There is a version of the Argument from Design, one of the traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, that has caught some popularity recently. It figures prominently in the work of theistic public intellectuals like Dinesh D'Souza, and it is (allegedly) what enabled some unscrupulous people to take advantage of Anthony Flew in his dotage. It's usually called the "Fine-Tuning Argument," for reasons that will shortly become apparent, and what makes it both salient and insidious in our political scene is that it pidgins the discourse of science, mathematics, and philosophy well enough to appeal to people who fancy themselves intellectuals, and at the same time provides the basic argumentative structure to propaganda on behalf of the peasant revolt against knowledge known as the Intelligent Design movement.

The Fine-Tuning Argument goes something like this: The laws of nature areGod: Still not proven specified not only in terms of variables like force, mass, charge, spin, color, flavor, etc., but also in terms of fundamental constants, real number values that are (at least presently) irreducible from physics. These constants are measured to an extraordinary degree of precision: the fine structure constant is 7.297352570(5) x 10^-3; Planck's constant is 6.62606893(33) x 10^-34 J⋅s; and so on (the numbers in parentheses are uncertainties of the last digits). Suppose each constant is set or tuned by some vast cosmic dial. If any dial were turned just a little bit --- and "a little bit" here means by magnitudes far smaller than anything human beings can consciously comprehend --- the formation of the universe would have been radically different from what it turned out to be, and in particular, there would have been no life in the universe.

Here's where the proponent of fine-tuning comes in. (The term itself, obviously, suggests an anthropomorphism.) Only a tiny range of values for the fundamental physical constants, a range smaller than any human imagination can conceive, permits the existence of life in the universe. Yet there is life in the universe --- look around. With that background established, the proponent of fine-tuning can now deliver her decisive blow: "Sure, maybe the fundamental constants just randomly all happened to settle on values conducive to life rather than the vastly larger range of values that would not have supported life. But isn't it infinitely more probable, given the apparent fine-tuning of the universe and the vanishingly small probability of the universe randomly fine-tuning itself, that some intelligence deliberately fine-tuned the physical constants so that they would support life? From a purely rational perspective, therefore, doesn't the fine-tuning of the universe warrant belief in a Fine-Tuner?"

At the extremes of the debate, this argument doesn't tend to move many people. Theists are already in the position the fine-tuning argument wants to take them to. Atheists, on the other hand, are far more likely to think there's something fishy about the argument than to be persuaded, but are seldom in a position to say just what's wrong with it. However, in the broad ecumenical center where those who "just know there's something out there" reside, an argument like fine-tuning that doesn't explicitly contradict evolutionary theory (indeed, it's a means by which religious believers can be Darwinists) and instead maintains the trappings of scientifically-informed discourse has great potential to shore up people's faith. It also --- and this is not the intent of all its proponents --- shores up the reasoning that supports Intelligent Design theory. It's a truly ingenious little argument.

But in addition to being ingenious, it's a bad argument. There are at least three fatal objections to it, which recur in one way or another in debates over Intelligent Design --- hence understanding them is a key to understanding how ID proponents mislead their audiences. The first objection undermines Fine-Tuning on its own premises, so I'll dwell on it a little more than the others (bear with me). In order:

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Gottlob Frege: Like a hedge fund manager, except about the logical foundations of mathematics This past weekend, the New York Times ran an education feature on the recent upswing of college students majoring in philosophy. The Times piece comes on the heels of a similar MSN report several weeks ago, in which a young hedge fund analyst and philosophy BA memorably explained that his work is "like reading Russell, Frege or Wittgenstein, except it's about money." Some of the purported practical benefits of a philosophy education are gaining critical and analytical skills that would be useful in virtually any industry, pursuing the closest thing to a pre-law undergraduate course there is (if nothing else, classes in formal logic ought to pay off on the LSAT), and in at least one case, sexual conquest. ("That whole deep existential torment" philosophers are known for is a major turn on to a 20-year old cog sci major.)

Most of my writing for Jewcy is on politics, but as a former philo major, these really hit a nerve with me. It's quite true, for example, that the tools required for doing philosophy have perhaps a wider practical application than those of any other field --- it used to be that philosophy was the only subject you could study; all the other sciences and humanities are spin-offs --- but that has always been the case, and doesn't explain why more college students are taking philosophy courses and majoring in it now than in the past. There are two more plausible explanations of the surge of interest in philosophy:

(1) Students are increasingly recognizing just how petrified most of the academic humanities have become. If you're at all interested in doing original work, rather than employing decoder rings and worshipping the bones of past masters, stay far, far away from comparative literature.

