Using exclusive surveillance footage obtained from MGM Resorts, we pieced together the last days of Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas gunman. He plays video poker, laughs with hotel staff and hauls bag after bag of weapons into his suite.
(ABC) Over a number of days after he checks into the hotel, he can also be seen coming and going at the hotel, bringing in luggage and bags.
(NYT) Over and over in the clips, Mr. Paddock is seen leaving the Mandalay Bay for his home in Mesquite, returning with a dark minivan loaded with suitcases. Over and over, valets take his keys; over and over, bellhops stack his luggage on gold carts, helping him transport at least 21 bags over the course of seven days. As they take the service elevator upstairs, Mr. Paddock chats with them. He cracks a joke. He tips.
The field of work is changing. Programmers, engineers, maintenance… that one job done by a human has turned into many jobs. Just gotta change your degrees from 18th century lesbian feminist writers to something more “techy.” A degree in literature is out — if you want to pay the bills some other way than waitressing, change your major.
“Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reasoning are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England 20 years before the American Revolution,” no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning past fear.” …. “Facts no longer matter. We simply decide how we want to see the world and then go out and find experts and evidence to back our beliefs.” (WUWT)
The above cartoon notes this recent story (h/t to Climate Depot) from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where Democrat Senator (RI) Sheldon Whitehouse asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch if there “are there other circumstances in which a civil matter under the authority of the Department of Justice has been referred to the FBI?”To which the AG responded,
This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” Lynch answered. “I’m not aware of a civil referral at this time.
In a poll of 1,000 likely voters, Rasmussen Reports asked if the “government [should] investigate and prosecute scientists and others including major corporations who question global warming?” A full 27% of Democrats replied in the affirmative, as did 12% of Republicans. (Breitbart)
This is an update to my very frightening post about where Democrats are headed in this country. And that is, where every other leftist government has ventured into… fascism. Except this time, it is “eco-fascism.”
More in this UPDATE from IBD (hat-tip to GAYPATRIOT):
Conform or else. That’s the message of the global warming alarmists. Those who don’t buy into the man-made climate change narrative should be prosecuted as criminals.
“Put officials who reject science in jail,” someone named Brad Johnson who says he’s executive director of something called Climate Hawks Vote tweeted last month.
At roughly the same time, Mark Hertsgaard typed a screed in The Nation which ran under the headline:
“Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us: The victims of Hurricane Harvey have a murderer — and it’s not the storm.”
“How long,” Hertsgaard asked, “before we hold the ultimate authors of such climate catastrophes accountable for the miseries they inflict?”
And then there’s Bill Nye, the Junk Science Guy, who hasn’t been able to cover up his apparent desire to see “criminal investigations” against those ignoring his truth. It’s not hard to see through him, though. He dissembles like a politician but his appetite is clear.
The urge to prosecute and imprison those who don’t believe as they have been commanded to is not a new wrinkle among the alarmist tribe. Three years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sounding like, well, a Kennedy, said the Koch brothers “should be in jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals.”
“Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offence and they ought to be serving time for it.”
The Kochs’ crime? Selling energy resources to willing buyers and funding organizations that have reservations about the climate change story we’re constantly being told……..
AL GORE
…For the third time in the last few years, Al Gore, founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project, spoke at the festival on Friday. Naturally, his interactive discussion focused on addressing the climate crisis. The former vice president focused on the need to “punish climate-change deniers, saying politicians should pay a price for rejecting ‘accepted science,’” said the Chicago Tribune.
Gore said forward-thinking investors are moving away from companies that invest in fossil fuels and towards companies investing in renewable energy. “We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends,” Gore told the Chicago Tribune, referring to a proposed federal cap-and-trade system that would penalize companies that exceeded their carbon-emission limits. “And in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics.”…
Climate commie Bill Nye the Pseudo-Science Guy has joined the ranks of totalitarians who want skeptics of the floundering global warming hoax imprisoned…
[….]
Science? This isn’t about science. Global warming, climate change, climate chaos, or whatever they call the hoax next week is about hard left authoritarian politics. The Bill Nye–level pseudo-science is strictly window dressing.
Meanwhile, there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 23 years despite rising levels of beneficial CO2, shedding light on why warmists have been resorting to coercion to prop up their hoax.
Various Democrats
Also note that Democrats are actively investigations into people who counter the anthropogenic global warming narrative:
Dem Congressman “sent requests to seven universities asking for detailed records on the funding sources for affiliated researchers who have opposed the scientific consensus on man-made global warming.”
