Sweet Jeezus!

There were plans to exhibit a chocolate Jesus in a New York art gallery until the Catholics complained. Funny thing, the group that did the effective whining calls itself the “Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.” Have they ever heard of that civil right called “freedom of speech”? Apparently not, or at least they don’t understand it, because they seem to think that it’s perfectly okay for them to get art exhibitions cancelled by complaining that they would be offensive and proposing a boycott. If you’re really interested in civil rights (our system of government doesn’t create any “religious rights” that are separate from our right to free exercise of religious belief), then you need to promote the rights of others, even if they are going to use those rights to offend you. Or be a hypocrite, I guess.

Really, is there anything less important than being “offended”? We’re living in a world where people strap bombs to themselves, go into public places, and detonate them. There is an international organization of people who would like nothing better than to destroy our civilization. But apparently the real danger for Catholics is that they might be offended by an art exhibition that they haven’t even seen yet.

Then they go and make the specious argument: “They would never dare do something similar with a chocolate statue of the Prophet Mohammed naked with his genitals exposed during Ramadan.” Which is not much different from kids on the playground complaining that somebody else is getting away without punishment or chastisement. Sorry, but the fact that people are not out there saying potentially offensive things about Islam in their art exhibitions does not mean no one should be allowed to treat Christianity that way.

Plus, there is the other issue, which I have pointed out before: there are Muslims who will kill you for offending them; Catholics are not out murdering their opponents. Maybe if Catholics posed more of a threat, they would be able to clamp down on dissent.

On the other hand, we should be doing things to offend Muslims. No one should be free from the existence of those who disagree. Failing to recognize that one’s views are not universally accepted breeds tolerance of others with different views. Trying to stamp out the opposition with boycotts and organizations constituted specifically for complaining about offensiveness just breeds intolerance. If you think art galleries are exhibiting offensive works, then why not use the vast resources of the Catholic church to start your own art galleries that say what you want to say? Take your instruments of intolerance and oppression elsewhere.

Two Faces of Two-Faced-ness

If nothing else, this is just interesting. The link takes you to the Snopes.com treatment of an email in circulation that compares the relative eco-virtues of Al Gore’s house and George W. Bush’s ranch house in Crawford, Texas. Turns out that Al Gore doesn’t practice what he preaches and George W. Bush doesn’t preach what he practices. Go figure.

So why not vote libertarian sometime? Those are the people who are so consistent in their refusal to succumb to propaganda that they can’t even manage to organize a coherent political party. Talk about practicing what you preach.

Stark Raving Godless

I only came across this excellent news today, but it’s been around for a while: Representative Pete Stark, a Democratic Congressman from California has “outed” himself as an atheist. He is “the highest-ranking elected official in the history of the U.S. to publicly acknowledge he does not believe in a supreme being.”

Then there are these people (the “Christian Seniors Association”), who are calling for “members of the Congress to speak of their belief in God on the floor of the House” in response to Stark’s admission.

Funny thing, there’s this bit in the Constitution, Article IV, section 3: “[N]o religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” That doesn’t mean members of Congress can’t “speak of their belief in God on the floor of the House,” but it’s clear what the Christian Seniors Association is looking for—they want to know who is “in” and who is “out” so they can be comfortable voting for someone who is satisfactorily Christian.

It is perfectly acceptable to use religion as one of the factors in deciding how you are going to vote, but demanding that politicians publicly identify their religious beliefs goes too far. The no religious test clause does not prohibit the consideration of religion by individual voters. Rather, it indicates the importance to our system of government that people serve in government office not because of what they do or do not believe about the supernatural. Our government officials, elected or appointed, are there to maintain our government, whose purpose is, quite simply, to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.” Our government was not established to “defend the faith” or “secure the Christian worldview,” but to perform those daily functions required to maintain a society in which people can live freely, even to the extent that they can practice whatever fool religion their parents foist upon them, or which they turn to in a time of need, or which they find most aesthetically appealing, or which salves their conscience.

