Squaring the Culture

Author’s Note: news released shortly after I published this article revealed that the reported objections were raised by a pair of economists. My use of the descriptive noun “scientists” for the authors of the suppressed opinion was therefore a little misleading. I apologize for the inaccuracy.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute on Friday released internal email obtained from the National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE), an office of the EPA, indicating that scientists within the NCEE have raised serious objections to EPA’s findings that human-generated CO² is causing climate change, and that the opinions of these scientists have been suppressed. This makes President Obama’s claim to be restoring scientific integrity to policy-making appear to have been rhetoric only.

Last April, the US Supreme Court decided the case of Massachusetts v EPA, finding that the EPA did have authority to regulate CO² emissions under the 1977 Clean Air Act (I discussed their finding and the EPA’s response here.) Obeying Clean Air Act guidelines, the EPA is required to show a reasonable expectation that the named pollutant will create a danger to the general public before they can issue regulations. They provided support for their intended rule-making in a Technical Support Document (hereafter “Endangerment TSD” or simply “TSD”) based primarily on the IPCC’s fourth public report (see the latest version of the TSD here.) The public comment period on the endangerment investigation lasted from April 24, 2009 to June 23, 2009 (see their request for public comment here.)

There have been several responses to the request for public comment, which I will discuss in a separate article. However, the one released by the Competitive Enterprise Institute is remarkable because it emanated from within the EPA itself, and because the author’s supervisor refused to forward it to the EPA’s office of Air and Radiation, which was reviewing critiques of the Endangerment TSD. The author of the critique was forbidden by his supervisor from discussing the Endangerment TSD with anybody outside the department, and ordered not to spend any more EPA time on climate change. The memos can be seen here.

Recall that one of the repeated complaints by Democrats and progressives throughout the Bush administration was that the Bush administration was conducting a war against science. The bulk of their objections had to do with administrative decisions within the Executive branch not to publish internal discussion that was inconsistent with the decided policy of the administration (see my blog post here regarding Rep. Henry Waxman’s report on the matter.) Of course, none of this restricted actual science in any way; but Democrats kept insisting that it did, even to the extent that President Obama publicly declared that his administration would reverse the backward ways of the Bush administration and “use sound, scientific practice instead of dogma” to form federal policy. President Obama’s newly appointed head of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, declared:

“As Administrator, I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.” (See her statement published Jan. 23, 2009.)

Naturally, since they claimed that the Bush administration’s practice of presenting only the findings that supported their official policy position constituted “a war against science,” we should expect that the Obama EPA would publish the opinions of all scientists, whether they agree with the official policy or not. This is not what was done. In fact, once it became clear that the scientists in question disagreed with the official position, they were immediately directed to projects outside of the arena of climate change, and forbidden to speak with outsiders concerning the Endangerment TSD. The EPA clearly is not living up to the lofty standard set by President Obama regarding placing science above “dogma” or ideology.

In the past I have defended the government’s refusal to publish as official policy the opinions of scientists who held opinions contrary to that of their administration. The EPA, after all, is a public policy agency, not solely a scientific organization, and it reports to the President; when the EPA controls the public statements of its employees and sees to it that they are consistent with administration policy, it is just doing its job.

However, the Obama administration and the Democratic party in general have long since made it clear that they do not regard this behavior as acceptable when conducted by the opposition party, so it is appropriate to hold them to the standard they have set for their opponents. Furthermore, the EPA did not merely refuse to publish the scientist’s contrary opinion, it refused to forward it to an agency that was actively soliciting public comment, forbade the author from performing further study on the subject, and slapped a gag order on him. This is a much more serious suppression of science than anything we saw under the Bush administration’s EPA.

The muzzled scientists, Alan Carlin and John Davidson of NCEE, objected to the Endangerment TSD on the grounds that EPA had spent too little attention critiquing the IPCC’s AR4 document on which the TSD was based (see a draft of their comments here.) They complained that the document was based on science no later than 2005, that more recent, peer-reviewed publications had thrown doubt onto the conclusions of that document, and that therefore the EPA’s official position was not based on sound, scientific information. They cited six separate findings that had become accepted after the IPCC closed its evaluation for its AR4 report:

• Global temperatures continue to trend downward following 1998, while atmospheric CO² continues to rise;
• The general consensus on Atlantic hurricane behavior has changed so that growth in hurricane activity is no longer expected;
• Recent evidence has shown that Greenland is not, in fact, in the process of shedding its ice;
• The current recession has already unexpectedly reduced greenhouse gas emissions;
• A 2009 paper demonstrates that contrary to IPCC model assumptions, the feedbacks from atmospheric CO² on climate are negative rather than positive, rendering those models useless;
• A 2009 paper demonstrates that the IPCC used faulty data when it dismissed solar irradiation as a direct source of climate change, and asserts that nearly 70% of climate change can be attributed directly to solar variations.

