Rust Belt Philosophy

Quoth the Washington Post:

"Does God Tweet?

Thanks to new digital technologies, you can 'tweet' prayers via Twitter to the Western Wall or prayer requests to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You can pray the rosary or pray the hours from your laptop. You can participate in worship services and discuss holy texts via Facebook. You can create and join faith communities on Second Life. Are social media tools a blessing or a curse for people of faith? Should we use digital technology to commune with the divine? Does God tweet?"

Besides their journalistic negligence (God does tweet, the account is right here), Sally Quinn and Jon Meacham display a real lack of seriousness in asking this question. The Washington Post, the company for which they work, is supposedly a newspaper, but I sure don't see any news in this story. (I'm not even sure I see a story in this story.) Just look at the sincere idiocy that this question elicits from the Post's correspondents:

"Jesus spoke in tweets before tweets became cool, if by tweets one means short messages."
-Robert Parham

"I suspect God chooses not to be on Facebook, but God does get in our face when we fail to care for our neighbor or help the poor."
-Bob Edgar

"Theologians also say God in omniscient, therefore he of [sic] she would likely know all 'tweets,' all blog entries, and even all e-mails."
-Ramdas Lamb

And on and on - I feel dumber for just having read these little one-liners (though it does help slightly that one of the people is named Thistlethwaite; what a great name). It's sorely tempting to go through the full answers and look for fallacies, but I don't want to even hint that this issue is worth thinking about (let alone writing about in a major newspaper).

Maybe I'll do a Thursday Silliness Blogging edition devoted to this self-parody - we'll see.

There's really not a whole lot to say about Eva Molina's no-true-Scotswoman-ridden article about what it means to be a lady, but this part did strike me as a little sad:

"It is important for a conservative woman to be a lady both in the real world and on the internet. In our social-network-obsessed society, all it takes is a single compromising picture to ruin one’s social and professional reputations. It has become commonplace for young women’s Facebook profiles to be littered with pictures of themselves scantily clad in compromising situations, partying, inebriated, and even kissing other girls."

Yep - according to Molina, if you're a girl who likes kissing other girls, you aren't a lady. And, if you aren't a lady, people can't be blamed for thinking that you aren't "worthy of time, love, and commitment," let alone "the respect both of men and other women."

One could probably also infer some interesting things about Molina's very intentional (and almost certainly untenable) categorization of female behavior into conservative and liberal varieties, but I really can't get past the unabashed way in which she parades her bigotry. Someone remind me - how is it that there are any conservatives who aren't heterosexual?

As a mathematician and a philosopher, I feel a special (though not necessarily unique) appreciation for works of thought that engage philosophical topics using mathematics or vice versa. Math and philosophy, further, have - or perhaps only seem to have - a leg up on other areas of academic inquiry in that they both truthfully go deeper than what we see before us. Biology, for instance, is a very interesting topic but ultimately doesn't extend beyond what we see every day just walking down the street: the trick in biology isn't looking for new things, necessarily, but rather correctly understanding the things one's already got (evolution works the same in Scotland as it does in Myanmar). Art, on the other hand, is limitless but incapable of discovering new truths about the world (the world, that is, other than the world of art). I don't think this makes biology or art inferior in any objective sense to math and philosophy, it's just the reason I find them less consistently appealing (I expect, actually, that many people feel the reverse of the way I do for precisely the same reasons). Ah - but can this categorization really be maintained under a careful analysis? The catalyst for my attempt at such an analysis is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Fooled By Randomness.

In his excellent (albeit poorly punctuated) book, Taleb investigates a mathematical topic (randomness) using what I take to be a fundamentally philosophical methodology. The first philosophically encouraging sign in Fooled By Randomness came on page xliii, on which Taleb observes that "literary critics do not seem to have a name for things they do not understand." This backhanded musing will inform the rest of this post because, even though art may not be unique to humans, art criticism most certainly is. As such, this serves as an excellent example of Taleb's hypothesis: that the human brain is fundamentally incapable of appropriately understanding and addressing randomness and therefore misunderstands randomness as patterned (caused) behavior. As he says much later in the book (177), this has particularly sinister effects in the world of finance:

"What has gone wrong with the development of economics as a science? Answer: There was a bunch of intelligent people who felt compelled to use mathematics just to tell themselves that they were rigorous in their thinking, that theirs was a science. Someone in a great rush decided to introduce mathematical modeling techniques (culprits: Leon Walras, Gerard Debreu, Paul Samuelson) without considering the fact that either the class of mathematics they were using was too restrictive for the class of problems they were dealing with, or that perhaps they should be aware that the precision of the language of mathematics could lead people to believe that they had solutions when in fact they had none."

That's a terrifying thought, having no answers, especially for a philosopher. But the alternative, as Taleb very rightly asserts, is too often false certainty. "Independence," for instance, "is a requirement for working with the (known) math of probability," so we often see people dogmatically asserting statistical independence where it's totally unreasonable to expect it to exist. Taleb gives several economic examples, but readers of this blog know that I have my own pet example: Alvin Plantinga's multifacetedly absurd evolutionary argument against naturalism (see here, here, and here), which pretends that we can find and meaningfully analyze large quantities of statistically independent beliefs. Plantinga's argument has many more errors than just that one, but it nonetheless serves to demonstrate Taleb's point about what I've termed the unreasonable allure of mathematics.

But is math really so confounding? For his part, Taleb certainly seems to think so - he shows no discomfort whatsoever when considering the idea that "mathematics may only be of secondary help in our real world" (178). This would fit, more or less, with my personal feelings about the discipline: you can always find more true mathematical statements, but these facts won't necessarily be useful. In fact, finding mathematical facts is so easy that computers can trivially become too good at it - unless they're given certain limitations or strategies, automatic proof algorithms become useless-theorem generators, spitting out very many useless or trivial (but true) statements for every one insight. Thus, returning to the original context, we can refine our statistical knowledge to an arbitrary extent without it ever being a good descriptor of economic (and maybe other) systems.

That one kind of limitation notwithstanding, though, Taleb's contention seems like a dangerous thing to remove from its intended context; mathematics, we very much want to say, is helpful in the real world, and not just in a mundane or insignificant way. As Mark Livio reports (via Paul Mealing's paraphrase), mathematical discoveries have surprised us many times. "Maxwell’s equations predicting electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light (an example of a pure mathematical construction predicting a yet-to-be discovered physical phenomenon); and Einstein using Riemann’s geometry to postulate his General Theory of Relativity (an example of pure mathematics employed for a completely unexpected natural phenomenon)" are just two such examples - closer to the layperson's experience with math, people are also typically puzzled to learn that imaginary numbers have real applications, or that personalities can be analyzed numerically (this is of course the crucial axiom behind the popular dating websites).

Whether or not we're surprised by its applications, if we were to say that math in general is not helpful then we would have to reject the vast majority of scientific knowledge, which relies heavily on mathematics. This obviously won't do: scientific knowledge is absolutely the most reliable a posteriori knowledge we have, so rejecting it means embracing an extreme form of skepticism. At the same time, though, accepting scientific knowledge means also accepting certain metaphysical ideas about the universe. If nothing else, we must accept the idea that the universe is the kind of thing that's apt to be described scientifically and, thus, mathematically. For some people, this is strong intuitive evidence that "[t]here is something absolute and 'God-given' about mathematical truth." However, even leaving aside the religious overtones, this intuition seems like it can't possibly be right.

For one thing, we've already seen that math seems ill-disposed to describe certain human interactions. Much more problematically, this failure extends even to physics - and now we return to Taleb. It's a well-known fact that quantum physics poses real and seemingly intractable problems to even the sharpest of physicists, and not just because of the built-in barriers to knowledge we've encountered therein. Some scientists believe "that indeterminacy is inherent in the world itself" - that, in other words, some knowledge can't be had not because it's hidden (as in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) but because it doesn't even exist. For these scientists, subatomic "particles have exactly the same kind of freedom" that we do, which is a phrase that would surely drive Taleb to distraction. Though this conclusion could be interpreted to mean that neither we nor subatomic particles have free will (and, yes, some people accept this interpretation), it also leads to the easy conflation between randomness and freedom. At both the micro and macro levels, then, it looks like the universe isn't the kind of place that's apt to be described mathematically.

