Total truth--three strong arguments for design

In another section of her book Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey gets down to basics in regard to first principles. There are not really many viable options. Either the universe is a closed system of cause and effect, or it is an open system, the product of a personal agent. She notes that everything that follows comes out of that fundamental choice.

Once we understand these two basic categories and their implications, then it becomes far easier to analyze worldviews. If we can show that a non-personal starting point fails to account for the world, we can eliminate a vast variety of philosophical systems that fall within that category -- materialism, determinism, behaviorism, Marxism, utilitarianism, and evolution.

To argue for an open system, in which there is a personal agent involved, Pearcey introduces intelligent design. The heart of design theory is the claim that design can be empirically detected. We do this all the time when we distinguish between products of nature and the products of intelligence. We see ripples on beach sand, but we know it's simply a product of wind and waves. If we see on that same beach a sand castle with walls, turrets and a moat, we intuitively recognize this is a different kind of order that's been imposed upon the sand.

The process of detecting design is thoroughly empirical in many scientific areas. Astronomers do this when they search for extraterrestrial intelligence. They distinguish between radio signals that are encoded messages and ones that are simply natural phenomena. Archaeologists distinguish between chip marks on a stone representing tool design and marks that display simple weathering patterns. Insurance companies take steps when they must decide if the fire was a case of arson (design) or just an accident.

Biologists who believe in evolution say living things only appear to be designed. Proponents of evolution must show that this obvious design is not real but is instead a deceptive illusion produced by natural selection.

Pearcey says there are three main areas where new evidence for design is being uncovered. The first is the world of the cell (biochemistry). There is an almost unbelievable complexity encountered in the tiny space of the living cell. Darwin and others of his time believed the living cell was extremely simple, but now we know it is a world of high-tech like modern machinery but far more complex than anything devised by mere humans. Francis Crick, investigator of DNA, says the cell is an incredible complex factory. Each cell has an automated rapid transit system to whiz cargo around from one area to the other. She brings up the famous example of the bacterial flagellum, which acts like a propeller. It requires dozens of precisely tailored, intricately interacting parts, which could not emerge by any gradual process as evolution would require. Instead, the coordinated parts must somehow appear on the scene all at the same time.

The second area that shows design, according to Pearcey, is the origin of the universe (cosmology). Lately astronomers have been uncovering evidence that the cosmos itself is exquisitely fine-tuned to support life. For example, the force of gravity has to be exactly right to create a universe capable of life. What makes this so puzzling is that there is no physical cause explaining why these values are so finely tuned to support life. One astronomer, Heinz Oberhummer, says, "I am not a religious person, but I could say this universe is designed very well for the existence of life. The basic forces in the universe are tailor-made for the production of... carbon-based life." The Nobel Prize-winner Arno Penzias has a good take on this: "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with a very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say supernatural) plan. The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole." Famous astronomer Fred Hoyle added to this insight when he said," A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics." The design inference, according to Pearcy, is the simplest, most direct reading of the evidence.

Finally, the author says the structure of DNA shows marks of design (biological information). There is a very close analogy between DNA and a written language. The DNA molecule is built up of four chemical bases that function as chemical letters which combine in various sequences to spell out the message used to create proteins. The discovery of this chemical code means we can now apply the categories of information theory to DNA. Richard Dawkins says that this code is truly digital, in exactly the same way computer codes are. So, the question is simple -- how do we get highly specified, complex biological information? When you see a message, a language, you immediately conclude that it is not the product of natural causes. The sequencing of DNA is not random (tossing dice) nor regular like laws of nature (mix salt into water; it will dissolve). Instead, it exhibits specified complexity, the hallmark of design.

So, Pearcey has laid out three important areas evolutionists have to deal with. So far, they appear to be losing ground to those who see intelligence at the heart of our universe.

Total truth--the philosophy behind Darwinism

In her book Total Truth, Nancy Pearcey focuses on a crucial element in the debate over origins. Darwinists insist on the power of natural selection to create the vast diversity of living things on earth. But their examples as cited in my previous blog are not all that convincing. She says this is a clue that something else is at work – that it is not really the evidence that persuades.

