Perry Giving Up the (Holy) Ghost

Governor Perry is knocking off campaign events today to attend to the wildfires that have ravaged Texas. The fires have claimed two lives and hundreds of homes since they were spread by wind gusts connected to Tropical Storm Lee this weekend. Lee dumped roughly 12 inches of rain on New Orleans but delivered only driving wind into Texas.

The winds come after a year-long drought in Texas that has caused huge economic woes for farmers. Now the tinder-dry brush across the state is becoming fuel for uncontained fires. As Lee turned North East away from Texas, the drought-stricken Texas has to wonder about their bad luck.

The Texas drought last attracted national attention when Rick Perry proclaimed a day of prayer for rain in April. Since then, rainfall in the lonestar state has remained anemic. In a normal year, San Antonio area gets roughly 14.5 inches of rain between April 21st and September 5th; this year, only 3.53 inches. The lack of rain even after Perry's proclamation for prayer should be a spiritual embarrassment for the Governor. Tropical Storm Lee even veered North East away from Texas, keeping the Texan plains dry.

Droughts are becoming more common along Texas's latitude, a process of desertification that is consistent with models of global climate change caused by anthropogenic carbon increases. Perry, of course, denies that climate science has anything to do with reality. So meeting Perry on his own terms is tempting: Is God punishing Texas with severe drought?

Perry's lack of religious sincerity and political stances against social welfare for God's children are possible targets of God's wrath. But many states have had 'Christian right' anti-worker and anti-poor governors for a decade. Texas uniquely endures the taunting spectale of a tropical storm bringing fire instead of rain.

The most plausible theological account is that the fires are divine punishment for Perry's wanton execution of innocents. Cameron Todd Willingham's execution at the hands of Gov Perry is a particularly haunting case. Not only was the condemned almost certainly innocent, but he was wrongly convicted for arson and refused clemency because of Perry's lack of belief in the scientific method that had thrown considerable doubt upon the jury's verdict.

It's terrible that 2 people would have to die and hundreds of homes burn to get Perry to atone for his sins. Let's pray that Perry does reform, and that the plagues on Texas will stop.

Are all Creationists Caricatures of Creationists?

I can't explain why this is popular on Memeorandum right now, but Bryan Fischer's caricature proof of creationism is too funny to be missed.

I admit that I was a little baffled while reading the article. The first paragraph reads as a fairly straight introduction to Fischer's interest in evolution and the timeliness of the satire article. The second paragraph appears to tip into tongue-in-cheek derision:

Perry’s [rejection of evolution] will help him, not hurt him, with the electorate. Even after almost a century of brainwashing and indoctrination in the government re-education camps called “schools,” only 19 percent of the general public believes that life developed without any assistance or direction from a Creator. That number drops to just eight percent among Republicans. That eight percent can happily throw their vote away on Mr. Huntsman, which will quadruple his total.

The first hint that the article is serious is the misrepresentation of the Theory of Evolution. The spiel is based around a jingoistic belief that evolution is anti-religous. You certainly don't need to reject a story of divine intervention into biological history to understand the process by which genetic frequencies change in species' populations over time.

Fischer follows his absurdist conflation of atheism and science with an appropriately sophomoric attempt at post modernist anti-empiricism.

Before we even start, we ought to notice that, if evolution is true, there would be no way to know it. Because evolution teaches that everything that exists is the product of the random collision of atoms, this logically includes the thoughts I am thinking about evolution. But if my thoughts are the product of the random collision of atoms, there is no reason to think that any of them are true — they just are. No one "random collision of atoms" can be said to be truer than another, any more than one randomly generated Rorschach ink blot can be said to be more correct than another.

That's a serious problem. It's exactly the problem that empiricism attempts to solve. By attempting to make predictions and refining those predictions based on experiments, the scientific method uses feedback from the physical world to verify or dismiss individual thoughts. That's how working theories are made. The alternative--Fischer's alternative in fact--relies purely on mental gymnastics to arrive at a truth value.

I suspect that Bryan Fischer means that the universe applies no normative value to the two thoughts, but that is very different from a truth value (ranging from true to false). Those truth values are only meaningful if there is some meaningful feedback from the universe. Again, empiricism the exercise of designing experiments to collect this feedback. Fischer rejects this process out-of-hand. His approach leads people into a barren desert so he can complain about a lack of water.

It would be convenient to leave aside dismissal of both physics and neuroscience (wrongly labeled here as 'evolution'), but that's precisely his argument. Fischer thinks it's necessary to reject any scientific discovery that overlaps with evolution. Ironic, because the rest of his self-parody relies on very badly misinterpreting basic assumptions that scientists make.

Romney Has No Path To Nomination

I think it's shocking that the media considers Mitt Romney a frontrunner in the Republican nomination battle. I don't mean this is the Jon Stewart-style "They're can't be a front runner when no one has voted." I mean that the fundamentals of the Romney campaign are incredibly weak.

Romney's perceived strength is that he is running the only fairly moderate campaign (besides John Huntsman, who is hardly running a campaign at this point). He has the entire center of the Republican party to himself. Tim Pawlenty was the only other serious contender for the middle (serious contender in that he was focused on that segment of the ideological specturm; he polled miserably). Romney clearly has the support of the Republican establishment, including the traditional conservative media. The feeding frenzy around Rick Perry over the last three days in the conservative legacy media and blog world has surprised right-watchers. Bachmann has received less opprobrium for similar morsels, probably because the conservative establishment never considered her a serious candidate (for a possible explanation see: gender). There's also the numerous pictures of Perry appearing to fire a gun in the air in the middle of a city.<

The Republican field is crowded far to Romney's crazy flank with no one to Romney's center. Huntsman is probably a little more conservative than Romney, but has no profile at this point. That should be good news for Romney. Conventional wisdom about the Republican party-as-stool holds that it has three legs: business interests, puritan social voters, and civil libertarians.

The Republican primary fight so far has been fought primarily among candidates among the latter two 'legs.' Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich all have supporters in both camps. They simultaneously argue that government involvement in personal lives is always bad, but that it should aggressively enforce conservative social ideas. The crush to the right in the primary field has left Romney alone with a wide ideological spectrum to appeal to.

The problem for Romney is that few Republican primary voters occupy that spectrum. Romney consistently places at 20% in the national GOP primary polling. His support is remarkably stable, and doesn't seem to be buffeted by other candidates' exits and entrances. Romney is in a similar position as Ron Paul. He has a group of core supporters, but little upside outside of that group. His voters likely won't turn out for another candidate, and the other candidates' supporters won't vote for Romney.