Of course, both of these can be true at once: the universe could (at least in theory) be mechanistically predictable in some respects but only probabilistically predictable others. (When we should really start to get worried is if there's an area with no predictability whatsoever.) If mathematics were just a human creation - that is, if the "God-givenness" of it is just an illusion - this wouldn't be so bad, but if math is really the language of the universe then it seems impossible to avoid Taleb's conclusion.

For my part, I'm not a great scientist in the best of circumstances, so there's really not a whole lot that I feel confident saying about this. It would be weird indeed if there were only certain spots where human epistemology and theory failed to produce understanding - subatomic physics and mass market dynamics don't seem to have much in common, after all - but, on the other hand, this entire thing only reinforces my contention that human intuitions are lousy guides to the "big" truths. More optimistic thinkers might urge patience, and they wouldn't be obviously wrong to do so: we've hit apparent barriers to knowledge before only to find solutions to them later. But I can't help but believe (and wonder at the implications of the idea) that the universe really is incomprehensible in important ways. The skeptic in me isn't surprised by this, but somehow another part wishes very much that it wasn't so.

Hanna Rosin, congratulations - you've brought high-profile blogging to a new low!

"A very interesting article in Scientific American this week explores new research showing that depression may be a mental adaptation that helps promote sharper analytical thinking.

...If that's true, I say meh to evolution."

Is that supposed to be disapproval, "meh to evolution"? Or approval? Or disbelief? Or what? "Meh to evolution" isn't a fucking conclusion. It's not a position or an opinion or a statement or even a sentence. If you have something to say, Hanna, use your goddamn words.

Jim Inhofe, do your damn job!

"At a town hall meeting Wednesday [8/26/09] Sen. Jim Inhofe told Chickasha residents he does not need to read the 1,000 page health care reform bill, he will simply vote against it.

'I don't have to read it, or know what's in it. I'm going to oppose it anyways,' he said."

As if this wasn't dumb enough, Inhofe got his info from "public opinion and [the] news media" - note to Jim Inhofe, you're supposed to be informing them about the bill, not the other fucking way around. What the hell do you think we pay you for?

Bert Stead, fuck you!

"I"m a proud right wing terrorist."

No the hell you aren't! I defy you, you brainless twerp, to identify even one situation where you engaged in terrorism. And you'd better hope I don't find out that you're one of those proud right-wingers who supports torturing terrorists or who condemns rappers for saying they're gangstas, because I will fly out to California just to tell you in person exactly how stupid you are. And while we're here, Jamie Soriano of FOX40 News, learn how to type - somebody's paying you not to confuse single- and double-quotes on their professional news website, but apparently that's too fucking complex for you. And you're making these basic errors during a recession, when they could fire you and find a competent, eager replacement within probably 45 minutes.

It's a good thing it's Friday, cause I'm definitely going to need a day or two to recover from this avalanche of idiocy.

For a warm-up, let's start with USA Today's Al Neuharth and his sadly not-ironic "Plain Talk" column. Neuharth, for whom explicit argumentation is apparently not "plain" enough, couches his discussion of homework in the most disjointed terms possible. I do, however, think that I understand his position. Since "working parents average eight-hour days on the job" and then are free to "get diversion" howsoever they choose, and since you don't hear them complaining about this, Neuharth figures that the 8-hour workday is just about ideal. Thus, grade school students, who "put in six, seven or eight consecutive hours" at school, should only have "a limited time in home studying." College students, on the other hand, can reasonably spend "as much time as is necessary" on homework, because their "classes are split more throughout the day [and h]ours generally are fewer." Even assuming that adults are as happy with the 8-hour day as Neuharth thinks they are, that's only one data point - generalizing it to the entire set (i.e., to every working and non-working human being) is absurd and more than a little stupid.

Our second example concerns a field that's infamously prone to mistaken reasoning: economics. More precisely, Sonny Bunch writes that the economics of film now are such that we may finally see a "real challenge to American hegemony over action-packed popcorn movies." Bunch goes through a long, drawn-out explanation of how Hollywood screws up its own product, concluding that the key to successful creativity lies mostly in "keeping costs to a minimum." Stated in the converse, he says that Hollywood's "budget expansion is the key problem: More expensive pictures are riskier pictures, and no one likes risk with his investments." This seems plausible, but even having a theory of causation in mind doesn't stop Bunch from making some silly mistakes.

In particular, Bunch notes (correctly) that many lower-budget action movies come from outside the U.S. and then says (incorrectly) that the success of these movies is in some meaningful sense the result of "a new generation of foreign directors...who are comfortable combining the spectacle of Hollywood with an original, indie sensibility." This is one of the most quintessentially human fallacies: identify a pattern, immediately associate it with a character trait. Even though Bunch spent the vast majority of his article discussing purely economic factors - acting salaries, special effects costs, and so on - and even though his argument is driven wholly by economic theory, he can't help himself from also including a more emotionally compelling version of events. If we take Bunch's economics seriously, it's far more likely that this "original, indie sensibility" is not in fact "new" or "foreign" but rather can only thrive in newly-possible economic conditions that (currently) only exist outside the United States. Nor would this be too surprising: sometimes people just get lucky and that's all there is to it.

Last, and by far the most interesting of the three, I turn to Cataphora. Continuing to add to the cyberpunk-ization of modern life, Cataphora "tries to model what an 'effective' employee looks like based upon her electronic trail." As you can imagine, this involves all manner of glorified guesswork: "using all-caps" or "communicating with people on a distant part of the org chart" are both suspicious (the former indicates "high emotion," the latter "a relationship that makes no organizational sense"); on the other hand, "rarely occurring combinations of words...found regularly throughout" company materials are good, because those represent "the biggest impact on the organization." This is bad enough as it is - people communicate weirdly, first of all, so measuring their manner of communication against some presumed "normal" standard comes awfully close to just picking people at random. As for their theory about buzzwords, I really hoped we were over that by now. Especially taking into account the nature of office politics, buzzwords can propagate very easily without making the slightest bit of difference to a company's bottom line. Even in the cases where a real contribution was made, looking for the first digital occurrence of a phrase is a truly pathetic way to figure out who deserves the credit or blame associated with that phrase.

It gets even worse when the CEO pretends to know something about how companies ought to work: "She gives the example of a bank manager who is in charge of the Asian money markets. Cataphora will analyze all communication related to the Asian market, and if the supposed Asia expert is not central in that map, there's a problem." Really? If the Asia expert isn't central, there's a problem? I had no idea that loquaciousness (specifically in an electronic medium, no less) was an essential component of expertise. Or, for that matter, value - it's very easy to think up crucial jobs where the main portion of effort is spent in non-communicative activities.

Having metrics on workplace performance is all well and good - it's a hell of a lot better, at any rate, than judging performance based on your gut feeling - but people spend their entire careers creating a smokescreen of meaningless numbers. This can be done even when the metrics themselves are (theoretically) inherently meaningful - are, say, production levels or number of missed deadlines or whatever. To shift to metrics without any inherent meaning at all means that you might as well not collect them in the first place - and, incidentally, that image-conscious employees might as well not even bother to put in the work necessary to fake productivity.

Conor Friedersdorf agrees with my overall negative reaction to this particular idea, hypothesizing that "if an existing company's managers started running algorithms, flagging electronic content, and reading it, they'd quickly find themselves awash in information they're unqualified to interpret and unable to handle maturely." I want to take this one step further, though: rather than say that post-hoc data is just hard to interpret, I want to say that it's totally useless. I'll take this last example just to make my point, but I do really mean it as a general phenomenon. Let's say you have someone who fits more than one of Cataphora's "good employee" signs: centrality, subject-appropriate communicativity, proclivity to answer open-ended questions. How do you know just from those three attributes that this person isn't just confusing the hell out of everyone around them and then clearing up that confusion? Or maybe this person is just acting as a modern-day telephone operator, connecting parties who aren't bright enough to contact each other directly; or maybe they answer every question sent to them regardless of whether the answer is correct; or maybe they have a small group of actual experts whom they consult offline; or...

