Vox Popoli

I like Arizona and Indianapolis today. UPDATE – Lawyer Milloy is getting eaten alive by the Cardinal WRs.

Dominic Saltarelli raises an interesting question:

If we all agree that “faith” is trust in a source, this still begs the question of who to trust and why. I’ve always taken evidence to mean things that you can verify for yourself. If my own mother came up to me and told me something outrageous, like a block of cheese told her where her favorite shoes were, I’d be skeptical. Now, I trust my Mom more than anybody, but until I start conversing with dairy myself, I simply wouldn’t believe her story. I’d just think my Mom had gone nuts (and if she’s reading this, Hey Mom! Love you too!)

Similarly, if the Bible tells me that Jesus really did rise from the dead, why should I believe its account, but NOT believe Hercules killed a hydra, or Mohammed flew around on a winged horse?

This is a perfectly reasonable perspective, although it is a mistake to think that evidence is something verifiable, as it is merely anything that provides grounds for belief. A man will believe his mother loved him because she told him so when he was a child, while a scientist will believe what he reads in an old scientific journal because he has confidence in the scholarly reputations of the editors. In both cases, the belief has reasonable evidential grounds even if it is not verifiable by the believer; the mother may be dead and the scientist may lack the expertise or the resources required to imitate the experiment reported. And yet, the evidence remains, even if it is only the memory of words spoken long ago.

Unsurprisingly, Dominic’s perspective betrays an unconscious bias towards “scientific evidence” which is, ironically enough, a bit of a misnomer. Consider the definition of evidence: “that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief“. Since scientists tell us repeatedly that science is not in the logical proof business but rather the pragmatic and effective model business, one could construct a perfectly rational case that there is no such thing as scientific evidence as the very concept borders on oxymoronic. But, as this would be taking pedantry to an inutile extreme in these circumstances, we shall forgo that line of thought for the present and focus on answering Dominic’s question.

I believe the issue of Hercules has already been dealt with to Dominic’s satisfaction, so let’s consider the comparative value of the sources for Jesus Christ’s resurrection and Mohammed’s flying horse. In the case of the latter, the oldest extant source is the one written down by Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari, who is reported to have collected over 300,000 hadith told to him and wrote down the 2,602 stories that he personally felt to be authentic. Al-Bukhari wrote down these tales in 846, 214 years after the death of Mohammed. Furthermore, one of the two major branches of Islam, the Shia, reject the Sahih Bukhari, going so far as to state that “There is NO requirement in Islam to believe in Sahih Bukhari….”

The story of Jesus Christ’s resurrection, on the other hand, is reportedly told by several of his personal companions, who claim to have encountered him subsequent to his very public death. The oldest manuscript to date is the Magdelen Papyrus, which contains Matthew 26 and has been dated as early as 66 AD, 33 years after the events it describes. The Lukan Papyrus is dated between 67 and 77 years after Christ’s reported death, and there are another 230 extant manuscripts compiled within 500 years of the event.

Contrast with this the earliest copies of the works of historians such as Thucydides, Herodotus, Aristotle, Caesar, and Tacitus. There are no more than 20 copies of any of these manuscripts and the earliest extant copy was made more than 1,000 years after the original. If it were not for the seemingly absurd claims about a man doing miracles and rising from the dead, no one would even think to question the historical veracity of the Bible. And there’s simply no comparison between the veracity of an account to which every Christian today subscribes and the Islamic hadith, in which many Muslims place no credence.

Now, it would be one thing if the event described in Gospels was claimed to be a quotidian reality that, nevertheless, no one has witnessed since. But that is not the case, as the accounts are very clear about the astonishing, even singular, nature of the event. Common sense dictates that one ask oneself the question: if the resurrection of God’s Son was a one-time historical event as it purports to be, how else could eyewitness reports possibly have been recorded given the technology of the time, and what alternative explanation beyond the convincing nature of the reports will suffice to explain the enormous number of ancient manuscripts that were produced and circulated long before the Edict of Milan ended the Imperial persecution of Christianity and the Church achieved its position of intellectual domination that allowed it to put thousands of monks to work making manuscripts.