(2) Students (and presumably, in many cases, their parents) are finally recognizing that the predominant mode of doing philosophy in Anglophone universities has nothing to do with wearing black, chain smoking, and thinking about how everything is a social construct (though you can do that if you want!), but is and has for more than half a century been what's generally called "analytic philosophy" --- a rigorous method of philosophical investigation based on, informed by and constrained by formal logic and theoretical linguistics. Analytic philosophy doesn't resemble any other field very closely, but resembles math more closely than it resembles anything else.

One word of warning, though. No matter what anecdotes you find in New York Times education features, do not go into philosophy thinking it's a path to an incredible sex life. It is not.

In recognition of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, Slate invited the 'liberal hawks' from among its regular contributors to answer the question, "Why did we get it wrong?"

Christopher Hitchens' answer: "I didn't." The main thrust of Hitchens' defense of hisLeave Berkeley alone! support of the war is that, despite the intelligence failures before and during the war, the administration's criminal mismanagement, the degradation of the United States' moral, legal, and indeed strategic international position due to our government's embrace of torture and human rights abuses --- the international community still faced a failed dictatorship on its way to implosion, the fallout from which would have been far worse without an American presence in the country.

This case rests on the supposition that, on balance, the outcome of the actual intervention in Iraq in 2003 is better than the outcome of likely counterfactual scenarios that would have played out at a later date, under more competent leadership, and under more credible international auspices, which in turn rests on the assumption that the immediate need for intervention in 2003 outweighs the obvious (in hindsight) benefits of a delay. I'm unpersuaded. But fair enough; Hitchens' case is the best that can be made for the pro-war position at this point.

What's completely unfair, shocking, out of bounds, and offensive, is Hitchens' slandering of George Berkeley. To wit:

There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved.

Hitchens is getting at a widespread, gross simplification of Berkeley's epistemology and metaphysics. So, let's get Berkeley right. What motivates Berkeley's philosophy is a worry about the concepts of quality and substance among Locke and his contemporary empiricists. The empiricists held that substances are the imperceivable substrates that manifest primary qualities (size, shape, volume, etc.) and secondary qualities (color, taste, tactile features, etc.). Substances exist, they argued, but qualities exhaust the objects of our acquaintance. Against this picture of the world, Berkeley thought, "If all we're ever acquainted with are sensible qualities, then why bother positing the existence of substances at all? They do no explanatory work, and thus violate sound Occamist principles by unnecessarily inflating our ontology."

So he cut physical objects out of his ontology, leaving only perceptions of them and perceiving minds behind. To be is to be perceived, according to the Berkeleyan maxim. And it really works out to an elegant system. There is no mind/body problem left to worry about, because there are no bodies.

Contrary to the common understanding of him, Berkeley is not a solipsist. He does not hold that objects cease to exist the moment you turn your back on them or otherwise stop personally perceiving them. There has to be some overarching principle correlating all perceptions, not merely in order to avoid solipsism, but also the worry that if perception is reality, then there is no meaningful distinction between veridical perception and hallucination. For Berkeley, it's God who does the work of separating true perceptions from false and coordinating the true ones, and keeping the world going while we sleep. (Berkeley might not have perceived the curvature of the earth and the fact that one side of the globe is sleeping while the other's awake; still, in his system, the whole earth exists.) But there are other possible, God-free answers to that dilemma. Kant's proposal that the objective validity of veridical perceptions is guaranteed by the nature of pure reason, is one way of secularizing Berkeley. But there are others.

In any event, maybe there are some woolly-headed peaceniks who think that if we put on blinders and earplugs and refuse to look at the problems of Iraq, that they'll just go away. But pace Hitchens, Berkeley wouldn't have been one of them. To adopt the parlance of our times, Leave Berkeley alone!

Looking back on this era of history, the gravest threat of the hour will probably not be understood to be Islamic extremism or Western neoliberalism, or whatever one's preferred party-fashionable bogeyman might be. It will likely be certain strains of Western philosophy.

