Proving Too Much

Taking Pride in Stupid Question-Begging

Homosexual propagandists usually engage in category revision to press the case for tolerating and promoting their sexual lusts.  Consequently, they choose to ignore the substantive position of their opponents. 

To illustrate, we have fisked a piece which recently appeared in national newspapers. (Fisking comments are in italics).
 

For some, pride is a quiet thing amongst friends and for others it’s a full scale, colourful and happy display.  For me, it’s supporting my friends who are either bisexual, like myself, or who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT), or who identify themselves as liars, thieves or adulterers.

Those who are against such people cause my friends to be upset, depressed and suicidal. I take it upon myself to show them and tell them just how much I love and adore them for being themselves and that they bring me hope for a better way of things with equality for all people.

To me, pride means to me stand up, stand your ground for friends and yourself against all odds. In the end my friends come out on top with me as a colourful and cheerful bunch of people. Pride for me is about standing up and yelling to the world that no matter what it throws at you, you’re not going down. You will drag your friends out of the hole of depression for the same reason.

I have no problem wearing a rainbow top or carrying the gay pride and bi pride and a-moral pride flag down the street, just as I have no problem stepping up and taking abuse, or protecting another getting abused for loving someone, or for rejecting judgmental societal constraints about property or vows.  I have lost friends to the bullies who hate the fact that they are different. There is nothing OK with anyone pointing the finger and judging a person and saying they are going to hell just for loving another person, or loving nice things, or breaking solemn promises or being dishonest.

I hope the coming generations will take it to heart that we are just like everyone else and I hope more people, LGBT and straight and owners of property and married people alike will take up the flag and stand up for those that get beaten down for loving someone or someone else’s things or refusing to be obligated to archaic things like the truth.

We fully expect that the particular author of the cited piece would endorse our editorial additions.  After all, if you reject the Almighty God, we are all “entitled” to believe in anything, and none is entitled to object nor gainsay.  And if lust can be morphed so as to placed in the category of legitimate and ethical expressions of  love, then nothing can be rejected as immoral or unjust or ethically perverse outright or in principle.

For homosexual advocates to maintain the slightest moral stricture over any human word, thought or act is oxymoronic. Or, alternatively, if they maintain even a smidgen of moral scruples over anything, then to refute their opponents they need to demonstrate why human sexuality is amoral in general, and homosexuality is moral, specifically.  In other words, they must prove satisfactorily what they assume and constantly assert to be the case. Their “case” and cause amount no higher than silly question-begging.

Taking Refuge in Vain Inanities

Over-Egging “Consensus Science”

It is often argued that the general consensus of scientists and the peer review process ensure the integrity of all scientific results and conclusions, and guard against faulty reasoning, over-extrapolation, poor methodology, and similar. . . . But . . . the way scientific research is actually undertaken reveals a very different story. 

Firstly, consensus should never be used to determine truth since this would be committing the logical fallacy of argumentum ad numerum.  Moreover, consensus  also seems to be applied rather inconsistently.  For example, many Christians accept the scientific consensus that the universe is 8-15 billion years old, yet those same Christians are usually vehemently opposed to the consensus that all life came about by naturalistic evolution. 

Secondly, history shows that the consensus has often been wrong–indeed, hopelessly wrong.
  Thirdly, as Kuhn points out, scientists do not start from scratch rediscovering all the currently known scientific facts and repeating all the experiments that lead to major new discoveries. . . . Rather, as students, they learn and accept the currently held theories on the authority of their teachers and textbooks.  This is indoctrination not consensus. 

Fourthly, much of the consensus is artificial and enforced.  Scientists have to choose which projects to pursue and how to allocate their time.  Younger scientists need to choose which research projects will lead to tenure, gain them grants, or lead to controlling a laboratory.  These goals will not be achieved by attacking well established and widely accepted scientific tenets and theories.  As a visiting fellow at Australian National University recently pointed out, many researchers feel that any new research which challenged or threatens established ideas is unlikely to be funded, and therefore, they do not even bother to put in an application.  Older scientists, on the other hand, have reputations to defend.  Thus Bauman concludes: “Whether we want to admit it or not, there is a remarkably comprehensive scientific orthodoxy to which scientists must subscribe if they want to get a job, get promotion, get a research grant, get tenured, or get published.  If they resist they get forgotten.”  [Andrew S. Kulikovsky, Creation, Fall, Restoration: A Biblical Theology of Creation (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications Ltd, 2009),  p.43f.]

To our mind, there is nothing sinister in this sociology of scientific knowledge.  It is the way all knowledge normally progresses.  What becomes sinister is when the existing orthodoxy or tacit consensus (to employ Michael Polyani’s construct) is over-egged to claim it therefore represents infallible and certain truth–as in, “X must be true because every reputable scientist agrees.”  The fallacy of circularity is blatantly to the fore in such tautological assertions.  Vain, ignorant, and foolish are those who find comfort or take refuge in such inanities.  

Historical Forces and Slippery Slopes

Slip Sliding Away . . . 

“Slippery slope” arguments can be true or false, valid or invalid.  In the public controversies over marriage, for example, slippery slope arguments have been deployed and serially mocked.  Yet they are proving to be true.  If one starts with the radical move in the eighties to legalise “no fault” divorce and then consider where we are now it is as plain as the noses on our faces that a devolutionary, downward spiral has been developing with respect to marriage.   There are strong forces within society that are driving this devolution faster and faster.  The concept of marriage is becoming so inflated that the institution will become more and more meaningless.  Almost anything and everything will end up qualifying as a marriage.

If someone had argued back then that it was the beginning of the end for marriage in society and that within a couple or more decades the parliament would be recognizing, legalizing, and sacralising homosexual “marriage” he would have been laughed out of the room as an idiot.  But in hindsight it turns out that the former signified the latter.  The slope has indeed been slippery, rapidly so.

The factor that makes a “slippery slope” argument true is when broader causative forces are at work.
  When cultures in general are integrating into the void  or coming out of it, for that matter, historical forces will be at work shaping and driving the culture either upward or downward.  A logical connection does not make a causative force in a culture.  People all too often think and act inconsistently and sporadically.  A causative force in a culture exists when churches, schools, media, literature, the wealthy, and politicians all join the fray.  Logic and argumentation in a certain direction will then become socially powerful.  One thing will lead to another because the historical and social forces are driving in one direction. 

Nevertheless, “slippery slope” arguments usually need careful qualification to be persuasive.  Philosopher and theologian, John Frame explains why:

A true and valid reductio must be distinguished from its fallacious imitators, one of which is the ‘slippery slope’ argument. A slippery slope argument goes like this.

‘If you take position A, you run the risk of taking position B;
position B is wrong,
therefore A is also wrong.’

Thus it is sometimes said that once one abandons belief in a pretribulational rapture, he runs the risk of denying the bodily return of Christ altogether, thus opening himself up to a thoroughgoing liberalism.

Or it is sometimes argued that if one accepts the textual criticism of Westcott and Hort, he runs the risk of denying biblical authority altogether.

Thus the slippery slope argument appeals to fear—to our fear of taking undue risks and to our fear of being linked with people (such as liberals), disapproved of in our circles, lest we incur guilt by association.

Often slippery slope arguments are buttressed by historical examples.  Such-and-such a theologian began by denying, say, total abstinence from alcoholic beverages, and five years later he abandoned the Christian faith.
Or such-and-such a denomination rejected the exclusive use of Psalms as hymns in worship, and twenty-five years later it capitulated to liberalism. . . .

In general, they prove nothing.

Usually, they do not rest on a sufficient statistical sample to establish even probable conclusions.  And they ignore the complexities of historical causation.