Maintaining the separation between church and state is more difficult when everybody in charge of administering the state is also religious; an atheist representative is not going to entangle the two.

(Unless, of course, you are one of those misguided people who thinks that not believing in God or gods is a belief system, or that science is a religion, in which case you are playing a ridiculous definitional game that makes everything into religion and thereby makes the word meaningless.)

For me, the most interesting thing about this Pete Stark admission is that I support his decision to “out” himself, but his politics would still probably keep me from voting for him if I lived in his district. According to Ellen Goodman’s column:

Pete Stark denies that it takes courage to become the first admitted non-theist in the house. “What is courageous,” he adds, “is to stand up in Congress and say, ‘Let’s tax the rich and give money to poor kids.’”

Or not. Sorry, pal, that’s not “courage.” And giving money to poor kids is not what the government ought to be doing. If you want to spend money to promote the general welfare, then invest it in research and technology and whatever methods you can find that will benefit all of society; just giving money to poor people is not the solution. People like Pete Stark give the impression that atheists are all on the far left. Not true.

A Field Guide to Discerning Intelligence in the World

This semester, I have been in a class entitled “Jurisprudence,” whose course description read as follows:

This class introduces the student to fundamental concepts of natural law as reflected in the writings of ancient Greek, Roman, and Medieval thinkers. These concepts include justice, law, nature, order, duty, reason, and virtue.

However, during the most recent session, it became apparent that the real agenda was to foist upon us a belief in theism as either the basis for all law or the legitimizer of all just laws. This occured when we came upon a particular passage in Cicero, The Laws, Book II (translated by Niall Rudd):

What can be more certain than this, that no one should be so stupid and so arrogant as to believe that reason and intelligence are present in him but not in the heavens and the world? Or that those things which are barely understood by the highest intellectual reasoning are kept in motion without any intelligence at all? As for the person who is not impelled to give thanks for the procession of the stars, the alternation of day and night, the regular succession of the seasons, and the fruits which are produced for our enjoyment—how can such a person be counted as human at all? Since everything that possesses intelligence is superior to what lacks intelligence, and since it would be impious to claim that anything was superior to universal nature, it has to be admitted that universal nature possesses intelligence. Who would deny that these ideas were useful, bearing in mind how many contracts are strengthened by the swearing of oaths, how valuable religious scruples are for guaranteeing treaties, how many people are restrained from crime by the fear of divine retribution, and how sacred a thing a partnership of citizens is when the immortal gods are admitted to that company as judges or witnesses?

[Emphasis added.]

There was no way I was going to sit in class and let such drivel pass without comment. How, I asked, are we to recognize intelligence in the things of the world around us?

The professor then made a short and rather insulting speech about the universe being either ordered or chaotic, and can I not agree that the universe is ordered?

Of course I can agree that the universe is ordered, I said, but order and intelligence are two different things. You have not demonstrated how order is necessarily an indication of intelligence.

To which the professor, if he had any intellectual honesty at all, should have given an explanation. Instead, he asked me to give an “example” of order that does not demonstrate intelligence. At that point, another student chimed in to say, at nearly the same time as I, “Everything! Everything is order that does not necessarily indicate intelligence!” (More on that below.)

The professor, now frustrated and getting a little red in the face, objected that giving “everything” as an example was as good as giving “nothing.” Fair enough.

So I said that a tree is ordered, in that it is a series of predictable branching patterns radiating from a trunk, both into the sky via branches and into the ground via roots. I mentioned that clouds are ordered formations of water droplets in the sky. The other student pointed out that objects falling to the earth under the force of gravity are a demonstration of order. None of these things, we contested, demonstrate intelligence.

“I don’t know how you can say that,” said the professor.

(It was difficult not to get sarcastic.)

I said that in order to infer intelligence from something, you would need an analytical framework. For example, “These particular factors, present in a given phenomenon, are indicative of intelligence for these reasons. Etc. Those factors are present in this phenomenon, therefore we can conclude that this phenomenon is the result of intelligence.” It seems like a simple framework; no more than instructions on how to recognize something, a sort of “Field Guide to Discerning Intelligence in the World.”

