Health care vs health insurance

What needs fixing, health care or health insurance?  If this administration or any administration is ever going to make any headway with this, they are going to have to separate the two.

If the issue is that millions of people are denied care when they need it, then I absolutely agree with the idea that the system is in need of fixing.  But that is not the issue.  People without insurance coverage are not turned away if they need treatment for an acute condition.  They are treated, and the system absorbs the cost, which ultimately means that you and I pick up the tab.  It’s amazing to me that so few people have connected the dots between that and the “out of control cost of healthcare”.

It’s hard to get preventative care if you’re uninsured, so that’s one aspect of the healthcare system that should be addressed.  But by far the bigger problem is that the rules now in place have so mangled the business of healthcare that nearly everyone agrees that the system needs fixing.

If everything is indeed back on the table now that the Democrats have lost their “supermajority” in the Senate, here are some things that we should do.

• Break the link between employment and health insurance.
• Allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines.
• Reform the laws that make the cost of malpractice insurance such a crushing burden on the providers of care.

In addition, two things that seem to have evolved out of the most recent version of the bills  that I do support are:

• Remove the ability of the insurance industry to decline coverage, cancel coverage or to decline to cover preexisting conditions.
• To compensate, ensure some way of giving them millions of additional people to collect premiums from.

And of course, they absolutely positively must open up the debate to coverage by CSPAN, so that it’s all done out in the open.  And no more earmarks!

Muggeridge had it right

As we count off the last days of both the year and the decade, I want to pause to reflect on the state of our culture.

From an economic standpoint, we are in for decades of muddling through.  We in the U.S. are still number one in commerce, the US Dollar is still king of currencies, and we still have more political, economic and religious freedom than any other country.  But we are slipping fast.

We have over 12 trillion dollars of national debt, and we have made over 106 trillion dollars of promises to pay (Social Security and Medicare, mostly) money out in the future for which we have no money in reserve.  (It’s officially referred to as an unfunded liability.)  So the entire unfunded liability is like an IOU.  And an IOU is the same as a debt, except that you don’t have to pay interest on it.  Add those two together and divide by the number of citizens in the country, and you get $385,727.  If you’re a citizen, that’s how much of the government’s IOU is on you.

And you’ve got some of your own to take care of too.  We have almost 17 trillion dollars of total personal debt, of which a bit over 14 trillion is mortgage debt.  That’s an average additional debt per citizen of $54,160.

So each of us, fellow citizens, has a total of $439,887 of red ink on our personal balance sheets.  That’s going to take a long time to pay off, even if we stop digging ourselves in deeper every minute.  I long for that eventuality.

The US Debt Clock, which you can see at http://www.usdebtclock.org/, animates it all nicely.  If you tarry a while, you can see that we do have $256,343 of assets per citizen, and that we do have $40,587 of income per citizen.  If we each gave up all of our income for the next 10 years, we’d have it all paid off!

Feel better?

Meanwhile, we have gender confusion, we’re divided over whether killing babies still in the womb should be legal, and what we used to call “shacking up” is now socially acceptable at nearly every level of society.  We’re divided on whether it is natural or normal or should be legal for members of one sex to marry members of the same sex.  We continue to turn our backs on all manner of religion, eschewing the cliched old standards of fidelity, honor, and integrity.  When I was a boy scout, I recited this oath”

On my honor I will do my best
to do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
to help other people at all times;
to keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.

How many of you can honestly say that you were taught values like those?  Do you remember JFK’s call to “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”?  Where is that nobility today?  Do you realize that in that same speech, Kennedy said this:

For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.

We have no moral compass outside the “law”, as prescribed by the hand of Almighty God.  We reject that belief more and more, and that is the source of most of the evil in our world – including the evil done  in the name of God.  We have met the enemy, and he is us.  Every person has the right to decide for himself whether to be subject to God – to be His follower, or to be the master of his fate and captain of his own destiny.  And one of the most sublime paradoxes in life is that trying to run our lives on our own is the one sure way to lose them.  Christ himself put it this way: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”

Yet today the ideal is something else.  Today, conservatives generally believe that freedom itself, or capitalism, or the great American entrepreneurial spirit will save us.  In other words, we will save us.  Liberals generally look for salvation to the government.  Better laws, kinder and gentler laws, more programs to fight poverty, injustice and pollution of our air, water and environment – that’s what we need.  That’s what will set us free.