The truth is that modern doubts about the Gospel accounts have a basis that is no more objectively legitimate than that upon which al-Buhkari’s rejection of the vast majority of hadiths he was told rests. They’re subjective, and they’re based on nothing more than personal feelings and the obvious difficulty in testing a historical event. If the ancients are trusted to have reliably passed on the accounts of the Peloponnesian war for 1300 years, then they were quite obviously just as capable of faithfully passing on the eyewitness accounts of a strange event that took place in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago for a few decades. Based on the available evidence, logic dictates that one either tentatively accept the essential reliability of the record testifying to Jesus Christ’s resurrection or reject the greater part of Mankind’s recorded history.

This may explain in part the peculiar nature of the New Atheism, given the obvious deficiencies of the New Atheists with regards to both logic and history. Now, does this prove beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ rose from the dead? No, it does not. But it should be more than enough to prove why that account is far more credible than the tale of a flying horse.

Note – any discussion of evolution or Creationism is off-topic and will be promptly deleted.

Last week was a surprisingly strong showing by the Voxiversians, as more than 100 people took the test despite the distraction of the holidays. This is more than double the number of individuals who survived to the same point in the Thucydides study, so well done, everyone. There’s only three chapters to go, but by this point I expect the broader message of the study has penetrated through even the thickest skulls, to wit: the discomforting panoply of similarities between the reaction of the fiscal and monetary authorities to the 1930s crisis and their reaction to the present one.

For next week, Chapter 10: 1931 – “The Tragic Year”.

The Sports Guy sums it up nicely:

VIKINGS (+3) over Eagles
The scariest game on the board and, quite possibly, in the history of mankind. Remember when I picked Philly over Dallas last week because “I hated this pick both ways, changed it 35 times and settled on being more frightened having the Cowboys than the Eagles”? This is that game, squared. The Vikings violate four of my signature rules for a decent playoff team: They’re poorly coached, they have abominable special teams, their QB could self-destruct at any time, and their fans are so racked with doubt about this particular team that you can hear their sphincters collectively tightening during games.

I have zero faith in this Vikings team. Childress is the most frighteningly incompetent game coach since, well, Andy Reid, now that Art Shell is no longer coaching. It’s like a Jedi showdown, only the exact opposite. The Tarvaris Jackson Experiment is proceeding and at times appears to have succeeded in developing into a robotic emulation of real NFL quarterback that goes haywire when the defensive pressure heats up. The Wall of Williams is damaged, the receivers are mediocre, the special teams are reliably horrible and our one superweapon, Adrian Peterson, is having more problems hanging on than a high school senior whose longtime girlfriend just moved to California to star in a major motion picture.

Fortunately, Vikings fans have no need of faith. We have no expectations, we have no heart, we simply watch in numbed catalepsy and hope for the best. An NFC North championship and a 10-6 record is more than we’d dreamed possible this year. Sure, there are those poor souls who shriek “Super Bowl” every time we win two games in a row, but that’s just the Post-Traumatic Staubach Disorder talking. Or, in the case of younger fans, 38 Wide Syndrome. Just nod, speak softly to them, and leave them to their haunted dreams of victories that never were.

Can we beat the Eagles? Absolutely. Can we lose to them? Definitely. Either way, we porphyrogeniti will watch, all purple-clad, and hope Sons of Bud Grant will give us cause to sound the horn and wave the sword.

The Gayfather enters the Faith Wars. I’ve exchanged email with Dr. Kameny several times in the past, and his response here nicely underlines how difficult it is for even intelligent, well-educated atheists to construct a coherent and logically consistent argument on these matters:

The alleged — or actual and proven — consequences of a theory are not relevant to an assessment of the validity of that theory. That Gravity has caused countless injuries and deaths and other catastrophies through falls and other incidents resulting from the action of Gravity tells us nothing about the validity of the Theory of Gravity and the physical constants associated with it.

This is true. I wrote as much in TIA.

