Shortly after my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible came out, I was asked to fly to Ireland to participate in a debate on the existence of God at University College Cork. I had been doing radio interviews for my book and was very comfortable discussing some of the sillier arguments atheists use to attack Christianity or the Bible – for example, that the Bible is full of scientific “errors” and therefore is obviously complete nonsense. Attacks such as these are basic category errors – a comparison of apples and oranges – that are easily refuted.

But despite studying philosophy as an undergraduate, I didn’t really feel qualified to debate the existence of God. Plus, I was super busy with other things and with business projects, about to go on a trip to Rome, and so I politely declined the offer in Ireland.

At the time, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were supposedly going around doing debates, taking on people like Dinesh D’Souza and the Oxford theologian and former scientist Alister McGrath. The impression I got was that Hitchens was simply demolishing the theists with his allegedly rapier-like wit and vast erudition. Also, I have always looked with awe on Oxbridge philosophy – home of such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elisabeth Anscombe and so on – and so I assumed that the UK philosophers would trot out their allegedly superior logical skills, decades of logical analysis, and easily smash the dusty old arguments of theism. (Truth be told, however, Fr. Coppleston more than held his own against Lord Russell in their famous 1948 debate on the BBC.)

It turns out that I was utterly deluded. In recent times, I’ve begun to systematically record and listen to all of the debates on the Existence of God that I can lay my hands on and listen to them at my leisure.

I made a shocking discovery. It turns out that the atheists are really, really good at insults but are actually quite poor debaters.

Thus, since Christians and observant Jews are typically polite, they are usually at an extreme disadvantage when “debating” atheists such as Hitchens and Harris – especially when they discover that the “debate” consists in nothing but a half-hour of put-downs, snide remarks and petty insinuations. The atheists insult Christianity, Judaism and religion generally with a nastiness that is almost breathtaking. They belittle. They demean. They insinuate. But the one thing they don’t do is offer intelligent arguments.

In fact, they don’t actually reason at all.

Reasoning, after all, is a systematic questioning of assumptions… a marshaling of evidence… a critical examination of arguments. It is not, primarily, name-calling. When I first started watching these debates, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I just assumed the atheists would put forward logical arguments that the Theists would be hard pressed to answer. What I wasn’t prepared for was that the atheists didn’t really marshal arguments at all: they merely sneered. The New Atheists were plainly accustomed to standing up in front of large groups of college students, making snide put-downs that got a lot of laughs and applause; and they were quite good at demolishing arguments made by young earth Creationists and snake-handling fundamentalists. But when faced with genuine Christian intellectuals – such as the philosopher William Lane Craig – they failed utterly to even engage the principal arguments that were made.

For example, when Craig debated Sam Harris on the topic of moral values – whether you can establish the existence of objective moral values without recourse to God – and Craig offered three extremely precise reasons why Harris failed to prove the existence of objective moral values in his then-latest book, The Moral Landscape. He offered a detailed, step by step critique for why Harris’s argument in his book is, at bottom, logically incoherent.

When it came time for Harris to respond, he didn’t. He didn’t respond to a single one of Craig’s logical arguments. Instead, he simply changed the subject – and fell back on his snide one-liner attacks on the Bible and how stupid Christians are.

I actually felt sorry for Harris because he was so clearly out of his depth. Harris studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford, but his Ph.D. is in the new pseudo-science of “neuroscience,” a new inter-disciplinary degree that brings together neurology, psychology and a little philosophy in order to discuss Big Ideas without the burden of actually having to think clearly.

In contrast, Craig earned two master’s degrees in theology, a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Birmingham in the UK, a doctorate in theology under Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich, and then, after all that, spent six years doing post-graduate research at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. What’s more, Craig is a professional philosopher in the analytic mode – meaning, he breaks down philosophical subjects into the various possible options, uncovers the logical assumptions in each of the possible options, and then demonstrates how the hidden assumptions in philosophical arguments or claims undermine the point being made or, in some instances, provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the argument to make sense. As an analytic philosopher, Craig is quite comfortable with rigorous logic, sufficient reason, proof, demonstrations and so on – and so, when doing battle on the field of pure reason and logic, he is able to expose the arguments of the New Atheists (such as they are) as little more than empty rhetoric. Here is how a typical debate between a New Atheist and someone like Craig goes:

Craig: But secondly, the problem that’s even worse is the “ought implies can” problem. In the absence of the ability to do otherwise, there is no moral responsibility. In the absence of freedom of the will, we are just puppets or electro-chemical machines. And puppets do not have moral responsibilities. Machines are not moral agents. But on Dr. Harris’s view, there is no freedom of the will, either in a libertarian or a compatibilistic sense, and therefore, there is no moral responsibility. So there isn’t even the possibility of moral duty on his view. So while I can affirm and applaud Dr. Harris’s affirmation of the objectivity of moral values and moral duties, at the end of the day his philosophical worldview just doesn’t ground these entities that we both want to affirm. If God exists, then we clearly have a sound foundation for objective moral values and moral duties. But if God does not exist, that is, if atheism is true, then there is no basis for the affirmation of objective moral values; and there is no ground for objective moral duties because there is no moral lawgiver and there is no freedom of the will. And therefore it seems to me that atheism is simply bereft of the adequate ontological foundations to establish the moral life .

Now, those were fighting words. Craig just demolished most of the argument in Harris’s most recent book in front of a large audience at the University of Notre Dame. You might think that Harris would be called upon to actually defend his position, to offer reasonable counter-arguments to show why Craig’s attacks were unfair or were missing the point.

But he doesn’t!

Much to my astonishment and disappointment, Harris just reverts to what Atheists do best – which is to change the subject and begin name calling!

Harris: Well, that was all very interesting. Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell? Well, I, I’m told it’s rather hot there, for one. Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality. Ok, the whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Now, happily, there’s absolutely no evidence that the Christian Hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

Alright, nine million children die every year before they reach the age of five. ok, picture, picture a, a a Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004, that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those, every ten days, killing children only under five. Ok, that’s 20, 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Ok,, think of, think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. Ok, but according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God’s plan. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn’t care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil.

This is what passes for reasoned argument among the New Atheists.

Well, I thought, perhaps this is unfair. After all, Dr. Craig is a trained professional philosopher with two doctorates and a lifetime of training as an analytic philosopher. Sam Harris studies “neuro-science.” It’s hardly a fair contest. Dr. Craig is trained in mathematical logic; Sam Harris is trained in school yard insults.

So, it seems fair that we compare apples to apples – in this case, an Atheist philosopher versus a Theistic philosopher.

As a result, I started looking for debates between Dr. Craig and some famous atheist philosophers. Much to my delight, I found some! In 2005, it turns out, Dr. Craig debated the British philosopher A.C. Grayling at the Oxford Union on the topic of, “Belief in God Makes Sense in Light of Tsunamis.”

