Evolution
At a recent lunch with some co-workers a friend shared a picture he thought was funny. The picture was of the sign for a Christadelphian Meeting Room, which in addition to the name and meeting time also had an area for a short message that could be changed. The message in the picture was “Evolution is a Lie.” What he found humorous was that taped to the sign was a paper that said, “If you have evidence to disprove evolution… then write it down, get it peer reviewed & collect your Nobel prize.”
Regardless of any possible humorous value, this picture does highlight a number problems with this entire issue. The first point is that it is always easy to poke fun at the fringe and the Christadelphian Church is clearly on the fringe. Not only do they reject evolution, they reject most of teachings that have defined Christianity for 2000 years.
Their claim that evolution is a lie is at best hyperbole, and more likely simply absurd. Regardless of what you think about evolution, it is not a lie. A lie is something said with the intent to deceive. The core of a lie is deception not truthfulness. In fact, it is possible to lie while only saying things that are true, if they are said in such a way as to mislead.
Few if any supporting evolution do so because they know that evolution is false, and they are just trying to deceive people into thinking it was true. They believe evolution to be true and that is why they defend it. Evolution can be true or false, but it is not a lie.
The paper taped to the sign is not much better, has it has several problems. Let me take them in reverse order. Let’s assume for a second that someone did have such evidence. Would it really be as simple as getting it peered reviewed and collecting a Nobel Prize? The history of science says no. Science, regardless of its benefits as a method to learn about the natural world, is governed by people. As a community, scientists have beliefs and agendas that get in the way of pure objectivity.
In my book, I cite the example of Alfred Wegener, who had a theory of Continental Displacement, what we would now call Plate Tectonics. When he published his results rather than winning a Nobel Price he was shunned and ridiculed to the point that he could not even get a job teaching in his own country. This was because his theory would have overturned the then current thinking on Geology. It was only 20 years after his death that his theory ceased to be considered pseudoscience and finally came to be accepted. Overturning evolution would be a far more massive change than that proposed by Wegener.
That brings us to the issue of what this “supposed evidence to disprove evolution” might be. Just how would one go about trying to disprove the theory? Evolution is not a repeatable event that can be verified by experiments. If one wanted to “disprove” Gravity one would need to construct an experiment which showed that the mathematical formulas that describe it break down.
But evolution was an historical process. It attempts to describe what happened. So how would one “disprove” it? Find a difference between the theory and the evidence? That already exists. Darwin’s theory involved small changes over long periods of time, but the fossil records shows long periods of stability marked by short periods of change, which has led to the version of evolution called punctuated equilibrium.
This leads to the second problem, which goes to the heart of what is evolution. I have seen a very wide variety of definitions. In short it means many things to many people. I have seen evolutionists define it so broadly as to account for all dogs, or even all canines, evolving from a single type, something even devout 7-day creationists would accept; to a godless and undirected natural process that accounts for the origin of all life.
This later definition is probably the most accurate for the most ardent supporters. It is not tied directly to any evidence, as evidence really does not matter. The theory of evolution will simply adjust itself to include whatever the evidence is found. Given the human ability to rationalize almost anything, it is hard to conceive of anything that could not be fitted in somehow.
After all the core of Darwin’s original theory was small changes over long periods of time. When that was not supported by the evidence, the evidence was simply incorporated into to the theory. In short, Evolution can accommodate large changes or small changes; long periods of change or short periods of change. It is whatever it needs to be. In short, it is a tautology and thus is something that cannot be disproven.
Finally, there is an even deeper issue at play, and it is one that involves the nature of science, particularly when it comes to historical issues such as evolution that do not lend themselves to repeated testing and experimentation. When dealing with such issues, is it the purpose of science to discover what happened, or is science limited only providing a natural explanation? This question is at the core of the debate over the possibility of discovering intelligent design.
The short history of research into intelligent design also shows the absurdity of the claim taped to the church’s sign. Even scientists who accept evolution have found themselves in trouble for even considering the possibility of Intelligent Design. This is because for many, science can only consider natural explanations, and as such, any consideration of Intelligent Design is a priori unscientific. This would be fine if it was then acknowledged that science was correspondingly biased, but strangely few skeptics will acknowledge that point.