And the evils visited upon us by various historical figures allegedly atheists are utterly irrelevant to an assessment of atheism itself, just as the claims of the evils which some allege to arise from organized religion tell us nothing whatever about the validity or invalidity of the supernatural upon belief in which those religions are based.

Now this, on the other hand, is not quite true and dances perilously close to a No True Atheist fallacy. If Christianity can be criticized for the failure of Christians to not wage the occasional war over the last 1,000 years, then surely atheism can be assessed and even criticized for the failure of open and avowed atheists – there’s no “allegedly” with regards to any of the individuals involved – to not slaughter tens of millions of defenseless people during the last century. However, it is true that the question of the existence of the supernatural does not enter into the equation.

I write as one who has termed himself a “good pious atheist” for some 68 years. I write as a scientist by training and background, with a BS in Physics; and an MA and Ph.D in Astronomy from Harvard University. The fact is that there is not a shred — not the tiniest shred — of valid, credible, persuasive evidence — actual EVIDENCE — for the existence of anything supernatural. There is just no actual evidence for the existence of any kind of supernatural beings: Gods, devils, angels, demons; nor of supernatural events: miracles, resurrections, and the like; or of supernatural places such as heaven and hell. And there is certainly no evidence for an afterlife: When you die you”re dead; it’s pemanently over for you. All the claims in support of the supernatural boil down to what I term “philosophical dithering”. They do not even begin to rise to the level of actual evidence and certainly not of proof.

Oh dear. All those years, that expensive Harvard education, and yet apparently no one ever taught him to open a dictionary. And perhaps if he’d attended Harvard Law instead of wasting his time on star-gazing, he might even grasp the law’s definition of evidence. Since Dr. Kameny is not a complete idiot, I shall charitably presume he is referring to a lack of SCIENTIFIC evidence and content myself with pointing out that scientific evidence is not only not the only form of evidence, it is not even considered the most credible form of evidence. For all that scientists sometimes whine about this, it is actually all to the good considering the fact that science is an inherently dynamic process and therefore a very poor foundation for what must be a generally static principle. Dr. Kameny should be downright embarrassed to make this argument, as even Richard Dawkins has tacitly conceded the point. To blithely label documentary and eyewitness evidence nothing more than “philosophical dithering” and so disprove the existence of everyone from Julius Caesar to George Washington is to do nothing more than demonstrate one’s philosophical incompetence.

One wonders, naturally, upon what scientific basis does Kameny assure us that once you’re dead, it’s over for you?

These whole complex structures of supernaturalism, whether the truly bizarre Christian one, or those equally weird ones postulated by other religions, are nothing more than imaginary fantasy-fiction and wishful thinking, utterly devoid of fact. The Bible ia nothing more than the attributed maunderings of a gaggle of intellectually-primitive, culture-bound near-barbarians who lived two to four millennia ago and have little of use, value or worth to offer to us today, structured around a flimsy, distorted skeleton of historical events of no relevance to anyone nowadays aside from scholars and historians of that era.

It’s more than a little ironic that Dr. Kameny should declare that the Bible is of no relevance to anyone nowadays. After all, the Bible states that homosexuality is abomination and the wages of sin are death. Dr. Kameny, on the other hand, was integral to convincing the American Psychiatric Association that homosexuality is normal. On the basis of his experience and his scientific training, he has also declared that it is objectively healthy and good. Of course based on the statistics, one has no choice but to score it Attributed Maunderings 1, Dr. Kameny and Science 0.

I allow no one to do my thinking for me on any subject including morality. I am no more going to allow my thinking to be done for me by those ancient primitive, barbaric biblical figures than I am going to allow my thinking to be done for me by Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Aesop’s Fables.

This sounds very intellectually brave, but it’s actually one of the most common atheist fables, because the reality is that he hasn’t reasoned his way to what passes for his morality. Instead, he has done what all other moral parasites do in accepting the traditional moral system and subtracting the few bits and pieces he doesn’t like. As for disregarding Grimm’s, well, if he’s foolish enough to enter a gingerbread house and partake of a feast there, he can’t say he wasn’t warned.