A denomination becomes liberal for many reasons, never just one. On the one hand, it may well be that rejection of exclusive Psalmody is in some cases at least a symptom of advancing liberalism. (I say that as an opponent of exclusive Psalmody, who nevertheless recognizes that people sometimes reject exclusive Psalmody for very bad reasons.) On the other hand, the denomination may be rejecting exclusive Psalmody for good reasons. This development may be quite independent of any trend toward liberalism, or it may bear a paradoxical relation to that trend. For example, the liberal trend may, for a time, help the church to break free of unbiblical traditions—God’s bringing a good result out of an overall evil development. (It could be argued that the development toward liberalism in the Presbyterian Church U.S., for example, enabled that denomination to take a strong stand against dispensationalism, a stand that to many nonliberals was a good thing.)

Thus not very much can be deduced from historical examples. They ought to make us think twice about what we are doing. They suggest possibilities, but they are never normative in themselves. —John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1987), 274-275.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

Faux Outrage

 Stupid Ignorant False Stuff

Regular readers of our blog will know that the New Zealand parliament is going to consider a bill to baptise homosexual relationships as marriage.  Protagonists have lined up on either side and public debate has been joined.  The leader of the Conservative Party, Colin Craig has asserted that homosexuality is a choice–an ethical and lifestyle choice.  Dismissing behaviourism, Mr Craig rejects the “I was born this way, therefore what I desire must be a human right,” meme.

This has outraged proponents of homosexual “marriage”.  It is amusing to witness the outpouring of splenetic indignation.  One blogger, David Farrar makes an earnest effort to re-frame Mr Craig’s position.  Mr Craig, apparently, is holding a “view”; he is not arguing from “facts”.  The flip side is the Mr Farrar and his cohorts purport to be arguing from evidence based, factual reality.  Using assumptive language, they portend that homosexuals are both born and made, and that homosexuals have no choice about what they are.  The upshot is that homosexuals cannot be condemned for their homosexuality any more than a human being can be condemned for sexual desires of the heterosexual sort.

Here is Mr Farrar in high moral dudgeon:

Chrestomathy

Damn All False Antitheses to Hell

D.A. Carson:

So which shall we choose?
Experience or truth?
The left wing of the airplane, or the right?
Love or integrity?
Study or service?
Evangelism or discipleship?
The front wheels of a car, or the rear?
Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge?
Faith or obedience?
Damn all false antithesis to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ.

—D.A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 234.

False antitheses are found everywhere amongst Christians as they seek to exercise an ungodly dominance over the Scriptures and reduce God’s revelation and the Christian faith to something they can control.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

>Fallacies and Those Who Glory in Them

>Hyperbolic Bloviation

Our vastly superior and excessively sophisticated state education system regrettably does not teach its pupils how to think or reason.  Such antiquated nostrums as logic are seen as old fashioned or too restrictive for the free flights of fancy that can be attained by a spontaneously combusting intellect operating at the peak of the evolutionary chain of being.  

As a consequence there is a king tide of ignorance, particularly amongst the “educated”. The poet e.e.cummings once “eulogized” the US President, Warren G. Harding as,  “The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors”.  Nowadays, almost everyone it seems in the chattering classes and the intelligentsia cannot put forward the most simple argument without an equal number of logical errors.   

In the recent horror of a deranged or evil person (the jury is still out on which) who attempted murder on a US Congresswoman and in the course of the crime successfully murdered six others, the chattering classes have been trying to find a scapegoat.  In order to pin blame on others–Sarah Palin, right wing extremists, the Tea Party movement, etc.–they found themselves breaking even the most fundamental precepts of logic.  Needless to say, most likely they are ignorant of  their ignorance.  

Arguably the most basic logical fallacy of all is that of “affirming the consequent”.  Would you trust or respect the argument of a person who reasoned as follows

“Dogs have four legs;
“That animal over there has four legs;
“Therefore that animal is a dog”?  

Yup.  That’s compelling.  Beyond reasonable doubt.  Now try this for size:

“Right-wing people have assassinated politicians; 
“Jared Lee Loughner (the Tucson assassin) attempted to assassinate a politician;
“Therefore, Jared Lee Loughner is a right-winger.”

There are lots of permutations on the fallacy:

“Some right-wingers favor the gold standard;
“Jared Lee Loughner favors the gold standard;
“Therefore, Jared Lee Loughner is a right-winger.”
(Hat Tip: Patterico)

As they say, ever let the truth get in the way of a “good” story.  In this case, never let reason stand in the way of hyperbolic excess. 

>Informal Fallacies

> Bulverism

Bulverism is a logical fallacy in which, rather than proving that an argument is wrong, a person instead assumes it is wrong, and then goes on to explain why the other person held that argument. It is essentially a circumstantial ad hominem argument. The term “Bulverism” was coined by C. S. Lewis.

Lewis explained bulverism as follows:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — “Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

Bulverism usually turns on a deliberate casting of suspicions upon the motives of your opponent, alleging that he stands to benefit in some way personally from the position or case he is making.  “Therefore”, the argument he is making must be faulty, because the one making it is self-interested.

Here is a classic example of the fallacy in full-throated roar, courtesy of Dr Nick Smith, Minister of ACC.  Smith has been challenged by surgeons who claim that the ACC, for which he is responsible, has been deliberately turning down surgery for accident victims on the grounds that their affliction is a result of old age, not an accident.

Here is Dr Smith’s bulveristic response:

Dr Smith warned levies would rise if ACC treated more cases, and said people should not be naive about the financial interests of orthopaedic surgeons pushing for more work to be paid for by ACC. He said 10 orthopaedic surgeons were paid more than $2.4 million each by ACC last year, including one who got $3.6 million. Figures included hospital costs, but he estimated the surgeons would have received half of that money. (NZ Herald)

Ad hominem “arguments”, of which bulverism is one, are often employed by those who are defensive, or too intellectually lazy to refute an argument and so play the man rather than the ball, or those feeling the heat and wanting to deflect attention elsewhere.  In all cases, ad hominem is a fallacy because it amounts to a gratuitous slur, not an argument. 

>Degenerate Discourse

>Shaky Ground

In the course of argument it is generally true that the weaker one’s case, the more likely spite and vituperation against one’s opponent will surface–quickly. Academics appear to be especially prone. Or so Theodore Dalrymple argues.

He observes that Richard Dawkins has recently experienced the syndrome.

Not every devotee of reason is himself reasonable: that is a lesson that the convinced, indeed militant, atheist, Richard Dawkins, has recently learned. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that he has learned it the hard way, for what he has suffered hardly compares with, say, what foreign communists suffered when, exiling themselves to Moscow in the 1920s and 30s, they learnt the hard way that barbarism did not spring mainly, let alone only, from the profit motive; but he has nevertheless learned it by unpleasant experience.

He ran a website for people of like mind, but noticed that many of the comments that appeared on it were beside the point, either mere gossip or insult. So he announced that he was going to exercise a little control over what appeared on it – as was his right since it was, after all, his site. Censorship is not failing to publish something, it is forbidding something to be published, which is not at all the same thing, though the difference is sometimes ill-appreciated.

The torrent of vile abuse that he received after his announcement took him aback. Its vehemence was shocking; someone called him ‘a suppurating rat’s rectum.’ He replied to this abuse with admirable restraint:

“Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, overreacting so spectacularly to something so trivial.”

Some would suggest that Professor Dawkins was experiencing a particularly poetic form of justice, since in his public career he has been known to hurl gratuitous insults, mockery, and scorn at his opponents from time to time, and imply they were lagging behind the higher stages of human evolutionary development, of which he considers himself an avatar. But we digress.

Dalrymple goes on to observe that vituperation appears to be particularly prevalent in internet discourse, and that he himself has suffered it.