Harassment prompts scientist to stop his research debunking extreme weather claims – CU Climate Expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: I am Under ‘Investigation’ – Accuses Dems of ‘a politically-motivated ‘witch hunt’ designed to intimidate me (and others) and to smear my name”
As The Post’s Joby Warrick reported earlier this week, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D- Ariz.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, asked seven universities for detailed records on the funding sources for seven scientists, many of whom are unconvinced that humans are the driving force behind recent climate change.
In a letter to Grijalva released this afternoon, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) — a scientific and professional society representing atmospheric and oceanic scientists — expressed strong opposition to the inquiry.
“Publicly singling out specific researchers based on perspectives they have expressed and implying a failure to appropriately disclose funding sources — and thereby questioning their scientific integrity — sends a chilling message to all academic researchers,” the AMS wrote.
The AMS joins a cast of individual scientists who have spoken out against the inquiry…
Democrats may be flustered after a week of being accused of engineering an anti-science “witch hunt,” but they aren’t backing down from their investigations into the financial backing of climate change researchers who challenge the movement’s doomsday scenarios.
Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, told National Journal this week that he may have been guilty of overreach even as he defended his probe into the funding sources of seven professors, now known as the “Grijalva Seven.”
Three Senate Democrats — Barbara Boxer of California, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island — are conducting their own probe of 100 fossil fuel companies and trade associations funding climate research….
Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI): ‘In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise…The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking.”
….That’s right — a sitting U.S. Senator is suggesting using RICO laws should be applied to global warming skeptics. Courts have been defining RICO down for some time and in ways that aren’t particularly helpful. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled RICO statutes could be applied to pro-life activists on the grounds that interstate commerce can be affected even when the organization being targeted doesn’t have economic motives.
Obviously, there’s a lot of money hanging in the balance with regard to energy policy. But when does coordinating “a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts” go from basic First Amendment expression to racketeering? The tobacco analogy is inappropriate in regards to how direct the link between smoking and cancer is. Even among those who do agree that global warming is a problem, there’s a tremendously wide variety of opinions about the practical effects. Who gets to decide whether someone is “downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change” relative to the consensus? If message coordination and lobbying on controversial scientific and political issues can be declared racketeering because the people funding such efforts have a financial interest in a predetermined outcome, we’re just going to have to outlaw everything that goes on in Washington, D.C.
…it’s the global warming scientists who are the ones fulfilling a narrative. I mean we have Michael Oppenheimer, one of the lead U.N. scientists, took an endowment from Barbra Streisand. Hollywood – he’s the climatologists to the stars. It’s so insulting to imply that somehow skeptical scientists are on the pay like tobacco companies. It’s the height of arrogance when you look at the actual data, the global warming scientists, through government grants, foundations, through media empowerment, have the full advantages of government money, foundation money, university money. There’s not even any comparison.’
Green News also notes proposed “jailing” of “deniers:
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has a new plan to combat climate change: sue fossil fuel companies for fraud. In a May 29 op-ed in The Washington Post , Whitehouse argued that the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to discredit climate science and attack environmentalists may constitute deliberate deception of the kind the tobacco industry perpetrated in previous decades. In 2006, a federal judge found the tobacco industry guilty of fraud in a civil lawsuit brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Cigarette companies’ efforts to hide the health effects of tobacco consumption included lying about the findings of…
A not so surprising thing happened as they do at all large Democratic gatherings, a whole bunch of trash was left behind. Continuing with Breitbart:
This week in New York City somewhere around 400,000 litterbugs descended on the Big Apple, and not to celebrate the wonderful news that the planet hasn’t warmed in 18 years. Instead they gathered to do, uhm, whatever this is , and to pretend Global Warming is real and dire, so that those pushing this phony crisis can tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives. (Breitbart)
John Kerry is blaming future calamities on those of us who deny the Left’s main contention that man-made CO2 is the main driver behind our planet’s weather system. Here is the WaPo article via Climate Depot:
…Kerry noted that he was speaking in Hampton Roads, where the land the city is built on is sinking as sea levels are rising twice as fast as the world’s average. He said political opponents who doubt the science of climate change are posing a threat to everyone.
“The science tells us unequivocally, those who continue to make climate change a political fight put us all at risk,” he said. “And we cannot sit idly by and allow them to do that.”