Here is something we all need to realize – the philosophy of naturalism that lurks behind evolution. Should the definition of science restrict inquiry to natural causes alone? Or should inquiry be free to follow the evidence wherever it leads – whether it points to a natural or intelligent cause? These are extremely important questions which she explores.

Pearcey says most ordinary people have an idealized image of science. They see it as impartial, unbiased investigation that sticks strictly to the evidence. That’s what all science textbooks say, but the problem is that in practice, science has been co-opted into the camp of the philosophical naturalists – the idea that nature is a closed system of cause and effect.

She uses quotations from well-known evolutionists as proof of this prior philosophical commitment. Richard Dawkins says, “Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory…. we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.” Why would he say this? Because it is naturalistic. A Kansas State University professor once said in a letter to the prestigious journal Nature, “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.” In addition, the editor in chief of Scientific American stated that “a central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism – it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.”

Pearcey objects to this definition of science. Who says we have to accept naturalism as a “central tenet” of science? One professor she knew retorted, “Who made up that rule? I don’t remember voting on it.”

We need to confront this definition of science. The only reason for restricting science to methodological naturalism (how science is done) is if we assume from the outset that nature really is a closed system of cause and effect. If, on the other hand, nature is not a closed system, then restricting science to naturalistic theories is not a good strategy for getting at the truth.

The author says our children are encountering this philosophy early in school. She quotes from a typical high school textbook: “Many people believe that a supernatural force or deity created life. That explanation is not within the scope of science.” She points out that the book does not say creation has been proven false or discredited by facts, but only that it falls outside a certain definition of science. It has been ruled out by definition.

It’s sad, but the first question many scientists ask is not whether a theory is true, but whether it is naturalistic. So, evolution wins the debate by default. Darwin himself indicated evolution was not so much a specific theory as a philosophical stance – a stance that could be described as saying any mechanism is acceptable, as long as it is naturalistic. He said, “I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.” He was not wedded to his own theory of natural selection as the only mechanism of evolution, but regarded any mechanism as acceptable as long as it got rid of the concept of divine creation. Pearcey’s conclusion? Darwinian evolution is not so much an empirical finding as a deduction from a naturalistic worldview.

She concludes this section with other interesting statements from well-known Darwinians. Richard Lewontin, for example, says “we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.” He says this materialism must be “absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.” The famous duo who discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, Francis Crick and James Watson, freely admit that anti-religious motivations drove their scientific work. Steven Weinberg, a well-known physicist, said, “I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive to religious belief, and I’m all for that.” The hope that science would liberate people from religion is, in his words, “one of the things that in fact has driven me in my life.”

So here is the main idea I hope you take away from all this information. Clearly, the motives driving many evolutionists have as much do with religion as with science. Their prior commitment to a worldview colors what they decide is true. No white lab coat can hide the fact that they have their own prejudices.

Total truth--Darwinism on trial

In the next section of Nancy Pearcey’s book, Total Truth, she deals specifically with Darwinism. She believes that so much of what is wrong today in American society goes back to how we see the beginning of life on earth. The Christian perspective is that God created everything; the Darwinian view says matter randomly assembled itself without any overall design or plan. The crucial thing to realize is what Darwinism does for the concept of truth. If evolution is true, than both religion and philosophical absolutes (goodness, truth, and beauty) are false.

She begins by showing how limited the evidence for Darwinian evolution really is. First, evolutionists trot out the idea of Darwin's finches, showing the beak size differs according to the habitats where they live. However, this is nothing but a cyclical fluctuation; the birds were not evolving into a new kind of bird. Beak size either grew or went back to a smaller size depending on the amount of rainfall. This was cyclical, not heading anywhere. The same thing applies to resistance of bacteria and viruses to antibiotics. Once the drugs are removed, the changes reverse. Then there are fruit flies -- exposed to radiation, they produce many mutations. After fifty years of bombarding fruit flies with radiation, scientists have not managed to turn them into any kind of new insect or even a new and improved fruit fly. The fourth case Pearcey discusses involves peppered moths in England. Supposedly, dark moths survived in England rather than light colored moths because of soot which during the Industrial Revolution darkened tree trunks where the moths perched. The lighter colored moths were easier for birds to pick off. This has been touted as the showcase example of natural selection. Oops – it can now be revealed that the moths don't actually perch on tree trunks in the wild. But what about all the pictures of them doing so in textbooks? Actually, scientists glued those moths onto the tree trunks. Perhaps the most famous fake was a well-known exhibit of vertebrate embryos lined up side-by-side -- fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, and human. The point of the illustration is to show how similar all the embryos are, suggesting common ancestry. It turns out the creator of this, Ernst Haeckel, fudged his sketches, making them look far more similar than they really are. Scientists in his time, more than 100 years ago, already knew these illustrations were fakes, yet only recently have they publicly been talking about them. Strangely enough, these illustrations still show up in biology textbooks.