The point is, none of this data was treated scientifically. Neither Neuhart nor Bunch nor Cataphora put controls on their information, checked the reliability of their samples, or worked with specific, testable hypotheses. But any significantly large data set contains patterns, and humans love nothing more than pattern-finding; whether those patterns are meaningful is another story. Without knowing that the data-gathering environment is reliable and that the data hasn't been intentionally tampered with, manipulating numbers is just another way to indulge this pattern-seeking instinct - and, as we've just seen, this instict fools us more than enough as it is.

The idea is that there's this town where, if you fall in love with someone, you become that person. Also, note that the alt text on this image (which you may have to visit the original to see) is a dance beat and not a misspelling of "UNCLE":
Also, for the record, "I converted to materialism for you" now has a special place in my heart as a phrase.

Just in case the Democrats' transparently manipulative "name the health care bill after a dead guy" plan doesn't work, don't worry - Obama has a back-up idea: lean on religious leaders using conveniently decontextualized Bible verses. How is that supposed to help, exactly? I'm not totally sure. There is bad news, though, to go with this news-of-undetermined-value, and I'll bet it won't come as too much of a surprise. As it turns out, not everyone agrees with Obama's theological assessment of the situation. Shocking, I know.

Sammy Benoit, for one, thinks that Obama's remarks "are a perfect example of Lifnei iver, putting a stumbling block before the blind." He doesn't mean this literally, of course - it's a reference to Leviticus 19:14, which uses the stumbling-block thing as a metaphor for doing anything spiteful to someone who can't defend themselves. (You could also, for instance, use it to criticize making fun of the Amish online.) So if Benoit wants to undermine Obama's Bible cred, all he has to do is show that Obama's advice sucks. Ready, set, fail:

"Sarah Palin's comments about 'death panels' were hyperbolic, but they were not 'bearing false witness.' While there is nothing in the ObamaCare bills about 'death panels,' make no mistake about it, this plan will lead to rationing — it is simple economics.

...How am I so sure? Because there has never been a government-run health plan, anywhere in the world, that did not ration care."

This objection is so bad that it in fact fails in the same way twice. Benoit's complaint - the rationing thing - is also true of every other health plan, meaning that in order to be consistent he has to decry all insurance. Notice in particular that he isn't attacking the manner or extent of rationing, just its existence. And, since this failure threatens to confuse or mislead people, Benoit also destroys his own claim to religious expertise: if violating Lev. 19:14 entails being untrustworthy for Obama, it means the same thing for Benoit.

Elsewhere, Andrew Klavan takes a much more direct line of attack, choosing to go after the very premise of Obama's plan. Counter to his claim that "[w]e are God’s partners in matters of life and death," Klavan cites Jeremiah 1:5 and Job 38:17. If you're really interested in what these say, you can go look them up yourself - I'm not too interested in going into the details because Klavan could just go find other verses to "prove" his point if these turned out to be inapt. But that's also his undoing: given the length of the Bible and its interpretive plasticity, I can just as easily find verses that agree with Obama. For example - and this only took me about three minutes - see Lev. 20:2 ("Any Israelite or any alien living in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech must be put to death") and Exodus 21:18-19 ("If men quarrel and one hits the other with a stone or with his fist and he does not die but is confined to bed, the one who struck the blow will not be held responsible if the other gets up and walks around outside with his staff; however, he must pay the injured man for the loss of his time and see that he is completely healed"). These verses not only put life-and-death situations in human hands, they do so in a way that indicates a partner-esque relation (in that God tells us what to do and then we ostensibly do it).

I would be remiss, however, if I didn't conclude this post by pointing out the obvious: it doesn't (or shouldn't, maybe) matter what the Bible says or doesn't say about health care reform (or health insurance reform, or whatever the fuck we're calling it now). The best we could possibly do by looking to the Bible for advice is to impose the right answer onto the text - but even then we would set a dangerous precedent regarding the Bible's usefulness as a policy-making tool. So on second thought, maybe it'd be better to hope for the dead-guy plan after all.

I don't really understand this:

"Mammals and many species of birds and fish are among evolution's 'winners,' while crocodiles, alligators and a reptile cousin of snakes known as the tuatara are among the losers, according to new research by UCLA scientists and colleagues.

...[Assistant Professor Michael] Alfaro and his colleagues analyzed DNA sequences and fossils from 47 major vertebrate groups and used a computational approach to calculate whether the 'species richness' of each group was exceptionally high or low. The research allows scientists to calculate for the first time which animal lineages have exceptional rates of success.

Among the evolutionary winners are most modern birds, including the songbirds, parrots, doves, eagles, hummingbirds and pigeons; a group that includes most mammals; and a group of fish that includes most of the fish that live on coral reefs, said Alfaro, an evolutionary biologist."

This seems like an extraordinarily shallow understanding of what it means to "win" at evolution (if, indeed, it isn't shallow to talk about "winning" evolution in the first place). Alfaro himself admits that he has a hard time explaining "[w]hy these evolutionary losers are still around" - shouldn't this hint that maybe "loser" is the wrong label? As I understand it, long-term species stability indicates either that the species can fit into many different niches or has found a niche that's largely protected from change. Is that really what evolutionary failure looks like? To me, we might as well say that mammals are the losers for failing to dominate their environment and thus missing out on the chance to crowd out competitors.

Hopefully someone with a deeper knowledge of the field can explain why species richness is such a reliable measure of evolutionary success - or, alternatively, why the media has once again misreported the original story - cause I don't get it.

To distract from the Democrats' dismal performance on health care, I turn today to the subject of torture. With the release of yet more damning evidence - it's disquieting, isn't it, how the news always gets worse? - and the start of Eric Holder's investigation, torture has reentered the political conversation (at least, here in the U.S.). For David Ignatius, this demonstrates that "the cynics were proved right" about Obama, but he'd be wise to reevaluate his position. I don't mean to say that cynicism regarding Obama is totally inappropriate - it isn't - but Ignatius's reasoning leaves me rather cold.

His argument in support of torture, to the extent that he bothers to provide one, takes up all of two paragraphs:

Looking back, it's easy to say the CIA officers should have refused the assignments they suspected would come back to haunt them. But questioning presidential orders isn't really their job, especially when those orders are backed by Justice Department legal opinions.

What will happen the next time the White House wants the CIA to do something that's potentially controversial? Well, you know the answer. The CIA officers will want to talk to their lawyers, and maybe then to lawyers from the party out of power. That's not the ideal mind-set for a modern intelligence service. But the republic will survive."

I have nothing to say about the first paragraph; for anyone with any understanding whatsoever of recent history, it should speak for itself. I'm more interested in Ignatius's second argument, the one about "what will happen." To be precise, I'm interested in what will happen, because Ignatius apparently doesn't want to say. I'll have to do a bit of extrapolating here because of this odd silence, so bear with me.

Explicitly, Ignatius worries that the CIA will consult with lawyers before they act, but this can't be his concern as such. There must, in other words, be some undesired consequence of lawyer-consulting, something that probably has to do with the CIA being "a modern intelligence service." Since "modern" connotes "fast" and/or "agile" these days, I take Ignatius to mean that lawyers will deprive the CIA of the ability to perform its job in a timely fashion. This, in turn, means that Something Terrible Will Happen, which is unacceptable. If this is indeed the direction Ignatius meant to go in, I see two problems with it.

First and less obviously, Ignatius has no actual evidence that Something Terrible Will Happen unless we allow the CIA to act with legal impunity. The thing he warns us about, in other words, is entirely hypothetical, and as I've said repeatedly on this blog, hypothetical evidence begs the question.