Perfect. Surely, I thought, an atheist philosopher of Grayling’s stature would mount scary, logically airtight arguments against the existence of God and would demolish Dr. Craig – at least teach him a lesson he wouldn’t quickly forget. I was actually rooting for the atheist side! Dr. Craig reminds me of Thomas Aquinas: His logic is so impeccable you have to attack his premises. He is so relentlessly rationalistic you start to root for the underdog.

But, again, I was quickly disappointed. Dr. Craig made his case in his characteristic analytic style: step by step, premise by premise, pointing out the possible weaknesses in his own argument and helpfully suggesting ways his Atheist opponents could possibly prove him wrong.

He began to remind me of Chess Masters who are so confident of their abilities that they actually point out to you, in advance, why you probably don’t want to make that move… because in ten steps it will result in Checkmate. Alas, Craig’s debate with Grayling was as one-sided as was his debate with Sam “I’m Just So Darn Smarter Than Everyone Else” Harris. Grayling was reduced to stammering… and fell back, as Atheists almost always do, on insults. Dr. Craig started off by explaining the underlying presuppositions of the classic logical argument against God from the existence of evil:

Craig: Traditionally, atheists have claimed that the co-existence of God and evil is logically impossible. That is to say, there is no possible world in which God and evil both exist. Since we know that evil exists, the argument goes, it follows logically that God does not exist. It is this version of the problem of evil that professor Grayling recently defended in his debate with Keith Ward in The Prospect.

So, according to the logical version of the problem of evil, (the two statements on your hand-out):

“(A) an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God exists”

and,

“(B) evil exists”

…are logically incompatible.

The difficulty for the atheist, however, is that statements (A) and (B) are not, at face value, logically inconsistent. There’s no explicit contradiction between them. If the atheist thinks they are implicitly contradictory then he must be som – uh – assuming some hidden premises that would serve to bring out the contradiction and make it explicit.

But, what are those premises? Well, the atheist seems to be assuming two things:

“(1) If God is omnipotent then he can create any world that he desires”

and

“(2) If God is omnibenevolent then he prefers a world without evil over a world with evil”

The atheist reasons that: since God is omnipotent he could create a world without evil, and since he is omnibenevolent he would prefer a world without evil, therefore if God exists, evil cannot exist.

Dr. Craig goes on to explain that this version of the problem of evil, based on logical incoherence, has been “seriously undermined” by the incisive critique of the philosopher Alvin Plantinga and has fallen out of disfavor among academic philosophers. He points out that Plantinga has demonstrated that the atheist must show that both of the critical assumptions (1) and (2) are necessarily true in order for the argument to be logically valid. But, Plantinga argues, if it is even possible that human beings have free will then (1) and (2) are not necessarily true.

This is what Analytic Philosophy does best: Break down arguments into their underlying premises… and then demonstrates what must or must not be true in order for an argument to be logically valid.

Okay, I thought, pretty slick. But now the Atheist team is going to bring in one of their Big Guns – an Oxford philosopher, trained in the same logical jujitsu as Dr. Craig. Surely he’s about to meet his match. Then Grayling spoke. If possible, he was even more meandering and non sequitur than Sam Harris, albeit with slightly better manners.

GRALYING: Um, let me just begin with a remark about the tsunami which, as you know, killed several hundred thousand people – among them small children and elderly people – a great majority of them were not Christians – they were people of other faiths and all faiths – I suppose – and of no faith. So I suppose one would need an assumption to the effect that the deity, if, he/she or it caused it or countenanced it or wasn’t able to stop it, nevertheless it would have – in some sense – to be the same deity for all those people, and if there is a greater good envisaged in the event then it would have to be one that, um, is somehow captured in very different forms in these different faiths. And I leave that point hanging in the air because I think it’s something that we need to bring up a bit later on – remembering that there was a competition between the faiths! After all, a Christian will tell you that that the founder of that religion said “I am the way, the truth and the life, no-one comes to the Father but by me”, which seems rather bad news for very many of the people who were swept away by that grave wave .

Once again, the Atheist declines to actually address the topic at hand and simply and quickly changes the subject – in this case, to the multiplicity of religions on earth.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I was by this whole performance.

That’s because there is a part of me that finds airtight logical arguments inherently unpersuasive. Faith, to me, is bigger than logic, bigger than reason. Proving the existence of God from logical arguments seems to me a lot like proving that I love my wife from logical arguments: the very exercise seems a bit inappropriate or even somewhat demeaning. I can imagine approaching my wife and, instead of giving her roses and a box of chocolates on St. Valentine’s Day, proposing the following argument:

A. All men who give their wives presents love them.

B. I give you presents.

C. Therefore, I love you.

If that was how I proved my love for my wife, offering her airtight logical demonstrations, I don’t think I would have been married for very long.

The same is true of God. Authentic religion of any kind has a mystical component that bypasses logic or, rather, that makes logic almost unnecessary. In a very real sense, we have an experience of the grandeur of God – an experience of what mystics call the Numinous – that is above and beyond the rational arguments of the human mind. These experiences don’t preclude logic; they just make logic irrelevant. My felt sense of the awesomeness and holiness of Being – of the transcendent power that maintains in existence galaxies as well as my own beating heart – makes me want to fall to my knees. To try to conjure up a logical premise from such an experience to use in an argument seems almost as absurd as trying to do the same thing after a date with my wife.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not belittling logic and reason, or even debates on the existence of God. I just see their limitations. They say that at the end of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas, Christendom’s foremost logician, had a mystical experience and, after that point, he refused to write another word. “All of my writings are as straw,” he supposedly said. The same thing was true of Blaise Pascal, the brilliant French mathematician, scientist and mystic. When he was young, he had a mystical experience of some kind that changed his life. In a frenzy, he scrawled out a description of what had happened to him:

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

Pascal sewed this inscription into his coat and wore it every day of his life.

All this explains why I am not particularly threatened by logical arguments against the existence of God… and why I can even root for the Atheist team a little. If I were to debate myself, I would never use mystical experience as an argument for God’s existence because it is non-falsifiable, it is an unfair trump card that avoids logical reasoning. But just as my love for my wife is not the result of a logical demonstration, so, too, my faith in God is not the result of a chain of deduction. Reason can perhaps confirm what we know already by faith, but faith is rarely the result of reason. What’s more, I have this sense that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not the Prime Mover of Aristotelian logic… and that to argue for his existence, using the paltry weapons of the human mind, seems almost presumptuous. So, that is why I came to the Atheist debates with a relatively open mind.

