All posts by Wintery Knight

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Commentary

Do you ever wish that your co-workers took your faith seriously?

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This is a problem that I used to have in the very beginning of my career, when I was still doing my undergraduate degree and working summer jobs and internships with software development companies. I was just in my early 20s, and was having to deal with being a Christian in the university and in the workplace. It’s very difficult to do it when you are young – everyone thinks that they know more than you do just because they are older – whether they have studied the issues or not. Not only that, but you have deal with the pre-conceptions that people have about Christianity from watching anti-Christian movies and televangelists, etc.

What a mess. So what is the way forward?

The way forward is for you to take Christianity OUT of the realm of private faith, Sunday singing, emotions and feelings, personal testimony, miraculous healings, apparations (if you’re Catholic), end times, Bible prophecies, and other stuff that scares non-Christians. And then you put Christianity INTO the realm of science, history, analytical philosophy, social science, economics, politics, law, and other public, testable, areas of knowledge.

After you’ve studied Chrsitianity and how it relates to public, testable areas of knowledge, it is easy to communicate your knowledge of things like the galactic habitability constraints, amino acid sequence specificity probabilities, minimal facts criteria for the historicity of the empty tomb, the grounding objection to middle knowledge, and the Laffer curve to other people. You are an expert at dumping the burden of proof on your opponent, every attempt by your opponent to make self-refuting statements is met with a whistle blow and a yellow card, and you wield Occam’s Razor like a samurai warrior.

Great! It all works great on people who will give you an hour at lunch to listen to your case. But what about the people who have heard through the grapevine that you are a Christian, identify you with Joel Osteen, and are snickering at you behind your back every time you walk by?

Decorating your cube at work

The solution is to decorate your cube at work.

Here is what you will need:

  1. a peer-reviewed paper on from a scientific journal (like this one, free version here)
  2. a peer-reviewed paper on from a social science journal (like this one)
  3. a news article on some foreign policy issue (like this one)
  4. a publication from a think tank on economic or social policy (like this one)
  5. a textbook on economics (like this one)
  6. a schedule of events from an apologetics event (like this one)
  7. a DVD of a William Lane Craig debate at a big university (like this one)
  8. a debate book from a big academic press (like this one)

Just print these out and read them, and then put them on your desk. That should get you some attention and end the snickering.

News

Why did the mainstream media ignore Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist obsession?

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First, a bit more about Loughner from the Arizona Republic. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

At the end of Loughner’s junior year, in May 2006, the school nurse had him taken to the emergency room. “Extremely intoxicated,” the sheriff’s report would later say. It was 9 in the morning.

Loughner told a deputy that he stole a bottle of vodka from his parents because his father had yelled at him.

Loughner was changing. Drugs and alcohol blurred some days, but what friends remember most are the things he thought. Theories, ideas, strange questions.

In Loughner’s latter two years of high school, friend George Osler saw him drinking and smoking marijuana more and more.

He would go off on these tangents and then he would stop talking altogether,” Osler said. “He struck me as odd. It was an uncomfortable feeling.”

Loughner began fixating on a documentary: “Zeitgeist: The Movie.”

The movie is a bramble of conspiracy theories involving Sept. 11, the international monetary system, and Christianity.

“There are people guiding your life and you don’t even know it,” the trailer for the movie intones.

“He wanted to watch it all the time,” Osler said. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”

Loughner developed a seeming obsession with currency, grammar and literacy rates. They were becoming the objects of his rants and screeds. Those around him didn’t understand.

By the way, Mary wanted me to mention this refutation of Zeitgeist by New Zealand philosopher Glenn Peoples.

Robert McCain is happy about this new mainstream media coverage of the story he broke, but not happy with the rest of the mainstream media that is still silent.

He writes:

As of noon Sunday, there were 39 search results on Google News for “Loughner+Zeitgeist.” Most of those were passing mentions. Meanwhile, a Google News search for “Loughner+Palin” returned 10,395 results. There were 595 results for “Loughner+Limbaugh.”

By comparison, so far as I have been able to determine, by Sunday noon there had been exactly five substantial articles devoted specifically to the Loughner-Zeitgeist connection:

Thursday, the Washington Post published a 2,700-word profile of Jared Lee Loughner, and today the New York Times published a 5,000-word profile of the Tucson killer.

Neither story so much as mentioned Zeigeist.

Can you count on the Washington Post and New York Times to tell you the truth about the world? Or rather, will they tell you what they want you to think about the world so that you will vote “the right way” – for left-wing politicians?

Certainly there could be that element of wanting to make people vote for Democrats and wanting to demonize Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. But I think another reason why they didn’t report on it is because they don’t disagree with the ideas presented in the movie. They may be sympathetic that Christianity is a myth, that 9/11 is some sort of conspiracy to make poor, innocent Islamic theocrats look bad, and that global communism really would be much better than free market capitalism. Jared’s beliefs are the mainstream media’s beliefs. So why would they associate murder with their own beliefs?

