The Global Warming Scare is on the Verge of Joining the Y2K Scare on the Scrapheap of History

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Robert Bryce entitled "Five Truths About Climate Change." The truths are:

1) The carbon taxers/limiters have lost. Carbon-dioxide emissions have been the environmental issue of the past decade. . . . Copenhagen became the epicenter of a world-wide media frenzy as some 5,000 journalists, along with some 100 world leaders and scores of celebrities, descended on the Danish capital to witness what was billed as the best opportunity to impose a global tax or limit on carbon dioxide.

The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.

Here's a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

2) Regardless of whether it's getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore. Sure, the U.S. is the world's second-largest energy consumer. But over the past decade, carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by 1.7%. And according to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is now cutting carbon emissions faster than Europe, even though the European Union has instituted an elaborate carbon-trading/pricing scheme. Why? The U.S. is producing vast quantities of cheap natural gas from shale, which is displacing higher-carbon coal.

Meanwhile, China's emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year. Africa's carbon-dioxide emissions jumped by 30%, Asia's by 44%, and the Middle East's by a whopping 57%. Put another way, over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—about 6.1 billion tons per year—could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up.

4) We have to get better—and we are—at turning energy into useful power. In 1882, Thomas Edison's first central power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan converted less than 3% of the heat energy of the coal being burned into electricity. Today's best natural-gas-fired turbines have thermal efficiencies of 60%.

5) The science is not settled, not by a long shot.

The whole global warming scare has always been about a massive transfer of wealth from first world consumers to third world governments and the moving force behind it has been Communists and Socialists who have transformed themselves into Eco-warriors as a way of obtaining results that could not be obtained in the traditional method of revolutionary action.

It is easily predictable that when the prospects of the global warming scare being a useful tool to accomplish the massive transfer of wealth envisaged through a global tax on financial transactions, then the whole scare will just die out like the Y2K one did after the turn of the century. It was never about science; it has been about politics all along.

Marxism has failed and true Marxists only occasionally show their true colors. In the US even socialism is discredited and such a vote-loser that socialist politicians must play semantic games to hide their true intentions. The environmentalist movement, with its apocalyptic rhetoric and scare tactics, has replaced the class warfare - revolutionary rhetoric.

In both cases the aim is essentially destructive: tear down existing economic structures in the Utopian hope that something better will emerge. For the past several decades Marxism has been hovering on the brink of nihilism and for all practical intents and purposes the distinction between Marxism, radical environmentalism and anarchism has become a distinction without difference.

One of the degenerate forms of 20th century Marxism is the Frankfurt School and its 'Critical Theory.' Whereas formerly socialists denounced capitalism for producing poverty, Critical Theory denounces it for producing abundance, which they label "consumerism" and claim is incompatible with high culture. But the commitment of Critical Theory to high culture is tenuous at best. Critical Theory lumps in Enlightenment rationalism, "positivist" science, logic itself and natural law and calls them totalitarian.

And one can see their point: if there is such a thing as objective truth (be it moral, scientific or logical) then the all-important, exalted, autonomous individual must bow to that fact and acknowledge it. In their romantic striving to get free of the "despotism of logic and mathematics" they stamp their feet and declare their independence of such wicked and inconvenient truths.

Lesek Kolakowski, in his magisterial history of Marxism entitled, Main Currents of Marxism (3 vols.), says something interesting in Part III: Breakdown, Chapter X "The Fankfurt School and 'Critical Theory'" that is extremely relevant to the whole global warming hoax (although he never even mentions global warming in his book). He writes:

The Dialectic of Enlightenment contains all the elements of Marcuse's later attack on modern philosophy, which allegedly favours totalitarianism by maintaining a positivist 'neutralism' in regard to the world of values and by insisting that human knowledge should be controlled by facts. . . the truth of science is subordinated to the criteria of any interest whatsoever; this simply means that anything is right which suits the interests with which the scientist identifies himself." (pp. 1088-9, my bolding)

The sentence in bold print in particular jumped out at me and I wrote in margin "eg. Global Warming." This is obviously the source of the attitude displayed in Climategate and in the sloppy, ideologically driven work of the IPCC. Science has been corrupted by people who have imbibed a corrupt, degenerate, postmodern worldview and whose twisted form of Marxism (they would likely call it 'social justice') justifies them in their manipulation of the data to accomplish what they consider to be a good end.

