Squaring the Culture

Leftward blogs were yukking it up this morning because McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb told CNN’s Rick Sanchez that Obama “hangs around with anti-Semites,” but then refused to name anybody but Rashid Khalidi. Lefties Andrew Sullivan and Joe Klein called Goldfarb “McCarthy” and “bigot,” respectively, and the title on the YouTube video announces that Sanchez caught Goldfarb “lying.”

McCain himself somewhat famously believes that a person’s religion is his own business, and thus refuses to bring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the campaign; this is apparently who Goldfarb had in mind while he was twisting in the wind on CNN.

As to other anti-Israel connections, Goldfarb simply was not prepared. Let’s take the time to recall just how many anti-Israel voices have been noticed in the general vicinity of candidate Obama:

To start with, there’s the current flap about Rashid Khalidi and Obama’s close friendship with him. The LA Times is holding a videotape of Obama toasting Khalidi, and there was plenty of anti-Israeli rhetoric flung around at that dinner. It also appears that Khalidi is a long-standing friend of both Ayers and Obama.

Then there is famously Obama’s pastor, Rev Jeremiah Wright, whose pastor pages apparently featured several rabidly anti-semitic writers.

We need to look under the Hope-and-Change campaign bus, where several pro-Palestinian foreign policy advisors are lurking, having been shoved there after being noticed by the public. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice all earn dishonorable mention in this category. Malley is probably the worst of them.

Just recently, Obama’s outreach director to Muslims, Mahdi Bray, was spotted and filmed at a Hamas/Hezbollah rally, and it was reported that he and the Obama team met with CAIR’s Nihad Awad.

It was a while back, but al Qaeda financier Hatem al Hady was spotted as a friend on Michelle Obama’s page, until Johnny Simpson at Digital Journal and Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs noticed it and blogged about it. Then the friendship link quietly vanished.

It was not long after that that Johnson at LGF noticed a veritable flood of anti-Semitic blogging going on at Obama’s campaign web site. I blogged about it back in June.

And of course, Louis Farrakhan’s ferociously anti-Semitic Nation of Islam recently called Obama the Messiah.

Now, in none of these connections have we heard candidate Obama utter his own anti-Israel sentiments. He wouldn’t, most likely, because you can’t get elected President in American if you’re anti-Israel. It’s thought that there are some anti-Israel comments on the unreleased Khalidi Toast tape, but we don’t know that.

However, where there’s smoke, there may be fire. Recall Obama’s radical connections. The problem is not just that they exist, but that he seems to have no close connections except from among the radicals. Where are his moderate Democrat friends? His Republican friends? We have the same problem with pro-Palestinian connections: why is it that all of Obama’s supporters, friends, and advisors seem to come from the pro-Palestinian camp? Where are the pro-Israelis among his staff, associates, and friends? And why is it that the rabid anti-Semites all seem to take it for granted that Obama is their man?

As with everything else we’ve come to expect about The One, it appears that he’s not telling us the truth about his stance on Israel. His background and associates suggest a strongly pro-Palestinian bent. His words say “I support Israel,” but can they be believed?

Jim Geraghty at the National Review Online noticed this morning that a Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll showed something a number of us have suspected for several election cycles: Republican voters are more likely to refuse to participate in exit polling than are Democratic voters.

Obviously, it’s tough to measure the attitudes of those who refuse to talk to pollsters, but this question in Fox News’ latest survey confirms a long-held suspicion:

40. Every election, the television networks conduct exit polls of people as they leave their polling places on Election Day. If you were asked to participate, how likely is it you would be willing to spend 10 minutes filling out a questionnaire?

Obama voterswho responded very likely/somewhat likely: 77 percent.

McCain voters who responded very likely/somewhat likely: 64 percent.

Obama voters who responded not very likely/not at all likely: 20 percent.

McCain voters who responded not very likely/not at all likely: 32 percent.

Will the networks even acknowledge the fact that one candidate’s voters are less likely to be represented in the exit polls?

We heard complaints about Republican voter fraud in 2004 based solely on differences between exit polls and actual tallies in Ohio. If this survey is to be believed, however, we should expect exit polls slightly to favor Democrats.

Geraghty predicts that Virginia and Indiana will be called for Obama by at least one network Tuesday night on the strength of those extra Democratic respondents in the exit polls. I think he’s wrong about Indiana, which has voters in the Central Time Zone, but it’s at least plausible that some nefarious network geek would “accidentally forget” and call the state while the western polls are still open. We saw that happen in Florida in 2000, and it did suppress Republican votes. I think it’s possible that Virginia might be called incorrectly immediately after the polls close.

This is one area where I favor some government regulation. Networks should be forbidden, absolutely, from reporting any returns on election night until all the polls across the nation are closed.

The actual survey results can be found here. The portion Geraghty quotes is on the last page.

Politics be damned. I’m doing baseball today.

