Hugh Hefner (1926-2017)

Perhaps no single individual has done more in his lifetime to destroy the moral fabric of a nation, certainly not this nation, than has Hugh Hefner who died this week at the age of 91.

Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine in the early 1950s, was a major influence in the sexual revolution of the 1960s exploiting the confluence of the rebelliousness of youth in the sixties, the development of easy birth control, the unprecedented sociological phenomenon of perhaps hundreds of thousands of young men and women being mixed together and isolated from any significant oversight of their lives and conduct for four years in colleges and universities, and the erosion of religious influences on people's personal lives.

At a time when even theologians were proclaiming and celebrating the death of God Hefner exploited the moral vacuum His "death" left through the promotion of his Playboy "philosophy." That philosophy was in fact just a repackaging of the hedonism which has been around ever since the ancient Greeks and doubtless for long before, but it was enthusiastically received by generations of young men and women eager to believe its promise of fulfillment through the liberation of their appetites from the repressive strictures of the old morality, and eager to make physical pleasure and sexual gratification their new gods.

The destructive effect this "liberation" has had on the American family is incalculable. The promises of fulfilled lives and happiness turned to dust in the mouths of countless families destroyed by infidelity, pornography addiction, incest, sexual abuse and divorce.

Millions of girls have grown up believing the absurdity that the way to make boys love them is to make themselves sexually available. Millions of boys have grown up believing that sexual access to girls is a right, that girls are objects for male gratification, and a vehicle for affirming their masculinity through sexual conquest.

Countless families have been devastated by the unrealistic sexual expectations of the husband for his wife and mother of his children because she could not measure up to the sexual standard established for her, directly or indirectly, by Hefner and his acolytes. Millions of children have grown up disadvantaged by the lack of a father in their lives because the men who sired them had no intention of committing to their mothers and their mothers did not insist upon commitment before giving them sex.

It's hard to imagine anything which has been more corrosive to social well-being and cohesion than the assumptions about sex promoted by Hefner and his successors over the last sixty years.

David French, writing in National Review Online, says this:

Hugh Hefner didn’t invent pornography, and it would no doubt be thriving today even if he hadn’t founded Playboy magazine those many years ago. After all, man is fallen, and somebody would have filled that depraved niche in American life. Hefner, however, played his part, and the part he played was immensely destructive to our nation’s cultural, moral, and spiritual fabric. Hefner mainstreamed porn, he put it in millions of homes, and he even glamorized it — recasting one of America’s most pathetic industries as the playground of the sophisticated rich.

He then grew to a ripe old age, consorting with women young enough to be his granddaughters. He was America’s most famous dirty old man....

So many A-list celebrities spent time at the Playboy Mansion, especially at its peak, that there was a time when one could wonder who hadn’t embraced Hef or the magazine he made. Our president has. The evidence is on his office wall. These were the people setting the tone for American culture. These were the people mocking the values that kept families strong. These were the people who were teaching a nation that fulfillment could be found in sex, and that the joy of sex was worth more than marriage itself.

They were wrong, and the cultural harm done outweighs the cost of botched presidential elections, bad congressmen, or a judiciary riddled with knaves and fools. The cultural harm done is even now ripping kids from parents and husbands from wives. When I think of Hugh Hefner, yes I mourn, but I mourn because the bitter fruit of his life’s work has helped poison the families of people I know and love. He is gone, but his legacy lives on. And his is a legacy of despair.

Hefner is gone, but rather than grieve for him as some in the media have done it's more appropriate, perhaps, to grieve for the millions of people whose lives were diminished or destroyed because either they or someone in their life believed the delusions about human nature that Hefner made a fortune promoting.

The Threat from the Left

John Sexton at HotAir has a story on Antifa which is alarming for a couple of reasons. First, is the level of violence Antifa is prepared to use against anyone they call a "Nazi" which could be anyone they don't like. Second is that they seem determined to sow chaos in our cities, and third is the fact that the national media seem completely uninterested in investigating this group of left-wing extremists.

Steven Crowder, a late night talk host and political humorist, infiltrated the group and managed to get this video. Since the video may be hard to follow Sexton's summary may be helpful. He writes:

As you’ll see in this clip, Crowder’s producer, Jared, put on a disguise and met with members of Antifa who installed an app on his phone to allow them to communicate. The protest plan, according to the organizer, was “plain clothes and hard tactics.” That meant not dressing in black or wearing masks, which had been banned by police, but preparing for violence.

