The God Within

Some recent posts on The Corner touched a nerve. Mike Potemra invoked some pretzel logic to claim that Christopher Hitchens does believe in God. Having just attended a debate between Hitch and Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete he writes

In the course of the discussion, Hitchens claimed not to be a reductionist; he said mankind cannot do without the “numinous” and (I think this was his other phrase) the “transcendent.” (He located this in, for example, Verdi’s “Requiem.”) Now the numinous and the transcendent are exactly what we believers mean by God. Hitchens says what he doesn’t believe in is the “supernatural” — but that’s merely a quibble about words. If you use the word “nature” — as so many people do — as interchangeable with “what is” or “being,” then God is not “super-natural” at all, because — as Aquinas, chiefly, reminds us — God is the pure act of Being itself, Ipsum Esse Subsistens.

Then a like-minded poli-sci professor emailed in to opine

I have often made a similar point to my students and to other professors:  Hitchens acts as if there are moral standards that never change—take human rights.  For Hitchens, human rights can never be contravened morally or rightly.  In some sense, I argued, he believes in natural rights (as opposed to natural wrongs).  To make it more interesting he is piously outraged when some rights have been violated.  Hitchens may not believe in the personal God many do, but he does believe in a god that is a non arbitrary standard of right and wrong, good and evil.

Jim Manzi later piped in

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve banged on and on and on in blog posts about the point that morality (as opposed to prudence dressed up as morality) strikes me as absurd in a purely naturalistic universe.

All I can say is that God is quite the moving target. He’s a supernatural deity who is sometimes not supernatural, he’s anything “numinous” or “transcendent”, and he’s a “non arbitrary standard of right and wrong”. That’s when he isn’t busy being the pure act of being. It’s no wonder I’m dizzy what with the goal posts whizzing about so.

I’m not here to defend Hitch. He’s quite capable of doing that on his own, and I fully recognize he can be abrasive and overbearing. I want to concentrate on what these gentlemen seem to be claiming, in spite of the fact that they’ll probably never see my little blog.

The first problem I have is with a false dichotomy. Saying that science provides no moral guidance reminds me of Thomas Sowell:

“Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain cabrohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrevelant standards.” (emphasis added)

Science is a method for knowing the truth about nature. Morality is about behavioral choices. Conflating the two is as false a dichotomy as having to choose between science and religion. As John Derbyshire pointed out, “the opposite of science is not religion; the opposite of science is wishful thinking”.

Playing semantic games with the word “supernatural” is just Orwellian. It’s not moving the goalposts; it’s erasing the boundaries of the playing field. The natural world can be observed and tested. God can’t. Appealing to authority, even Aquinas, to arbitrarily redefine something which must be taken on faith as natural is fallacious.

Claiming that recognizing the numinous and transcendent in man is a belief in God is a willful misreading of the words. When Hitch used numinous he clearly meant “appealing to the higher emotions or to the aesthetic sense” and when he said transcendent it meant something more like “relating to experience as determined by the mind’s makeup” than what Potemra and Manzi claim.

I used to be one of the faithful. The God I believed in was not some vaguely numinous transcendent idea, but a specific being. If Potemra and Manzi believe in such an ethereal notion that’s their business, but I don’t think they can speak for all believers with howlers like “[n]ow the numinous and the transcendent are exactly what we believers mean by God.” This reminds me of the “god of the gaps” maneuvering at the Discovery Institute: Just keep redefining the problem until the only possible solution looks like your deity.

Getting finally to the matter of morals in a godless universe, I think the problem is explainable as internal versus external decision making. A wonderful book on child rearing I read makes the case that children who do things because their parents want it are responding to external guidance. If the child learns what is right and wrong and makes his own choices he is using internal guidance. It should be obvious which one will best survive the buffeting of peer pressure in later life.

The most comfortable thing about a belief in God is not having to worry about where the rules come from. They simply come from the Ultimate Authority. Period. That’s external guidance. It’s also one of the most common and pernicious logical fallacies – the Appeal to Authority. I happen to think that religions have evolved to help form cohesive groups and pass along moral guidance. At their best they represent the wisdom of the masses, and the accumulated wisdom of experience. On the other hand it should not come as any shock that many of our morals have evolved with us biologically. It’s an evolutionary advantage to love your children, because human children can’t survive on their own. The fact that my love for my daughter came from nature and my own choices makes it no less real than a love gifted by God.

Repeat after me: I have a right to exist.

Yes, I’ve read my Nathaniel Branden. Once you can say the above and mean it, rationally you must conclude that others also have the right to exist. From those two statements you can derive just about all the morality you need. But let’s even include that accumulated wisdom from the great religions and recognize that fidelity and responsibility and all the nice refinements are also required for success. That’s internal guidance.

While man requires an external diety to justify the law, even if that diety exists, then man is still a child. Healthy adults make their own choices and evaluate their own consequences, as well as observe the consequences of choices made by others.

