Our military--who fights for us?

I found an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal that lays to rest the old lies about who really fights for us. We hear so often of our military as a refuge for those unable to make it in society, a place for the ill-trained and minorities of our society. The belief is that our nation is cruelly sending these poor saps off to die in lands they couldn't spell or find on a map. But the truth is far different.

In 2008, using data provided by the Defense Department, the Heritage Foundation found that only 11% of enlisted military recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth, or quintile, of American neighborhoods (as of the 2000 Census), while 25% came from the wealthiest quintile. Heritage reported that "these trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40% of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods, a number that has increased substantially over the past four years."

Think about what that is saying. More than twice as many of our soldiers come from the wealthiest portion of our society as come from the poorest section. In fact, the Heritage report showed that "low-income families are underrepresented in the military and high-income families are overrepresented. Individuals from the bottom household income quintile make up 20.0 percent of Americans who are age 18-24 years old but only 10.6 percent of the 2006 recruits and 10.7 percent of the 2007 recruits. Individuals in the top two quintiles make up 40.0 percent of the population, but 49.3 percent of the recruits in both years."

What about the charge that our Army is disproportionately minority, especially African-American? This too is false, as the Journal points out in data for fiscal 2010 available on the Army's website: Whereas African-Americans comprise 17% of Americans ages 18-39 with high school degrees, they represent only a slightly larger proportion of enlisted soldiers, at 21%.

Yes, but what about whites? Are they shirking their military duty? Nope. They were significantly overrepresented among enlisted Army personnel in 2010. While 58% of Americans 18-39 years old are white, 64% of the Army's enlisted men and women are. One area that is particularly uplifting is the percentage of Army officers. While 74% of 25-54 year-olds with bachelor's degrees are white, 72% of Army officers are white. While 8% of 25-54 year-olds with B.A.s are African-American, 13% of Army officers are. So African-Americans are represented well as officers.

Why do myths persist despite all the evidence? It seems likely that it suits the interests of many members of the urban elite to believe that the military they do not join is composed of poor, uneducated victims of an unfair society. I'm so glad to know this idea is far from the truth.

Intelligent design in the hot seat

I never finished covering the chapter in I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist that deals with evolution. I wanted to spend some time now with the authors' discussion of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. They organize their discussion by looking at objections to intelligent design with responses to those objections.

The first objection is that intelligent design is not science. Of course, Darwinists make this claim based on their own biased definition of science. Science used to be a search for causes. But Darwinists say now that all answers must be materialistic, not allowing as they say a "divine foot in the door." The irony is that if intelligent design is not science, than neither is Darwinism because both are trying to discover what happened in the past. Darwinists would also have to rule out archaeology, cryptology, criminal and accident forensic investigations, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence since they are all legitimate forensic sciences that look into the past for intelligent causes.

Another charge against intelligent design is that it commits the God-of-the-gaps fallacy, which occurs when someone falsely believes God caused the event when it was actually natural phenomenon. At one time people used to believe lightning was caused by God, but now we know the real reasons. But it's not that we lack evidence of a natural explanation; it's because we have positive and empirically detectable evidence for an intelligent cause. In fact, intelligent design scientists are open to both natural and intelligent causes rather than being opposed to continued research into natural explanations for the first life. In addition, intelligent design is a falsifiable premise. It could be proven wrong if natural laws were someday discovered to create specified complexity. But Darwinists don't allow falsification of their story because they don't allow any other creation premise to be considered. Actually, it's Darwinists who claim that someday they will have answers to explain how complex, information-rich biological systems came into existence--they believe in science-of-the-gaps, it appears.

Another charge against intelligent design is that it is religiously motivated. Here's a quick answer to that – so what? Truth does not lie in the motivation of scientists, but in the quality of the evidence. After all, it's not just religious people that have a worldview. So do atheists. Intelligent design is not "creation science" either. Proponents don't make the same claims of a young Earth or a worldwide flood.

One final objection to intelligent design has to do with imperfections in creatures. The fact that scientists complain about sub-optimal design implies that they know what optimal design is. It sounds like actually an argument for a designer. When they claim something is designed correctly, they're implying they could tell if it were designed correctly. Secondly, even if something was sub-optimally designed,it doesn't mean there was no design at all. In addition, all design requires trade-offs. For example, cars want to get good gas mileage but they need power, so some sort of compromise is reached. One final thought here – the book does not discuss it, but many of the complaints about bad design have turned out to be incorrect. Many systems in our bodies which at one time were considered poorly designed have actually proved to have important, helpful features.

There's one final section in this chapter dealing with motives behind Darwinism, but I think I'll save that for a future blog.