Both sides are wrong.  We cannot save us, and it does not matter whether “we” is defined as free, enterprising individuals, or the government.  We cannot be the kings of our own kingdoms.  We just can’t.  We’ve been trying for several thousand years, and we do not have one single success story that lasted more than a few hundred years.  Every one eventually sowed the seeds of its own destruction by turning its back on the fundamental principles of human dignity – the most enduring of which are found in the Holy Scriptures.

So our political freedom is being sandpapered away with each new crisis.  “Fix this!”, we cry, and so our elected leaders feel the weight of a moral obligation to do so.  And whatever solution they come up with, two things are nearly certain to grow – our national debt and the size of our government.  And the bigger the government gets, the less freedom we have.  And the bigger the government gets, the more it needs to be fed, so we become “another day older and deeper in debt”, as Tennessee Ernie Ford sang in “Sixteen Tons”.

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt.

Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go;

I owe my soul to the company store…

All of which is why I say that Malcolm Muggeridge had it right when he said:

“…it has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself. Having wearied of the struggle to be himself, he has created his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, his own vulnerability out of his own strength; himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, in a process of auto-genocide, convincing himself that he is too numerous, and labouring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to be an easier prey for his enemies; until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus and becomes extinct.”

So this year as we sing Auld Lang Syne, let us ask not how we can once again ascend to that position of global-leader-in-everything that we once thought was our manifest destiny.  Let us rather ask, what can I do, what price can I pay, what sacrifice can I make, and what foe can I oppose, in order to once again regain my rightful place as a champion of the oppressed, defender of the weak, and servant of all?

Here’s your chance to vote on healthcare

Well, they apparently have the 60 votes needed to get the Senate’s bill passed.  Whoopee.

We might just have a new law on the books early next year.  How do you feel about that?  Are you pleased overall?  Or do you want something else?

Here is your chance to tell me how you feel about some things.  You can “vote” on as many as you like, you’re not limited to just one.  Feel free to tell me whether you would add questions to this poll.  But for now, take a shot at this.

And if you think I should include something else, some other question, just comment at the bottom.

Maybe it will go nowhere.  But who knows, maybe we can make somebody listen after all.

Protecting the favored hypothesis

There is still plenty of debate over whether man-made global warming is threatening life as we know it.  In the minds of many, it is an absolute certainty that we are dooming ourselves.  I don’t want so much to talk about that, though.  I want to talk about the scientific community, and their worldview.

Apparently, they are not as interested in scientific discovery of important truths, as they are clandestine cover-ups, collusion and group-think.   Many have leaped to the conclusion that they were hiding a truth that was different than what they wanted the rest of the world to believe.  That may be true, but it may just be that they have become so used to this kind of science-vs-the-world mentality, that they behaved the way they did even though it was not necessary.

What am I talking about?  Consider the fact that this thing has been called The Greatest Scandal in Modern Science. That’s a bit of an overstatement, in my view.  It was a scandal, to be sure.  The revelation of the emails did not reveal the whole global warming idea as a falsified concoction.  Not at all.  Yet it did reveal something.  It revealed a conspiracy to cover up facts – a conspiracy to protect the “favored hypothesis.”

The Wall Street Journal, in an op-ed piece, said

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a “unified” view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the “common cause”; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to “hide the decline” of temperature in certain inconvenient data.

Inconvenient data?

Favored hypothesis?

Wow.

Some see this as one incident – one isolated occurrence of inappropriate behavior. But what if this were to be seen as just the latest evidence that something unsavory is being cooked up?  What if we were to discover a similar pattern of conspiracy to promote another one of science’s most favored hypotheses?  What if we were to discover a similar pattern covering not just a brief moment in time, but a period of time covering several generations of human population?  And what if the favored hypothesis being “protected” is the grandaddy of them all?  What if we were to see it in the real “greatest scandal in modern science?  What if we were to see it in the grand doctrine of Darwinian evolution by natural selection?