The Phillies won the World Series last night, finishing a game that was suspended on Monday due to rain and taking the series, 4 games to 1. I’m in Phillie heaven, a pleasant region that’s seldom populated. Fans from Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia know exactly what I’m talking about; we’re used to pain, but not this time.

The Phillies’ brilliant post-season performance, winning 11 games and losing only 3, was remarkable for the number of relatively obscure players who came through with clutch hits or important plays at key moments. This wasn’t a show by a few prima donnas, but truly a team effort. A monster at-bat by pitcher Brett Myers, prying a walk out of Brewers’ ace CC Sabathia on 10 pitches in game 2 of the league championship, unnerved him and set him up for a game-winning grand slam by center fielder Shane Victorino. Forty-year-old Matt Stairs iced game 4 of the division series with a pinch-hit home run (about the hardest-hit ball I’ve ever seen. He absolutely jack-hammered it.) Geoff Jenkins, batting just .246 for the season and reduced to bench-warmer status, smacked a clutch pinch-hit double to lead off the continuation of game 5, scoring one out later on Jason Werth’s blooper. Catcher Carlos Ruiz, batting 8th for a reason, came through with the game-winning single to take game 3 of the World Series, scoring Eric Bruntlett, another utility player who reached third by aggressive running on a passed ball. None of those guys have big names, but they all produced big plays. On top of reliable pitching from all four starters and solid, fundamental fielding by the Phillies’ defense, the entire team was unstoppable through the post-season.

If there was any part of the game where the Phillies excelled more than the others, it was relief pitching, where closer Brad Lidge led a group that’s been dominant all year. In the Division Championship Series, the relief staff boasted a combined ERA of 1.44, allowing the Dodgers only 13 hits in 81 at bats (12 walks, though) for a team batting average of just .188 against the Phillies’ relievers. Tampa Bay fared no better in the World Series, managing only 6 hits and one walk in 42 at bats, striking out 14 times. The Rays batted .146 against Phillies’ relievers, who bagged an ERA of 1.54 in the series.

Credit also goes to the Phillies’ scouting corps, which managed to grok Tampa Bay’s power hitters and prepare Phillie’s pitchers. Tampa Bay produced 16 home runs in their Division Series against the Red Sox, but the Phillies’ pitchers allowed them just 4 homers, and held the four most potent hitters of the Rays’ line-up (Crawford, Upton, Longoria, and Pena) to just 13 hits for the entire World Series, for a combined batting average of .171.

Phillies ace pitcher Cole Hamels nearly created post-season history, coming just one rainstorm shy of winning a record-setting 5 games in the post-season. He won four (one in the division series, two in the league series, and the opener in the World Series) and had only thrown 75 pitches by the end of the 6th inning in game 5 of the World Series, but the game was suspended due to rain with the scored tied 2-2 after the top of the 6th inning on Monday night. When the game continued 46 hours later, Manager Charlie Manuel sent in Geoff Jenkins to hit for Hamels to lead off the bottom of the 6th, so when the Phillies pulled ahead for good in the 7th, relief pitcher J.C. Romero snagged the win. Hamels had to settle for Most Valuable Player for both the Division Championship Series and the World Series, having pitched 5 solid starts and netting an ERA of 1.80 for the five games.

Also important to the win was the Phillies patience at the plate, forcing opposing pitchers to work extra-hard and earning an incredible number of walks. Phillies power hitting left fielder Pat Burrell, who had batted over .300 through the division and league series’, managed only 1 hit during the World Series — but walked 5 times. Second baseman Chase Utley, usually a potent hitter, batted only .167 through the series — but walked 5 times, and scored 5 runs. Right fielder Jason Werth, whose .444 average figured in a great deal of the scoring, pried 6 walks out of Tampa Bay pitchers.

Truly, though, the Phillies dominated every phase of the game through the series. Tampa Bay hustled and earned runs effectively off of the few hits they produced, but the Phillies answered nearly every run with a run of their own, and apart from game 2 never allowed the Rays to lead even for an inning. Tampa Bay has young talent, and will likely be a contender for years to come, but they were outplayed by a solid and irrepressible Philadelphia team this year.

I won’t be in Philly to enjoy the celebration, but I’m offering my heartfelt congratulations from a distance. They’ve waited a long time for a winner in Philadelphia, and they’ve earned the right to celebrate. Kudos.

Photograph snagged from a video at Major League Baseball’s web site, http://www.mlb.com.

Quin Hillyer at the American Spectator applies his mind to constructing what he would consider the best, most completely honest argument for voting for John McCain. I think he’s nailed it, including the candid observation at the beginning that the real reason to vote for McCain is to keep the inexperienced, incompetent, corrupt, and overly radical Obama from becoming President. He emphasizes McCain’s impressive record of being correct about foreign policy choices since the 1980s, several times bucking the party leadership to warn of impending trouble, his genuine bipartisanship, his sincere commitment to spending discipline and honest government, and his leadership in forgiving the Vietnamese after the war. I agree: these are McCain’s positive qualities. Read it.

