Vital Remnants

I have commented before on this blog about the argument used by Darwinists that Intelligent Design is false because it is not falsifiable--an argument that surely wins the prize for brazen ridiculousness.

I don't have a position on ID per se, other than to question whether, as philosophers like Ed Feser point out, it doesn't operate within the same modern mechanistic paradigm as does Darwinism. Creationism too, whatever its other, scientific challenges, seems to have this same philosophical problem.

But it is not only the low standards of argumentation employed against non-Darwinian explanations of origins that are remarkable, but the willingness of modern scientism to employ completely different standards of what constitutes science, as it suits their fancy.

Physicist Brian Greene has just written an article for Newsweek magazine on Multiverse theory. This is the idea that some of what we know of our present universe us unexplainable without postulating that there are other, parallel universes.

Now we have all heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the creation of critics of creationism and Intelligent Design used to underscore their argument that these scientifically heretical views are the unscientific products of the overly-credulous. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is used as an analog for religion. Like the God of religion, say the New Atheists who invented him, the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe (when none of us were around to see it; he helps those who believe in him to explain the universe as they see it; but his existence cannot be verified. There is literally no way to prove his existence (or to disprove it).

But the New Atheists all of a sudden have a brain lapse when theories of their own suffer from the same problem. Not only do they not apply the falsifiability standard to their own beliefs, they go so far (as Lawrence Krauss does in his A Universe from Nothing) to champion such unverifiable beliefs.

Multiverse theory (or string theory for that matter) displays the same characteristics of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: It is used to explain the origin of the universe and its current state, and it is entirely unverifiable. And, like the adherents to "Pastafarianism" (the name of Flying Spaghetti Monster religion) scientists averse to a belief in God find it a great comfort to believe in him.

As far as I know, these facts are not even in dispute. Every scientist I have ever read who comments on it admits this. There is not only no way to verify it; there is not even any conceivable way of verifying it.

Behold the Flying Spaghetti Multiverse. Bow the knee, ye credulous scientistic people.

Labels: creationism, Darwinism, Flying Spaghetti Monster, intelligent design, science, scientism

One step in the process of instituting the Liberal Regime of Mandatory Tolerance is to marginalize those institutions inconsistent with the totalitarian liberal social order. After instituting government programs that make Christian charity redundant and after evacuating the culture of all religious, cultural, or sexual standards, we, of course, get all the social maladies we have today, including high rates of teen pregnancy and high rates of divorce. Both of these, of course, only heighten the need in people's minds for the very things that brought them about: problems which liberalism brought about are championed as things liberalism can solve.

Once again, here is James Kalb, from The Tyranny of Liberalism: Administered Freedom, Industrial Tolerances, and Equality by Command, on how liberalism has marginalized traditional human institutions in favor of formal liberal institutions, all of which it has done in the name of freedom and equality. Only problem is, they are not really free and equal:

Only rational formal institutions remain functional and authoritative. What were once traditional social institutions with definite form, function, and authority become personal pursuits that each can make of what he wishes so long as all others remain free to participate or abstain as they will. [Note the difference between these institutions, now voluntary, with liberal ones, which become increasingly mandatory] Marriage and family are replaced by "relationships" and "living together"; religion becomes a freeform pursuit of individual fulfillment; and inherited culture becomes an optional consumer good, a matter of personal style or group assertiveness. 

Such tendencies make it impossible to deal reasonably on their own terms with issues of identity, such as sex, kinship, ethnicity, and religion. Those distinctions play no role in the liberal understanding of rational social functioning, so they are understood as pure principles of irrational opposition and hatred: absolute, unbridgeable, and impossible to reconcile with a peaceful, just, and efficient social order. The consequence is that they must effectively be abolished--trivialized, conceptually dissolved, canceled through reverse discrimination, or kept from entering into thought at all.  

