timeimmortal

It’s perhaps pretty to think, for some, that we could just do away with Religion and order/govern society on the basis of strict reason. The problem with doing that, however, is that reason, so very often, can be — and is — tainted by that pesky human element:

Saying that correcting misinformation does little more than reinforce a false believe is a pretty controversial proposal, but the claim is based on a number of studies that examine the effect of political or ideological bias on fact correction….a pair of political scientists, Brendan Nyhan of Duke and Jason Reifler of Georgia State, have shown a similar effect, this time concerning misinformation surrounding the presence of WMDs in Iraq, tax cuts, or stem cell research. Participants were shown news reports that contained inaccuracies, followed by a correction. The news reports were not real, but were presented to the volunteers as coming from either the New York Times or Fox News. Again, the findings suggest that facts that contradicted political ideology were simply not taken in; if anything, challenging misbelief with fact checking has the counterintuitive effect of reinforcing that misbelief.

I always laugh when atheists attempt to suggest that their belief in God could be motivated with the presentation of proper evidence, when in truth the opposite would tend to happen: even good, solid evidence would be greeted by most of modern atheism with either ignorance or a collective “that’s it?”

Vox Day links to an article from the New York Times that discusses new policies being put in place by Italy’s recently-elected government.

Underscoring the new Italian government’s determination to crack down on illegal Immigration and what the government contends is associated crime, Italy’s police arrested hundreds of people this week in a sweep of migrant shantytowns in major urban areas across the country, the police announced Thursday.

Nearly 400 people were arrested, including more than 100 who were immediately expelled. The police said more than 100 of those arrested were suspected of violating immigration laws, 180 of theft or prostitution, and 92 of drug dealing. Those arrested included 50 Moroccans and 32 Romanians.

The widely publicized raids were a strong signal from Italy’s new right-wing government, which is led by Silvio Berlusconi and includes the anti-immigrant Northern League Party, that it will keep its promises to pursue tougher policies toward immigrants.

“The anti-immigrant sweep was a positive thing because that’s what people want,” said Umberto Bossi, the minister of institutional reforms and federalism. “People ask us for safety, and we must give it to them.”

Vox is predicting that Italy will, within a decade or so, withdraw from the EU (given that the Italians seem to dislike most of the rest of Europe, this is probably a good possibility). Whether or not that comes to pass, however, this crackdown is ultimately a bit of a sign of hope for the Italian nation.

Especially in Europe, but over here as well, multiculturalism has become something vastly different than what it began as. The “mosaic/patchwork quilt” I was told about in school was all well and good when it simply meant that people wore different (and often more colourful) styles of clothing on the streets and opened up all manner of tasty restaurants and novelty shops. Now that it means that all manner of frankly ugly ideologies — things like Sharia law — are making inroads into Western democracies, multiculturalism is revealed to be something much less beneficial to those nations which espouse it.

I seem to recall that it was Lenin who remarked that the capitalist West would sell Communism the rope from which the West itself would hang. Lenin, ultimately, turned out to be wrong, but I can’t help but wonder if the sentiment itself had a ring of truth to it. More and more, it seems like multiculturalism is the rope from which the West — or, at least, some Western nations — may end up being hung. And there’s really only one plausible response to that danger: jettison multiculturalism.

Something for my misguided atheistic readers to consider.

During the year just past, much attention was paid to a spate of atheist tracts, notably Sam Harris‘ Letter to a Christian Nation, Christopher Hitchens‘ God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion. Less attention was paid to a spate of books by scientists who happen also to be believers - biologist Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution and Christian Faith, astronomer Owen Gingerich’s , and geneticist Francis Collins‘ The Language of God.

Though the media buzz has tended to focus on the science-vs.-religion angle, it is worth noting that only four of the aforementioned books are by scientists and three of those argue against such a conflict. That said, it is also worth noting that none of the books is by a theologian, and Dawkins’ book suffers - as does Hitchens’ - not only from a relentlessly hectoring tone, but also from a tenuous understanding of both Philosophy and Theology. (In fairness, Dawkins seems to have read the Bible pretty thoroughly and is openly appreciative of the Authorized Version’s glorious language and literary significance.)

Christoph Schönborn’s Chance or Purpose offers a look from the theologian’s side. Schönborn, the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, studied theology under Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Together, they edited the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Schönborn’s new book may be said to have evolved out of an article of his that appeared in the New York Times in July 2005 headlined “Finding God in Nature,” in which the cardinal seemed to place Catholic doctrine uncomfortably in alignment with intelligent design theory.

In his book, however, he goes out of his way repeatedly to differentiate between evolution as the best scientific explanation we have of how species come about and evolution as an ideology maintaining that natural selection has rendered all religious faith untenable.

In doing so, he says a number of quite interesting things, among them this: “. . . nowadays, whenever people talk about ‘design’ and a ‘designer,’ they automatically think of a ‘divine engineer,’ a kind of omniscient technician. . . . Here, in my view, lies the most profound cause of many misunderstandings - even on the part of the ‘intelligent design’ school in the U.S.A. God is no clockmaker; he is not a constructor of machines, but a Creator of natures.”

Schönborn does not regard “the methodical exclusion of divine involvement” - sometimes called “methodological atheism” - as amounting necessarily to a denial of God’s existence. It is, rather, “a straightforward method of science [which] cannot assume the existence of a ‘clockmaker’ who intervenes. [It] is looking for mechanisms and sets of conditions that can explain the way things happen.”

What the theologian’s perspective contributes most to this debate is that the term God, as theologians understand it, simply cannot be an object of scientific inquiry: God “is not just one cause among others. . . . He does not shape something that already exists. . . . [His] act of creation is not in time. . . .”

I think a lot of atheists make the — pardon me — dumb-ass mistake of assuming that the Universe is, for lack of a better term, a superset, with all things — including any notion of God they are willing to acknowledge — being subsets thereof. Everything has to be either empirically quantifiable or, at least, logically falsifiable according to the normal rules of the Universe and the workings of the human brain for it to exist, or for any discussion of its existence to have “meaning”.

Such an argumentative and analytical framework is unable to contemplate that the Universe itself might not be the superset, so to speak, but rather a large subset of something even bigger. The notion of a God that is external to nature, above creation, is an alien one, and dismissed out of hand anyhow because in such a case one could not hope to demonstrate God empirically or demonstrate that the idea of God can be adequately falsified.

Of course, it is incorrect for them to think that way — one needs not even launch into a convoluted example to demonstrate that. It’s easy to see how if we dismiss from consideration everything that cannot be revealed directly through the natural environment, we would of course fail to notice things external to that, and in fact cannot comment at all on whether or not such things exist.

More importantly, though, whether or not one believes in God is immaterial to one’s ability to conduct good science, and to accept the validity of scientific theory. It’s entirely possible for me, as a Christian, to accept the theory of evolution and the various evidences presented in support of it (and, in fact, I do accept it). It’s entirely possible for me to likewise believe that God is the author of all Creation. Like an artist and his brush, the two beliefs are not incompatible, but are actually compatible and to be expected. God is the artist behind Creation; evolution is the brush with which He painted mankind into being.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Mark Shea)