Kerry called climate change more than a threat to the habitats of butterflies and polar bears. He said it has a direct impact on military readiness…
Various DEMOCRAT Leaning Person’s
….In 2009, New York Times Paul Krugman accused Congressmen who voted against climate cap-and-trade bill of ‘treason against the planet!’
‘Execute’ Skeptics! Krugman’s sentiment joined by fellow climate fear promoters
In June 2009, a public appeal was issued on an influential U.S. website asking: “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.” The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S.
After all the attention drawn to it by Climate Depot, the Talking Points Memo article was later pulled and the website published a retraction and apology, but the sentiment was stark and unequivocal and has significant company among climate fear promoters.
Romm, a former Clinton Administration official, pulled the comments after Climate Depot drew attention to them. “The original was clearly not a threat but a prediction — albeit one that I certainly do not agree with. Since some people misread it, I am editing it,” Romm wrote.
Small sampling of threats, intimidation and censorship:
November 12, 2007: UN official warns ignoring warming would be ‘criminally irresponsible’ Excerpt: The U.N.’s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be “criminally irresponsible.” Yvo de Boer’s comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating.
Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics (January 17, 2007) Excerpt: The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to “Holocaust Deniers” and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.
Professor Lawrence Torcello
This comes way of WUWT, and highlights the tendency of the Left towards totalitarian thinking in order to make their vision “work.
Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.
Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”. (H/T Bishop Hill)
What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.
What next, numbers tattooed on our arms because we hold an opinion different from Torcello?
DAVID SUZUKI
Here is David Suzuki calling for jail, and the PBS host more worried that there isn’t enough space [yet?] for us to be jailed:
David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.
At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month….
Suzuki: “I really believe that people like the former Prime Minister of Canada should be thrown in jail for willful blindness. If you’re the CEO of a company and you deliberately avoid or ignore information relevant to the functioning of that company, you can be thrown in jail… And to have a Prime Minister who for nine years wouldn’t even let the term ‘climate change’ pass his lips! If that isn’t willful blindness, then I don’t know what is.”
Reason.org ends with a great commentary on this freedom restricting idea of the above lunatic:
In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, “climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”…
…He ultimately allows that he wouldn’t actually criminalize poor scientific communication—just anybody who might support dissenting scientists, or receive such support.
If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism….
We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.
If you’re trying to figure out how that doesn’t threaten the free exercise of speech, Torcello assures us, “We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions.”
So…You can voice a dissenting opinion, so long as you don’t benefit from it or help dissenters benefit in any way?
By the way, according to RIT, Torcello researches “the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.” Presumably, his job is a paid one. But this is OK, because…the majority of scientists agree with his views on the issue?
Let’s allow that they do—and that a majority of scientists agree about man-made climate change and a host of other issues. Just when does the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition meet to decide what is still subject to debate, and what is now holy writ? And is an effort to “undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus” always criminally negligent?…
In a recent article, 20-leading scientists have come out to recommend legal action (jail) for those of us who use science to counter AGW types:
Twenty climate scientists called for RICO investigation in a letter to Obama and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The scientists argue that the systemic efforts to prevent the public from understanding climate change resembles the investigation undertaken against tobacco. They draw inspiration from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse who said on the Senate floor that there might be a similar conspiracy here, and a civil trial could provide the tools of discovery needed to find out.
[….]
[Note: This call for treating skeptics as racketeers comes the same week that the New York Times promoted equating climate skeptics to Hitler. See: The Next Genocide – NYT OpEd: Climate “deniers” present “intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s”….
One law professor is calling for the World Court to “rule on climate science to quash skeptics” ~ leading one writer to say:
If this thinks that the World Court or any other court is remotely qualified to “settle the scientific dispute,” he is a total fracking moron advocating a crime against humanity on a scale not seen since the trial of Galileo. (WUWT)
Mark Levin delves into the insane ideas from the Party I find the most in common with (the GOP) that somehow Congress can legislate or Mandate that Trump not fire Mueller. This is evidence that some well-known names in the Republican Party have no idea about our Founding document or passion to adhere to It’s clear enumerated guiding lines of separation of powers. Levin also delineates clear investigatory lines regarding Trey Gowdy’s assertion regarding Mueller’s mandate. Classic Levin!
Barack Obama says his administration didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed them. Funny … we seem to remember nothing BUT embarrassing scandals. Join Jon Miller on a stroll down memory lane to revisit some of the most grievous scandals that plagued the Obama administration.