In addition to the comments arising from research that has appeared since submissions to the IPCC’s last report were closed in 2005, Carlin and Davidson observe that there are several data that were available even before that time that have been ignored by the EPA and the IPCC, for which explanations are required. They are:

• By far the best explanation for global temperature fluctuations is the combined effects of ocean temperature fluctuations produced by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO,) the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO). The EPA and IPCC simply ignore this data;
• There exists a strong correlation between solar sunspot activity and irradiance and global temperatures that is not explored in the TSD;
• Changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels show absolutely no effect on satellite-based global temperature readings;
• Changes in global surface temperature readings are more likely to be the result of increasing urban heat island effects than they are to be the result of greenhouse gas forcings;
• The 1998 temperature peak could easily be explained by things other than greenhouse gases, notably by a 1997-1998 El Nino occurrence.

The scientists conclude:

These inconsistencies are so important and sufficiently abstruse that in our view EPA needs to make an independent analysis of the science of global warming rather than adopting the conclusions of the IPCC and CCSP without much more careful and independent EPA staff review than is evidenced by the Draft TSP. Adopting the scientific conclusions of an outside group such as the IPCC or CCSP without thorough review by EPA is not in the EPA tradition anyway, and there seems to be little reason to change the tradition in this case. If their conclusions should be incorrect and EPA acts on them, it is EPA that will be blamed for inadequate research and understanding and reaching a possibly inaccurate determination of endangerment. Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.

Of course, since the Obama administration can increase its power, influence, and the likelihood of future Democratic victories by imposing total economic controls in the name of climate science, it is probable that it does not care very much whether the current hypothesis actually fits the available data. After all, if humans are not heating the atmosphere, then President Obama cannot save the planet. That would be disappointing, and would stop him from running the entire economy, which seems to be his goal.

American Conservative Union just emailed me and said they’d heard that Speaker Pelosi has postponed debate on HR 2454, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. This is excellent news; it means she counted her votes and didn’t think she had enough to pass.

Please, call your representative right now and urge him or her to vote “No” on HR 2454. We need to ratchet up the pressure to make sure this anchor does not sink the US economy into the ocean.

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UPDATE: HR 2454 passed the House by a vote of 219 “yea” to 212 “no” at around 7:15 PM EDT. Eight Republicans voted in favor of the measure, while 44 Democrats voted against it. The bill will now move to the Senate, where plenty of pork will likely be added; there may be additional opportunities to stop this disastrous legislation in the Senate.

The eight Republicans who voted for the measure were Reps. Mary Bono Mack (CA), Mike Castle (DE), Steven Kirk (IL), John McHugh (NY), Leonard Lance (NJ), Frank LoBiondo (NJ), Dave Reichert (WA), and Chris Smith (NJ).

I found this on The Anchoress this afternoon, and had to post it myself.

The kids on this video began singing to their mother, who was in a coma from a head-on collision. Eight months later, here they are on America’s Got Talent. Listen:

Ironically, what we’re seeing here is both the best and the worst of America. The virtue at the heart of the story is the children singing to their mother, and to others in the hospital. The vice is the pit into which talented children like this might fall if they take the media-amplified adulation to heart. The recent death of the immensely talented, immensely troubled Michael Jackson highlights this ugly downside to American consumerism; he bought the entire glittery package, and attained the peak of stardom. What did it profit him, in the end? He died young, twisted, in trouble, and alone, an object of pity.

Ultimately, America is about people hitching what little they have to the grace of God, in order to bless the people they love, like these kids did. The fame, wealth and adulation are just icing, and you can die from eating too much icing.

The inmates may be running (and ruining) the asylum for now, but the heart of America is not dead. It gives me hope that what we’re facing is not death, but chastisement. The true America will rise again. God bless America.

According to NRO on Wednesday and the New York Times yesterday, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill may contain a clause that forces the President to impose stiff tariffs on imports from any nation that does not restrict carbon emissions the way we do.

A stiff tax on carbon emissions in the US will encourage producers to move their facilities to nations that have friendlier policies toward producers. In order to prevent the exodus of still more of America’s productive capacity, the bill’s authors reportedly added language that requires the President to impose carbon tariffs on carbon-intensive imports from countries that fail to institute emission-reduction measures that are at least 80% as costly as ours.

So, not only will cap-and-trade oppressively and regressively tax the American people into poverty, it will initiate trade wars with China and India, who are not about to stifle their own, new-found prosperity to mollify preening environmental busybodies.

Of course, the tariff measure, which certainly will not work, constitutes the Democrats’ admission that they know perfectly well that a US cap-and-trade measure will increase rather than reduce global carbon, by shifting production to less efficient producers overseas.

Apart from the sheer insanity of willfully demolishing our own productivity over environmental concerns that have already fallen into scientific disrepute, the hypocrisy of the measure takes one’s breath away. Leftists have been lecturing us for decades about how arrogant it is of America to dictate moral behavior to the rest of the world (meaning, how dare we defend liberty?) The moment they took office, they sent their shame-faced emissaries to bow and plead forgiveness from every foreign court — and now, within 6 months, they are proposing ham-fisted tariffs to force foreign governments into engaging in radical environmentalism, which everybody recognizes as a leisure game for the rich.