At a subsequent meeting, one member of the group discusses the guns he has in his trunk. Another member hands Jared an ice pick. Jared immediately makes an excuse and takes the footage [to] local police who have already been monitoring the situation. Crowder ends the clip by focusing on the media's [disinterested response].

The media's response, at least the response of the national media, is pretty pathetic. You can bet that were this a bunch of white nationalists they'd pay a fortune to get their hands on Crowder's video, but the media progressives simply aren't interested in anything that makes anyone on the left look evil.

According to a piece on Crowder and his video at Infowars - a site with a dubious reputation, to be sure, but they link to Antifa sites from which they quote in their article - Antifa is planning to “gather [on November 4] in the streets and public squares of cities and towns across this country” in the hope of building momentum for civil unrest that leads to nothing less than domestic regime change.

“Our protest must grow day after day and night after night—thousands becoming hundreds of thousands, and then millions—determined to act to put a stop to the grave danger that the Trump/Pence Regime poses to the world by demanding that this whole regime be removed from power,” states a call to action on the RefuseFascism website.

A longer screed posted on the Revolutionary Communist website makes it clear that Antifa is not prepared to wait for electoral change from Democrats, and will engage in a “ferocious struggle,” based on plans outlined in a book written by Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is called The Coming Civil War.

At some point perhaps liberals will wake up to the extremist wolves in their midst who've attempted up until now to present themselves to the public as innocent sheep just trying to prevent a fascist take-over of America. Perhaps if liberals start to condemn it instead of defending it it'll wither away. Let's hope no lives are lost before that happens.

An Intractable Problem

Over at Evolution News Denyse O'Leary has an interesting piece on attempts by scientists and philosophers to crack the intractable problem of determining exactly what consciousness is and how it arose.

According to O'Leary we haven't made much progress and part of the reason is that those who are working on the problem are doing so within the philosophical straitjacket of metaphysical naturalism according to which any explanation that doesn't conform to materialist or physicalist assumptions is rejected a priori.

It could be, of course, that consciousness cannot be explained naturalistically, that it's something completely other than the physical brain matter with which it seems to be integrated in the human species.

Whether it is or isn't, some of the questions related to consciousness that philosophers and neuroscientists are addressing include the following: Does everything in the universe possess at least a spark of consciousness or is it limited only to living things, or only to animals, or only to humans? Is consciousness physical, i.e. reducible to brain chemistry? Is it "real" or is it an illusion generated by the brain? Is consciousness more like information than like matter, energy, or force?

O'Leary asserts:

We know almost nothing about human consciousness but naturalism must treat it as evolved from unconscious elements (material stuff). Much confusion is avoided by recognizing that that is a core assumption, not a discovery. Naturalist theories of consciousness currently proliferate with abandon because there is no basis for deciding among them. They are tossed, like hats, into a ring.

She goes on to consider a sampling of these naturalistic theories, skewering their inadequacies, before turning to a fundamental problem of all naturalistic explanations, one that I wrote about a few days ago:

As double helix discoverer Francis Crick (1916–2004) famously announced in The Astonishing Hypothesis, “Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.”

If that's true, how can we trust that our brains are reliable guides to truth? Indeed, isn't Crick's statement self-refuting? If our brains didn't evolve to recognize scientific truth, why should we believe Crick's assertion to be true?

Similarly, literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, “If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? … Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.”

Wieseltier is right. There's something profoundly self-defeating in assurances that natural selection has evolved reason for survival and not for truth. In other words, if that's true there's no good reason to think that it is true because by its own testimony reason could just as easily deceive us as enlighten us.

This is why Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry said that, "[T]his debate [over the origin and nature of consciousness] is immensely frustrating. In fact, much of the ongoing conversation about consciousness is self-evidently absurd."

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that "Maybe an explanation of consciousness is forever beyond us, just as calculus is forever beyond the mentality of a chimpanzee."

Even so, the longer the explanation of consciousness as a product of our material brain continues to elude us the more it looks like there's something else involved in producing the phenomena of conscious experience - an immaterial mind or soul, perhaps.

This, though, is a possibility that those researchers wedded to a naturalistic worldview will never consider, but if the possibility is, in fact, true, their obstinate refusal to abandon what's turning out to be a heuristically sterile metaphysics will trap them in a frustrating and futile effort to espy a satisfactory explanation in one theory after another - an effort to find an explanation that doesn't exist.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

A recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) puts a price tag on illegal immigration.