Ian Buruma and Paul Berman have been among the most prominent figures who have tried to show the connection between Islamic radicalism and it's having absorbed ideas from European thinkers, although Stephen Schwartz has out-muscled both of them in his explication of the historical and ideological debt that modern Islamic radicalism owes to that infamous people of the Najd. Islamism doesn't stand a chance in the long run because depraved nihilistic movements always burn themselves out. The question is only how much ground they'll gain and how much damage they'll do before then (no small matter in view of the power of 21st century weapons technology). The ears their claims fall upon and the responses of the societies they attack and wish to destroy play a large part in determining the course of events. As one can quickly gather from reading Anja Havedal's review of Afghan Women by Elaheh Rostami-Povey in this month's issue of Democratiya, the particular Western incarnations of philosophy that inform certain current understandings of multiculturalism are poisoning "Western" minds just as much as the screeds of kaffir beheaders are infecting the minds of Muslims.

According to Havedal, Rostami-Povey thinks that just about every effort to help women in Afghanistan is a failure and/or a ploy disguising colonialist arrogance and avarice in the cloak of rights and freedom. But what's nonsense in all the talk about us and them, Western and non, is that while Elaheh Rostami-Povey claims that "an alien imperialist culture and prefabricated identity wrapped in the rhetoric of 'security, development, women's liberation and democracy' has [sic] been imposed on Afghan women and men alike" she herself speaks as one educated in the halls of British academe. Her CV is impressive: a BSc in Applied Economics (University of East London), an MA in Agrarian Studies (University of Sussex), and a PhD from the Open University. According to Rostami-Povey's view of things, she is herself imposing the philosophical insights of Western thinkers on Afghan women.

Culture is a notion that only has meaning through alienation or distance from one's way of life--the kind of alienation experienced in modern multicultural societies. Much widespread understanding of the moral evils of imperialism derive from the European-American experience of having been imperialists. The critique of imperialism most preferred by academics to this day was hatched by a German Jew steeped in the work of the monumental German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. So when Rostami-Povey mounts her high horse of anti-imperialism and cultural preservation, shall we accuse her of making Afghan women Hegelians or Marxians? Individualistic self-determination, one could argue, is decidedly a product of European political philosophy, and the modern understanding of authenticity from Trilling to Taylor is American and Canadian, respectively. Isn't Rostami-Povey's argument just an imposition of a tapestry of "Western" ideas?

One doubts that she would welcome this critique. Certainly Rostami-Povey believes that Afghan women deserve a certain quality of life that is universally appreciated by our species. Freedom from war, loss, starvation, coercion, and suffering. This was precisely the political project from Hobbes onward, to see that humans improve their lot beyond the short, brutish one it has potential to be. But was Hobbes unique? Muhammad was himself a sort of political philosopher and conflict resolver proposing a way of organizing life both personal and political so that suffering might be decreased and goodwill promoted. More likely, these figures spoke in different places to the same need.

But Afghanistan is one of the most recently converted majority Muslim countries in what can only rightly be described as an Islamic empire. Prior to the arrival of Islam, and in many ways even after, Afghans adhered to centuries-old patriarchal tribal traditions. So when Rostami-Povey insists that Afghan women should be allowed to " struggle against local male domination in their own way and according to their culture," to which 'culture' can she possibly be referring if she hopes to maintain an ethic of anti-imperialism and women's rights?

People like Rostami-Povey must decide whether they believe it is a universal good that women be free and persons have a right to self-determination. If she does, then she must also accept that Western philosophers' ideas were not ethnically bounded, but considerations of human beings attempting to create what used top be called in less relativistic times "the good life." Those ideas are no more culturally specific than is the basic need to live free of the horror that Afghan women have been experiencing for centuries under male, Soviet or Islamist domination. Instead, she suffers from the cancer in Western philosophy--the popularization of two absurd notions in particular. One, that the preservation of culture is an end in itself, even if that culture espouses ideas that are inimical to the good life; and two, that quest for the good life is a conceit to be replaced by instating the regime relative values. That regime is, by Rostami-Povey's standards, a German (read: Nietzschian) one. I prefer to say it's just a bad idea.

Her system of designations is undesirable. That regime is, according to the standards of anyone interested in bettering of the lives of others, at best a hindrance and at worst a recipe for the kind of liberal nihilism, despair and self-hatred that will say when thousands of its countrymen die at the hands of illiberal murderers, 'We deserve it.' But in Afghanistan, it makes the best the enemy of the good, positing failure due to the 'self interest' part of enlightened self interest. It declares the messy business of aid a fiasco where there are instead some lives improving, even if not all at the rate and to the degree that Rostami-Povey--and any decent person, I might add--would like to see.

