George W. Bush and Conservatives

George W. Bush is about to leave office. I've read several opinion pieces recently evaluating his presidency. You might be surprised how divided conservative opinion is on the subject. Personally, I'm divided within myself.

Just take a look at Townhall.com's opinion pieces, and you'll find at least two rather scathing reviews of Bush's presidency, one by Pat Buchanan, and another by Steve Chapman, which you can read here and here. On both of their lists for Bush screw-ups: the war and the economy. These are conservatives talking.

The reality is that arguably Bush isnot a conservative, nor ever was. His policy on the economy is conservative only in the sense that he has a strangely unwavering commitment to tax cuts. In every other respect, he has abandoned conservative principles by continuing to spend more and more while accumulating more and more executive power for the sake of his war on terror.

Conservatives can even wonder about his foreign policy. While conservatives are all about national defense, and traditionally believe that a strong military is the only way to deter our opponents from attacking us, Bush's war in Iraq was in many ways an innovation. The concept of "pre-emptive strike" is anything but traditional.

In the end, I think Bush is his own person--he acted according to his own particular vision in response to very unique circumstances (9/11 and so on). Call him arrogant or call him principled; in either case, he's really not traditional.

Where does that leave conservatism, I wonder? I used to consider myself a conservative, but these days I feel that the word "conservative" utterly fails to name any one particular worldview. Of course, I suppose that's what politics is all about, anyway--gathering coalitions of various interests into one party or another. Still, I used to think there was such a logical coherence tying together fiscal conservatism, pragmatic foreign policy, and traditional moral values.

That coherence has all but evaporated in my mind. Perhaps it was enough for me just to discover the diversity of conservative/libertarian thought, but the presidency of George Bush was certainly a catalyst for making me rethink the system I was used to. Bush is an enigma, a radical conservative who is not conservative, a visionary who is not progressive, and for those of us who are generous enough not to just hate him, he is quite a mystery to ponder.

Bush's character is indeed mysterious. I read a transcript of his final press conference. He does seem to have this odd contentment about him, like he's completely satisfied with what he did in office because he thought it was the right thing. You know, for most people we consider that okay, but for the President of the United States there does seem to be something wrong with it. I mean, a whole country's fate was on the line. Still, the man followed his conscience from start to finish. Such people are usually called visionaries when the majority actually agrees with them.

But Bush's approval ratings are just about the lowest they've ever been for an American president, so rather than seeing him as a visionary, many Americans have outright hatred for him. I suppose that's the risk he was willing to take, and he's paying for it. I wonder if, behind the face he wears in public, any of that hatred matters to him.

In any case, he acted on what he thought was right in a time when something had to be done. A new era of global terror has come upon us, and George Bush was the one given the task of deciding how we should approach it. Like it or not, we have to live with the consequences of his bold agenda. I'm not sure I like it.

In the meantime, Democrats will soon gain full control of the government, and conservatives are left wondering what to do next. Personally, I think this is a good thing for conservatives. Maybe this will cause them to think more about political philosophy than about retaining power. Probably not, but hey, it could happen.

As for me, I feel I'm looking at the political landscape from a bit of a distance. I wonder if there's something better on the horizon, perhaps a visionary who has all the idealism of Barack Obama with none of the gross moral errors (such as his views on abortion). I wonder if there is someone who combines a passion for justice with keen economic wisdom and political restraint.

(See, I think I'm too idealistic these days to be truly conservative.)

Anyway, goodbye George W. Bush. You've certainly made your mark.

The Pains of Blogging

So I started writing my last blog post, which you can read here, about a week ago, and so my blog posted it under that date! I wish it would have posted it under Jan. 14, the day it was actually finished, rather than Jan. 6, the day it was started. Oh well. Hopefully if I have any regular readers, they won't get confused. I'm sure it's my fault.

World's First Flying Car

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article5489287.ece

Thanks to Sarah Keckler for the link. Check it out! I'm really excited about it.