The pattern has been there for decades.  We have allowed them to pull the wool over our eyes.  We have allowed them to tell us that we are not to teach children to think – not when doing so would put their favored hypotheses up to the light of questioning and examination.  “Evolution is science!”, we are told, and “Intelligent Design is just religion masquerading as truth!”  And we buy it.  We buy it because we are ignorant of the unalterable fact that every scientific hypothesis starts with at least one unscientific presumption.  And we buy it because we are ignorant of the distinction between religion and faith.  It is impossible to live at all without taking some things on faith.  We know that to be true.  Yet we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the misdirection that reminds us of the separation of church and state.  It’s time to snap out of it.

The favored hypothesis is that life, after having started by some unknown natural means, evolved from one species to another using a mechanism called natural selection.  There are two presuppositions built into that sentence.  Neither is or ever will be testable, so both are assumptions built not on cold, logical, empirical data, but on faith.  Scientists who assume life started naturally, do so not based on observable data, but by faith.  They simply do not believe that anything supernatural exists, so only a natural explanation is possible.  Likewise, even when examining evidence suggesting that one species has evolved into another, they can only assume that the mechanism at work is natural selection.  It’s a nice theory.  The evidence fits the hypothesis – reasonably well anyway.  But that is not a proof.

What if there were some other explanation?  What if the Biblical version of creation really is the explanation of not just all of life, but all of everything?  And what if life was actually designed? What if the mechanism at work in getting one species to evolve into another is not natural selection, but the operation of a designed mechanism not yet fully understood – a mechanism that could be observed at work in the natural world?  Or what if the Creator actually existed not only in the spiritual (non-material) world, but in the material one as well.  What if the mechanism at work is God’s actual creative work, still going on, moment by moment, millions of times every day?

These questions are not really being subjected to any real scientific thought.  That’s because, in the greatest scandal in modern science, the favored hypothesis has been covertly guarded and protected for decades.

Drowning in debt

The Washington Post editorializes what it calls “the coming debt panic,” generated by a realization that

Getting the debt back down to a reasonable level will require extraordinary, almost unimaginable, fiscal discipline and political cooperation. Failing to do so will lower the national standard of living and ultimately threaten America’s economic stability.

The Post cites the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform recommendation that Congress move to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio at 60 percent over the next decade, as opposed to the 85 percent projected by the Congressional Budget Office, then reduce debt to 40 percent over the longer term. But what would this require?

The deficit level leading to a sustainable ratio of debt to GDP equals the rate of economic growth multiplied by the target debt/GDP ratio. In this case, the target ratio of debt/GDP is 40 percent and the CBO projects an average nominal rate of GDP growth of around 4.6 percent. The result is a budget deficit of 1.8 percent of GDP.

Now consider the budget deficits we’re looking at: CBO projects an average annual deficit over the next 10 years of more than 5 percent of GDP under President Obama’s budget, implying significant tax increases or spending cuts would be needed now. In the following decade, when entitlement spending really kicks in, things will only get more difficult.

If you can’t believe this can be done—and I here expressed some skepticism that our elected officials are capable of doing it—then we have two choices. First, a commission approach to reforming entitlements and potentially the tax code, with representation from across the political spectrum and an expedited process for legislative consideration. Or second, ultimately a true panic situation when it becomes clear that the federal government is unable to get its borrowing under control and our lenders attempt to limit their losses. I sketched out what this might look like here.

Left-leaning groups protest that an entitlement commission bypasses the legislative process. But the alternatives may be even worse.

The above is from an article by Andrew Biggs at the American Enterprise Blog entitlted Our Coming Debt Panic.

Here’s my two cents worth.

The government, as Ronald Reagan told us, IS the problem.  We need to get them to stop trying to fix what’s wrong, stop tying our hands behind our backs, and let us get to work fixing things.

The US Debt is now over $12 trillion.  You probably knew that.  What you may not realize is that we have another cute little item called “unfunded liabilities” on our balance sheet, and that number absolutely dwarfs the debt!  It’s over $106 trillion.

If the government promises to pay you something later, rather than now, it’s not called a debt.  It works like a debt, but it’s not counted as one.  Still, it is money the government is going to have to pay out some day.  And if they can’t pay it, guess what they do?  There are only three things:  Raise taxes, borrow more money, or (gasp) default on the debt.  I do not believe we are anywhere close to that nightmare.  But it is not a pretty picture.

