Plotting Philosophy’s Future

By Richard Kamber
The Common Review

Fifty years ago, on May 7, 1959, the British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow presented the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University titled “The Two Cultures.” The gist of that lecture was that a wide and worrisome gap had developed in Western society between the sciences and the humanities. During and after World War II, Snow had helped conduct interviews of thousands of British scientists and engineers. When he asked his subjects what books they had read, their typical reply was: “I’ve tried a bit of Dickens.” Humanists, he discovered, were equally ignorant when it came to science. He surmised that they had about as much insight into modern physics as did their Neolithic ancestors. Snow put much of the blame for this gap on overspecialization in education. He worried that the house of Western culture had become so deeply divided that it was losing its ability to keep pace with Russia and China and to “think with wisdom” in a world of accelerating social change where the rich “live precariously among the poor.”

A different “two cultures” problem afflicts my own discipline of philosophy, and that is my subject here. But perhaps thinking about philosophy’s future offers us additional insight into the problem that Snow expounded.

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When nonphilosophers think about philosophy, they tend to think of it as the history of philosophy. They think of it as a succession of eminent philosophers—along with, of course, the theories those philosophers developed, the texts they wrote, and the movements they inspired. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the perennial favorites. After that, the lists vary according to taste and background, but there are some philosophers who seem never to get on these lists. I have found, for example, that a good way to kill conversations with nonphilosophers is to ask what they think of Willard Quine or Saul Kripke. Because Quine and Kripke are among the most influential American philosophers of the past fifty years, there is reason to wonder why they are not better known outside of philosophy.

One reason for their extramural obscurity is suggested by an imperious quip attributed to Quine, who is alleged to have said: “There are two kinds of philosophers, those who are interested in the history of philosophy and those who are interested in philosophy.” What is intimated here is that the history of philosophy is not really philosophy at all, and that those who pursue such a history are not really philosophers.

Quine knew full well that philosophy departments were expected to conduct research and teach classes in the history of philosophy, but he did not think that service of that kind had much to do with the proper business of philosophy—working out solutions to philosophical problems like, What is there? and, What can we know? In other words, he saw two cultures within philosophy: a can-do culture akin to mathematics and science, and a can-teach culture akin to the humanities.

As a humanist and historian of philosophy, I am tempted to dismiss Quine’s dichotomy as false. I am ready to point out that philosophy, unlike the natural sciences, is the custodian of its own history. Astrophysicists do not think it is their task to write histories of astrophysics. They relegate that task to historians of science—a branch of learning that belongs to the humanities. Philosophers, in contrast, are jealous guardians of this duty and, thus, of their own footing in the humanities. I am also disposed to argue that every chapter in the history of philosophy is an experiment from which we can learn valuable lessons. I am inclined to insist that retelling the story of philosophy can be a powerful way of doing and critiquing philosophy. But these objections may miss a deeper point. Perhaps Quine’s dichotomy should be construed, not as an imperious quip, but as a provocative way of raising an Aristotelian question about the telos—the good—of philosophy. Is the telos of philosophy to solve problems in the manner of the natural sciences, or is it to produce a rich succession of inspiring texts and ideas?

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The answer I would like to give is, “Both!” Unfortunately, both alternatives face significant difficulties.

The first alternative is compromised by the fact that, after 2,500 years, philosophers have not reached agreement on the solution to a single, central philosophical problem by means of philosophical methods or argument. Scientists, in contrast, have enjoyed spectacular success in reaching provisional agreement on a wide range of problems and in changing the face of the world with technological applications. I emphasize the word provisional, for agreement in science is always subject to revision when new evidence warrants. If you had asked astrophysicists twelve ago what the universe is made of, they would have said “matter and energy” and referred you to the “standard model” of particles and forces, plus gravity, to describe the details. Today, most astrophysicists will tell you that that ordinary matter and energy make up only about 5 percent of what there is. The rest, they now say, is dark matter and dark energy—elusive stuff whose origin and characteristics remain unknown. Again, this is provisional knowledge, but it is the best answer we can get now, because it fits the relevant data better than any previous answer does. To page back in the history of science for an answer one finds more congenial or inspiring would be foolishness.

The case with philosophy is very different. If you ask philosophers, “What is there?” you will get a multitude of competing answers—including, “It’s a matter of faith,” from Roy Clouser, in The Myth of Religious Neutrality, and Quine’s deflationary analysis, from “On What There Is,” “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” What you will not get is consensus, provisional or otherwise. Plato complained in The Republic that the quarrels of philosophers discredited the search for wisdom. Two thousand years later, René Descartes drew an even bleaker picture and set out to fix it: “As to philosophy,” he wrote, “it [has] been cultivated for many centuries by men of the most outstanding ability, and that none the less there is not a single thing of which it treats which is not still in dispute, and nothing therefore, which is free from doubt.”

Until a few decades ago, most philosophers nurtured the hope that a revolution in methodology or reforms in standards of practice could change this picture. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom Bertrand Russell accused of having “the pride of Lucifer,” claimed in 1921, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to have “found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems [of philosophy].”

Eleven years later, the English pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller predicted in Must Philosophers Disagree? And Other Essays in Philosophy that, if philosophers selected for their “open-mindedness, honesty, and good temper” were brought together for “thorough and systematic discussion” under conditions that encouraged mutual understanding and the working out of differences, “they could clear up and clear away a majority of the questions which cast a slur on Philosophy in considerably less than . . . five to ten years.”

Philosophers today are far more skeptical about the chances for philosophical consensus. Few think that agreement on central problems will ever be realized, and some declare openly that philosophical problems are unsolvable (Hilary Putnam, in Realism with a Human Face) or at least unsolvable for human brains (Colin McGinn, Problems in Philosophy).

Given philosophers’ failure to reach agreement and the erosion of hope that this might one day change, the second alternative seems all the more appealing. If the telos of philosophy is to produce a rich succession of inspiring texts and ideas, then it may be a plus that the ingenious worldviews and critical insights that philosophers have developed over the centuries don’t converge. Aristotle’s teleological worldview fell from favor a long time ago, but it remains a majestically coherent way of thinking about ourselves and the world we inhabit. George Berkeley’s arguments that one cannot prove the existence of material substances have never been decisively refuted—not even by Samuel Johnson’s petulant kicking of a rock. But practically no one today accepts Berkeley’s conclusion that all that exists are minds and ideas.