We should force Democrats to state the matter plainly. They have no objection to America dictating morals to the rest of the world, to the entire universe, or even to God Himself, so long as the morals being enforced are theirs. Their objection is not to arrogance, but simply to America deigning to defend virtues to which they, the Originators of All Things Blissful and Harmonious, do not agree. How dare we disagree with them!

John Hinderaker at PowerLine reports that in order to secure the necessary votes to pass the measure, Speaker Pelosi has struck deals with farm state Democrats to add protections for ethanol. Thus, it gets even better; to crushing the economy and initiating a world-wide trade war, we now add starving the poor of Africa! No price too high to save the planet from .07 degrees of warming (their estimate, and not a scientifically sound one). Just so long as Nancy gets her taxpayer-funded private jet, and Barry and Michelle, their wagyu beef.

Hinderaker also notes that we don’t know for sure whether this measure made it to the final bill, because, typical of governance by Democrats, the Speaker is eager to pass this legislation before anybody has a chance to read the whole thing. No, I’m not kidding.

Q and O offers a good set of supporting links, and Volokh astutely draws parallels to Smoot-Hawley from the Depression years.

And for a little gallows humor, here’s South Park writers Matt and Trey explaining their “Smug Alert” episode about preening enviros. In the episode, all the characters close their eyes when they explain how they’re saving the environment; Matt and Trey insist that people really do this in San Fransisco and LA. Unbelievable. Multiple F-bomb warning, but the stench of the enviro’s self-satisfaction is truly more obscene than the language here.

We are SO screwed…

Congress will be voting tomorrow on H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade scheme. This is a permanent energy tax that will, in fact, cripple the US economy, extending the current downturn into the foreseeable future. Proponents are touting a Congressional Budget Office estimate that says the cost will be minimal, but the Heritage Foundation explains why their estimates grossly underestimate the costs and completely ignore the depressing impact that an energy tax will have on the economy.

American Solutions has a petition that we should all sign, expressing our general opposition to any cap-and-trade system or energy tax.

Two factors that I’ve discussed frequently on this blog come into play:

(1) The alternatives to fossil fuels are not ready for prime time. The evidence of this is that nobody will touch them without enormous subsidies, which means they do not believe they can make a profit at current energy prices. By this we know that a tax sufficient to force producers to build alternative-technology electrical generating capacity will necessarily drive our electricity rates through the roof; they will not work unless fossil-fuel-generated electricity costs more than alternative-generated electricity — which we already know costs so much that producers won’t touch it without huge subsidies. Worse, even with artificially high fossil-fuel prices and ridiculous subsidies, fossil fuels will continue to provide most of our energy for at least the next 35 years, and more likely longer. If you want to read what I’ve written about energy alternatives and their readiness for use, click the topic “Energy” under the Topical Index on my sidebar, or click here.

(2) Switching away from fossil fuels will accomplish exactly nothing. Not only is it the case that the best estimates of the reductions in CO² by America implementing cap-and-trade are not sufficient to stop any significant warming; it is the case that current science has pretty much demolished any defense of the notion that humans are causing the climate to heat enough to cause any damage. There remains not a shred of observable evidence suggesting that humans are heating the planet more than a few fractions of a degree, and the returns from NASA’s Aqua satellite demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the earth responds to increases in CO² by generating more cloud cover, cooling the earth to counteract greenhouse warming. Not only that, but theorists studying the effect of solar flares on cloud formation predict 25 years of cooling, and the earth has not experienced any warming in the last 11 years. If you want to read what I’ve written about climate change, click the topic “Climate Science” under the Topical Index on my sidebar, or click here.

Thus, Waxman-Markey engages bad economics in an attempt to calm fears caused by obsolete science.

Please sign the petition, then call your Congressman and tell him to vote “No” on H.R. 2454.

Aren’t you glad the Democrats control Congress?

I punctuated my morning scan of the headlines with an obscenity after reading this headline referring to Gov. Mark Sanford’s admission of an extramarital affair, from the Washington Times:

Social conservatives fall from moral high ground

This is a “moderate” Republican publication displaying its distaste for the fact that social conservatives still hold some influence in the Republican party. Their first reaction is the reaction of the worst moral pariahs in the world: “Good, we can rub it in the faces of those who remind us that we have moral responsibility. We hate moral responsibility, we hate being reminded that we have it, and we especially hate the person who dares to remind us. So when one of them demonstrates that they’re fallen just like the rest of us, we can use that to shut them up!”

We hear this same baloney every time a social conservative commits a sin.

Look, Sanford chose to be a scumbag. He enjoyed his little distraction for 8 years while his wife raised his four boys and ran his campaigns for him. He does not deserve her. He does deserve whatever pain and trouble this is about to cause him. His wife and boys deserve our compassion. Gov. Sanford does not deserve our compassion, but we owe it to him anyway, because every one of us is a sinner capable of similar misbehavior or worse, and we have all received compassion from God.

But when I hear somebody, especially somebody from my own party, using the ruin of a family and a promising career to sully the reputations of others who have not similarly fallen, in an attempt to silence voices advocating moral behavior, I have to suppress the urge to break noses.