Check it out for yourself.  The US National Debt Clock is now online.  It’s too big to fit here, so you’ll have to leave this page.  But spend some time with it.  It’s fun watching the numbers roll by.

Wait, what?

You mean those are real numbers?

Undeclaring the Declaration

Is it really any wonder we are struggling to maintain our superiority in world commerce?  We have met the enemy, and he, to paraphrase Pogo, is us.  Will we regain our role of the world’s leading nation in commerce?  Alas, I do not believe we will.  Worse, I fear we are headed for fates far worse than of losing our competitive edge.  Why?   Because we have trashed the ideals that made us great.

When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they laid the cornerstones for a new kind of country:  one governed not by a monarchy, but by “We the People”.  By way of review, it starts thus:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of governments. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

That first paragraph isn’t quoted nearly as often as the second.  But pause just a second and consider:  their purpose was to declare themselves “separate but equal” and that doing so to them was given “by nature” and by “nature’s God”.  This they saw as something to which they had been entitled not by the mere act of declaring themselves independent, but by the God of nature.

Then come those ringing words that are unique among the world’s most famous and significant documents.  But let’s see what we believe as contrasted against the Declaration’s noble ideals.

We hold these truths to be self-evident – What do we as a society hold to be self-evident?  Not much.  We have come to believe that all things are relative.  There are no absolute truths anymore.  What’s true for you is not necessarily true for me, and you have no right to declare my truth untrue, even in the face of objective verifyability.

…that all men are created equal – We give this one lip service.  Sure, we have finally given black people the rights they were denied for so long.  But slavery remains rampant.  It’s just underground.  We believe in Darwin, not God, and that gives the strong the right to do with the weak as they please.

…that they are endowed by their Creator – What creator?  We weren’t created at all.  We evolved.

…with certain unalienable rights – So if there is no creator, there are no rights that have been endowed upon us by one.  We give ourselves rights.  Or the government gives us rights.   Sadly, many of our elected leaders actually believe that they are the givers of rights, and that they have the power to take them away.

…that among these are life – We have the right to live.  That’s a right given to us by our creator.  Without God, we as a society or as a government can deny this right.  All we need to do is deny that certain groups are really not people at all.  The Nazis did it with Jews, Stalin and Pol Pot did it with dissenters, and we do it with unborn babies.  We just “thank god” that our mothers didn’t abort us.

…liberty- There is a distinction between freedom and liberty.  Your freedom, it has been said, ends where your fist meets my face.  Freedom is the unrestricted ability to act as one will.  The trouble is that freedom without restraint is anarchy, because no one is guided by any overriding ethical or moral framework.  If I have liberty, I along with the people I owe allegiance to, have the freedom to determine our own courses of action.

…and the pursuit of happiness. – In today’s society this is taken as the right to do whatever makes me happy, so it is much like freedom.  I believe that what the framers meant here was more like a right to pursue that which would be good not just for ones self, but for society in general.  Unfortunately, we too often don’t make the distinction.

To paraphrase the next section, people consent to be governed only so long.  Inevitably, if they are not governed under just laws rather than the whims of the powerful, they will rise up in revolution.  Indeed, it is their duty to do so.  So after a litany of despotic actions by the King of England, they declare themselves independent thus:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliance, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

What do we hold sacred?  Would we make such a pledge, knowing as they did that it could be put severely to the test, and that they, each one, would be called upon to give up their lives and their fortunes.  But “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence”, they knew without doubt or reservation that they would never be called upon to give up their sacred honor.

Dorothy Sayres once said

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, It’s the accomplice of the other sins, and their worst punishment.  It’s the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

John Lennon sings to a rapturous generation:

Imagine

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

It sounds beautiful, but like all dreams of utopia, it’s a myth.  We simply cannot ever achieve such a wonderful state, because evil is real, and the line between good and evil, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, runs through the heart of every human being.  That’s why Pogo was right.

We aren’t all that.  We are incapable of governing ourselves without allegiance to a higher power.  And since we refuse to bow, as our forefathers did, we are toast.

Oh, it will take a few generations.  We may even wake up one day and pledge to each other all that we are and all that we hold sacred in order to recapture what we once had.  But until then, future generations will look at us and ask “What were they thinking?”