I’m expecting McCain to win next week. I think a lot of the polls have been cooked, I think actual voting usually gives the Republican about 5 points more than the polls suggest 2 weeks before the election, and I think a lot of weak Obama supporters are going to suffer buyer’s remorse in the next week. We’ll see.

Let’s keep in mind, though, that a McCain win may be a Pyrrhic victory. Not only will we see Democrat-lite social policy, cap-and-trade schemes to limit carbon production, and some sort of amnesty for illegal aliens, we’ll also likely see a successful campaign for President by Hillary Clinton in 2012. In the wake of the Obama campaign, fears of Clinton’s radicalism or criminality simply won’t wash; she’ll seem a breath of fresh air after the slime bath we’re taking this year. (Says something about Obama, that he actually makes a Clinton look honest, no? I did not think that was possible.)

Good news — very good news, in fact — and some bad news.

I’ve been predicting for a while that McCain will win Pennsylvania. Apparently the folks at HillBuzz agree with me, and they’re basing their assessment on reports from the ground in PA. (For those of you who don’t know, HillBuzz is a blog site of PUMAs — Hillary Clinton supporters who will have nothing to do with Barack Obama.)

Point 1: all the active members of Clinton’s team in PA are now working for McCain.

Here is specifically what we talked about tonight: never in any of our careers have any of us ever seen members of one party switching sides and voting for the other party as we see in this election with Democrats for McCain. There has never been anything like it. Not even the “Reagan Democrats” who voted for Reagan over Carter, for the simple fact that these “Reagan Democrats” weren’t identified and labeled until AFTER the election.

No, Democrats for McCain are real, are voting for McCain right now, and are open and organized, as well as self-identifying. Lynn Rothschild might be our poster gal, as one of the most prominent of our ranks, but it’s telling that everyone from Team Hillary that we know now works for McCain. ALL OF US. Whether they are open about it, like we are, or are working quietly behind the scenes, we can’t think of a single person we worked with on a daily basis for Hillary who is now working on behalf of Obama.

Point 2: Union members are lying to pollsters about how they’re going to vote.

Union members repeatedly tell all of us that they are lying to pollsters because the unions have been polling these people — and the unions will threaten people’s jobs if they don’t tow the union line. So, the people lie when asked whom they are supporting. But, the unions can’t control who they vote for on Election Day. And that’s when things are going to get interesting.

Note that this is not the Bradley effect. It has nothing to do with race, nor with perceived response to racially-charged questions. It has to do with fear of union goons.

Republicans, pay close attention to point 3: McCain and Clinton may cooperate closely.

We all truly believe that John McCain will work more closely with Hillary Clinton in the Senate and make it a priority to team up with her on legislation than Obama ever would. We also believe Obama winning this election means his supporters would actively seek to eliminate all Clinton loyalists from the Democratic Party, to consolidate his power base and purge anyone who is not 100% loyal to him. For obvious reasons, those of us loyal to the Clintons will not let that happen without a fight.

Mind, this is the perception of Clinton supporters, not any sort of statement of intent from the McCain camp. They could be overly optimistic; they could be whistling “Dixie”. However, they could have a point. We all knew coming in that McCain was more centrist than conservative. While I believe he’ll be an honest President and keep his word regarding pork-barrel spending and earmarks, I expect another “Democrat Lite” presidency on domestic policy. We absolutely have to spend the next several cycles rebuilding the conservative wing of the Republican party, and finding conservative congressional and state legislature candidates who will take a pledge to uphold conservative principles rather than feather their own nests with the public trust.

In previous installments, I’ve established

• that there’s a need for explaining why Christianity is the most reasonable position for an educated, skeptical individual to take (see the post here);
• that there exists such a thing as absolute truth, and that truth claims may be made about religion just as they can about any other topic (see the post here).

Today, I begin explaining the evidence that God exists.

There are three broad lines of thought about what God might be like: theism, pantheism, and atheism. Simply explained, theism says “God made all,” pantheism says “God is all,” and atheism says “There’s no God at all.” Personally, I see no logical difference between the last two: as was argued so eloquently in that excellent theological treatise, The Incredibles, if everybody is special, then nobody is. The position that says “God is everything, and everything is God,” in practice leaves us the same place as the position that there is no God. But when studying philosophy, claims about God generally fall into one of those three categories.

I submit that the universe in which we live provides enough evidence to conclude reasonably that there is a God, that the God that exists is theistic, and that we can therefore eliminate both pantheism and atheism as possibilities. I’m going to provide three lines of argument supporting that claim: the argument from the beginning of the universe (Cosmological argument,) the argument from design (Teleological argument,) and the argument from the existence of objective morality (Moral argument.) The first two arise from modern science, while the third arises from human self-evaluation. Both looking out into our universe, and looking within ourselves, we see evidence of God’s existence and clues to His nature, just as we might expect if there really is a God.

