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Right on the Left
To quote one of history’s most conflicted figures, let me be perfectly clear:
I am no fan of Bill Maher. And that is precisely the point.
No doubt he would deny it to the death, but the toxic talk show host has much in common with his own favorite target of righteous condemnation, Donald Trump.
Mr. Maher is arrogant, opinionated, abrasive, belittling, ill-informed about positions he opposes, and indifferent to nuance. He subscribes to a black-and-white worldview that disdains and denigrates anyone with whom he disagrees. For him, there are only two ways to look at the world: his way and the way of morons.
If the online quotes attributed to him are accurate, Bill Maher defines faith as the purposeful suspension of critical thinking – implying that there is no such thing as reasoned belief and that only the religious suffer from self-delusion.
He:
• Equates the 9/11 terrorists with churchgoers
• Calls religion a neurological disorder
• Fails to recognize that political dogma on both sides of the aisle can be as virulent as the most zealous religious dogma.
So what is my point? Simply this: however much I may despise the man and virtually everything he believes, it’s only fair to acknowledge when he’s right.
The Science of Fake News
Thousands gathered on the grounds of the Washington Monument this past Saturday for the “March on Science.” What were they advocating? Well, in a word… science.
What can we expect next? Doctors for Hospitals? Lawyers for Jurisprudence? Mammals for Oxygen?
To be fair, there is a real issue here. Namely, the exploitation of science for political advantage. In a perfect world, scientific data would be apolitical, serving as a nonpartisan lodestone for guiding public policy. Facts are facts, and the only debate should be about what they mean, not what they are.
But our world is far from perfect, and the problem is not that we don’t have faith in science. It’s that many have found good reason to lose faith in scientists.
Case in point. Last February, John Bates, formerly of the National Climatic Data Center, charged that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association had manipulated global warming data to advance a political agenda. So here’s the question: if climate change poses as grave a danger as scientists say it does, why do they have to fudge the data to prove it?
HOW TRUE ARE THE FACTS?
The arrogance of scientists is evident nowhere more than in their zealotry against religion. Every thinking person knows that the world came into existence through Big Bang and that life developed through evolution. Anyone who questions these axioms is living in a world of denial and delusion.
Right?
Not necessarily. More than a few members of the scientific community are uncomfortable with their colleagues’ blind worship before the altar of science.
If you ask a professor of physics what existed before the Big Bang, you’re likely to hear that Big Bang created time as well as space. Since there was no time before the Big Bang, the question is “scientifically irrelevant.”
Writes Bob Berman in Astronomy Magazine, the truth is that “nobody has the foggiest idea what happened the Tuesday before the Big Bang.” So why not simply say so?
Evolutionary theory – or, perhaps more accurately, evolutionary hypothesis – is riddled with unanswered questions. The first premise is spontaneous generation, the appearance of life where there was none. According to science, this is impossible.
So how did life begin? In 1954, Nobel Laureate George Wald of Harvard wrote in Scientific American: “One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are – as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.” Dr. Wald then went on to clarify his definition of “impossible.”
It gets worse. There’s the dearth of fossil evidence. Dr. Gerald Schroeder points out that wings, for example, appear fully formed in the fossil record. There should be countless examples of macroevolution – intermediate stages of change from one species to another. Evolutionists love pointing to apteryx, a prehistoric flightless bird with hairy feathers, as one such intermediary link. So here is one piece of evidence where they should have hundreds. Where are the rest?
Yet another problem is exemplified by bats, which have echolocation — they navigate by sound. To do that, observed the late Michael Crichton, they would have had to develop simultaneously specialized vocal apparatus to make sounds, specialized ears to hear echoes, specialized brains to interpret the sounds, and specialized bodies to dive and swoop to catch insects. Without any one of these, the other three are worthless. How did evolution “know” to bring about all four faculties at once?
Returning to the cosmos, we have to deal with the expansion of the universe – which is accelerating, in contradiction to the laws of physics. How does science explain that one? Again, Bob Berman provides the answer: “It’s not galaxy clusters that travel outward,” the professor will say pedantically, “but space itself that grows larger. The galaxies don’t actually move.” So here I am thinking, wait a minute. Are we at a Daffy Duck convention?
