil, whether it was Communism during the Cold War or Islamic totalitarians in its midst today.

7. Without God, people in the West often become less, not more, rational. Religious people in Judeo-Christian countries largely confine their irrational beliefs to religious beliefs (theology), while the secular, without religion to enable the non-rational to express itself, end up applying their irrational beliefs to society, where such irrationalities do immense harm.

8. If there is no God, the human being has no free will. He is a robot, whose every action is dictated by genes and environment.

9. If there is no God, humans and "other" animals are of equal value.

10. Without God, there is little to inspire people to create inspiring art. That is why contemporary art galleries and museums are filled with "art" that celebrates the scatological, the ugly and the shocking. Compare this art to Michelangelo's art in the Sistine chapel.

11. Without God nothing is holy. This is definitional. Holiness emanates from a belief in the holy.

12. Without God, humanist hubris is almost inevitable. If there is nothing higher than man, no Supreme Being, man becomes the supreme being.

13. Without God, there are no inalienable human rights. Rights depend upon a moral source, a rights giver.

14. "Without God," Dostoevsky famously wrote, "all is permitted." There has been plenty of evil committed by believers in God, but the widespread cruelties and the sheer number of innocents murdered by secular regimes -- specifically Nazi, Fascist and Communist regimes -- dwarfs the evil done in the name of religion.

What I find striking is the similarity between Prager’s comments and Provine’s five inescapable conclusions if Darwinism is true. Morality becomes a mass delusion. There is no purpose in living, no life beyond death, and no free will.

Beldar, Phone for You!

2008-08-13T15:37:00.000-07:00

From the “This Just In” Department: A new paper by Chandra Wickramasinghe of the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology at Cardiff University in Wales, co-authored with Janaki Wickramasinghe in the June 2008 issue of the journal Astrophysics and Space Science suggests that the outer atmosphere of Venus may be breeding grounds for extraterrestrial life, albeit the microbial sort. According to Wickramasinghe, “The temperature and pressure there are entirely congenial to the survival of certain types of microbes.” He adds, “Microbes are known to survive in similar environments on Earth."

Further, these microbes may even be headed our way, blown towards Earth by the solar winds. Because of Venus’s close proximity to Earth, we may finally have evidence of extraterrestrial life, when the two planets align in 2012.

Such an event would be, at long last, the great put-up-or-shut-up moment for those who assume the validity of abiogenesis. Life can just pop up, all on its own, without any prodding from You-Know-Who. All you need are the basic raw materials of living matter, plus the purely naturalistic machinery to assemble those raw materials into a suitable vehicle (aka “critter”), plus maybe a flash of lightning or some sort of furnace like a thermal vent to get it going on its own. Why, say Wickramasinghe & Wickramasinghe, the cloudy layers of the Venusian atmosphere are possibly a-chock full of that very sort of thing!

In which case, all we need to do is Johnny-up a means of collecting any single one of the microbes which may be sailing our way in 2012, and we’ll finally have our proof that Mr. You-Know-Who is not at all necessary for explaining the origin of life. If it can take place on Venus, where rivers of sulfuric acid flow free, then by crackey it can take place anywhere.

Uh-huh. And, as the adage goes, if “Ifs” and “Buts” were candy and nuts, we’d have Christmas every day. Mighty big word, that “If.”

And never mind that Venus and Earth were also closely aligned in 2004, and no one spotted any extraterrestrial microbes then. We weren’t LOOKING for any Venusian microbes in 2004. Who’s to say none were ever blown Earth-wards, in 2004, or sometime earlier? Heck, maybe it’s already happened. Maybe that’s where venereal disease comes from, since “venereal” is the REAL adjective form of Venus rather than the silly and nonsensical “Venusian.”

Science journalists just LOVE reporting stories like these. I’ve lost count of all the stories beginning with “A new study suggests extraterrestrial life may be found on…” blah blah blah, or making some breathless assertion that science “may have at long last found the holy grail of modern biology” or some such. All sorts of speculation abound in the name of proving that YKN is unnecessary. We’ve looked for life on the moon; sent dozens of probes to Venus, Mars, and elsewhere; speculated incessantly how life may be found floating on some comet or asteroid; taken countless photos of all the planets of our solar system, and their moons as well; made infrared and thermal and what-have-you scans in practically every direction; and donned our headphones, listening anxiously to the heavens for some brief burst of radio emission which might at long last provide a definitive answer to the question: “Are we alone in the universe?”

NB: That always cracks me up. “We.” “Alone.” Hah!

Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t look. Of course we should. Go right ahead. Look to your heart’s content.

And now for the buzzkill: You’re not gonna find anything!

According to our best scientific guesswork: the universe got its start some fifteen billion years ago with the Big Bang; our planet was formed some six or seven billion years ago and was completely inhospitable for life; but once the planet cooled sufficiently, once it was no longer bombarded from all directions by comets, meteors, asteroids and other cosmic effluence, life got started on this planet, some three to four billion years ago.

While our planet was inhospitable, there was no life. But once it became hospitable, life got started in relatively short order—that is, sooner, rather than later. There’s even the possibility that life got its start and was later extinguished, only to start up all over again, maybe even three or four times.

This fact might support the hypothesis that life can arise abiogenically, but for one other rather annoying fact: we have absolutely zero evidence of it happening anywhere else, in our solar system, in our galaxy, or in the universe. So if life happened all on its own here (and possibly more than once), why hasn’t it happened all on its own anywhere else? The universe is rife with the same sorts of raw materials found here. And there must be countless planets out there not too awfully different from ours. So why isn’t the universe teeming with life?

All this, then, lends credence to a competing hypothesis: that maybe it isn’t quite so easy for life to pop up on its own. Maybe, just maybe, it needs a push. And maybe SOMEONE has to do the pushing.

Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled, For Life is Meaningless

2008-08-04T16:10:00.000-07:00

There is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which begins with Dr. Beverly Crusher, played by the oh-so-fetching Gates McFadden, who returns to Earth to attend her grandmother’s funeral.

The service has all the trappings of a real funeral—a group of appropriately-dressed mourners, many in black, standing around a freshly-dug grave. The casket, adorned with flowers, stands ready to be lowered into the ground, as a frocked cleric addresses the crowd, offering a few words of praise for the dearly departed as he comforts the bereaved. Everyone looks sad, especially Dr. Crusher, who, we surmise, loved her grandmother very much.