Under the regime of liberalism, the way in which people have traditionally understood themselves and others now can have no bearing on their relations to each other, at least to the extent that those relations have substantive consequences. Who you are can have no connection to how things are with you, except to the extent that "who you are" refers to your relation to institutions liberalism accepts as authoritative. A man and woman have to be the same, but a Harvard and state-university graduate can be different. The result is the forcible imposition on everyone of a wholly abstract and radically depersonalized order that abolishes the connections and distinctions by which human beings have always lived in favor of more formal ones such as wealth, education, and bureaucratic position. Factually considered, that new order is unequal and unfree, but it is able to pass itself off as an indisputable application of neutral principles to which no sane and moral person could possibly object.

And even saying such a thing will make you a target of charges of insanity and immorality. Cue the comments: three, two, one ...

I began responding last week to some of the arguments being commended to her listeners by Mandy Connell, the ostensibly conservative host of WHAS's morning talk show in Louisville, in regard to same-sex marriage. In going back to check on several things that were said, I listed to the podcasts of a couple of shows last week and was reminded of two maxims I voiced to myself many times which I repeatedly (to my own woe) fail to heed :

1. Never listen to radio talk shows. Just don't do it. You either have to listen to people who disagree with you on an issue who you just want to reach into the studio from your car radio and strangle or you have to listen to people who agree with you on an issue who you want to reach out and strangle even worse. Do something more enjoyable with your time. I suggest having your skin slowly peeled from your body.

2. If the talk turns to religion, turn the channel. As fast as you can. Forever. And don't come back. Whenever a conversation turns to religion on a talk radio show, you have the faux theological experts showing up: the Biblical revisionists who think they know what they are talking about but don't, and the Biblical fundamentalists who think they know what they are talking about but don't. When the show is over the Bible is in complete tatters and no listener in his right mind wants anything to do with it. The only thing that prevents a resulting mass exodus from Christianity is some even more insipid atheist calling up and proving that he is even more narrow-minded and ignorant than the religious people he called to insult.

Mandy is not to blame for this. In fact, she is victimized by the nature of her format as much as her listeners. I used to think it was just their implicit secularity that caused talk radio hosts to avoid talking about religion. But now I see the wisdom of the policy.

Mandy herself is clearly not well-versed in the Bible or in theological topics, but she's cognizant of the fact. Some of the people who call in do seem to have a familiarity with Biblical texts, but even then they falter in articulating it because what they have in the way of Biblical knowledge they lack in the rhetorical arts.

But the chief problem is that Mandy seems to have bought in to the idea unfortunately propagated by both sides of most of her audience on this, which is that current marriage laws are premised on a religious objection to same-sex marriage, and that, because such a restriction is irrelevant to the secular purpose of the law, the default position on the issue is that it shouldn't exclude same-sex relationships.

Well, first off, this isn't even close to being correct. Current laws don't even contemplate the issue of same-sex marriage because same-sex relationships have never been thought to have anything to do with marriage. The historic definition of marriage by its very nature excluded anything like it.

Marriage excludes same-sex relationships not because they are wrong according to religious moral traditions but because it is not and never has been a part of the definition of marriage. I know people have a short attention span anymore, but nobody even thought to suggest same-sex relationships could even contemplated in a marriage context until about five years ago.

No one. Including non-religious people.

Here's Michelle Malkin on the mean-spirited smear of Phillipine boxer Manny Pacquiao who must wonder, at this point, what the United States is good for anyway:

Boxing champion Manny Pacquiao is guilty — of being true to his Catholic faith. The gay-marriage mob is guilty — of the very ugly bigotry it claims to abhor. And left-wing media outlets are guilty — of stoking false narratives that shamelessly demonize religion in the name of compassion. 

Read the rest here.

Labels: same-sex marriage, Tolerance Police

Liberals? Employing doubles standards? Get out! Here's Charles Krauthammer on Obama's newfound position on same-sex marriage:

He was pro when running for the Illinois legislature from ultra-liberal Hyde Park. He became anti eight years later when he was running for U.S. senator and had to appeal to a decidedly more conservative statewide constituency. And now he’s pro again.  

When a Republican engages in such finger-to-the-wind political calculation (on abortion, for example), he’s condemned as a flip-flopper. When a liberal goes through a similar gyration, he’s said to have “evolved” into some more highly realized creature, deserving of a halo on the cover of a national news magazine.