But more obviously (and probably more importantly), Something Terrible Has Already Happened: we've tortured people. This point seems somehow to have escaped Ignatius's notice, so it bears repeating: it's terrible to torture people. I mean, terrible. Torture is horrific, despicable, abhorrent, and unconscionable. For some people, though, this may not be convincing (Terrible) enough - David Ignatius certainly isn't buying it. But torture is a political as well as a military tool, and this torture in particular was in "large part...focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq" - a link which then "appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq [and Colin] Powell's February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war." Ignatius may have the Machiavellian nature necessary to shrug off torture itself, but it would require a total disconnect with reality to deny that the Iraq war was (and, indeed, still is) a gigantic waste of resources and lives that was based on not just one but a series of total fictions. If that doesn't qualify as Terrible for Ignatius, I doubt that anything will.

A more charitable man might say that Ignatius was aiming for loyal patriotism and just missed, but I find that hard to believe. The line between patriotism and jingoism is admittedly on the thin side, but it's not always hard to tell the difference. My rule of thumb? If the legal or moral defense you're proposing was actually made famous by the actual Nazis, pick a different defense. Sounds easy enough, right? Tell that to David Ignatius.

First, a quick note: I am now on Indy Team B and not Indy Team A as previously reported. The rest of that post remains accurate.

Now for the good stuff: fantasy football. I'm in two leagues with my friends, one competitive and one casual. My rosters are as follows.

Casual league (12 teams):
Starters
Kurt Warner
Andre Johnson
Roy Williams
Derrick Mason
DeAngelo Williams
Julius Jones
Tony Gonzalez
Darren Sproles
Bench
Matt Cassel
Donald Driver
Justin Gage
Bo Scaife
Kickers
Josh Brown
Rian Lindell
Defense/special teams
Arizona
Minnesota

This is going to be something of a haves-and-have-nots situation, as approximately half the league is currently projected to score less than 85 points per week. I, luckily, am in the other half. I just have to hope that the risks I took with running backs are outweighed by the performance of my other positions, basically.

Competitive (10 teams):
Starters
Tony Romo
Andre Johnson
Roddy White
Roy Williams
Adrian Peterson
Ryan Grant
Chris Cooley
Jonathan Stewart
Bench
David Garrard
Brett Favre
Sammy Morris
Devin Hester
Justin Gage
Kicker
Mason Crosby
Defense/special teams
New England
Miami

I worry about picking both a QB and his main target - if Dallas has a bad year or one of them gets hurt, I'm sunk - but I do think it's a strong lineup. Hopefully Favre works out well and I can leverage him in a trade later in the season if it turns out I'm weak at a certain position; if not, I'll just exchange him for an appropriate free agent. This league is more balanced (with the exception of my one friend who took a tight end in round 2 and a defense in round 3), so I have to hope that Adrian Peterson matches the hype - otherwise my draft position will hurt much more than help.

Expect weekly updates for all three leagues.

Step 1: when you start to get hungry, watch this video over and over and over again until the hunger abates.



Step 2: if you still have an appetite, resign yourself to the fact that no diet could possibly help you.

Children, it occurs to me, occupy a weird place in our value system. To have child-like wonder as an adult is usually conceived of as good or desirable but to have a child-like intellect as an adult is usually frowned upon - is it just me, or do those two conflict in a pretty obvious way? We rarely notice this tension because we typically don't encounter people who have child-like wonder regarding something we understand in a mature way, but when we do the results can get pretty ugly (I consider our ongoing cultural hissy fit about religion to be an example of this). In fact, though, I far prefer a messy, drawn-out public debate to the alternative.

To show you what I mean, first think back to the start of your moral education. Even though we now understand that ethical reasoning requires lots of subtle and reflective thought, that's not how we (or at least I) began. For kids, moral rules are of the simplest order: teasing people is bad, asking permission is good, and so on. While we know that children only possess a limited intellect, we also know that child-appropriate ethics aren't the ones that exist in reality. It's just that some people seem to forget this, starting a piece of moral reasoning with a black-and-white premise and refusing to budge when their argument goes astray. We've seen this before in the context of gender roles, art, torture, and probably others: "This thing I like is under attack, but I like it, therefore everyone else is wrong to attack it." I now present yet another case.

In his The Woman Who Decided To Die, Ronald Munson gives away a small piece of medical showmanship: in order to maintain the personal autonomy of everyone involved, doctors are required to make sure that we don't "fear any negative consequences" of our decisions. Usually we think of these consequences as being purely medical - the typical side-effects of a drug, say, or the possible complications of a surgical procedure - but Munson reports that they extend even to "family reprisals," as in the case when a person refuses to become a donor for a relative. In such cases, he says, doctors will label the refusing party as "unsuitable" and then decline to go into detail. (65) This is all well and good, and I support this practice fully, but Munson goes one step too far in his evaluation of it.

The canny reader will notice that, even though this "unsuitable" thing has good intentions, it looks an awful lot like lying. Munson sympathizes with this view: one such "unsuitable" donor, he says, "encouraged [his family] to believe that he couldn't become a donor for reasons beyond his control. No one at the transplant center told [them] otherwise. It's thus reasonable to ask if the transplant center wasn't engaging in deception in failing to reveal to [them] that, even though [he] was medically qualified to become a donor, he had decided against it." Despite this, Munson says that "[t]he blunt answer is no." (67) His reasons for this, unfortunately, are all of the child-appropriate ethical variety.

He's right that we should "prevent people from being railroaded into becoming donors" and that the way we do this is by "[p]rotecting confidential information by refusing to reveal it" (68), but both of these factors are moral and thus irrelevant to the point. Doctors know that people will think "medically unsuitable" before they think "bioethically unsuitable," which means they know that they're encouraging false beliefs in others by using this technique; Munson basically admits as much when he says that the technique is an effective one for preventing what he calls family reprisals. That it's still morally right only means that deceptions are sometimes morally right - not a surprising conclusion, one would think, but one we could never reach if we were all stuck in Munson's infantile mode of moral reasoning.

If you feel a slight rumbling underneath you, that might be Isaac Asimov rolling in his grave: "Robots can evolve to communicate with each other, to help, and even to deceive each other, according to Dario Floreano of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology." And these aren't little, benign lies, either. The robots in question, which were "evolved" to "forage" for specific colors of light ("food") and avoid others ("poison"), sometimes "would light up to tell the others that the poison was food, while they themselves rolled over to the food source and chowed down without emitting so much as a blink." Assholes.

The good news, I guess, is that this didn't necessarily have anything to do with clan associations. Unless I'm misreading the terms of the experiment, the robots weren't able to identify each other as belonging to any group, so this evolution didn't depend on robot racism or anything like it. I say this is good news because it opens up the possibility that we won't have to create an artificial homogeneity in order to achieve social stability. Race and gender in particular are very, very visible and would not be at all easy to dispose of, so it'd be nice if we didn't have to worry about hiding them.

On the other hand, it does also suggest that conflict might be too deeply rooted in our psychology - or, put differently, too intuitive - for us to eliminate or even significantly reduce. I think this thought owes too much to a mythological understanding of evolution and psychology, though, so I'm not taking it too seriously.

Whatever the case, I now know for sure that the various computers in my life aren't trustworthy just because we think we've programmed them to be. I'm on to you, you little bastards.

Today's reason to love the internet: it provides an excellent opportunity to make good scholarship easier. Instead of choosing one of the many, equally unintuitive citation systems, you can in theory just link your sources - and then, instead of hunting down the article or book in real life, readers can in theory just follow the link. Things may not work out so nicely in practice - the economics of the situation, for instance, tend to make this system somewhat less than perfect - but the idea, at least, is sound.

Even if I never get the versatile, light-weight bibliography system I want, some good may come of the internet's small contribution to academia. In particular, the more people recognize good writing, the less likely it'll be that people get away with writing badly. So the next time Karen Armstrong says something like "Music has always been inseparable from religious expression," I won't be the only one going, "Has it really, though?" Because that seems like some made-up bullshit to me, but since Armstrong conveniently neglected to link (or cite, or even obliquely allude to) her references I don't have anything to go on.