INTERVIEW NUMBER TEN WITH RON PRICE

Last night I was arguing with my mother about Kaplan. I manage to convince her that Kaplan’s analysis of God in The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion was the only justifiable way to understand God in a modern context. This was no easy feat, considering that she is a very traditionally pious woman and it was done through instant messenger. For Kaplan, God cannot be understood in the modern context as a supernatural being. The universe is simply the way that it is; there is no divine purpose nor was it created by

A couple of years ago I had the occasion of meeting a Reconstructionist Rabbi. As we were discussing my philosophy thesis -- which was on Nietzsche and an Indian-Muslim philosopher named Muhammad Iqbal -- the Rabbi shocked me when he said that not only did he know who Iqbal was, but that he was actively studying his works.

I can understand how the Rabbi became aware of Muhammad Iqbal – not only was Iqbal a friend of Bertrand Russell, Alfred Whitehead and Bergson and thus part of early 20th century philosophy – but he wrote a book called “Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam” which describes the religious experience as one that is lived and evolving; an experience that contains movement and change; an experience that borrows from the tradition but is not limited by it. These are principles at the heart of Jewish reconstructionism as well. In light of the fact that I was the only one the Rabbi had ever met who was thoroughly conversant in Iqbal, while the Rabbi was the only non-Muslim I had met who knew Iqbal well, one would imagine that we would spend the entire night talking about the book.

We did talk the whole night, but not about the book. Our conversation became waylayed by violence – not between us, but the reality of terrorism, suicide bombings, and to some extent, honor killings. That conversation, in itself, was quite interesting. I insisted that the violence was problematic per se, that it had no excuses, and to some extent no causes other than the fact that the texts made themselves amenable to such readings. He insisted that Western foreign policy had something to do with Muslim violence.

Yet, now that I think about it, I find it so saddening and depressing that we didn’t get to talk about Iqbal’s book. I get especially melancholy when I think what Iqbal would feel if he found out that eighty years on from his Islam-shaking book, a reconstructionist Rabbi and a reformist Muslim law student, opted to talk about cave-dwelling psychopaths, barbarous patriarchal fathers, and deranged anarchists, instead of talking about the Islamic legal tradition, about “the spirit of movement in Islam,” or, about “the spiritual democracy which is the ultimate aim of Islam.”

Iqbal’s time in the world was an interesting one. It appeared that in reaction against the colonial powers, Muslims had come together, and for the most part, were actively engaged in reconciling republicanism with religion, and liberalism with Islam. They were integrating their minorities; and basing the citizenship of their nations, not on religiosity or perceived piety, but on their shared nation-hood. Iqbal discuses almost all of these ideas in this essay from the Reconstruction, suggesting that Muslims ought to consider making a "League of Muslim nations" which is less concerned with Caliphates and more concerned with their internal well-beings. Yet, today, just a few decades later, various hardline organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood, the Jamaat e Islami, and the Hizb ut Tahrir, all along with the Wahhabi machine, have created the conditions for a complete breakdown in Islam. Emanating from the fringes of these organizations came the terrorists and anarchists. Today, Iqbal’s vision, which presupposed the perpetuity of stability and peace, has now been replaced by entropy and chaos -- no one knows what will happen. The Sunni Islam of Iqbal's era -- which could give rise to nation-states -- seems to be teetering. The things that people who take interest in Islam talk about are, deplorably shameful, both in their content and quality. Suicide? Collateral Damage? Noncombatant immunity? Iqbal thought that none of these would ever be issues, so that when you read him, eighty years ago, he neither addresses them, nor conceives of their possibility.

Therefore, in that sense, Islamic “reform” appears to have gone backwards. Right?

But here is my conundrum, the more that I think about it, the less I can blame the reformists. It is not as if Islam ceased to produced liberal reformists of Iqbal’s ilk. There was Fazlur Rahman, and Muhammad Shahrour, and Amin Ahsan Islahi, and Abullahi an-Naim, and today Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, and a vast collection of second tier reformers, situated in hundreds of universities all across the world, all of whom have been emphasizing and re-emphasizing the themes that Iqbal set forth. Why has the influence of these people waned? Why isn’t Iqbal’s monumental poetic compendium -- he is also considered the greatest of two Indian poets of the 20th century -- on the lips of Muslims today like it was one hundred years ago?