These examples illustrate a flaw in the standard Darwinian argument. The essence of Darwin's theory is that minor adaptations (microevolution) can be extrapolated over vast periods of time to explain major differences in groups of animals (macroevolution). But small changes simply don't add up the way the theory requires. In 1980 there was a landmark conference on evolution held at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Paleontologists reported at the conference that the fossil record does not, and never will, support the Darwinian scenario of a smooth, continuous progress of life forms, nicely graded from simple to complex. What do the rocks show? Forms appear suddenly, with no transitional forms leading to them, followed by long periods of stability where there is little change or none at all. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard, a popularizer of evolution and science, called this "the trade secret of paleontology."

Something important is going on here, Pearcey says. She believes smart people tout evolution not because of the evidence but because of philosophical reasons. They have already committed themselves to what is called philosophical naturalism -- nature is all that exists, or at least the natural forces are all that may be invoked in science. Once people have made that commitment, they can be persuaded by relatively minor evidence. There’s no good reason science has to be run according to philosophical naturalism. It didn’t used to be—scientists followed the evidence, no matter where it led. Now the playing field has been changed. Only naturalistic answers may be given. So, based on this set of parameters, evolution is the best choice, despite its problems.

Total truth--three key elements

I'm working my way for the seond time through Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey because it is so useful to Christians today. In our western world it is not considered polite to mix public and private (secular and sacred) areas. This division keeps Christianity from having as big an impact as it could have since the truth of Christianity is assumed to be useful only for the private portion of our lives, having nothing to say about our public selves. This is the third blog on the book with more to come because we all need to be reminded of the total truth that Christianity represents--its value for both parts of our lives and for all of society.

Pearcey says the tragedy of the two-story split is that the things that matter most in life (dignity, freedom, personal identity, ultimate purpose) have been cast into the upper story with no grounding in accepted definitions of knowledge. The bottom story is reserved for reason, scientific knowledge, facts, rationality. But no one can live in that lower story because it takes all the joy and beauty out of life.

Pearcey wants all aspects of life to be injected with a Christian worldview perspective. To do this, she says we must ask three sets of questions:

Creation: How was this aspect of the world originally created? What was its original nature and purpose?

Fall: How has it been twisted and distorted by the fall? How has it been corrupted by false worldviews?

Redemption: How can we bring this aspect of the world under the lordship of Christ, restoring it to its original, created purpose?

One example she uses appeals to me since that's where I work everyday as a teacher -- education. Creation says that children are created in the image of God. Education should seek to address all aspects of the human person. Yet the biblical view of human nature is realistic enough because of the fall to remind us that children are prone to sin and in need of moral and intellectual direction. Children are not naturally innocent and shouldn't be allowed to come up with their own morality. Finally, redemption means that education should help equip students to take up vocations to bring about a better world.

Pearcey says we can use the same three-part format to compare worldviews. Creation refers to ultimate origins (where did all come from? how did we get here?). Every worldview will also offer a counterpart to the fall, an explanation of the source of evil and suffering (what has gone wrong with the world? why is there warfare and conflict?). Finally, every worldview has to instill hope by offering a vision of redemption -- a way to reverse the fall and set the world right again.

As an example, she turns to Marxism. Regarding creation, Marxists believe matter itself is the creative power. The fall, according to Marx, was the creation of private property, bringing about all the evils of exploitation and of class struggle. Redemption, for Marxists, involves destroying private ownership of property. This explains why Marxism has such widespread influence today even though it never produces the classless society it claims. It taps into a deep religious hunger for redemption.