On the other hand, it is just a plane old car. :)

Obama Chooses Private School--Well, Duh

So I've heard that Barack Obama is sending his two daughters to Sidwell Friends School, a private school where Chelsea Clinton also received part of her education. And why wouldn't he? He didn't send them to public schools in Chicago, so why would he try out the failing public schools in Washington, D.C.?

Since school choice is one of the most important political issues to me, I thought I'd mention this article by Ed Feulner. In it Feulner rightly points out the irony of Obama's decision.

During his campaign, he vowed, “We cannot be satisfied until every child in America -- I mean every child -- has the same chance for a good education that we want for our own children.” And the best way to give students that chance is to give their parents a choice. If parents were allowed to pick their children’s school (as the Obamas have now done twice), they’d pick the best available school, not merely the one that happens to be in their neighborhood.

...Sadly, candidate Obama seemed to be leaning in the wrong direction. “What I do oppose,” he told the American Federation of Teachers, “is spending public money for private school vouchers. We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools, not throwing our hands up and walking away from them.”

Giving parents and students a choice is not "throwing our hands up and walking away from" public schools. Rather, school vouchers put power in the hands of common people, rather than giving it directly to a corrupt and inefficient public education system.

What we have now, as this site makes clear, is a system in which teachers' unions work politically to maintain the status quo, which is that teachers get public money for doing less than our money is worth. So Barack Obama is really in favor of a system that favors the powerful over the powerless.

School vouchers, however, would still use public money to pay for education, but they would give power to the powerless, choice to those who have no choice. This would create a system in which schools actually have to compete for the money they make, and that would be in the public's best interest.

I do recall a commercial campaign by Lending Tree that said, "When banks compete, you win." When it comes to education, it's just as simple. When schools compete, students win. It frustrates me that Barack Obama would put the interests of teachers' unions before the interests of America's youth, despite what his rhetoric may say.

The Prayers of Lab Rats

It's about time I got back to my reflections on God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stenger. In my last post, I talked about Stenger's arguments against design of the universe. In this post, I turn to perhaps a more concrete topic: prayer.

In Chapter 3 of Stenger's book, entitled "Searching for a World Beyond Matter," Stenger argues against the existence of any non-physical part of the human being and against the effectiveness of prayer. I just want to briefly address his comments on the soul.

I am not sure why Stenger, supposedly arguing against the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, bothers to refute such things as ESP and qi (chi). However, most Christians do believe in some sort of non-physical soul, which supposedly houses the will, certain emotions, and other abstract qualities of a human being.

I just wanted to make the point that this isn't the only possible Christian view. I found a wonderful article by Greg Bahnsen, which you can read here, in which he argues that a Christian can believe that a human is one substance, not two. This is currently the view I hold. I tend not to believe that the soul is a separate substance that exists outside of space and time. I could probably write a whole other post on this subject, but I will let it rest for now.

The real issue I wanted to address is prayer. Stenger wants to argue that prayer is ineffective. In his words, "Surely, with the millions of prayers being submitted daily, totaling billions in recorded history, some obvioulsy verifiable (not just anecdotal) positive evidence should have been found by now!" (p. 94)

Stenger submits as evidence against God's existence some scientific studies on the efficacy of prayer. Let's look at the methodology being used here.

In a three-year clinical trial led by Duke University physicians, the effects of intercessory prayer and other so-called noetic therapies such as music, imagery, and touch therapy were examined for 748 patients in 9 hospitals in the United States. Twelve prayer groups from around the world were involved, including lay and monastic Christians, Sufi Muslims, and Buddhist monks. Prayers were even e-mailed to Jerusalem and placed on the Wailing Wall.
Patients awaiting angioplasty for coronary artery obstruction were selected at random by computer and sent to the twelve prayer groups. The groups prayed for complete recovery of the patients. The clinical trials were double blind: neither the hospital staff nor the patients knew who was being prayed for.
The findings, reported in the journal Lancet, showed no significant differences in the recovery and health between the two groups. (p.99-100)

Apparently, the prayer of a lab rat availeth little.