The Argument

Today’s post focuses on the Cosmological argument, which goes like this:

1. Everything that has a beginning, has a cause.
2. The universe has a beginning.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Until about 50 years ago, everybody accepted the first premise as indisputable. In fact, science as a discipline is not possible without causality. If a baseball flies through my living room window, I assume that somebody launched it, and so do all physicists; none of us imagine that the ball simply materialized in flight out of nothing, and proceeded to slam into my living room. If a dog is in my house tearing up my carpeting, I assume that somebody let the dog in, and so do all philosophers; none of us think it’s possible that a dog simply appeared out of nowhere and started clawing my carpets. This relationship between cause and effect is what science studies. If an event occurred, something must have caused it, and the scientist digs to find out what that was.

Until about 50 years ago, it was also accepted that there must have been something that existed forever, beyond all causes. The atheist’s version of it went like this:

1. Everything that has a beginning, has a cause; but…
2. Anything that has no beginning, requires no cause.
3. The universe has no beginning.
4. Therefore, the universe requires no cause.

Theists used the same argument, only substituting God for the universe:

1. Everything that has a beginning, has a cause; but…
2. Anything that has no beginning, requires no cause.
3. God has no beginning.
4. Therefore, God requires no cause.

In other words, everybody pretty much understood that something has been there forever; we just disagreed about what it was. And everybody pretty much understood that aside from the whatever-it-was that existed forever, everything since has obeyed the law of causality.

So what happened about 50 years ago to change that?

What happened is that scientists obtained convincing evidence that the universe had a beginning, evidence that we’ll cover in a moment.

Immediately, scientists grasped that if the universe had a beginning, that lent very, very strong support to the theists. If the minor premise “The universe has no beginning” was provably false, then the alternate proof had to be true; the thing that had no beginning was God. This was immediately acknowledged by agnostic scientists, some of whom were pretty irritated by the fact.

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream,” wrote Robert Jastrow, first director of the Goddard Space Flight Center. “He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak. As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Albert Einstein admitted in a personal letter to a friend that he was so irritated by the evidence supporting the notion that the universe had a beginning that he invented a constant out of thin air to make it go away. “It was the worst mistake of my professional career,” he confessed. And more recently, measurements of the variations in background radiation confirming that the universe began in a hot, singular explosion had skeptical astronomer Geoffry Burbidge of UCSD complaining of his fellow astronomers rushing off to join “the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.”

Atheist Reactions to the Argument

Atheists could not exist in this state for long, of course, so they’ve resorted to all sorts of fascinating speculation: multiple universes, universes creating themselves out of quantum events, universes creating themselves out of mathematical points, and a resort to a child’s innocent question: “Who made God?” I heard Christopher Hitchens, atheist extraordinaire, argue in a debate that this question was a “painfully obvious problem” for theists. The trouble is, it wasn’t painfully obvious 50 years ago; what was painfully obvious 50 years ago was that something had to have begun the chain of causation. The infantile question only became “painfully obvious” when it became painfully obvious that space, time, matter, energy, and even the laws of nature all began at a measurable point in time.

“Who made God?” is a category fallacy. A category fallacy occurs when you assign an attribute to a thing that is not really one of its attributes. “How much does love weigh?” is a category fallacy. “My car doesn’t want to start” is also a category fallacy, assigning intention to a hunk of metal, but it’s a fallacy we like because it’s whimsical; it makes the expensive machine made of metal and plastic parts seem like a crotchety aunt. “Who made God?” is a category fallacy because the definition of God includes “unbeginning” and “timeless;” God, by definition, has no cause.

I suppose I should mention at this point that causality requires time. The entire concept of causality implies a time sequence. First I threw the ball, then it traveled through my living room window. First I struck the cue ball with my cue, then it struck the 9 ball at the wrong angle, then the 9 ball hit the corner of the rail next to the pocket and bounced away (and then I cringed). These are time sequences. Causality breaks down if there’s no time. So, if time is not infinite, if in fact time was created along with the rest of the universe, then whatever existed before the beginning of time does not need a cause.

One of the consequences of Einstein’s general relativity is that time and space, matter and energy, are linked, and that time was created along with the universe. According to Einstein, the universe has a beginning, and time has the same beginning. This is another of Jastrow’s nightmares: that time itself is a created entity was first suggested formally by St. Augustine as a theological concept in the 4th century. Einstein helped us scale one of those peaks of knowledge, and there, at the peak, Augustine was already having lunch. And since there was no time before the beginning of the universe, whatever existed there did not need a cause.