Kolakowski also says:

Their 'critical theory' is in fact not so much a theory as a general statement that theory is of great importance, which few would deny, and a plea for a critical attitude toward existing society, which we are invited to 'transcend' in thought. This injunction, however, makes no sense as long as they cannot tell us in what direction the existing order is to be transcended. (p. 1090)

Those insiders who know how to read the coded language know that the goal is revolution, but the vagueness allows naive idealists to read in whatever they cherish. The Obama campaign with its vacuous "hope and change" slogan was a prime example of this approach.

Marxism is already intellectually and morally bankrupt and is in the process of becoming an historical curiosity like phrenology or alchemy. Yet its hold on degenerate Western universities remains strong. Increasingly it takes on the trappings and feel of a death cult, as can be seen in the increasingly violent rhetoric of Michael Moore, for example.

Despite, the intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism, however, there will be more dangerous nonsense in the years ahead before the universities can be reformed in accordance with the classical, Western, intellectual tradition embodied in the metaphysics of the Great Tradition. We may soon look back on the 'good old days' when all we had to worry about was global warming alarmism.

Do You "Believe" in Science?

Well, I don't. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. I believe in God the Son. I believe in the Holy Ghost. I believe in the holy catholic Church.

But science? Heck, no - asking someone to believe in science is like asking someone to believe in the existence of the United States. It is a fact, an empirically observable fact. Believe in it? Heck, I've been there! No need to believe in it; it just is a scientific fact. To demand "belief" in science is a category mistake.

So why do some people go around in pairs knocking on doors handing out "Believe in science or be doomed forever" tracts? Beats me, but it happened the other day in New Hampshire to Rick Perry. Here he was minding his own business campaigning for president of the United States when one of these secularist fanatics ambushed him using her child as a prop. (See video from ABC News here.)

Eric Kleefeld summarizes what happened:

Rick Perry is sure about a lot of things. But the theory of evolution, or even how old the planet Earth is, are not on that list.

A woman who will probably not be supporting the Texas governor brought her young son along to a campaign event in New Hampshire on Thursday, and had the boy ask Perry his views about science. "How old do you think the earth is?" the boy asked. This was an apparent allusion to how fundamentalist Christians often insist that Earth -- and indeed, the whole universe -- is about 6,000 years old.

"How old do I think the earth is? You know what, I don't have any idea," Perry responded. "I know it's pretty old. So it goes back a long, long ways. I'm not sure -- I'm not sure anybody actually knows completely and absolutely hold the earth is.

Perry then steered the conversation to some questions the boy's mother had been asking him, about evolution.

. . .

"Here your mom was asking about evolution. And you know, it's a theory that is out there -- it's got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools. Because I figure--"

The mother cut back in: "Ask him why he doesn't believe in science."

Perry continued: "Because I figure you're smart enough to figure out which one is right."

Rick Perry, open-minded skeptic, meets "True Believer."

As Ben Smith at Politico points out, this was a trap. She hoped to get a quote out of Perry to make him look ridiculous to New England secular materialists. She is probably a Democratic Party supporter.

As Kevin Williamson points out, the questioner is not at all interested in science; the question is blatantly political and rooted in the issue of worldview.

The broader question, however, is: Why would anybody ask a politician about his views on a scientific question? Nobody ever asks what Sarah Palin thinks about dark matter, or what John Boehner thinks about quantum entanglement. (For that matter, I’ve never heard Keith Ellison pressed for his views on evolution.) There are lots of good reasons not to wonder what Rick Perry thinks about scientific questions, foremost amongst them that there are probably fewer than 10,000 people in the United States whose views on disputed questions regarding evolution are worth consulting, and they are not politicians; they are scientists. In reality, of course, the progressive types who want to know politicians’ views on evolution are not asking a scientific question; they are asking a religious and political question, demanding a profession of faith in a particular materialist-secularist worldview.