The real irony in all this is that within the Christian community, evolution is a matter of open debate. There are Christians who accept evolution, Christians who do not, and some in the middle. One is free to look at the evidence and reach their own conclusion. Within the scientific community, evolution is a belief that can only be questioned at serious risk to one’s career, where even the research into the possibility of Intelligent Design is strongly opposed and condemned. Yet somehow it is the Christians who are closed minded because they consider more than one option.
A Constitutional Crisis
Major disputes, be they family disputes, disputes at work, political fights, or conflicts between nations often operate at several levels. The classic example of this is World War I, seemingly started by the assassination of an obscure archduke by a Serbian terrorist, but in reality the causes ran much deeper to the point that the assassination of archduke Ferdinand of Austria was little more than a pretext.
It is becoming increasingly clear that such is the case with the current government shutdown. Going into the shutdown the apparent cause, the dispute over the funding of ObamaCare, seemed pretty straightforward. But even before the actual shutdown began it was becoming clear that there was something deeper at work.
If nothing else, this was clear because, while Republicans did pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) that defunded ObamaCare, once it failed to pass the Senate they quickly abandoned that demand. Instead they sent up a stream of bills, each bill asking for less than the previous one. Eventually they got to a bill simply asked that individuals be given the same exemption that the President had already granted to corporations, and that Congress follow the provisions of the bill. When even this was rejected, the final bill simply asked that they do what the House and Senate has historically done when they could not reach an agreement, they go to conference to work out their differences, but this too was rejected by the Democrats in the Senate
Thus while ObamaCare is the pretext, there is something else going on here, something much deeper. It can be seen in Senate Majority Leader Reid’s response to a question when he rhetorically asked “What right do they have to pick and choose what part of government is going to be funded?” This is the crux of the matter.
What makes it somewhat surreal is that Obama continues to say things such as, “But we’re not going to accomplish those things if one party to this conversation says that the only way that they come to the table is if they get 100 percent of what they want and if they don’t, they threaten to burn down the house,” yet then he refused to come to the table and negotiate and instead demands that he get 100% of what he wants, a clean CR! All the while the Republicans have sent up a series of increasingly weaker proposals and are now asking to go to conference.
So whatever your view on ObamaCare, it is clear that Obama and Reid are refusing to compromise, while the Republicans are so willing to compromise that they have effectively been negotiating with themselves.
But the real looming crisis is not the current shutdown, or even the looming debt ceiling, it is the Constitutional crisis which is emerging, and which is embodied in Obama’s hard line refusal to negotiate and can be seen in Reid’s question.
What right do Republican have? While it is true that President Obama did win re-election, and that the Democrats held on to the Senate, it is also true that the Republican in the house won their elections and held on to the House. So Democrats hold the Presidency and the Senate, and Republicans hold the House. We have divided government.
In addition Article 1 Section 7 of the Constitution says that all revenue bills must start in the House. Thus while they do not have 100% say in spending, they have the Constitutional edge, and cannot be dictated to by the Senate and President.
Given the divided nature of Government, the demands of Obama and Reid that their wishes be followed, without any negotiation is not only unprecedented, it is extremely dangerous.
Obama is President, not dictator. The house is not his servant, but a co-equal branch of Government, and one that according to the Constitution holds the purse. And yet the President is refusing to even negotiate and is trying to dictate that the House follow his demands. This is much bigger than Obamacare; this strikes at the very core of our government based on checks and balances.
What is even more troubling is Obama’s actions in the shutdown, which seem based on inflicting as much pain on the American people as possible in order to put pressure on the Republicans to cave to his demands. During any shutdown the president has complete authority to determine what is and is not “essential” so if kids with cancer are blocked from Clinical Trails, it is only because the President has deemed this to be non-essential.
While it is reasonable to say, for example, that the Smithsonian is not essential and therefore the people who work there will not come to work to open the museums up, how is it in any way reasonable to say that we are going have people go to work so as to block access to open air locations such as the WWII memorial, that we are going to pay people to put up barricades and pay people to keep people away? This is just being mean spirited and vindictive; trying to inflict needless pain on WWII vets in order to score a few political points out of their suffering.