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When seen from this angle, the beauty of philosophy is very much like the beauty of poetry. I don’t share John Milton’s theology—though I am sometimes tempted to believe that Satan invented gunpowder—but I am happy to share the world he envisioned. Milton’s world is a kind of refuge, a place where the ways of God and the woes of man are united in poetic intelligibility.

Sometimes I like to slip into Franz Kafka’s world, a nightmarish warren in which earnest people strive in vain to get on with their lives in the face of hopeless odds and cosmic silence. Kafka consoles me for having to commute on the New Jersey Turnpike. I also like to roam James Joyce’s Dublin, where microcosm becomes microcosm and the mundane is transfigured into the mythic. Each of these worlds is remarkable in its own right, but it would be foolish to ask which represents the consensus of poets or the best answer to date in light of relevant evidence.

So why not treat philosophy the same way? Jean-Paul Sartre is among my favorite philosophers. At a time when other philosophers were trying to dissolve the problem of consciousness by reducing it to something else, Sartre put it at the center of his philosophy. In his most important work, Being and Nothingness, he called consciousness Nothingness (le Néant) to emphasize that it is a nonsubstantial being that can exist only as a revelation of something other than itself. What flows from this is a rich worldview that includes, among other things, a radical theory of free will and an original framework for psychoanalysis. Sartre’s world is as atheistic and pessimistic as Milton’s is theistic and hopeful. He closes the main body of Being and Nothingness with these words: “Thus the passion of man is the opposite of that Christ, for man loses himself as man so that God can be born. But the idea of God is contradictory, and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.”

Now, as much as I admire the gritty originality of Sartre’s picture of the world, I find it unconvincing in many respects. I doubt the usefulness of treating consciousness as its own kind of being. I am not convinced that human beings have as much free will as Sartre claimed. I find his psychoanalytic theory naive. I don’t think the concept of God is contradictory. And I believe the pessimism of Being and Nothingness had more to do with temper of the times—the darkest days of World War II—than with anything basic to Sartre’s understanding of the human condition. Sartre himself confirmed this by turning his pessimism into optimism after the liberation of Paris. (His best-known repudiation of his pessimistic assessment of the human condition was a lecture he gave at the Club Maintenant on October 28, 1945, titled “Existentialism Is a Humanism”—that lecture was published a few months later and has since become a classic.) Today the gloominess of Sartre’s writing before 1945 is more likely to elicit smiles than shudders. Perhaps, nothing illustrates this more cheerfully than Danny Shanahan’s 1991 New Yorker cartoon “The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to his Mother.” A stocky Madame Sartre stands before an empty rural mailbox. A balloon shows us her thoughts: “Sacre bleu! Again with the nothingness, and on my birthday, yet!”

I have talked about Sartre in some detail as a way of illustrating my own comfort with looking at philosophy through the lens of history and appreciating the power and originality of individual philosophers without worrying about consensus on the solution to philosophical problems. I must confess that I have been looking at philosophy this way for a long time. I started college as a physics major, but after causing a nasty explosion in a chemistry lab, I was counseled to seek a major in which I was likely to do less harm. Philosophy seemed like a safe haven, especially if one stuck to the task of studying and teaching the ideas of eminent philosophers rather of trying to solve philosophical problems.

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As the years went by, I realized that you can take the lad out the lab, but you can’t take the lab out of the lad. I never lost my interest in science or my reservations about the ability of philosophy to secure knowledge of the world through methods independent of empirical research. Luckily, my style as a teacher was to celebrate what was best in each philosophical text, and my duties as a dean insulated me from thinking very deeply about anything. But things began to unravel several years ago, when I started to write the book Why Philosophers Can’t Agree. It occurred to me that my historical outlook embodied a historical distortion. One may treat philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes as akin to great poets, but that is not how they saw themselves. They wanted to answer philosophical questions and to do so in ways that would be persuasive to anyone who was willing and able to follow their arguments. In essence, they agreed with Quine that the telos of philosophy was to solve its problems rather than to celebrate its history.

So the second alternative cannot stand on its own. To do justice to the history of philosophy, we need to acknowledge the priority that nearly all celebrated philosophers have given to problem solving and try to explain why they have failed to reach agreement. My own explanation for the persistence of philosophical disagreement has multiple facets, but I shall mention only two. One is that philosophers often strive to acquire knowledge with characteristics that may be impossible for humans to obtain: knowledge that is categorical, essentialistic, and necessarily true. Another facet is that philosophers lack a process for discarding theories.

Stephen Jay Gould, who was both a biologist and a historian of biology, observed in The Mismeasure of Man, “Science advances primarily by replacement, not by addition. If the barrel is always full, then the rotten apples must be discarded before better ones can be added.” Scientists, unlike philosophers, rely on the testing of empirical predictions extracted from their theories to help them reach agreement on what theories to discard. The process is sometimes messy, and its implementation varies from one science to another, but it works surprisingly well.

Philosophers are not blind to their lack of a comparable discarding process. They joke among themselves about the dean who was chiding the physics department for spending too much money on lab equipment. “Why can’t you be more like the math department?” she asked. “All they ask for are pencils, paper, and wastebaskets. Or, better yet, why can’t you be like the philosophy department? All they ask for are pencils and paper.”

Philosophers generally rely on reasoning and intuition to debate the relative superiority of philosophical theories, but they have never succeeded in developing a process that commands consensus on which theories must be removed from the apple barrel of provisional knowledge and tossed into the wastebasket of history. Perhaps the closest they come is by tacit agreement that some theories are no longer interesting.

Is my explanation surprising? For many philosophers today, it may seem little more than a confirmation of the truism that philosophy isn’t science. But the methodological chasm between philosophy and science, now so familiar to us, is the culmination of a fissure that was still being formed a century ago. It is worth noting that more than 25 percent of Aristotle’s extant writings are biological treatises and heavily empirical in content. Descartes, who was best known in his own day as a mathematician and physicist, dissected animal carcasses to study the interaction of brains and bodies. The arch experimentalist Robert Boyle wrote essays on moral philosophy. David Hume subtitled his Treatise of Human Nature: “Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.” Had Immanuel Kant died before he wrote Critique of Pure Reason, his most original work would have been his essays in astronomy. Adam Smith was influential as an ethicist, and John Stuart Mill as an economist. William James was trained as a medical doctor and helped found modern psychology. His celebrated treatise The Principles of Psychology (1890), was used as a textbook in both psychology classes and philosophy classes.