The one difference, of course, because this is TNG, is that the cleric is an alien, and so instead of offering the usual do-not-mourn-for-lo-you-shall-see-Granny-again-some-sweet-day-in-Heaven line, or ending the eulogy with the traditional reminder about the return of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, our alien cleric offers these words of comfort: Granny isn’t really dead, because she lives on in our memories.

I have said that Darwinism is a religion, and a dreary one at that. The episode of TNG serves to reiterate the point. William Provine asserted that when we die, we die, and even went so far as to call this assertion an “inescapable” conclusion of Darwinism. The extraterrestrial cleric, echoing Provine, does not and cannot believe in an afterlife; he cannot appeal to any notion as decidedly Christian as the Resurrection; he is certain that Granny is dead, and that no one is ever going to see her again. So, he offers what comfort his world view will allow. Mind you, this is simply the best he can do.

And no better. Granny is dead, but not ENTIRELY dead, because some part of her lives on in us, so long as we continue to remember her.

This is a COMFORT? Prithee, HOW?

Suppose, for instance, that because of a transporter malfunction during her return to the Enterprise, Dr. Crusher has her memory erased. Then, while examining her personal files in hopes of finding who she is, she learns that she had a grandmother whom she loved very much, and that this grandmother is now dead. Pastor ET’s words of comfort would mean nothing to her, since they are contingent upon Dr. Crusher’s ability to remember someone she has now forgotten. I see no means of finding comfort in such a situation.

For that matter, even if the transporter malfunction never takes place, even if Dr. Crusher remembers her grandmother fondly for the rest of her life—it would only be for the rest of her life, however long that may be. Even if she lives another hundred years, it would mean the memory of her grandmother would only live on for another hundred years—and then die when Dr. Crusher dies. And all those others standing around the casket, listening to Pastor ET, will die as well, and with them their memories of Granny.

So, what then? Does young Wesley take up the charge of keeping his great-grandmother alive by remembering her? How? He doesn’t have the same memories as his mother, presuming he has any at all. Worse yet, one day young Wesley will become Old Wesley, and he’ll die, too, and with him the memories of his great-grandmother (whatever those may be) and those of his mother.

There is simply no scenario escaping the inevitability of Granny being dead, buried, and ultimately forgotten. Not if when we die, we die, and that’s it.

Worse yet, consider this point: the memory of someone you love is only a memory; it is NOT the person you love. Memories are faulty, inexact. Sometimes, memories are outright false. To draw from another popular TV series, as Hawkeye Pierce once noted of Frank Burns, “No, I’m sure he remembers it that way. More’s the pity.” And true or false, a memory is all in your head. No part of it is physically real.

So, to sum up: never mind if Granny is dead and you’ll never see her again; you can delude yourself that it isn’t really so, even if it really is, just long enough until you die, at which point it won’t matter that you were deluding yourself, as if it ever mattered. This is all okay, because even though the universe is an accident, which means that life is an accident, and that Granny and all those who come before and after her, yourself included, are an accident, too, go ahead and tell yourself that Granny mattered, because… uh… the delusion will facilitate your survival. Yeah, that’s it. Your survival matters. Somehow. Even though nothing matters. Even though you and everyone you know and everyone who will ever be are all going to die, because even survival is at best temporal; when we die, we die, and that’s it. Not that you or anyone ever mattered in the first place.

This is simply what passes for “comfort” in a Darwinistic framework.As I’ve said in another post, if there’s anything inaccurate in describing such an outlook as “bleak,” it is only in that the description represents a rank understatement.

So What’s So Wrong with Darwin?

2008-07-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I stated that Darwinism has the bleakest outlook of any religion. So, what is it about Darwinism that makes it bleak?

The late William Provine, a professor at Cornell University, once wrote about what he called the five inescapable conclusions about Darwinism, if Darwinism is true. These are:

1. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature.

2. There are no inherent moral or ethical laws, and thus no absolute guiding principles of human society.

3. Human beings are complex machines, which become ethical persons by means of two primary mechanisms: heredity and environmental influence.

4. When we die, we die, and that’s it.

5. There is no such thing as free will. Quote: “There is no way that the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make choices.”

It should be noted that in drawing these conclusions, Provine was not trying to disprove Darwinism. He was not trying to portray it as ridiculous or silly. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Bible-thumping creationist viewing Darwinism as a threat to his religion. He remained, until his dying day, a secular scholar who found no fault in Darwinian principles and who agreed wholeheartedly with the Huxleyan assertion that Darwin at long last made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist and who considered himself a member of that good company.

No, this is an open and honest critique, a simple statement of the core beliefs of the faith, made by a member of the faithful. It is the Nicene Creed of Darwinism.

Sidebar:

By “Darwinism” I mean the belief that new species arise from pre-existing ones; that over great periods of time by means of gradual, slow changes from one species to the next, new genera, orders, and phyla are established; that the mechanism behind the change from one species to the next is natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation; that this mechanism applies universally throughout nature; and that the process occurs on its own, without any help from outside the natural system. My standard shorthand is: A Darwinist believes that the great-great-great grandchildren of a fish can become the great-great-great grandparents of a bat. The shorter shorthand: A Darwinist believes a fish can become a bat. Same difference.

End sidebar.

To expand on each of Provine’s assertions just a bit:

1. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. By this Provine means that when something happens in nature—say, the beaver acquires buck teeth—it occurs only because natural forces have allowed it to come about, and never because of some goal-oriented force wanting it so. The beaver has his buck teeth because there is a benefit to having buck teeth, not because someone ever said to himself “If we want the beaver to build a better dam, we’d better give him a couple of whopping great incisors to help him bring down more trees.”

2. There are no inherent moral or ethical laws, and thus no absolute guiding principles of human society. Morality and ethics are mere human constructs, formulated perhaps to help us survive in a world red in tooth and claw (or perhaps for some other reason), but not imposed upon us by some exterior force. They do not exist because they have to exist but because we allow them to exist. Murder, for example, is bad only because society claims it is bad; if humanity were suddenly to decide that murder is good, we could murder with impunity.

3. Human beings are complex machines, which become ethical persons by means of two primary mechanisms: heredity and environmental influence. If no laws of morality/ethics exist, and since morality and ethics are mere tools of our own invention, these come about either because we have evolved with these notions already in mind, or because our experiences have led us to adopt our particular ideas of what is moral or ethical. Any strictly scientific theory such as evolution does not contain within itself the resources to underpin or to undermine a normative activity such as morality. Specifically, the theory of evolution does not tell us directly what we ought to do, but only aids in explaining why we engage in such normative activities.

