… if Jews can listen to Wagner, conservatives can listen to the Smiths.

Edmund Standing is a conservative blogger and retired anti-fascist activist who also wrote from an atheist perspective. After a few months of quiet, he has revived his blog because he has re-found God. In one post, he linked to some of William Lane Craig’s arguments or, as Lane Craig would put it, proofs of the existence of God. One of these contains five proofs that God exists.

Lane Craig is a formidable Christian apologist who has debated with most of the new atheists, Hitchens, Dawkins and the others. In live debate he tends to throw out about five such arguments in a Gish Gallop, but here we have them on the page to think about at more leisure.

The first runs as follows:

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1, 3).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God (from 2, 4).

Obviously, the first thing an atheist can say, to the very first point, is “no it doesn’t”. An atheist could say “stuff pops in and out of existence in quantum foam – what causes that?”.  An atheist could say “the idea of cause depends on the arrow of time, cause precedes effect, and the idea of the Big Bang is that time, as well as space, is curled up into a tiny point at the origin. There isn’t a ‘before’. It doesn’t even make sense”.

There’s quite a lot of following argument, but none addresses the simple: “no, it doesn’t”. The closest he comes is in response to a putative atheist argument that the universe is all there is so there couldn’t be anything to cause it. There’s nothing else. This is similar to something I said above about the Big Bang:

This line of reasoning is, however, obviously fallacious because it assumes that the universe is all there is, that if there were no universe there would be nothing. In other words, the objection assumes that atheism is true. The objector is thus begging the question in favor of atheism, arguing in a circle. The theist will agree that the explanation of the universe must be some (explanatorily) prior state of affairs in which the universe did not exist. But that state of affairs is God and his will, not nothingness.

What he misses is that both sides are begging the question, because of the way the question is phrased. Point 1 above might as well be re-worded to read “God exists”. Atheism plainly includes the idea that the universe might not have a cause.

And what of  ’the necessity of its own nature’? What does that mean?

Things that exist necessarily exist by a necessity of their own nature. It’s impossible for them not to exist. Many mathematicians think that numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities exist in this way. They’re not caused to exist by something else; they just exist necessarily.

God’s like that:

Now if God exists, the explanation of God’s existence lies in the necessity of his own nature, since, as even the atheist recognizes, it’s impossible for God to have a cause.

This is from someone who is supposed to be reading and understanding atheist arguments. Not only does the atheist not recognise that, the atheist actually asks how come, if everything has to have a cause, God doesn’t? Doesn’t the idea of God just displace the problem of origin?

But consider the argument. God is like numbers or sets. They all exist because their own natures make it necessary. That’s something that can just be declared, without any substantiation. Are numbers not just a by-product of our brains’ aptitude for categorisation? Perhaps we categorise things that are on their own as 1 and have built on that? Since complex numbers have no physical analogue, like three sheep for 3, yet work with practical things like engineering, maybe we’re just catching glimpses of a completely unimagined reality. We don’t know.

Lane Craig doesn’t grok “I don’t know”. The basic atheist view is “I don’t know, but it’s not something that’s been revealed to anyone. We have to tease it out by looking at nature herself.”

I wish Standing every happiness in his newly re-found faith but, really, this is drivel.

Andrew Mitchell is in trouble for calling a police officer a ‘pleb’. He apparently swore as well, but the ‘p’ word is his real problem. Just this morning, on Radio 4′s Today program, we were reminded by a classical scholar that plebs were the non-aristocratic class of Ancient Rome, ruled over by patricians and aristocrats, in a culture quite unlike today’s democracies in which the government are the servants of the governed.

Mitchell’s disdain for the lower orders has no place in modern society. Nobody should show the ordinary people of Britain such contempt. Nobody.

Nobody, that is, except the Institute for Government and the Cabinet Secretary, Head of Britain’s Civil Service Sir Gus O’Donnell, on behalf of the entire arrogant, patrician edifice of government. Sir Gus writes, in the Foreword to the Institute’s publication ‘Mindspace’:

Influencing people’s behaviour is nothing new to Government, which has often used tools such as legislation, regulation or taxation to achieve desired policy outcomes. But many of the biggest policy challenges we are now facing – such as the increase in people with chronic health conditions – will only be resolved if we are successful in persuading people to change their behaviour, their lifestyles or their existing habits. Fortunately, over the last decade, our understanding of influences on behaviour has increased significantly and this points the way to new approaches and new solutions.