Proof That the Universe Had a Beginning

For those who aren’t so familiar with the science underlying the beginning of the universe, allow me to review it for you, but let me begin by noting that practically no scientist today would dispute that the universe began in an explosion from a single point called a singularity, a point of near-infinite mass and density at which the laws of nature did not apply, and that this explosion occurred between 10 and 20 billion years ago. I’ll be using one of those cutesy acronyms to list some of the major discoveries that led to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning:

• Second Law of Thermodynamics
• Universe is expanding
• Radiation afterglow
• Galaxy seeds
• Einstein’s general relativity

SURGE. As in, the universe SURGEd into being.

Newton articulated the second law of thermodynamics back in the 17th century, but it took a while for scientists to catch up with the fact that it proves the universe must have had a beginning. Simply put, the 2nd law says that the universe is running down, like a spring-driven clock. There’s only so much energy in the universe, and that energy is gradually being converted from a useable state to an unusable one. It’s a huge amount of energy, true; so huge it’s hard to imagine. But, it’s finite. And if the universe were infinitely old already, if there were no beginning to the universe, then the universe would have run down by now. There would be no motion. All matter in the universe would be motionless, and sitting at a temperature of absolute zero. So, the 2nd law of thermodynamics leads us to conclude that the universe cannot be infinitely old; it had to have a beginning.

Einstein (the E at the end of SURGE) noticed that his work on general relativity in the early part of the 20th century provided another, similar problem for the theory of an infinite universe; the law of gravity said that if the universe existed in a steady state, then all the bodies in the universe would be collapsing in toward a central point (the universe’s center of gravity), and if the universe were infinitely old, we’d all be at that central point by now. The only alternatives he could imagine were that the universe was expanding, or that there was some sort of constant force that counter-balanced the law of gravity. Einstein recognized that if the universe were expanding, it must have had a beginning, and he didn’t favor that explanation. So he produced what he called the Cosmological Constant, a force that counteracts gravity and keeps the universe from collapsing in on itself. The problem was that the math didn’t work for his Cosmological Constant, but he didn’t catch the error; another researcher caught it, and argued that the universe must be expanding.

Einstein admitted the error when he viewed the work of astronomer Edwin Hubble, who produced evidence that the universe is expanding. Hubble was studying the apparent red-shift in galaxies they could see from the Hooker telescope on Mt. Wilson.

We’ll step away from the story for a moment to explain red-shift. Red-shift is an instance of the Doppler effect in stars, the same effect that makes the sound of a train’s horn sound higher when it’s coming toward you and lower when it’s speeding away. What’s happening is that the sound waves get compressed as the train speeds toward you (making it sound higher to your ears), but they get stretched out as the train moves away from you (making it sound lower.) The same thing happens with light sources that are moving very, very quickly. The spectra of burning elements would get shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum if the object were moving toward us, but toward the red end of the spectrum if the object were moving away from us. Astronomers had noticed that the spectra from galaxies we can see through telescopes were always shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, so they must all be moving away from us.

Back to our story: Hubble studied the differences in those red shifts of galaxies, and noticed that the farther away the galaxy, the greater the red shift. This told him that the universe was expanding (which is the U in SURGE). Think about it: if you were to double the size of the room in which you’re sitting and move everything proportionately, objects near the center of the room would not move as much as objects at the far edges of the room. A coffee table 6 inches from the center of the room would only have to move 3 inches; a lamp in the corner, 10 feet from the center of the room, would have to move 5 feet. Hubble noted that the red-shift in galaxies conformed to this model, and he formulated it into Hubble’s Law in 1929. When he showed Einstein, Einstein agreed that he’d proved that the universe was indeed expanding, and abandoned his Cosmological Constant. (It happens that recently cosmologists have re-introduced the Cosmological Constant to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but it’s much smaller than Einstein’s original constant, and positive where Einstein’s constant was negative.)

Scientists recognized that an expanding universe might have begun from a single point and possibly from an explosion, and they noted that if that were true, there should be a background echo remaining from the original explosion. Nobody had observed such an echo, though, until Bell Labs built the Horn Antenna in the early 1960s, a microwave receiver that was more sensitive than any receiver had ever been. Scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were calibrating the new receiver when they discovered a very low-frequency vibration coming from every direction. At first they thought it was noise from the equipment, but they quickly ruled that out. Then they discovered pigeons nesting in the horn, so they had the pidgeons removed (each of the researchers says the other ordered the pigeons killed) and the equipment cleaned, but the vibration remained. They quickly realized that what they were hearing was the background radiation afterglow from the origin of the universe (the R in SURGE.) In fact, what they were hearing was very close to the frequency that other physicists had predicted would be found, corresponding to a background temperature around 3 degrees Kelvin (that’s just 3 degrees above absolute zero.)

This was taken as stunning confirmation of what was being called the Big Bang theory, but some problems remained. Specifically, critics asked why the universe was “lumpy.” The background radiation was evenly distributed throughout the universe, but matter was not; matter clumped into galaxies, stars, planets, and such. Why?

