Debate in Darwinian Territory

In case you're interested and have nothing better to do, you might like to read the brief offensive I launched Thursday in the wake of Cardinal Schönborn's op-ed "Finding Design in Nature" (which I posted about same day). This Darwinian fire-fight¹ took place in the New York Times's online backyard. I don't know that I took any prisoners, but I at least inflicted a few thought-provoking questions. These were unanswered: hardboiled materialists seem rather impervious to thought.

A couple responses were themselves thought-provoking, and raise some issues worth investigation. Not all of the correspondents were that lucid, but these provided unparallelled entertainment. It's always fun to read the frustrated sputterings of secular humanists, particularly when their worldview is straitjacketted to what the Times editors see fit to print. We can only pray that someday, they'll realize they can't beat objective reality, but will just have to join it.

Here are links to my first post and last post at the New York Times Forum. Please note that you do have to sign up for access to the site, but there is no charge.

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Note

1. "Darwinian fitness contest" might be more appropriate, but the inevitable associations with Richard Simmons don't fit the combat metaphor.

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UPDATE: another Times article:

Cornelia Dean and Laurie Goodstein, "Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution," New York Times (July 9, 2005). (Hat tip to Thoughts on Christianity and Science)

Contrarian Demographics

Steve Sailer, as usual, has some great items on his homepage and blog—stuff you definitely won't find in the mainstream media (MSM), and backup up with good quantitative analysis (which you also won't find in the MSM).

How legal abortion hollowed out the black middle class

Uses a 1996 Brookings Institution policy brief called "An Analysis of Out-Of-Wedlock Births in the United States." The effect of legalized abortion on illegitimacy conformed to what anyone with their feet on the ground would expect (but our elites seem clueless about):

Before legalization, the birthrate for married black women was 129 and for unmarried black women 91. A decade later, the married black birth rate dropped from 129 to 93, while the unmarried black birth rate fell only from 91 to 86. So, social changes, including abortion legalization, had barely any effect on the unmarried black birth rate, but drove down the black married rate sharply.

Moreover, black women weren't getting married as much, in part because of the collapse of the shotgun wedding...

Interestingly the brief maintains that after Roe, "Sexual activity without commitment was increasingly expected in premarital relationships."

"Affordable Family Formation"—The Neglected Key To GOP's Future,

In this VDARE article Steve describes three differences between GOP and Democratic voters (Dirt, Mortgage, and Marriage Gaps) and advises the GOP to tell voters, "We're on the side of making it affordable for you, and your children and grandchildren, to form families. The Democrats are on the side of dying alone."

WSJ's Taranto pushes his "Roe Effect" half-truth again

Here Steve disputes the idea that the Democrats wouldn't have lost (or at least lost so badly) had they not aborted their future constituency (an idea that I've trumpetted before in this forum).

• Feb 23: "Super-Natural Selection"
• June 10: The Democrats' Darwin Award

Also here's an interesting post on African economics at Contrarian Views: aid to Africa hurts the common people.

Humble Pie, Baked Not Evolved

On the subject of evolution, we Catholics tend to look down our noses at our Evangelical brethren, whom we tend to see as needlessly exercised about secular boogie-men like Darwin. We tell ourselves that they're so untutored in Christian history as to reject use of our God-given faculty of reason, so their excitement about Darwin must come from a similarly unfounded suspicion of science. And the neo-Darwinians have been all too eager to flatter our vanity.

Today we receive the prelude to a correction from Holy Mother Church, transmitted through (of all places) today's New York Times. The Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, writes an op-ed on "Finding Design in Nature." An eminent Thomistic philosopher and member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Schönborn is best known as editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the first universal catechism since that of Trent. In the Times, he writes

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

The truth is that Darwinism is an abdication of reason. To propose chance as a cause of anything (including genetic information) is to abandon the bedrock of science, the principle of causality: "Everything has a cause either in itself or in another." Darwinism boils down to a fundamentalist-style belief. (See also this post on Carl Sagan's brand of ol'-time religion, and very good comments to this one.)

