Return to a Familiar Theme: The Natural Law

Friends, neighbors, TRC’ers, I have returned. Your faithful correspondent was back in Waco taking his doctoral preliminary exams.

I can report two things.

First, I have now equalled one Dick Cheney in terms of progress toward the Ph.D. He is ABD and so am I. (Cue the Bentsen-tribute where a ghostly voice reminds me that I’m no Dick Cheney.)

Second, the subject of the natural law came up in a talk with a friend. She is very passionate about the rights of illegal aliens, border issues, etc. I happened to know prior to the conversation that she considers herself a “nontheist.” If I understand correctly, the word nontheist is being used by some to get away from the highly negative associations attached to the word atheist.

Anyway, I listened to her talk about the rights of various people and finally had to ask: “Where do those rights come from?”

She thought about it and said, “I think I’d go with the Constitution on that.” (This would strike some as a bad response, but it isn’t so wrong. Just because one doesn’t have all the constitutional rights as with a youth, prisoner, or illegal alien, it doesn’t mean one has no constitutional rights.)

I replied, “Those are just words on a piece of paper. They could easily say something else.”

She then returned, “I can’t see the answer being natural law.”

Me: Why not? I have a friend from Nigeria and we agree on the essentials. Lying is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Murder is wrong. Unprovoked assault is wrong. Yet, we are on opposite sides of the globe. These notions seem to be built into the structure of reality.

She: But there have been people who sacrificed virgins!

Me: That doesn’t do anything to undercut natural law.

She: Huh?

Me: The people who have sacrificed virgins have offered justifications for doing so. In fact, they offer an ultimate justification — to satisfy a god. What would damage natural law thinking would be if they thought it wonderful to sacrifice virgins for no reason at all. They may be wrong about the justification, but they aren’t wrong that one must have a good one before murdering innocent people.

And at that, we had to switch the subject because she did not wish to be converted to natural law any more than to Christianity.

Rush Limbaugh and Our Alan Reynolds

Alan, were your ears burning a little after noon today? Rush Limbaugh spent, I kid you not, about 10-15 minutes discussing your column in which you referred to his immigration analysis as “patently absurd.”

Reform Clubbers can get the Alan Reynolds column here at Townhall.com. The gist of it is that Alan thinks Rush and other conservatives are pumping the numbers of future illegals way up with assumptions that mirror those of compound interest with money. Rush’s response is:

a. It’s realistic to think multiplication will occur as described.
b. If the numbers are too high, we are still talking about a ridiculously high number of illegal immigrants.

What interested me more than the debate itself was the amount of time Rush spent talking about Alan. Do you have any idea what an advertiser would have to pay for a quarter hour of Rush’s national audience’s undivided attention?!!! Alan, I have no idea what you get from Cato and Townhall.com, but influence-wise, you just became a millionaire.

There was also something provocative in Rush’s treatment of Alan. As he went into the break, Rush suggested Alan was probably asked by someone to write the column. Rush, are you accusing our Alan of a Bandow-esque lapse? More important, are you suggesting our man Alan is doing the administration a solid?

If the answer is yes, then I want to get to know Alan better, because he’s rubbing some premium elbows!

More seriously though, if Rush were to look a little deeper, he’d find Alan Reynolds has been writing about immigration for some time and that this latest column is a continuation of a pre-existing interest in the issue.

Response to Dick on Intelligent Design

National Review Associate Editor Anthony Dick has an article up today
praising a new documentary about Intelligent Design and Evolution. I got
hung up on the part where Dick starts talking about the concept of irreducible
complexity:

Olson’s exposition of this first point hinges on what has become the
biggest buzzword in the ID movement: “irreducible complexity.” This concept is
the golden calf of ID advocates, who argue that there are some biological
structures that are so complex that they could not possibly have evolved through
the Darwinian process of genetic mutation and natural selection. The proper
functioning of these structures, they claim, requires the simultaneous operation
of numerous different components. These components supposedly could not have
been of any use to an organism if they had evolved individually on a gradual
timescale, so it is not clear how they could have evolved together to form the
larger structures.

And so? Do IDers modestly conclude from this that they may have found
an interesting challenge that should be the topic of further discussion and
investigation?

Well, not exactly: They conclude that, because we can’t presently think
of a way that some complex biological structures evolved naturally, these
structures must have been fashioned by an intelligent designer. Here you will
want to fire up your camcorders: Rarely will you see a logical long-jump that
hurdles so many acres of careful reasoning with such soaring ease. If ever there
was a record-breaking flight of fallacy, surely this is it.

Olson correctly identifies this “irreducible complexity” canard as a
textbook example of “God of the gaps” reasoning, whereby one finds a gap in
human understanding of the world, and then immediately plugs this gap by
invoking divine intervention. It is by the same thought process that the ancient
Greeks deduced the existence of an angry Zeus hurling thunderbolts.