Wearily I suppress the urge, and wearily I drag out my lecture regarding why it is not just important, it is required, it is essential, it is indispensable, to articulate ordinary morality in the public hearing loudly and often, why the fact that every one of us who does so is human and fallible does not suggest that we should stop, and why we cannot, ever, under any excuse, for any reason, condone treating sexual license, or any other moral failing for that matter, as though it was some small thing.

The survival of civilization rests on the clear articulation of moral standards. Without them, we die.

There are, no doubt, plenty of folks who preach morals out a self-satisfied arrogance, but they don’t represent the best, or even the bulk, of moral teaching; they’re an aberration. Much more common, and more representative of the Christian West, are those who recognize morals as the necessary bulwark against their own barbarism. We denounce adultery because we know how very easy it is for anyone, including ourselves, to fall into it. We denounce theft because we know, ourselves, what it is like to be tempted to take what is not ours. We denounce revenge because we have felt the urge to exact it. We train our children diligently to play fair, tell the truth, work hard, set goals, because we know how natural it is to cheat, lie, avoid work, and wander aimlessly. We react harshly to these things because civilization comes unglued if we relax and excuse them.

Every time somebody who stands for virtue publicly gets caught in some moral failing, the hyenas and baboons screech, howl, and bay about how anybody who defends public morality must be, likewise, a hypocrite. The argument seems to be that in order for a person advocate public morals, one must feel holier than the general population.

This is vicious nonsense, but a very specific sort of vicious nonsense. It is the rationalization of those who secretly, in their heart of hearts, think of themselves as less holy than the general population. It is the self-defensive anger of those who have chosen to excuse immoral behavior in themselves, and feel the finger of accusation pointed at them. What they do not realize is that the finger pointing at them is their own. “The wicked flee when no one pursues,” says Solomon in the Proverbs. Guilty consciences lash out.

It is easy and appealing to react with compassion to those who fall; after all, it might be us next. Compassion is appropriate, but there has to be a stiff price tag on self-indulgence, because every one of us is capable of it. Civilization hangs together on the common agreement that yes, we’re barbarians, but we’re not going to act like barbarians today. We’re going to behave better than that, because we all benefit when we do. And we’re going to exact a price from those who give in and act like barbarians today, because we want to make sure that we all make the same, common agreement tomorrow.

I feel genuinely sorry for Governor Sanford. I feel a great deal worse for his wife and children, who are the primary victims here. But I am not sorry he was exposed, and I am not sorry his career will suffer. Civilization is better off when the Mark Sanfords pay a stiff price for their moral failings.

I will feel even better when Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Ted Kennedy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Shumer, Sen. Chris Dodd, Sen. Harry Reid, Rep. Jack Murtha, and a number of others suffer publicly for their publicly-exposed incivilities as well. But so long as only one party in American politics sees the need for enforcing civilization among its own, we’ll just have to make do with that.

There will always be those among the righteous who fall short of it themselves; and their advocacy of righteousness, even when violating it in private, is a better protection against human barbarity than is the facile indulgence of those choose to excuse their own lapses by pretending that morals do not exist. I feel far less contempt for hypocrites like Sanford than I feel for the hyenas who avoid hypocrisy by abandoning morals altogether.

The Washington Times can go pound sand.

As for Gov. Sanford, I’m very disappointed. He was my choice for John McCain’s running mate a year ago; he has governed well, and had promise. My condolences to his wife and sons; I will pray for them. However, I have to echo Michelle Malkin’s sentiments, coming, as they do, from a married woman who feels the betrayal in her gut:

If you can’t honor your marriage vows, how can you expect voters to trust you to honor your damned oath of office?

Idiot.

The bulk of this essay was reproduced from an earlier essay written after the resignation of Rep. Mark Foley in 2006, before this blog was launched publicly. The original article can be found here.

In previous installments (the most recent of which was quite a while ago, I’m afraid), 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);
• that using the Cosmological Argument, the scientific fact that our universe had a beginning establishes that something like a Theistic God must exist (see the post here);
• that using the Teleological Argument, the anthropic principle establishes that the universe was designed for life, which requires a designer something like a Theistic God (see the post here).

Of the roughly 20 arguments I’ve seen for the existence of God, a large number key on some part of life that is vital but non-physical — justice, consciousness, reason, morality — and argue that this cannot be explained by naturalistic causes. Each has its particular quirks, but they all say the same thing: the world we live in does not look in any way like a world that would arise if it were not intended by a being who cares about the things we care about, or who somehow embodies that issue. Human beings use reason, infer meaning, are ruled by morality, seek justice, and in general behave as though the universe demands a reasoned, moral, purposeful life. There is no purposiveness, no meaning, no “ought” in mere chemical interactions; there is only what is. The most likely explanation for the appearance that life needs meaning is that it does, and this requires a primary, personal agent from Whom all meaning, justice, reason, or consciousness arises.