For example, I received unpleasant abuse for articles I wrote about Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw. I am the first to admit that what I wrote was not emollient, indeed it strongly attacked both these figures to whom some people are strongly attached. But while I might have been mistaken in what I wrote, I do not think I am being partial in my own defence when I say that it was at least rational in the sense that it was based upon evidence culled from what they wrote. I quoted them at some length precisely to avoid the accusation of quotation out of context.

It is not necessary to repeat here what I said about them, but I shall give just one example. I pointed out that George Bernard Shaw never believed in the germ theory of disease (possibly the greatest advance in medical science ever made), regarded it as a delusion, and called Pasteur and Lister – two of the greatest benefactors of mankind, if one is prepared to admit that there can be such – impostors and frauds who had no idea of scientific method, unlike George Bernard Shaw, presumably. This was a preposterous, but not untypical, misjudgement of his, and one which he never recognised as such. Indeed, he went on re-publishing his libels on their memory until quite late in his life.

I suspect that he had that contrarian mindset that supposes that the truth must be the opposite of what everyone thinks, instead of the judicious mindset that supposes that the truth might be the opposite of what everyone thinks.

From the quality of the replies that I received, you might have supposed that I had animadverted on the moral qualities of the mothers of Latin American sons. No one ever wrote a reply (on these subjects, at any rate) claiming that I had misquoted them, quoted them out of context, misrepresented the totality of their work, overlooked their good qualities etc. I do not think I did these things, but still such replies would have been reasonable. No; I just received abuse, some of it unprintable and quite a lot of it vile.

Now, from whom did the bile eruct? Dalrymple says it was largely and particularly from university professors.

Indeed, much of the abuse, even the vilest, came from university professors. Almost to a man (or woman), they said that what I had written was so outrageous, so ill-considered and ill-motivated, that it was not worth the trouble of refutation. On the other hand, they thought its author was worth insulting, if their practice was anything to go by. I didn’t know whether I – a mere scribbler – should feel flattered that I was deemed worthy of the scatological venom of professors (not all of them from minor institutions, and some of them quite eminent).

What struck me most about these missives is the sheer amount of hatred that they contained. It was not disdain or even contempt, but hatred.

The question is begged as to why this should be. Dalrymple observes that prior to the internet he used to get critical letters, but few containing the venom expressed via digital electronic media. He suggests it has something to do with the immediacy of the internet. It is hard to sustain venomous ire while sitting down and writing a letter, which in the nature of the case takes longer and forces one to be more deliberate. The features of immediacy and instantaneous release, he suggests, help facilitate ad hominem bile in internet discussion. Maybe.

But one would have thought that the professional stock-in-trade of academics was to critique analytically and that, even if brief, academics who were supposed masters of their subjects and craft, would be both adept at and used to employing pithy rejoinders. But alas, it would seem not. Instead unremitting ad hominem appears to be the order of the day when academics post on the internet.

Dalrymple thinks that the immediacy and relative anonymity of the medium is to blame.

So it seems to me at least possible that easy access to public self-expression tends to make people more bad-tempered and ill-mannered than they would otherwise have been. It releases people from inhibitions, and allows them to breach psychological barriers. Even wit suffers, for it is far easier to insult than to think of a really damaging, but amusing, witticism. To write to Professor Dawkins that one feels ‘a sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails down your throat’ is easier than to explain succinctly why he is wrong, if he is wrong.

Moreover, the fact that one can vituperate using a virtual rather than a real address promotes such verbal intemperance.

But it seems to us that these features may exacerbate, but are not themselves the cause or fundamental explanation for the syndrome. Ad hominem and personal vituperation is the first preserve of weak argument and shaky rational ground. In general academia in the West has claimed for itself (and been granted) virtual infallibility. Having denied God, the West looks for infallibility and certainty elsewhere, and its intellectual elites are it.

As Frank Furedi and others have argued, it has turned to “experts” who are always clothed with the garb of intellectual academia. Conformity to group-think and consensus has replaced argument, debate, and critique as ways of doing business because of the place in society in which academics sit and the functions they are expected to perform. Infallibility and debate do not sit well together. Society prefers certainty, not argument, when it wants to know “what to do”. It therefore finds academic consensus much more congenial and consistent with its own narrative of the virtual infallibility of academic experts. It quickly becomes impatient with debate.

Academics, cloistered amongst group think and consensus, can inevitably find it difficult to cope with contrary views, which can quickly become typecast as blasphemous. Ad hominem, easily facilitated by the internet, becomes the response of choice. But what it betrays is that all the “learning”, all the “knowledge” is built upon marshy foundations. Repetition and reiteration has been masquerading as truth. When one’s familiar prejudices get exposed, vituperation is the reflexive response.

The outpouring of venom tells us far more about the true state of academia in the West than it does about the limitations of the internet.

>Global Warmists In Denial

>The Worm is Turning

It would appear that the global warming cheerleaders are in denial. They simply just do not get the significance of the leaked e-mails from the CRU. The award for the most lame apologia must go to Michael Le Page, writing in the New Scientist. Despite the fabrication of data (more on that below) Le Page assures us that we can be one hundred percent certain that the earth is getting warmer. Yes, one hundred percent. No room for doubt.

The leaking of emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, UK, has led to a media and political storm. The affair is being portrayed as a scandal that undermines the science behind climate change. It is no such thing, and here’s why.

We can be 100 per cent sure the world is getting warmer

Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked. Next spring, go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago.

Well, matey if that is the kind of “one hundred percent certainty” you are proffering, you are in deep trouble. The globe is recording record cold temperatures all over the place. But never let the facts get in the way of a good story. And if they do, well the CRU and its cabal has shown the way: make up data to fit the story. But Le Page goes on: “We know greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming.” Excuse me . . . how do you know?

Upon asking this question, the whole bogus case unravels faster than the Man of Steel on a good day. The entire global warming case rests upon a fallacy–the fallacy of “False cause”, otherwise known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which means after the event therefore caused by the event. Or, to put it another way, the fallacy is a confusion of co-incidence with causation. The mere fact that something occurs with or after an event does not establish or prove causation.

The “undeniable proof” offered by the warmists to establish that “greenhouse gases are the main cause of warming” is that CO2 emissions have increased under industrialisation and economic growth during the past two hundred years. At the same time, temperatures have allegedly risen. Therefore, the latter must be caused by rising CO2 emissions. QED. Bollocks. The argument is completely fallacious. If a boy goes out at sunset every day and beats his drum, then minutes later the sun goes down, is he entitled to conclude that the beating of his drum makes the sun go away? Of course not. Yet this is the quality of “argument” which warmists are trying to foist upon the world.

But poor old Michael Le Page has now been made twice foolish. Not only has he been sucked in by fallacious reasoning, he also has not yet grasped that the temperature data–that is, the base, non adjusted, non fabricated temperature data shows no warming at all over a hundred years. Not only is he busy beating his drum, but the sun is staying high in the sky. So there is not a shred of credibility left.

Now, moving on to the most important tree on the planet. Christopher Booker gives the best piece yet explaining the damning significance of one tree in Siberia. (Hat Tip: Fairfact Media)

Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed “the most influential tree in the world”. On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of “Climategate” – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest.

If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see. To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of “hockey stick” fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week’s Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

It is therefore vitally important that we should trust the methods by which these men have made their case. The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period). The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the “hockey stick” graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced “hockey stick” graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as “proxies” to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels.

Although McIntyre’s exposure of the “hockey stick” was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the “hockey stick”, by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC’s fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre’s criticisms.

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a “hockey stick” pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU’s studies, which led McIntyre to dub it “the most influential tree in the world”.