Where this gets really troubling is the upcoming debt ceiling. The history of negotiation and compromise when increasing the debt limit is clear and well established. But as with the CR, Obama is just demanding an increase without any compromise or negotiation. He is demanding that the House just rubber-stamp his wishes without any say in the matter.
Despite all the dire predictions, a failure to raise the debt ceiling does not automatically mean that the government defaults. It just means that the government cannot borrow any more money. It would still have all the money it normally gets from taxes, which, while not enough to cover all government spending, is more than enough to keep us from defaulting and in fact to keep funding the majority of government. It would, in effect, just be another type of partial government shutdown.
But just as the President gets to define what is essential and non-essential in a shutdown, he also gets to decide which bills to pay if we cannot borrow more money. The Republicans have repeatedly attempted to pass a law that would mandate the federal government not default on its debt as that would have dire consequences, but the Democrats have repeated blocked all such efforts. In short if the debt limit is not increased, Obama could choose to have the country default, in hopes of blaming it on the Republicans. Given his current actions and rhetoric, he might actually do this.
Thus we are rapidly approaching a Constitutional crisis. The best and constitutional way to settle this is to have both sides sit down and work out a compromise. But Obama and Reid are blocking this, explicitly refusing to negotiate, much less compromise. Instead they are demanding that the House abandon its Constitutional role and simply rubber stamp their demands.
Neither option the President is offering is a good one. It effectively comes down to either trashing the Constitution, or trashing the economy, take your pick.
Debate 6: The Role of Profit
Question 6 is out for Energion debate between the more liberal author Joel Watts and myself. This question is on “What is the value of profit as a motive for action in the marketplace and competition as a regulating force? Do you trust profit making organizations more than non-profit? Under what circumstances?“ You can find Joel Watts’ reply here. You can find my reply here.
SIX HIRB and the Scandals
In a discussion with a liberal friend, he referred to my position that, as a result of all the scandals, the Obama administration is one of the most corrupt in history as “strangely deluded” and then out of the blue referred to the Tea party as “the Tea ‘We Don’t Want Black People to Vote’ Party” as if it had some relevance to the discussion, even if true.
It is clear that at least one of us is ignoring the facts, but I am content to wait for the investigations to progress on the seeminly ever growing number of scandals, which is up to at least eight as I write, though I may have missed some. As we have learned from past scandals, it can take years to finally break through an administration’s stone walling to get to the facts and we are only at the beginning. For example, the Watergate break-in occurred in June 1972, but it was not unit August 1974 that the evidence accumulated to the point that Nixon had to resign. We are not even two months into the investigation of some of these these scandals.
Concerning the charge of racism I would ask my friend a couple of questions and make some comments.
1) I have been involved with the Tea Party from its earliest days and have not only attended Tea Party events, but spoke at one. I have seen no hint of racism and in fact at the event where I spoke, the lead speaker was a black pastor from Milwaukee. So as part of the tea party, how do I fit in to the charge of racism?
2) In the Tea Party’s earliest days disapproval of Bush rivaled disapproval of Obama. While the focus was on the present not the past, and thus on Obama, anger at Bush kept bubbling up even though he was no longer in office. If the Tea Party is concerned with its stated issues of the size of Government, taxes, and the debt, this is completely understandable. But how does your theory of racism fit in with the anger at Bush?
Of course the simple answer is that his charge of racism is false. But this is one of the big problems I see with the left. Whereas people on the right generally view those on the left as people with good intentions who are simply wrong on the issues, people on the left frequently view those on the right as bad or even evil, as in the charge of racism.
The frequency of the left’s malicious charges are equaled only by their baselessness to the point that they have become a source of humor on the right at how reflexively and how absurdly those on the left resort to such labels.
In fact this makes up so much of the liberal argument that Dennis Prager has coined the terms, “SIX HIRB” which stands for Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, Bigoted, as a short hand way of referring to the lefts claims. One could add to this terms like selfish, greedy, uncaring, etc. but Prager’s shorthand captures the essence of the liberal argument: to attack the character of those who disagree.
This is detrimental for many reasons. First, it makes real debate very difficult for it takes what would otherwise be simple policy discussions, and instantly transform them into clashes between good and evil. More importantly, it effectively closes the minds of the liberals. After all if one believes that the real issue is SIX HIRB, there is no need to pay attention to any reasons that the right might say they are concerned with as these would be at best rationalizations, and at worse, lies.