I bet officers wish all arrests were this easy! (Via LIVELEAK)
...Eezy Peezy - 1,2,3
A Costco store called 911 to suspected shoplifters Wednesday, March 14 at 5:30 p.m. Loss prevention officers told police they recognized the suspects from a previous shoplifting incident. The suspects ran out the fire exit last time.
When officers arrived on scene, they noticed a black Toyota backed up to those same fire doors. An 18-year-old woman was at the wheel. They blocked the car from leaving. Police figured the shoplifters were repeating their previous theft, so they waited outside the emergency exit.
At 6:04 p.m., a 30-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman kicked the doors open. They exited the building with stolen property in their hands only to find police mere feet away.
Police booked the 18-year-old woman and the 21-year-old woman for investigation of theft. They booked the 30-year-old man for investigation of robbery. Officers found a 7-inch knife on the male suspect.
After further investigation, it was discovered that the suspects allegedly stole from another Costco earlier that same day. The stolen property is valued at $2,200.
As news and excited reactions pour down the collective American brainstem in a semi-rigorous attempt to make sense of Andrew McCabe‘s firing, one liberal legal expert and constitutional law professor is simply not there for partisan response efforts.
Instead, it appears McCabe’s ouster was in line with the law and he should probably be thankful he’s not facing criminal charges for the behavior that led to said ouster.
George Washington University School of Law Professor Jonathan Turley predicted McCabe’s firing some time ago. Turley discussed the firing today in an interview with CNN‘s Michael Smerconish.
First, Turley moved to dismiss widespread liberal accusations that McCabe’s firing was some sort of heavy-handed political payback by the Trump administration. Rather, Turley said, McCabe’s firing was a suggestion originally made by an Obama appointee–and therefore a suggestion Jeff Sessions simply could not ignore.
Turley noted:
[McCabe’s firing] was justified in the sense that these were career officials–at the Office of Professional Responsibility–that made this recommendation which is exceedingly rare. In fact, it’s unprecedented for someone in this position. These are not political appointees. The OPR, quite frankly, is not viewed as a particularly aggressive office. So, all of that makes this a relatively rare sanction coming from career officers. They clearly concluded that McCabe misled them–and that he misled them on one of the core issues they were investigating, not a collateral issue.
Smerconish then launched into an anecdote about his own past experience with the Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) and stressed that the OIG was not really the type of government agency likely to succumb to political pressure. Turley agreed.
He said, “Everyone that I know of speaks highly of [Inspector General and Obama appointee Michael] Horowitz–he’s viewed as completely highly apolitical. This office is, as you note, insulated like a Sherman tank from any outside forces. What’s fascinating about the way this has all unfolded is not its outcome. I first said when I heard of the report and its recommendation that I thought it was a given that he would be fired. It would be very surprising for Sessions to turn down this type of rare recommendation from the career staff. After all, he followed a recommendation from career staff to recuse himself–and I think rightfully so.”
Then Turley got to his broader point about criminality. He said:
What’s going to create an issue going forward is whether there will be a criminal referral. Michael Flynn was indicted for making a false statement to investigators. Now, it’s true that they were looking at him for other crimes as well. But there will be some that will argue, “Why would you indict Michael Flynn, but a deputy FBI director is just worried about his pension, not prison?”
As Turley pointed out, Flynn’s indictment was entirely the result of Flynn’s own super-poor decision to lie about his otherwise legal behavior. Flynn was allowed to meet with Russians. That’s not currently a crime. Back-channel communications happen all the time and are completely aboveboard. Flynn did it to himself by lying about his lawful behavior after the fact.
…A group of offended moonbats promptly got up and stormed out, one of them grousing in the lobby that “Even the women in there have been brainwashed.” Women who believe that men tend to be taller have been “brainwashed.” Only those who embrace liberal ideology in all of its absurdity think for themselves…. (MOONBATTERY)
Keep in mind that this movement won’t even allow atheistic, evolutionary biology to proceed on it’s own path.
At least eight people have been injured after a malfunctioning ski lift threw people from their seats at a ski resort in Georgia.
Skiers and snowboarders were forced to jump from the faulty chairlift on Friday as their seats hurtled backwards down the mountain, with some people falling from carriages at speed, in what one witness likened to “a scene from a Final Destination film”.
Videos of the accident at Gudauri resort in Georgia show a pile-up of broken and twisted chairs at the bottom of the lift as bystanders scream at people to jump.
Ryan Wilkinson, 24, from Kent, was queuing at the bottom of the lift with a group of friends when he saw the incident happen. He said the ski lift had been closed for repairs all week, but reopened on Friday morning.