Many people like to ask the question “what went wrong with Islam” and look back to colonialism or all the way back to the Mongol invasion. My submission is quite simple: sometime in the early third of the 20th century Islam was going to be OK; but something went wrong between 1935 and 2001. Why, today, when we should be talking about how Muslim states can better organize their systems, are we talking about non-state people, lone suicidal wolves, mercenary killers, and thugs? Western foreign policy clearly has something to do with the problem. It isn't the sole cause though, because as I've pointed out numerous times, fanatics pre-dated 20th century Western political hegemony (this time its American rather than British), and would post-date it even if the US were to remove all of our military bases. Still, when I see articles like this one (see the one on Iran), and consider the fact that even I, an extreme skeptic towards reformist successes, can't always blame reformists for not doing enough, I have to take a step back. Why are liberals, and conservatives, who care about Islamic reform, so unwilling to accept blame for our policies? If it is reasonable to expect that Chomsky speak out against Islamic radicals, I think it is extremely reasonable to expect that hawks, liberals, and conservatives stop creating a world which feeds, breeds, perpetuates violence.

Regarding Leo Strauss, there is something particularly bizarre in the fact that the discussion always turns to politics. Not Politics in the Aristotelean sense, but everyday politics; the transient concerns and resentments of the current moment. Strauss, who thought in terms of the entirety of Western civilization, would likely have found this quite bizarre.

The truth beyond the debate over whether Strauss is the neo-con devil incarnate or simply misunderstood is that Strauss probably would not have cared one way or the other. His primary concern was, in fact, the role of the philosopher in society; both in historical and theoretical terms.

Strauss, like other Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany such as Hannah Arendt, struggled throughout his career with the question of what, exactly, had gone so horribly wrong in Germany and in the West as a whole. He was, in other words, trying to wrap his head around the fact of Auschwitz; and the sense that Auschwitz was not some horrifying aberration from the Western tradition but the fulfillment of something dark and terrible at the heart of that tradition.

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I’m creating an SIQ-test. It stands for “Spiritual IQ”. So far, I've only written one question:

What was the greatest impediment to Jewish spirituality in all of history?

A. Idolatry
B. The destruction of the Temple
C. Persecutions
D. False messiahs
E. Economic prosperity
F. None of the above

What do you say? I vote for F, none of the above.

This is because I believe that the greatest stumbling block to Jewish spirituality in all of Jewish history was...

A guy named Michelangelo.

Well, it wasn’t really him as much as something he created: Michelangelo gave us (quite literally!) a cartoon image of God. Do you know what I’m talking about? The Sistine Chapel image of God creating Adam? God is depicted as an old man with a long white beard:

So for the past 500 years we have been saddled with this cartoon image, and the word “God” has become for many associated with the old man and long white beard.

If you think about it, though, didn’t Michelangelo have a point? After all, it says in Genesis that God made Man in His image....So doesn’t that mean that God looks like us?

Well, no.

The God that Jews have always imagined is an Infinite, unknowable...something. I don’t even want to say “being” because the word “being” like any word, begins to define or limit God and we’re talking about something that is non-definable, not finite, a.k.a., infinite.

So, when Moses asks to see God in Exodus 13, God says, “No one can see my face and live” - this limit of human perception is consistent with an Infinite God.

A close reading of Genesis leads to an even deeper idea about God. Genesis describes humanity as made “in the image of God”. So according to the Torah, it is we who have God’s characteristics, not the other way around. Yes, God has a “hand”, but our hand is only an image of that. We don’t know what God’s “hand” looks like because our entire perception is trapped within the framework of this physical realm, and God is transcendent.

Therefore, the only way for us to glimpse what is meant by God’s hand is via some kind of transcendental technique, such as meditation. That’s what Micah and Isaiah and other sages were doing when they glimpsed God. But they weren’t seeing God’s essence, only a spiritual projection that is more subtle than this finite world (which is also a projection) but not God’s true essence, which is likened to seeing God’s face.

In other words, God isn't anthropomophic. We are theomorphic.

I’ll end these holy thoughts with two tools, one practical and one amusing.

The practical tool is a superb on-line test you can take at beliefnet.com to determine your religious affinity. It is remarkably well-designed; someone put a lot of thought into it. Here’s the online test. After you take it, please share your results in the comments section below. My own results were a surprise, which I'll share after a few other people get a chance to comment.

The amusing tool is this video series on youtube – the later episodes are not quite Jewish, but the first one (below) is universal. If you subscribe to my Friday Table Talk blog then you saw this already.

Roll over Michelangelo. The God of the 21st Century wears black-rim frames and sports a goatee.

Tomorrow: What’s a mitzvah and what difference does it make?