Whats Okay with Big Gov and Not Okay With It (Nanny State Comparisons)

Libertarian Republican notes the latest nanny state move by the banning of cartoon characters for sugary cereals.

The Federal Government, pushed along by liberal pressure groups, is taking the first steps towards banning the sale of sugary cereals and salt-abundant foods to kids.

CBS News reports: “GOP decries “nanny state” push on junk food ads”:

To critics, it’s the latest example of “nanny state” overreach by the federal government that could cost money and jobs.

The issue? A proposed set of voluntary guidelines backed by the Obama administration designed to limit the marketing of junk food to children through mascots like “Tony the Tiger,” the smiling animated figure used for decades to sell Kellogg’s “Frosted Flakes” breakfast cereal. Under the guidelines, companies would only be able to advertize and promote healthy foods low in fat, sugar…

…(read more)…

Professor Walter Williams described these “Do Gooders” as lifestyle Nazis. CS Lewis aptly talked about his fear of such people:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 292.

The government will demand the following to be placed on cigarette packs (forcing private business to place gruesome photos on their product:

That, however, is not my main focus. What I do wish to zero in on is what causes the secular left does go to the mat/floor for. That is, the above at the Federal level is kosher… the below at the local level is not! That is, to ban simple labels inserted into biology textbooks simply warning the school children about the monolithic view taught in their science classes [in regards to origin science, not working science] in a small label inserted into their biology textbooks:

  1. This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered. (Selman v. Cobb County School District)
  2. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind. (Tammy Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District)

How is this argument misconstrued with straw-men and non-sequiturs? Here is a great example that comes from an evolutionary website, first the person posts this graphic equating ID to the following:

Did you notice the lumping in of Neo-Darwinian THEORY with laws of science and effects that are repeatable, observable? The author contunues down the non-sequitur road creating a straw-man and then defeating it, not the real argument:

How long does this fight need to go on? Do we need to teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of gravity? That’s right. That’s all it is. A theory. But I don’t see any creationists defiantly jumping off cliffs.

One commentator also hops in and says something that is truly amazing and shows you the depths of non-thinking in regards to this topic:

The world is flat, the moon landing was a hoax, global warming is not real, and intelligent design is true. Amazing what some people will resort to, just to avoid facing the truth and questioning their beliefs or their lifestyles.

All I have to say is “WOW!” Which brings me to the god centered vacuum that man tries to fill with himself. And this is the bottom line, do you want to give ultimate credence to The Designer, or the creature:

Romans 1:21-23 (ESV):

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

 I would hope, to rightly understand what Intelligent Design theorists ARE saying, one would take the time to read the small portion entitled “The Golden Arm,” posted after an atheists point about ID:

If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism – the philosophical position that restricts all explanations in science to naturalistic explanations – it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic. More and more evidence could come in suggesting that a supernatural being exists, but scientific theories wouldn’t be allowed to acknowledge that possibility.

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design ~ Apologetics315 h/t

Enjoy the following read, click to enlarge:

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Serious Saturday~Theistic Evidences by Dr. William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig gives one of his best presentations on evidences for theism. It is directly aimed at the heart of atheistic arguments and destroys many of the straw-men placed by said atheists.

There is a short follow up by atheist professor Daniel Dennett that lasts about 10-minutes or so. who has no defense of his atheism in light of what just happened. He basically mentions that his non-knowledge will some day be filled in (atheism-of-the-gaps). Professor McGrath (theist) finishes up with about a 5-minute outro.

Ethical Naturalism? (Defined by Apologetics315: Terminology Tuesday)

Apologetics315 (Terminological Tag):

Ethical Naturalism: is a reductionist view that holds that ethical terms (goodness, worth and right) can be defined by or reduced to natural, scientific properties that are biological, psychological, sociological or physical in nature. For example, according to ethical naturalism the term right in “X is right” means one of the following: “What is approved by most people”; “What most people desire”; “What is approved by an impartial, ideal observer”; “What maximizes desire or interest”; “What furthers human survival.” The important point here is that these moral terms and moral properties are not irreducibly moral in nature. Moral properties (e.g., worth, goodness or rightness) turn out to be properties that are biological or psychological.

Furthermore, according to ethical naturalism, these properties can be measured by science by giving them operational definitions. Consider an example. Suppose “X is right” means “X is what most people desire,” and one goes on to argue that the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain is what most people desire. A scientist could measure the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain by defining such a state in physiological terms — the presence of a certain heart rate, the absence of certain impulses in the nervous system, slight coloration of the skin. “Rightness” means what is desired by most people; what is desired by most people is the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain; and pleasure and pain can be defined by certain physical traits of the body. Thus the moral property of rightness has been reduced to a natural property that can be measured.