Read the rest here.

The following article will appear in the summer issue of The Classical Teacher magazine:

There was an old Indian method of torture that consisted of tying someone down in the hot sun next to a pond or lake. The victim would thirst to death only inches away from the water. Our education system today employs a similar method with students.

Most critics of American education today have a good grasp of one part of the problem: our children don’t have enough knowledge. They cite poor test scores and the general lack of awareness of important events in history as proof of this. And they are right.

But although this analysis is correct, it is not complete. There is, after all, no shortage of information. It is everywhere. In fact, students today, with their access to the internet alone, have greater access to the world of knowledge than ever before.

They are thirsting to death on the shore of a sea of information. Why is this?

I think that at least one of the reasons has to do with the lack of order both in our conception of education and in the actual curricula we use in our schools. There are a lot of things we want our students to know, but our own lack of any understanding of the structure of reality prohibits us from getting this knowledge into the heads of our students.

Many people have heard of the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman. But many people have not heard of a speech Postman gave in 1990 to the German Informatics Society titled, “Informing Ourselves to Death.”

In the speech, Postman talks about buying a deck of cards. When you first open it, he says you find all the cards in a particular order. First there are, say, the hearts, from Ace to King, and then the spades, and the diamonds and the clubs, each in the same order. What this allows you to do, he points out, is to make sense of the whole deck. As you look at each successive card, you know exactly what you will find. And you can say why the previous card was what it was. All because you know the order.

But when you shuffle the deck, you destroy the order of the cards so that, if you were to go through them again, you would not know which card should come next or why the card before was the one it was. The order would be lost, and you would have no knowledge of the inherent structure of the deck, unless you already knew it before.

For purposes of playing a card game, the random ordering of the cards is necessary, but for purposes of understanding the inherent order of the deck, it is problematic.

Postman points out that there are times in history when we have had an unshuffled cultural deck:

The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like my brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible world-view, beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come from God. What the priests had to say about the world was derived from the logic of their theology. 

... The medieval world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design, but they had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.

But, he points out, our world today is nothing like the world of the medievals:

The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say, sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore, in a sense, we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

The situation in which the modern world finds itself—one in which there is no acknowledged order to reality—is reflected in our institutions of education. Not only do they not acknowledge any coherent picture of the world, but, more to the point, they acknowledge no inherent order in either the structure of knowledge itself or in the way it should be presented to students.

Our students are faced with wave after wave of random, disconnected information. And because it is presented in no discernible order, and because they are not provided with any kind of mental structure within which it can be made sense of, we frequently do little more than confuse those whom we pretend to teach. “[W]hat started out as a liberating stream,” says Postman, "has turned into a deluge of chaos.”

There are two proposed solutions to this problem: the modern one and the classical one.

The modern solution to the problem of random, disconnected information consists of providing students with more of it. “Education technology”—in other words, more computers—will solve our educational problems. This often takes the form of computers in the classroom.

Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better—best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.

It is presented to us, says Postman, as a “technological messiah.” Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars providing schools with free computers. They are marketed as an educational elixir that will cure all educational ills.

But the truth is something different:

The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront—spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future.

An Apple a day keeps learning away.

The answer to the modern educational problem of too much ill-ordered information is not, itself, modern. It is an ancient answer that has not been lost, but only ignored. The answer to the problem is the sequence of learning known as the “liberal arts.” The liberal arts were an ordered set of seven skills that provided educators with a guide to teaching and students with an order in light of which they could make sense of what they were taught.

“Wisdom hath builded her house,” says the writer of Proverbs, “she hath hewn out her seven pillars.”

The trivium skills of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the first three liberal arts, served as the elementary skills. Grammar is the study of the structure and content of language; dialectic was the practical study of logic; and rhetoric was the practice of speaking and writing. These formed the foundation of the last four arts: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music—the quadrivium. While the arts of the trivium were linguistic and qualitative, the arts of the quadrivium were mathematical and quantitative.