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU’s leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann’s procedure for the “hockey stick” (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre’s Climate Audit, known only as “Lucy Skywalker”. She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

In other words, what has become arguably the most influential set of evidence used to support the case that the world faces unprecedented global warming, developed, copied and promoted hundreds of times, has now been as definitively kicked into touch as was Mann’s “hockey stick” before it. Yet it is on a blind acceptance of this kind of evidence that 16,500 politicians, officials, scientists and environmental activists will be gathering in Copenhagen to discuss measures which, if adopted, would require us all in the West to cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions by anything up to 80 per cent, utterly transforming the world economy.

Little of this extraordinary story been reported by the BBC or most of our mass-media, so possessed by groupthink that they are unable to see the mountain of evidence now staring them in the face. Not for nothing was Copenhagen the city in which Hans Andersen wrote his story about the Emperor whose people were brainwashed into believing that he was wearing a beautiful suit of clothes. But today there are a great many more than just one little boy ready to point out that this particular Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

I will only add two footnotes to this real-life new version of the old story. One is that, as we can see from the CRU’s website, the largest single source of funding for all its projects has been the European Union, which at Copenhagen will be more insistent than anyone that the world should sign up to what amounts to the most costly economic suicide note in history.

The other is that the ugly, drum-like concrete building at the University of East Anglia which houses the CRU is named after its founder, the late Hubert Lamb, the doyen of historical climate experts. It was Professor Lamb whose most famous contribution to climatology was his documenting and naming of what he called the Medieval Warm Epoch, that glaring contradiction of modern global warming theory which his successors have devoted untold efforts to demolishing. If only they had looked at the evidence of those Siberian trees in the spirit of true science, they might have told us that all their efforts to show otherwise were in vain, and that their very much more distinguished predecessor was right after all.

Finally, Climategate has gone uber-viral on the web, but the MSM are largely in denial. It is the biggest story of a decade or more, and it is being steadfastly and studiously ignored. Nothing to see here, move on. Old news. Insignificant. Minor in the grand scheme, etc. Consider this piece by James Delingpole (Hat Tip: Maria at NZ Conservative)

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Al Gore has had to cancel a Copenhagen speaking event at which he had hoped to charge starry-eyed believers in his ManBearPig religion $1200 a piece for the privilege of shaking his hand, breathing in his CO2 and having his latest book inflicted on them.

Could those unforeseen circumstances have anything to do with Climategate?

I think so. Climategate is now huge. Way, way bigger than the Mainstream Media (MSM) is admitting it is – as Richard North demonstrates in this fascinating analysis. Using what he calls a Tiger Woods Index (TWI), he compares the amount of interest being shown by internet users (as shown by the number of general web pages on Google) and compares it with the number of news reports recorded. The ratio indicates what people are really interested in, as opposed to what the MSM thinks they ought to be interested in.

North explains:

Tiger Woods delivered 22,500,000 web and 46,025 news pages, giving ratio of 489. That is the “Tiger Woods Index” (TWI) against which I chose to measure a raft of other issues.

Here are the rankings:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

And lest anyone doubt how big this story is, now Sarah Palin has weighed in. On her Facebook page she urges President Obama to boycott Copenhagen. She totally gets it:

The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. I support Senator James Inhofe’s call for a full investigation into this scandal. Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.

She concludes (and if she goes on like this, we really ought to start thinking her of a serious candidate for next president: way to go, Sarah!)

Policy decisions require real science and real solutions, not junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a “sin” against the planet. In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to “restore science to its rightful place.” Boycotting Copenhagen while this scandal is thoroughly investigated would send a strong message that the United States government will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices. Saying no to Copenhagen and cap and tax are first steps in “restoring science to its rightful place.”

Yep. From your mouth to God’s ear, let us hope

>Sleeping Through Logic 101

>Extraordinary Ad Hominem

One of the sites we check most days is the very helpful Climate Debate Daily. Run by the folk who set up Arts and Letters Daily, it provides a great resource to keep up with the debate over climate change, with a representation of both pro and con articles and protagonists.

Every so often the site comes up with a pearler. George Monbiot writes a blog for The Guardian. He is an ardent climate change protagonist and warrior. One of the things which has been apparent for a long time is the tendency for the climate change folk to resort to ad hominem when dealing with opponents. We are certain that the other side is not guiltless in this regard. The standard ad hominem accusation is to accuse climate change sceptics of being paid by “big oil” so that sceptics are portrayed as prostituting propagandists, meaning that their arguments can be dismissed.

Ad hominem is said to be the first resort of the lazy mind. If you cannot deal with your opponents arguments, deal to your opponent’s person (education, motives, class, interests, etc) and by implication his arguments are dismissed. Monbiot recently came up with an exemplary presentation of the ad hominem fallacy.
He launched a three-pronged ad hominem attack upon his opponents, whom he labels “Climate Change Deniers.” There are only three kinds of Climate Change Deniers apparently.

The first kind is the psychologically weak or venal denier. This is the person who thinks that the burdens and threats of climate change are just too great to bear, or dealing with it is too disruptive to his lifestyle. This group is to be pitied and sympathised with. Their denial is a psychological disorder, nor evidentially or rationally grounded.

The second kind of denier belongs to a group of predominantly men (that will get the feminists swinging in behind), who are in their sixties or above (somewhat ageist, George, don’t you think), who are “not paid for their stance” (the blanket ad hominem of big oil prostitutes is wearing thin), who have achieved “a little post-retirement celebrity through well-timed controversialism”. Apparently this second group of deniers are little more than aging gadflies with too much time on their hands, who seek faux celebrity status. Clearly they and their arguments are not to be taken seriously.

Have you ever come across such a wonderful example of ad hominem as the following:

Then there is a smaller group of people – almost all men, generally in their sixties or above – who are not paid for their stance, but who have achieved a little post-retirement celebrity through well-timed controversialism. It has kept David Bellamy in the news, long after his wonderful career on television sadly (and wrongly, in my view) ended. It has lent more recognition to people like Philip Stott and Tim Ball than anything they published during their academic careers. It attracts adoring fanmail (from people in category one) for journalists like Christopher Booker and Melanie Philips. It permits men like Lord Monckton to indulge their fantasies of single-handedly rescuing humanity from its own idiocy. Their intellectual acrobatics are as blatant as that of the people in the third category, but they appear to be driven by vanity, not cash.

OK. So the first kind of denier is psychologically disturbed. The second group is driven by vanity. The third group are the traditional prostitutes who are paid by oil companies to militate against the climate change thesis.

Therefore, QED. Case over. Next please.

The climate change protagonists are arguing that on the basis of their belief in a coming devastation of the planet, mankind ought voluntarily to consent to unprecedented pain, suffering, self-imposed poverty, disease, and global human abnegation to avoid the greater harm of a warming planet. Surely this is so serious, either way, that it deserves careful substantial considered debate. Surely, Monbiot–one of the leading public protagonists in the UK for the cause–can do better than childish ad hominem against his opponents. It is not even advocacy. It is cheap misdirection and deception. If this is the best a leading public advocate can manage the climate change cause is in deep, deep trouble.

>Myth and Superstition on the Rise

>A Man Has Got to Know His Limitations

Absolute brute objectivity is a myth as far as man is concerned. Absolute rationality is an idealistic abstraction. It does not exist. Objectivity and rationality are always to be written in lower case: it is a necessary and inevitable consequence of being a creature, not the Creator.

Only the Living and Eternal God is absolutely and infinitely objective and rational. Infinite objectivity and rationality arise from God being omniscient—of His infinite knowledge of all things, including His knowledge of Himself. Being a creature, our knowledge is conditioned firstly by our constitution—by the way we are made. It is also conditioned by our finite limitations. Our knowledge, being limited, can never be absolutely objective nor rational. It will always be constrained and limited by what we do not know—and we do not know what it is we don’t know.