This is exactly right. The issue has to do with a materialist-secular worldview that claims to be based on science, but actually is not. It could not be based on science because science is limited to empirical questions of fact and cannot tell us answers to metaphysical or religious questions. The materialist-secular worldview gives answers to such questions, which is why it is something other than science.

There is a particular kind of voter (probably no more than 20% of the American electorate) for whom adherence to the materialist-secular worldview is all-important. These people have worked hard for a century to establish this new (actually as old as Epicureanism) religion as the de facto "State Religion" of America. In Europe their co-religionists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in establishing the materialist-secular religion as the official religion of Europe instead of Christianity. But America is proving to be a tougher nut to crack.

This kind of question is not about science and people who accept the validity of natural selection as an efficient cause of evolutionary diversity can be on both sides of the worldview question. What divides Christians from materialist-secularists is the question of whether the universe is fundamentally personal and intelligently designed by a God or not. For the materialist-secular worldview, the denial of a Creator is essential to its project of human liberation from natural law, morality, traditional marriage and the sanctity of human life, with its limitations on the freedom of individuals to do anything they want up to and including aborting their babies and euthanizing their parents.

If God exists, then evolution or no evolution, the materialist-secular worldview is a dangerous delusion. Since evolution is denied by many Christians, the secularists think that by demanding that everyone accept evolution as "scientific" they can bludgeon believers into giving up faith in God. Of course, they are making numerous logical mistakes here. Evolution could be an accurate scientific theory and could be guided by Divine Providence in such a way as to maintain the sovereignty of God. Or, alternatively, evolution could be a mistake and simply the only conclusion one can come to if one begins by rejecting the existence of God.

But the real issue is which religion, going forward, will influence public policy decision on abortion, the sexual revolution, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, capital punishment, just war, religious freedom etc.

Clearly, the secular-materialist establishment is spooked by Rick Perry. He represents a challenge to their hegemony and they hate him. It is going to be a long, hate-filled, dirty campaign precisely because there are two different worldviews on offer here. Unlike the recent UK elections where the choice was between secular socialist and even more secular socialist, this election is a choice between the Judeo-Christian religion that built Western civilization and the materialist-secular worldview that is tearing it apart.

As the materialist-secular experiment in Europe continues to implode, it behooves Americans to be extremely skeptical about the wild-eyed fanatics who want to misuse science as a crutch for their irrational, immoral, anti-humanistic political agenda. They want us to "believe in science" but I think I'll stick with believing in God the Father Almighty.

Happy Birthday Israel!

The modern version of the State of Israel turns 63 today, having been founded on May 10, 1948. I wish a Happy Independence Day to all Israelis and take this opportunity to pray for the survival and flourishing of this wonderful country. The continued existence of the Jewish people as a people is one of the proofs for the existence of God. The Jews are one of the great pillars of Judeo-Christian civilization and the West. No wonder they are so hated by those who hate God.

Ed West points out that aside from the debates over Zionism, there is one area of human accomplishment in which Israelis have made a tremendous contribution: science. He writes in a post on his Daily Telegraph blog entitled "What have the Israelis ever done for us?:

And yet although the debate centres around whether Israel has been good and right for the Jewish people, weighed against the interests of the Arabs, the media largely ignores the benefits Israel has brought to the world; one of the least talked about aspects of the country is its incredible and unique contribution to science.

In terms of inventions Israelis have given the world the Uzi, the mobile phone (partly), camera chips for phones, SMS messaging and the first anti-virus software; Israel has the highest percentage of home computers per capita and the third most educated workforce on earth, with 12 per cent holding advanced degrees. The country also has more engineers and scientists per capita than any other country around the world, and has more companies quoted on the high-tech NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country outside the United States, more than all of Europe, India, and China combined.

Israelis are also at the forefront of medical research into heart transplants, strokes and Hepatitis C. Incredibly, some Israelis are even at work on a space mission, which could make that tiny state of seven million people the third country to land a probe on the Moon. Jews on the Moon? Conspiracy theorists won’t know where to start.