My irritation aside, that particular slip is hardly Armstrong's biggest problem in the linked article. To start with, the title represents one of the dumbest arguments I've seen in some time. She seems to think that since "'God' is infinite, nobody can have the last word" when it comes to "the nature of religious truth," but I strenuously disagree. Just look at infinity: infinity, obviously, is infinite, and yet we've made a great deal of progress in learning about it. Some arguments persist, but Armstrong's theory predicts that all infinity-related arguments would still be ongoing, which is simply not the case. The infiniteness of (any part of) a topic in no way implies that it's unknowable.

But for Armstrong, the entire point may be moot. In what must be one of the weirder defenses of religion, she says that "Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist." (Note, again, the extraordinarily convenient lack of citations.) This denial, according to Armstrong, helps maintain "God's transcendence," which might seem like a strange thing to worry about maintaining - didn't we just say God doesn't exist? But Armstrong doesn't really mean what she's been saying. For her, religion is like music in that it "confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof." And, despite appearances, Armstrong really does mean a mode of knowledge and not, say, a reliable way to feel certain "deep" emotions: she files music and religion together with (surprise!) science under "means of attaining truth," so unless she's operating under the worst-ever definition of science it's safe to say that her thesis pertains to epistemology as such. The question is, what does she think music and religion help us to know?

Armstrong insists several times that they aren't good for knowledge that (which, if I recall correctly, is termed "declarative knowledge"). "Music goes beyond the reach of words," she says; it leads us to "become aware of an inexpressible otherness." Not all knowledge fits into that paradigm, though, so we must search for at least a little while longer. Many philosophers also recognize performative knowledge - that is, knowledge how - which can exist without an accompanying piece of declarative knowledge ("I know how to hit a baseball, but I can't explain what I do to hit it"). And though she does voice her support for knowledge acquired by "dedicated practice," this won't work either, as Armstrong never identifies a thing that music (or religion) enables her to do - heck, she won't even tell us what "practice" means in this context. Maybe she means knowledge of, as in familiarity with something? But again, Armstrong doesn't identify any such thing, other than this amorphous "God" that she apparently also thinks is nonexistent.

To her credit, Armstrong has hit upon - and has evidently spent some measure of time investigating - a philosophically important phenomenon, namely, the limits of popular truth-seeking tools (language, science). Her treatment of this topic, however, falls short of even amateur-level skill and rigor. It's bad enough to make an argument that boils down to the blithe and credulous substitution of "God" for "a pretty girl" in the Irving Berlin tune, but it's far worse to ignore the possibility that our awkward epistemological situation is just what it looks like and not the ultimate proof of a magical reality that lies just out of our sight. To change his original meaning somewhat, it would behoove Armstrong to remember Shakespeare's postulation that the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.

So we've heard a lot about how science and religion don't play well together, but surely that's not the only point of importance, right? Not to denigrate science, but the human experience is comprised of more dimensions than the sciences can currently model - does religion mix with any other field of study, such as art? If so, perhaps there's hope for a religious ontology after all, if a rather more limited one than what we're used to; if not, though, it's hard to see how religion can be relied on to make any truth claims ever.

To help answer this question in the affirmative, we'd need to find an example of religious thought contributing to art theory in a unique way: it's not enough just to say that religion often inspires great artworks or even that religions themselves are beautiful, because we can say the same thing about any other random system of thought. In particular, just like most religions align with science sometimes for no other reason than sheer volume,* a limited agreement between religion and art wouldn't be enough to show that the two are capable of joining forces (so to speak) or working together in any meaningful way. It might seem like I'm asking for too much, but Jeff Mirus is happy to oblige.

Mirus groups beauty together with truth and goodness as "transcendentals, categories that have universal application, that go beyond the contingent and 'accidental' (philosophically) elements of human experience." Being a Christian apologist, Mirus views truth and goodness as primarily theistic - originating or owing their nature in some sense to God - so it's no surprise that he goes in a similar direction with beauty. Beautiful art, he says, "tends to lift a person out of himself, to touch the heart in a way that moves the person from what we might call his routine existence, in and for himself, toward that which is more than himself," which Mirus basically defines as "God." This might seem a bit odd, because Mirus apparently defines a universal, objective attribute as one that depends on human behavior, but he has more to say, so we'll withhold judgment for now.

Ugliness, the traditional opposite of beauty, consists of "any use of the artistic crafts which tends to turn the receiver in upon himself, closes him to the universal, concentrates his attention on apparently disjointed particulars, and tends to stimulate a sense of meaninglessness or despair." Mirus says that this means that "all materialisms and ideologies invariably subvert art," but that's just unfair: materialism, sometimes by itself and sometimes in combination with other beliefs, hardly tends to cause meaninglessness or despair. To the contrary, materialism - just like every other -ism ever invented - has often "lifted people out of themselves" and so on. Moreover, individual works of art have inspired both widespread exhiliration and widespread revulsion - are they both beautiful and not-beautiful? As expected, Mirus's attempt to combine an objective quality with a subjective one has failed.

What about his overall project, though? Maybe he's wrong about how to measure beauty and ugliness but still correct about their religious implications. Well, he does offer one other argument in support of his thesis, but it didn't exactly blow me away. "Through Revelation," Mirus says, we are told "that Truth is a Person ('I am the truth'), that Goodness is a Person ('One only there is who is good'), and Beauty is a Person." And no, I didn't truncate the Bible quote off of that last example. There is no Bible quote for that last example: despite choosing an unreliable and incredibly easily satisfied standard of argument, Mirus fails to meet it, like insisting on batting from a tee and then striking out anyway.

His failure alone doesn't show that religion has nothing unique to contribute to art, but it sure doesn't help any. It's the way he failed that really bothers me: with Mirus at the keyboard, art and religion are written in totally different languages. If the two can be reconciled at all, it'll have to be by someone with a much steadier hand.

*Or, for the mathematicians in the house, the law of large numbers.

Quick, look out your window: are there any pigs flying? If so, I can tell you why. It's because today I praise a townhall.com writer.

Writing on the subject of gay marriage, Steve Chapman makes an observation that had utterly escaped me. Even though social conservatives tend to warn gay marriage proponents about "the weakening of marriage as an institution, children at increased risk of broken homes, the eventual legalization of polygamy and who knows what all," they never really turn those general concerns into anything specific. Chapman, who displays an admirable reliance on data, "contacted three serious conservative thinkers who have written extensively about the dangers of allowing gay marriage and asked them to make simple, concrete predictions about measurable social indicators -- marriage rates, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, child poverty, you name it," only to find that none of them gave a satisfactory answer.

This is an important failure to highlight for at least two reasons. Rhetorically, the absence of specific predictions could - if ignored - allow right-wingers to announce that they were right all along no matter what happens. "Gay marriage will be bad," in other words, could mean practically anything, so if we accept that as the conservative position then any negative social trend could be co-opted into a conservative talking point. This wouldn't mean that they actually are right, of course, just that they'd positioned themselves so as to take advantage of any random twitch in the data. In part, then, Chapman's analysis helps to clean up our incredibly messy political discourse.

Much more subtly, it also suggests that we need to reevaluate the position of marriage in society. While Chapman restricts his writing to the subject of gay marriage, it actually points to a much more general question: given that marriage doesn't seem to have any social benefit as an institution that exalts heterosexuality, does it have any social benefit at all? I'd guess that it does, personally - but, and this is the crucial point, I can't say what that benefit might be. Just like the right-wingers that Chapman goes after, my opinion (and, I have to think, most everyone's opinion) about the value of marriage is based on pretty much nothing. Just like minimum drinking ages and traffic cameras, we have a duty to measure the effect of marriage to see whether it really makes a positive difference on the population level. And I don't say this just on the chance that marriage is actually useless as a social tool: if it turns out to be useful, knowing exactly why will make us better equipped to protect and improve upon it.

So let it never be said that I let partisanship get in the way of truth-seeking. Steve Chapman, I commend you for being a voice of absolute reason - not, that is, just relative reason - in a chorus otherwise made up of lunacy and cognitive inflexibility. May you inspire your fellow right-wingers to similar feats of sanity.