Another scientist walks away from Al Gore

You've heard the old saying, :"Another one bites the dust." Well, it happened in the arena of global warming. Another Nobel laureate breaks from the climate change pack.

Ivar Giaever, a 1973 physics Nobel Laureate resigned last week from the American Physical Society in protest over the group's insistence that evidence of man-made global warming is "incontrovertible." That's the wording of Al Gore, who reassures us all that the issue really is settled.

In an email to the society, Mr. Giaever—who works at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—wrote that "The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me . . . that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period."

Mr. Giaever was an American Physical Society fellow, an honor bestowed on "only half of one percent" of the members, according to a spokesman. This is no slouch. He follows in the footsteps of University of California at Santa Barbara Emeritus Professor of Physics Harold Lewis, a former APS fellow who resigned in 2010, calling global warming "the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist." Now that's hard-hitting commentary.

But, as the late-night TV ads say, "Wait, there's more." Other dissenters include Stanford University physicist and Nobelist Robert B. Laughlin, deceased green revolution icon and Nobelist Norman Borlaug, Princeton physicist William Happer and World Federation of Scientists President Antonino Zichichi. Not that all of these men agree on climate change, much less mankind's contribution to it, but they at least maintain an open mind about warming or what to do about it.

One of the least savory traits of climate-change advocates is how they've tried to bully anyone who keeps an open mind. Remember Al Gore, who compared deniers of global warming to racists in the 1950s? With the cap-and-trade movement stymied, Mr. Gore and the climate clan have become even more arch in their dismissals of anyone who disagrees. You decide whom you wish to agree with--Professor Giaever, or Mr. Gore. My choice is pretty easy.

How did life get started?

The next section of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist deals with the design of life. It focuses particularly on the most difficult problem of all for Darwinists – where did the first life come from?

The authors point out that the first problem when talking about evolution is in its definition. Darwinists make no distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, and thus use the evidence for micro to prove macro. Microevolution has been observed (changes within species), but it can't be used as evidence for macroevolution, which has never been observed (the evolving of one organism into another kind of organism). Natural selection, the device Darwinists say that powers evolution, has never been observed to create new types.

There are five reasons the authors list to explain why natural selection can't create new life. For one thing, there seems to be genetic limits built into basic types of animals. For example, dog breeders create different kinds of dogs, but the dogs always remain dogs. Secondly, the change that occurs within types of animals appears to be cyclical rather than directed toward the development of new life forms. The two authors use an example of Darwin's finches, which were noted as having varying beak sizes depending on the weather. No new life forms came into existence; only the beak sizes changed in these birds. The third reason involves something called irreducible complexity. Living things are filled with molecular machines that are irreducibly complex, meaning that all the parts of each machine have to be completely formed and in the right places and in the right size in the correct operating order at the same time for the machine to function. The authors use as an example a car engine, which needs so many systems to operate together for success. These complex biological systems could not have developed in a gradual Darwinian fashion because intermediate forms would be nonfunctional. All the right parts must be in place in the right size at the same time for there to be any function at all. A fourth problem with natural selection is the non-viability of transitional forms. The authors use as an example the Darwinian assertion that birds evolved gradually from reptiles. Such a change would necessitate a transition from scales to feathers, but how could a creature survive that no longer has scales but does not quite have feathers? A creature with the structure of half a feather has no ability to fly. Finally, the authors discuss molecular isolation. If all species share a common ancestor, the authors indicate we should expect to find proteins sequences that are transitional from fish to amphibian, for example. That's not what is found. Scientists have discovered that the basic types are molecularly isolated from one another, which seems to preclude any type of ancestral relationship.

But Darwinists say the fossil record supports their position – does it? It actually lines of better with supernatural creation. There aren't missing links – there's a missing chain. Nearly all the major groups of animals known to exist appear in the fossil record abruptly and fully formed in strata from the Cambrian time period. This is been called the Cambrian explosion or biology's Big Bang. This, of course, is completely inconsistent with Darwinism. There's no evidence of gradual evolution but of instantaneous creation instead.

Again, I'm going to quit at this point even though I have not finished the chapter in the book. There's plenty here to think about.

The philosophy behind Darwinists

This blog is a continuation of a summary of a powerful book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Geisler and Turek.. The last time I discussed the book I was working my way through a chapter about the complexity of life. This time I would like to finish that particular chapter, which talks about the philosophy behind Darwinism and materialism.

The authors say Darwinists have been successful in convincing the public that Darwinism represents science while those who oppose Darwinism represent bad science. However, Geisler and Turek say just the opposite. It's the Darwinists who are practicing the bad science because their science is built on a false philosophy.