The moral argument is the simplest of these, but they are all inherently difficult to grasp. Most of the objections to them indicate that the critic simply has not thought through the implications of the fact that we actually think there exists such a thing as morality, for instance. I think this is because morality is something easy to take for granted. It’s so much a part of our lives, both conscious and unconscious, that it takes a serious effort to imagine a universe without automatically assigning morality a role, as though it were an inevitable part of any physical universe; and yet, if there is no God, there’s no particular reason for anything to arise aside from what simply is. This applies to morality, and the same applies for justice, reason, consciousness, and the rest.

The Moral Argument

The moral argument is simple in syllogistic form: Any law requires a law-giver; there is a universal moral law; therefore, there must be an ultimate, universal law-giver.

By “law,” I mean something more like legislation than like a natural law. When we speak of natural laws, we mean that we’ve observed that physical elements in our surroundings behave in a certain way consistently. Bodies on the earth tend to move toward the center of the earth, so we give it a name — gravity — and call it a law, because things behave this way. However, there is no moral “ought” to gravity, or entropy, or enthalpy. These laws simply describe what is. We might say of an anomalous result, “That ought not to do that,” but what we mean is that it is unusual and inconsistent with expected results, not that it’s morally wrong. If we’re being whimsical, we can imagine a world in which the “laws” are different, and while that world might be more or less convenient than ours, we don’t regard that difference as meaningful apart from convenience. From a point of view before the singular explosion that began our universe and created time, space, and nature, the laws of nature were arbitrary; they could have been anything, and the universe would have been neither more moral, nor less moral.

Moral laws are different. They describe our feelings about how things ought to be. They say “this is better than that,” and by “better” we mean something very different from “more common” or “more consistent,” or even “more convenient” or “more functional.” We actually mean “praiseworthy,” and we think that such praise matters, although we also assert that doing the thing we call “good” is infinitely more important than receiving praise for it. We mean that there are certain rules regarding how people are supposed to treat each other, and that a person who does not adhere to those rules is something worse than merely defective. People who obey the moral law deserve praise; people who ignore it, deserve condemnation.

Three characteristics of the concept of moral law in the last paragraph need emphasis.

The first is that they apply only to entities that possess a will. We don’t assign moral laws to inanimate objects. We don’t praise the moral virtue of a rock for falling toward the center of the earth, nor do we condemn a yucca plant as a malicious enemy for piercing our finger (we might praise their utility or denounce their inconvenience, but that’s not morality.) Morality belongs to those who can make conscious choices.

We don’t even hold people responsible for morals if they’re simple or incapacitated for some reason. Selfish toddlers are not regarded as evil, they’re just too young to know better. My wife has worked with head-injured adults who have lost the ability to control certain impulses, and while these people often do things that are inappropriate and offensive, nobody regards them as morally defective. By their physical incapacity, they’ve fallen short of the exalted status that is conferred by their behavior having an “ought”; their behavior simply is what it is, like gravity, and we pity them for it. They can’t help it. Morals are about those who can help it.

The second characteristic is that it’s not just about utility, but seems rather to be about pleasing someone or something greater than ourselves. The closest we can come to the feeling is from our childhood, when we do a chore without being asked and think “Mom will be pleased with me for doing this.” Naturally, we’re not children anymore, and the impulse to do moral good feels like something more consequential than just making Mom smile, but there’s something about doing moral good that feels like we’re pleasing an overarching parent, as though the universe relaxes a little and feels better. Whom, exactly, are we pleasing?

The third characteristic of morality is that nearly all of us choose against it sometimes. In this it is completely unlike laws of nature. A law of nature is called that because physical objects always behave in a certain manner. A moral law is called that because most of us agree that people ought to behave in a certain manner but very often do not.

Morals Are Universal

In fact, this is one of the ways we know the moral law is universal — we all make excuses for our bad behavior. We would not feel the urge to do that if we did not feel that certain behavior needed excusing. To whom are we directing our excuses? Why do we imagine that it matters what others think of certain types of behavior? When we are doing right, helping someone helpless, for example, we don’t feel the need to explain even if some find fault with us; it is easy to dismiss nay-sayers when we’re doing good. When we’re doing bad, though, we feel the need to excuse ourselves even if we’re surrounded by people who approve of what we’re doing. The hoodlum who throws a brick through a store window may be joined by friends who would never mention that he ought not do it, but he still feels the inner impulse to explain or excuse his behavior — “He’s been cheating the community for years, he’s rich and can afford it, we’re the ones who have needs,” and so forth.

Everybody agrees that certain people are good, and other certain people are bad. Jesus, good; The Rev. Jim Jones, bad. Albert Schweitzer, good; David Berkowitz, bad. Mother Teresa, good; Adolf Hitler, bad. There are some disagreements over which category some figures belong in — there are those who dismiss Mother Teresa, for instance, because she was not poor at the end of her life — but those are disagreements over facts, not denials of the moral law.

Whenever we make assessments like those, we necessarily call on some inner notion of what true morality looks like. If a map-maker shows us two maps of Idaho and asks which is a better representation of the true state we call Idaho, we would not be able to answer unless we had knowledge of what Idaho truly looks like. If we have a clear concept of the real Idaho, then we can compare representations of Idaho and say which is closer to the real thing. It’s the same with morals; if we can compare two individuals and agree that one represents moral behavior while the other does not, we must have a concept of what true morality looks like.