Mr. Dick appears to have done some easy leaping of his own. If it is the case that there are some biological structures that are simultaneously too complex and too irreducible in function to have had some predecessor (and we don’t mean the eye, but a flagellum), then the entire evolutionary theory is on the rocks waiting to be spelled out by a more capable theory. Such a finding would not be modest, but would be foundation shaking. Dick’s “god of the gaps” is Behe’s “find a new theory, don’t worry I’ll wait.”

Once again, as an observer of the debate rather than as a participant, I can’t help but feel that one team is desperate to knock the other one of out the arena by pure scorn rather than by engagement.

I’m particularly intrigued by the accusations about “god in the gaps.” It is quite true that one of the great achievements of science is to explain how certain things work, how they happened, or how they might have happened in such a way that we can go beyond, “God made it that way.” And we should all applaud. I can imagine some good Calvinists out there thinking that scientific exploration is exactly the sort of role God envisioned for man right from the beginning.

However, the joy of learning, explaining, and naming shouldn’t mean that we are incapable of admitting a need to go back to the drawing board or to make a major revision. I think that because the issue of evolution has been so charged with atheist and Christian fervor, there are many who believe evolutionary theory is a battlefield of honor on which science must prove itself to be the master narrative with the best chance of explaining “life, the universe, and everything.” And on the battlefield, you don’t admit weakness, even if it’s real.

When I watch the way this battle is conducted. I see weakness and its not with the IDers. It’s with the guys who conduct little inquisitions in colleges and universities when they find a colleague whose orthodoxy is suspect.

Is this How a Think Tank Works?

I’ve now read in several places that John Podesta’s (Bill Clinton’s former Chief of Staff) glitzy new think tank, the Center for American Progress, circulated press kits to members of the media informing them of Tony Snow’s negative appraisals of the Bush White House. The idea was apparently to embarrass Bush or Snow or both on the day of his hiring as White House spokesman.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) was conceived as a left-wing counter to outfits like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. It launched with a lot of fanfare and has surely offered its share of white papers, policy briefs, and expert testimonies. I sense that with the Tony Snow maneuver the CAP may have damaged its own credibility. We’re talking about petty electioneering type stuff and my experience is that think tanks don’t do that, not even the ones with a clear ideological bent.

S.T., Kathy, Ben, Alan, you have all done plenty of think tank time. Am I right? Is this a breach of etiquette?

Evolution and Abortion

Several posts down I included the words of Francis Canavan, who countered the usual baby’s rights versus mother’s rights talk by inserting the commonsensical notion that the child is in his mother’s womb, which is, in fact, the only natural place for him to be.

A debate commenced in which one group repeatedly invoked the notion of competition between mother and unborn child for scarce resources. There is an immediate problem with that metaphor if we consider that Americans are typically not starving and that food is not scarce, but let’s leave that aside.

The bigger problem is that this segment of the abortion debate could be dealt with via Darwin. In evolutionary terms, we all just want to reproduce and ensure the spread of our contribution to the gene pool. A pregnancy is, therefore, mission accomplished. In evolutionary terms, aborting a child is evidence of insanity. It is evidence that a person doesn’t wish to do the only thing they are really here to do.

I find this fascinating because I’ve finally found a confluence in traditional morality and Darwinism. Darwin says, have the baby. Christianity says, have the baby. The natural law says, have the baby. All three agree that infanticide is evidence of a mind not working correctly.

A Startling Thought on Abortion

“If we take the principles of liberal individualism as axiomatic, we find it possible to think of the fetus and the woman as the parties of the first and second part arguing over their respective rights. We are then able to blind ourselves to the natural fact that they are related as mother and child and that the child is in the only natural place for him to be, his mother’s womb.”

–Francis Canavan, The Pluralist Game

How are things in your town?

I took the wife and kids (both under 4) to Little Italy Pizzeria in downtown Athens last night. As we walked toward the restaurant from our parked car, I saw and heard a very large parade coming toward us on the sidewalk. I knew what it was right away. The American flags and the Spanish chanting gave it away. I maneuvered my way through the crowd into Little Italy with my one year old in my arms.

It was a peaceful demonstration, but it didn’t go down well with me. I kept thinking that this was something in the nature of a demonstration of power in numbers — a steel fist in a velvet glove, a loudly whispered “Don’t tread on us.”

My wife works in an indigent clinic in Athens and speaks Spanish. She basically provides free medical care to illegal immigrants for a living. She’s not very political and didn’t know the purpose of the rally. When she finally came in the restaurant she was smiling and said, “Those are my people!”

When I explained the point of the rally, she was a little less happy. It was her natural sense that there is something not quite right about illegal immigrants demanding that the host country do nothing to secure the borders or regulate the citizenship process, especially when they receive things like free medical care.

That natural sense is right. America should be generous, but not because she is intimidated.