Allow me to explain:

"Liskula Cohen is a Canadian-born model, best known for her appearances in fashion magazines such as Vogue, Elle, and Cleo. When she discovered that a blog called Skanks in NYC, hosted on Google’s Blogger, had been referring to her as 'skank' and 'old hag,' she decided to press Google to reveal the identity of the blogger through court, and the court has now decided in her favor."

All of that sucks, to be sure, but...it's the internet. And yeah, the original blogger was an immature, almost certainly misogynistic asshole - before its removal from the internet, Skanks In NYC "consisted of five entries dated Aug. 21, 2008, all of which slammed the 37-year-old Cohen" - but...it's the internet.

I'm not trying to make a legal argument per se, especially since we still don't know whether (as Cohen claims) "the blog had drawn the attention of at least one client, who questioned whether the model was an appropriate spokesperson." If someone's out there making false statements about another person and those statements cause real damage, I guess it probably is libel. But seriously: it's the internet. We need the internet.

Don't believe me? Just look around the world: it's already legally risky to hurt people's feelings in Europe and India, even when your claims are factually true. Probably the factual claims about Cohen weren't true (if indeed there were any) - I don't know her and I don't really care to find out - but it would be really disastrous if you were allowed to sue someone any time they wrote something false (or just negative) about you on the internet. The lawsuits from private citizens would be bad enough, but just try to imagine being sued by Wal-Mart because you complained about the quality of their potato chip selection one time - or, for that matter, being sued by the Catholic church because you wrote that communion wafers aren't actually the body of Jesus. Scary thought, isn't it?

So the judge in the upcoming defamation suit needs to be very careful, first and foremost. But also, people in general need to learn that you can't trust everything you read on the internet, especially if your only source is an anonymous blog with no journalistic standards and little to no readership. The original blogger in this is certainly a villain in this story but they ain't the only one, and if I had the choice I'd rather risk being damaged by some random internet troll than turn every opinionated blogger into a target for corporate intimidation.

It just occurred to me today that the "Christian nation" thing has at least two potential interpretations. Stupid, right? I should've figured that out ages ago. Anyway, I got the idea from this Pharyngula post, where both positions are presented:

• "Donohue insists the United States should be considered unequivocally a Christian country. Eight out of ten Americans consider themselves as such." (People view)
• "...the US is a secular nation with religious liberty. Again, what that means is that the government is out of the god business (or should be, ideally), and individual Americans get to worship or not worship as they want." (Government view)

Which of these, if either, feels right to you? That is, when you say "the U.S. (or wherever) is (or isn't) a Christian nation," which do you mean?

For my part, I don't think either of these really hits the mark. As of just now, I would guess that a Christian nation by definition fulfills at least one of the following two criteria:

1. The public practice of Christianity has so thoroughly permeated its culture that the basic tenets of Christianity are familiar to most of its non-Christian as well as most of its Christian inhabitants.
   
2. Its political axioms are significantly more compatible with Christianity's normative framework than with the normative framework of any other religious or secular worldview and are more compatible than incompatible with Christianity's normative framework.

There's imprecision here, of course, in that Christianity as such doesn't have just one normative framework - just specify the relevant sect to resolve this. Likewise, to consider other religions, just remove "Christianity" and plug in whichever name you like.

Also, as you may already have guessed, these are basically just more sophisticated versions of what Donohue and Myers originally proposed. I don't think self-identification as Christian makes for a strong enough populist condition because you could (at least in theory) live in a country where 90% of the population identifies as Christian and still be surprised to find this out - in that case, calling it a populist Christian nation seems to deprive the phrase of any meaning. I also don't think that explicit government support for Christianity is necessary for that government to be, in a real sense, a Christian nation. We'll almost never see this in the real world because of the many similarities between Christianity and other religions, but you could (again, at least in theory) evaluate the U.S. as politically Christian if the only other choice was, say, a religion that denied the reality of individual identity. So, on the hasty assumption that my definition is in the right ballpark, is the U.S. a Christian nation?

Politically, no: to reiterate, Christian normativity looks too much like other religious normativity for this condition to trigger. (And, at any rate, I strongly suspect that many Christian sects conflict more than they agree with the basic political premises that form the foundation of our government and legal system.) It's tempting to answer negatively for the populist condition as well, but I'm going to hedge my bets instead and say that we are a pop-Christian or Christian-lite nation. That is, while many people know some of Christianity's basic tenets, I think the average understanding of them is extremely shallow. Also, I doubt that the practice of Christianity has really permeated our culture: while lots of non-Christians celebrate Christmas in some form or other, you also have to take into account the fact that lots of Christians rarely or never perform basic public Christian duties (e.g., going to church). So if we're a populist Christian nation in any sense at all, our Christianity has lost most of its original substance (hence the "pop" or "lite" label).

To close, I'll observe that political Christianity (even in its weakest form) would be much more meaningful than populist Christianity. After all, we believe (rightfully, I think) that our country's basic political tenets are good ones to have, so the fact of a politically Christian nation would endorse Christian normativity at least to some extent - and, not trivially, denounce other normative frameworks to an equally large extent. A populist Christian nation, on the other hand, could just as easily be the result of ethically moot or ethically shallow concerns - like, oh I dunno, the peer pressure that (in part) motivates non-Christians to give each other gifts on or around December 25. So when somebody says that the U.S. should be a Christian nation, you can pretty safely conclude that they mean politically.

Well, that, or their concept of ethics consists of "I like shiny lights and presents." One of the two.

In the wide world of intellectual argumentation, it's easy to get intimidated. Too many fields extend too wide and too deep for any one person to have expert knowledge in every (or even every relevant) area of study, so everyone with any degree of curiosity will eventually run into some new, complex information that at first seems impenetrable. But it's important not to give up or lose confidence, because you never know when somebody will try to use verbal shock-and-awe as their argument strategy.

While any field can in theory support this kind of vocabulary blitzkrieg, in practice only a few do. Philosophy is the example I'm most familiar with - "monad," anyone? - but every so often I find one in another area, such as Fazale Rana's jargon-laden article about e. coli and intelligent design. In it, Rana claims that the success of rational design programs is "clear-cut evidence that life requires the work of an intelligent Designer" - and then hides his actual argument behind thirteen paragraphs of probably very interesting but philosophically irrelevant science lingo.

It'll help to first identify just what Rana means by "rational design." According to the abstract of the experiment he cites, the scientists in question employed "a nonnatural metabolic engineering approach...to build artificial metabolism [sic?]." Rational design, then, is not directed evolution but rather an attempt to bypass the natural selection process altogether and directly implement biological changes in an organism. This distinction (which you can read more about at wiki) will be important later.

So, then, on to Rana's actual argument. Such engineering, he says, can't succeed without "ingenuity and strategic efforts based on decades of accumulated knowledge and insight." Moreover, "the researchers didn't create this metabolic pathway from scratch, but pieced together the pathway using modified enzymes taken from a variety of sources," so in a very loose sense they'd been given a head start. "In the end," he says, "it's fair to say that this novel metabolic process was intelligently designed. ... Doesn't this work provide direct, empirical evidence that biochemical systems require the work of intelligent agency in order to come into being and to undergo significant change?" In short: no.

Despite the overall failure of his argument, Rana does manage to prove the obvious. If life was intentionally designed by an agent, that agent would have to be pretty bright and relatively powerful (at least, by human standards). But the success of one life-tweaking mechanism no more invalidates every other such mechanism than the success of driving to work means by process of elimination that it's impossible to bike* or walk or take the bus. Moreover, Rana couldn't even use this scenario to directly disprove the effectiveness of evolution: the research was conducted so as to specifically avoid having to encounter natural selection! If his strongest argument is that evolution fails in the absence of natural genetic changes, environmental pressures, and reproduction, we probably don't have all that much to worry about.

That Rana's argument fails may be obvious now - it is, at any rate, if I've done my job - but remember that he stuck it behind a wall of scary-sounding science terms. So while it doesn't take a genius to see why his point is a non-starter, it's very hard to figure that out if you get spooked by his advanced degree and run off at the first sign of trouble. As much as I appreciate the help of science-literate (or "science-fluent"?) people, we science noobs need to be able to contribute, too, and often that help relies on having enough presence of mind not to go into shock when you see a big unfamiliar word.