As Job said so eloquently, when we know all that we can know of God, we have merely touched the hem of His garment, the word we hear, although true, is limited and faint. None can understand His mighty thunder. (Job 26: 14)

Human rationality and objectivity, then, is a function of conforming our truth to the Truth which God has revealed to us. As we do this, we become more reasoned, more objective, more truthful.

But mankind has a third impediment. To these limitations of being, shared with all creatures, even the angels, we must add the corruption of sin. Since the Fall, objectivity and rationality are not only limited, but they are distorted by our sinful prejudices and predispositions. The Scripture characterises the Unbeliever as blind and deaf. All the thoughts and intentions of his heart are only evil continually. He pathologically resists God at every point and seeks to exclude Him from the universe. This is such a massive distortion of the truth, such a colossal deceit, that every thought of man is twisted and distorted in some degree by this Great Lie. As Jeremiah observed: “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

The Enlightenment promoted the myth of pure Reason—of definitive rationality as the handmaiden of Truth. Yet even a brief reading of the philosophers and men of letters of the Enlightenment quickly shows them to be people of enormous prejudice, reflecting the preconditioning of their time. Who can forget, for example, Rousseau’s myth of the Noble Savage. Or the appeal to the Laws of Nature and Reason to justify the Reign of Terror in France. Their much vaunted rationalism can be seen now as little more than propaganda and its apologia.

The sad reality is that every fallen Athenian culture regards as rational that which is merely widely held. The more widespread a prejudice is, the more reasoned and rational it seems to be. Each age in Athens succeeds the former, looks back and with contempt or with condescension on the ages which have gone before, and dismisses them as ignorant, prejudiced and irrational. Why? They had to be ignorant, because they believed in slavery. Or, because they were prejudiced because they thought the earth was flat, or the sun revolved around the earth. Or, they were irrational because they thought that white races were superior–and so forth.

But it turns out each of these former ages firmly believed that their positions were based on reason—profoundly so. They believed they were acting rationally—emphatically so. Just as the philosophes of the Enlightenment so believed, yet espoused so many things no longer given even a moment’s credence today.

This leads to the promulgation of Tertullian’s Law of Athenian rationality: in Athens, authoritative rationality is a function of social currency. In other words, the more widely held a belief, the more rational it appears.

Now, modern Athenians will be quick to claim that a belief can only achieve widespread currency if it is rational in the first place. They see this as the Great Contribution of the Enlightenment to human civilisation. Autonomous man, supposedly freed by the Enlightenment from cant, prejudice, and superstition, now is able to think truthfully, according to the facts—just the fact, baby. Thus, in such a climate, only those beliefs which are already rationally grounded, can and will win widespread currency.

Clearly, modern Athenians have not read much of the Enlightenment, otherwise they would never make such specious claims.

But consider the logical fallacy involved in this particular piece of irrational legerdemain.

If a belief is rationally grounded and proven, it will achieve widespread currency.
Therefore, all beliefs which are widely held today must be rational and proven.

The fallacy of affirming the consequent—a prime example of which is displayed above—is as irrational today as it always was.

If one were to take any dogma which has achieved widespread acceptance and currency in our day and question it, two things would almost certainly follow. Firstly, the questioner would be assailed as ignorant, irrational, unreasonable, primitive, etc. etc. Secondly, no-one would even bother to discuss the rational foundation of the popular dogma in defending it. The presumed rationality of modern dogma is beyond question, simply because it is widely held. There are some things too obvious even to bother to defend.

For example, consider the nature and tenor of the outcry if we were to make the following propositions in the public square:

The Lord created the heavens and the earth in the space of six days, by the Word of His mouth, out of nothing.

Life begins at conception: the fertilized egg is a human being.

There is but one God and the Lord Jesus Christ is His Messiah. All other religions, including secular humanism, are idolatrous and untrue.

Government enforced redistribution of private property is theft.

Of course the outcry and scandal would be prodigious. But the tenor of the objection is what interests us. Modern Athens sees such propositions as inherently ridiculous, stupid, foolish—irrational. Why? Because the opposing propositions are rationally grounded, and comprehensively argued? Not at all. They just appear more rational, by virtue of their being widely held.

Increasingly, Athenian society is becoming superstitious. It is dominated by ideas and beliefs that have little, if any, genuine rational foundation, but are believed beyond doubt, nonetheless. The ultimate proof of these propositions is a democratic one. “Everyone believes in x; no-one any longer believes y. Therefore x must be reasonable and true”

An indication of the just how superstitious and unreasoned modern society has become is provided by the febrile insistence that “the vast majority is senior and responsible scientists believe that earth’s climate is getting warmer.” The polling booth has replaced reason and truth. In such a climate, to prove your case you have to have the numbers. If you have the numbers, the rationality of the case is thereby most certainly demonstrated.

Of course this is completely contrary to the logic of scientific discovery. In principle, all it takes is one accurate contrary observation to call into question an entire edifice of universally believed theories.

Ironically, it is precisely the insistence by modern Athens that autonomous Man has achieved absolute rationality and objectivity, that seduces him so crucially to the willing acceptance of superstition and myth.

>Education on a Pale Horse

>Reductio Ad Educatum Rides Again

The fallacy reductio ad educatum is ubiquitous within Athens—no more so than at election time. Those who aspire to rule over us inevitably present their stock take on where Athenian society is currently to be found. Naturally, this leads to myriads of problems being highlighted for which solutions have to be found.

Ninety percent of the time (not an accurate measure, but a figure of speech, for the literally minded amongst us) the solution turns to some form of education. The reductio ad educatum is the fallacy which makes education the answer or solution to all ills and problems. It is one of the most widely deployed fallacies in modern Athens. It is such a pervasive part of the deceit of that religion that virtually no-one can see the fallacious nature of the argument any more. It is accepted as a truth beyond contesting—it is accepted, therefore, as a matter of religious faith.

A quick survey of the newspapers over the past two days serves to illustrate the point. Firstly, we turn to widely respected Athenian prophet, Colin James. He was describing the Achilles heel of the New Zealand economy (too much lifestyle and consumption debt, coupled with very low productivity) and was criticising Labour’s abysmal record in these matters. The government, he said, had been slow to focus upon the bulimic nature of the economy: when it looked in the mirror, the Labour government saw a fat, highly active economy, but it was the false mirror of the anorexic. Eventually the government began to wake up, but it was too late, according to James. He writes:

“Cullen and his colleagues came more slowly to infrastructure, savings and early childhood education and have not yet really focused on the under-3s, the critical formative years that create the education tail.” What is the education tail, you ask. It is the “long tail” of underperformers (read, failures) in our education system.

Get this!. The education system is a manifest failure and now has a long tail to prove it—which is a real worry given that, according to reductio ad educatum, as employed by Prophet James, the cause of low economic growth and prosperity is education, or the lack thereof. To solve this, what should society now do? Well, one hundred and forty years of free compulsory and secular education has not worked. NCEA is a dismal failure. Zoning is an obstruction. Adding two more years to compulsory education is putting ambulances at the bottom of the cliff.

But belief in the the reductio ad educatum fallacy remains unquestioned: with it, the Force is strong! Prophet James’s solution is to extend education to the under 3’s. Yes. Get them early. These are the critical “formative years.” And (state) education can, will, must make a difference in these years. It would be blasphemy to demur. A thousand curses upon the present government that it has failed to see this obvious solution to the problem of our fading economy. Next, when that fails (miserably) as it must, Prophet James will be telling us that education in-utero is where the action ought to be.