4. When we die, we die, and that’s it. The explanation for our existence is to be found within nature. Mind is just an epiphenomenon of the neural activity of our brains, and notions such as religion have only come about because they somehow facilitate our survival, and offshoots of those notions such as the idea of Heaven or Hell are but the creation of our own fancies. An afterlife implies a purpose to the present life, which we know not to be the case because the universe is purposeless as stated in #1. Because being is a mere temporal verity having no real ontological meaning, we are thus mere physical beings and not spiritual ones.

5. There is no such thing as free will. Everything that we are is the product of natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation, including our minds and our ability to use our minds in decision-making. The choices we make are due entirely to our heredity, which is the product of our environment, or to our environment, which acts upon our heredity, or to some combination of the two. Since our choices are dependent upon either our DNA or our environment, there is ultimately so such thing as free will, which is necessitated upon an ability to act independently. If we can’t act independently of our genes or our environment, we aren’t free from it, either.

So, why do I find the Darwinistic outlook so bleak?

If Darwinism is true, the universe itself is without purpose. A notion such as God becomes superfluous, since He is not needed in explaining where a fish, a bat, or anything else, comes from. I see no intrinsic difference between a God who is unnecessary and one who does not exist.

If the universe is without purpose, and if everything that exists is part of that universe, then there is no purpose in anything. The fish, the bat, you, me, and the scum on the bottom of your shoe are all on the same level—the meaningless, accidental offshoots of an accidental universe, resulting from blind, undirected, purposeless processes which did not have the fish/bat/you/me/scum in mind as an end product.

If there is no purpose behind our being, then there is no purpose in our living, either. Our creation was purposeless, and likewise our existence and all phases of it: our birth, our life, and our death. What does it matter whether you die today or eighty years from now? There was no purpose in your being here in the first place, and once you die there’ll be nothing left of you to know the difference.

Morality is a purely subjective illusion. Murder is not immoral, only illegal. Were we to change the law, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with murder. And, anyway, if morality is an illusion, so is the law. So we are left with no means whatsoever of establishing murder –or anything else, for that matter—as right or wrong. Murder is only a meaningless event in a meaningless universe, perpetrated by meaningless people upon meaningless others. There’s no sense in crying over spilled milk, especially when even the significance of the milk can be called into question.

Moreover, Provine’s assertions about Darwinism, to use his own verbage, are inescapable—if Darwinism is true.

If there is something inaccurate in describing such an outlook as “bleak,” it is only in that the description represents a rank understatement.

But I believe that free will exists. I believe that right is separate from wrong. I believe that we are here for a purpose. And my only means of reconciling what I believe with what Provine asserts is to understand that there is therefore something wrong with his premise that Darwinism is true.

And that is to realize that Darwinism is NOT true.

Jake Killjoy, P.I.

2008-07-21T18:19:00.000-07:00

Once, not too long ago, I was taking part in an online discussion concerning intelligent agency. The starting-point of the conversation was an essay by Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer in which he had added his two cents’ worth concerning Intelligent Design, namely that he thought it was just religion masquerading as science. My main thrust was that anyone who claims that Intelligent Design theory is religion simply doesn’t understand it very well, inasmuch as the main theorists behind ID (William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen C. Meyer, et al) oftentimes bend over backwards to avoid making religious pronouncements. The main claim of ID, according to Dembski and company, is that objects or events resulting from intelligent causation exhibit certain characteristics, and that these characteristics are identifiable in a scientifically rigorous way, barring the unnecessary, second-order proposition that scientific explanation, in order to BE science, must be naturalistic. This may have theistic implications, but to call it religion is to overstate the matter, and then some.

There was, no surprise, a good deal of high-spirited disagreement with my assertion. One commenter, for instance, posted this little gem: “Yeah, but the problem is, agents as designers don’t really DO anything.”

To which I replied: “I’ll keep that in mind the next time I read a murder mystery. Gee, I wonder how that knife got into the murder victim’s back? Was it just an accident, or did some law of nature put it there?”

The point being, there are three modes of causation: chance, necessity, and design. To exclude design as a mode of causation, all in the name of keeping science naturalistic, is to argue that the knife either found its way into the victim’s back by accident (chance) or by some law of nature (necessity), and that we can’t even CONSIDER the possibility that the knife was deliberately PUT THERE BY SOMEONE, because “that wouldn’t be scientific.”

Such a position is obviously absurd. Yet, it is not so obvious to the “defenders” of science who work so diligently, so steadfastly, so loudly, to keep science designer-free.

The idea of a “design-free” murder mystery has been bugging me for quite some time. Just after publication of my second novel, Wonderboy and the Black Hole of Nixvy Veck, I began working on my third, with the working title The Road to Heresy.

The basic idea behind Heresy is to depict a future society in which Darwinism has been elevated to State Religion. This is no wild conjecture—-Darwinism is already our de facto state religion inasmuch as it IS a religion (an all-encompassing world view founded on a leap of faith—-that natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation is all you every need to explain the diversity of life on Earth), and the only one we’re allowed to teach in our public schools.

Admittedly, though, the writing has been slow. My main problem is, as a humorist, I’m having trouble telling the story without making it all depressing and dreary. As religions go, Darwinism has the most bleak outlook of any of the mainstream religions and is of the least comfort to its faithful, because if Darwinism is true, there’s no Heaven or Hell, no afterlife, and no real purpose in living; we just live our pitifully few years on this Earth, then we die, and that’s that. So, why live to be a hundred? Why not burn your candle at both ends, have some fun, and leave a good-looking corpse? For that matter, why even have fun? If death is meaningless, so is life, and so is having fun. You might as well end your life right now and spare yourself the pain which is sure to come your way in the future: marriage, kids, mortgage, bills, taxes-—and should Barack Obama be elected president, more taxes—-followed by old age, illness, and death. Nope, not a pleasant outlook at all, and difficult subject matter for a humorist.

But a “design-free” murder mystery? Now that’s something else! Yessiree, full of comic possibilities.

So, I’ve decided to revise what I’ve written so far for Heresy and go instead with (drumroll, please!): Jake Killjoy, P.I. (Legal Dept: Jake Killjoy, P.I. and all other Jake Killjoy, P.I.-related items, including Jake Killjoy, P.I. Junior Investigator Kit, Jake Killjoy, P.I. Malibu Beach House, and Jake Killjoy, P.I. Action Figure with Kung-Fu Grip, are the exclusive property of Terry L. Mirll.)