Darwinism is likewise an abdication of moral responsibility. Chance and determinism rule the universe¹, so man is only a "trousered ape," in C.S. Lewis's words. Charles Darwin himself sees the moral implication of his theory is the removal of all limits to human behavior and he even describes genocide as the inevitable outcome of his system. (And I haven't mentioned Darwin's desciples, like Francis Galton, the "father" of modern eugenics.)

Most importantly, Darwinism adnegates hope in Divine Providence. On this point, Pope Benedict's proclaimation at his installation (from which Schönborn quotes) is most significant:

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.²

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Notes

1. Cue "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. [1-min WAV sample][MIDI]

2. "Necessary" meaning 'part of God's eternal plan,' not 'being one's own cause of existence.'

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Christoph Schönborn, "Finding Design in Nature," New York Times (July 7, 2005). [Online edition sponsored ironically by "Kinsey: Now on DVD"—Kinsey the trousered-ape impersonator.]

Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, Mass, Imposition of the Pallium and Conferral of the Fisherman's Ring for the Beginning of the Petrine Ministry of the Bishop of Rome (April 24, 2005).

Hope

Hope is the certain knowledge that life's evils have an end—that when we are denied a good, it is because there awaits something greater.

These last few years' suffering has dragged me through the valley of desolation to the threshold of despair. I used to say that the secret to happiness in life was to lower your expectations, but in a way that I can't credit myself, I have learned that my cynical aphorism was backward. The problem is not expecting too much, but settling for too little.

In one film, Abbott and Costello are fishing in a rowboat. Costello catches a fish and uses it as bait to catch a bigger one. He repeats this procedure several times, each time catching a larger fish and using it for bait. Finally he hooks a fish so big that it pulls him overboard.¹

Our lives are a big game of double-or-nothing. If we refrain from grasping at our little hopes, eventually the Lord will send us a hope so big that its ecstatic fulfillment will consume our whole being.

There are hopes and there is Hope. Our little hopes rise and fall. Some are fulfilled, some fall by the wayside. Yet beyond these ups and downs is a greater Hope, and winning and losing both have the purpose of opening our hearts to receive it.

Through suffering comes the wisdom of Hope. Hope is the most difficult virtue² and it is the one we most need in this age that denies purpose and pouts over suffering.

My parents' extreme—even senseless—love has come home to me only in my adulthood. I discovered that they want to give me everything to make me happy—and in fact they have always wanted to give me everything, but feared spoiling me. By denying my desires, they left me a greater gift.

Hope recognizes that God has always wanted to give us everything for our happiness. We err in resting our eyes on glittering goods that cannot satisfy, instead of looking beyond to our true fulfillment.

Ultimately Hope points beyond our senses, far outside this world's shrivelled confines to something, some One.

Hope is the certain knowledge that life's evils have an end—that when we are denied a good, it is because the Lord holds something greater, far greater, for us.

Our suffering purchases a priceless truth. Take this lesson to heart, my child: today's tears will vanish in the radiance of the joy to come.

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Notes

1. Jean Yarbrough, dir., The Naughty Nineties (1945).

2. Charles Peguy, Portal of the Mystery of Hope, David Louis Schindler, Jr., trans. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdman's Publishing Company, 1996).

Lighter Elements

I thought that whether you're working today after the long weekend (assuming you were fortunate to get one) or on vacation, you might appreciate a few items to lighten the summer heat:

• Fishermen net giant catfish
  646 pounder in Thailand

  World's Ugliest Dog

  Frightful photograph here.

  Days of Our Lamps

  Soap-opera parody

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A friend tells me that the cold-fusion claim has been disputed and withdrawn. I'm still waiting for confirming documentation, but I'll let you know the result.

UPDATE: This statement was based on miscommunication. My apologies.

Patriotism

This week having begun with Independence Day, I thought it appropriate to reflect on the meaning of patriotism. It is sadly little known that C.S. Lewis writes wonderfully on the subject in The Four Loves.

Editorial Note: The practice of some blogs is to intersperse selections of an outside text with the blogger's reflections. Instead of "gilding the lily" by gratuitously inserting my meager self, I'll let you read selections of Mr. Lewis straight—take him as you will.