Let’s turn now to the problem of crime and punishment. National has released its long awaited corrections problem. What is at the heart of changing things for the better. You guessed it. Reductio ad educatum comes galloping to the rescue right on cue. The more extreme the societal problem, the more compelling the education fallacy becomes. National is promising to increase educational courses and programmes in prisons, focusing upon numeracy and literacy. The idea is that if prisoners are educated in the basics they are less likely to re-offend. But as a spokesman for Corrections Officers pointed out, all the educational opportunities in the world don’t mean a thing if people lack the inward resolve and motivation to learn.

So, nice try National. No doubt reductio ad educatum applied to criminals makes everyone feel better. Something is being done, after all. But here we get close to the heart of the problem. Athenian penology is always religious—in fact, it cannot escape employing overt religious motifs. Criminals must atone—that is, they must “pay their debt” to society. Moreover, criminals must be rehabilitated and reintroduced into society to become useful and productive members thereof. That sounds suspiciously like redemption and conversion. The Department of “Corrections” sounds a lot like parenting, discipleship, and sanctification. The fallacy of reductio ad educatum leavens the whole baker’s batch. This makes sense, because for Athens, education is salvation, pure and simple. To make people better, to redeem them, to save them you have to educate them. Education has become the Great Redeemer, the Saviour of mankind.

So, our sympathies to National. The prison system is indeed a mess. It is true that there is not one solution—but lots of small incremental changes. No one thing is the magic bullet. But what National is proposing remains naïve and superficial. To make progress, Athens needs to give up on its religious dogma which asserts that “man is intrinsically good” and that the causes of evil are extrinsic and environmental. It is this fundamental religious dogma which leads ineluctably to reductio ad educatum—that is, education is the key tool of social conditioning to remove external evil influences. Therefore, with education we can create utopia and solve all our problems.

Finally, in recent days, both major parties have trotted out their education platforms. Both parties plan multi-million dollar spend ups. Both are going to focus upon the school leavers who are currently “graduating” without any qualification. They leave with nothing more than a certificate for time served. Everyone agrees that this is a disgrace. Reductio ad educatum leads everyone to say that we will solve this problem by—wait for it—wait for it—yes, you guessed it, by giving them more education. That is, more of the same. Good idea, folks. We would never have thought of that in a thousand years. And it must be good, too, because it is going to cost millions.

Well, we can hear Athenian folk saying, “So, what’s your solution?” The response of Jerusalem is cautious and guarded. The response is given on a number of levels. At its most fundamental, the prophets of Jerusalem would say the solution to all these social problems is more Christians. If eighty percent of the population were faithful Christians, the vast majority of these problems would not exist. Christian parents are charged by God Himself to love, care, and nurture their children. They are obligated to educate them faithfully. There would be no “long tail” in such a society.

Such a phenomenon will eventually come to pass—but it will be by the Lord’s doing, not by Athenian manufacture or design. So, at root Jerusalem acknowledges that apart from Athens bowing the knee to the Lord Himself, we have no real solution to Athenian problems.

At another level, Jerusalem is aware of a deeper spiritual malaise in Athens that will not be solved painlessly. The ordinary pattern of our Lord’s government over the unbelieving nations of the world is that when a society sets its heart arrogantly against the Lord, He gives them up to taste the fruit of their ignorance and folly. And the taste is bitter indeed. It is when people find that their false gods have lied to them, deceived them, and damaged them that they can open their hearts to reconsidering the claim of Christ upon their lives. They can come to realise that even the “foolishness” of God is much to be preferred to the wisdom of arrogant men. When a culture has been humbled, its people often open their ears to hear what was once odious to them.

Therefore, Jerusalem knows that often times, when the hand of God is against a culture, and it is sinking under their weight of its own idolatry, there is little that can be done until the historical process is gone through. The role of Jerusalem is to be with Athens in its perturbation and ultimate collapse, and in humility sit with its citizens amidst the detritus of their once-proud-city and urge those who now have ears to hear the calls of the Saviour of the world.

But at another level still, it is the duty of Jerusalem to do good to all men, as we have opportunity. Now, this doing good to all men must be on Jerusalem’s terms, not in Athenian coinage. In this sense, we are not unmindful of, nor unmoved by, the intractable problems evident in Athens. So, from the framework of what we know about the nature of man and his fallen state, we may from time to time give some advice to Athens. Maybe some might listen and give heed.

Key principles of policy would be those that focus upon individual motivation, incentive, responsibility and accountability. A necessary, but deeply unpalatable corollary of Jerusalem’s world view is that you must let the willfully lazy, stubborn and incorrigible suffer the consequences of their actions, even to death. If someone wills not to work, he must be left to starve.

So, with the educational “long tail” for example, Jerusalem would suggest that those of school leaving age who have no qualifications be treated as responsible adults who must bear and suffer the consequences of their actions—whether for good or bad. We would suggest a five point plan:

1. People can leave school at any time without qualifications but thereby relinquish any rights to social welfare assistance of any kind for the rest of their natural lives—including superannuation.

2. People who leave without qualifications would have the opportunity to return once to special state-funded remedial schools at any time up until aged twenty, for two year courses that will focus upon basic literacy and numeracy. If students fail to achieve, then the first point will apply. Achievement would be nationally tested. State funding for remedial courses would cease at age twenty.

3. Employers would be entitled to employ any school leaver without qualifications for any wage during a defined period (until age 25)—all minimum wage standards would not apply in such cases. The only restriction would be that employers cannot “bind” such an employee—he would be free to go to another employer, offering more attractive employment terms. Once employed, the unqualified school leaver earns entitlement to social welfare assistance of all kinds, but automatically loses these, once unemployed—including any unemployment benefit. However, once an unqualified school leaver achieved basic literacy and numeracy skills, and achieved employment, the loss of social welfare assistance upon losing one’s job would not apply.

4. Impecunious, out-of-work, unqualified school leavers would be entitled to welfare from their families or extended families, or from charitable organisations, without restriction—but with no compulsory claim on their part.

5. Sicknesses, ill-health, or diseases related to malnutrition would not qualify for any public health support for such people, whatsoever—until such a person had graduated with basic literacy and numeracy qualifications and had a permanent job.

If such a plan were adopted, we confidently predict that there would be no education “tail” within Athens after five years. While there would be some short term social disruption and dislocation, people would quickly adapt. That’s what policies based on holding people responsible, coupled with facing consequences, and appropriate incentives, do.

But, we wryly admit that Athens is a thousand miles from even remotely considering such advice. So the fallacy of reductio ad educatum will remain entrenched and the education tail will likely get longer and larger.

>Intelligent Design and Primitive Irrationality

>Intelligent Design Theory is a Christian Cop-Out

There has been a frenetic controversy swirling around the legitimacy or otherwise of teaching Intelligent Design as an alternative to Darwinian Evolution in schools. Christians have argued that Darwinian Evolution is only a cosmogenic theory; there are other theories, equally plausible, equally able to marshal supporting evidence. Intelligent Design is one. Christians have argued for “equal time.”

Now this has a ring of reasonableness attached to it. Scientific inquiry is supposed to be open, rational, reasoned, objective, non-prejudiced, and neutral. Therefore, nothing could or should be excluded from the outset. Open minded inquiry would argue that one should follow the facts wherever they lead. Refusing to give “air time” to Intelligent Design in schools seems to smack more of prejudice and propaganda than honestly objective self-critical scholarship. The resistance seems downright unscientific.

The other side, however, will have none of it. Intelligent Design is unscientific by definition. In their telling of it, Intelligent Design means that one has to deny the evidence, give up on the scientific method, lay rationality aside. To incorporate Intelligent Design theories in schools would be like going back to the ignorance of the Dark Ages where superstitious prejudice suppressed reason.