In the last ten years Israeli scientists have won five Noble prizes in the sciences, a tally bettered by only four other nations, while per capita Israel produces more economists than any other country.

Israel also publishes a huge number of Scientific and Technical Journal Articles, some 16,470 in 2005, more than the entire Arab world and Iran combined. And the Jewish state produces an astonishing number of inventors. Last year in the United States Israelis registered 1917 patents, just below Italy (58 million people) and the Netherlands (15 million) and way ahead of its neighbours Saudi Arabia (58) Turkey (45) Egypt (20) Kuwait (14) UAE (9) Iran (8) Lebanon (5) Jordan (1) and Syria (0). Israel itself grants 2500 patents a year, putting it in the top 20 of all countries and again more than all its neighbours combined. Israel is number one in the world for medical device patents per capita and number four for biotechnology patents per capita. And its biotechnology exports are now worth $6 billion a year.

The accomplishments of Israeli scientists while living under a nearly-constant siege for the past six decades are phenomenal. We salute them and pray for their continued success.

The Devil's Delusion

David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (NY: Basic Books, 2009) is a delightful piece of polemical writing: witty, concise, clear, funny and devastating. It is a relatively easy book to read, considering the amount of highly technical and abstract theoretical physics and advanced mathematics it treats.

Berlinski takes no prisoners and pulls no punches; he dares to call the bluff of leading scientists as to why, given that science seems more and more to point to a Creator, they insist that this must not be allowed to be admitted. As a secular Jew, Berlinski himself is not actually arguing for theism. Instead he is arguing that it is abuse of science to claim that science either disproves God's existence or renders God's existence irrelevant to cosmology. It is the pretentiousness of turning science into a faith system - which is really little more than old-fashioned village atheism - that offends Berlinski's sensibilities. Why should such a grand and glorious human achievement as modern experimental science be degraded in this way? His answer is that it ought not to be so.

Berlinski's explanation of the Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe is perspicuous and suggestive (pp. 69-78). But what is utterly fascinating is the discussion of the reaction of physicists to the obvious fact that what science has discovered about the beginning of the universe looks exactly like what the Book of Genesis says about the beginning of the universe, or, as Berlinski carefully phrases it: "The hypothesis of God's existence and the facts of contemporary cosmology are consistent."

The response of scientists was to assume that there had to be a way to explain the beginning of the universe without resorting to that hypothesis. The Church of Atheism needed to do apologetics against the believers' inferences from the facts of science. Berlinski stresses something that anyone who believes in original sin would never think to deny: that personal motivations function in the directions of theoretical thought chosen by individuals. Yes, there are facts; but there are many ways to explain those facts.

Berlinski discusses the Anthropic Principle and the theory of multiple universes (the Landscape) in order to show the degree to which some scientists are willing to go to avoid "You Know Who." One of the most interesting questions discussed in the book is the one posed to Neil Turok by Joel Primack: "What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws?" (p. 132) Obviously, something seems to compel physical objects to obey the laws of nature. But, as Berlinski notes, "neither compulsion nor obedience are physical ideas."

Anyone familiar with St. Augustine's Christianized Neoplatonism would not only know the answer, but also would recognize that a science which purports to be hot on the trail of the unified "theory of everything" should not omit a search for the answer to this question. It is time for Christian theology to move from the defensive to the offensive in the war between naturalism and theism. Science is on our side; scientism is not science. And if scientific fact is best explained with reference both to physical and theological ideas, well, what else would a Christian expect?

The Devil's Delusion is a terrific book and I highly recommend it.

Why Evolution Cannot Explain a Man Capable of Grasping the Theory of Evolution

Denish D'Souza's book, What's So Great About Christianity (Tyndale, 2007), is an excellent refutation of the "New Atheism." Here, in this passage, D'Souza popularizes skillfully a point made by many others including Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address.

First D'Souza quotes Stephen Hawking, who articulates the atheist dilemma.