Our Hero will be your typically acerbic Sam Spade/Mike Hammer gumshoe, downing hard liquor like lemonade and spitting in the eye of all who come his way. I haven’t decided on a title yet—-Dial D for Darwin, or Select Me Deadly, or some such. Something pithy, like the titles used in “The Venture Brothers” (from Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” lineup. My personal favorite is: “I Know Why the Caged Bird KILLS.” Now that’s pithy!)

Truth vs. truth

2008-07-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

It’s kind of depressing, really: you have to have good sense to use good sense, and no one seems to have good sense. As I stated in yesterday’s post, we seem incapable of knowing the world, but can only perceive it, and poorly at that.

I’ve always believed that Truth (the unblemished, unassailable Truth—with a capital T) exists. But it seems elusive. The closest we ever come is truth (lower case), which is vastly imperfect and can only be intellectually satisfying unless we exert great effort to block out anything that doesn’t harmonize with it. To borrow Jack Nicholson’s line from “A Few Good Men”: Truth? You can’t handle the Truth!

Sorry, but that’s just how it is. You CAN’T handle the Truth.

Instead, you (and yes, not just you; I mean myself as well) settle for the truth, the truth as you see it, not True, but true enough. And yet, AT BEST, truth, because it is not Truth, is a kind of delusion.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to understand the world about us. It is only an honest acknowledgement of our intellectual limits.

Since Truth is elusory, and understanding that our ability to find Truth has its limits, our best hope is to be honest, or at least as honest as possible. (A discussion of honest vs. Honesty is another topic altogether.) That implies two things: a healthy acceptance of our own fallibility (as Dennis Miller puts it, “That’s just my opinion—I could be wrong”) and the realization that stupidity is NOT defined as “That with which I do not agree.” Both are difficult to achieve, though of the two, the second is the more burdensome. Anytime I observe a heated debate, it’s usually because someone is unwilling to admit to himself that his adversary has a point.

A case in point is an exchange I recently viewed on a science blog. It involved an opponent of Intelligent Design who openly admited that he solicited a scathing review of a book which he never bothered to read. Despite this admonition he could never compel himself to admit that what he did was the teensiest bit dishonest, since the object of his animadversion was a member of the Discovery Institute and therefore instantly worthy of disdain and contempt regardless of what the book says. Surely, any truly reasonable person would agree that in order to offer a valid review of any book, one should first be obliged to read it (as evidenced by the fact that the word “review” has the word “view” in it, implying that one should at least LOOK at the damn thing before damning it), and yet Our Hero, whose claim to expertise was in having "a graduate education in paleobiology" (and never mind that the philosopher he is attacking has two PhDs; a graduate education in paleobiology trumps two PhDs because—well, just BECAUSE), remained adamant in his asseveration that reading a book is no prerequisite for reviewing it. And for anyone who should disagree with him, he could only offer the oh-so-clever retort (which is just oh-so-clever that he felt compelled to use it again and again): “Enjoy your membership in the Discovery Institute IDiot Borg Collective.”

Yes, a mind IS a terrible thing to waste, isn’t it?

What truly flummoxes me is that Our Hero actually thinks he is defending science. He truly believes he is fighting the good fight, standing firm at the bulwark of knowledge and driving away all who would make science a religion and turn back the clock of human progress. Yet all he really does is utter the intellectual equivalent of “Persecute! Kill the heretic!” against anyone not fully in line with his way of thinking (or, rather, non-thinking), which speaks volumes about who is REALLY trying to make a religion of science, even if only inadvertently.

His version of science is not science, but ideology draped in the reliquary of science. It is still ideology, however. Not the open examination of evidence to see what it might reveal, but the automatic shouting down of anything not in accordance with that ideology. It is a witch hunt mentality, all in the name of science.

Like I said, kind of depressing.

The Old Knowledge/Perception Debate

2008-07-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

UT Austin philosopher J Budziszewski says in his essay “The Second Tablet Project,” (First Things, June/July 2002):

“One cannot predict in advance what stories people will tell themselves to make believe that they do not know the reality of God and their obligation to Him; every agnostic and atheist devises a different set of plausibility gambits, a different pattern of omissions, of forgettings, of avertings of gaze. But it is extraordinarily difficult--I think impossible--for such self-deceptions not to slop over at some point into what one admits about the moral law. Our minds won’t go like that. “

I agree, but would go one step further: it’s not that our minds won’t go like that; it’s more like they can’t go like that. The human predilection to delude oneself is so strong, it prevents us from having any real epistemic access at all. We don’t know the world, only perceive it.

This is hardly a new idea. “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” as the Apostle Paul wrote in the 13th chapter of Corinthians. Our understanding of the world is hampered by our ability to interpret it. Or, as Plato expressed it in his cave analogy, we do not see the world itself, only the shadows and reflections of it. Behind what we see is a greater reality, if only we could turn around and look at it.

My point being: it’s not that we don’t turn around and look; we can’t.

Does anyone remember Jeremy Burke’s PBS series “The Day the Universe Changed”? Though not nearly as well received as his “Connections” series, he still made a good point: the history of science is a tale of perceptions followed by discoveries that alter those perceptions. Then, with the altered perception in place, now held to be the truth, along comes another discovery that alters the new reality. Still, it is not the reality that is altered, but only our perception of it. And in that sense, the universe changes.

Thomas Kuhn makes much the same point in his “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” which coined the term “paradigm shift.” A paradigm in Kuhn’s terminology is a model of the world, a model that expresses a basic idea of what the world is, how it works, and how we are to interact with it. The model seems cohesive and is held as valid for any given period of time, sometimes for centuries. But along comes some phenomenon or observation that doesn’t seem to fit. At first there is resistance, followed by acceptance, at which point we revise the model to incorporate the anomaly, which we then term a scientific revolution.

Yet Kuhn’s examination of scientific revolutions only touches upon the fact that, from time to time, they occur. One question he never seems to ask is why. Seems to me, humanity lacks the basic ability to do otherwise. Whatever paradigm of the universe we may have in mind at any given moment, it is only a paradigm. The model of the world is not the world itself. The former is only a tool to describe the latter, yet that tool is flawed, as evidenced by the fact that sooner or later it is abandoned for one that is better—or, at least, for one that we think is better.

I say “think” because even when that purportedly better tool comes along, there are still those among us who are unwilling to accept it and who still refuse to abandon the previous model. And here’s there kicker—there is absolutely no means whatsoever for any of the rest of us to make them change their minds. There is so such thing as a rational compulsion to adhere to any particular model of the universe; or to any idea; or to any scientific theory. For anyone who doubts this assertion, allow me to point out that the U.S. is home for the Flat Earth Society. There are folks who sincerely believe that the Earth is flat.