In those of your articles which I have seen (granted, I have not read your book) I have seen nothing which even begins to make a case for the existence of anything supernatural or to rebut a firm atheism. There is just no supernatural. There is just no god. There is just no afterlife. There is just nothing other than the natural and the material. It’s just not there. While I might easily have missed some of your writings, I have seen nothing by you which shows otherwise.

This keen observation is most likely due to the fact that I have never even begun to make any such case in my articles or in any of my books. Nor, given the near-complete inability of so many atheists to comprehend well-documented critiques of their flawed champions, do I see any reason to bother casting pearls of reason before intellectual swine. It seems to somehow escape the attention of many atheists that I am not an apologist or a theologian, I am simply a critic of the New Atheism and a chronicler of the many logical flaws of atheism. As for that brilliant summation, complete with an appeal to the powerful authority of Dr. Franklin E. Kameny his own gay self, I should say that only Richard Dawkins could possibly demonstrate a more overwhelmingly conclusive proof!

Ed Brayton is unable to follow a simple analogy regarding Richard Dawkins’s illogical defense of historical crimes committed by atheists:

That may be the single most idiotic analogy I’ve ever seen…. And all while criticizing the claim that religion can lead to similar massacres.

Brayton is a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why he’s not only historically ignorant and phillosophically incompetent, but can’t even read properly. Like most journalists, he’s simply constructing a narrative, the observable facts be damned. And the fact that he can’t comprehend the analogy doesn’t make the analogy idiotic, it simply demonstrates Ed Brayton’s obvious intellectual inadequacies. The claim of Richard Dawkins that was being addressed in the column to which Brayton refers is this statement from p. 273 of The God Delusion:

“What matters is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things.

As I pointed out in The Irrational Atheist, Dawkins is incorrect because determining who was or was not an atheist matters tremendously in figuring out whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things or not. (I should note that Hitler was not an atheist nor was he a Christian either.) For how can one possibly figure out whether atheism is systematically influencing people or not if one doesn’t first take the trouble to determine precisely which people it has influenced? On p. 238 of TIA, I wrote:

Dawkins, like Harris, focuses on the wrong question. Like medieval philosophers they focus on the explanatory logic of the perceived problem, and they do so ineptly, instead of examining the matter in a scientific manner by observing the relevant evidence.

Brayton is taking very much the same approach, which is why he can’t understand the analogy. Let me spell out both illogical processes inherent in the analogy nice and slowly so that the dim-witted “brights” can follow it. This is what passes for Dawkins’s logic; Sam Harris, on the other hand, tends to prefer the No True Atheist argument.

1. People were slaughtered.
2. Those people were ruled by atheists.
3. But those people were not slaughtered in the explicit name of atheism.
4. Therefore, atheism does not cause slaughter.

And now for the Marlboro analogy utilizing the same Dawkinsian logic:

1. People died of cancer.
2. Those people smoked Marlboros.
3. But those people did not smoke cigarettes in the explicit name of Marlboro.
4. Therefore, Marlboros do not cause cancer.

Dawkins is trying to argue that because he cannot figure out HOW atheism causes atheists to kill large quantities of people, it does not systematically influence them to do so. This is not only illogical, it is fundamentally unscientific. No one really cares why atheists kill innocent people en masse, they are primarily concerned with the undeniable problem that atheists do it with such an astonishing degree of regularity on the occasions they find themselves in a position to do so. In fact, the statistical analysis will show that the 58 percent chance an atheist leader will order the deaths of more than 20,000 people is much greater than the 16 percent probability that a lifetime habit of smoking cigarettes will cause lung cancer. Correlation is not causation, but such a strong degree of correlation is, at the very least, evidence of a systematic influence that Dawkins claimed to be unable to find.

Brayton has obviously not read TIA, or he would understand that there is a perfectly rational explanation for how it is not atheism alone, but rather the lethal combination of atheism with an ambitious vision of secular progress that has such a high probability of leading to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber.