Now if you beleive that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories in science into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe. But there is a fundamental paradox in the search for such a complete unified theory. Our ideas about scientific theories . . . assume we are rational beings who are free to observe the universe as we want and to draw logical deductions from what we see. In such a scheme it is reasonable to suppose that we might progress every closer to the the laws that govern our universe. Yet is there really is a complete unified theory, it would also presumably determine our actions. And so the theory itself would determine the outcome of our search for it! And why should it determine that we come to the right conclusions from the evidence? Might it not equally well determine that we draw the wrong conclusion?" (as quoted by D'Souza, pp. 249-50)

Hawking really cannot give any explanation for why a universe based on chance and natural selection should throw up creatures who are rational and able to see order and structure in nature. Where did the order and structure come from? Why should we be able to grasp it? How does natural selection produce the order and the rational knower?

D'Souza suggests that there is no explanation for Hawkings' dilemma unless you posit the existence of God.

Based on evolution, our ideas may be considered useful to us, but there are no grounds for presuming that they correspond with truth. Indeed a useful lie is preferable to a truth that plays no role in genetic self-perpetuation. In reducing everything to the laws of nature we risk denying that there is any rationality or truth behind nature's laws. (pp. 251-2)

We see contemporary late-modernity (aka "postmodernity") making this exact move; our culture is losing it faith in the existence of truth. And it is a matter of faith. Early modern scientists did not know that there were laws governing the world: they believed there were because they believed in a God who created the world by his Wisdom and Word - in other words by reason.

Augustinian Christianity says that Hawkings' unified theory of everything exists in the mind of God and that we have been created in his image with free will to make moral choices and reason to discern the hand of God in nature.

Christianity allows us to escape both: (1) the deterministic fatalism of Hawkings' unified theory (which is the reduction of human nature to the laws of physics) and (2) the loss of faith in reason that leads to relativism, nihilism and the will to power in post-Nietzschean philosophy.

Pope Benedict makes a similar point about science itself pointing beyond itself to God in his Regensburg Address:

. . . modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element [i.e. the mathematical structure of reality discussed earlier in the lecture] bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structure of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.

Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, an one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, abeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religions traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. . .

The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. (#59-62)

We must believe in God if we want to preserve human dignity, free will and science. This is our urgent message to our culture today.

Biology and Teleology

It could be argued that one of the key elements in the beginning of what we now call "modernity" was the rejection of the concepts of formal and final cause and thus the rejection of teleology or purpose from what came to be known as science. There were several reasons why modern science rejected teleology:

1. First of all, renaissance thinkers like Francis Bacon were preoccupied with power and they found that analyzing nature with reference only to material and efficient cause allowed them to simplify their investigations and focus only on one aspect of reality at a time. Yet this one focus - on the material and efficient causes of phenomena - eventually allowed researchers to develop a powerful technological science. So teleology proved to be superfluous.

2. But in addition to that, teleology was part of the Christian worldview that saw the whole of physical reality as a unified cosmos and questions of purpose were sometimes answered prematurely on a deductive basis without an openness to empirical confirmation or challenge, especially in Aristotelian science. So teleology tended to get rejected along with Aristotelian biology, which, I would argue, was a throwing out of the proverbial baby with the bath water.

3. By the 19th century there was a strong trend toward applying the model of Newtonian physics to biology and Darwin was the one finally to propose a theory of how to conceptualize this reductionistic approach to life by focusing on material and efficient cause only.

4. In the 20th century, those who wanted to advance atheistic materialism, socialism and the sexual revolution and get rid of God as the source of law in the Western world saw the rejection of teleology as essential to their cause. Thus we see the so-called "new atheism" attempting to argue that since modern science can produce great technology without reference to formal or final causation, therefore we should banish all concepts of purpose from, not only biology, but also law and ethics. Human beings have no telos except what individual will choose for themselves. This is the final degradation of liberalism into nihilism.

In a striking passage from Brave New World, Aldous Huxley pictures the World Controller for Western Europe, Mustapha Mond, making a censorship decision on a biological paper.