One would think such a thing to be impossible. Surely, in the 21st century, in an industrialized, high-tech, literate society such as ours, with all the data, information, and evidence at our command that the Earth is spherical (well, egg-shaped, according to recent accounts), no one would dare refute such a thing. And yet, there are those who do. I once caught an interview with an FES member, who, when confronted with a photograph of the Earth, taken by a satellite in orbit in space, explained the image before him this way: Einstein stated in his Theory of Relativity that “space is curved”; so the curvature of space forces the light reflected from a flat Earth to display itself to the camera’s lens as circular.

Never mind that this is nothing at all what Einstein meant when he talked about the curvature of space. For the FES member, this was enough.

This sort of rationalization, moreover, is not rare, but common. It is what causes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deny the Holocaust. It leads Terry McAulliff to say that Al Gore won the election in 2000. It makes the lawyer in Richmond assert that smoking does not cause cancer, while the blowhards from Truth.com assure us just as forcefully that it does. Each of us, in our way, is like the Black Knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” looking at our severed arm lying on the ground and adamant that it is not ours.

Dreams of Memes

2007-09-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

I found this little gem on the internet the other day, on a website called Meme Central (http://www.memecentral.com/). Now, a meme, must you know, is one of the latest attempts by materialists to explain the epiphenomenon of human thought—since the material world is all there is, since the only thing that matters is matter, and since the only means of explaining any aspect of the universe is to make an appeal to Nature, even non-physical things have their origin in the physical universe. In other words, since human beings evolved (without ANY help from You-Know-Who) independently, human thought must have evolved as well. Enter the meme, a kind of cross between an immaterial, abstract thought and a virus. Like a virus, a meme replicates itself by passing from one host organism to another.

Got that? EVERYTHING, including the thoughts in your head, has its origin in Good Old Mother Nature. Your brain secretes thought in the same was as your liver secretes bile. And if you don’t believe that you’re just a pseudoscientific creationist dilettante trying to shove your religion down our throats. This is simply what the materialists would have us believe.

So here’s how we explain where music comes from (from Meme Update #24):

The Evolution of Music
One of the criticisms being leveled at the budding science of memetics is a valid one: what is it good for? Can memetics explain historical facts any better than existing theories? Can it make better predictions? If not, it can hardly be called a science, let alone a paradigm shift in understanding culture. To the rescue comes philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, deliverer of the first Charles Simonyi Lecture at Oxford last week. What does memetics explain that we otherwise have no clue about?

Music.

Traditional evolutionary theory — not taking memes into account — boils down to the idea that in the end, everything is about improving an organism’s chances for reproducing its genes. While there has been ample speculation as to the biological function of music, most people thinking along traditional lines of evolutionary theory have concluded that it’s at best some kind of not-yet-understood social-group bonding mechanism and at worst a mistake that hasn’t been caught yet by Mother Nature. Given enough time, they say, genes for liking music will be out-competed by genes for something more productively related to reproduction.

Dennett proposes that music has less to do with genes, and more to do with much-quicker-evolving memes. Memes may actually be directing the evolution of genes to suit themselves much the way we breed dogs so they look and behave the way we fancy them. When one looks at the sex lives of popular musicians, that’s not so far-fetched a thought, is it? Why is it that rock stars have so many adoring admirers? What possible genetic function could it serve to want to mate with a singer?

Dennett weaves a tale of how it might have happened, beginning with caveman Og pounding with a stick on a log. Some of the rhythms he pounds, for whatever reason, are more catchy than others. The ones that are catchy get picked up by other cavemen. These rhythms are mental information patterns: early memes.

Now this pounding evolves for awhile, and it turns out that some of the rhythms that get pounded out are more pleasing than others, and crowds tend to gather around when someone pounds them out. Since the crowds gather around, the meme spreads faster. As a byproduct of this, the best rhythm-pounders gain in social status and therefore get more chance to spread those genes that give them the knack for rhythm.

If this demonstrates anything at all I think it shows what utterly goofball ideas you have to adhere to if you want to argue that human beings evolved all on their own. Maybe they evolved—but all on their own? I don’t think so.

First of all, note that phrase: “the budding science of memetics.” Somehow, memetics is scientific. Just how, prithee? Because. And for no other reason. Bear in mind, the “meme” is a purely abstract concept. There is zero—ZERO—evidence that memes even exist. They were formulated only as an attempt to explain the theoretical evolutionary origin of thought. It is purely a rhetorical device.

So, sum up: 1) There is no evidence that memes exist. 2) We believe in them anyway. Aaaaaaaaand—what do we define as “the evidence of things not seen”? If you answered “Science,” you’re incorrect.

And it’s funny how one thing can be “scientific” and another thing cannot. The SETI program scours the heavens for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI program is scientific. Intelligent Design theory uses the exact same methodology used by SETI. Yet ID is unscientific. How can it be possible that one thing is scientific and another thing that uses the exact same methodology is unscientific—unless a philosophical bias, and an arbitrary one at that, is in the way?

Next, note another phrase: “Dennett weaves a tale of how it might have happened.” MIGHT. Or, might not. This is an example of a just-so story, like the legend of how the camel got its hump, parading itself as a scientific investigation. Somehow, though—and, behold I show you a mystery—a story of Og the Caveman is scientific. But injecting You-Know-Who into the equation is unscientific.

And, speaking of somehow, get a load of this one: Some of the rhythms pounded by Og the Caveman are more catchy than others. Why? “For whatever reason.” Whatever. Some of the poundings are more pleasing than others, and they’re more pleasing, well, just because they are. In other words, this is a perfectly plausible scientific examination of how music arose—provided, of course, that you assume as a given the very thing being argued. It’s plausible because we say it’s plausible. Just like it’s scientific because we say it’s scientific, or that ID isn’t scientific because we say so. Just so.

Gilder and Me

2007-08-16T09:45:00.001-07:00

I have been, at times, a member of the Discovery Institute, and even less frequently a financial contributor thereto. (If you aren't acquainted with the Discovery Institute, I invite you to have a look at http://www.discovery.org/. I also talk about these guys a bit in Chapter 5 of Wonderboy.)

Recently, I received my membership renewal request in the mail, and with it, a copy of an essay entitled "Evolution and Me," by one of the founding members of the Discovery Institute, George Gilder. (I note, with no little amazement, that this is MISTER George Gilder and not DOCTOR George Gilder, because he's absolutely USDA Choice-Grade Freaking Brilliant. In addition to being a founding member of DI, he has also authored several books, on topics as diverse as biology, computer theory, and macroeconomics, and currently publishes an investment newsletter. No dummy, this hombre.)

