Phony Federalists
original article (requires subscription) A phony theory of federalism may paralyze the Federal Communications Commission’s halting movement toward deregulating the telecom industry. The battle cry of the faux federalists is “states’ rights,” which is not the first abuse of that term, or of the federalist principle. Like similar abuses, this one deserves to fail. The flashpoint is whether the FCC Read More ›
‘Underutilized’ Rail Line Getting Closer Look: Corridor From Snohomish To Renton May Combine Transit, Trail In Years To Come
Original Article Several officials say they are united behind rescuing a 40-mile railroad corridor snaking from Renton’s Gene Coulon Beach Park through the heart of the Eastside to Snohomish. While the route does a pretty good job of hitting major job centers, state and local officials say the rail line misses the biggie: Downtown Bellevue. “As a high-capacity transit line, Read More ›
Blinded by Science
Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human, by Matt Ridley (HarperCollins, 336 pp., $25.95) This is a very strange book, and I am not quite sure what the author is attempting to achieve. At the very least it appears that he wants to shore up genetic determinism as the key factor in understanding human nature and individual Read More ›
True Enough:
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Ageby Bill McKibben Times, 255 pp.,$25 PEOPLE AREN’T SMART ENOUGH, strong enough, pretty enough, healthy enough, talented enough, or agile enough the way we are. Worse yet, our miserable lives are over far too soon. The human condition stinks, and then we die. That seems to be the vague despair that drives the partisans Read More ›
The Clone Hustlers
Human cloning: it’s the public policy issue with the greatest potential to define the morality of future generations. The science may be complicated, the very premise appear a futuristic fantasy, but the moral questions we now face with the emergence of this new technology are clear: Does human life have ultimate value precisely because it is human? Will society be Read More ›
PBS’s ‘Evolution’ series is propaganda, not science
“It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” Leading Darwinist Richard Dawkins The wicked and insane will presumably have to fend for themselves, but for the rest of us, PBS has undertaken a massive new Read More ›
Designed for Living
Does God exist? You can answer that question in at least two ways, including, notably, “yes.” But how do you argue for that particular answer?
A new cottage industry among the religiously minded is the re-articulation of the so-called “cosmological argument” for the existence of God. Its proofs work backward. They start with visible creation and reason that it can only be the work of an uncreated First Cause. Such proofs were once compelling to educated people. Now the average college graduate can do without them. He doesn’t know exactly why this is so; he simply believes that Darwin and Stephen Hawking have somehow managed to explain creation without reference to a Creator.
Darwin and Hawking, of course, have done no such thing. Science can never answer the question: Why is there something rather than nothing? The universe is a massive fact that does not account for its existence and — some would say, following Goedel’s incompleteness theorems — cannot do so. This does not stop certain astrophysicists from trying to generate whole universes from mathematical equations. But a mathematical model does not tell us why there is a universe to describe in the first place.
If we cannot so easily dismiss the brute fact of the universe, neither can we ignore its appearance of having been designed. As one staunchly atheistic 20th-century astronomer put it: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” How do you get around such a “common sense” interpretation? Darwin supplied the answer: Any “design” in nature is only apparent, the work of blind mechanisms. All you need to produce the bombardier beetle, for example, is random variations directed by natural selection — and a lot of time.
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