“The lift stopped for a minute. There is a language barrier with the Georgians, so we didn’t know what was happening. Then it started reversing backwards slowly, then it got quicker. There was a guy in the office smashing on a machine and shouting who seemed powerless to stop it,” he said……
The question is — if given a chance to have some time with these kids — what would I do to try and counter these actions? They are based on cultural myths passed on by parents, uncles, and the like. In other words, how would you begin to counter these myths? FIRST the actions, then some thoughts.
Students at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, tore down the Stars and Stripes during a walkout over gun violence. CHANNEL 4 in Chicago has more on the violence.
Here are the Chicago students being allowed out of school for 17-minutes:
Here is expanded footage of the walkout protesters trashing the Chicago Walmart pic.twitter.com/lnVsp8h9sD
I would start a reading club and meet weekly to discuss the issues in the book we would be currently reading. My first book I would have us read is Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. At some point I would have the kids listen to the audio chapter from Thomas Sowell’s book regarding slavery. Of course during this time one would be befriending and involved in a loving support of positive outcomes based in truth. As Christians, we should gravitate towards truth in outcomes in all things. Another study and discussion of a topic is the broken home. Something Larry Elder confronts in his own discussion with his father: Dear Father, Dear Son: Two Lives… Eight Hours. There are many resources to counter bad thinking on my page regarding RACIAL MYTHS… but the problem in the inner cities will continue as long as the family is broken and the blame is laid at the feet of historical myths and lies.
In a lecture from Stephen Hawkings (who holds the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Einstein’s chair) at a lecture given to a university crowd in England entitled “Determinism – Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate.” He discussed whether we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free. In other words: do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms?
Stephen Hawking is quoted as saying the following:
Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing
However, what the people who support scientism do is often get categories mixed up. Something that needs explanation itself and exists in spatial time relation needs an explanation itself. For instance, Irtiqa comments after pointing out the above quote:
…he is already postulating the existence of gravity and the laws that will lead to the creation and evolution of the universe. Shouldn’t we ask about the origin of gravity and all features of the universe? Many of us scientists and thinkers doubt that full explanations of everything can be complete and self-contained, with no need for a metaphysical principle like God.
While I have not read the book, nor plan to, it seems that Dr. Hawking is defining gravity as something other than a function of the mechanics of the cosmos. Perhaps he’s placing gravity outside of the dimensions like theists place God outside the universe? IN which case it is atheism of the gaps theory. Not to mention that M-Theory itself, if true, doesn’t explain anything away, it just adds more parameters that need explanation. The Blaze has some good insight on this, one can be found by both an atheist and theist dealing with Hawking’s new book:
Another video follows, but, an ex-atheist deals a bit with what is being discussed herein. Here is Dr. Antony Flew’s conversion reasoning:
“My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.” After chewing on his scientific worldview for more than five decades, Flew concluded, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” Previously, in his central work, The Presumption of Atheism (1976), Flew argued that the “onus of proof [of God] must lie upon the theist.” However, at the age of 81, Flew shocked the world when he renounced his atheism because “the argument for Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.”
Okay, another video (you may need to avert your eyes from his “crazy” eyes):
Dr. Craig, given that, in the past, in its quest for simplicity physics has often discovered previously unsuspected connections between seemingly unrelated constants like electromagnetic constants and the speed of light and given that, in his 1997 lectures at Harvard University, physicist Ed Witten said that most of the recent string theories have no free parameters, that is, no variable constants in the model––all the constants just follow from the mathematical structure of the theory itself, O.K.?––given that, don’t you think it’s even probable that future discoveries in physics will reduce, or even completely eliminate, these seemingly strange improbable coincidences that you appeal to, to give evidence for God’s creation and tweaking of constants in the human universe?
Dr. Craig Responds:
No, I don’t see any reason to think that that’s probable at all, though I would like to hear more about Witten’s claim with respect to string theory. I’m not aware that that’s a feature of that model––that it eliminates all need for fine–tuning. I would very surprised to hear that were the case. I mean what you’re really talking about is a so–called “Theory of Everything.” But what that would ultimately show would be that the laws of physics are not really just physical laws at all but, somehow, they’re logically necessary, which, I think, strikes me as extremely counter–intuitive, that this is the only possible universe that could exist. So from what I’ve read, I think that the idea of ultimately finding some sort of a “Theory of Everything” is really a fantasy. I think we’re always going to be stuck with a certain amount of contingency that just is put in at the beginning.