Although the existence of God is as self-evident to me as the existence of air, I am perfectly comfortable with the notion that his existence may not be provable logically. The Catholic Church holds as a religious dogma that his existence can be proven, but I was and am willing to entertain the possibility that, with the development of new tools of logical analysis, the traditional Theistic arguments for his existence may be found wanting. For example, I have long been persuaded that the modern argument from design, at least as presented by the Intelligent Design movement, can be persuasively overcome. The concept of “irreducible complexity,” used by Intelligent Design theorists such as Dembski and Behe, has been effectively questioned by scientists and philosophers. As a result, not all Theist arguments hold water… and I came to the New Atheist debates with an open mind concerning which arguments were solid and which could be undermined.

What I was wholly unprepared for, however, was the way in which the Atheist team completely abandoned the effort to present logical arguments at all and simply reverted to name calling. As I said, when faced with worthy opponents, such as Dr. Craig or even Dinesh D’Souza, many of the atheist debaters gave up any effort to mount rational arguments and just started making snide remarks. These remarks sometimes got a laugh – even I chuckled at some of them – but what they didn’t do was make any sort of rational case. It’s gotten so bad that the enfant terrible of the New Atheists, the popular science writer Richard Dawkins, has refused to debate William Lane Craig at all. In typical New Atheist fashion, he doesn’t offer reasons but only insults: He asked colleagues in the philosophy department at Oxford and “no one” had heard of Dr. Craig. Thus, Dr. Craig is too small of a fish to face such an intellectual giant as himself. Even many atheists are now embarrassed by Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig.

The post Why I Secretly Root for the Atheists in Debates first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philospher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk… coffee houses… salons… adult education classes… and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Joseph Maréchal, Karl Rahner and, my own guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue… marshals the evidence in favor or against those options… and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”).  The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge.  I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals.  I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness.  Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God.  A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P.  If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P.  An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God.  (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.)

My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities… and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline.  If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

The post Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Ready or not, Obamacare is finally here. Polls show that most Americans remain highly skeptical of the law’s benefits. According to a new CNN/ORC International survey released October 1, less than one in five Americans say their families will be better off under the new health care law.

Nevertheless, the controversial law’s passionate defenders insist it represents an historic event.

It extends health care coverage to between 10 and 35 million Americans, depending upon how many will actually choose to sign up, and represents the single biggest change in health care financing since the advent of Medicare in the mid-1960s.

More controversial is the claim that Obamacare will reduce costs for most Americans.

Republicans insist that the costs of Obamacare will be enormous and that they will be borne by middle class families who can ill afford them, especially in the current economy.

Democrats, like the president himself, claim that most families will actually save money with Obamacare. Obama himself claimed that the new law would reduce premium costs for the average family by $2,500 a year.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) insists that Republicans are “desperate” to stop the law before it goes into effect so ordinary people can’t learn more about the law’s many benefits.

“That’s why Republicans want to stop Obamacare,” the Illinois liberal said. “They don’t want these exchanges to be announced. They don’t want people to see these options. They know what’s going to happen.”

Well, like many Americans, I decided to run the numbers for our family.

As a self-employed writer, I’ve bought my family’s health insurance for the past 25 years. We’ve been with Blue Cross ever since my wife and I were married. At first, we had fairly low deductibles… but as premium costs escalated over the past 10 years, we, like most business folk, have gradually raised our deductibles and paid more of our health costs out of pocket. I remember paying about $5,000 for every birth, for example.

Our current Blue Cross plan currently costs us $650 a month or $7,800 a year with a $5,000 per person deductible with a maximum out-of-pocket family limit of $15,000. This is the type of plan that the Democrats ridicule as little more than “catastrophe insurance” and “not really health insurance at all.”

And I must admit, when compared to the taxpayer-provided Cadillac plans government workers and teachers get, I suppose that characterization is fair.

The chief advantage of our current insurance, for us, is that it limits the outrageous fees that hospitals and doctors can charge.

For example, a typical visit to a hospital emergency room two years ago – when one of my sons had severe stomach pains and we suspected appendicitis – was billed at around $10,000. Blue Cross disallowed 90% of that as absurd over-billing and we ended up paying $1,000 out of pocket – still a lot for a 3-hour visit, but a lot less than we would have paid.

Nevertheless, we pay enough in out-of-pocket fees each year that I was willing to give Obamacare the benefit of the doubt.

I spend a lot of time in British Columbia and look longingly at BC Medical Services Plan (MSP)’s monthly premium of $128 per family of three or more — with all primary care (excluding dental) covered. My eldest son’s new British wife extols the virtues of the National Health Service (NHS) which will pay 100% of the costs associated with the delivery of their expected first child – albeit delivered by a China-trained midwife and without the benefit of the epidural American women say is a necessity.

So, using MSNBC’s nifty Obamacare calculator, I decided to take a hard look at the numbers. (You can use the calculator yourself by clicking here.)

We are a solidly middle class family – yet, with so many children, we qualify for a substantial tax credit.

Under Obamacare’s Silver Plan (comparable to our current Blue Cross plan) our annual premiums would cost $18,190 – or $1,515 a month.

That’s $865 more than we’re currently paying – an increase of 133%.

With a projected tax credit of $4,890, however, that would lower our annual premiums to $13,300 ($1,108 per month). That’s still $458 more per month (or 70% more) than we currently pay—and we have to, in effect, loan the government money because we actually have to pay the $1,515 per month and only get a tax credit at the end of the year.

But that’s not all.

All this might be worth it if the Obamacare plan provided better benefits or a lower deductible – but it doesn’t!

The law’s defenders ridicule our current plan as mere “catastrophe insurance” because of the high deductibles and out of pocket costs, but the Obamacare plan for our family has an annual cap on out of pocket expenses of $12,700 – or just a little less than the Blue Cross limit of $15,000.

In other words: Obamacare is just as much “catastrophe insurance” as most high-deductible private plans.

As a result, I calculated the costs of three scenarios: (1) we spend 100% of our out-of-pocket limits; (2) we spend 50% of our annual out of pocket limits; and(3) we spend 0% of our annual out-of-pocket limits (basically, never visit a doctor all year).

Under all three scenarios, Obamacare represents a real increase of $3,200 to $5,500 a year for our family.

Finally, the worst aspect of the new law is that, while you pay substantially more for the same coverage you can get privately, your choice of doctors and providers is more limited under Obamacare. Our Blue Cross PPO plan covers pretty much every doctor and clinic in our area. Obamacare is more like a HMO in that limits the doctors and hospitals to which you have access – in some areas, severely so. (See the Heritage Foundation’s analysis here.)

My conclusion: Obamacare doesn’t make any financial sense whatsoever for our family…and is a lousy deal. We will stick with our Blue Cross plan, which I don’t particularly like, because government provided health care costs more and offers less choice, not more.

By the way, on October 1, the U.S. Senate voted to provide massive subsidies to itself and its staff – so the politicians who voted for Obamacare would not themselves have to pay any of the new costs associated with it.

One final note: As a self-employed business person, I’m pragmatic. I think the U.S. is rich enough that it actually could provide a generous, single-payer health care system that eliminates the over-priced and wasteful system we have now. Medicare really is proof of that.