And moreover, the mainstream media doesn’t DO detailed historical investigations of Christianity, so they would be more likely to fall for “Christianity is a myth” viewpoints. Even on the right-wing, you have ignorant journalists reducing Christianity to faith, who have never heard of William Lane Craig, the kalam argument, the fine-tuning argument, or specified complexity. All of these complicated arguments for theism are just beyond them – they only want to believe things that will make the right kinds of people like them, and provide them with maximum autonomy in their own lives. Their support for things like abortion and same-sex marriage isn’t something that they have carefully weighed by listening to academic debates… they take their position because they want to behave selfishly and do not want to be told about boundaries or consequences. And they embrace left-wing economic policies because it gives them the feeling of being enlightened, compassionate and generous… with other people’s money. They love the idea that people can act selfishly and stupidly and yet be rescued with someone else’s money.

So don’t expect the mainstream media to tell the truth about stories like this. They are Democrats, and they will never undermine the central pillars of the Democrat party, which are largely in agreement with the Zeitgeist movie. Those pillars are, of course, that Christianity is a myth, that Christian positions on social issues are therefore false, that American military action is necessarily imperialistic and evil, and that socialism would be much better at creating prosperity for the masses than free market capitalism. Most event reporting is going to be massaged so that it fits that narrative, to some degree or other. Not sports stories, but certainly sensational stories like this one.

Is the media biased to the left?

Here’s a UCLA study on media bias.

Excerpt:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

[…]The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

From the Washington Examiner.

Excerpt:

Senior executives, on-air personalities, producers, reporters, editors, writers and other self-identifying employees of ABC, CBS and NBC contributed more than $1 million to Democratic candidates and campaign committees in 2008, according to an analysis by The Examiner of data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The Democratic total of $1,020,816 was given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks, with an average contribution of $880.

By contrast, only 193 of the employees contributed to Republican candidates and campaign committees, for a total of $142,863. The average Republican contribution was $744.

Don’t count on them to tell you the truth… that’s not their job.

Related posts

News

New peer-reviewed article argues for irreducible complexity in birds

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From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

In a peer-reviewed paper titled “Evidence of Design in Bird Feathers and Avian Respiration,” in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Leeds University professor Andy McIntosh argues that two systems vital to bird flight–feathers and the avian respiratory system–exhibit “irreducible complexity.” The paper describes these systems using the exact sort of definitions that Michael Behe uses to describe irreducible complexity:

[F]unctional systems, in order to operate as working machines, must have all the required parts in place in order to be effective. If one part is missing, then the whole system is useless. The inference of design is the most natural step when presented with evidence such as in this paper, that is evidence concerning avian feathers and respiration.

He further notes that many evolutionary authors “look for evidence that true feathers developed first in small non-flying dinosaurs before the advent of flight, possibly as a means of increasing insulation for the warm-blooded species that were emerging.” However, he finds that when it comes to fossil evidence for the evolution of feathers, “[n]one of the fossil evidence shows any evidence of such transitions.”

Regarding the avian respiratory system, McIntosh contends that a functional transition from a purported reptilian respiratory system to the avian design would lead to non-functional intermediate stages. He quotes John Ruben stating, “The earliest stages in the derivation of the avian abdominal air sac system from a diaphragm-ventilating ancestor would have necessitated selection for a diaphragmatic hernia in taxa transitional between theropods and birds. Such a debilitating condition would have immedi¬ately compromised the entire pulmonary ventilatory apparatus and seems unlikely to have been of any selective advantage.” With such unique constraints in mind, McIntosh argues that the “even if one does take the fossil evidence as the record of development, the evidence is in fact much more consistent with an ab initio design position – that the breathing mechanism of birds is in fact the product of intelligent design.”

Let’s take a step back and ask what counts as evidence for (macro) evolution for people who actually care about evidence.

Here’s what counts as evidence:

  1. A smooth sequence of fossils showing the gradual emergence of different body body features across a wide spectrum of body plans. Not just horses and whales, not just micro-evolution. Major changes in body structure, which properly dated fossils, from a wide range of body plans.
  2. A lab experiment that derives a new organ type or body plan from an unmodified organism, like the Lenski experiments tried to do on a smaller scale.
  3. A computer simulation that shows a string of mutations that occur on one organism that would give it a new feature or organ within a reasonable amount of time (less than 4 billion years). The mutations must be probable, and the organism must have improved functionality at each stage of its development. And a calculation would have to be done to show that each beneficial mutation would spread to the rest of the population and survive in the next generation, which is a separate question.

Do we have that evidence in the case of bird evolution (feathers and lungs)? Of course not.

Do we have that evidence in the case of evolution as a whole? Of course not.

People who embrace evolution embrace it on the basis of non-rational, non-evidential factors.