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Is consensus in philosophy possible? I believe philosophers could achieve agreement on at least some of their central problems, if they were willing to formulate theories that yielded predictions as testable as those in science. How this might work in practice has barely been explored, but a new movement called experimental philosophy has suggested some promising steps. Philosophers often appeal to intuitions as critical links in their arguments, but they seldom explain what intuitions are or why we should rely on them. Experimental philosophy borrows techniques from experimental psychology to gather systematic data on philosophically interesting intuitions, such as what counts as knowledge or under what circumstances a person is morally responsible. It takes armchair pronouncements about what is obvious to all or natural to believe and tests them against the reported intuitions of actual subjects. It sets up experiments that are designed to discover whether variations in intuitions correlate with contingencies such as a subject’s cultural, linguistic, or socioeconomic background.

One of the fringe benefits of experimental philosophy is that it lends itself to student participation. Last fall, I asked the students in my freshman seminar “Morality, Mind, and Free Will,” to join me in developing a survey designed to test John Stuart Mill’s thesis on qualitatively superior pleasures. In Utilitarianism, Mill contends that it is better to be a dissatisfied human than a satisfied pig, better a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool. In defense of this thesis, he cites the “unquestionable fact” that those who have experienced both prefer the higher to the lower. He says, “No intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.” But do these preferences belong to a category of unquestionable fact? My students and I found that the preferences collected by our survey were far more diverse and ambivalent than Mill predicted.

An intriguing question for me is whether philosophers would be willing to let their theories be discarded if those theories yielded false predictions about the intuitions of appropriate subjects. Would an aesthetician be willing to give up a theory of art if it turned out that artists and art professionals had intuitions incompatible with the theory? Clive Bell argued that William Powell Firth’s popular painting The Railway Station was not art because it lacked “significant form.” Would Bell have been willing to give up his theory if painters, museum curators, and art historians found Firth’s painting to be a work of art?

There is considerable interest at present in the naturalization of philosophy and a spirited debate growing about the fruitfulness or futility of seeking wisdom from an armchair. Many philosophers regard the very idea of trading the autonomy of philosophy for the promise of gaining sciencelike agreement as a Faustian bargain. But I think they overlook the riskiness that has always attended originality in philosophy and underestimate the toughness of philosophy’s soul. At the very least, an earnest effort to bridge the methodological gap between science and philosophy would be a thrilling experiment. Admittedly, not all experiments are successful. But this one might open a new chapter in the history of philosophy and help draw cognitive scientists into new areas of fruitful collaboration with philosophers.

Unlike C. P. Snow, I have not said much about the drawbacks of an overspecialized and illiberal education, but a moment’s reflection should make some of those drawbacks obvious. How can we expect financial executives to behave responsibly when they turn a blind eye to economic history and can’t—or won’t—recognize a bubble that is about to blow sky high? How can we expect the citizens we educate and the governments they elect to think with wisdom about turmoil in the Islamic world if they know nothing of the religion, cultures, and history of that world? How can we expect our graduates to exercise good judgments about energy conservation or environmental protection if they lack basic scientific and technological knowledge? Of course, specialization is indispensable to the functioning of a modern society, but it needs to be leavened with liberal learning if we are to grasp the problems of our time in historical perspective and solve them with a sense of proportion. If helping solve some of these problems is to become part of the charge of philosophy, then experimental philosophy poses at least one way out of the conundrum of nonconsensus, the seemingly perpetual state of disagreement that has afflicted the discipline since its beginnings.

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Editor’s note: Kamber delivered an earlier version of this essay as the presidential address at the Association for Core Texts and Courses annual conference in spring 2009. The association is an international, professional organization that seeks to advance liberal education through the use of core texts. Its Web site is www.coretexts.org.

An Economic Agenda for the GOP: Republicans need to be pro-market, not pro-business

By Luigi Zingales
City Journal

For 30 years, the Republican Party dominated American political life, winning five of the seven presidential elections before 2008. But the GOP has taken its lumps of late, culminating in its loss of Congress in 2006 and the White House last November. As the party suffers not just from a leadership vacuum but from considerable internal division, its future direction is unclear. This much, however, is certain: as America struggles to emerge from a financial crisis, any renewal of the Right will require the Republicans to rethink their approach to the economy. An agenda focused chiefly on tax cuts, as the Republicans’ has been since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, is no longer enough.

In 1980, Reagan won the election by attracting a substantial portion of Democrats with three simple ideas. First was the fight against the Soviet Union. Second, the battle against the excesses of the state: “Government is the problem, not the solution,” Reagan famously said. Third, and most relevant to this discussion, was an overarching faith in economic growth. Growth improves everyone’s well-being, lifting the underprivileged from poverty and eliminating the need for costly fiscal redistribution. With growth as the objective, a deep cut in tax rates for higher-income people was not only justifiable but necessary, because it would increase the incentive to work and thus foster productive activity.

Lower taxes became a winning political weapon for the Republican Party—all the more so, perhaps, because the cuts weren’t accompanied by painful reductions in public spending. Fiscal deficits, traditionally unacceptable to conservatives, had even become welcome to the Right, which regarded them as a way to “starve the beast.” By burdening the state with debts, the thinking went, we could reduce its ability to expand and thus the danger that it could suffocate the economy.

In 1980, when the highest marginal income-tax rate stood at 70 percent, this economic platform was extremely attractive, as were Reagan’s other key ideas. The country had just seen a decade of low growth and high inflation, defeat in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the humiliation of the American hostages in Tehran. It was ready for change. An entire generation adhered to the Republican Party, forming a majority so solid that it permitted George W. Bush to be elected president 20 years later.