Theorists eventually answered that there must have been waves in the background radiation, like the waves radiating out from the place where you drop a rock into a pond, and those waves would form the seeds of galaxies. However, there was no way to measure the background radiation that accurately from earth; we had to wait until sensitive enough instruments were launched into space to determine whether such waves existed. The COBE satellite (COsmic Background Explorer) was launched in 1989 to measure data from the early universe. Over the next several years, COBE returned temperature data that conformed very closely to what scientists predicted they would be if the universe had begun in a hot, big bang, and contained variations in the range required for the creation of galaxies. These were the Galaxy Seeds (the “G” in SURGE). COBE’s results have been confirmed by a number of independent findings, so that very few scientists now doubt that the universe began in a singular explosion.

I Don’t Have That Much Faith

Consequently, we now know that the universe as we know it began in an explosion some 14 billion years ago, give or take a few billion. Not only matter and energy, but also time and space sprung into existence at that moment. Nature itself, the common behaviors of matter that we call laws of nature, sprang into existence at that moment. And because it began in an explosion exhibiting immense heat, there’s virtually no possibility that we can know what existed before the singularity, so we’re left drawing inferences from the universe itself.

The universe itself suggests the following:

• Whatever existed before the Big Bang must have been immaterial, since matter came into existence at the Big Bang.
• It must have been eternal, since time came into existence then.
• It must have been immensely powerful, to set off such an explosion.
• It must have been something like what we call conscious, since it chose to initiate the universe. It was not a machine.
• It must have been what we would call supernatural, because it created nature.

This leaves modern atheists with a problem. Matter and energy, time and space, and nature sprang from nothing. They didn’t exist, and then they did. The only evidence that exists or ever can exist, suggests that they were initiated by a Something that was immaterial, timeless, immensely powerful, conscious, and supernatural. If you’re an objective observer, that pretty clearly spells “God.” If you’re an atheist, you have only two logical alternatives — that something sprang from nothing, or that it sprang from something for which there exists no evidence, nor can there exist any evidence. Nothing existed; nothing created; nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’ (that’s Billy Preston cosmology). And yet, something happened, and now matter, energy, time, space, and nature exist. If you’re an atheist, your only logical possibility is that it all came from nothing, with no initiator, no feedstock, and no choice. That, or you have to make up something out of the air.

Richard Dawkins, in what he calls the central argument of his book The God Delusion, argues that the appearance of design in the universe is overwhelming, that physics contains no explanation for it, but he has hope — hope — that physicists will one day come up with an explanation for how the universe could spring into being without God. He mentions some speculation, for which no evidence exists nor can exist, that we’re one of an infinite number of universes. In the meantime, he asks, who made God?

That’s a faith statement. He has faith that there’s no God. The blind kind of faith, without any evidence.

Christopher Hitchens, in his 300-page diatribe about how awful God is, spends only a few pages on the topic we’re discussing here. He acknowledges that the Big Bang is the accepted theory for the origin of the universe. He claims that the theory works without God, but never says how. And then he asks, who made God?

Is there a pattern? Obviously, there is.

These guys are expressing faith that something arose, ultimately, out of nothing, without intelligence, purpose, design, choice, or impetus of any sort. They’re entitled to their faith, but I don’t have enough faith to believe that. The universe had a beginning, and the beginner was God.

Astonomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.

Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 1978

Next time, the argument from design.

This will probably be the end of my analysis columns about the election, since the election is now upon us. However, the most-read posts I’ve written to date (here and here,) raise the possibility that Obama was a modern communist rather than a Democrat, and I feel the need to post my conclusion about the matter. It’s not likely that this will have any impact on the election at this point; the matter I’m discussing really exists in the public mind only in the discussion of Joe the Plumber, who unintentionally revealed Obama’s core desire to redistribute the nation’s wealth. But I want to finish the job.

Thanks to the work of Stanley Kurtz from the National Review and a handful of others, we’re finally getting a clearer picture of the Barack Obama who wants to redistribute wealth. The big picture seems to be that Obama really is some sort of neo-Marxist, and that for about 20 years he’s been cooperating in a tight-knit Hyde Park collaborative including Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Rashid Khalidi, aimed at inserting their radical, anti-American point of view into American government and culture. The amount of effort he’s put into the attempt to hide this, the efforts to silence or discredit anyone who attempted to research it, and the embarrassingly transparent lies he’s told and continues to tell about these connections, merely emphasize how important he feels it is that we not look into it. He knows perfectly well who he is, and he knows that what he’s telling the American people about himself is a bold-faced lie.