Immediately one might object that we’re all taught morals when we’re children, and that these reflect a cultural norm. This is partly true, but not relevant. We are also taught multiplication tables when we’re young, but multiplication tables are universal. The fact that we need to be taught does not imply that what we’re being taught is not universal. And furthermore, children do not need to be taught that morals exist, they need to be taught to obey them. They already know what’s right and wrong; anybody who’s raised a child, and watched a six-month-old reach toward something forbidden while looking over their shoulder to see if Mom is watching, knows that the kid was born knowing “ought,” and choosing not to obey it. For that matter, anybody who’s heard a child whine, “That’s not fair!” knows that kids have a sense of justice; where did this notion of “fair” come from? Kids don’t need to be taught morals from scratch, they need their innate sense of morality trained to maturity.

The indication that the moral laws are universal lies in the fact that all cultures in history have held more or less the same standards, in gross terms. There is no place where murder has been considered virtue and gratitude has been considered vice. There are different emphases in different cultures, and different cultural implementations (honoring the aged looks different in Afghanistan than in Indiana) but the basic rules are the same everywhere — don’t take innocent life, don’t steal the property of others, honor the aged, care for your own family, be loyal to your friends, seek wisdom. Even most of our contemporary moral disagreements actually amount to quibbles over which evils are tolerable, and which are intolerable. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

Let’s summarize: moral laws apply only to conscious, choosing agents like ourselves. We all know they exist; we all agree pretty much regarding what they are. And yet, we often ignore the moral law, making excuses for doing so; the excuses prove we know the rules. When we do good, we feel like we’re pleasing something greater than ourselves; when we do wrong, we feel the need to explain ourselves.

This combination of features — moral rules that are universal, apply only to conscious acts of the will, which are not our natural inclination, and which matter to something or someone greater — requires that the law exist outside of ourselves. We are aware of it, sometimes keenly so, but it does not emanate from us; it’s imposed on us from outside of ourselves. Consequently, the moral argument posits a final Moral Agent from which all our morals emanate. That is really all it takes to prove the argument. The logic is simple, and the only question of fact among the premises — “Does a universal moral law exist?” — is more or less self-evident.

Did Morality Evolve?

It’s at this point, however, that the misunderstandings begin.

The first objection that usually occurs is the notion that morality has evolved. There’s a good deal of research regarding the progress of moral understanding among humans, and social anthropologists make a good case for claiming that human understanding of moral behavior has increased in sophistication over the millennia.

I don’t disagree. However, what the people making this objection fail to notice is that it does not refute the argument in any way. They say “It evolved” as though that explains where morals come from; in fact, saying that explains nothing relevant to the moral argument.

To say that morals evolved is to say that they have survival value — survival in the sense that natural selection can operate because moral behavior increases the probability of survival. If they have survival value then they must be somehow intrinsic to the universe.

Let me illustrate by supposing that a tree lizard, by developing a flap of skin between it’s foreleg and hind leg, could reach branches from further away by gliding, and thus improved its ability to escape predators. If such a thing occurred, it occurred only because the laws of aerodynamics already existed; if there were no aerodynamics, the flap of skin would have conferred no advantage. The appearance of the flap of skin did not create the laws of aerodynamics; they were already part of the universe. The flap survived natural selection because it took advantage of something real and useful, something that already existed apart from itself.

Likewise, if moral behavior actually improves survivability in such a way that natural selection can work, it must be conforming to something that already exists in the universe, apart from the evolving creature. The evolving behavior does not create morality, it conforms to it, in the same way that the lizard’s flap of skin conforms to the rules of aerodynamics. Thus, the evolution of morality actually proves that the moral laws have always been what they are, and that what is evolving is nothing more than our ability to take advantage of them.

There are additional problems with the idea that morality evolved, though. For one thing, there’s no plausible path from “is” to “ought;” they’re unrelated concepts. The mere survival value of a behavior says nothing about whether it’s right or wrong. Without a moral law, even survival itself is nothing more than a preference, and is no different from an autonomic urge to satisfy hunger. There is no moral component to survival itself without a moral law. One might imagine a bizarre set of developments that lead to creatures that actually feel that some things ought to be, but those feelings would have no connection to reality unless the moral law was intrinsic to the universe apart from ourselves; it would be no different from satisfying hunger or scratching an itch, and have no real meaning. So the evolution of real morals, morals that truly matter, cannot actually occur; if what we call “morals” evolved in this fashion, then morality is an illusion, and child rape, genocide, and enslaving blacks are as morally proper as loving your spouse, raising your children properly, and working productively.

CS Lewis, in his book “Miracles,” points that the result of the previous paragraph is not strictly fallacious. Logic permits that morals be imaginary. However, Lewis also points out that even those who claim to believe such a thing, behave in such a way as to demonstrate that they do not. People who behave in such a way as to demonstrate that they genuinely believe that morals are an illusion, we call “sociopaths,” and we lock them up. Nobody we consider sane actually behaves as though morals don’t exist. Consequently, it’s proper to dismiss such claims as a philosophical conceit, and not to take them seriously.