To fund such a system, I propose we eliminate 30% of the do-nothing government jobs we currently pay for – along with the six-figure, retire-at-50 pensions we also pay for – and use that money to fund the single-payer healthcare system the Democrats want so badly.

Let’s make a deal: In exchange for a single payer system, Democrats will agree to eliminate 30% of all government worker jobs (the assistant sub-deputy undersecretary for the Department of Public Money Wasting) along with their fat pensions – to shrink the government back to what it was in, say, 1990.

That would be a deal the country would support, could afford, and which might actually fix the long-term health care crisis.

The post Crunching the Obamacare Numbers: A Lot More Money for A Lot Less Care first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

So if, as Albert Einstein insisted, Biblical religion was the necessary intellectual precondition for the gradual development of scientific method, how did the myth of the “scientific revolution” come about?

One reason: For the past 400 years, the partisans of irreligion-from the Marquis de Sade to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins-have deliberately misrepresented the way science actually developed in the West as part of their ideological crusade against Judaism and Christianity.

What’s worse, the partisans of atheism have been intellectually dishonest in the extreme: They have tried to take credit for the development of science when, in fact, they had little if anything to do with it.

Many of the most ideological and dogmatic of atheist crusaders, although continually referring to science, and seeking to use science to justify their own philosophical assumptions and declarations, were not scientists themselves.

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years-who sought to use science to justify their unbelief-never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation.

That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H.L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

In dramatic contrast, most of the true giants of empirical science-the people who founded entire scientific disciplines or who made landmark scientific discoveries-were primarily devout Christians who believed that their scientific studies, far from being in conflict with their religious faith, ultimately was dependent upon it.

In his book, The God Delusion, atheist crusader Richard Dawkins once again tries to reclaim Einstein for atheism, citing quotations at length in which Einstein denied belief in a personal God, but the truth is that Einstein was struggling to enunciate a middle position between atheism and classic theism and couldn’t seem to make up his mind how to describe it. “There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like `God is subtle but he is not malicious’ or `He does not play dice’ or `Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic,” Dawkins writes. “`God does not play dice’ should be translated as `Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.’ `Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ means `Could the universe have begun in any other way?’ Einstein was using `God’ in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense.”

Perhaps. Yet when Einstein was explicitly asked whether he believed in “Spinoza’s God”-meaning an impersonal Deistic God-this is what he said:

“I can’t answer with a simple yes or no. I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

Not an orthodox Jew, certainly, but hardly a snide atheist ideologue along the lines of Dawkins, Chistopher Hitchens, or Sam Harris, either.

To sum up: We have two rival claims.

On the one hand, we have scientific (let’s be charitable) amateurs-from Nietzsche and Ingersoll to Chrisopher Hitchens and Sam Harris-insisting that science and Biblical religion are fundamentally incompatible.

On the other hand, you have the greatest minds in the history of science, the people who actually made most of the discoveries that created modern science to begin with-folks like Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Max Planck, Louis Pasteur, Werner Heisenberg, and even Albert Einstein-who insist that, not only is religion not at odds with science, but Biblical religion is what made science possible in the first place.

Whom should we believe?

Should we believe the attorney Clarence Darrow, who said “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose” … or should we believe Albert Einstein who said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind”?

Frankly, in the great debate over religion and science, faithful Christians and Jews stand with the more enlightened half – those who make the actual discoveries in science.

The post Atheists Take Credit for Science When They Had Nothing to Do with It first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed off. Ouch!

And yet here it is, the following week, and I am showing up again.

I took up Aikido ten years ago, at the ripe old age of forty, and have been struggling to learn it ever since. The kids wanted to take a martial art and I thought judo might be nice. Something difficult, real fighting, like wrestling.  I looked around for a judo dojo but couldn’t find any near our home. But I did find some Aikido dojos that taught kids and that intrigued me. At the time, Steven Seagal wasn’t yet an incarnate lama, just a Hollywood action star, and I was intrigued by those flashy moves he did. It seemed elegant and different, not like the typical side kicks you saw at the local tae kwon do school.

So, my three sons and I started Aikido together. Week after week, year after year, we drove 30 minutes each way for Aikido classes two or three times a week. One by one, though, the kids lost interest and quit… but I was hooked.

My first teacher was a former ambulance driver who trained at the New York Aikikai and was the apprentice (uchi deschi) of Seiichi Sugano Shihan.  He teaches the traditional “Aikikai” style of Aikido that is taught at Hombu Dojo in Japan and he is affiliated with the U.S. Aikido Federation (East), run by Yoshimitsu Yamada Shihan.

I also trained for a time with Huruo Matsuoka, Steven Seagal’s oldest student and uke, whom you see getting slammed to the mat (hard!) in Seagal’s first movies and in Seagal’s Aikido documentary, The Path Beyond Thought. Matsuoka Sensei is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, a truly gentle and wise man, a devotee of macrobiotics, and he teaches Seagal’s somewhat unusual style of Aikido that is called “tenshin” Aikido. Around the time Seagal discovered that he is an incarnate Tibetan lama or tulku, Matsuoka had some falling out with the pony-tailed Hollywood star, returned to Japan and studied with Abe Sensei, the founder of Aikido (O Sensei’s) calligraphy teacher. Matsuoka came back to America in the early 2000s and started some new dojos where some of my old sensei’s students and my friends came to study. Matsuoka’s Aikido is very advanced and technical – too advanced for someone like me. But I learned a lot from him and heartily recommend his dojo to anyone who lives close enough to study with him.

I now study with students of the legendary Kazuo Chiba Shihan, spread out in locations all over the world. Chiba Sensei is a fairly scary figure in Aikido circles, someone who doesn’t tolerate fools lightly and who is more than willing to make believers out of skeptics. From what I can tell, Chiba’s approach to Aikido is practical and very direct – “we like to make sure a certain amount of pain is involved,” my current teacher says with a smile. What Chiba Sensei’s students are trying to teach me is how to take someone’s balance first before you try any technique — a basic concept in judo (called kuzushi) but which many Aikido schools neglect.  Chiba-affiliated dojos (part of the Birankai federation) in British Columbia include Still Waters Aikikai in Sidney and Mountain Coast Aikikai in Richmond.

So, I’ve been at it for ten years now… and have only scratched the surface. I have to say, I’m really lousy at Aikido. I’m stiff as a board… clumsy… my knees hurt… my ukemi (falling) sucks… and I am still struggling with moves that any beginner knows how to do. But I feel at this point I can at least describe why Aikido captivates so many of its adherents and yet, to outsiders, seems so strange. My wife considers it a bizarre “cult,” akin to people who are in telepathic contact with aliens.