Andy McCarthy spells out what we know about the Obama – Ayers – Khalidi connection. The links in his article provide the necessary support, but I want to draw attention specifically to this Hugh Hewitt interview of Stanley Kurtz, the dogged reporter who’s done the Herculean labor of researching all these details. Kurtz details actual collaborations between Obama and Ayers, links Khalidi to Ayers, and even provides some detail about ACORN’s role in creating the current economic mess. McCarthy also links to Kurtz’s work tying Obama to ACORN (and describing some of ACORN’s “public interest” efforts that will chill your blood a bit,) and his work tying ACORN to the subprime lending crisis. Given the fact that ACORN grew out of the National Welfare Rights Organization, and that the NWRO deliberately attempted to destroy capitalism by overloading welfare rolls, it’s not impossible to imagine that the subprime crisis was a deliberate attempt to take down the economy and gain power for an authoritarian government that would enforce Marxian economic policies. It’s by no means proved at this point, but it’s hard to see how they could have accomplished it better if they had planned it, and the tactic is consistent with the historical intent of the organization, so…

Kurtz is very cautious in saying “This is what we’re sure is true” about Obama working with Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, but in fact, it’s likely that they’d already been collaborators for almost a decade by that time. Ayers coordinated Mayor Richard Daley’s School Reform Project back in the late 1980s, and Obama headed the Development Community Project, one of the organizations being coordinated, at the same time. They had to know each other back then by virtue of that project association. Also, Sidley Austin, the law firm that employed Obama when he graduated from Harvard, employed both Bernadine Dohrn and Michelle Robinson, who later become Michelle Obama, during that same period. There are other connections as well, through partners at Sidley Austin and through Mayor Daley’s office; you can piece them together from the time line at Conservative Politics Today, among other sources that have plumbed these waters.

The specific connection to Ayers has never been the basis of my claim that Obama was a radical. It was not the presence of a single, specific radical in Obama’s circle of friends that led me to that supposition. Rather, it’s the fact that I haven’t found any major influence in Obama’s life that did not come from among the radical left. His mother, his grandparents, his father, his step-father, the mentor of his teen years, his college buddies, his early employers, his sponsors, his professional collaborators… all from the hard left, no exceptions. Try to find one that was a mainstream Democrat, let alone a Republican of any stripe. There are none, not until he engaged himself in Chicago machine politics, and then his only associations with them were aimed at maintaining and gaining power. And even then, his close associates were radicals, not Democrats.

What the Ayers – Khalidi connections do is give us a referent for what Obama genuinely believes. One naturally acquires the worldview of the people among whom one grows to maturity. It’s possible to break out of that worldview and acquire a different one — I did it, after all, my family of origin is Jewish and mainstream left — but it does not happen without a crisis of conscience of some sort. Obama has written, not one, but two personal memoirs; that he could have had such a crisis of conscience and not mention it in either memoir is simply not believable. He did have epiphanies, and he documents some of them; but none of them suggest any reason to think he’s thrown over the radicalism of his upbringing and environment. Ergo, we have to assume that he holds to the anti-capitalist radicalism of his upbringing, and that his beliefs are not far from those with whom he collaborates — like Ayers, who pukes at the thought of capitalist America. Let’s not forget that Obama has publicly supported all the major goals articulated in Ayers’ publicly-promoted educational reforms. Let’s not forget that Obama has been lying and launching slime attacks to make sure no attention is paid to Ayers.

Obama’s public pronouncements are transparently intended to garner as many votes as possible. It’s not uncommon for a politician to shade his views to appeal to the largest possible segment of the population during an election; it is unusual for one to change so many of his positions so transparently as Obama has done over the last year or two. Since we can’t take his public stances as anything but press fodder, and since Obama will not tell us much of what he genuinely believes, we have to look to his associations. He’s been collaborating with Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi for 20 years, and trying to hide the trail; we can take it for granted that his own views match theirs pretty closely. Forget whether Ayers cares whether he bombed the Pentagon or not; that’s not the point. Pay attention to the America-hating, black-separatist-supporting, authoritarian radical that Ayers is today. Pay attention to the extreme, pro-Palestinian, America-hating radical that Khalidi is today. You’re looking at Barack Obama.

The election is just around the bend, so nothing I post here is likely to change anything at this point. However, simply for the sake of understanding, allow me to posit a truly excellent analysis I discovered about a week ago, explaining how so many bright folks have attached themselves to Obama’s candidacy. His thesis claims that in just about every case, it’s apparent from their reasons that the intellectual Obama supporters have permitted emotions to make the choice for them, and have mustered their intellectual forces, not for the purpose of making the decision, but for the purpose of rationalizing it. His support is pretty good.

The author is Patrick O’Hannigan (Irish, perhaps?) and he calls his blog a “paragraph farm,” ergo the blog name, Paragraph Farmer. He’s clearly a religious Catholic (which is not the same as a Catholic Religious, which would be a priest or a monk) and this post is actually a letter to another religious Catholic.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

Having followed both Democrat and Republican campaigns closely since the tumult of Primary Season, however, I’d like to take a crack at answering your question about unity if I may. What you asked was, “how and why do you think Obama is the right man at this time in history to lead and heal a nation politically divided?”