It’s also the case that morality does not fit any pattern that has evolved in nature. In fact, many moral laws run exactly contrary to the natural rules of survival. You’ll find practically nobody defending Social Darwinism anymore, because in Nazi Germany it led to behavior that was so obviously and so starkly immoral that it caused the world to recoil in horror. We did some similar things here in America –sterilizing thousands of convicts, for example — and nobody will defend those anymore, either. Survival of the fittest commends killing off those who weaken the gene pool (or allowing them to die off.) Morality commends those civilizations that treat its weakest citizens with the most compassion. Those are opposites. How could our morality possibly have arisen by natural selection, when natural selection itself produces something we consider deeply immoral?

More Misunderstandings

Frequently, when a Christian posits the moral argument for the existence of God, atheists object that this would require that Christians uniformly be more moral than atheists. They then go on to posit all the examples they can remember of Christians behaving in a horrible manner, as though this disproves the moral argument somehow.

This does not disprove the moral argument. The moral argument does not assert, nor does it require, that any specific individual, group, or belief system produce more moral behavior than any other. Quite the contrary, in fact; the argument supporting the existence of a universal moral law makes the claim that everybody knows the moral law, regardless of their beliefs. Atheists know what’s right, just as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, or Druids. Morality is intrinsic to the universe, and everyone sees it. The argument further observes that none of us obey the moral law particularly well, and that’s also true of everybody. So, no, I don’t believe that any particular Christian necessarily behaves better than any particular atheist, and I don’t need to in order to defend the moral argument.

The answer to the follow-up question, “Then what’s the use of religion?”, is beyond the scope of this article. The brief answer is that religion codifies the moral law and expresses it for a culture, but also that religion provides the impetus for us to obey the moral law, something we’re prone not to do otherwise. This is where the question of which group behaves better becomes relevant; it is not relevant to the moral argument for the existence of God, however. The moral argument only observes that there exists no logical explanation for the existence of morality other than that there exists an ultimate author of morals. There can be no law without a law-giver.

Ultimately, the atheist has to believe that morality arose out of chemical interactions that have no intrinsic “ought” to them. Logically, this requires that morality is simply an illusion, but atheists uniformly assert next that it’s a useful illusion, and one they won’t dispute. They want it both ways; no God to assert moral requirements on us, but moral requirements exist on their own (even though they don’t mean anything.) I scratch my head, and wonder why anybody would consider that sort of finagling more plausible than an ultimately moral God from Whom morality flows.

Next will be a summation of the arguments proving the existence of God.

The topic today is the Public Option portion of President Obama’s health care plan, the part that offers government insurance as an alternative to private insurance. However, the title gives away my subtext: it appears that they plan deliberately to sabotage private insurance.

For years, Rush Limbaugh’s been saying that liberals choose policies that keep poor people dependent on them, in order that they have a ready supply of dupes to support their candidates. I’ve never believed this was true. It’s too cynical. I want to think that most leftists (I also disagree with Limbaugh’s nomenclature) sincerely believe that what they’re advocating is the best policy, however wrong-headed their choices.

It appears, however, that the Public Option is actually, deliberately engineered to undermine private insurance, while pretending simply to provide an additional option. Verum Serum patched together a frightening video laying out the strategy, which showed up on Jim Blazic’s blog about a week ago. Listen:

This is rather stark, and frankly shocking. The Congress is apparently plotting with the President to ruin perfectly legal businesses, with an eye toward producing a crisis that will permit them to finally produce a single-payer solution, with the government as sole guarantor.

Ed Morrissey, writing for the American Issues Project, articulated the core of the plan yesterday in an informative article called Three Dirty Little Secrets of the Public Health-Care Plan. He’s right about the first two secrets. The Public Option works only because the government can compete unfairly, and can set prices at a level that forces private insurers to subsidize their competition.

This is what the government has been doing all along with Medicare and Medicaid: the prices they’ll pay do not actually cover the doctor’s costs, so doctors are forced to pass their losses on as higher charges for other services. The government can do this because doctors can be forced to take Medicare and Medicaid patients, and because government medical payments, federal and state combined, exceed all private individual and insurance payments; they already have enormous market power. This is an unspoken reason for the rise in medical costs; it’s at least in part a distortion produced by government price controls, initiated through Medicare and Medicaid.

Morrissey appears to be wrong, however, about his third secret. They seem to know precisely what they’re doing, at least insofar as it undercuts private insurers. They may not understand that the supply of doctors will dry up as soon as the profession ceases to be a decent source of profit; he could be correct about that part. Human nature somehow eludes progressives.

Verum Serum noted yesterday that the President flatly denies that the Public Option has anything to do with trying to force a single-payer system:

In the past week the President of the U.S. and his Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have both publicly denied that the public plan is intended in any way to be a trojan or stalking horse for a single-payer system. The President went so far as to claim that anyone who says this is lying.