The success of the Republican platform went well beyond the voting booth, of course. The war against the evil empire brought the collapse of Communism and the democratization of the Soviet Bloc countries. During the Reagan years, the battle against the state led to a negative real growth rate in nondefense public spending. Deregulation freed the economy from excessive constraints and, together with tax cuts, sparked enormous entrepreneurial and creative forces. A golden era of economic growth began in the early eighties and continued, aside from a few minor recessionary interludes, until 2007—a quarter-century of unparalleled prosperity. After the Reagan economic reforms kicked in, the United States grew by an average of 3 percent each year, against Germany’s 1.9 percent, France’s 2.1, and Italy’s 1.8.

Not only did this revolution allow the U.S. to outpace Europe in income and productivity; it also transformed the country from a manufacturing economy into an innovative, high-powered service economy. Today, America does not produce iPhones, but it generates the technology and the design that permit a piece of plastic to sell for $300. It does not manufacture microchips, but it creates the technology that lets some wafers of silicon sell for thousands of dollars apiece. It does not build computers, but it develops the operating systems that run them. This transformation has enabled the United States to face the competition of emerging countries from a position of strength.

Yet today the Republican brand, so successful for over two decades, has lost some of its luster. In part, it’s simply the curse of success. The war against the evil empire has been won. Taxes were substantially reduced. The battle for deregulation has achieved many of its main objectives. Deregulation was a cry of freedom that most Americans supported back when Chicago banks couldn’t open branches in southern Illinois—let alone in other states; when a truck had to obtain a permit to transport merchandise across state borders; and when a government agency decided the prices of commercial flights. But now that these restrictions are only a distant memory, the public may see further deregulation as unnecessary, or even as a cover for the financial lobby, rather than as a symbol of freedom.

In part, too, Reagan’s platform lost its appeal because the Republican Party frequently betrayed it. How can Republicans effectively campaign against big government when the size of government increased by 33 percent during President George W. Bush’s first term, the largest increase in federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson? How can Republicans portray themselves as free-market paladins when Bush’s last secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, orchestrated the most massive state intervention in a Western economy since François Mitterrand’s nationalization of the French banking system? The party has much to do before it regains credibility on this score.

The Republican approach has also lost traction because the situation of Americans changed. By juxtaposing his faith in the American dream to Jimmy Carter’s portrayal of American malaise, Reagan captured the hearts of traditionally Democratic blue-collar workers who believed that with hard work, every generation would enjoy greater prosperity than the previous one. But this dream has materialized only in part. Though American GDP has doubled in real terms over the last 25 years, median real income has grown by only 17 percent. While the richest 1 percent of the population has almost tripled its real income and the richest 0.01 percent has more than quintupled it, the bottom 10 percent has increased its income by only 12 percent. While in 1980, an average high school graduate earned 26 percent less than a college graduate, in 2005 this gap had grown to 38 percent. The blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” are among those struggling the most.

America’s transition to a service-based economy is one reason for its growing income inequality. A country specializing in manufacturing needs many high-quality (and well-paid) workers. By contrast, a service economy can succeed with a relatively small number of geniuses who design devices like the iPhone and earn millions, while less educated workers have fewer opportunities to make a good living.

Ironically, the relatively slow increase in American workers’ wages also results, in part, from the success of the American economic model throughout the world. In the first three quarters of the twentieth century, companies operating in the United States enjoyed unique advantages: a well-educated workforce that shared pro-market values and a government sensitive to the will of the people. Much of the rest of the world was run by dictators, torn by ideological conflicts, and populated by illiterate or semiliterate people. American companies dominated easily, and American workers shared in the prosperity that came from their privileged position.

Over the last 30 years, however, these values have spread around the world. Communist countries and autocracies have become democracies. Generalized education has become the rule. And much of the world has embraced basic market principles. America has succeeded in nation-building after all—not by force, but through example. The only unfortunate consequence of this otherwise happy story, which has brought greater prosperity across the globe, is that the comparative advantage of U.S.-based production has declined, and this has put downward pressure on American workers’ wage growth.

Many Americans could not help but feel disgruntled at such developments. Until recently, though, they could console themselves with the robust capital gains on their home-equity and retirement accounts. Unfortunately, the financial crisis has destroyed this comfort, too, creating significant discontent. In a survey taken in December 2008, 60 percent of Americans declared themselves “angry” or “very angry” about the economic situation.

This anger is affecting political decision making. In September 2008, when Congress voted against the first version of the Paulson plan, it did so in response to the anger pervading the country. This past March, the House of Representatives approved a 90 percent tax on AIG bonuses for the same reason. And when President Obama contradicted his advisors and condemned the bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch executives, he, too, was responding to widespread anger. The question is not whether this populist pressure will have a strong influence on policy decisions, but how: Will it work to destroy, or to improve, the market system that has brought so much well-being?

If Republicans ignore popular anger, as the party establishment did last autumn, they leave a powerful and potentially disruptive force in the hands of Democrats. The majority of the Democratic establishment does not believe in the American dream, in the importance of providing incentives for economic growth, or in the market as the best mechanism to allocate available resources. The Democrats could channel popular anger into protectionism, 90 percent tax rates, and onerous new market constraints.

In Republican hands, though, populism could become a strong force for positive change. At the beginning of the twentieth century, facing similar conditions of rising income inequality and popular anger, President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, approved a series of fundamental reforms that turned the United States into a modern country. From creating the Food and Drug Administration to trust-busting, Roosevelt used public anger to counterbalance the power of large companies (and monopolies) and create a more efficient and popular form of market capitalism.

The Republican Party today must follow a similar strategy, updated for present circumstances. It has to move from a pro-business strategy that defends the interests of existing companies to a pro-market strategy that fosters open competition and freedom of entry. While the two agendas sometimes coincide—as in the case of protecting property rights—they are often at odds. Established firms are threatened by competition and frequently use their political muscle to restrict new entries into their industry, strengthening their positions but putting their customers at a disadvantage.

A pro-market strategy aims to encourage the best conditions for doing business, for everyone. Large banks, for instance, benefit from trading derivatives (such as credit default swaps) over the counter, rather than in an organized exchange: they can charge wider spreads that way, and they can afford to post less collateral by using their credit ratings. For this reason, they oppose moving such trades to organized exchanges, where transactions would be conducted with greater transparency, liquidity, and collateralization—and so with greater financial stability. This is where a pro-market party needs the courage to take on the financial industry on behalf of everyone else.