Sidebar: A common strategy of the pro-Darwin crowd is to try to paint DI as a mere bevy of Bible-thumping, evangelical Christian, Young-Earth creationists, hell-bent on stifling scientific inquiry, and eager to bring the scientific juggernaut not only to a halt, but to push it back to the Dark Ages. In Wonderboy, when San Salbedo Professor and global warming knowitall Dr. Fabari presents a lecture entitled "Barbarians at the Gate: Defending Science from Bad Science, Pseudoscience, and Creationist Pretension," he speaks specifically of DI. So George Gilder is one of the barbarians.

Bull-oney. Darwinian evolution can be questioned without citing Scripture. There's nothing in the Gospel that says we have to reject evolutionary theory. Not everyone who believes in creation believes that it took place in 4000 B.C. And it is Darwinism itself, and not the questioning of Darwinism, which stifles scientific inquiry.

That's because Darwinism is a religion. Not LIKE a religion, but a genuine, bona fide religion all its own, with its own dogma (that natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation is all you ever need to turn a one-celled microorganism into a whale or a bat or a human being), its own creation myth (abiogenesis), its own message for salvation (Darwin loves you--and, yes, there's actually a book by this title; you can find it on Amazon), its own code of ethics (scientific explanation must be naturalistic), and its own god (not the God of Nature, but Nature herself). But I digress. End sidebar.

Anyway, after reading Mr. Gilder's essay (reprinted from its publication in the July 17th issue of National Review), all I can say is I was stunned. This was some top-notch writing, the kind of writing I've ached to do all my life--precise, eloquent, with color, flavor, and a jim-dandy vocabulary. As a result, three things happened:

· With no thought of my current financial state, I immediately squeezed out another $50 from my budget and renewed my membership with DI.
· I propped my elbows upon my desk, plopped my face into my hands, and cried great gloppy girly-man tears at the realization that I will never--capital N-E-V-E-R--be able to write as well as this guy does, and
· Out of sheer envy (and something of a sense of desperation), I quickly opened up a blank document and copied the essay, word for word, in the hopes that, by forcing my fat fingers to go through the motions of writing well, I might get something of Mr. Gilder's style to germinate in myself. You tell me if it worked.

I won't bother to reproduce the essay here. You can find a copy easily enough on your own. But allow me to offer this wholehearted recommendation that you give it a read. It is further support to the idea that Darwinism isn't the whole story. There are questions that naturalistic evolution doesn't--and can't--answer.

A Plug for Goswami

2007-08-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

And now, from the You've Absolutely GOT To Read This Files: I finished a truly fascinating book this weekend, by quantum physicist Amit Goswami, PhD. It's called The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, and I wholeheartedly recommend you have a look at it. (I figure anyone with the word "swami" in his name has simply GOT to know a few things!) True, some of the meatier chapters in the middle of the book get a bit heady, but otherwise Goswami does an excellent job of making the basic tenets of quantum physics understandable to laymen (such as myself, and if I can understand it, you can understand it) and demonstrates conclusively the overlap between science and religion. As one who has argued with annoying persistence how science and theology are NOT mutually exclusive, I found Dr. Goswami's book to be both enlightening and entertaining, which is what I've tried to do with my own books, and in that vein I find in Dr. Goswami a kindred spirit. Plus, he has a really terrific sense of humor, which I didn't think quantum physicists had. (If any quantum physicists are out there, I'm kidding.)

His central idea is that science has it all wrong defining reality in terms of the material world. Such a position, often revealed by the adage "Science by virtue of its own methods excludes metaphysics," is based on the deterministic postulates of classical physics, the notion that the movement of all matter can be predicted with 100% certainty provided that you know its position and velocity. Such a worldview, however, as Goswami puts it, is "an overly enthusiastic indulgence in a four-hundred-year-old revel called classical physics that was kicked off by Isaac Newton sometime around 1665. Newton's theories launched us on the course that led to the materialism that dominates Western culture." In other words, however well classical physics works on its own, we have known since the days of Heisenberg and Schrödinger (the beginning of the 20th century) that classical physics is incomplete physics, and thus materialism is hardly the whole picture. (And so the seeming commonsense claim that "everything has a perfectly reasonable explanation" is actually a bunch of hooey.)

That whole picture, rather, is what Goswami calls "monistic idealism," which is a philosophy based on what at first glance appears to be a radical idea: that the fundamental makeup of the universe is not matter but consciousness. The world of things is not simply built upon more (and smaller) things, but is instead based on ideas. This is not some wild speculation, however, but is instead a conclusion drawn from observations based on experiments in quantum physics, proposed to satisfy a number of seeming paradoxes that quantum physics demonstrates (paradoxes in the sense that classical physics can't explain them): that an object can be both a particle and a wave; that an object can be in one place and then suddenly appear in another without actually traveling through the intervening space to get there (the so-called quantum leap); that a quantum object cannot be said to manifest in ordinary space-time reality until it we first observe it (what quantum physicists call coherent superposition collapsing its wave function); and that the manifestation of a quantum object, caused by our observation, simultaneously affects its correlated twin object no matter how far apart the two objects are (the sort of instantaneous reaction in nature that Einstein says is an absolute no-no, since this would imply faster-than-light speed).

To repeat, don't have to be a quantum physicist to understand this stuff. And, like I say, if I can understand it, I figure absolutely anybody else can. PLEASE pop down to Waldenbooks or Barnes & Noble and buy a copy, or else buy one from an internet bookseller like Amazon. I promise you, it's absolutely mind-blowing.

The notion that the universe is the result of consciousness is significant in two ways. First, it demonstrates the insufficiency of purely naturalistic explanation. To say that things are made up of merely smaller things is a bit like saying the world is stacked onto the backs of turtles, each turtle resting on the back of the turtle beneath it. So, what's underneath that turtle at the bottom? Just another turtle? Doesn't that stack of turtles have to end somewhere, and if so, what's at the end if the only thing your philosophy will allow is another turtle?

Second, it supports the claim I have made that the universe cannot be explained without reference to some form of higher intelligence, and by that I mean You-Know-Who. If consciousness constitutes the basic makeup of the universe, it is impossible to explain consciousness other than to say that it is intelligent. Further, intelligence implies that the universe we observe is here for some purpose, and it is hardly unreasonable to suppose that this purpose might have something to do with us. As Goswami puts it, "If this sounds as if we are re-establishing an anthropocentric view of the universe, so be it... The cosmos was created for our sake."