*Just dangerous, maybe.

Personal anecdote time: when I was a kid, back before the World Wide Series Of Tubes, we had this "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?" video game for our computer. The idea was, in addition to teaching you about history and geography, it'd also help you learn how to do research like a grown-up. Your progress in the game depended on your ability either to remember otherwise useless pieces of historical trivia or else look up said pieces of trivia in a huge reference guide provided with the game, so in order to get anywhere you had to familiarize yourself with how indexes worked and maybe how to read bibliographies and so on. It was a fun game, but as I said: pre-internet.

What's the point of this charming childhood tale, you ask? The point is firstly that finding new information used to be really hard, even when that information was more or less common knowledge, and secondly that it no longer is. Somehow, this seems to have escaped the notice of the various people and organizations in charge of education in this country (and quite possibly elsewhere). My case in point here is William Mattox, Jr., who advocates for Bible courses in public schools on the grounds "that incoming college students need to be well-versed in the stories, themes and words of the Bible."

Citing a couple of studies by the Bible Literacy Project, Mattox concludes that students just can't learn about art or history without a thorough understanding of our most popular holy book. Just like "you can't teach about [Martin Luther King Jr.] without helping students understand the meaning and power of his frequent references to 'the Promised Land' and other scriptural metaphors," he says, a good part of Western literature will simply be wasted on anyone without the requisite religious background. Thus, rather than simply acceding "to the Bible being ignored in the classroom," we should work "to legitimize Bible courses in public schools."

The first question here must be one of legality, but unfortunately it won't help to look in that direction: for the time being and for the foreseeable future, schools are free to present any subject matter they choose so long as they do so in an objective, value-free manner. At least in theory, then, it won't work to object to Mattox's argument on the basis of separating church and state. A similar mindset, however, will be very useful indeed.

Let's start with the historical angle. I don't have anything against MLK, but he wasn't the only major civil rights figure with a very public devotion to religion - oughtn't we also institute Koran classes in honor of Malcolm X? Or, if he's deemed too insignificant, surely 9/11 represents a major enough event that we should investigate its context. But we can even extend this further and look into the Eastern religions that were expressed by the hippie movement. And it would be incredibly foolish not to spend time on the Mormon books, given that they're 100% American. We should start to wonder, what with all of these choices, why Mattox's focus is so relatively narrow: even if he isn't trying to promote Christianity as such, surely his reasoning is at least a little biased.

His case weakens even further when it comes to art. Whereas historical discussions almost always take place with a measure of self-centeredness ("How is this relevant to the US?"), the art world much more readily tries to present things on their own terms. The assumed superiority of Western culture that drives the Western view of history, therefore, will be absent where Mattox needs it most: on the premise that all art is equally worthwhile (or, at least, that much non-Western art is worthwhile), the Bible starts to look less and less unique as a cultural force. Even if he manages to limit art curricula to Western works, it begs a very serious question to understand the Bible as primary. After all, we can make the same argument with respect to the Bible that Mattox makes with respect to other works: trying to read the Bible without first understanding the works that influenced it "is like trying to appreciate a good joke when someone has to explain the punch line."

Besides his very questionable assumptions about what merits inclusion in public school curricula - I mean, the garden-variety "my culture counts more than your culture" racism is one thing, but does he really think that the ancient Greeks aren't as important as the Bible? - I contend that Mattox is also operating in an outdated model of how information propagates. He says, for example, that the only alternatives are either to start Bible-specific courses or else "ignore" it altogether - and this may well have been true at one point in time. But it certainly isn't true anymore.

Going back to my heartwarming story about my Carmen Sandiego game, recall that the answers to the game's questions could only be found in a giant book. Now think about having to keep tens if not hundreds of such books lying around just to find basic facts on a given topic, some or all of which may contain false, incomplete, or outdated information. (My older readers shouldn't have much trouble picturing this - you'll remember collections of such books as "encyclopedias.") With only these resources, someone who wanted to write accurately about e.g. Shakespeare would either have to have a phenomenally well-organized reference system or else gain an intimate familiarity with all of Shakespeare's strongest influences. If I've analyzed his position correctly, Mattox suggests the latter because the former used to be impracticable: especially given the volatility and complexity of information in the social sciences, maintaining such a system would be nigh impossible using only pre-computer-age tools, so the options were either "learn nearly everything about the Bible and other miscellaneous sources" or "don't even bother trying."

But we are, of course, no longer pre-computer-age. More strongly, we just so happen to have the phenomenally well-organized reference system that makes Mattox's concerns immaterial: it's called "the internet." Want to know how one of Shakespeare's works incorporated stuff from the Bible? No problem - you can find the full text online, hundreds of pages of searchable, Bible-specific commentary online, and then cross-reference whatever allusions you find with the original Bible verses themselves (complete, naturally, with their own commentary).* This doesn't mean that devoted students won't develop the kind of familiarity that Mattox wants, it just means they'll do so in a much more natural, organic, and efficient way that doesn't consist of having it beaten into their heads.

The really nice thing about the internet - I mean, besides the slew of free, high-quality, relatively unbiased material - is that it's tailor-made to support relational data structures. No matter how thorough Mattox's proposed class is, it'll never match the flexibility or power he could have if he just advocated for more technology in the classes that already exist. Not coincidentally, that same flexibility and power would make it easier for students to learn about cultural influences other than the Bible (the Koran, Socrates et al, and so on). But Mattox, it seems, is more interested in perpetuating the "Christian nation" myth than equipping students with a useful education - among the horrific statistics he hopes to ameliorate are the "68% [of students who] couldn't identify who asked 'am I my brother's keeper?'" and the "53% [who] couldn't name the Biblical event at Cana."

Call me crazy if you want, but I just don't care how many ancient (possibly fictional) proper names a student can memorize. I'd much rather have a child actually ask in seriousness if we do have moral obligations to one another or if it really is possible to turn water into wine. Besides the fact that these questions have real-world implications, understanding the question will in fact be superior to understanding just the Bible story that expresses it: why introduce a concept as though it belongs to one religion or one worldview when in fact it's shared across many? We may only be talking about abstract objects, but a monopoly on intellectual property is a monopoly nonetheless. And Mattox can claim neutrality until he's blue in the face, but it's very hard to escape the feeling that he actually feels good about the idea that his system will arbitrarily portray Christianity as more legitimate and meaningful than every other theory in history.

Anyway, I say it's about time that we start letting the Bible fall by the wayside of our storytelling. Christ figures already ruined The Matrix and Harry Potter, and Mattox thinks we need to see more Bible stories in our art? Thanks, but no thanks: sometimes a hero should just be a hero.

*Note also that these are all public resources. Anyone in a college or a particularly well-equipped grade school will have a much greater depth of material available to them.

Despite my very, very strong opinions about music, I don't typically do the thing where you hound one member of a band you like from project to project. If I like a band, great; if not, oh well. So while I like (for example) both Gorillaz and The Good, The Bad, & The Queen, it's not because I was so enamored of Damon Albarn that I felt compelled to snatch up anything with his name on it. Likewise with Paul Simon, Sting, Ben Gibbard, Jack White, and so on - they're fun in many incarnations, granted, just not fun enough for me to adopt any level of stalker-like behavior.

But the time has come, I think, for me to start. Today, thanks to KEXP's fantastic song-of-the-day podcast, I heard a song from Brent Knopf's second project. It was, let us say, convincing.

For those who don't know, Brent Knopf's first project goes by the name Menomena. As in:


Or:


Weird? Absolutely. As weird as Ramona Falls, his new band? Probably not, but I'll let you be the judge:


Mr. Knopf, keep up the good work.

I mean, the guy basically demanded a major roster upgrade over the summer, then watched as Carlos Boozer and Lamar Odom and even Jamaal Tinsley fell by the wayside, and now his consolation prize is Quentin Richardson? Yeah, you can't always get what you want, but I'm pretty damn sure this isn't what D-Wade needed, either.