Some people, whose intellectual honesty is as questionable as my professor’s, have actually tried to posit “particular factors” that should be indicative of intelligence. Popular methods include Michael Behe’s “irreducible complexity” and William Dembski’s “specified complexity.” Neither is satisfactory. Behe’s idea has been shown wrong by experiment and Dembski’s idea assumes that we can know the probability of the occurrence of any phenomena. (“Specified complexity” is supposed to be anything that is both highly complex and highly unlikely. Except how do you know if it is unlikely? What is the probability of trees? Impossible to say.)

Nobody has yet come up with a convincing “Field Guide to Discerning Intelligence in the World,” but that did not stop my professor from insisting that I have no basis for failing to see intelligence in “natural” phenomena. Apparently it did not occur to him that since he (via Cicero, or vice versa) was making the proposition that “Intelligence is evident in natural phenomena,” it was up to him to explain why exactly that proposition should be accepted, not up to me to demonstrate why it is incorrect.

As I pointed out in class, it seems to be essentially a matter of whether one is convinced by the statement and whether one is prone to perceive something called “intelligence” in “natural” phenomena. I am not convinced.

(By the way, I am putting “natural” in quotation marks because I do not believe there are such things as “unnatural” phenomena; to say that some things are “not natural” would be to say that they are caused by some unknown, unidentified force beyond what is “natural.” Many people would like to say that the body typing this post is “natural” but that the MacBook upon which this post is being typed is “not natural.” That is a false distinction, I think. The MacBook is simply part of the natural world as has been rearranged by members of the human species, just like a beaver dam or a wasp nest is a part of the natural world as has been rearranged by beavers or wasps, respectively. The MacBook is more complicated than a beaver dam, but the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. Unless you are William Dembski, in which case you will assert, with no basis whatsoever to do so, that the MacBook is less probable than a beaver dam, therefore clearly the result of intelligence. Or something to that effect.)

But wait, there’s more.

So there was my professor, inexplicably thinking that we could just traverse this passage of Cicero, assume that the universe evinces “intelligence,” and that such intelligence is the thing that makes the universe and all of our laws function. (Anyone who fails to see something so obvious is clearly not human, according to Cicero. Why shouldn’t I feel deeply insulted? I am even now, several days later and in a much cooler mood, fighting the urge to hurl personal attacks upon my professor, who appears to be one of those disgusting fools who thinks that belief in God is an absolute necessity for being a good person.)

And there I was, pointing out that I remained unconvinced. He referred me to Aristotle, whose works we have been reading as well as Cicero’s, and Aristotle’s concept of the end toward which all things move. Just think about that, he said. Like an arrogant bastard. (Oops. Slipped out.)

But that would require accepting Aristotle’s premise before accepting Cicero’s premise, I responded.

Yes, that’s true, he said, but it’s a premise that has been accepted for a long time, and Aristotle’s formulation of logic has been the foundation for Western philosophy.

Excuse me? Did I just hear a law professor argue two huge fallacies?

I said: “Just because you’re right about one thing doesn’t make you right about everything.”

And before I could continue by saying, “And long acceptance of an idea doesn’t make it true, either; people long accepted the idea that women were property before we finally gave that one up,” he said, “Well then I wish you luck in your life of skepticism.”

Thus ended the exchange and my esteem for the professor. He apparently does not possess a Field Guide for Discerning Intelligence in the World and I am simply supposed to look at everything and see “intelligence.”

Already you are thinking, if you are crafty, about the example I made, refusing to make a qualitative differentiation between my body and my MacBook. “Aha!” you are thinking. “But you know the MacBook is the result of intelligence and if you do not differentiate between the MacBook and your body as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ phenomena, how can you not infer that your body is also the result of intelligence?”

Easy.