Rev John Sirico says it well in this short video.

Intolerance of intolerance

It’s amusing how we Christians are often accused of being intolerant.  We keep insisting that there is right and wrong, that there is one way,  and one way only, to “come to the Father”, and that Jesus is that way.  Many people who are not Christian want us to accept their belief that many paths lead to salvation, and label us as intolerant that we don’t believe that.

But who’s really the intolerant one?  Those who insist that some things are mutually exclusive, or those who insist that all things can coexist, and anyone who doesn’t agree with that is intolerant?

The term “mutually exclusive”, of course, means that if one thing is true the other must be false, and that’s true regardless of whether A or B is the one that is true.  So we believe that Jesus actually said that He was (is) the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6).  We believe He believed that to be true.  And we believe He was speaking not as a man, but as God Himself.  Scripture testifies to that.  (Luke 24:25-27 says “He said to them, ‘How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! ²⁶Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.’”).   So if He said it, and if He was who He claimed to be (I and the Father are one – John 10:10), then it would be folly not to take Him at His Word.  So, yes, that’s intolerant.  We do not tolerate the idea that we should accept a lie as the truth.

Ironically, those who call us intolerant don’t see themselves as being intolerant.  Yet they are.  They say ‘Hey, we should all just get along, and anyone who tells me I am wrong about such an important idea is doing me wrong by being intolerant of me’.  And they’re right in a sense.  But importantly, there is a distinction.  We tolerate the person, but we don’t accept as true something we believe to be untrue.  So they misinterpret our intolerance of their belief as intolerance of them.  They take it personally.

But here’s the thing.  If you were driving along at 60 miles an hour, and I was right behind you and you made a turn onto a road that I knew led to a collapsed bridge, what would you have me do?  Should I be tolerant, and let you continue on as if nothing was wrong, or should I do whatever I could to get you to pull over so I could explain the situation?  You might say, sure, keep me from going over the cliff.  But what if I told you that I wasn’t really sure the bridge was down?  What if I only believed it was down, because I read it on a blog earlier in the day?  I might believe the source to be completely reliable, and believing that, would feel that my failure to act would send you to your death.

So I honk my horn, wave and yell from behind, but you pay no attention.  Then I get up real close and yell and wave.  Then I pull alongside and yell and wave.  You go ‘What is this, a crazy person?’  So I try to cut you off, but fail to do so.  Now road rage kicks in and you start trying to cut me off.

At that point, I’d probably give up, not being willing to die trying to protect your life.  And as I fade into your rear view mirror, you mutter something like ‘What a jerk!’, and continue in your anger toward me and your intolerance of me right up to the point when you crash through the barricades and plummet to your death.

Sometimes it pays to be tolerant of intolerance.

Defending ID

Some time ago, George Gilder (surprise, he’s not just a technology guy) wrote the following:

Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the world – especially in math and science. Our biology classes, in particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda about global warming and the impact of DDT on the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so stories about the random progression from primordial soup to Britney Spears. In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in their own thought.

The Darwinist materialist paradigm, however, is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago. Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists coming to understand that the cell is not a simple lump of protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It’s a complex information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands of proteins arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of communication and synthesis. The human body contains some 60 trillion cells. Each one stores information in DNA codes, processes and replicates it in three forms of RNA and thousands of supporting enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with energy, and seals it in semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a process subject to the mathematical theory of information, which shows that even mutations occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected at the rate of a Google search couldn’t beget the intricate interwoven fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a short amount of time. Natural selection should be taught for its important role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science.

What is the alternative? Intelligent design at least asks the right questions. In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the concrete. The contrary notion that the world of mind, including science itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired all the reductionist futilities of the 20th century, from Marx’s obtuse materialism to environmental weather panic to zero-sum Malthusian fears over population. In biology classes, our students are not learning the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century science; they’re imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven 19th-century materialist myth.

I have been making the assertion lately that the materialist-atheist worldview is incoherent.  In saying so, I am not calling names or just being antagonistic.  I am saying that is does not cohere.  I am stating an opinion that I am hoping will invite some intelligent exchange.