They think they should seek to change people’s behaviour in areas like diet and exercise because the plebs are too stupid and rudderless to manage their own choices.

Mindspace was launched in March 2010:

MINDSPACE explores how behaviour change theory can help meet current policy challenges, such as how to:

• reduce crime
• tackle obesity
• ensure environmental sustainability.

Today’s policy makers are in the business of influencing behaviour – they need to understand the effects their policies may be having. The aim of MINDSPACE is to help them do this, and in doing so get better outcomes for the public and society.

Reducing crime is certainly part of the role of government. Tackling obesity isn’t. Environmental sustainability is a waffle term for imposing the preferences of a few, mainly aristocratic, cranks on the population at large*.

Quoting further from the main report:

David Hume argued that “all plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind are plainly imaginary”.

Such sweeping scepticism is unfounded, since there have been many policy successes in changing behaviour: for example, reducing drink driving, preventing AIDS transmission and increasing seatbelt usage. Nevertheless, some behaviours - such as antisocial behaviour and lack of exercise – have remained resistant to policy interventions. We need to think in more integrated and innovative ways about how policymakers can intervene in ways that help people help themselves – and that also help society reduce inequalities in health and wellbeing that are avoidable and considered unfair.

The entire document reeks of patrician arrogance. It gets the relationship between citizens and government exactly wrong: it is we, the voters, who should get to influence the behaviour of governments by voting for the ones who promise to behave in ways we want.

Instead, professional politicians lie to gain power, then try to modify the beliefs, behaviour and allegiances of the plebs.

Mitchell was just too honest.

* You might enjoy Lobos Motl’s reply to the question “How to stop a star”. The question includes this gem:

One might say that, on time scales measured in trillions of years, the stars are an unsustainable use of the universe’s fuel.

The last theme crashed Internet Explorer – Dom, thanks for letting me know – so I have updated temporarily. I don’t use Windows, therefore haven’t used I.E. for years. Any bug reports like that are very welcome.

New post coming tomorrow.

Daniel Hannan Tweeted:

What is the single greatest line in Shakespeare’s canon?

— Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) August 20, 2012

I say it’s “Never, never, never, never, never” from King Lear.

Cordelia lies dead in her father’s arms.  He says:

No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
and thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
never, never, never, never, never!

I could see the first “never” being querulous, questioning. The last one has finality. Between the two is a path, a trajectory that Lear’s thought takes, vocalised at intervals.  For an actor or a reader, or a member of an audience, that path becomes personal. It’s a brave line to write. You completely leave it to other people.

But by doing so, you let them re-invent it. That’s why Shakespeare plays were popular 200 years ago and today. It’s why they are popular in Japan and Germany. It’s what characterises Shakespeare.

Hannan then Tweeted what might be his favourite line:

And scants us with a single famish’d kiss Distasted with the salt of broken tears…

— Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) August 20, 2012

That could be one of several writers of the period.

Only one playwright would have written “never, never, never, never”.

For all their intellectual vanity, it is clear that the Left is not only incapable of organising a root in a brothel, the brothel itself would be renamed a non-procreative recreational outlet; a place where lonely men could part with their hard-earned to have one off the wrist over dog-eared photographs of Margaret Mead while the organisers stood in the hallway arguing angrily about the phallic symbolism of the stairway banister.

Jack the Insider (a man of the left himself)

I started moving this blog to a new server and got sidetracked part way through, so it’s been offline for a while.

2011 was an interesting year. Briefly, I bet the farm on a particular business and it didn’t happen, which was a bit trying. Then it did happen, which was trying in a different way; I could have used a couple more pairs of hands and things like blogs took a remote second place.

The busy stage is still going on, so posting will be intermittent. Happy New Year.

From this week’s Normblog profile of Emma Lee Potter (these lines are consecutive, I haven’t altered the sequence):

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > Definitely not.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Generosity of spirit.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > Meanness – in every sense.

He’s taking questions here.