You might notice that I never said the MacBook is the result of intelligence. I said it is the result of humans rearranging things from the world around them. Is that “intelligence”? Is a wasp nest the result of “intelligence”? A beaver dam? How about honeycomb? Those are all examples of things created by one phenomenon (a biological species) rearranging things from the world around it. Is that “intelligence”? Or is it just the processes by which the universe works?

And what is the universe doing, anyway? What is that end toward which all things go? Aristotle said it was eudaimonia, or happiness. Poor Aristotle, though, happened to live a little early in human history. Now we know that the thing toward which all things go is increased entropy and eventually the heat death of the universe. All of these processes around us, in us, and which comprise us—which are us—from the most basic movements of the constituent parts of matter and the simplest chemical reactions, are heading toward increased entropy. Those basic chemical reactions trigger more chemical reactions, which can lead eventually, over time, to the development of patterns of chemical reactions so huge and so complex that they begin to rearrange the things round them, perhaps even into MacBooks.

Is that “intelligence”? If by “intelligence” you mean that value-laden, metaphysical idea that there are some how these ideas that enter the universe from outside and manifest as thoughts or actions, then no, none of that is intelligence. But if by “intelligence” you mean “that quality of action in which we believe we are the recipients of some communication by another being such as ourselves,” then maybe it is. I should point out, however, that merely believing that we are the recipients of some communication by another being such as ourselves does not mean that we are recipients of such communication.

What of Cicero and his assertion that no one could possibly believe that “those things which are barely understood by the highest intellectual reasoning are kept in motion without any intelligence at all”? His argument in simpler terms, is something like, “Everything I can’t figure out must be the result of somebody smarter than me; since I can’t figure out how the world works, there must be somebody smarter than me who did it.” Phrased like that, it is (or should be) easy to see that there is a premise that must be accepted: that “everything I can’t figure out must be the result of somebody smarter than me,” or, in the words of Cicero, “no one should be so stupid and so arrogant as to believe that reason and intelligence are present in him but not in the heavens and the world.” The problem with that premise is that it is basically just an insult: “You wouldn’t be so arrogant as to think that there’s nothing more intelligent than you, would you?” Of course, you are supposed to respond with a sense of honor: No, I’m not that arrogant! I’m a nice person!

Neither Cicero nor my professor (nor anybody else, that I know of) bothers to explain why it should be so arrogant a thing to believe that human “intelligence” is unique. One ought to take a good dose of Stanislaw Lem at this point; I recommend His Master’s Voice, in which Lem demonstrates, through the device of a fictional story about a “signal” from space, the difficulty of recognizing an intelligible message in something completely alien. As I mentioned above, we perceive something called “intelligence” when we recognize, or think we recognize, communication from another entity similar to ourselves. But we are so good at recognizing patterns of “intelligence,” we often tend to see it where it is not. (The word you want to toss around is “anthropomorphism.”)

If my professor looks at a tree and believes that he is receiving some kind of communication from another entity like himself, then he is certainly entitled to believe that. However, he cannot prove that he is actually the recipient of communication from another entity like himself. He cannot prove, and neither can you or anyone else, that what he perceives in the orderliness of that tree is actually “intelligence.”

To come full circle, I thought I would also share a passage from the essay “Accept No Imitations: The Rivalry of Naturalism and Natural Law” by J. Budziszewski and appearing in the book Uncommon Dissent, edited by William Dembski. This passage is interesting because it is remarkable how closely it parallels the passage from Cicero above:

The naturalist cannot view nature as a design because in his view there isn’t anyone whose design it might be. What is, just is. If you accept the principle of sufficient reason, this is rather unsatisfactory, for no one seriously maintains that the universe had to be just the way it is. There might have been fewer stars, or more. There might have been creatures like us, or there might not. There might not have been a universe at all. Nature, then, is a contingent being, not a necessary being like God, and contingent beings need causes. The naturalist rejects this line of reasoning, or at least limits it. He might concede that each thing in nature needs a cause, but he denies that the entire ensemble of things needs a cause. This exception seems suspiciously arbitrary.