What are the possible explanations for “human consciousness” that support an atheistic worldview?  Does the mere fact that we have bigger brains than “other animals” explain how thought itself comes about?  If abiogenesis can explain (and I do not believe it ever will) how the first life forms came to be by natural forces, how will we explain human thought?  How will we explain the information coding present in every cell – coding so complex that no existing computer technology even comes close.

And what explanation can there be for the cause of the so-called big bang?  And how can we ignore the elephant in the room that no explosion ever produced order.  Yet in our universe, we have mind-boggling degrees of order.

So why do we persist in twisting ourselves up into knots in order to make reality fit into our “God is myth” view of reality?  Intelligent design is at least worthy of further scientific study.   Darwinism requires at least as much faith as Deism.  By their abject refusal to accept either possibility, well-intentioned groups of people stifle creative thought and keep the world engaged in the biggest wild goose chase of all time!

Learning how to think

This is an answer to Maranda, who commented on a recent post.

You’ve done it again, Maranda.  Are you even aware that you are arguing against points I did not raise in this post?  I never said that I would like to teach creation in public schools (I wouldn’t).  I never said that they should stop teaching evolution (they shouldn’t).  And twice you have invoked the talking snake, whereas I never mentioned it or even alluded to it.

What I advocate is teaching kids to think.  That’s a horse of a far different color than teaching them “facts”.  They tell you, for example,  that we evolved up from lower species, and that the more evolving we did, the more sophisticated and intelligent and downright attractive we became.  Then before you have a chance to ask how that’s even possible without some force or entity or intelligence at work, guiding the process, they tell you that the mechanism that caused it to work is “natural selection”.  Somehow we’re supposed to just accept natural selection as a done deal – a closed case.  But is it?

A friend of mine says this about natural selection:

Natural selection isn’t even a mechanism.  By definition, a mechanism is something that does something.  NS, doesn’t qualify because at best it is merely a descriptive term to describe certain observations after the fact. That doesn’t tell us a thing about what mechanism caused something to be the way we observe it.  And all those supposed successive slight modifications haven’t been observed either….they’ve been supposed, proposed and speculated upon, but never observed.

What we have observed is adaptation which merely means that organisms have a remarkable ability to adapt to changes in thier environment.  One of the interesting things about adaptation is that in nearly every case, those adaptations tend to ocillate around a mean depending on what environmental pressures are present or absent over some period of time.  None of that explains how the organism came to posses adaptability in the first place.

And then we have some rather insurmountable problems for Darwinian evolution, such as irreducible complexity found in many biological systems, especially at the cellular level.  Or specified complexity.  Neither of these can be explained by Darwinian evolution, but are explained by intelligent cause.

So without the doctrine of natural selection, Darwinists are exposed as emperors without any clothes.  They are left to say in effect, ‘OK, if natural selection is not a mechanism, or if it is a mechanism, but can’t be proven scientifically, can’t we just accept that it’s a reasonable thing to assume? ‘

The answer is  yes, it is reasonable to build a hypothesis on that assumption.  But that’s not what they do.  What they do is to obfuscate the fact that they did that little slight of hand and simply move on, as if they had just made an irrefutable statement.  Red is a color.  Jet engines are loud.  All living things eventually die.  Those are all statements of fact.  We would have a hard time proving any of them true scientifically.  But it is reasonable to assume they’re true, because we have seen them to be true every time we have observed them, and we know of no exceptions to them being true.  But no such claim could be made of natural selection.  So it’s completely bogus to assume it’s fact.

Meanwhile, the main point of the Stephen Meyer article is that information always has an intelligent source.  Here again, we can’t prove that, but it’s reasonable to assume it’s true because each and every observation has seen it to be true, and it seems reasonable to assume its complexity and non-random arrangement required something more than the working of nature.

What’s your answer to that Maranda?