Where does Darwinism go wrong? Many Darwinists start with the idea that God is not necessary because science can explain everything. But there are all sorts of rational beliefs that cannot be proven by science: mathematics and logic (science can't prove them because science presupposes them), metaphysical truths (for example, there are minds that exist other than my own), ethical judgments (you can't prove by science that Mother Teresa was good because morality is not part of the scientific method), aesthetic judgments (no one can scientifically prove something is beautiful), and science itself (the belief that the scientific method discovers truth ironically can't be proven by the scientific method itself).

The key point the authors wish to get across is that science itself is built on philosophy. So, if you have bad philosophy, you get bad science. How is it that science is built on philosophy? First, scientists use philosophical assumptions and the search for causes. For example, scientists assume by faith that reason and the scientific method allow us to accurately understand our world. You can't prove the tools of science by some sort of experiment – the laws of logic, the law of causality, the principle of uniformity. Secondly, philosophical assumptions can dramatically impact scientific conclusions. I think right now about the debate on climate change. Many scientists are getting a conclusion that they wish to get to keep the scientific funding going.

The authors say the bad science of Darwinists essentially comes from their false philosophy of naturalism/materialism. Geisler and Turek have five reasons why materialism is not reasonable. First, there is specified complexity in life that cannot be explained materially. Think about the DNA message. Secondly, human thoughts and theories are not comprised only of materials. How much does love weigh? Third, if life was simply material, then we could take these materials and make a living being. But we cannot do that. Fourth, if materialism is true, then all people of human history who had spiritual experiences have been completely mistaken. That's hard to believe considering the list of those who have had such experiences – think of Abraham, Moses, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Jesus Christ. Fifth, if materialism is true then reason itself is impossible. Why? If mental processes are nothing but chemical reactions in our brains, why should we believe that anything is true? Chemicals don't reason, they react. We would be doomed to conclusions based on chemical reactions rather than reason.

Well, that's a lot of heady material to consider, and it deserves further thought. But I think it's pretty powerful.

Language to mask failure

As you know, I'm an English teacher who likes our language. I was reminded once again of the power of words the other day. This time it has to do with politics.


The news was about Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats. According to internet reports, they have dropped the word 'stimulus' from their vocabulary. This was reported shortly before President Obama's jobs speech before a joint session of Congress. He proposed another hugely expensive stimulus bill . . . oops, it's now being called a "jobs plan" much like his his $830 billion 2009 economic stimulus package. And we all know how lovely that turned out to be.


But since that previous program was so ineffective and ruinously expensive, a change in vocabulary was necessary. Democrats are now being careful to frame their job-creation agenda in language excluding references to that dreaded word "stimulus," even though their favored policies for ending the deepest recession since the Great Depression are largely the same--throw money at the problem.


The phrases used now will make people forget earlier failure, so get ready for new, uplifting language. It will now be "job creation" and "Make it in America" in lieu of "Recovery Act." Gee, I feel better about it already.


You know there's failure in the air when language has to change rather than the policies. The Democrats are wedded to the idea that money solves all problems. I hope this lesson in language wakes up the American people to the Democrats' lack of good ideas to solve our economic problems. I'm certainly not happy with the Republicans, but I think they have better plans to reduce our bloated government and return economic decisions to the people.

Al Gore as a prophet for profit

At the risk of irritating readers of this blog, I want to go back to global warming again. A previous blog mentioned the latest from CERN, the respected scientific group that has issued its findings that suggest cosmic rays may be a leading cause of climate change. Well, there goes the man-caused-only rants from the leftists around the world. Who leads them? Why, it's Al Gore, bless his soul.


The other day he implied that those who oppose his agenda were the same as the racists in the 50s who opposed equal rights for African-Americans. Now, you know when someone plays the race card, he is in trouble. By the way, we can expect that in next year's presidential election, can't we?


But I don't want to go over these issues. Instead, I'd like us to consider why Al Gore is so insistent on scaring us, ranting about the issue, smearing his opponents. Does he care that much more about the earth than the rest of us? Or is there more to his position? People always say, "Follow the money." Let's do that with Al Gore.


No one has made more money from climate change hype than Gore. According to the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper, just one of the "green" companies in which Gore has invested has received over half a billion dollars in subsidies from the Energy Department. Ah, scare people enough, and they throw money your way. Scientists learned that too--yell a lot and get more funding.


Financial disclosure documents released before the 2000 election put the Gore family's net worth at $1 million to $2 million. A mere decade later, estimates are that he is worth $100 million. He's been touted in the press as one day becoming the first "carbon billionaire." Now, there's a reason to keep the hysteria alive. It's good for the pocketbook.


According to the Science & Public Policy Institute, the U.S. government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid and tax breaks. And why are we doing this, considering that the rest of the world, especially China and India, have no plans to ruin their economy along with us? The net impact will be nil.