Yep. For our sake, indeed.

Some Notes on The Road to Heresy

2007-07-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Today a brief discussion of my next novel, preliminarily titled The Road to Heresy.

My overall theme is going to be that purely naturalistic science is an epistemological dead end, that in defining science as naturalism, we are unnecessarily limiting the scope of scientific inquiry and thus limiting what science is able to discover. Further, I want to say that the faith placed in science and technology as a means of curing mankind of most, if not all, of its problems is misplaced. Science and technology can only do so much. People will continue to be people, with all their foibles, problems, and inadequacy. In five hundred years, the descendents of 20th century assholes will be 25th century assholes with better technology. Well, maybe better technology-the only thing that is absolutely certain is that they'll be assholes.

And, in fact, we're already seeing signs of that today. Consider, for instance, the world as envisioned by Arthur C. Clarke (one of my absolute favorite science fiction writers) in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. According to Clarke, by the 21st century (2001 being as early into the 21st century as you could go--yeh, you heard me: the year 2000 was the LAST year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st), mankind was supposed to have: 1) hotels in space, 2) routine flights to space stations comparable to modern-day transatlantic flights on airliners, 3) research stations on the moon, 4) proof of the existence of extraterrestrials, and 5) manned interplanetary flights to investigate such things as mysterious monoliths orbiting Jupiter.

It is now five years past the fictional world as envisioned by Clarke, and what do we have in reality? 1) There are no hotels in space, only one rather insignificant (and pathetic, IMHO) international space station, performing experiments about the effects of weightlessness on bean sprouts. Wah-hoo. There was a Skylab, which fell from space and was quickly incinerated. Oh. And Mir, a floating garbage can made up of chicken wire and duct tape. If Heywood Floyd wants to stay at the Hilton, he's stuck on Earth like the rest of us. 2) Although the space shuttle has provided something akin to regular space flights, it is hardly what you could call an everyday space program. We have nothing at all like what we saw in the film version of 2001: long, sleek, reusable spacecraft with open, spacious, pressurized cabins; stewardesses in magnetic shoes; and nary a soul wearing a spacesuit or needing to bring along his own breathing equipment. Nope, all that stuff is still in planning. And what reusable spacecraft we have is not quite as reusable as we had first hoped it to be. A few measly excursions beyond Earth's gravity, and they start falling apart-literally, and at times with tragic results. 3) We've not only failed to establish research facilities on the moon, we haven't even visited the place in thirty years. 4) Despite all the effort expended into finding E.T. and all the money and facilities thrown into SETI, we have zero evidence that there is life anywhere but on Earth. We continue to search the heavens, likely in vain, telling ourselves that we'll find something if we just keep trying-and I have to wonder what the descendants of the SETI program will have to say in five hundred years. Will they have found anything? And if not, will they still be trying? 5) And we've yet to have a single manned interplanetary flight of any kind. We've sent probes out into space that have brought back some nifty photographs-the Voyager spacecraft, the Pathfinder series, the Spirit and Endeavor rovers--but, other than that, mankind is still decidedly Earth-bound. So what's all this crapola I hear about going boldly where no man has gone before? What? You say that's Roddenberry, not Clarke? Who gives a rat's furry not-space-exploring backside?

So far, the 21st century must seem a bit of a disappointment to visionaries like Clarke. At any rate, it's a disappointment to me, which is one of the things I plan on writing about in Heresy.

Though I'm still quite a ways away from writing even the first draft. So far, I've been doing a lot of reading (I've just finished Robert Heinlein's Revolt in 2100--a truly awful piece of science fiction, if you ask me--and am about to re-read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale; both are ominous warnings of future ultra-conservative Christian theocracies in the U.S. Oh, 'tis to laugh!), but also a little writing, trying to flesh out some of the major ideas I plan on examining.

What follow are some predictions I have made, given the assumption that I'm wrong about the universe being the product of Intelligent Design and that the materialists are right. In Heresy, the story will concern a future society in which Darwinism has been elevated to State Religion (as I've argued before, Darwinism is a religion; since it's the only religion allowed to be taught in public schools, that makes it a de facto State Religion already, but for argument's sake I'll say that this doesn't happen until the 24th or 25th century).

Darwinism is founded upon a philosophy of naturalistic materialism, so what I'm trying to do here is formulate a few ways of proving how materialism is right, rather than waste time trying to prove it wrong. My thesis will be: if none of the predictions ever pan out, we can conclude that materialism, and therefore Darwinism, is wrong. It IS, of course, but I'm trying to give the Darwinist crowd every opportunity to put up or shut up.

So, without further ado:

If naturalistic materialism is true:

1. We are nothing but the sum of our parts. Our bodies are wholly explicable in terms of nature, and there is no aspect of our bodies that cannot be described in purely naturalistic terms, nor any means of describing ourselves other than naturalistic ones. Human beings are simply organic beings and nothing more, composed of organs which are composed of cells which are composed of molecules which are composed of atoms which are composed of sub-atomic particles (and, if string theory is valid, the particles are composed of various strings of energy), and that's it. We are thus material beings and not spiritual ones. We have no souls. Consciousness is therefore nothing but a curious offshoot of biochemistry, a higher reasoning function of our brains that has arisen from the natural advantage afforded to us by both the size of the human brain and its level of complexity. It is NOT evidence that Man is a creature imago dei, but rather evidence of the power by which natural selection operating in tandem with random genetic mutation can operate.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that scientists will one day construct a device capable of transporting a human body across vast regions of space--a device comparable to the "teleporter" as portrayed in the "Star Trek" TV series. It will disassemble a living human body at a molecular or sub-molecular level, transport those small bits of living organic material at high speed across great distance, and reassemble them to their original macroscopic configuration, with no ill effects to the body it has transported.

IF, HOWEVER, after several hundred years of scientific advance no such a device will have been formulated, this fact should be taken as an indication that materialism is not true.