First, Aikido, at least in the mainstream Aikikai style, is the best workout you could ever have. It manages to combine a lot of stretching with tumbling and falling… a serious cardiovascular workout… and the kind of muscular training you’d get with, say, wrestling…. and a little self-defense. After an hour of Aikido, my gi is soaking wet, every muscle in my body hurts and I feel like I’ve been doing yoga for a week. I’ve been tossed around like a sack of potatoes by experts and have had my wrists and shoulder joints twisted out of their sockets. It’s great!

Second, Aikido teaches you weird stuff you don’t learn in a typical rock-‘em, sock-‘em kicking and punching martial art. Whether you’ll ever use this weird, esoteric stuff is another question entirely – but you definitely feel like you’re learning strange Shaolin voodoo, not just how to kick someone in the balls.  I studied Shito-Ryu Karate as a kid with a wonderful hippie carpenter and nidan and love traditional Japanese karate… but Aikido is from an entirely different planet.

The hard part for me is learning how not to use my muscles.  The tendency of every beginner is to try to muscle through the techniques, forcing someone to the mat, for example, or really cranking on a wrist lock.  But the people who really know Aikido use very little muscular force.  They use the weight of their whole bodies… and the ability to move their opponent off balance… so the techniques seem almost effortless.  That is why Aikido is great for women because women are generally not as strong as men and so must learn how to do the techniques correctly.  It’s also why Aikido is a great martial art for people as they get older.  It’s one of the few where technique really can overcome brawn… providing, of course, you actually learn how to do it right.  And that’s the trick!

The post My First Decade of Aikido first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

I’ve been fortunate, over the years, because I have discovered a number of gurus who have cautioned me about indulging a monomaniacal commitment to work at all costs – especially when it involves a neglect of what really matters in life, such as anniversaries, soccer games and swim meets, school plays, sex in the afternoon, History Day competitions, Rock for Peace concerts, picnics, days at the beach, swimming, Aikido seminars, reading, Mass, vacations, skiing and lots more.

These gurus include personal heroes such as the English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton… the 1930s Chinese writer and philosopher Lin Yutan… and, more recently, the British iconoclast and crypto-Recusant Tom Hodginkinson, founder of The Idler magazine and movement.

Chesterton, of course, one of the founders of the Distributist movement of the early 20th century and advocate of a “small is beautiful” approach to both economics and politics, was highly critical of the wage slave mentality that dominates modern industrial capitalism and Big Business.

The Distributists, such as Hilaire Belloc and Vincent McNabb, OP, encouraged people to abandon wage-earning factory jobs in polluted, crime-ridden, overcrowded cities and return to a more humane, more pastoral life in small towns and villages, where, they argued, a life of a small shop owner or craftsman offered a better balance for family living. Whether the concrete proposals of the Distrubutists are practical when applied on a mass scale is a topic for another chapter, but what the Distributists argued was that, at least for the individual family, a small town businessman or craftsman had a far better life than a wage worker in a big city. The reason, for this, was the priority that the Distributists gave to home life.

As Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist explains it:

“It is now an exception for a woman to raise her own children. But Chesterton’s Distributist ideal not only called for mothers to stay at home, it called for fathers to stay at home as well. The home-based business, the idea of self-sufficiency, would not only make for stronger, healthier families, but a stronger, healthier society. If everything in a society is based on nurturing and strengthening and protecting the family, that society will survive centuries of storms. A home-based society is naturally and necessarily a local and decentralized society. If the government is local, if the economy is local, then the culture is also local.”

Precisely!

Almost by instinct but with some encouragement along the way, my wife and I have struggled to build just this sort of life together – a home-schooling, home-based business in which both parents are flitting about at their work while children toil away at their studies and everyone meets for lunch and dinner.

It goes without saying that this sort of life is not possible for most people, since most people do not have their own businesses, let alone their own home-based businesses; and everything in modern society conspires to force people into the same mass market employee system.

Local governments are especially hostile toward home businesses since they limit the amount of surveillance and control that governments can exercise; and many localities, at least in the United States but also in the UK, ban them outright.

What’s more, the outrageous, artificially inflated cost of goods and services in modern industrial societies makes it very difficult for many families to survive on a small business income – forcing both parents into the workforce and their children into daycare and substandard government schools.

Nevertheless, as an ideal, the Distributist vision of home as the center of economic and well as family life is one that my wife and I embraced and I believe it has many, many benefits that most people never even experience.

The post Finding a Balance Between Work and Leisure first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Here’s what sucks about life: You wake up in your crib, confused and more than a little dazed, and then spend the next 20 or 30 years trying to figure out what to do with yourself.

You mostly do what you’re told. You learn how to read, play sports, try to attract members of the opposite sex. In your 20s, you look for some kind of job – and maybe decide to settle down, get married and have kids. But life, as they say, doesn’t exactly come with an operating manual – whatever people may say about the Bible or other holy texts. Even if it did, no one would have time to read it.

We catch what wisdom we can on the fly, from our friends mostly, a little from our parents, more than we care to admit from ideals dreamed up for us on television and in movies.
It isn’t very much to go on.

And then problems start coming, fast and furious. Life is harder, more complex, than TV would have us believe. Kids get sick. Spouses get angry, bored or indifferent. Work is not exactly a dreamland of creativity and fun.

Before you know it, you hit 30 and the bills are getting scary, the problems even harder. You still have dreams but you’re concentrating on survival, keeping your head above water. The big things you want to do with your life will just have to wait for a while. Reality bites.

But then, before you know it, you’re 40! Holy smokes! Someone close to you dies, a parent perhaps. You get sued. You get arrested for drunk driving. Your spouse cheats on you. Your business goes bust. You get seriously hurt in an accident – or develop a life-threatening disease.

It is often then, perhaps for the first time, when you realize you might need help – that you’ve done as best you could but perhaps it’s time to reflect a little, to question the assumptions that have guided your life up until now, to reevaluate where you are and where you are going. For some, this process begins early; for others, later. But eventually we all realize that we need more wisdom than is available to us on HBO… or on our favorite blog.

That’s the purpose of religion – and why parents desperately try to keep their teenage children connected, in whatever way is possible, to a religious community. Religion is nothing more than the depository of humanity’s accumulated life wisdom, won over millennia of trial and error and its haphazard encounters with the Infinite.

Many people, scared off of religion by TV evangelists or other nightmare experiences, look for wisdom elsewhere. Maybe in politics, or pop psychology, or the Law of Attraction. Or they decide, like Descartes, the only wisdom worth having is what they can discover for themselves. Fair enough.

But parents instinctively sense that their children will someday need better advice than what is available on TV talk shows or the Internet – and so drag their reluctant offspring to synagogue, or to church on Sunday, or to Mormon institute classes, or to their Zen sitting group.

They want to at least put them into contact with a bigger community of shared spiritual values, with the great prophets and mystics of their religious tradition, with its saints and even sinners, with the ideals and ideas that shaped their own souls and which can help guide them through the treacherous rapids that are real life.