The second example comes from New Age thought. The origin of all things is a universal, spiritual essence. The source of evil and suffering is our sense of individuality, and we solve the problem by being reunited with this essence.

This is the first part of Total Truth. Pearcey has shed light on the secular/sacred dichotomy that restricts Christianity to the realm of religious truth, creating double minds and fragmented lives. She tries to overcome this by training Christians to come up with a biblically based worldview using the structural elements of creation, fall, and redemption.
In the next couple of blogs I'll look at Part Two of her book, which zeroes in on creation with a focus on Darwinian evolution. In the meantime, I hope we all think about how we can live whole lives, bringing Christianity into both the public and the private aspects of our society.

Total truth--the split in our lives

Nancy Pearcey wrote an important book a few years ago—Total Truth. It’s the kind of book that can be read more than once. That’s what I’ve been doing lately, and I wanted to share some of her ideas. This is the second blog on the book. She talks about the importance of the secular/sacred dichotomy in our society and how it has been used to push religious faith out of the public arena. We have a unique challenge here in the West if we want to have an impact for Christianity -- we need to learn how to liberate it from the private sphere and present it as total truth, applicable to all of society.

The first step, she says, is to identify the split mentality in our own minds. Evangelicals are highly committed to their faith, according to many surveys. On the other hand, when asked to articulate a Christian worldview perspective on other subjects (such as work, business, and politics), they had little to say. Their faith is almost completely privatized, restricted to areas of personal behavior, values and relationships. They don’t think “Christianly” about the rest of their lives and how their faith has answers for living in this public sphere.

Pearcey says we must understand three parts of the Bible story to fully bring healing and wholeness to our split lives -- creation, fall, and redemption.

Regarding creation, the biblical doctrine says that nothing is preexistent or eternal except God. No part of the creation is inherently evil or bad. We can hate the sin, but we should also exhibit a deep love for this world as God's handiwork. We don't want to lead monkish lives, separating ourselves from life around us.

We must also understand the cosmic scope of the fall. Even the natural world has been affected by human sin. We have to insist that evil and disorder are not intrinsic in the material world but are caused by human sin, which takes God's good creation and distorts it for evil purposes. As in example, Pearcey talks about music, which is good in itself, but popular songs can often be used to glorify moral perversion.

The good news is that all eventually will be redeemed. The material world will participate in this final redemption. Every valid vocation has its counterpart in the new heavens and new earth, which gives our work eternal significance. The early reformers of the church gave work a higher standing than it had held during the middle ages. Now you could glorify God with the most menial tasks.

This comprehensive vision of creation, fall, and redemption allows no room for this secular/sacred split. It’s something we need to think about as we go about our busy days. We are to see all we do and experience as part of the total Christian message. Only Christianity as a worldview can put it all together in a coherent package, bringing total truth to both our private and public halves.

Total Truth

I am currently rereading a powerful and provocative book by Nancy Pearcey called Total Truth (2004). It's a book that deserves at least two readings because it discusses the split between the sacred and the secular in today's society—a major problem. Does God belong in the public square in areas of politics, business, law, and education? Or is religion strictly a private matter? Secular thinkers have ruled Christian principles out of bounds in the public arena. According to Pearcey, we need to unify our fragmented lives and understand there is such a thing as total truth that applies all across society, not just in religious matters.. This is a worldview book, dealing with the importance of how we see and understand the world. In the next few blogs, I would like to mention some of the highlights of this book.

She says the first step to form a Christian worldview is to overcome a sharp divide in our society between the public and private. We are told there is a public sphere which is scientific and value-free. It is made up of facts and scientific knowledge. It is rational and verifiable. It is objective and universally valid. Then we are told that there is a private sphere made up of personal preferences, values, individual choices that are full of subjective feelings. It’s nonrational and noncognitive. This divide is the single most potent weapon to delegitimize the biblical perspective in the public square today. Most secularists consign religion to the value sphere, treating it as if it has no relevance to the public realm.