Although the liberal arts were taught and practiced since the time of Greece and Rome, it was the Middle Ages in which they were shaped into the seven discrete arts—the Seven Habits, we might call them, of Highly Educated People.

It was this educational structure that dominated learning until the turn of the 20th century, when it was largely pushed out of schools in order to accommodate the progressivist pragmatism that now dominates education. The liberal arts were abandoned but never replaced.

These seven educational habits do not have the glamour of a new iPad, and there are few new "apps" to accompany them. To many modern educators, they seem a hoary relic from a bygone age. But such a criticism, of course, is irrelevant. “What avails a golden key,” asks St. Augustine, “if it cannot give access to the object which we wish to teach, and why find fault with a wooden key if it serves our purpose?”

That an educational method was old was once a recommendation to educators, who valued the tried and true. This attitude, however, has been replaced by a kind of neophilia which threatens the entire educational enterprise, if not our culture itself.

To fail to pass on these basic intellectual skills, skills without which learning can become a torture, is to consign the modern student to death by intellectual thirst  just out of reach of the educational water.

Labels: Classical Education, liberal arts

Here is Chris Hartman, director of the "Fairness" Campaign, in a much calmer mood than when I last saw him stomping around the hallway of the State Capitol, pointing his finger in the face of Family Foundation policy analyst Andrew Walker and trying to intimidate him after the faux bullying bill was defeated in committee last session. He's representing "Straight against Hate."

I'm wondering why, with Hartman heading it up, they didn't call it something like "Cracking Heads against Hate," or "Giving Haters a Knuckle Sandwich," or maybe just "Hating the Haters."

"Hate" is a term gay leaders affix to people who disagree with them on issues like same-sex marriage, making them perpetrators of precisely what they claim to oppose.

Hartman talks about the "alphabet soup" of the gay community: "the LGBTQQI [pant, pant, sit down for a moment, take a breather, stand up, continue...] ...AAPH community ..." He then points out that "We'll never probably be a majority of the population ..."

Oh, I don't know. If they continue adding to that acronym, won't it eventually include everyone?

Labels: gay rights, The Gay Pass

That sound of goose-stepping you hear is the Tolerance Police banning boxer Manny Pacquiao, the winner of six world titles, from The Grove, a Los Angeles shopping center where he was scheduled to be interviewed, after publicly disagreeing with President Obama on gay marriage.

But first, the media had to misrepresent what he actually said. A reporter for the L. A. Examiner falsely reported that Pacquiao had quoted Leviticus 20:13, a verse referring to laws under the Hebrew theocracy in which homosexuality is a capital crime. It then accused him of advocating the killing of homosexuals.

As it turns out not only did Pacquiao not quote the verse, he's not even read Leviticus yet. The journalist who conducted the interview from which the quote allegedly came said, "That, Pacquiao never said nor recited, nor invoked and nor did he ever refer to such context."

But it doesn't matter. Intolerance must be stamped out. With steel-toed boots.

Labels: same-sex marriage, Tolerance Police

HT: NPR.

Just so we all understand what is happening to us and why, we'll be running occasional excerpts from James Kalb's The Tyranny of Liberalism, perhaps the best book published in recent years on Tolerance Regime that is now consolidating its power.

Pay attention you conservatives out there who don't even realize you're liberals but really are. With each step liberals take to dismantle traditional society as we have known it, you can turn to the appropriate page and have Kalb's explain to you why this is.

Here is Kalb's description of the general problem with what he calls the "politically correct managerial liberal regime" :

In a society that claims to be base don free speech and reason, intelligent discussion of many aspects of life has become all but impossible. Such a state of affairs is no passing fluke but a serious matter resulting from basic principles. It is the outcome of rationalizing and egalitarian trends that over time have become ever more self-conscious and all-embracing until they now make normal informal distinctions--for example, those between the sexes--seem intolerably arbitrary and unfair. Those trends have led to the politically correct managerial liberal regime that now dominates Western public life and makes demands that more and more people find unreasonable and even incomprehensible. 