Now it is important to analyze this critically. Let me just make a brief first pass at these results. First of all, why in the world would God answer prayers that were randomly distributed, healing some patients, and not others, who were involved in the experiment, merely on the basis of a computer's random choice? That hardly seems logical for a loving God to do.

Second, if you're going to study prayer scientifically, don't you have to come up with some definition of prayer? Maybe the people praying in this experiment didn't do it right, even according to their own faith traditions. (I've often wondered if Catholics ever space out during the rosary and do one too many Hail Mary's. No offense to you Catholics out there.)

The point may seem trivial, but then again, if trivial points like this can be made, it throws a wrench in the whole idea of experimenting on prayer. Still, I suppose Christians like me ought to have some sort of explanation of prayer that makes sense in the real wold. What is prayer, anyway, and what does it do?

I am not a theologian, and I can only give an amateur's opinion. However, let me start by saying what I think prayer is not. Prayer is not magic. Now magic can be tested scientifically (and is pretty much always found to be fake), because it is supposed to be pretty mechanical. You speak the right incantations, mix the right weird ingredients, and poof! You get a door that you can paint onto a wall to get inside the castle and save the princess. Or whatever.

Prayer is not magic. In Matthew 6:7-8, Jesus teaches, "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him." Indeed, it appears that Jesus explicitly denies any sort of superstitious understanding of prayer.

What Jesus says next is also of critical importance. It is an outline for true prayer according to Jesus, and we Christians have come to call it "the Lord's Prayer." N. T. Wright has written a beautiful article on "The Lord's Prayer as a Paradigm of Christian Prayer." Wright emphasizes something that I think is absolutely crucial: "the Lord’s Prayer is not so much a command as an invitation: an invitation to share in the prayer-life of Jesus himself."

When we pray as Jesus taught us, we are not simply asking for things we want. We are becoming more and more servants in his kingdom, a kingdom that will save the world. We would all like to have some magical prayer formula to make everything perfect right now, but Jesus never said he had such a thing.

Here's a mystery to chew on for a while: Jesus himself prayed a prayer that was not answered. According to Matthew, he prayed three times in Gethsemane, "My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want." Jesus didn't get what he wanted, but he did get what his Father wanted.

So what is the point of prayer, after all? If it can't really sway God, then why pray?

Perhaps the best answer is that we can only discover the true purpose of prayer by praying. I think it is one of those activities which becomes clearer the more it is done. I believe prayer is a transforming experience, designed to make us more like Christ, which means more like the kind of person God intends us to be. But I know prayer is also more than that; prayers are sometimes answered, and those answers sometimes give us clues about God's purposes.

As with my last post in response to Stenger, for me it all comes down to meaning and purpose. We offer up prayers to God because we are convinced that things in this world matter, and not just to us, but in a very real, cosmic sense. People, events, and the natural world all matter, not just because we experience them, but because God created them.

In Stenger's world, things just happen according to physical laws that have nothing to do with God. The human race as well as the entire world we live in is the product of chance. Events that happen can only teach us to learn the laws of physics better.

But in God's world, events that happen can tell us something about His purposes. Answered prayer is not meant to assure a person that he can control the natural world with his voice. Rather, it is meant to assure a person that history has meaning, and there is hope in sight not just for us, but for the whole world.

Therein lies the simple reason why you can't test prayer in a lab. Science looks for outcomes, but religion looks for meaning in outcomes.

In my mind, the question of whether God exists remains largely a question of whether events in the world have any objective meaning--that is, meaning in a cosmic sense, and not just to us. This is a metaphysical question, and that's part of the reason I disagree with Stenger each time he says science proves there is no God.

Designed or Undesigned--that is the question

As promised several days ago, I'm going to respond to Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis, one piece at a time. In this post, I'll take on chapter 2, 4, and 5, which talk about the issues of evolution, cosmology, and order in the universe.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all share in common the idea that the universe was created and is sustained by God, even though all three religions define God differently. Stenger, in looking for evidence of God, thinks that if God exists, we should be able to find some physical signs that God was involved in creating the universe, and that he is involved in sustaining it. The evidence that he thinks he should see is a place in the development of the universe (especially the development of human life) where natural descriptions are not enough.