It’s dressed up as a cooler rationale, but it’s essentially the same thing as Cicero: “Nobody could be so arrogant as to believe that there is no God, right? You would have to be dishonest!” I am amused, though, at how simplistic is Budziszewski’s thinking that he conflates “cause” with “purpose,” and thereby imbues a causal universe with purpose and direction. They’re not the same thing. If I am holding a baseball bat and some other force comes along, catches me by surprise, and causes the bat, while still in my hand, to swing around and hit somebody in the face, there is causation, but no purpose. (And, as any law student can tell you, that is the difference between an intentional tort and a mere accident.)

At any rate, that is enough for now. Maybe some other time I will write about what all of this means for the idea of “natural law.”

Sometimes Even Jerks are Right

I’m with Mel on this one.

Apparently Mel Gibson was doing a little Q&A for some film students when a professor and her pal (“Professor and Pal”) showed up to complain. After Professor and Pal claimed that his movie Apocalypto is historically inaccurate and racist, they demanded an apology.

Mel said:

“I spent two years reading a f—ing (lot) of books” and “f— off, lady” and then “This is my movie. You make your own.”

The author of the article linked above calls this a “PR misstep.” Right.

First, when has there ever been a historical movie that some historian didn’t complain about for its inaccuracies?

Second, why should a movie be historically accurate?

Third, how exactly is it “racist” to portray people as warlike? (For those who like to pretend that I’m some kind of right-winger and get on my case because I don’t spout the left-approved doctrine at every turn, I’m not saying it’s not racist; I’m just saying that that assertion alone is wholly devoid of any kind of analytical content that could provide a supporting explanation. The term “racist” gets bandied these days like it’s some kind of magic “ooh-you’re-evil” incantation—call somebody “racist” and you’re automatically a good person, moral and upright, no doubt. But good luck finding people who are willing to go the distance and explain their use of the word. Here’s a pattern you might use: “Racism is defined and can be identified by elements X, Y, and Z. Here, elements X, Y, and Z are present, therefore we can conclude that this is racism.”)

Fourth, even if a movie is racist, why shouldn’t a private film director get to make it? Lots of movies are offensive to lots of different people, for lots of different reasons. Why should this particular one merit an apology from its maker?

Sixth, why shouldn’t a filmmaker be annoyed when people make presumptions about what he is or should be portraying in his film? Outside clear cases of defamation, why should a filmmaker ever have to apologize for his film?

Gibson may be anti-semitic (which, unfortunately, is another label now applied nearly indiscriminately, like “racism”), but that does not make everything he does automatically suspect. Being wrong about one thing does not make you wrong about everything else. Being wrong even about nine things does not make you automatically wrong about the tenth one. It is not fair or reasonable to compare this particular statement from Mel Gibson to his anti-semitic remarks, as those were delivered unprovoked and while intoxicated. The more recent comments appear to have been delivered while he was sober and after direct provocation on the issue from Professor and Pal.

And Another Thing

This evening at the annual Barrister’s Ball, which is where the scholarships are awarded, I received a $1000 scholarship, the qualifications of which are something like leadership, academic excellence, and financial need.

The outgoing law review editorial board also presented me with a framed certificate indicating my law review membership.

This post and the previous should cover me all the self-serving announcements for a while.

Just a Self-Serving Announcement

The other day I got a memo in my box at school indicating that I have won three more Witkin Awards. That makes a total of four so far in my law school career:

• Civil Procedure, Fall Semester
• Advanced Torts
• Tribal Sovereign Immunity
• Business Organizations, Fall Semester

More stuff to put on the ol’ résumè. Sweet.

Jury Duty Blogging

So you’re a blogger and you get a jury duty summons. What do you do?

Apparently one juror-blogger in New Hampshire, who was serving as foreman of a jury deciding a case involving five counts of sexual assault and one count of theft, decided to post on his blog that he was about to “listen to the local riff-raff try and convince me of their innocence.” When the defense attorney learned about the blog, he moved for a new trial on the grounds that the comment evidenced juror prejudice. Probably not a bad idea.