What defines that regime is the effort to manage and rationalize social life in order to bring it in line with comprehensive standards aimed at implementing equal freedom. The result is a pattern of governance intended to promote equality and individual gratification and marked by entitlement programs. sexual and expressive freedoms, blurred distinctions between the public and the private, and the disappearance of self-government. To implement such a program of social transformation an extensive system of controls over social life has grown up, somethings public and sometimes formally private, that appeals for its justification to expertise, equity, safety, security, and the need to modify social attitudes and relationships in order to eliminate discrimination and intolerance. 

The last are never clearly defined, but in practice they turn out to include all attitudes and distinctions that affect the order of social life but cannot be brought fully in line with market or bureaucratic principles, and so from the standpoint of those principles are simply irrational. "Discrimination and intolerance" are thus held to include those attitudes, habits, and ties--sex roles, historical loyalties, authoritative cultural understandings, religious commitments and teachings--on which independent, informal, traditional, and non-market institutions and arrangements normally rely in order to function and endure. 

Because such arrangements operate on principles that are regarded as irrational, and because they are difficult to supervise and control in the interest of rationality and equal freedom, they have no place in advanced liberal society and are edged out as the social order progresses.

Get your copy form ISI Books now.

Labels: decline of Western civilization, liberalism, same-sex marriage

Paul Greenburg on Obama's rapid evolution on same-sex marriage--not to mention the 24/7 gay rights messages coming across our telescreens:

But let us be thankful for any moment of clarity in politics even if it's only a moment. Ever since the love that dare not speak its name became the love that just won't shut up, what used to be a taboo has become a real yawner.

Read the rest here.

The decision by Lexington Catholic High School to refuse to admit two girls to the school's prom as a couple has the liberal media in a tizzy and the Tolerance Police reaching for their truncheons.

It's no big secret where the school stands on the issue of same-sex couples. In fact, the very title of the school contains a word the should tell anyone bothering to pay attention how it would come down on an issue like this: the word "Catholic."

The Catholic Church hasn't exactly been vague about how it views marriage and sexuality. And the school correctly underscored its adherence to Catholic teachings. All of them.

So then what do you say about the two girls?

Well, for one thing, if they don't believe in Catholic teachings, then why are they enrolled in an institution whose stated purpose is to teach them to students? And given this, why were they surprised when the school acts on these principles? Is it really all that shocking?

Would anyone be surprised if they weren't allowed to brings drinks to an AA meeting? Are there really people out there who wouldn't be able to figure out why they couldn't smoke while sitting under a "No smoking" sign? Maybe there are, I don't know. But it's kind of hard to empathize with them.

I know it's a revolutionary concept, but if you don't agree with the beliefs of an institution, then don't join it. Go join one you agree with. Better yet, found your own. One nice thing about belonging to an institution you founded yourself is that you'll never have to kick yourself out.

In fact, the girls told the newspapers that they went out and had their own little party in the parking lot and had just a fine time. Good. I'm happy for them. But that doesn't seem to be enough. They seem to want the school to change its policy and violate it's own standards.

The girls argue that they would have been fine with the school's action if they had been consistent:

“I would understand and respect the school’s decision if they truly upheld church teachings,” Wright said. “They didn’t forbid the entrance of all the couples who’ve had premarital sex and all the kids who planned to get drunk after the prom.”

Raise your hand if you really think it would have been just fine with the girls if the school had barred everyone from the prom for doing all these things. Now, those of you who did? We're going to show you the door here at Vital Remnants for violating our policy of being hopeless credulous.

You can go have your own little gullibility party outside. Have fun.

Of course, there's very little the school can do about the dissolute behavior that goes on outsides its doors, other than teach students why they shouldn't act this way when its got them inside its doors, which, hopefully, it does. The argument would make more sense if the drinking and the premarital sex were actually happening on the premises during the prom. But it isn't.

But for argument's sake, let's say the school really wasn't upholding its standards on other kinds of bad behavior. It is really a mature position to take to say that the school should lower its ethical bar further because it won't let you do what you want to do? No, its not.

In fact, that's why they're students and other people are teachers and administrators. The latter are presumed to be mature and the former are not.

And these particular students just confirmed that.