SO MANY QUESTIONS
Educated adherents of religion feel no need to reject evolution or Big Bang completely. But it’s difficult to take seriously scientists who demonstrate such utter certitude in the face of unrelenting mystery. Why aren’t there more scientists as honest as Harry Cliff? Unlike so many, the particle physicist with CERN is unafraid to observe that “maybe for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer, not because we don’t have the brains or technology, but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it.”
So when it comes to climate change and other matters that may affect the future of mankind, perhaps the scientific community should consider how much their own hubris has damaged their credibility before they blame the public for questioning their conclusions.
The Talmud teaches: One who speculates upon these four things – what is above, what is below, what is before, and what is after – would be better off never having been born.
This does not mean that we are forbidden to ponder the vastness of Creation and the mysteries of the universe. Rather, it cautions us that, as J.B.S. Haladane observed, the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
We would all do well to remember that there will always be more for us to know, that the truth may not be what we want it to be, and that humility is the first step toward wisdom.
The evil of economics
It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong.
There are few men bigger than Alan Greenspan. And there are few men who have gone wrong in such a big way.
Although he stands shy of six feet tall, the former Federal Reserve Chairman was the colossus of the business world as he oversaw the longest economic boom in American history. But when financial collapse swallowed up the bulls of Wall Street like the cows in Pharaoh’s dream, Mr. Greenspan’s reputation deflated along with the economy.
To his credit, the erstwhile guru humbled himself and confessed the error of his ways. In October, 2008, Mr. Greenspan gave testimony on Capitol Hill before the House Oversight Committee concerning the economic meltdown that ravaged the country. This was the takeaway:
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”
In other words, despite all logic to the contrary, people cannot be trusted to do what is in their own best interest.
The question is: why not?
St. Patrick’s Day — Searching for the way out of exile
Every year on St. Patrick’s Day I revisit these thoughts from 1999. Things have gotten better in Ireland, where both sides have finally recognized that peace requires sacrifice and compromise. Not much has improved in Israel, where leaders on one side continue to oppress their people, holding them hostage as political pawns so they can keep their own hold on power.
At first glance, the soggy, green downs of Ulster bear little resemblance to the parched and craggy hills of Israel. But a gentle tugging at the cultural fabric of either place unravels an unmistakable common thread: two peoples, impossibly close geographically, impossibly distant ideologically, with more than enough fuel for hatred between them to burn until the coming of the Messiah. Tromping over hills and through city streets, however, first in one place and then in the other, I discovered a more compelling similarity: the bitter struggle of humanity in exile.
“Which are the bad parts of town, the ones I should avoid?” I asked the owner of the bed-and-breakfast where I passed my first night in Belfast.
She dutifully pointed out the Shankhill neighborhood on my map, cautioning me to steer clear of it. I thanked her and, with sophomoric self-confidence, proceeded there directly.
It was the summer of 1984, in the midst of “the Troubles,” and central Belfast exuded all the charm of a city under martial law.
Incivility: the new gold standard
“Are you still beating your wife, Mr. Secretary?”
That was about the only question not leveled at White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer by the ill-mannered woman who accosted him in an Apple store over the weekend.
“I wanted to speak truth to power,” Mr. Spicer’s assailant explained, after her Periscope video went viral and made international headlines.
Indeed, here was a rare moment of opportunity, a chance to catch a high-ranking official in an unguarded moment and engage him free from the filters of the national press corps and the censors of the nightly news.
So how did our heroic citizen capitalize on her unexpected access to Mr. Trump’s confidant as she streamed it live from her cellphone? What were the penetrating questions she posed to solicit a candid discussion with a representative the president’s inner circle? Here they are:
Telling evil from evil
My home town of St. Louis made headlines across the country last week. Some of it was bad news; some of it was good news.
And some of it might have been fake news.
The bad news was the travesty of desecration: vandals toppled of 154 headstones in a Jewish cemetery during the night of 21 February. The Jewish community has far too much history of indignity and intimidation over decades and centuries to not react with horror, anger, and fear.
The good news was the community response. Citizens of St. Louis from across the religious and political divide came together in an inspiring show of support. Hundreds showed up last Wednesday to participate in a collective cleanup effort, including Missouri Governor Eric Greitens and Vice President Mike Pence. A crowd-funding campaign initiated by the Muslim community raised $75,000. People responded to a profane act of hate with solidarity, compassion, and brotherhood.
But what if they were missing the point?
Yonason Goldson 