A pro-market strategy rejects subsidies not only because they’re a waste of taxpayers’ money but also because they prop up inefficient firms, delaying the entry of new and more efficient competitors. For every “zombie” firm that survives because of government assistance, several innovative start-ups don’t get the chance to be born. Subsidies, then, hurt taxpayers twice. A genuinely pro-market party would have resisted more vigorously the Wall Street bailouts, in line with popular sentiment.

And a pro-market approach holds companies financially accountable for their mistakes—an essential policy if free markets are to produce sound decisions. A pro-market party will fight tirelessly against letting firms become so big that they cannot be allowed to fail, since such firms may take risks that ordinary companies would never dream of (see “ ‘Too Big to Fail’ Must Die,” Summer 2009).

Being pro-market does not mean being heartless. For markets to work properly, inefficient firms must be allowed to fail, but their workers don’t have to suffer unduly. In fact, it’s a market imperative that they don’t: the harsher their pain, the more politically feasible it becomes to subvert the market system to alleviate that pain. In Italy, for example, where unemployment insurance does not exist, governments frequently bail out large firms, fearing televised images of massive protests and the political cost of thousands of families without financial support. (The mechanism is so automatic, in fact, that some firms hire more people once they get into trouble.)

Thus a wise pro-market party understands that any strategy is only as good as it is politically sustainable. Markets enjoy political support primarily because of the well-founded belief that they do a better job of providing goods and services than any other arrangement. This conviction often weakens during major crises like the current one. So a pro-market party should favor a robust safety net—for people, that is, not companies. Of course, this safety net should be run on market principles as much as possible. For example, unemployment insurance should retain incentives to look for work, and the health-insurance industry should be opened up to competition. But defenders of markets cannot ignore the importance of providing such security for citizens.

They also cannot ignore the nation’s growing income inequality, and the loss of confidence, among a substantial part of the population, that the future will be better than the past. Revolting against the devastating effects of technological change, early-nineteenth-century British workers destroyed mechanized looms. Modern Luddites don’t need to resort to violence: they can resist progress by supporting protectionism and regulation. And they will do so, unless they’re given a stake in the brighter future of technological progress—retraining for new jobs, sending their children to better schools, and so on.

The knee-jerk Democratic reaction is to give these poorer citizens entitlements disguised as rights: the right to a job, the right to health care, the right to appropriate a fraction of someone else’s income. The Republican response should focus on providing opportunities. Parents should have access to good schools for their kids, regardless of their financial means or where they live. The best way to deliver on that promise is through a voucher system. Students should have better access to loans to finance their education because everyone gains from a better-educated workforce. The unemployed should have access to retraining, which can also be designed through a voucher system. Health care should be available in the marketplace; the current system, in which only employers get a tax deduction for health insurance, reduces labor mobility and increases the cost of becoming unemployed.

In the end, it’s not only the Republican Party that would benefit from these policies: it’s America and the world. The United States has been the inspiration for all who believe in freedom, both political and economic. Its identity, however, is predicated upon maintaining a political consensus that supports market values. Growing income inequality, the financial crisis, and the perceived unfairness of the market system are undermining this consensus.

Today, the Republican Party is the best candidate to carry the pro-market flag. Being in the opposition, it is less subject to the lobbying efforts of big business, which always sides with whoever is in power. The party’s current leadership vacuum and intellectual disorientation create the perfect conditions for renewal and the emergence of a new agenda. And the nation’s social tension creates a sense of urgency. Above all, the Republican Party has a moral obligation to support markets. The United States and the world are threatened by protectionism, state intervention, and dirigisme. If Republicans don’t stand up for markets, who will?

Luigi Zingales is the Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the coauthor of Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists.

Preaching to Psychologists

By Allen Yeh
Scriptorium Daily

A few weeks ago I was asked to be the speaker for the chapel of Biola’s Rosemead School of Psychology. Talk about being out of my element! The most I know about this field is my one Pastoral Counseling class I took in seminary. However, if there’s one thing that psychologists understand, and all Christians understand as well, it’s suffering. Suffering is at the heart of our faith—it is right there in the cross. When we talk about Christ’s “passion,” that word “passion” means suffering. So I chose a great text that talks about suffering, from James 1:2-12.

This is a summary of what I preached:

I want to address you from James 1. James is one of my favorite books of the Bible, and I think that as I grow older, its applicability continually increases. I think while it can be read by young Christians, it is really meant for those who are maturing. It takes on tough topics like the tension between faith and works (“faith without works is dead”), taming the tongue (“the tongue can be used for praising and cursing”), and true religion (which involves both social justice and personal holiness). All of these involve nuance and discernment to properly understand them. They are “both/and” rather than “either/or,” they are that tough middle way rather than the easy trite black-and-white Sunday School answers that we like to give. Let’s take a look at our text, then:

(2) Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, (3) because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. (4) Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (5) If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. (6) But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. (7) That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; (8) he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. (9) The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. (10) But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. (11) For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business. (12) Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.

1) Trials can turn you toward holiness or bitterness

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “If it doesn’t kill you, it only makes you stronger.” Well, when I was growing up, I hated that phrase because the cynic in me always thought, “Unless it maims you for life!” Suffering doesn’t always produce good fruit in people—it can often bring out the worst in you.

What does James mean, then, that trials should bring “pure joy”? Are we just masochists?

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes.” I think this is another way to restate James 1:2-4. In the middle of war, when the bombs are exploding all around you and you’re in the trenches, then your wealth, your intelligence, what you own, none of that matters whatsoever. You pray, because at that point, God is all you have. And I think that’s somewhat of an unfortunate reality—I often pray the most when I am going through the most trials. And that’s horrible—I should pray in all circumstances, shouldn’t I? But I think that James understands human nature. I often find that the more that God gives me good blessings, the less I tend to focus on him. It’s only when he takes those things away from me that I tend to turn to him for help.

Maybe that’s why Jesus preached the Upside-Down Kingdom. My former pastor, Ken Fong (of Evergreen Baptist Church of L.A.) said: “I have long believed that a huge part of Christ’s redemptive work is to have the powerless teach the powerful.” I think you see that all throughout the Bible, for example the following statements (taken from Jesus and Paul):
-The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
-Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
-Blessed are the poor, the meek, and those who mourn.
-Whoever wants to be great would have to be a servant.
-God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
-Jesus was rich, yet for our sake he became poor, so that through his poverty we would become rich.
-Jesus was equal to God, and then he emptied himself and made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, which is why he is worthy to be exalted as Lord.