Children, of course, are bored silly by this. How can the Bible compete with YouTube?

Mark Twain once famously described the Book of Mormon as “chloroform in print,” but, with all deference to Joseph Smith, it’s fair to say that’s an equally accurate description of most holy texts.

I say this as someone who actually loves the Bible and spent a decade of graduate study learning more about it. But it takes time, and more than a little study, to appreciate the wisdom and beauty in the Bible – an odd anthology of ancient Hebrew and Greek writings utterly removed from the reality of 21st century modern industrial society. Expecting a modern teenage boy to be moved by, and gain wisdom from, the Torah or St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans is like expecting him to be similarly inspired by the Analects of Confusius or the U.S. Constitution. It’s asking a lot, usually too much.

Yet parents know they only have so much time to introduce their children to what matters in life, and most of what matters – in terms of marriage and family, birth and death, God and our purpose on earth – is found in the teachings of the world’s great religions. However, because the accumulated life wisdom that is found in religious tradition can really only be appreciated much later in life – when you actually need it — the best most parents can hope for is to introduce their children to the sources of this wisdom, the religious communities in which it is found and passed down, and do their best to give their children warm fuzzy feelings about the community so they will return to it later as adults.

In other words, smart parents recognize that children are often bored out of their heads by Sunday Mass, or Hebrew school, or whatever, but do their best to find activities and communities that have enough fun and sociability in them that their children are not put off forever.

Catholics are pretty bad at this, in my experience. It takes considerable skill and wisdom to trick teenagers into learning about a religious heritage – and most efforts, quite frankly, are pathetic. I learned this first-hand when teaching a Confirmation Class at my local Catholic parish, to fourteen very bored fourteen-year-olds. A teenager’s mind is on sex and maybe sports, not religious doctrine.

Evangelicals seem better, what with Christian rock, Young Life, Campus Crusade for Christ, Bikers for Christ, hip urban Christian magazines. Still, even they have trouble. I don’t know for sure, but Mormons seem able to keep their kids connected. Jews, too. Yet baby boomer ex-hippies struggle to hand on their Zen or Hare Krishna beliefs to their offspring (my first paid magazine article was on the children of the Hare Krishnas)… who rebel and join strange cults, like the Greek Orthodox Church. Just kidding.

My point is that all knowledge is cumulative, a series of insights that are passed on, over the centuries, and which lay the groundwork for further insights. We learn from and build upon the past.

The life wisdom that human beings need, spiritual knowledge, is the same. To ignore the spiritual wisdom of our religious traditions is to perpetually reinvent the wheel each generation, to start over from scratch.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question how the wheel was made in the past, or wonder if we could re-design it, or see if there might be alternatives to the wheel that would work better. That is the nature of human knowledge, to constantly test inherited insights against current problems. But we gotta start somewhere, and that somewhere, for most people, is the collective wisdom found in the world’s great spiritual and religious traditions.

My advice: Go to church… or shul… or your local Scientology seminar… or your mother’s Zen sitting group. Go to whatever spiritual tradition you were born into until you find something better.

The post Why Parents Drag Their Kids to Church, Temple or Their Zen Sitting Group first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

I would like to briefly examine the claim, made by advocates of Neo-Darwinism and others, that advances in contemporary systems theory now give a rational explanation for the development of highly complex structures in the universe without recourse to the hypothesis of a Divine Creator.

Further, I will show that such claims, while purporting to be based on the evidence of empirical science, are, as certain postmodern philosophers of science have shown, metaphysical assertions. I will offer a few brief remarks on how advances in the mathematics of complex systems (illustrated by cybernetics and so-called chaos theory) actually can be reconciled with a theory of theistic evolution. Finally, I will discuss how the “critical realist” philosophy of the Canadian Jesuit cognitional theorist and theologian, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, offers a coherent response to the dogmatic scientism of the neo-Darwinists, on the one hand, and the simplistic “pseudo-science, relativism and nihilism” of postmodern philosophy on the other. You do not have to throw out the baby of logical coherence and rationality with the bath water (rightly critiqued by postmodern theorists) of metaphysical naturalism and scientism.

The Blind Watchmaker

Many contemporary Christians, especially those without training in mathematics, the metatheory of logic or the philosophy of science, are under the impression that the teleological argument for the existence of God has been definitively refuted by new developments in cybernetic systems theory, fractal geometry and evolutionary biology. This refutation is symbolized, in popular culture, by the widely influential book, The Blind Watchmaker, written in 1986 by the British zoologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins purports, and is purported by many others, to have delivered an analytical coup de grâce to the classic “argument from design” as formulated, for example, by the 18th century theologian William Paley. Paley argued that, just as a watch is far too complex and functional to have simply sprung into existence by chance, and so provides indubitable evidence of the existence of an intelligent watchmaker, so, too, the universe’s far greater complexity and functionality are proof of purposeful design by a Divine Watchmaker.

Au contraire, says Dawkins. The complexity and apparent functionality of the universe only give the illusion of design and planning. In reality, the intricate complexity inherent in the universe’s systems is merely the result of blind, unconscious natural forces. “There may be good reasons for belief in God, but the argument from design is not one of them,” he writes.

“Despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

Advanced Systems Theory and Evolution

Dawkins’s assertion, that random mutations alone explain what he calls “cumulative selection” – the gradual evolution of more and more complex biological structures – has seemingly been buttressed in recent years by rapid developments in systems theory, aided, of course, by the analytical tools used in creating new supercomputers . For our purposes, systems theory actually has two relevant components.

(1) Chaos theory, pioneered by such scientists as Edward Lorenz, is the scientific study of simple, nonlinear, dynamic systems that give the appearance of random activity but which are actually the result of simple deterministic forces. A practical example of chaos theory is fractal geometry and the study of snowflakes, which show how simple processes can give rise to apparently random variations of immense complexity.

(2) Cybernetics, developed by the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann (d. 1957) and further developed by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine at the University of Brussels, is the scientific study of what are called “self-organizing systems.” Self-organizing systems are complex assemblies that generate simple emergent behaviors. Practical applications of self-organizing systems studies can be found in the study of cellular automata (self-reproducing systems), neural networks (artificial learning), genetic algorithms (evolution), artificial life (agent behavior), fractals (mathematical art) and physics (spin glasses).

Interestingly enough, systems theory is not really the stalwart alley that advocates of a blind, random universe believe it to be. And in fact, many Neo-Darwinist theoreticians now recognize this. The inability of Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist theories to convincingly explain the origin of life from non-life is part of the reason why “self-organizing systems” are among the hottest topics in the philosophy of science. Further, analysts who study self-organizing systems often insist that they resist reductionist explanations, indeed that the properties that emerge are not explicable from a purely reductionist viewpoint. This is why systems theory has been so enthusiastically embraced by advocates of process theology, because it provides for both a scientific study of the complex processes of nature and yet does not reject the existence of a Divine Intelligence that set these processes in motion in the first place.