"'A New Theory of Biology' was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title page. 'The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published.' He underlined the words. 'The author will be kept under supervision. He transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary.' A pity he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose - well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily recondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes - make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstances, admissible. He picked up his pen again, an under the words 'Not to be published' drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed. 'What fun it would be,' he thought, 'if one didn't have to think about happiness!' (Vintage Canada ed. 2007, pp. 154-5)

I would argue that to expel teleology from biology is to make it impossible to understand human beings. In fact it ensures systematic misunderstanding. To reduce humans to matter in motion is to dehumanize them.

For example, when we hear stories about how promiscuity in males is actually a mechanism for natural selection and therefore not to be seen as unnatural or bad, we are witnessing the importing into biology of bad teleology. This is only possible because true teleology has been already ushered out the front door, which enables anti-humanistic teleology to sneak in the back door.

What is going here is an example of the fact that no science can have much to say about its object of study without resorting to teleology. However, in modern biology the arbitrary (philosophical and religious) decision to reduce final cause to material and efficient cause means that the human being is systematically reduced to the level of an animal and thus tragically misunderstood.

In the passage quoted above, it is instructive and significant that Mond does this deliberately. It is not a mistake; it is a crime against humanity rooted in rebellion against God.

My Predictions for 2010

Politics and the Economy
1. The Conservative Party in the UK will fumble a glorious opportunity to win a large majority in the Spring election and one of the smaller parties (either UKIP or the BNP) will make astonishing gains thus changing the electoral landscape radically, possibly even to the extent of holding the balance of power in a hung Parliament.

2. The Conservative Party of Canada will win an historic majority in a Fall election.

3. The Republicans will either gain, or nearly gain, control of the House and gain at least 4-5 seats in the Senate during the 2010 mid-term elections, which will be a referendum on Obama's fiscal, health care, environmental and abortion policies.

4. By late 2010 there will be fierce debate over the introduction of a European-style Value Added Tax and drastic cuts to military spending in the United States in response to a spiraling deficit.

5. By the end of 2010 polls will show Sarah Palin leading Barack Obama and there will be talk of Hilary Clinton challenging Obama for the nomination in 2012.

Religion
6. The Emergent Church movement will gradually fade, though it will take longer than a year for it to be absorbed completely into liberal Protestantism.

7. The Church of England will begin to splinter in 2010 as the Anglican Communion divides into the section that remains in communion with The Episcopal Church and the section that does not.

8. Pope Benedict XVI will succeed in bringing the Society of St. Pius X back into full communion with the rest of the Church. He will continue to be vilified by the liberal media and will continue to view that as a good sign that he is doing his job.

9. John Paul II's Theology of the Body will begin to be recognized by Evangelicals as the theoretical foundation of an alternative to the sexual revolution and will be increasingly embraced by conservative Christians of all stripes.

Culture
10. The debate over whether global warming is man-caused or part of the natural cycle of the planet's constantly changing environment will accelerate in 2010 and climate change alarmists will be increasingly placed on the defensive.

11. It will become widely recognized in 2010 that declining world population growth rates mean that a drop in population by mid-century could result in economic disaster.

12. There will be another major terrorist attack in the United States in 2010.

Milbank's Critique of Nietzsche

In his excellent book, (see previous posts), David Deane sheds new light on the interpretation of Nietzsche. We have examined his chapters on N's epistemology and N's anthropology. Now I want to discuss Deane's critique of John Milbank's treatment of N. in ch. 10 of the book that launched the radical orthodoxy movement: Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (1990). Deane's thesis is that Milbank's critique of N. is good so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Despite Deane's modesty and deference to Milbank's reputation, it is quite clear that Deane's criticism is of great importance to the future of RO.

In the inside cover to the volume, Radical Orthodoxy, ed. by Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, we read that RO is characterized by four claims, the third of which is that "All thought which brackets out God is ultimately nihilistic." If we can agree with this proposition, the question I think that arises next is whether or not "God" here must be understood with the help of a philosophy of being, such as was developed by the Fathers in dialogue with Greek philosophy and which came to a climax in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. Or can we avoid nihilism with a "God without being"?