I think part of the reason for the Upside-Down Kingdom is that gifts often take our focus off of the Giver. The reason that trials help us to grow is because it helps us to focus on the Giver. It helps us to rely on God instead of the things of this world. And it is only in God that we find “pure joy.”

James 1:9-12 is essentially the Upside-Down Kingdom expressed in James’s own words—“The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. But the one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower.”

2) Trials only turn you toward holiness if they are taken with faith

As I hope I made clear above, suffering can definitely turn you toward holiness, but it can also turn you toward bitterness. I definitely know of people who have been broken, and they wallow in their misery.

I think James recognizes both types. He gives a case study in two different types of people, both of whom suffer trials—the one with faith and the one with doubts:
One with faith: steadfast (v. 4)
One with doubts: unstable (v. 8 )
One with faith: perfect and complete (v. 4)
One with doubts: double-minded (v. 8 )

So here you have two types of people, both of whom suffer trials, but they have drastically different results.

I once heard the Christian singer Ginny Owens say, “It’s not trials that make you stronger, it’s what you do with those trials—whether you choose to give them up to God or not.” Trials can lead you to either holiness or bitterness, but it depends what you do with them. I think that’s the key here to James. God wants us to participate with him when we’re going through sufferings. In vv. 5 and 6, James encourages us to “ask.” Ask for wisdom, ask in faith, and it will be given to you. We don’t just sit there and take the sufferings, we must do something with it.

So what’s the difference between the one with faith and the one who doubts in James? It’s not suffering vs. no suffering, because both suffer. It’s not even asking vs. not asking, because both ask. It’s asking in faith vs. asking with doubt. That’s the difference between being steadfast and complete, vs. unstable and double-minded.

The latter will not receive anything from the Lord. When life gives you lemons, do you just scrunch up your face and eat the sour lemon, or do you make lemonade? James tells us that the way that Christians make lemonade of our trials is to ask God in faith.

3) What to do if life is good on an individual level

We’ve been talking about suffering, and most people in this world suffer. Some would even say that all of life is suffering. However, I have a dangerous confession to make: right now I don’t have many trials in my life. Why is this “dangerous”? Because when all is good, I think there’s always a part of us that gets a little nervous. Like, “I just know that something huge is going to hit me like a Mack truck at any moment now!” When we say that all of life is well, everyone around us runs and ducks for cover because they expect lightning to strike at any moment.

Now, let me qualify that statement: I have had many trials before this. Perhaps it’s not quite on the level of the Apostle Paul’s sufferings in 2 Cor. 11:23-29 where he recounts being beaten and stoned and shipwrecked. But I’ve definitely had my share of hardships. I’ve been physically assaulted while ministering in an inner-city neighborhood. I know what it’s like to have no money in my bank account. My parents went through a messy divorce. And of course, as human beings, we are all subject to sin. I am no stranger to pain.

But for right now, in this stage of my life, I’m good. I’ve got a stable job and thus a steady income, a great church, good friends, I have a couple of books coming out next year, and God is good. Probably the only thing that is “lacking” in my life right now is a wife. But hey, rather than complain, I should count my blessings! How ungrateful would I be to say, “God you’ve given me a million good things and all I can think of is that which you haven’t given me.” It makes me think of Veruca Salt, the spoiled girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Ugh.

Then I start getting some crazy ideas, like, “Maybe I need to seek out suffering before God puts it into my life!” But then my rationality gets the better of me. I remember King David and his sinful census in 2 Sam 24, and David said it’s actually better to be in God’s hands rather than the hands of men, right? God gave David a choice of punishments, and David says, “Let us fall into the hands of the LORD, for his mercy is great; but do not let me fall into the hands of men.”

But how do we “fall into the hands of the LORD?” A friend of mine told me that he sometimes prays, “God, break me.” And I think, “Are you nuts? I’ve learned not to pray that prayer! There’s enough suffering in life without bringing it voluntarily on yourself!” I think a better model of prayer is when Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane—“Lord, take this cup from me—yet not what I will, but what you will.” No one ought to deliberately seek suffering, even Jesus preferred not to let it happen. But Jesus let subsumed His will under the will of the Father. That is the right way to go about it.

4) What to do if life is good on a corporate level

Can we extrapolate this to a corporate principle? The word “you” used all throughout the book of James is the plural “you” in Greek. Though I think it’s rare when you, in your individual life, don’t have trials, but sometimes I feel like corporately, we’re good—as Americans, and as Christians.

First let me speak to the faculty here—as professors, we have our degrees, our status, and students look up to us as authority figures not only in terms of grading but in terms of knowledge. But strip us of our degrees, our status, put us in a position of discomfort, and see how we respond. Or for those of you who are in training to be in positions of leadership, as counselors and teachers—the same principle applies.

As Christians, we’re also good. I mean, we don’t suffer for our faith, unlike many places in the world where people are thrown in jail or tortured. We live in a country where the President of the United States must confess a Christian faith otherwise he won’t be elected. I think this is hardly a position of persecution. But that’s a dangerous place to be in.

John Stott in Christianity Today (Oct 2006, p. 96) said: “When I was ordained in the Church of England, evangelicals were a despised and rejected minority…Over the intervening 60 years, I’ve seen the evangelical movement in England grow in size, in maturity, certainly in scholarship, and therefore I think in influence and impact. We went from a ghetto to being on the ascendancy, which is a very dangerous place to be. Pride is the ever-present danger that faces all of us. In many ways, it is good for us to be despised and rejected. I think of Jesus’ words, ‘Woe unto you when all men speak well of you.’”

What do we do as American evangelical Christians who enjoy the fat of the land, we who are the largest religion in the most powerful country in the world? I think we ought to be humble instead of arrogant, because “how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven!” I don’t think that verse is only talking about material wealth.

Conclusion

This is why, when we suffer trials, we should “count it all joy.” But that can only come from taking the trials in an appropriate way—to ask in faith. Here’s a caveat: I’m not advocating works righteousness here. Because sometimes evangelicals can make faith into a work, ironically! I’m not saying that if you have faith, everything will be made right. But what I am saying is, if you don’t have faith, surely everything will not be all right. To abandon God in the midst of trials is foolhardy at best. Let us hold fast to the One who is our “soul anchor” and count it all joy whenever we face trials of many kinds! In the end we will become more Christlike and that is God’s will for us.