The first part of my answer would involve advancing a question of my own: are you sure you’ve got the right verb? I suspect that those people who believe most in Obama’s potential are driven more by their emotions than by their intellects. For them, in other words, it is not a matter of thinking he can unite the rest of us; it is a matter of feeling or intuiting so…

What I think supports the “feeling rather than thinking” hypothesis are endorsements of Obama from such public intellectuals as law professor Doug Kmiec and contrarian pundit Christopher Hitchens. These are people who make their living in the idea trade, yet if you scrutinize their endorsements, what you find in the end are appeals to emotion rather than to logic (people who don’t make their living in the idea trade don’t even keep up the pretense of appealing to logic where Obama is concerned– he’s “change we need,” and never mind asking why or how).

The recipient of the letter actually posts a comment following the analysis, and his comment also deserves to be read. Quote-worthy:

…I suspect many are using their prodigious intellects to talk themselves into where their hearts have already taken them. I know this from personal experience. Back when I was a Democrat voter (but no longer a radical leftist), I would listen to Jesse Jackson and be moved almost to tears. Then, a day or two later, I would think about it and realize: he didn’t say much, and what he did say I don’t really agree with. I then had the sense, in hindsight, that I had been charmed. (’Snookered’ would be a less charitable way of putting it). I had allowed myself (lemming-like or cobra-like, take your pick) to be enchanted into an state that felt good, emotionally and even physically — happy brain chemicals were flowing.

I find two things interesting in all this: 1) religious people are accused of falling into the same trap, and 2) the social effect of individuals being charmed is self-magnifying — again, for good or for ill. I don’t think we can or should deny that some of the same mechanisms are at work in each case (we’re all human). We should observe however, that it’s different if said belief/religion is empirically true, demonstrably rooted in history, physics, documentary evidence, eyewitness testimony, and the confirmation of one’s own emotions — e.g., about babies being precious creatures.)

All worth reading. Enjoy.

I know this is a bit highbrow, but I’m just tickled by the thought: if I am because I think, what happens if I stop thinking?

For those of you who are not students of philosophy, “Cartesian” refers to the philosophy of Rene Descartes, who famously kicked off Rationalism as a system of thought with the dictum, “I think, therefore I am.”

Image from the folks at mathematicianspictures.com, who have quite a few other highbrow quips on mugs and t-shirts. I guess they’re committed to giving geeks a better look.

This is for those who wondered if Obama’s mention of the redistribution of wealth was just a verbal flub, not an accidental exposure of his core principles.

The following is a clip from a radio interview of Barack Obama on Chicago Public Radio from 2001, a mere 7 years ago. Obama is doing what he does best, analyze social change as an academic. He’s discussing how best to achieve the redistribution of wealth in America to achieve economic “justice” for black Americans. The video is roughly 4 minutes long, with text emphasis that really does a good job of emphasizing the important parts. Don’t just listen, watch it.

I noted in Barbara West’s interview of Joe Biden, in which a liberal finally gets treated like conservatives routinely get treated by news reporters (and whines about it), that Biden’s response to her question regarding the similarity between Marxism and Obama’s intent to distribute wealth was “Is this a joke?” followed by “I don’t see how any rational person could believe that.” Well, Sen. Biden, here’s how… in case you really couldn’t figure it out. Of course, that entire interview was Orwellian doublespeak. I didn’t think it would be possible for the level of dishonesty among liberals to increase, but the ongoing Obama fraud has managed it. Impressive, and very sad.

A little review, for those of us who haven’t had to think our way through why Marxism is wrong in a long time:

In order to call it “economic justice” when the government takes money earned by person A and gives it to person B, you have to assume 1) that wealth genuinely belongs to the government, which decides who’s permitted to have it, how much of it, and under what circumstances; 2) that there exists an inherent right to possess wealth that exists independent of personal effort, worth, ability to produce, or character; and 3) that person A can only obtain wealth for himself at the expense of person B (otherwise, why would person B’s lack of wealth be “unjust?”). This eliminates any concept of private property, and private property is the economic idea on which American liberty is built. It arises from the notion that human beings answer ultimately to God rather than to other human beings, and that the thing that makes human life worth living is the liberty to do what one’s conscience demands, without impediment from either religious institutions or governments. Do away with the concept of private property, and you’ve done away with individual liberty. (Author adds: it seems to me that the Marxist notion of justice is simply a sophisticated version of the toddler’s whine, “that’s not fair!”)

By contrast, we assert that property belongs to the individual who earned it, that the government has no inherent right to it, that no other individual has any inherent right to it either. We believe that charity, while a personal and religious imperative, is an imperative to the individual, not to the government, and that charity by taxation constitutes oppression. We further believe that wealth can be created, that when person A creates wealth for himself, he is not reducing the amount of wealth available for person B, but rather creating an example that person B, by following it, could produce wealth for himself. Taking money or property from A against his will and giving it to B is not “justice,” it’s “theft.” This is true regardless of whether the legislature, the court, or the executive approves it. It’s theft by virtue of the act itself, and no governmental activism has the power to change universal morals.