In my opinion, that particular blogger overstepped the boundary of propriety with his comment. Despite the ancient and well-known tradition in our legal system that criminal defendants are innocent until proven guilty, which means that the prosecutors have the burden of convincing jurors of the defendant’s guilt, there are probably a lot of jurors who sit for criminal trials and think, consciously or unconsciously, that defendants ought to “convince me of their innocence.” However, expressly articulating and publishing that sentiment after being seated as a juror is not a good idea.

Calling the defendant “riff-raff” is not so smart, either. I doubt that anyone really believes jurors are capable of being wholly impartial and without prejudice; we just look for people who are least partial and least prejudiced of those in the venire. On the other hand, once a juror openly refers to a criminal defendant as “riff-raff” right from the start, then there is evidence of specific prejudice, which the defendant can use to argue for a new trial (which will incur greater cost to the taxpayers by requiring the litigation to continue where otherwise it might not have).

The article linked above raises another interesting point:

[T]he juror isn’t supposed to discuss the case with anyone else, but are they discussing the case if they are posting information about it but not hearing anything back?” said Clay Conrad, a partner at Conrad, Marteeny & Looney in Houston who runs “Jury Geek,” a blog about juror issues.

In other words, is unilateral communication really “discussing” the case? Alter the facts a little. What if a juror keeps a private diary of his or her service and then posts the contents of that diary on a blog after the verdict? That probably wouldn’t solve the problem of providing evidence of prejudice if the juror makes potentially prejudicial remarks (like calling the defendant “riff-raff”), but it might more easily get past the issue of “discussing” the case while it is pending. But if the blogger accepts no comments, or does not read the comments, what is the difference?

At any rate, contemporaneous blogging about pending legal issues is probably not a good idea for anybody.

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Finally, some climate scientists who aren’t keen on the alarmism:

Professor Hardaker … believes that overblown statements play into the hands of those who say that scientists are wrong on climate change—that global warming is a myth.

“I think we do have to be careful as scientists not to overstate the case because it does damage the credibility of the many other things that we have greater certainty about,” he said.

“We have to stick to what the science is telling us; and I don’t think making that sound more sensational, or more sexy, because it gets us more newspaper columns, is the right thing for us to be doing.

“We have to let the science argument win out.”

No, god forbid we do that. Let’s just continue foisting injudiciously chosen and emotionally-charged language into the public discourse and hope that people are whipped up with enough fear that we don’t have to sit down and explain the whole thing to them in cool, reasonable, scientific terms.

Examples of injudiciously chosen, emotionally-charged, nonscientific journalism might be using words like “urgency,” “dire, or “war,” or perhaps stating the obvious in such a way as to make it seem out-of-the-ordinary. (The only way it could be “news” to say that climate change will affect evolution and that the human species will leave behind an evolutionary legacy is if you don’t understand that everything affects evolution and that every species leaves behind an “evolutionary legacy.” Here is a much better article on the same subject.)

And here is another interesting interview with a German climate scientist, who points out that the whole thing is real, but that all the chest-thumping and moralizing are not going to help:

Unfortunately many scientists see themselves too much as priests whose job it is to preach moralistic sermons to people. This is another legacy of the 1968 generation, which I happen to belong to myself. In fact, it would be better if we just presented the facts and scenarios dispassionately—and then society can decide for itself what it wants to do to influence climate change.

Good luck.

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?

There’s a great picture with this news article. Is Alberto Gonzales auditioning to be the next George W. Bush impersonator on Saturday Night Live? He’s got that weird smirk down pat. Maybe that’s what happens when you’ve been a “confidant and friend [to George W.] for more than a decade.”

But Gonzales is a nice guy, though, right? I mean, he apologized by conference call to the 93 U.S. attorneys remaining after eight of them were fired, apparently for political reasons. (One might think an apology to the fired ones—or maybe giving their jobs back—would be more appropriate, but the DOJ works in mysterious ways.)

See, George, this is what happens when you hire your “lawyer-pal” instead of “the best person for the job.”