In other words, systems theory, like any branch of science, can be viewed as merely the rigorous, mathematically-based description of actual processes that exist in nature. It describes precisely how these processes work themselves out in practice – simple forces giving rise to seemingly random, complex structures (chaos theory) and complex systems giving rise to simple behaviors (self-organizing systems). Neo-Darwinists want to pretend that these bare empirical descriptions alone constitute a rational explanation for the complexity of the universe, but of course that goes far beyond the scope of systems theory as an empirical, descriptive discipline.

The Philosophical Temptation

That is why, when all is said and done, Dawkins, like many scientists before him, can’t resist abandoning science for philosophy. The crux of Dawkins’ argument in favor of a blind, random universe is not, as he imagines, scientific analysis but a metaphysical assertion.

Dawkins’ rejection of theism is actually the old objection that recourse to an original “first cause” is essentially a circular argument. After hundreds of pages in which he attempts to show how the complex structures of nature are the result of natural selection and random mutation, he must, in the end, resort to a philosophical argument. “To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer,” he says. “You have to say something like, ‘God was always there,’ and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say, ‘DNA was always there,’ or ‘Life was always there,’ and be done with it.”

But Dawkins, like many scientists before him, is making a fundamental epistemological error here. The inability to explain one reality (e.g., God) does not, in and of itself, free one from the necessity of explaining other realities. If that were the case, then one should abandon science altogether. Advocates for the argument from design assert that it is illogical, and contrary to all observable phenomena, to assert that something can happen without a cause. That human beings cannot, at this stage, explain what caused God does not logically mean that we can rationally assert that things happen without a cause. If Dawkins can prove that a sophisticated robot factory exists that can produce, blindly, a perfectly made watch – and scientists and engineers can describe in detail the complex processes by which the robot factory produces these watches – that does not answer the obvious question of who or what made the robot factory. It merely begs the original question.

If anything, chaos theory and its related disciplines are only further strengthening this fundamental metaphysical axiom that all things must have a cause, showing how the apparent randomness of certain natural processes are not, in fact, random at all – but only appear to be random. Chaotic systems appear disorderly, perhaps random, but are not. Underneath their random behavior lies an order and a pattern that, with the aid of new supercomputers, can now be for the first time actually tracked mathematically. It was Lorenz’s discovery that, as his famous metaphor put it, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Ecuador may affect weather patterns in Alaska. The Alaskan weather patterns may appear random, and without cause, but that is only because of the inability of human minds to know all of the deterministic processes involved.

Theistic Evolution

Advocates of Neo-Darwinism and so-called creation science rarely agree on anything, but they are often united in their contempt for what is called theistic evolution. Dawkins asserts that any attempt to bring God into the scientific picture is “transparently feeble” because “science” can show how organized complexity arises spontaneously. As we have seen, science does no such thing: It merely describes the processes by which complex systems arise, without explaining what set these processes in motion in the first place. Creationists, for their part, object that theistic evolution is, in effect, incoherent, an ungodly pact with the devil in which Christians compromise their fundamental belief in divine providence. Typically, theistic evolution is described as evolution guided by God. But, creationists argue, this is a contradiction in terms: If it is evolution, then it is a theory of change in which natural processes are governed by random chance. If it is theistic, then change occurs through divine guidance.

But this presents a false dichotomy. As some of the early “fundamentalist” theoreticians saw (A.C. Dizon, Louis Meyer, R.A. Torrey), there is nothing inherently anti-theistic in a theory of Creation by which God created the universe using evolutionary processes. Christians have long accepted the notion, in physics and chemistry, that there exist observable, seemingly deterministic laws of nature. What is the essential difference between laws which govern atomic particles and, say, the complex DNA encoding by which a single cell develops into a newborn child?

Moreover, it is not even clear, from a logical standpoint, why a theistic worldview could not accommodate elements of randomness as part of the universe’s physical processes – why, contrary to Einstein’s famous assertion, God could not play dice.

Purpose, design and planning do not, in and of themselves, rule out an element of randomness. Indeed, randomness can be part of a design and purpose. College officials may plan and organize a football game – to be played according to fixed, unvarying rules – and yet require, as part of their plan, that the first kick-off be determined by a random flip of a coin. God, for His part, could conceivably create a universe in which randomness can and does occur – not least in the free choices of spiritual beings not entirely bound by deterministic forces. In other words, even if Quantum Theory (to take one example) is somehow able to prove the existence of irreducibly probabilistic laws – in which random events simply occur apparently without a cause – that could still be seen within the boundaries of natural laws established by a Divine Creator.

This is what the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard J.F. Lonergan set out to show in his classic work Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Lonergan thought through the implications of a shift from a classical to a statistical worldview, from a mechanistic cosmology to one in which universal order is constituted by emergent probability. Lonergan argued that a world process, governed by schemes of recurrence best described by the laws of probability, is still a world of design and purpose. Intelligence can both discern, and, ultimately, create, an underlying purpose in an aggregate of systems – a system of systems – that operate seemingly independently.

Systems theory and chaos theory have, in fact, proven Lonergan’s basic point: Systems are fundamentally “schemes of recurrence” that, while often appearing to be random, and which are best described by statistical probability, nevertheless exhibit patterns of cumulative complexity.

In the end, therefore, we begin where we started. Popularizing scientists such as Dawkins are justly proud of their new analytical tools. As a methodological starting point, science can and should proceed according to naturalistic presuppositions – lest every scientific mystery be explained away as “God does it.” The purpose of science is to describe the mechanisms discoverable in nature, to discern the patterns observable in what appears to be, to unaided human eyes, random or disorganized events. Chaos theory… and Ilya Prigogine’s self-organizing systems… have demonstrated just how unfathomably complex the processes of nature actually are.

But science, by its very nature, must recognize that its descriptive theories do not, ultimately, explain the origin of the universe. They only describe how the universe works, not how it came into existence or for what purpose. It is the task of the philosophy of religion, and systematic theology, to learn from new disciplines such as chaos theory and propose a new rational synthesis that takes into account the discoveries of these new disciplines and integrate them into classical Christian affirmations about creation. It is by no means clear that we live in a random universe, but if we do, Christian theology can show how the Creator can work His purposes through the “schemes of recurrence” of emergent probability just as He could under the old laws of classic Newtonian mechanics.

Relevance for Apologetics

Ultimately, Christian apologetics must face up to the intellectual challenges posed to it by the culture in which it is operating – and that culture, in the West at least, is dominated by increasingly sophisticated computer technologies and disciplines that call into question both the simple-minded determinism of 19th century modernist science and the “head in the sand” anti-science attitudes of postmodern “critics.” Young people, born with Nokia cell phones in their hands, and struggling with the challenges of mastering ever-more-complex technologies, know that postmodern philosophers are not serious when they deny the existence of objective facts.