2. The biodiversity of this planet is explicable in purely naturalist terms. Organic life on earth has arisen from purely inorganic material. As the fossil record clearly indicates that at one time in its early history earth was lifeless, the subsequent appearance of life on Earth can only be explained as abiogenesis-that is, that life occurred spontaneously out of nonlife. Further, since there is nothing particularly unique about the earth, since life can arise purely on its own given the right ingredients and the right conditions, and since there are assuredly other Earth-like planets in our galaxy as well as in other galaxies, it is inconceivable that we are alone in the universe. Surely on some other planet or planets, life has spontaneously generated much like it did on ours, and since the intractable rule of natural selection is to force the various species into ever-greater levels of complexity, it is reasonable to suppose that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. If we look for it, sooner or later we should find it.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that scientists will one day find unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial life. We will either be visited by members of some extraterrestrial race, or we will visit them, or at least detect their activity via radiometry or telemetry or some such means. If there is no intelligent life in the universe other than ours, there should at least be signs of the unintelligent kind: an alien hive or nest, an otherworldly forest, or an ocean filled with algae.

IF, HOWEVER, after several hundred years of searching for life on other planets no such evidence is found, this fact should be taken as an indication that materialism is not true.

3. Darwinism is true. Live evolves in an undirected, unscripted way. It just happens, all on its own, and unassisted by anyone. Nature is thus a closed system, fully capable or self-sustainment.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that an incident of active evolution will be observed in the field. Now that we know what we are looking for, we will be able to demonstrate what we claim the fossil record indicates. Scientists will be able to tag a species of plant or animal, and by meticulous tracking and tagging of its offspring by generations of scientists yet to come, will eventually identify an incident in which new speciation occurs. They will be able to point to the descendants of the original species and, by careful examination of their DNA, indicate at what point their genetic coding diverged. Further, they will be able to identify the conditions responsible for the divergence, whether via natural selection, random genetic mutation, or some combination of the two.

IF, HOWEVER, after hundreds of years of field observations, no incident of new speciation is ever identified, this should be taken as an indication that materialism is not true.

4. Concomitantly, if Darwinism is true, then morality is subjective--and if it is subjective, then no single standard of morality is required for our survival. There is no higher authority establishing morality or requiring us to live among each other in any particular way. The only code of conduct required is the Rule of Law, and as this code is exclusively of human invention, we should be able to legislate ourselves into Utopia. Religion, the byproduct of primitive superstition, will ultimately disappear, once we discard our fears and emotions and give in to reason and logic.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that one day a nation will arise that will be a purely secular society with no notion of religion, spirituality, or morality. It should be a society which does far more than merely tolerate atheism, but has atheism at its core as its functioning principle. It will be a Nation Not Under God, and will be able to function without any appeals to religion. It will be a free society, curtailed only by law, the codified product of mutual consent. It will be truly tolerant of all viewpoints, regardless of how extreme, and will accept all modes of behavior without judgment or dissatisfaction. It will be not the product of mere wishful thinking, but an active, living, fully functional entity.

IF, HOWEVER, after hundreds of years of trying to build a wholly secular society, no such society is ever able to establish and sustain itself, this should be taken as an indication that materialism is not true.

5. As we as a species are either a product of our heredity or of our environment, or of some combination of the two, all human characteristics must have their explanations along those lines as well. This includes notions such as higher intelligence, self-awareness, and free will. Therefore, what we call the mind--as separate from the brain-is no esoteric concept but has, as all things do if materialism is true, a perfectly natural explanation. The mind does not operate independently from nature. It therefore has its cause in nature and nowhere else. As the mind is clearly linked with the brain, its source must be somewhere therein.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that science will one day identify that area or areas of the brain which produce the mind, describing in precise detail the chemical basis for thought. It will demonstrate the biochemical processes from which the mind emerges and by which the mind operates. Schematic diagrams of the mind will be produced, showing with mathematical precision its complexities and programming, displayed in a format similar to an elaborate computer program. Scientists will be able to manipulate the mind just as a neurosurgeon can manipulate the brain, and human thought will be augmented by use of computer drives-actual "thinking caps," surgically installed into the brain, allowing its user to access a wide variety of programs and databases, visually and aurally linked into the user's cerebral cortex; he will be able to manipulate data, store files, watch videos, listen to music, write new programming of his own, and otherwise operate his mind the same way a modern computer operator uses a CPU or BDA; furthermore, he will be able to interface with the minds of those around him, comparable to modern-day internet surfing. Such augmentation of human thinking will accelerate human evolution, and man will attain the Nietzschean ideal. The Uebermensch will emerge.

IF, HOWEVER, after hundreds of years of research into the human brain, the mind is never established as a dependent construct of the brain, this should be taken as an indication that materialism is not true.

6. Furthermore, since higher intelligence can be explained in materialistic terms, we should be able to reproduce it in the laboratory eventually. Thus, our efforts in constructing artificial intelligence will bear fruit.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT that artificial intelligence will continue to be refined until it ceases simply to mimic human intelligence and becomes self-aware, capable of self-reflection and introspection--the so-cammed Turing Machine. It will become sentient.

IF, HOWEVER, future science fails to develop artificial intelligence programs capable of doing everything human intelligence can do, this should be taken as an indication that naturalistic materialism is not true.

7. Knowledge and information are finite. As Carl Sagan once famously remarked, "The universe is all that ever was, is, or will ever be." Because knowledge and information can only be explained in materialistic terms, the amount of knowledge or information available in the universe is limited to the total amount of material of which the universe is comprised, and, as science has demonstrated, the universe is finite. Just as there is a theoretical limit to the amount of information that can be stored in a computer chip, there is a corresponding limit to the amount of information that can be stored in any brain, human or otherwise (or in any organ other than a brain that is capable of storing knowledge and information). Further, there is only a finite amount of material that can be used to form a chip or brain and likewise a limit to the amount of information that can be stored in any computer, however large, or in the mind of any organic being, however complex (infinitely complexity also being an impossibility, as complexity is also limited by a finite source of organic or inorganic material). This suggests that both knowledge and information are finite, limited by both the total numbers of individual entities, living and nonliving, which are capable of storing knowledge and information, and by their capacity for doing so. It is impossible to construct a computer that is larger than the available material out of which to build one; it is also impossible to have more organic beings than the total amount of organic material out of which to build them. If knowledge and information are finite, and if human beings are merely materialistic entities suborned to a material universe, then there is a theoretical limit to human thought. A Theory of Everything is therefore possible, as it would encapsulate the entire set of all things that are knowable.

THEREFORE, I PREDICT a Theory of Everything will be one day formulated and will be born out by repeated experimentation. It will accurately predict knowledge of things we do not yet know, and all future scientific discoveries will flow from it.

IF, HOWEVER, after hundreds of years of research in theoretical physics, in neurology, in psychology, and/or in related sciences no Theory of Everything is forthcoming and no experiment is ever devised to test it, this should be taken as an indication that materialism is not true.