While I’m at it, I want to also suggest that there are a few important points you seem to be ignoring.  One is this:  If Darwinian evolution is true, why do we care what other people think of us?  Natural selection seems to work by getting the strong to overpower the weak – by having the strong and fast eat the weak and slow.  If I steal your purse, you yell ‘Stop thief!’ and have me arrested for doing you wrong.  But Darwin says I was just doing what came naturally – trying to survive.  Listen to what Annie Dillard had to say on the subject in her Pulitzer prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  While trying to commune with nature, she saw that evolution loves death, not life.  She saw a waterbug sting a frog and suck its brains out.  it was one of the most horrifying and brutal things she had ever seen.  She wrote:

Cock Robin may die the most gruesome of slow deaths, and nature is no less pleased.  The sun comes up, the creek rolls on, the survivors still sing.  I cannot feel that way about your death, nor you about mine, nor either of us about the robin’s… We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit.  It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized. Is human culture with its values my only real home after all?  Either this world – nature – is a monster ,or I am a freak, because I believe that the strong should not eat the weak, but everything in nature says it should.

All right then. It is our emotions which are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state.  We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.

The point is that we know down deep inside of us that people matter.  I matter.  So do you.  So does your neighbor.  If we act on that, if we protect our neighbor from harm rather than eating him, we are acting counter to what evolution tells us we must do to survive.

Think about it.

Nature vs. Intelligence

Steven C. Meyer is one of the brightest lights in the known universe when it comes to articulating the concept he calls intelligent design.  I say he calls it that, because when he uses that term, he  means something very specific.  It may not mean what you think it does.

I believe in evolution.  I believe it explains a lot of what many scientists say it does.  But I do not believe that the evidence is there for a few of the important elements of Darwin’s grand theory.  The first is natural selection.

The following article, from the Boston Globe (read the source here) is a pretty good case in point.

IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson’s demand for a “separation between church and state’’ has been cited countless times. Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution. By invoking Jefferson’s principle of separation, many critics of intelligent design assume that this visionary Founding Father would agree with them.

But would he? For too long, an aspect of Jefferson’s visionary thought has been ignored, hidden away as too uncomfortable for public discussion – his support for intelligent design.

In 1823, when materialist evolutionary ideas had long been circulating, Jefferson wrote to John Adams and insisted that the scientific evidence of design in nature was clear: “I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.’’ It was on empirical grounds, not religious ones, that he took this view.

Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.’’

The “ultimate cause’’ and “fabricator of all things’’ that Jefferson invoked was also responsible for the “design’’ of life’s endlessly diverse forms as well as the manifestly special endowments of human beings. Moreover, because the evidence of “Nature’s God’’ was publicly accessible to all and did not depend upon a special appeal to religious authority, Jefferson believed that it provided a basis in reason for the protection of individual liberty. Thus, the Declaration of Independence asserted that humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’’

Of course, many people assume that Jefferson’s views, having been written before Darwin’s “Origin of Species,’’ are now scientifically obsolete. But Jefferson has been vindicated by modern scientific discoveries that Darwin could not have anticipated. For example, in 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions – the information – for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive. Francis Crick later developed this idea with his famous “sequence hypothesis,’’ according to which the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. As Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.’’

This discovery has made acute a longstanding scientific mystery that Darwin never addressed or solved: the mystery of how the very first life on earth arose. To date no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information in DNA needed to build the first living cell on earth. Yet modern scientists who argue for intelligent design do not do so merely because natural processes have failed to explain the origin of the information in cells. Instead, they argue for design because systems possessing these features invariably arise from intelligent causes.

DNA functions like a software program. We know that software comes from programmers. Information – whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal – always arises from an intelligent source. So the discovery of digital code in DNA provides a strong scientific reason for concluding that the information in DNA also had an intelligent source.

Design is an inference from biological data, not a deduction from religious authority. Jefferson said just that, and based his political thinking on it. The evidence for what he presciently called “Nature’s God’’ is stronger than ever. Our nation’s existence, with its guarantee to protect each person’s “inalienable rights,’’ may be counted among the fruits of Jefferson’s belief in intelligent design.

Stephen C. Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His new book is “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.’’

Information…always arises from an intelligent source.   I repeat that here just in case you missed it.  There are no exceptions.  Information by its definition requires an inform-er and an inform-ee.  An intelligent designer does the arranging of a message and the means of transmission, and someone or or something thing receives it, processes it, and exhibits some resulting behavior.  Why is that so hard to get?

Yogi Berra said that you can observe a lot just by looking.  If we look, we see information present in DNA.  By logic, we should be looking for the intelligent source of that information, not twisting ourselves up in knots trying to explain how it came to be by random fluctuations.

Can I get a witness?