Just as there are no atheists in fox holes, so, too, they are no sincere postmodern theoreticians in the cancer ward. When the postmodern theologian is sitting on the examination table, and her physician is explaining that she could have (a) a brain tumor requiring immediate surgery to save her life; or (b) a headache, requiring an aspirin, it’s a good bet that this postmodern theologian will NOT explain to the doctor that, in fact, she rejects the “foundationalist” premises of his science “practices,” that reality is really a social construct and that just because a tumor is “true for him,” it doesn’t follow that it is necessarily true for her. Instead, she will probably demand more tests – thus proving to everyone, including her students, that when push comes to shove she very much believes in objective reality over and above what she thinks about it. She even believes in absolute truth – because, if she takes an aspirin rather than undergoing surgery – and makes the WRONG choice – she will probably die. In her case, at least, the truth matters. Her life depends upon it.

In a similar way, a Christian apologetics that does not display at least as much conviction will not persuade anyone. That is why it is important that theologians today meet the challenges posed by contemporary science and not flee from them into a postmodern humanist ghetto. As I have attempted to argue in this paper, such flight is unnecessary. We have the intellectual resources to meet the challenges posed by contemporary systems theory, evolutionary biology and quantum physics. We do not have to accept either a simplistic naturalism, advocated by proponents of neo-modernism, nor a simplistic postmodern relativism and skepticism. While critiquing the excesses of 19th century modernist science, we do not have throw out the baby of truth with the bath water of scientism and naturalism.

The post How Chaos Theory Refutes the Blind Watchmaker of Richard Dawkins first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

There are many different ways of life, of course, and each person has to choose the way that fits his or her personality and intuitions about what life is all about and how to be happy. There is the way of the adventurer. The way of the businessman. The way of the scholar or priest. There is the way of the artist or mystic. There is even Gurdjieff’s Way of the Sly Man, the secret mystic who lives like an ordinary business man. But because I studied Aristotle at a young age, I’ve always been persuaded that, when considering how to “structure” your life, you should consider how best to use whatever God-given talents you’ve been given. In his Nicomachian Ethics (1095a15–22), Aristotle said that happiness (eudaimonia) comes from the full exercise of your powers… from using your gifts… and I’ve always thought that is true. And that is why, for me personally, one of the dominant themes of my life has always been what I call balance – the attempt to arrange your life, in so far as its possible, so that you have some balance in life and are able to use as many abilities as possible. Perhaps this is actually the Way of the Dilettante but I prefer to think of it as the Way of the Renaissance. In other words, I wanted a life in which I could marry, raise a family, think, create, study, make money, travel, play sports, stay in shape, play music, read books, and, in general pursue my interests and passions. I tried to make choices, as life went on in its haphazard way, that created conditions in which this multi-faceted, balanced life would be possible.

For example, I knew early on that I wanted to be my own boss – both because I would probably make more money with my own businesses but also because it meant I would have more free time, the ability to travel, the ability to see my children growing up, and so on. As a result, I never really pursued any sort of corporate job or career. This has its disadvantages, of course. We’ve always had to pay for our own health insurance and medical costs, for example – and to this day marvel when friends complain about their $30 “co-pays” and rising insurance costs. We paid for each of our children’s deliveries, about $5,000 each, almost literally in cash. We’ve also had to create our own Defined Benefit Pension Plan with its myriad federal regulations, its mandatory reporting requirementss, its frequent demands for cash, and what I like to call the “adult supervision” of a professional pension fund administrator – a delightful woman, the “dragon lady,” who is an Orthodox Jew and who does her best to keep us out of trouble with the Feds.

But overall, being self-employed, in my opinion, gives you many more opportunities for the “full exercise of your powers” and be happy than working in a nine-to-five corporate job. I am revisiting all these issues afresh because, as I write these words, my eldest son is plotting his own career trajectory in the corporate world of high finance – and I marvel both at his ambitious determination and at the assumptions that underlying his plotting. It is so utterly alien to my own way of life – trying to fashion a career in a corporate setting – that I am only now appreciating the stubborn but quite deliberate choices that went into our way of life.

Another part of living a balanced life is making money – not a lot of money, perhaps, but enough to provide a safe and comfortable home, in a quiet and secure neighborhood, and so that you can afford such luxuries as sports teams, music and language lessons, health care, good schools and so on. If you want to marry and raise children – which, for most people, is the most realistic path to becoming a decent human being and whatever enlightenment is granted us on this earth — a minimum amount of money is a requirement. The practical upshot of this, for me, was that I didn’t want to choose businesses or jobs that would make me too poor. I’ve never really been all that materialistic (as anyone who sees the old truck I drive or my clothes would confirm) but I do like to travel, buy books, study Aikido and philosophy in my spare time, and provide educational opportunities for my children. This meant that my wife and I had to figure out how to make money – and thus becoming a starving artist wasn’t a choice I was prepared to make. I admire artists for their single-minded dedication to their art… and I actually would encourage anyone with serious talented to pursue art or music as a career choice… but you still have to earn a living, artist or no.

When young people call me up, as some do, and ask me if they should become writers, I always say the same thing: Absolutely! It’s the best way of life in the world! My only caveat is that, to be happy, most people will want to marry and have children, to exercise all of their powers – not just their artistic ones – and that you therefore have to balance your artistic pursuits with the need to make money and provide a comfortable home. You want to enjoy your body and stay in shape. Play tennis or softball. Go to yoga classes. This is self-evident to many people but not to all, especially not to all of my children. When you are young and idealistic, you want to give yourself over to a great artistic passion or project – to spend years working on plays that never get produced, or a great novel, or painting, or a rock band. In your early twenties, that’s what you should do – test out your abilities and explore different ways of making a living. But if you want to have a happy life, you need to know that you have to balance the desire for creative pursuits with the need to make a decent living – not to “sell out” but in order that you can “exercise your full powers,” so you’re able to become a full human being.

Again, I am only thinking about these issues because I have so many children. But I really do believe balance in life is essential, perhaps even a key to happiness – even if you decide that your talents lie in science, or engineering, or medicine. For example, my eldest daughter is thinking about becoming a doctor. My wife likes this idea because her sister is a doctor and she likes the economic security that being a doctor can provide to women, especially in an increasingly competitive global economy. I think that’s great, of course, and will do everything I can to help my daughter through medical school, if she decides to pursue that course. My only caution to her would be to strive for balance – to think about how to balance the demands of a medical career with the needs and expectations of family life, her musical talents, her passion for swimming and athletics. Medicine is a fairly demanding and monomaniacal profession… but I know it’s possible to build a balanced life as a doctor, as my younger brother and my sister-in-law have proven. But it takes effort and deliberate choices.

The post How to Be Happy in Life first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

The post Studying Philosphy at the Catholic University of Leuven first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.