One of the beautiful and terrible things about people is that we can change our minds very quickly given a change in information. We may, for instance, choose to leave via the stairs and not the window but then wisely change our minds when we find out just what it means to choose the stairs - or, less wisely, we may believe that an insurance policy against all injuries is in fact less valuable than an identical insurance policy against only sports-related injuries. Without taking this fact into account, it seems obvious beyond debate that political liberals would never show general or overall support for the pope: I mean, the guy runs a theocracy, isn't elected by any reasonably representative process, and holds to a significantly repressive set of moral principles. Short of actually instituting some kind of thought police, it's hard to come up with anything the pope could do to be less liberal.

But there's always something worse, even if that worse thing only exists in theory. That, along with the mental malleability described above, is what Robert Knight relies on in his argument that liberals should embrace Ratzinger or else risk falling prey to "the alluring but poisonous siren song of" - have you guessed yet? - "relativism." To spare all of us the headache, I'll skip the part where I talk about relativism as such and proceed right to the part where Knight shoots himself in the foot.

Without having a "framework of values" that's "anchored in natural law," Knight says, we naturally gravitate away from liberal societies. As examples, he cites the "'human rights' tribunals in Canada and in Western Europe that emit platitudes about 'tolerance' while steadily crushing freedom of speech." As with relativism itself, I'll not debate this point. So assume, if you will, that everything Knight has said so far is correct: relativism is terrible and must be avoided because it leads to things like the suppression of free speech, whereas Ratzinger's system fights relativism. To this point, Knight's case looks good, but his argument's strength is also its undoing.

The mental one-eighty* we're supposed to pull when Knight contrasts relativism with Catholicism is the same thing that results when we add still more information - in particular, that the Catholic church doesn't exactly have a stellar free-speech record itself. Along the same lines, we can both agree with Knight that we should work to counteract "the undermining of the rule of law" and realize that the governing body of Catholicism hasn't exactly been entirely respectful of other country's laws. To construct a transparently false dilemma is one thing - to do so in such a way that both choices evaluate equally badly is just pathetic.

(As a final note, and because I couldn't find anywhere else to say it in this post, what's up the phrase "natural law"? If it belongs to or originates from God, wouldn't that make it supernatural law? I've officially had just about enough of people using words to mean something specifically precluded by their definitions.)

*Or, if you are a math geek, pi.

Just in case anybody is not yet clear on my opinion of Francis Collins, USA Today has inadvertently given me the perfect opportunity to continue talking about the bad consequences of bad thinking. Collins, to make a long story short, is the vocal Christian scientist who Obama placed at the head of the government's biomedical research group, thus setting off a brief and almost entirely useless flame war between religious and scientific partisans. More relevantly to today's post, Collins is also one source of inspiration to Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk, co-presidents of the BioLogos Foundation (which, incidentally, Collins founded). Giberson and Falk - hereafter Galk - share Collins's opinion that Christianity can be reconciled with modern science, but their arguments look more like the results of trying to keep too many balls in the air at once.

Probably for PR reasons, their USA Today editorial plays things very close to the vest, mostly attacking young-earth creationists. But Galk slip a bit at the end when they defend the perfection of evolutionary development. It "is not," they say, "a chaotic and wasteful process, as the critics charge. Evolution occurs in an orderly universe, on a foundation of natural laws and faithful processes." This might seem like a really strange thing to say, but Galk and other Christian scientists have to try their best to explain away the many cruelties and inefficiences that evolution entails or else abandon their idea of a God who lovingly watches over the whole universe (or even just over humans in particular). In particular, though it's easy to say that evolution is in some sense a "prettier" or "more elegant" system of creation, aesthetic values can't substitute for moral ones: at best, defending theistic evolution on these grounds would allow for an artistic genius god with apparently little to no morality at all.

So Galk at least recognize the problem - it's just their solution that's wanting. Assuming they mean something relatively uncontroversial by "faithful processes," everything that happens "occurs in an orderly universe, on a foundation of natural laws and faithful processes." We know for sure that some events are chaotic and wasteful, though, so Galk's objection is really more like a distraction: "yes, evolution looks kind of ugly, but check out how great the rest of the universe looks!" Moreover, "chaotic" in the scientific sense isn't in any way a pejorative word - it doesn't, for instance, imply unreliability or inaccuracy or randomness - so Galk either don't know the meaning of a (relatively) basic term or else purposefully misrepresent that meaning in order to serve their own purposes. Neither of those possibilities is particularly promising.

But, being the nice guy that I am, I figured I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and go check out their website. You've only got so many words to use in a USA Today editorial, I reasoned, so maybe they'll come off as less stupid on their own turf, where they're in total control of what they say. You can imagine how disappointed I was when I got there and only found more nonsense.

To give you just a taste, Galk (or whoever writes the stuff on the BioLogos site) characterize "the laws of physics, chemistry, weather and tectonics" as "the inherent freedom of [God's] creation" when they're considering the problem of evil. The obvious strategy at work here is to take the most (rhetorically) successful response to the problem of chosen evil - the so-called free will solution - and emulate it for the problem of natural evil. Accordingly, they just pick the thing responsible for natural evil and call it "natural freedom" without stopping to ask whether that's even a coherent notion. From there, the highly questionable analogy proceeds predictably: "As with the free will of humans, God cannot [justifiably] intervene in these areas," they say, and dust their hands off. In and of itself, this is only kind of dumb and a little annoying (language really should be used less haphazardly than this); combined with their other views, however, this argument is literally explosive.

Leaving omnibenevolence behind for the moment, Galk turn their attentions in another article to one of God's lesser-known attributes: activity. "Divine Action," they say, "is defined as God’s interaction with creation" and is absolutely vital for Christian belief. I don't know why they say this, but if I had to guess I'd guess that it has something to do with Jesus - but, at any rate, they also think that divine action needs some special explanation in light of physics. A deterministic universe, they say, "could...imply God’s absence. After all, if the laws of nature can explain almost any phenomenon, how is God involved?" As before, I myself am not sure that this problem is as important as they make it out to be, but okay, I'll bite: how can God be involved in a deterministic universe?

According to Galk, God in fact can't: "In order to understand how God could take an active role, or how the world could have any inherent freedom, the laws of nature must be somehow open or flexible" (emphasis mine). So systems with no flexibility are unfree because neither God nor any other agent can affect their results - but that was exactly the same set of criteria they used before to show that those same systems are free! Chemistry and plate tectonics and so on, Galk seem to say, are free (because God bears no moral responsibility for them) and also unfree (because they're wholly determined). I could spend a whole post going into the many reasons that they've talked themselves into this, but it's easier to just say that this whole thing is a fucking mess.

So, supporters of Francis Collins and his position on religion and science, here is your choice: either cut it out or accept the fact that people like he and Galk will continue to have credibility when they voice their scientifically inaccurate gibberish. Religion can be a fun hobby, but if this is the best that actual scientists can do to reconcile it with reality, then it can't be much more.

Just keep reading it, you'll get it eventually:

Somebody please tell me that this is all a sick joke, that our national dialogue on health care isn't being driven by this kind of total garbage:

• "[K]eep your government hands off my Medicare."
• "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
• "You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life."
• "...death panel..."
• "The health care bill is reparations."

I even saw one article that said we shouldn't mess around with government involvement with health care because it's better to experiment first and then implement a system that takes those results into account - as though this is the very first centralized health care plan in the history of the world.

The most honest statement of opposition I've seen comes from John Rosenberg:

"To say, as the president did, that 'no one in America should go broke because they get sick' is to say that having health insurance is a civil right. Not only does the president think of his health care health insurance reform as at least in part a civil rights measure, but it is important to realize that what he means by civil rights is both far broader and deeper than what most of us think of when we think of civil rights enforcement — removing artificial barriers based on race, sex, or ethnicity that block equal opportunity."

It's a bad, bad sign when people can openly say that rich people have more and better rights than poor people do.