It’s a wonderful, numinous and transcendent thing that man has figured out morality. Why is it so hard to take credit for it? The founding fathers of this country knew that certain truths were self evident. That’s because they are. It is quite possible to believe in a fixed set of morals and not believe in a supernatural being. One need not believe in any sort of god to know that Verdi’s Requiem is transcendent and numinous. And, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, God is not a natural thing. He is not necessary to explain anything.

If anybody tries dragging Darwin into a debate on morals, they are being dishonest. Evolution just happens to be the scientific truth about how we became the species we are. It is completely silent on many things, notably the origins of life and morality. It was the Marxists who tried to co-opt Darwin to justify their junk political “science”.

If God has accomplished wonders, we invented him. Any species that can create Mozart, pesto sauce and space ships is divine in its own right. It’s about time we grew up and took credit.

Black Widow

When I was a little boy my dad gave me a modelof the P-61 Black Widow. I’ve always loved the way that airplane looked: every bit as badass as it really was. I heard stories about it, its first-ever airborn radar, and how the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) system designed for it became the transponder pilots still use today.

I was thrilled to be able to see one in person years ago at Wright Patterson. Today I was corresponding with someone about great-looking aircraft (my other favorites are the Connie, the DC-3 and the Staggerwing) and stumbled across this P-61 recovery and restoration project.

I’ll bet it’d sound awesome.

Disinvitation

Council Demands Palin Ouster from Fallout Shelter

Newark, Blast Ring 4: Radioactive mutants from the National Jewish Democratic Council today tapped an angry Morse code press release message on the lid of the fallout shelter of another Jewish organization, demanding that it “immediately disinvite” controversial Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin from its fortified underground bunker.

Want some death threats?

Just make the case that the mortgage meltdown is the Democrats’ fault.

Steve Hayward writes:

As previously mentioned, don’t miss Kevin Hassett’s Bloomberg News column this morning on how Democrats caused this financial meltdown.  Kevin has clearly struck a nerve; he tells me his e-mail and answering machine are getting filled up with howls of indignation and death threats.  Implicitly McCain is missing a huge opening here.

The Glove

A couple of Stanford biologists have invented an amazing set of gloves.

In the early 1990s, Heller and Grahn first began looking at using controlled heat to halt tremors in patients coming out of anesthesia. When they put their device over the hand and arm of a patient at Stanford Medical Center, “The core temperature went up so fast,” Grahn said, “we thought our recording equipment had broken.” The tremors stopped.

Then they looked at using it for cooling. Katie bar the door.

Their first “aha” moment in cooling came after they talked their assistant Vinh Cao into doing his regular workouts in the lab instead of at the gym. His routine included 100 pull-ups. One day, Grahn and Heller started using an early version of the Glove to cool him for 3 minutes between rounds of pull-ups. They saw that with the cooling, his 11th round of pull-ups was as strong as his first. Within six weeks of training with the cooling breaks, Cao did 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks later, he went from 180 to 616.

As you can imagine, the DOD is as interested as sports teams.

Update:

Wired has an article on just how interested.

Astroturf

The Jawa Report has a big post, example of the kind of investigative reporting bloggers do and the MSM no longer does, tentatively linking the Obama campaign with anti-Palin smears. Even if it wasn’t Barry’s campaign directly, it seems like his friends include an awful lot of sock puppets.

Our research suggests that a subdivision of one of the largest public relations firms in the world most likely started and promulgated rumors about Sarah Palin that were known to be false. These rumors were spread in a surreptitious manner to avoid exposure.

It is also likely that the PR firm was paid by outside sources to run the smear campaign. While not conclusive, evidence suggests a link to the Barack Obama campaign. Namely:

• Evidence suggests that a YouTube video with false claims about Palin was uploaded and promoted by members of a professional PR firm.
• The family that runs the PR firm has extensive ties to the Democratic Party, the netroots, and are staunch Obama supporters.
• Evidence suggests that the firm engaged in a concerted effort to distribute the video in such a way that it would appear to have gone viral on its own. Yet this effort took place on company time.
• Evidence suggests that these distribution efforts included actions by at least one employee of the firm who is unconnected with the family running the company.
• The voice-over artist used in this supposedly amateur video is a professional.
• This same voice-over artist has worked extensively with David Axelrod’s firm, which has a history of engaging in phony grassroots efforts, otherwise known as “astroturfing.”
• David Axelrod is Barack Obama’s chief media strategist.
• The same voice-over artist has worked directly for the Barack Obama campaign.

This suggests that false rumors and outright lies about Sarah Palin and John McCain being spread on the internet are being orchestrated by political partisans and are not an organic grassroots phenomenon led by the left wing fringe.

Update:

No doubt pure coincidence:

UPDATE: Within an hour of this post going up, YouTube videos implicating Ethan Winner were yanked, sockpuppet accounts deleted, and more importantly, the Wikipedia entry on David Axelrod began to edit out mentions of his well known astroturfing campaigns. Hmmm, it sounds to me like we’re on to something.

We have backups of all the deleted websites, and will update as soon as we can.

Further Update:

The scraping sound you hear are Astroturfing articles being shoveled into the memory hole. This is getting fun.