Here's one criterion he uses. "In principle," he says, "the creation hypothesis could be confirmed by the direct observation or theoretical requirement that conversation of energy was violated 13.7 billion years ago at the start of the big bang." He goes on:

However, neither observations nor theory indicates this to be have been the case. ... Remarkably, the total energy of the universe appears to be zero. As famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking said in his 1988 best seller, A Brief History of Time, "In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero."

So the universe actually just cancels out, and is really nothing after all. But not, as Francis Schaeffer might put it, nothing nothing. Just nothing with some amazing properties.

Which is a very key point in all of this. In his explanation on why there is something rather than nothing, Stenger fumbles around with the idea that nothingness is less stable than, I suppose, somethingness:

[M]any simple systems of particles are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since "nothing" is as simple as it gets, we cannot expect it to be very stable. It would likely undergo a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent. (emphasis mine)

This is one of those points where I think Stenger can't ignore metaphysics. Indeed, he tries to shrug it off, but it's actually rather painful to watch:

Clearly many conceptual problems are associated with this question. How do we define "nothing"? What are its properties? If it has properties, doesn't that make it something? The theist claims that God is the answer. But, then, why is there God rather than nothing? Assuming we can define "nothing," why should nothing be a more natural state of affairs than something?

Stenger's use of the word natural is basically consistent, referring to things that follow the same basic laws of physics. The problem, of course, is that he sets this at odds with the concept of a creator God, without bothering to delve into any of the relevant metaphysical questions.

Although he uses the word natural consistently, he does not use the word nothing consistently. Indeed, if "nothing" has properties, doesn't that make it something? He asks the question, but never answers it. The kind of nothingness that he claims will spontaneously become something is not, as I mentioned earlier, nothing nothing. To illustrate what I mean, I'll use Schaeffer's words (from He Is There and He Is Not Silent):

Suppose we had a very black blackboard which had never been used. On this blackboard we drew a circle, and inside that circle there was everything that was--and there was nothing within the circle. Then we erase the circle. This is nothing nothing.

In other words, no laws under which it is likely that "nothing" will spontaneously "decay" into "something." No symmetries to say that "nothingness" is perfectly uniform throughout. Nothing nothing has no symmetries, and no asymmetries. There is nothing measurable about it. That is what, I think, you get without a creator. Schaeffer was wise to dwell on this.

Stenger wants to say that the universe came into existence because it had to, and I agree. That is because I don't think God is a piece of the universe that might, in theory, be cut off from it. God is as inescapable as are the laws of the universe and the truths of mathematics. But here we are getting into metaphysics, and I know Stenger hates that. The point I want to stress, though, is that the God of the Bible need not create a universe from "nothing." Rather, in my view, he created the universe from "nothing nothing," that is, He is the source of all reality, not just matter and energy.

The fact that matter and energy always seem to behave themselves is a testament to the divine act of creation. Of course, when we overly anthropomorphize God, it seems silly to think of a guy like you or me trying to keep all those particles in check; but when we shed all of our childish visions of God, we see that the incredible uniformity that underlies all the diversity of the universe is a symptom of there being only one God, a being so other it is literally breathtaking for me to contemplate.

To say that diversity comes from uniformity naturally is not an argument against God, as Stenger thinks it is. Rather, the fact that meaningful diversity comes from beautiful uniformity is a stroke of divine genius (although intelligence, after all, is hard to actually define).

Well, I have already spent a great many words on cosmology. There is more that Stenger has to say about the design of the universe.

In Chapter 2, Stenger talks about evolution, and I really won't go there. I will simply say that I am with Francis Collins on this one, and my comments on cosmology should also apply to evolution. (I've already blogged a little about evolution here.) However, I noticed something in this chapter that Stenger picks up full force in Chapter 5, which is titled, "The Uncongenial Universe."