According to the World Bank, the value of carbon trading doubled from $63 billion in 2007 to $126 billion in 2008. Big money has been and can be made by conning governments into formulating policies based on fraudulently hyped climate hysteria.
We still remember "Climategate," right?


While many like Gore have profited handsomely, these policies cost the nation dearly in terms of jobs and economic growth. Let's see real proof before we unilaterally dismantle the American economy.

The amazing complexity of life

Back to my blog on I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. The last blog on this covered the design argument in which the authors claim the basic laws of the universe are set up to allow human life to exist. This time I'll focus on a second type of design in the universe -- the complexity of life. The authors point out that advancing technology has enabled scientists to discover a tiny world of awesome design and astonishing complexity.

The biggest problem for Darwinian believers is to explain the origin of the first life, which is not as simple as once thought. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA, the chemical that encodes instructions for building and replicating all living things. It's a blueprint, and Bill Gates called it the most complex computer code ever seen. DNA even in a one-celled amoeba is unbelievably complex in its message. Richard Dawkins, an atheist professor of zoology at Oxford University, admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is more than all 30 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Darwinists have a difficult task. They have to say life came spontaneously from nonliving chemicals without intelligent intervention. The trouble is, all experiments designed to spontaneously generate life have failed. Another difficulty they have, besides the complexity of DNA, is the origin of DNA. It relies on proteins for its production, but proteins rely on DNA for their production. So which came first, proteins or DNA? One has to be in existence for the other to be made.

So why are Darwinists so committed to their viewpoint? Because they have a philosophy which rules out intelligent causes before they even look at the evidence. Since they have ruled out any possibility of God because of their philosophical foundations, Darwinism has be true since it's the only God-free theory.

A couple of key quotations make this very clear. Phil Johnson, a Christian law professor, states, "Darwinism is based on an a priori [prior] commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence." Richard Lewontin, a Harvard University atheistic professor, says, "It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenonal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door." That's an amazing statement, considering he is saying Darwinists start with a philosophical position of atheism and build their science on that. So much for the neutrality of science.



But Darwinists say that they have billions of years to work with, so that may allow spontaneous generation of life to happen. The problem is that nature disorders; it doesn't organize things. Atheists and theists alike have calculated the probability that life could arise by chance from nonliving chemicals. The results are staggering. One biochemist said that the probability of getting one protein molecule by chance would be the same as a blindfolded man finding one marked grain of sand in the Sahara desert three times in a row. And one protein molecule is not even life. You need about 200 of these molecules to get life going.


This is fascinating material, but there is a lot of it. So I'll save some for the next blog.

A CLOUD covers global warming fanatics

If you've read any of my blogs in the past, you know I'm skeptical of global warming. I wanted to share a recent news item that adds to my skepticism.

It regards the latest revelations from CERN over its landmark CLOUD experiment, whose significance one journalist explains here:

"The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating. The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth."

First, a little background on where this article came from and the organization CERN. The research was published this week in the prestigious journal Nature, so this is not the result of some crackpot publication. And the research comes from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories. This is a hugely successful and respected organization. It was CERN that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere.

So what happened during the research? In this stainless steel chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds. If there are more clouds, the result will be a cooler Earth. Where do these cosmic rays come from? The sun. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

The idea that cosmic rays and the sun hold the key to the global warming debate was first proposed by two scientists from the Danish Space Research Institute, at a 1996 scientific conference in the U.K. Within one day, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bert Bolin, denounced the theory, saying, “I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible.” Note that it was the IPCC that played a role in later incorrect announcements on global warming. Al Gore and his fanatic followers made sure that anyone who disagreed about the politically correct theory of global warming being humanity's fault alone were vilified, marginalized and starved of funding, despite the fact that many of the skeptics had impeccable scientific credentials.

But Jasper Kirkby, a CERN scientist became disenchanted with the standard line of the global warming crowd. He convinced the CERN bureaucracy of the cosmic ray theory’s importance and developed a plan to create a cloud chamber — he called it CLOUD, for “Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets.” Needless to say, the global warming establishment sprang into action, pressured the Western governments that control CERN, and almost immediately succeeded in suspending CLOUD. It took Mr. Kirkby almost a decade of negotiation with his superiors, and who knows how many compromises and unspoken commitments, to convince the CERN bureaucracy to allow the project to proceed. And years more to create the cloud chamber and convincingly validate the Danes’ groundbreaking theory.

So, despite the fact that Al Gore implied that anyone who opposed his version of global warming was a racist, the verdict is still out. Again, I caution everyone to investigate and think this thing through before we ruin ourselves economically by following the harsh mandates the global warming crowd has set up for us.