Pearcey believes Christians have to find a way to overcome this dichotomy. She turns to a classic book called The Christian Mind by Harry Blamires, in which the author claimed there is no longer a Christian mind. He meant there was no shared, biblically based set of assumptions on subjects like law, education, economics, politics, science, or the arts. Christians follow the Bible and pray, but outside of church they succumb to secularism. We need to understand that Christianity gives truth about the whole of reality. She warns of a particular danger here -- if Christians do not consciously develop a biblical approach to all aspects of their lives, they will unconsciously absorb some other philosophical approaches.

Pearcey offers three examples of how Christians need to influence their culture based on a worldview that sees the value of Christianity in all aspects of life. Her first case involves the way Christians are taking over philosophy departments and universities across the country. Why is this happening? Largely because of the work of one Christian philosopher – Alvin Plantinga. He writes well and has shown that Christians are capable of using their work to influence society, in this case academia. Another example is the work of David Larson, who turned around the medical community on the subject of religion and health. His studies found that religious beliefs actually correlate with better mental health, in contrast to Freud, who had said belief in God was a neurosis. The final example is Marvin Olasky, a former Marxist who analyzed American welfare policy. He discovered that churches didn't just hand out money to the poor. Instead, they helped people change their lives, focusing on job training and education. Churches required that the poor do some useful work, giving them a chance to rebuild their dignity by making a worthwhile contribution to society. On the other hand, government aid to the poor actually makes things worse by rewarding antisocial and dysfunctional patterns. It was Olasky who came up with the term "compassionate conservatism." This concept resonated with George W. Bush, who attempted to make changes in dealing with the poor based on this concept. So these three examples illustrate the way people's Christian beliefs can go beyond the private realm to make positive changes in the public sphere.

Good news (at least for some)

Some good news from last week’s election:

1. Republicans added two new African-Americans to the Congress with Allen West in Florida and Tim Scott in South Carolina.

2. Republicans also gained two new Hispanic stars this election: Sen.-elect Marco Rubio from Florida and the new governor of New Mexico, Susanna Martinez. So, how do Democrats portray Republicans as racist now? I’m sure they’ll come up with something. I think they are very worried about Rubio, who has star appeal.

3. But the biggest news (and the one less commonly known or discussed) is that Republicans clobbered the Democrats in the state gubernatorial and legislative races. Next year, state lawmakers draw new congressional districts, determining the congressional map for the next decade. In the past, Democrats have had a 2-1 advantage in congressional redistricting. Not anymore.

The list of governor races won by Republicans is amazing--Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Alabama, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Alaska, Maine, Iowa and Florida. They also swept the state legislatures.

Now, it’s true that the tidal wave didn’t sweep through all parts of the nation equally. Democrats won governor's races in California, New York, Massachusetts, Arkansas and Maryland. But what’s interesting about these victories is that all the Democrats' states are losing population—not a good sign for the future of liberalism in the nation.

More bad news from California for the Dems—we’re not only losing congressional seats for the first time since the '50s, but (thanks to the passage of Prop 20) we’re also taking the redistricting out of the hands of the California legislators (hugely Democratic) and turning it over to a Citizens Redistricting Commission.

4. The results will probably mean some Dems currently in Washington will abandon the leftist policies pushed so hard by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, making it easier for Republicans to gain some of their goals. No doubt Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb, Sherrod Brown, and Jon Tester of Montana -- all of whom will be facing the voters in two years -- noticed that popular, long-serving Democrat Russ Feingold just lost an election in a much more liberal state than their own.

All in all, it’s going to be an interesting couple of years. The key question is whether Barack Obama will be like Bill Clinton and modify his position to keep in step with the voters. All indications right now tell me he won’t want to compromise. He’s an elitist, leftist ideologue who thinks we are just too stupid to understand what good things he has done and will continue to do for us, as long as we are willing to turn our lives over to him and a giant national government. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want that. Let's keep the pressure on the Republicans to derail Obama's ambitious plans to remake this nation into another European state.

Why I voted the way I did

Well, the election is over. The people voted for change—the biggest increase of one party in the House of Representatives in over sixty years. I voted as a conservative on all issues as well as candidates and wanted to share six reasons for doing so.

I believe in common sense. Look at the Democratic Party. Its leaders are lawyers. In fact every presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school. Every vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Then look at Republicans on the national scene—business leaders, company starters, teachers, blue collar workers. I would trust this group far more to reach a common sense conclusion about how the world really operates, especially in this time of economic concerns. If more conservatives had been in charge, I think they would have seen the stupidity of pouring money into new-car rebates or huge stimulus plans that failed to deliver real improvements.