Dr. Craig continues elsewhere to zero in on this “M-Theory” model (A thorough scouring of this can be found here where this was excerpted from, Beyond the Big Bang):
Ekpyrotic Models
We come finally to the extreme edge of cosmological speculation: string cosmology. These models are based on an alternative to the standard quark model of elementary particle physics. So-called string theory (or M-theory) conceives of the fundamental building blocks of matter to be, not particles like quarks, but tiny vibrating strings of energy. String theory is so complicated and embryonic in its development that all its equations have not yet even been stated, much less solved. But that has not deterred some cosmologists from trying to craft cosmological models based on concepts of string theory to try to avert the beginning predicted by standard Big Bang cosmology.
The most celebrated of these scenarios in the popular press has been the so-called ekpyrotic scenario championed by Paul Steinhardt.[xvi] In the most recent revision, the cyclic ekpyrotic model, we are asked to envision two three-dimensional membranes (or ‘branes’ for short) existing in a five-dimensional space-time (Fig. 9). One of these branes is our universe. These two branes are said to be in an eternal cycle in which they approach each other, collide, and retreat again from each other. It is the collision of the other brane with ours that causes the expansion of our universe. With each collision, the expansion is renewed. Thus, even though our three-dimensional universe is expanding, it never had a beginning.
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Now apart from its speculative nature the ekpyrotic scenario is plagued with problems.[xvii] For example, the Horava-Witten version of string theory on which the scenario is based requires that the brane on which we live have a positive tension. But in the ekpyrotic scenario it has a negative tension in contradiction to the theory. Attempts to rectify this have been unsuccessful. Second, the model requires an extraordinary amount of ad hoc fine turning. For example, the two branes have to be so perfectly aligned that even at a distance of 1030 greater than the space between them, they cannot deviate from being parallel by more than 10-60. There is no explanation at all for this extraordinary setup. Third, the collapsing and retreating branes are the equivalent of a 4-D universe which goes through an eternal cycle of contractions and expansions. In this sense, the cyclic ekpyrotic model is just the old oscillating model writ large in five dimensions. As such, it faces exactly the same problem as the original: there is no way for the universe to pass through a singularity at the end of each cycle to begin a new cycle and no physics to cause a non-singular bounce. Finally, even if the branes could bounce back, there is no means of the physical information in one cycle being carried through to the next cycle, so that the ekpyrotic scenario has been unable to deliver on its promises to explain the large-scale structure of the observable universe. These are just some of the problems afflicting the model. It is no wonder that Andrei Linde has recently complained that while the cyclic ekpyrotic scenario is ‘very popular among journalists,’ it has remained ‘rather unpopular among scientists’ (Linde 2002: 8).
But let all that pass. Perhaps all these problems can be somehow solved. The more important point is that it turns out that, like the chaotic inflationary model, the cyclic ekpyrotic scenario cannot be eternal in the past. In September of 2001 Borde and Vilenkin, in cooperation with Alan Guth, were able to generalize their earlier results on inflationary models in such a way to extend their conclusion to other models. Specifically, they note, ‘Our argument can be straightforwardly extended to cosmology in higher dimensions,’ specifically brane-cosmology.[xviii] According to Vilenkin, ‘It follows from our theorem that the cyclic universe is past-incomplete’,[xix] that is to say, the need for an initial singularity has not been eliminated. Therefore, such a universe cannot be past-eternal.
Summary
With each successive failure of alternative cosmogonic theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated. This beginning of the universe, of space and time themselves, reveals the contingency of the universe. The universe is evidently not necessarily existent, as Hume suggested, since it is not eternal, and therefore its existence does cry out for explanation. It is no longer sufficient to dismiss this problem with a shrug and a slogan, ‘The universe is just there, and that’s all.’
Of course, in view of the metaphysical issues raised by the prospect of a beginning of the universe, we may be confident that the quest to avert such a beginning will continue unabated.[xx] Such efforts are to be encouraged, and we have no reason to think that such attempts at falsification will result in anything other than further corroboration of the prediction of a beginning. In the meantime, the beginning cannot be wished away. Given its origin ex nihilo, the demand why the universe exists rather than nothing presses insistently upon us.
Here is Dr. Craigs presentation (2hrs, 21 minutes long):
thinks that the World Court or any other court is remotely qualified to “settle the scientific dispute,” he is a total fracking moron advocating a crime against humanity on a scale not seen since the trial of Galileo. (