Myths about Christmas

By Allen Yeh
Scriptorium Daily

OK, you might think that I’m being a Grinch for posting this blog, but I hope that we as Evangelicals are being biblical at all times, especially when it comes to something as important as the birth of our Savior! So here are some common myths I’d like to bust regarding Christmas:

-Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright. On the night of Jesus’ birth, it was not a silent night — and probably not calm! Jesus was fully human; he almost certainly cried (unlike “Away in a Manger” would have us believe—“But little Lord Jesus no crying he makes!”). It is no sin to cry, it is how babies communicate since they can’t talk. Not only did Baby Jesus probably cry, the animals made noise. Cows, sheep, and donkeys are noisy animals. The Silent Night myth probably comes from us wanting hushed reverence and awe, but I think that noise can be just as meaningful if it is celebratory and social! Those shepherds and angels, if nothing else, were making noise out there!

-Hark the herald angels sing … and angels we have heard on high sweetly singing o’er the plains. Unfortunately, angels do not sing! Though a couple of times in the NIV it does say that angels “sing” (e.g. Rev. 5:12), in the Greek the word is always “say.” Angels seem to always speak; only humans are shown to sing in the Bible. So when you sing your Christmas carols, sing it with gusto — perhaps this is a privilege that God only affords humans!

-The Magi presented gifts at Jesus’ birth. The Magi (Wise Men) from the East did not come when Jesus was born! The dirty stinky shepherds were there (Luke 2:15-16) but not the Magi. Jesus was actually two years old when the Magi arrived, as Herod tried to kill all the boys under two years old in accordance with the time the Magi had said (Matt. 2:7,16). So I’m afraid all those Nativity scenes showing the wise men with the gifts at the manger are a couple of years too early. (Note that “The First Noel” got it wrong: “And by the light of that same star / Three wise men came from country far; / This star drew nigh…Right over the place where Jesus lay. / Then entered in those wise men three / Full reverently upon their knee, / and offered there in his presence / Their gold, and myrrh, and frankincense.”)

-Christmas trees are Christian. Nope — they are pagan (see Jeremiah 10:1-5). That being said, I don’t think they are wrong to have, unless they are seen as biblical or taking the place of Christ (I think the song “O Christmas Tree” comes dangerously close to crossing the line). The injunction in Jeremiah is against pagan idolatry, but I think it’s fine to “baptize” pagan things as Christian (after all, we Christians did that when we changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, when we changed the pagan fertility goddess cult of Ishtar into our Easter, when we turned the Roman pagan holiday of Yule into Christmas, and when we use words like “God” and “church” which are pagan words which have been Christianized — even the Greek words theos and ekklesia are pagan in origin).

Where do most of these myths come from? Unfortunately, often from our beloved Christmas carols and from Christmas cards. We want our picture-perfect Nativity scene, but a lot of that is not biblically correct. However, Jesus was not born into perfection but into a broken world. And it is precisely this world He came to save. So let’s not paint an inaccurate picture of Christmas — it was a messy, noisy night, with a lot of chaos and crying and animal sounds. There were no angelic choirs, though angels did make a heavenly pronouncement. Those shepherds probably stank as they’d been out all day with the sheep. The Magi didn’t come until two years later, and they were not Jews. (But it is interesting that these three “unclean” Gentiles recognized the Messiah before most of the “pure” Jewish people did. This isn’t even the book of Acts yet, and Gentiles are already coming to worship the Christ!). And Jesus quickly became a political refugee, fleeing to Egypt because a death mark was placed upon his head by a lunatic king who massacred all other boys of Jesus’ age.

Why all this imperfection at the original Christmas? Because Jesus is the only one who is perfect. I think it provides a stark contrast, which is this: Even while Creation is groaning, only in Jesus is light and goodness and salvation.

Oh yeah, and while we’re at it … there is no Santa Claus.
Just in case this one slipped through the cracks.

Women of Advent and Christmas V: Eve, She Made It Necessary

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

The one thing most moderns know about Eve is that she was naked. They have some notion that there was a talking snake, a tree, and some problem, but nobody is quite sure what the problem was.

Evidently God got really mad because Eve ate an apple . . . or something.

What does Eve have to do with Christmas?

God wanted to have fellowship with humankind, creatures made in His image. He loved us and wanted to elevate us to become as much like Him as a being can be. How would God have done this if we had obeyed Him?

We cannot know for sure, but we know He would have done it. There would have been a great Deed, but no great cost. Women and men would have become like God without God having to suffer the indignities of the cross and of our hatred of justice and love.

Instead of doing well, Eve chose . . . badly . . . and so God created Christmas, but Christmas in the shadow of the cross.

In the beginning God created human beings. A free God gave a gift that nature could never give, because nature does not have it. He gave Eve a free will. She was allowed to choose to follow God or not follow Him.

Eve was a given a life so good that it must have been hard for her to know if she was really free. If she wanted something, it was at hand. In the Garden, all was good and her will was free and unstained by selfishness.

Eve was loved and could love in return. So she could know her own freedom, she was given a chance to deny her immediate desires. Eve could demonstrate her love for God by trusting Him. God had earned her trust and love by giving her a perfect life and by being His good, true, and beautiful Self.

God wanted Adam and Eve to walk with Him and grow. He placed before them a choice to learn good and evil through resisting evil or through choosing evil. If they trusted and loved God, they would learn good and evil by choosing good. If Eve and her husband chose to disobey, then they would learn good and evil by choosing to do evil.

Taking what is not yours, just because you desire it, makes you a slave to your passions. Once that slavery begins no woman or man can escape it without help.

Eve stood before a tree and said “no” to God. She would do what seemed desirable and not what was rational or good. She followed her gut and denied her mind and heart and so all of us inherited a doomed nature.

We are psychologically broken and cannot live in the world as it is.

God still wanted unity with us and so He did not just start over and wipe humankind out. Eve made a bad choice, but God allowed that choice and all the implications of it. His work was difficult and required that He sacrifice Himself.

God became man so that man could become like God.