I believe in the existence of real evil. Barack Obama has downplayed the horrors of Iran, North Korea, China, and other miserable countries where human rights are neglected. He thinks, like so many liberals in the Democratic Party, that tyrants will change their ways if they are accommodated, smiled at, embraced, praised, listened to. That didn’t seem to work with Hitler, Mao, or Stalin, and I don’t see any reason to believe it will work now. Let’s go back to calling terrorism what it really is rather than “man-made disaster,” in the words of the current administration.

I believe in smaller government. A huge bureaucracy cannot respond well to individual needs. As I heard the other day, “A big government means a small citizen.” We are part of America, where freedom from bloated government has allowed for business to thrive, for people to become anything they wish, for self-reliance to flourish. Do we really want to become another Europe? Look at how they have reacted in France when the government has had to reign in all the goodies.

I believe in a strong family. There are way too many who, for the sake of social experimentation, have called for more abortion, same-sex marriage, and other attacks on the family, which is the place where the young learn to become civilized. A traditional family is where the next generation is raised, loved, and sent out into the world as complete individuals.

I believe in American exceptionalism. That’s not popular today in some quarters, including the White House, where Obama can’t bring himself to say there’s anything special about the United States. But it was our country where liberty, equality, the respect for laws, and religious fervor provided inspiration for the entire world. We have done more to make the world a better place than any other country in the history of mankind. I wish this was taught in our schools as it once was.

Finally, I believe in seeing the world realistically. The liberal view is one of wishes, utopias, dreams, and abstractions. They don’t seem to get it-- evil really exists, the world’s climate has changed many times long before the industrial age, business is not a dirty word, the Constitution shouldn’t be twisted out of shape to serve a current fad, school is a place for information rather than indoctrination, hard work needs to be rewarded instead of being penalized, the human heart is twisted so that cleaning up the exterior will not solve the problem, oil is necessary right now while we are switching over to alternative fuels, and the existence of God seems like a reasonable assumption, given all the evidence.

Now that the election is over, the hard part begins. Let’s make sure these new members of Congress carry out the desires of the people who sent them there.

Tuesday--what message will the President receive from the voters?

Tomorrow America votes. It will primarily be a vote of confidence or no confidence in the policies of Barack Obama--whether we are moving the right way as a country. Many pundits believe the nation will hand Obama a stinging repudiation of his big-government policies. I found the following on the internet and thought you all might appreciate it.


Think about the reasons you might have voted for Obama, and it's almost impossible to find any cause for enthusiasm this year:

• You agreed with his policies. Like most politicians, he has fallen short of his promises. Some he has flat-out broken (closing Guantanamo, not raising taxes on anyone making under $250,000 a year), some he has kept in ways that make hardly anyone happy (health care "reform"), some he has carried out in a half-hearted way (escalating the war in Afghanistan), and some he has deferred for the future (the global warming tax). As a practical matter, the last category is indistinguishable from the first, since it's unlikely that the next Congress will pass any liberal initiatives that couldn't get through the current one.

• You liked the intangible aspects of his candidacy. Obama has given way to "Oh, bummer," hope and change and unity and bipartisanship to condescension and bitter attack politics. Maybe you think it's the Republicans' fault. It's still no cause for enthusiasm.

• You wanted to get beyond racism by electing the first black president. Obama's supporters have told us endlessly that racism still thrives in America. Besides, no matter how badly the Democrats do Nov. 2, Obama will still be president, and he will still be black.

• He wasn't George W. Bush. If you are the sort who actively despised Bush, this may still be a motivator. But if you were just weary of Bush, by now you're probably weary of Obama, who won't shut up about him.

• You like voting for a winner. Obama and the Democrats don't look like winners now.

• You're a partisan Democrat. This is about the only reason anyone would be enthusiastic about voting Democratic this year.


OK, back to me. I hope you vote tomorrow. When you do, consider what you want from your government. As someone said, "A bigger government makes for a smaller citizen." I trust the American people will vote to keep their government limited, with opportunities for individuals to grow great instead.