This debate is one great big hoot. But it does betray two fundamental weaknesses in the Christian camp. Firstly, it shows a regrettable naivety on the part of Christians over what the state school system is all about. The state school system is essentially an extended secular humanistic propaganda machine. It represents the received wisdom of Athens—a City which is deadly opposed to Christians and the Christian faith. We will use the term The Academy to represent the entire academic—instructional complex of secular humanism. It is completely unrealistic and naïve to expect the Academy to give any air time to Intelligent Design or similar theories.

Secondly, it demonstrates a fundamental compromise, by Christians, of the Christian faith itself. Jerusalem is being untrue to itself if it looks to The Academy to grant it even a modicum of credence. Both world-views, while being at root respectively fundamentally very simple, are diametrical contra-polar opposites. Jerusalem asserts that all truth, knowledge, and rationality turns around and depends upon the Living and Eternal God. Truth is what God says it is. The Academy asserts that all truth, knowledge, and rationality turns around man. Truth is what man says it is.

In going to The Academy and asking for an audience, Christians are wanting the Christian world view to be assessed, judged, and determined by man. In do doing, they are accepting the world-view of The Academy. If The Academy could authoritatively determine the truth of Jerusalem, if it were to be countenanced for a moment, then it clearly proves that Christianity is false and a lie. If all truth is subject to man, and determined by him, then clearly the Christian world-view cannot possibly be true; truth cannot be what God says it is.

Thus, we must regrettably conclude that Intelligent Design theories, and the campaign to have them accepted within The Academy, while well-meant, are both naïve and an implicit, denial, at root, of the Christian faith itself. Intelligent Design theories, as constructed and pitched to The Academy, are indeed sub-rational and inconsistent, a kind of Unbelief itself. Insofar as they look for the mind of man to be the canon and measure of all truth, they fundamentally agree with The Academy’s world-view. It is indeed a return to Unbelieving dark ages. To this extent, The Academy is being true to itself, it is being consistent, in its lampooning of Intelligent Design and in its refusal to even consider for one moment Intelligent Design within its halls.

But this is not to say that Unbelief and The Academy has any credibility whatsoever. It is utterly and hopelessly bankrupt—intellectually, philosophically, and ethically. The Academy is one gigantic crock. The ignorance and contradictory blind prejudice of The Academy is far greater than any so-called medieval Dark Ages.

The Academy insists that the universe does not reflect Intelligent Design, but rather it is a brute (that is, unintelligent) chaos. At the same time, in the same breath, and with a straight face, The Academy not only wants to talk about rationality, order, structures, categories, laws, it uses these constructs to propound and describe its assumptions of a universe of brute chance. Breathtaking irrationality, inconsistency, and blindness.

What The Academy relentlessly suppresses—and it has to, for it is a truth most inconvenient—is that if it were actually true that there is somewhere in the vastness of the universe just one molecule or one particle or one entity that is truly random, then everything in the universe must be truly random and utterly chaotic in principle. All order is a mythical illusion. This has to be the case because order cannot withstand true chaos or brute chance. The least amount of true chaos breaks order apart and makes it meaningless, unpredictable and, therefore, ultimately unintelligible. This is what Chaos Theory, in part, has argued and demonstrated successfully.

But, The Academy has done far worse than that: it does not accept that somewhere in the universe is one a single particle of chaos—rather The Academy insists, from the outset, that the entire universe is grounded in brute chaotic chance. Yet it still insists upon its science, and its order, and its study, and its research—and insists still further that these things alone define and determine truth. And it wants to be taken seriously and have its self-claimed gravitas honoured and respected! Truly, The Academy represents the foolish babblers of our time.

The remarkable Mircea Eliade has given us reason to suspect that all Unbelief has been characterised by similar foolishness. This ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy of The Academy is not new. The bankruptcy of The Academy reflects the same motifs as the oldest primitive traditions of mankind.

Eliade has shown that one recurring motif of primitive religions is to believe in an all governing, all creating god, then over time gradually to banish that god out of frame, replacing it with contradictory deities because those constructs enable them to deal with the phenomenon of the world as it was actually experienced, and offer the promise of controlling the world. He writes:

. . . neither the religions called “primitive” nor those classed as polytheistic are ignorant of the idea of a god who is the creator, omniscient and all powerful. Yet we have only to look at things a little more closely to realise that such supreme deities enjoy hardly any religious worship. . . . These are not objects of worship: they are regarded as deities so remote as to be inactive, indifferent . . . in fact. . . .

There is no need to multiply examples. Everywhere, in these “primitive” religions, the highest heavenly being has declined in practical religious importance; he has withdrawn from human beings. He is remembered, however, and prayed to as a last resort, when all the petitions put up to other gods and goddesses, demons and ancestors, have been ineffectual. . . . .

(T)he divinities , who among the “primitives” are substituted for the Supreme Beings, are . . . divinities of fecundity, riches and the fullness of life; in short the deities who exalt and amplify life, the life of the cosmos—its vegetation, agriculture, herds and flocks—no less than the life of man. Their religious importance was due precisely to their strength, their illimitable reserves of vitality, their fecundity.

Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Reality (Glasgow: William Collins, 1957), pp 135—137

This spiritual and intellectual legerdemain, so characteristic of primitives, the motif of positing a supreme entity responsible for all things yet only to banish it in favour of narrowing down and focusing upon mastery of man over the natural world, is precisely evident in The Academy.

In so doing it has taken up this age-old, primitive, deceit. It has posited chance as the supreme and most fundamental force of the cosmos, responsible for all things—then, banished it from consideration, while it focuses upon man and his mastering of nature, in complete contradiction of the supposed fundamental cosmic force. The radical disconnection of these two things, even while both are held to be true, is the mark of the superstitious primitive mind. It is why irrationality and ignorance lies embedded in all that The Academy does and represents. It is why The Academy can be so credulous and manipulated and easily led. Superstitions lie at its roots; its trees of knowledge draw deeply from them.

What, then, has Jerusalem to do with The Academy of Athens? Precisely nothing. You cannot test truth while lying upon an irrational bed of self-imposed, self-contradictory deceit.

Athens remains seduced and transfixed by the myths and contradictions of ancient, pagan primitivism. Its Academy is a crock.

>The Mythology of Evolution

>We Don’t Believe in It Anymore
It’s an Illusion, It’s an Illusion . . .

No-one really believes the theory of evolution. Well, maybe a few isolated extreme sociopaths do. But for the rest of mankind, evolution is profoundly disbelieved.

Yet, it has a very useful function, nonetheless. Its utility is akin to Locke’s concept of the Social Contract. Locke was trying to justify the existence of limited and proscribed civil government. The original state of mankind—the state of nature—he argued, was one of no laws, no governments, no restrictions upon anyone’s rights. However, this proved to be unworkable, so mankind entered a Social Contract, whereby man voluntarily surrendered some rights in order to establish protections of property and life.

The Social Contract was a formal warranting concept—a philosophical notion—that gave legitimacy to civil government and its laws. No-one really believed, including Locke, that there was an actual time in the history of mankind where a universal human convocation was held and men decided to cede some of their rights to a civil government.

Evolutionism functions in our society in exactly the same way. No-one really believes it, but it is a useful fiction, because it places man at the top of the tree of being (which is rather nice) and it removes the idea of sin and judgment in the hands of an angry God (which is even nicer). It also justifies just about every libertinistic moral impulse or action imaginable (which is nicer still).

But no-one really believes it. Even the academic and scientific propagators and defenders of evolutionism are just going through the motions. They don’t really believe it either—except as a formal warranting philosophical concept.