Two major objections can be raised against ethical naturalism both based on its moral reductionism. First, it confuses an is with an ought by reducing the latter to the former. Moral properties are normative properties. They carry with them a moral “ought.” If some act has the property of rightness, then one ought to do that act. But natural properties like the ones listed do not carry normativeness. They just are. Second, every attempted reduction of a moral property to a natural one has failed because there are cases where an act is right even if it does not have the natural property, and an act can have the natural property and not be right. For example, suppose one reduces the moral property of rightness in “X is right” to “X is what is approved by most people.” This reduction is inadequate. For one thing, the majority can be wrong. What most people approve of can be morally wrong. If most people approved of torturing babies, then according to this version of ethical naturalism, this act would be right. But even though it was approved by most people, it would still be wrong. On the other hand, some acts can be right even if they are not approved of (or even thought of, for that matter) by most people.[1]

[1] William Lane Craig & J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 401.

Reducing Crime To Genes

Determinism has reemerged heavily in evolutionary psychology. It is nothing new, but it seems to be the “go to” theory as of late. Bio-Edge has this interesting story o recent story in regards to this:

Can an imaginary gene keep you behind bars?

Nearly every day, it seems, you read about the discovery of a gene for genius, for obesity, for voting conservative, for cancer, for chocaholism, for alcoholism, whatever. Scientists’ bombastic press releases are taken reasonably seriously by glossy women’s magazines and hucksters selling genetic testing kits, if not by their colleagues.

But has it ever happened that an undiscovered gene is taken seriously? This would turn genetics into a quasi-religious faith based on nothing more serious than the glossy women’s magazines. But it did happen and it nearly meant a longer jail sentence for a man convicted of possessing child pornography.

The New York Times reports that a Federal District Court judge in Albany, NY, spurned reports that a man was “at a low to moderate risk to reoffend” because, in his opinion, he had a yet-undiscovered child-porn-viewing gene. He handed down a severe 6 and a half year sentence plus a life term of supervision thereafter. The expected sentence was about 5 years.

The judge, Gary L. Sharpe told the defendant, “It is a gene you were born with. And it’s not a gene you can get rid of”. Nor did Judge Sharpe need evidence for his genetic theory — because he was sure that it would be discovered within 50 years. The “opinions of the psychologists and the psychiatrists as to what harm you may pose to those children in the future is virtually worthless here”.

“You are what you’re born with. And that’s the only explanation for what I see here,” the judge said.

However, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has quashed the sentence. “It would be impermissible for the court to base its decision of recidivism on its unsupported theory of genetics.” They declared that a sentence relying on findings not supported in the record “seriously affects the fairness, integrity and public reputation of judicial proceedings.”

If a Federal Court judge believes so strongly in the power of imaginary genes that he is willing to throw people in the slammer, what about the man in the street? It looks as though genetic determinism has a bright future. ~ Biopolitical Times, Feb 2; New York Times, Jan 28

I wrapped up one paper with this point on determinism:

The point is that our actions, thoughts, decisions and the like, cannot be reduced to just chemical reactions in our brain. Some headline examples:

“Infidelity – It May Be In Our Genes”;

“20th Century Blues” –  Stress, anxiety, depression: the new science of evolutionary psychology finds the roots of modern maladies in our genes;

“Born Happy (Or Not)” – Happiness is more than just a state of mind… It is in the genes too;

“Born To Be Gay?”;

“What Makes Them Do It?” – People who crave thrills, new evidence indicates, may be prompted at least partly by their genes;

“Your Genes May Be Forcing You To Eat Too Much”.

And as I have already shown with the examples I made to you last post, this “determining” factor undermines all rational thought and expression, and thus, morals.

Mikey Refutes determinism (wind noise accepted only because she does a decent job in answering the main issues at hand):

Jim Manzi dealt with this growing problem a bit in his article, “Escaping the Tyranny of Genes: The Fallacy of genetic Determinism,” from the June 2nd (2008) National Review:

OLD THOUGHTS, NEW ERRORS

Now, the idea that the vast majority of people share a set of stable, inherent characteristics—that is, the idea that there is such a thing as human nature—is not new. Nor are the subsidiary ideas that individuals have somewhat varying inborn natures; that this variation is partially heritable; and that individuals who share a lineage will demonstrate common traits and tendencies. All of these beliefs are at least several thousand years old, and probably predate written records.

What’s new is that—because we believe that we have uncovered at least a component of the physical manifestation of human nature, in the form of the genome—many now believe that we can operationalize these old ideas: that we can explain the causes of the behaviors of individuals and groups sufficiently to predict these behaviors scientifically. Those who believe this  believe that we can remove the mind-body problem from the  purview of philosophy by reducing the mind to a scientifically explained physical phenomenon. When pushed, such theorists will generally admit that we cannot yet do much of this, but will then state confidently that we “are starting to understand” or “are on the verge of explaining” various human behaviors.