The real problem is that if you only look at the evidence that supports what you want to believe and ignore everything else, you can believe anything and with SIX HIRB that is exactly what liberal have done. Self-reinforcing arguments from those they agree with are uncritically accepted. Anything that conflicts with their position is dismissed without any serious consideration as being grounded in SIX HIRB. In many respects when it comes to conflicts with the right, evidence and reasons do not matter. They are combating evil and in the fight against evil everything is justified.
This is why those on the left are so quick to see corruption in the right that they claim it even when it does not exist, but have such a blind spot when it comes to corruption on their side. Now it is very common to hear claims of “both sides do it” at this point, and while to some extent this is true, it masks the historical difference between the left and right.
It is simply a fact that historically, the left and right have reacted to charges of corruption by those on their side in vastly different ways. Sure, in the early stages there is a natural, and I would argue justified, tendency to defend those on your side from charges of corruption, the real difference between the sides become clearer as the evidence of corruption grows.
Thus, for example, when it became clear that Nixon had committed obstruction of Justice, Republicans went to the White House and asked him to resign. When it became clear that Clinton and committed not only obstruction of justice, but perjury as well, Democrats went to the White House and held a rally of support, and then helped divert attention away from the legal issues with claims that “it was all about sex.”
When Republican Congressman Mark Foley was found to have sent inappropriate emails to former congressional pages after they had turned 18, the Republican leadership immediately forced him to resign. When Democratic Congressmen Gerry Stubbs, was found to have had sex with then current pages who were still minors, he was reelected and went on to be lauded as “a role model” as the first openly homosexual Congressman.
Such examples of double standards abound. While corruption occurs in both parties, historically Republicans have not, or at least have not been allowed to, tolerate it within their midst. Either way that is a good thing. The same cannot be said for Democrats, who focus so much on the people bringing the charges, that even blatant examples of wrong doing are simply ignored.
Thus in the Fast and Furious scandal, the Justice Department send information to Congress, and when it was later shown that this information was known to have been false well before it was sent, executive privilege was invoked to block further investigation. More recently Holder claimed to Congress that he had never heard of prosecuting journalists, and then it was revealed that contrary to his claim to Congress he had in fact signed the application for the warrant. Either he does not know what he is doing, lied to Congress, or lied to the Judge. But we are told by those on the left nothing to see here, move along. And if we press the issue, SIX HIRB is invoked. It cannot possibly be that we want an Attorney General who tells the truth, it can only be that we are racist.
Of course, that which gets rewarded gets repeated. Thus it should not be too surprising that since the Clintons got away with all of their corruption, and are in fact honored stars within the Democrat party, with Hillary the odds on favorite for 2016, that corruption within the party would not only continue but would expand.
To be clear, this is not a claim of direct involvement by Obama. In fact, it is a reason to believe that he may not be directly involved. For corruption within the party that now controls so much of government may simply have metastasized to the point that it does not need to be directed from the top. It literally might be breaking out independently throughout the government. In fact given the large number of government agencies plagued with scandal, that might be a better explanation than corruption directed from a single source from above.
This would not absolve Obama from all responsibility, after all as President of the United States, he sets the tone from the top. His constant demonization of his opposition, combined with his unconstitutional claims of plans to go around Congress if they do not do what he want; his lawless actions that at best side step Congress, such as creating a new legal classification without any actual law to support it with his imposition of the Dream Act, set the tone. Such lawless actions display an anything goes attitude that only can encourage lawlessness within the various departments. Thus we should not be all that surprised by the current outbreak of scandals in so many areas.
Finally, it would seem that even if not directly involved Obama continues to support at least indirectly such actions. Clear examples of corruption and wrong doing are still being downplayed if not outright denied. Attempts to discover the truth are stonewalled and those involved defended and in some cases even promoted. But then after all, if you believe your opponents are SIX HIRB, then why believe anything they say, and even if true, they probably deserved it anyway.
Debate 5: U.S. Justice and Penal System
Question 5 is out for Energion debate between the more liberal author Joel Watts and myself. This question is on “What would you do to reform the U.S. Justice and Penal System?“ You can find Joel Watts’ reply here. You can find my reply here.