Eve chose badly, but later a second Eve, a young Jewish girl from Nazareth, would choose well. She would say “yes” to God and so generations would honor her decision. She acted against her immediate desires and did what was right. She learned goodness through the humility of obedience to sweet Reason and divine Love.

Eve made Mary a mother.

Mary gave Eve hope.

Mary would stand before a second tree after her choice, but the voice she heard was that of her Son and not that of serpent. Mary was not, fundamentally, blessed because she was Jesus mother, but because she heard His word and obeyed it.

Eve heard the word of God and chose to obey the word of a snake.

Mary lived in the snake’s Empire and chose to obey the word of God.

If Eve is your mother, you have inherited a cruel burden. You long for goodness, truth, and beauty, but you never see them really manifested and have no hope of ever seeing them. If Jesus becomes your brother, then you get a new family and there is the sure promise of seeing the Good, the Truth, and Beauty.

This is the hope and message of Advent and Christmas. Eve made it necessary, Mary made it possible, Jesus is it.

Climate Change Is Natural: 100 Reasons Why

Daily Express

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.

8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds

13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.

14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates

21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder

25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.

28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population

29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago

30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles

31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming

32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere

35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything

36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes

37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally

40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms

41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests

44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years

45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations

47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.

48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change

49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.

50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.

51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.

52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”

53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.

54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics. Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot

55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.

56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.

57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”

58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.

59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.

60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.

61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.

63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.

64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.

65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.

66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature.

67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.

68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.

69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.

70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”

71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.

72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all.

73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.

74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.

75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes.

76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.

77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.

78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.

79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).

80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.

81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.

82) Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.

83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.

84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.

85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.

86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.

87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.

88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.

89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.

91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.

92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.

94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.

95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.

96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.

97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.

98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”

99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”

R.W. Dale on the Trinity

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Today (December 1) is the birthday of R. W. Dale (1829 – 1895), a British Congregationalist pastor and writer. Dale is best remembered for his conservatizing essay on the atonement, and for his commitment to social work in applying what he called “the civic gospel” to Birmingham, England.

Dale also wrote a brief systematic theology, entitled Christian Doctrine: A Series of Discourses (1894), and it includes a very helpful account of the doctrine of the Trinity. Dale approached the doctrine almost apologetically, for though he was committed to it, he hoped to win over some of the nonconformist clergy who had become all too comfortable with unitarian views. So he presented the doctrine of the Trinity with great candor, and commended it warmly, even taking the high-risk strategy of emphasizing the biblical and experiential truths that trinitarians and unitarians have in common.

“These great truths do not rest merely on authority, but have been confirmed in the experience of Christian men in all countries and all ages,” he argued. The doctrine of the Trinity is about facts:

In its substance it is not a merely speculative docrine; it is a brief summary of those great facts which through eighteen hundred years have revealed their power and glory in the moral and spiritual life of the Christian Church. It is a declaration that in the Lord Jesus Christ, heaven and earth have been brought together; that, in Him a divine Person became man; that having found Christ, we have found God; that ‘He is the same yesterday, and to-day, yea, and for ever,’ Son of God, Son of man, the Lord, the Saviour, the Brother of our race. It is a declaration that the great ‘Advocate,’ who now sustains the life of the Chruch, leads it into all the truth, directs its activity, and consoles its sorrows, is a divine Person whose ‘coming’ has brought with it such transcendent grace as more than to compensate for the withdrawal from the world of our Lord’s visible presence and His return to the Father.

Dale immediately goes on to admit that although the true interpretation of what happened in Christ is that an eternally triune God revealed himself, nevertheless other interpretations of the events are possible:

It may, indeed, be contended that one and the same Person has manifested Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit; and that, therefore, it is possible to believe in the divine glory of our Lord and in the personal solicitude of the divine Spirit for the life and perfection of the Church without believing in the Trinity. I rejoice to acknowledge that the substance of some great truths is recevied by many who find insuperable difficulties in the traditional definitions of them. If you love and obey and trust and worship the Lord Jesus Christ as a divine Person; if you shrink from sin lest you should ‘grieve’ the Holy Spirit, if His care for you and His patience with you fill your heart with courage and gratitude; and if you believe, at the same time, that the Son and the Spirit are one with the Eternal Father, your life is rooted in the facts which the doctrine of the Trinity is intended to express, although you may be unable to accept the Trinitarian creed.

“Your life is rooted in the facts,” he says to those who believe less than he does, “although you may be unable to accept the Trinitarian creed.”

Dale then presses some biblical evidence: Jesus prayed to the Father, and this makes it very difficult to interpret his life as the revelation of a unipersonal God. If God is one person, who was the incarnate Son talking to? “It is clear that He Himself was not the Father but Another… The relations between Father, Son, and Spirit are analoguous to those which exist between different persons; they are not analogous to the relations which exist between different forms of the activity of the same person.”

“The immediate question with which we have to deal,” he says, is “whether in the Incarnation of our Lord and in the ‘coming’ of the Spirit and His permanent activity in the Church and in the world there is a revelation of the inner and eternal life of God.”

Have we the right to assume that the historic manifestation of God to our race discloses anything of God’s own eternal being? But this is really to ask whether the revelation of God really reveals God –shows us what God is– manifests His ‘eternal life.’ It is to ask whether when we have seen Christ, and seen Him in His relations to the Father, we have seen the ‘Truth.’ To those who have been filled with wonder by the glory of Christ, and have known the power of His redemption, the answer to this question cannot be uncertain. Wherever else we may be surrounded by illusions, we are in contact with eternal realities when we are in the presence of Christ. We are sure that in Him God is relly revealed, and that the relations between Him and the Father have their ground in the life of the Eternal. The mystery of that life remains impenetrable; but the Incarnation reveals the truth that the eternal life of God has not been an awful loneliness; that in some wonderful sense the Father has always been the Father, and the Son the Son. And the revealed relations of the Spirit to both Father and Son have also their eternal ground in the Godhead; they did not originate in order that God’s mercy might achieve our redemption; they are revealed in the great acts by which redemption is achieved; that they are revealed implies that they already existed.

Dale has a firm grasp of the way redemption and revelation belong together in the doctrine of the Trinity. God saved us in a way that revealed who he is: Eternal Father, Eternal Son, and Eternal Spirit.