Media outlets will often speak loosely of things such as a “happiness gene,” a “gay gene,” or a “smart gene.”

[….]

SOUND THE WARNING

The fallacy of what might be called “geneticism” is particularly tempting to conservatives, because it appears to provide scientific support for the idea of an innate human nature—an idea that has long been assaulted from the left. But this temptation should be resisted. If the pretense to scientific knowledge is always dangerous, it is doubly so when wedded to state power, because it leads to pseudo-rational interventions that unduly extend authority and restrict freedom. That the linkage of race and IQ is provocative to contemporary audiences is not surprising: It is almost a direct restatement, in the language of genetics, of the key premise of Social Darwinism. That prior attempt to apply beliefs about human nature to public policy should be a cautionary tale for our era.

Just as Newtonian physics formed part of the backdrop for the thought of the Founders, Darwinian biology—from its beginnings, even before being synthesized with genetic theory—has found expression in both descriptions of physical evolution and conceptions of human society as similarly evolving. In the decades after the publication of On the Origin of Species, evolution became the dominant scientific metaphor for understanding human society. Woodrow Wilson was clear about this when he said in The New Freedom (1913):

Now, it came to me … that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory… Politics in [the Founders’] thought was a variety of mechanics.

The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.”

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. . . . There will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.

Many thinkers at that time believed that Darwinian evolution represented not just a metaphor, but a physical explanation of the material superiority of European civilization. The application of evolutionary ideas supported the eugenics movement in the U.S. and Europe, in which policymakers gave natural selection a helping hand by encouraging differential breeding rates for “fit” and “unfit” persons.

This idea was the basis of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s Supreme Court opinion upholding the right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize the feeble-minded, which ends with the immortal statement that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Let’s be clear about the results of this decision. A specific 18-year-old girl named Carrie Buck, who had been accused of no crime, was placed on a table, whereupon an agent of the state sliced open her abdomen and cut her Fallopian tubes against her will. She lived from that moment until her death with no chance of having children. All of this was done because Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was pretty sure that her children would not have been smart enough. The ironic denouement is that, just prior to this operation, Carrie Buck had actually had a daughter—whose subsequent performance in school was average at worst and often better.

This was not an aberrant case; over 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized in the 20th century. The Laughlin Model Law, which was the basis for most state statutes that regularized this practice, chillingly permitted the forcible sterilization of any “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring,” and provided tactical inspiration for relevant statutes in Nazi Germany.

It was, in fact, the conflagration of the Holocaust that made human eugenics a more or less forbidden research topic for decades. But this halt has proved temporary. As the Holocaust passes from living memory, and biology makes enormous advances, the human inclination to intellectual vanity is reasserting itself. This seems almost inevitable. The sense of seeing beneath the surface of things, provided by the greatest scientific insights, is intoxicating. Genetic maximalists are just a modern version of the Pythagorean cultists or the Newton-inspired Enlightenment philosopher.

Despite their confidence in predicting future discoveries, however, our ignorance about humanity runs deep, and the complexities of mind and society continue to escape reduction to scientific explanation. This ignorance is one of the most powerful arguments for free-market economics, subsidiarity, and many of the other elements of the conservative worldview. Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior comprehensively and reliably, so that we can live in Woodrow Wilson’s “perfected, coordinated beehive.” Until then, however, we need to keep stumbling forward in freedom as best we can. NR

Below is a paper that refutes the deterministic paradigm, see especially pp. 12-15:

Reduction’ism

A Panel Debate On Whether Or Not the Universe Has Purpose

Apologetics315 h/t (presentation begin around the 8:30 mark.) ~ English and Spanish throughout.

Matt Ridley, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkin
VS
Rabbi David Wolpe, William Lane Craig, Douglas Geivett

Divine Providence-Molinism,Calvinism,and libertarian free-will

William Lane Craig discusses the book “Four Views of Divine Providence,” to which he defends Molinism. I tend towards the ground between Calvinism and Molinism. Here are some great resources to start delineating where you stand:


 

A good response to deepen your understanding of this perplexing and fun theological issue is this by Gregory Koukl:

The Grand Design ~ Hawking on Gravity, Philosophy, and Creation

(A post of note is M-Theory – Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, “The Grand Design” – by True Free Thinker)

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. William Lane Craig touched on this “Theory of Everything” that Stephen Hawking has been wanting for quite some time. In a Q&A he responds after the initial question:

Question: 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.

[…no picture supplied in original post…]

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):

Beyond the Big Bang (Ekpyrotic Models Discussed) from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.