Basically the argument goes like this. If there were a God who created this world and human beings in his image, then the universe would be well-suited to human life. By empirical evidence, it is not. Therefore, there is no God.

Here is some of the empirical evidence he cites:

1. Our bodies are not as efficient as they could be if they were designed by an engineer (p. 69)
2. The universe is really big, and there is "an awfully large amount of space where humanity will never make an appearance." (p. 156)
3. The universe is really old. (p. 156-7)
4. It would be practically impossible for us to travel to another planet congenial to our form of life. (p. 158-9)
5. Complex organisms such as humans evolve "by famliar, purely reductive physical processes without the aid of any overarching holistic guiding principle." (p. 162)
6. The portion of the universe that is "structured" is very small (p. 162-3)

Point number 5 can be addressed, I think, in the manner I have already dealt with cosmology. All other points are merely statements of the form, "This certainly isn't how I would've designed the universe." Indeed, the idea that God "wasted" space and time (as implied in a subheading of Chapter 5) presupposes that one already has a good idea of how God should have created the universe. Yet that is exactly how Stenger argues; it is more metaphysics than physics, though he doesn't think it is.

Which leads me to one point I can't stress enough to both theists and atheists. Whether or not you see design in the universe is, in some sense, irrelevant. In order to see or not see design in the universe, you have to anthropomorphize God in some way. Either God created the world as you would have (though perhaps more skillfully), or he created it in a way that you don't like, and in either case you're making God in your image. Note that theists can be just as guilty of this as atheists.

Rather, what we really learn from the fact that God created the universe is that matter is intrinsicaly good. Scripture does not teach us how matter behaves, how far it extends into the universe, or even really what it is in the first place. However, it does teach us that matter is intrinsically good, and thus it makes sense to study it eagerly as scientists.

I think a quote from Robert Wilken's The Spirit of Early Christian Thought will bring my point home:

But early Christian thinkers offer no philosohpical argument for the existence of God drawn from the world of nature. ... They did not argue that there is a God because there is order; rather, they saw design in the universe because they knew the one God. God was not a principle of explanation. In seeking God they sought to understand the God they already knew. (p. 16)

The knowledge of God provides a framework in which all sorts of other knowledge can be properly integrated. Real knowledge about the universe amounts to personal growth within the context of knowing God. Stenger makes the mistake of thinking that science can work outside of this framework.

Ultimately, I get back to my very first point about Stenger from my last post about his book. He fails to give necessary attention to the metaphysical questions that we must answer. If we are the product of chance in a universe where matter is not intrinsically good, then what can we say? Are humans better off alive or dead? Is science worth doing in the first place?

However you choose to answer those questions, if there is no God, then there is no way to justify your choice outside of yourself. It is merely your personal, private truth. A full pursuit of knowledge demands that we have some framework in which to integrate both a description of the universe and an evaluation of our role in it, and its role in our lives. Such a pursuit cannot even begin without the knowledge of God on some level.

I think these chapters contain Stenger's strongest arguments in the whole book, and that is probably because he knows that most about these subjects, from evolution to cosmology. I have argued that he is lacking in his metaphysical interpretation of the science he presents. However, I have not disputed any of his science, and I do not think it is necessary to do so. I understand many Christians feel it is necessary, and I respect that, but I must say I think that is a losing battle. When scientists say, for example, that they have confirmed Darwinism and the big bang through extensive testing, I am inclined to believe them. They can have nothing to gain by falsifying the evidence.

However, scientists can have many reasons to make metaphysical claims and try to back them up with their science. While science may be relevant to metaphysical questions, I think Stenger fails to actually deal with the metaphysics, and therefore his empirical claims don't do all that he wants them to do. There is more that I could say, but I think I'll stop for now.

A Little Update on "Pro-life Atheists"

Thanks to my friend Melissa Rupp for this article about Nat Hentoff, who recently got laid off by the Village Voice, a left-wing magazine.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/12/nat-hentoff-laid-off-by-villag.html

You can take a look for yourself. It's just another example of how weird and sad the whole abortion debate has been for the past 35 years.