We’ve heard enough of Obama’s denials to know what that means. When there’s no serious threat, Obama always opts for the diplomatic middle. It is only when some hidden truth is being aired that he takes a strongly partisan stand, in this case calling his critics “liars.” Beginning with the Reverend Wright incident and progressing through a dozen or more reruns, this has become a near-infallible indicator that we’ve touched the heart of the matter.

Jim Geraghty of the National Review has apparently become our unofficial chronicler of President Obama’s Alinsky tactics.

He began a month ago by describing the current administration as “the Alinsky Administration,” explaining that in obedience to his training under Alinsky, Obama’s first obedience is to obtaining power:

Moderates thought they were electing a moderate; liberals thought they were electing a liberal. Both camps were wrong. Ideology does not have the final say in Obama’s decision-making; an Alinskyite’s core principle is to take any action that expands his power and to avoid any action that risks his power.

As conservatives size up their new foe, they ought to remember: It’s not about liberalism. It’s about power. Obama will jettison anything that costs him power, and do anything that enhances it — including invite Rick Warren to give the benediction at his inauguration, dine with conservative columnists, and dismiss an appointee at the White House Military Office to ensure the perception of accountability.

Yesterday he provided another account, this time identifying a troubling tactical pattern arising from the Obama administration: that of attacking the enemy of the moment: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Geraghty correctly notes that this tactic was applied against Jim Cramer, an excitable, boisterous financial prognosticator who attracted derisive and dismissive editorials from the likes of the New York Times, Jon Stewart, and Media Matters — but only so long as he was criticizing the Obama administration’s measures. Once he’d moved on to other topics, they left him alone.

Geraghty notes that we’re seeing the same pattern with the American Medical Association, which is suddenly receiving a flood of vicious attacks from Daily Kos, the Times, Media Matters, and other Progressive groups, painting the AMA as a Washington lobbyist group, a major contributor to the rising costs of medical care, and a relic from the days of the buggy whip.

Why? Simply because the AMA opposes Obama’s national health care proposal.

There are a couple of disturbing elements in this. One is that the resident of the White House, being the President of everybody, traditionally does not assault individual American groups, citizens, or institutions. There have been times when particular critics get addressed directly, as part of an ongoing debate over some topic or other; if that’s what we were seeing, it would be fair enough. It’s not. What we’re seeing, instead, is an attempt at demolishing a reputation in the public’s eyes. This is not debate, although it’s tiresomely typical of leftist speech; it’s character assassination. The President should not engage in it, no matter how badly he wants his agenda implemented.

The second troubling element is the coordination with allegedly independent elements. It’s increasingly obvious that what we’re watching is not legitimate debate from independent commentators, but carefully coordinated propaganda messages emanating from conscious shills of the White House. Media Matters, Daily Kos, Jon Stewart — they all seem to be lending their public positions explicitly to instructions from the White House. If this is not a violation of the law, it ought to be; it’s the stuff of fascist tyrants, and has no place in a free society. Contrary to the childish prating of leftists, there was seldom anything remotely like this from previous Republican administrations, and certainly nothing of the sort of character assassination we’re seeing here.

We have, however, seen this before. Barack Obama is not the first Alinskyite President, he’s the second. The first was William Clinton, who, like Obama, launched character assassination attacks against political opponents through shills. Clinton seldom tried merely to win debates, although he at least maintained an appearance of debating in the public eye. Almost invariably, he simultaneously engaged in character assassination, successfully turning well-meaning patriots like Henry Hyde and Ken Starr into slavering demons in the public eye. Nobody who opposed the Clinton administration escaped with their reputation intact. To this day, Newt Gingrich, arguably the best thinker in the Republican party and one of the most effective Speakers of the House in American history, has trouble being taken seriously as a contender for President because his approval rating was below 20% when he left office, a victim of the Clinton Slime Factory.

We saw plenty of instances of the same approach during the Democratic primary season, from Hillary Clinton (see here, here, and here for starters.) Her supporters now complain of having been the victim of corrupt, hard-ball political thuggery, and they seem to have a case. However, she arguably was simply “hoist with her own petard.”(1) It’s hard to imagine Frau Hillary as an innocent victim in a political sludge match.

We thought it was a reflection of the Clintons’ character. It turns out, instead, to be a reflection of the growing influence of Saul Alinsky among the strategists of the Democratic party. Thanks to Mr. Alinsky, who may be, I fear, experiencing the hospitality of the demonic majesty he once admitted to imitating (he thought he was joking), we are about to learn just how unsafe is the average American citizen, when faced with a chief executive who considers himself unconstrained by Constitutional limits on his power, and who is primarily committed to the expansion and retention of his power. We’re all perfectly safe, just so long as we’re no threat to the President’s personal power. Stand in his way, and we become targets of a great deal more than just the White House. If this doesn’t remind us of something ominous that’s been seen in other countries, we need to think a bit harder.

(1) From Hamlet, by William Shakespeare: “For tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his owne petar”. A petard, or petar, was simply a box filled with gunpowder, used to blow open a gate. To have an engineer “hoist with his owne petar” is what happens when he doesn’t scoot away from the lit bomb quickly enough. Oops.

Picked this up from a friend on facebook, but the photo editing apparently originates at photobucket. Cue the Vader theme…