As for his assertion that I criticize the idea that religion can lead to similar massacres, he’s merely demonstrating his ignorance. I specifically cited 123 wars caused by religion in TIA and covered all of the usual subjects, from the Crusades to the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in more detail than any of the New Atheists; the relevant points are that the very worst crime commited by any of Christendom’s many medieval monarchs killed less than half as many people as the 50 most bloody-handed atheist leaders, and that while 58 percent of historical atheist rulers have committed mass slaughter, less than one percent of historical Christian rulers have done so. I have never argued that religious massacres don’t take place, I have only pointed out that they take place much less frequently and are orders of magnitude smaller than non-religious massacres. And the liquidation of the Midianites cited by Brayton is rather different than the example of the Vendée massacres because the Old Testament example describes a bloody intertribal war, whereas the destruction of the Vendée was the massacre of a people by their own rulers.

Now, it is true, as one commenter noted, that none of this can prove that God does or does not exist. What it does call into question, however, is the common atheist assumption that a godless society is likely to be an improvement of any kind, let alone the shiny, sexy, secular paradise that Hitchens and others have faith that it will be.

Spacebunny doesn’t play a lot of games, but when she does find a game she likes, she plays hard. She’s currently the Queen of the Wii, having been the first to unlock her own Mii. As a game designer, it’s been fascinating to see how she has enjoyed various Nintendo games over the years, but has never had any interest in anything on the XBox 360 or Playstations.

On a related note, if you have a Nintendo Wii, you may wish to be apprised of a sporadic known problem with the machines not booting or not turning off. If the red light doesn’t appear and you’re unable to turn the machine on or even get it to respond, don’t panic. Unplug the machine from the power adapter and also unplug the adapter from the outlet. Wait an hour, then plug everything in again. This should reset whatever is preventing the Wii from turning off or turning on.

This is a complete list of all of the readings and related quizzes for the study of Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression.

Section 1: The Introductions – TEXT

Section 2: The Positive Theory of the Cycle – TEXT

Section 3: Keynesian Criticisms of the Theory – TEXT

Section 4: Some Alternative Explanations of Depression: A Critique – TEXT

Section 5: The Inflationary Factors – TEXT

Section 6: The Development of the Inflation – TEXT

Section 7: Theory and Inflation: Economists and the Lure of a Stable Price Level and Prelude to Depression: Mr. Hoover and Laissez Faire – TEXT

Section 8: The Depression Begins: President Hoover Takes Command – TEXT

Section 9: 1930 – TEXT

Section 10: 1931 – ‘The Tragic Year’ – TEXT

Section 11: The Hoover New Deal of 1932 – TEXT

Section 12: The Close of the Hoover Term – TEXT

America’s Great Depression: 25-question Final Exam

While 2008 was pretty rough on a lot of people and appears to have laid the foundation for even worse years to come, it turned out to be a surprisingly good year from my perspective. Business was only okay, but it wasn’t bad and the building blocks were put in place to deliver a much better year in 2009. After a lengthy dry spell, I published two books that were reasonably well-received, and made significant progress towards completing a new technology project that will be announced this spring. And some reasonable headway was even made towards getting my two pet game projects moving along the development curve.

In 2008, this blog grew 30 percent in terms of monthly visitors and 92 percent in monthly page views, to 130k and 240k, respectively. However, I have the sense that the quality of both the posts and comments have declined somewhat of late. I take full responsibility for the former and hope to write at least one longer, more insightful post per week in the coming year, but there’s not much I can do about the latter since it’s the inevitable result of increasing traffic lowering the common denominator. On the other hand, the Voxiversity experiment was successful and I think we are in the process of creating something that may become quite useful to a number of people over time.

Sadly, 2008 saw the loss of the inimitable Bane, and also saw a legendary Marine, General Victor Krulak, exit the stage. If have any interest in military matters but haven’t read First to Fight, you really owe it to yourself to do so. May God welcome both warriors to Him with open arms.

All in all, it was a pretty good year. But, even so, here’s to a better 2009. Happy New Year, everyone.