Lewis identifies five kinds or strains of patriotism, but it is reasonably clear that he most upholds patriotism as an affection or...

...love of home, of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes; and of all places fairly near these and fairly like them; love of old acquaintances, of familiar sights, sounds and smells. Note that at its largest this is, for us, a love of England, Wales, Scotland, or Ulster. Only foreigners and politicians talk about "Britain." Kipling's "I do not love my empire's foes" strikes a ludicrously false note. My empire! With this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life; for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it; for the local dialect and (a shade less) for our native language. As Chesterton says, a man's reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he "could not even begin" to enumerate all the things he would miss.

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Of course patriotism of this kind is not the least aggressive. It only asks to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude toward forgeigners. How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realised that the Frenchmen like café complet just as we like bacon and eggs—why, good luck to them and let them have it. The last thing we want is to make everywhere else just like our own home. It would not be home unless it were different.

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Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for 'their country' they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men still needed to be comvinced that their country's cause was just; but it was still their country's cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds—wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine—I become insufferable. The pretense that when England's cause is just we are on England's side—as some neutral Don Quixote might be—for that resaon alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country's cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.

The glory of the old sentiment was that while it could steel men to the utmost endeavor, it still knew itself to be a sentiment. Wars could be heroic without pretending to be Holy Wars. The hero's death was not confused with the martyr's. And (delightfully) the same sentiment which could be so serious in a rear-guard action could also in peacetime take itself as lightly as all happy loves often do. It could laugh at itself.

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C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1960), 23, 24, 29.

Nothing Comes from Nothing

While I was hunting down that Hawking quotation for my previous post, I ran across a book review of Kitty Ferguson's The Fire in the Equations. The author of the review is an excellent writer Stephen M. Barr, University of Delaware physicist.

As I might have expected... Barr very clearly (more clearly that I have) untangles the muddle of something and nothing that befuddles scientific atheists.

Another class of ideas involve explaining the Big Bang as a quantum event. In quantum mechanics one can have particles being "created out of the vacuum." That is, there can be transitions from a state with no particles to a state with one or more particles. By analogy it has been suggested that spontaneous transitions can occur from a state with "no universes" to a state with one (or more) universes.

Whether this makes sense as physics is not yet clear. But if it does, will it give us creation ex nihilo without God? Only if one equivocates about what "nothing" and "universe" mean. A quantum state without any particles or even without any "universes" is not nothing-it is a quantum state.

Perhaps the distinction can be illustrated with an analogy. There is a difference (if not a spendable one) between a bank account with no dollars in it and no bank account at all. To have a bank account, even one with a momentarily zero (or negative) balance, requires having a bank, an agreement with that bank, a monetary system, a currency, and banking laws. Similarly, to talk about states with various numbers of "universes" requires having a quantum system with different possible "states," and laws determining the character of those states and governing the transitions among them. The term "the universe" should really be applied to this whole system with its laws, and not, as is misleadingly done in such discussions, to "space-times" that are coming into and going out of existence.

Hawking had it right: having equations that describe a "universe" (or anything else) coming into being does not mean that these equations must be describing anything real. Having a story about fairies does not mean there are fairies.

Barr concludes with a classic quotation:

The Latin apologist Minucius Felix, writing around 200 a.d., said, "If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat, and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he himself was superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth, believe there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and the various parts of the whole world." The greatest contribution of science to the "search of God" has been to bring into fuller view the grandeur of this providence, order, and law.

This is just common sense: you can't get something from nothing. Or, as that soulful street-sage Billy Preston sings,

Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me

This ain't rocket science....

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Stephen M. Barr, "The Gods of the Physicists," First Things 65 (August/September 1996): 54-57.

Kitty Ferguson, The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God (Grand Rapids Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994).

Minucius Felix, Octavius, chapter 18. [The ancients were masters at rheortic, weren't they?]

Billy Preston (and Bruce Fisher), "Nothing from Nothing," Kids and Me (1974).

Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). [In case you're interested in reading more by Barr, this book is great!]