Here is how I think Deane's book is furthers this debate. It suggests that Milbank's way of dealing with the challenge posed by N. is insufficient - not wrong, just incomplete - and this, in my opinion, it shows the necessity of some sort of a philosophy of being in order to overcome N., who is the quintessential philosopher of modernity. Why is this so? N. brings together two streams of modernity that are often not thought together: the political/ethical emphasis on the will and the scientific emphasis on biological drives in the truely modern view of the self. N. combines liberal politics and technological reason and grounds both in the will-to-power.

In N's philosophy, man in the Christian sense of "person" dies and the human race splits in two to become the overman and the last men. In modern genetic engineering we see the scientific possibility of humans taking control of evolution and splitting the genetic ties that make the human race one. The result could be a series of social classes determined genetically as in Huxley's Brave New World or simply the evolution of a slave race and a master race. With the advent of genetic engineering, N's vision of the overman and the last men becomes feasible technologically. The question we need to be asking is "Do sufficient resources exist in the dominant liberalism of the West that could enable a firm "No" to such a course of action?" The difficulty in answering this question reveals the extent to which the West has become Nietzschean and its glaring lack of such resources. This situation (in my view) makes the discovery of a renewed philosophy of being not a luxury for Medieval hobbists or a pipe dream of pious traditionalists, but an absolute necessity for the survival of human persons.

Deane begins by rejecting the strategy of responding to N. by re-articulating "a modernist anthropology by seeking that which is universal in human experience to ground a notion of self, thought and text and that core concept of the modern 'humanity.'" (77) Such an anthropology cannot be grounded in evolution, which can only throw up a barbaric and amoral social Darwinism. "Maximizing our potential for genetic replication" is not a basis for ethics and love, but for a radical individualism as the basis for violence. Both the laudable and the cruel are interchangeable within the context of our biological constitution, which means that evolution cannot be the basis for liberal ethics.

Deane opts instead for Radical Orthodoxy of Milbank and David Bentley Hart as a better approach than liberal modernity. (78) They both construe the self in pre-modern terms and reject the fundamental presuppositions of modernity. They both advocate an ontology of peace, rather than an ontology of violence. However, Deane argues that it is necessary to defeat N. in a different manner than these two theologians try to do.

First, in what may seem to be a surprising opening move, Deane says that Milbank rejects the truth of N. too completely. He says that Milbank's approach "risks repeating the problems of pre-modern theology in failing to see the radical juxtaposition between humanity and the humaniuty offered to us through the one human whom God uniquely intended, Jesus Christ" and therefore "risks failing to take the reality of natural human sinfulness seriously enough." (79) It is on Christological grounds that he challenges Milbank and his concern leads him to distinguish between fallen man as described by N's Darwinian will-to-power and man in Christ as described in this book by Barth's Christological anthropology. (The last 3 chapters of the book, with which I am not as concerned, deal with a Barthian Christological anthropology as an answer to N.)

So what Deane is suggesting here is that N. must be taken seriously as describing what man outside of Christ, man under the conditions of the Fall, man in sin, really looks like from an empirical and philosophical perspective. The strength of N's philosophy is that it is rooted and grounded in the observations of modern science, especially in the Neo-Darwinism celebrated in the work of Richard Dawkins and co., who view DNA in strictly materialistic and amoral terms. Deane's point, which I take to be unassailable, is that this is what science done from an atheistic set of presuppositions ends up looking like. This means that N's philosophy, including the will-to-power, is rooted in empirical reality, rather than in philosophical assumptions, except at the point of the very first presuppositions regarding God and the nature of reality. Neither the Neo-Nietzscheans, (Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Levinas), whom Milbank treats as a group along with N., nor the RO, like Milbank and Hart, reckon with the truth claims of N. when he claims that his philosophy is right, not because he has told a better story but because it is rooted in empirically verifiable reality.

Now, I do not believe it is actually rooted in empirically verifiable reality and I think this is the point at which N. must be challenged if he is not to triumph. But this is a question that Milbank and Hart do not take up and, (I can't believe I'm saying this) Deane and Barth do not really get to terms with either! Why? Milbank and Hart don't get to grips with N's truth claims because they opt for trying to tell a better, more convincing story than N., on the assumption that no one can prove that any story is true by means of science. Deane critiques their atttempt for being insufficiently Christological, which gets us half way there, but not all the way. What seems to me to be still missing is the claim that Christian theology describes reality better than the version of modern science that begins with atheism as its presupposition.