We know that no-one really believes the theory, because no-one is prepared to stand up and advocate, much less live out, evolutionism as an ethic. No-one is prepared to be evolutionistic. At first glance this may seem rather strange. If someone were to say that they believed in Islam, one would expect that they would endeavour to live out their lives as an Islamic—in a manner consistent with the teachings of Islam. If they failed to do so, or disregarded the teachings of the Koran and Islamic traditions, we would quickly conclude that they were hypocritical, or they were really infidels (to use an Islamic category).

But for some reason, similar assessments are not made over evolutionism, its belief, and its practice. All of which leads to the conclusion that evolutionism is a myth of convenience.

How should an evolutionist be expected to live? We would expect him to hold up and seek to live out the ethic that lies at the heart of evolutionism—that the survival of the fittest is not only the greatest engine of progress, but that only by the outworking of this ethic, will life and existence be maintained. This would be a consistent and entirely reasonable position for an evolutionist. Now, of course, evolutionism is meaningless because the “survival of the fittest” is a tautology—something that is true by definition. But let’s not get side tracked on technicalities.

Evolutionists at the very least should be expected to ensure the survival of the species by destroying all threats, including threats from other creatures. Evolutionists should also, not only advocate, but be actively involved in the killing off of the weak to ensure that the strong are made stronger. If food is short, solve the problem by exterminating the overly-numerous mouths—that is what evolutionists should be advocating. The elderly should be terminated, or exposed so that they die off. This very act makes the living stronger. They are no longer distracted and dissipated by worthless concerns. For the true evolutionist, these things would be amoral—except that the process of terminating the weak both ensures the survival of the species, and ensures the progress of being from lower to higher life forms.

We are aware, of course, that some fundamentalist evolutionists have danced a merry jig trying to avoid these implications, which for some reason they find unpalatable. They have suggested that the evolution of mankind has reached such an advanced stage and man is such a higher life form that he has been able to turn away from the raw brute fight to survive by killing and destroying others. Man is so advanced on the chain of being that he has evolved into co-operative activity. Yes, the jig for these die-hard fundamentalist evolutionists is very lively and frenetically danced. Mankind is so advanced that he has been able to banish evolution. The doctrine that the survival of the fittest is necessary to enable a species, well, to survive has been retired.

But these fundamentalists surely could not object in principle if other human beings disagreed and were successful in terminating them. Such road kill would help ensure the survival of the species.

No-one really thinks and acts like this—which is to say that no-one really believes in the theory of evolutionism. The most die-hard fundamentalist evolutionists spend most of their time arguing that the process has actually stopped now—which is deeply and richly ironic. They can be dismissed as fatuous idiots. But what of the rest of the population?

Just as Locke and all the Contract theorists did not actually believe in the historicity of the Social Contract, so the vast majority of people today could not care at all whether evolutionism is actually literally true or not, or whether it actually occurred. Its value lies in what the theory justifies or warrants.

That makes evolutionism a pearl of great price for the Unbeliever. He will sell all that he owns to possess it, even, especially, and literally, his own soul.

>Fallacies of Argument

>The Fallacy of False Cause

We live in an ignorant and terribly uneducated age. Regrettably, propaganda and social engineering occupies a great deal of the curriculum bandwidth and has been substituted for true education and providing people the tools of learning.

One symptom of the affliction of widespread ignorance is the tolerance of logical errors or fallacious arguments. In public discourse people are now allowed to get away with murder.

One of the most common fallacies of our time is False Cause. It is simple. The co-incidence of two factors or events is taken as evidence or proof that the one causes the other. The fallacy lies in that mere co-incidence does not establish a causal relationship: causal relationships have to be proven, not asserted. How could anyone make such a stupid mistake? How could anyone be sucked in by such shoddy thinking? Millions, literally.

Consider the following fable to illustrate the fallacy and its folly.

Scientists in Loco Land, a small landlocked African country, had been studying the length of the days, and nights. They had taken innumerable observations of the time of sunset, and noticed that at certain times of the year, the sun set later each evening, and at other times of the year, it set earlier. This was indeed a puzzle.

They searched their cultural archives, and found that this phenomenon had been occurring for centuries and that many explanations had been put forward, none entirely satisfactory. However, they determined to solve the matter once-and-for-all. Therefore, they purchased some sophisticated scientific instruments, clocks and the like, and began to make some precise and more regular measurements.

They noticed that for months the sun went down earlier each evening. But, then, the results of their observations changed. Suddenly, after a period when the sun appeared to go down at around the same time, it then began to go down later each day. By the time six weeks or so had passed, the trend was irrefutable. The days were getting longer. But, what had caused the change?

There had to be something new, something different, which had caused the sun to go down later each night. It became a bit urgent. They began to fear that night time would disappear completely; the nation would not be able to sleep. Tempers would fray. Crime would rise. Huge social dislocation might occur. Some even suggested that they were facing the end of civilisation as they knew it.

Suddenly, the most eminent and respected of the scientists, had a Newtonian-apple moment. He was focusing upon what might be new, what might have caused the change in the time of sunset. A week or so ago, he had been wandering in the streets, thinking, thinking. At the time of sunset on that particular day, he noticed a small boy beating a drum. As the boy beat the drum the sun went down for the day.

He spent several days asking some questions, and found out that the boy had had a birthday recently, and his mother had bought him a drum. No-one else had one. It was a great hit. When was his birthday? About six weeks ago. And when did he beat the drum? He went out and beat it every evening as the sun was going down. Any other time during the day? No—just in the evening. It was the only spare time he had to play with his drum.

Excitedly the scientist rushing back to tell his colleagues. He had found the answer. The sun had started going down later each day, and almost to the day, that the boy had started beating his drum. The boy’s drumming was causing the sun to delay its setting. It had to be. It was the only new factor.

His colleagues were both ecstatic and humbled. They knew they were in the presence of greatness. Together they saluted their colleague, and nominated him for a Noble prize. It was duly granted, to much fanfare.

The fallacy of False Cause. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After the event, therefore, caused by the event. The sun set later after the beating of the drum; therefore the drum caused the later time of sunset. As you read the fable, no doubt many of you thought, how could anyone be so stupid. Precisely. Yet almost everywhere, on every hand, people are sucked in by this particular fallacy.

The fallacy of False Cause is a fallacy of presumption. It presumes a causal relationship from co-incidence of factors. The fallacy is ubiquitously on display in social and scientific research. People who eat pork are significantly statistically more likely to get heart disease. Ergo, pork is a cause of heart disease.

Maybe. Maybe not. The mere coincidence of the factors does not establish a causal relationship. It has to be proven to be established. Otherwise, it just remains an empty, unreliable, and shoddy presumption.

The biggest mother of all fallacies of False Cause is found in the debate over climate change and global warming. The global temperature is (was—it hasn’t risen since 1998) rising. Are there any “new” factors that might explain this phenomenon. Yes. Industrialisation has released significant “new” carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Human industrialisation is causing global warming. This claim is as fallacious and stupid as the claim about the sun and the boy’s drum—as it stands.

The mere co-incidence of the two factors does not prove causality. Guesses and hunches do not count. In order to be believed and accepted it has to be proven that man made carbon dioxide atmospheric release is the cause of global temperature warming. The mere observation of the co-incidence of the two factors being offered up as evidence that the one caused the other is a childish fallacy.

It is shameful that respected scientists and public figures are allowed to get away with such shoddy, primitive thinking. Instead of being lambasted, ridiculed, and shamed they are treated as enlightened prophets and guides. Such is the unenlightened decrepitude of our age.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After the event, therefore caused by the event. The Fallacy of False Cause. One of the most common fallacies of all in our superstitious, pseudo-scientific age.