G-D WOULD COMPLICATE IT In that secularist redoubt the New Republic a bit of light shines through. In its pages Alvin Plantinga a renowned philosopher and religious Christian recently reviewed a slim new volume called Mind and Cosmos by another eminent philosopher NYU’s Thomas Nagel. Nagel argues that materialist naturalism — the belief that life on Earth arose purely through natural processes and human beings and all else in our world are purely material objects — is “antecedently unbelievable — a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense.... I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.”

Nagel has weathered the withering obloquy that inevitably follows the voicing of such heresy in the open-minded groves of academe. For endorsing of some of the conclusions of the Intelligent Design movement “Nagel paid the predictable price; he was said to be arrogant dangerous to children a disgrace hypocritical ignorant mind-polluting reprehensible stupid unscientific…. His new book will probably call forth similar denunciations.”

One of the intractable problems Nagel raises with materialist naturalism is that “[p]hysical science can explain the tides and why birds have hollow bones and why the sky is blue; but it cannot explain consciousness.” But Nagel “has even greater difficulty with cognition. He thinks it monumentally unlikely that unguided natural selection should have ‘generated creatures with the capacity to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances.’ He is thinking in particular of science itself.”

In other words even if one were to “concede for the moment that natural selection might perhaps be expected to produce creatures with cognitive faculties that are reliable when it comes to beliefs for example about the presence of predators or food or potential mates … what about beliefs that go far beyond anything with survival value … [like]physics … or evolutionary theory? What is the probability given materialist naturalism that our cognitive faculties should be reliable in such areas? It is very small indeed. It follows — in a wonderful irony — that a materialistic naturalist should be skeptical about science.”

So Dr. Nagel must be a believer no? No but he’s a quite honest nonbeliever. In a 1997 book he wrote:

I am talking about something much deeper — namely the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.... It isn’t just that I don’t believe in [G-d] and naturally hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no [G-d]! I don’t want there to be a [G-d]; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

Dr. Plantinga concludes his review this way:

[I]f Nagel followed his own methodological prescriptions and requirements for sound philosophy if he followed his own arguments wherever they lead if he ignored his emotional antipathy to belief in God then (or so I think) he would wind up a theist. But wherever he winds up he has already performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age.

BUBBLE TROUBLE This past week a column in the Jewish Week helped give me a new understanding of people who ascribe the fact that many Orthodox Jews and most Israelis opposed Barack Obama’s reelection to silly notions like a belief that he’s a “secret Muslim.” I’ve never addressed these kinds of statements before because frankly I didn’t want to dignify unserious — indeed condescending — claims with a serious response.

Based on a New York Times voting map the columnist notes that some predominantly Orthodox neighborhoods voted heavily for Romney in contrast to Obama’s resounding win in the rest ofNew York City. Then as predictably as day follows night the author writes: “Charges that he was a ‘secret Muslim ’ that he had insulted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and that he would turn his back onIsrael as soon as the election was over could be heard over Kiddush in many Orthodox congregations.”

“Over Kiddush in many congregations” eh? How’s that for rigorously empirical analysis? I actually have heard a few Orthodox folks muse about Mr. Obama harboring Muslim sympathies. But I am inclined to grant that the majority of Democrats aren’t raving conspiratorial anti-Semites despite the not-insignificant number of commentators on liberal websites who are. Could this columnist consider returning the favor?

Might perchance a Jew’s problem with candidate Obama have had to do with his administration’s unyielding assault on religious liberty; the opportunity he’d get to fashion a decades-long liberal majority on that arbiter of societal morality the Supreme Court; his attempts to block Iran sanctions passed overwhelmingly by Congress (all this before reaching his Israel and domestic policies)? Nah … just pass the herring.

This is just a Jewish variation on a standard left-wing ploy: imputing outlandish even demonstrably false motives to people one disagrees with the better to not have to engage thoughtfully and factually with a view different from one’s own. It’s happening right now with the potential nomination of Susan Rice as secretary of state. Liberal pundits are crying “racist ” even though as National Review editor Rich Lowry notes “Across the last 20 years of our national life only one party has had lily-white secretaries of state. If she were nominated and confirmed Susan Rice would make history — as the Democrats’ first black secretary of state.”

But this Jewish Week column opened my eyes to the possibility that not all such imputation of silly motives has its roots in ill-will and conscious close-mindedness. Instead some of the people saying these things are genuinely clueless. How do I know? Because some time ago this same columnist a fine fellow asked to meet me to talk about the chareidi community which we did for a couple hours. When I told him I was an attorney by training he looked at me wide-eyed and asked if there were others like me. I came away from our time together marveling at the bubble individuals like him live in hermetically sealed off from the lived reality of the very people they write about.

VIVA CLICHÉ! British writer Hephzibah Anderson has been roused to defense of the cliché by a new book entitled Clichés: Avoid Them Like the Plague. The book by Nigel Fountain catalogues these offending phrases — a potpourri of the predictable one might say; a laundry list for the literarily lazy if you will — which Ms. Anderson writes includes “buzz-words and bromides as well as adages truisms and idioms.… [T]hey are all [Fountain] argues either redundant vacuous or overused to the point of meaninglessness.”

Andersonnotes that “not all clichés … are created equal. ‘At the end of the day’ which has justly been voted the most hated cliché is little more than a verbal tic.… Strip [it] from a sentence and its sense remains unchanged.” Not to mention that it can be confusing; you can still hear it being used inBoroPark for example long after it’s pitch-dark outside.

Ironically as Ms. Anderson delved further into the book she “discovered a new respect for certain clichés … [and] began to appreciate their sturdy truthfulness and comforting ancientness.” She had no idea for example “that ‘better late than never’… was first inscribed by an ancient Greek the historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus.” And here for the longest time I’ve been thinking it was Chananya Yom Tov Lipa Katzenellenbogenstein.

And besides she says

Their adaptability ensures their survival — true not everyone knows exactly what a drawing board looks like these days yet we all recognize what it feels like to find ourselves back at one. [A] well-chosen cliché [is an] implicit acknowledgement that there is after all nothing new under the sun. That doesn’t excuse us from the never-ending task of finding new ways of capturing our experience in language but at the end of the day sometimes only a cliché will do.

A textbook example: The other day I was on the phone with an up-and-coming writer discussing the brass tacks of dollars and cents. She was preparing a pictorial spread with some accompanying text for a magazine and wondered what to ask for in compensation which is usually figured on a per-word basis. My son listening in whispered “She can tell her editor ‘a picture’s worth a thousand words.’$$$SEPARATE QUOTES$$$”