This is precisely the claim that Pope Benedict XVI made in his Regensburg Lecture. Modern science is comprised of a Platonic (Cartesian) element plus an experimental method. The Platonic element, the Pope points out, “is the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently.” (Par. #40) By applying mathematical description to reality and combining it with the experimental method, modern science advances by means of verification and falsification. Every new technological advance is further proof that the world is rationally ordered, not random chaos. So science bears within itself a question to which it has no answer: why is reality structured in such a way that it can be described mathematically and why are our minds able to grasp this structure? Atheistic science has no answer, but Christianity with its account of the Logos does. This is just a hasty sketch of Benedict's argument that science naturally arises out of Christianity and needs Christianity to be itself.

So I agree with Deane that the answer is Christology, but not merely the Christological description of man under sin and as reconciled, but the Christology of creation in which we understand the Logos as the source of order and structure in the universe. Only this doctrine can ultimately defeat N's will-to-power philosophy.

Richard Dawkins and the Little Green Men

I watched Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" today (thanks to my daughter and son-in-law's suggestion) and it was much better than I expected. I suppose I had been brainwashed by the review of the "controversy" it had generated. (Sigh . . .) In fact it was very well done.

All the Christians were open to believing in both some form of biological evolution (at least to some extent) and also in design by an intelligent Creator, while the scientests generally held that one must accept naturalism (ancient Epicureanism) and reject Christianity in order to believe in science. Of course, the science establishment doesn't speak for all working scientests, many of whom are believers, but there is not doubt that the crusading atheists hold the high ground when it comes to funding and science education and are not prepared to cede an inch of it.

I find it funny that they constantly talk about "believing" in science. I never hear of anyone talking of "believing" that 2+2=4. They talk of "knowing" it. Many atheistic science educators seem obsessed with polls measuring how many people "believe in Darwinism." This is not healthy. It bespeaks a deepseated insecurity and a mania for a certain religious point of view that they wish to impose dogmatically on all of society in the name of truth and academic freedom. It is totalitarian and inimical to free thought.

Anyway, the most eye-opening moment for me came when Stein was talking to Dawkins and asked him the question of what he would say if in the course of his scientific investigations he came to the conclusion that life could not have gotten started by accident and that it appeared to have required an intelligent designer to get it going. Would that not constitute evidence for design? Dawkins' reply was competely unexpected. Instead of hewing to the party line, he suggested the hypothesis that perhaps a highly advanced race of aliens had visited earth and dropped off some "life" that they had created in their (highly advanced) labs. Now, I think it was clear that he was not joking, although that was my first thought.

Richard Dawkins is so determined to disbelieve in God that he is willing to entertain a hypothesis that space aliens created us? Is that what it has come to? Space aliens? It reminds me of the saying (was it by Chesterton?) that when modern man ceases to believe in God, he does not for long believe in nothing, but rather is willing to believe anything. The recent Baylor study that found that religious believers (including Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians) were less likely to be superstitious than atheists and agnostics is interesting in this regard. Christians were less likely to give credence to spiritism, astrology, etc. than the general population. Religion makes superstition less likely. Atheism does not.

But what can one say about poor Richard Dawkins? He has a hard time posing as a martyr in the train of Galileo. Here he has been given a prestigious chair at Oxford which demands nothing so hard as scientific research - all he has to do is spew out atheist propoganda full time. His books sell in the millions and he is lionized by the elite of Western culture for putting those dastardly Christians in their place. And all he has to offer us intellectually is little green men?

During the first Dark Ages it was the Church that kept the flame of reason and science alive and it appears that the Church had better gear up to do it again. The leading scientests have apparently gone mad en masse and have substituted wish fulfillment and juvenile rebellion for hard thinking and logic. Little green men - but no fairy tales. Really now!