It turns out that according to the study illegal immigrants and their children cost American taxpayers, you and I, $135 billion every year.

We often hear the argument that illegal immigrants pay enough in taxes to more than offset their costs to the state and federal government, but according to the study, that's simply not the case. Illegal immigrants pay almost $19 billion a year in taxes, but their cost to both state and federal governments is just under $135 billion per annum. The net burden to the nation for allowing people to immigrate illegally into the country is thus about $115 billion every year, and it's rising.

Of this cost, almost $89 billion is borne by the states with the remaining $46 billion paid out by the federal government.

The Federation's 68 page report documents that the average state, local and federal spending comes to $8,075 for each of the of 12.5 million illegal immigrants and their 4.2 million citizen children.

This includes $29 billion in medical care, $23 billion for law enforcement, $9 billion in welfare, $46 billion for education.

Much of the education cost is a consequence of having to teach children who don't speak English. FAIR's study estimates that that educational effort costs on average over $12,000 per student per year, and as much as $25,000 per student in New York. Add to that amount the expense of welfare, health care, school lunches, and the per student price soars.

California leads all states in spending on illegal immigrants at $23 billion per year, followed by Texas at $11 billion, and New York at $7.4 billion.

Whatever the good arguments may be for amnesty, the argument that illegal immigrants pay for themselves is surely not among them. Indeed, they are placing a crushing economic burden on states and communities in particular and taxpayers in general.

The cost of border enforcement may be high, the cost of a wall may be high, but the cost of doing neither is simply unsustainable.

What's it All About, Anyway?

As is often the case, Robert Tracinski has some interesting things to say about a current issue - in the present case the spectacle of wealthy, pampered pro athletes protesting it's not clear what by refusing to stand for the national anthem.

The NFL has made hundreds of black athletes very rich over the past several decades, but because none of the league's teams wanted to sign a single, mediocre, malcontent black quarterback named Colin Kaepernick, dozens of other black athletes have chosen to show their contempt, not for the league, but for the fans and the country that have made their lives a dream come true.

The protest began as an act of solidarity with Kaepernick, but evidently the protesters soon realized that it was ludicrous to think that a league which is about 85% African-American was racist, so the effort morphed into a general protest against police shootings of innocent black men. Very well, but it's not clear how disrespecting the flag, the fans, the military and everything else the flag stands for really advanced the message that there are rogue cops who need to be removed from the police force or put in jail.

Nor is it clear what measures the NFL, or anyone else, could take to convince the protesters that their grievance had been addressed and to end their protest. It seemed that the demonstrations either had to continue indefinitely or else fizzle out in an embarrassing loss of interest and relevance.

Then, just as the few players who participated in refusing to stand for the anthem began to look less newsworthy, even to a media always eager to promote anything which divides people, Donald Trump helped them out by interjecting himself into the matter. In a speech Friday in Alabama Trump chose to express displeasure with the protesters, and that was all it took. Now the protests were infused with new purpose - they were a sign of "resistance" against Trump. The numbers of players joining the demonstrations swelled even as the rationale for them became even more unclear.

Anyway, to avoid giving the appearance of spurning the flag and the country that has made them rich and famous, players and owners at last night's Monday night game linked arms and knelt prior to the anthem in a show of solidarity, but it wasn't clear what they were solidified about. Perhaps they were in solidarity against Donald Trump, in which case the entire protest theme has wandered as far from its original significance as if they were kneeling to express their objections to the minimum wage or global warming.

Tracinski makes a couple of points about the co-option of the players' protest by the "resistance left."

He says, rightly, I think, that if anybody thinks Trump is going to be hurt by his comments in Alabama with the people who voted him into office, then they're facing a long eight years. He also comments on the fact that,

[S]everal prominent left-leaning figures are now suggesting that “The kneel will now become a sign of opposition to Trump.” But kneeling, of course, is an ancient sign of submission, not resistance.

He cites one person who tweeted: "Wouldn't it be great if taking a knee became the symbol of resistance to Trump, and wherever he went, wherever people gathered, they did it?" To which he replies:

That’s what happens when blind, unthinking opposition become more important to you than actual principles and good sense. You end up resisting Trump so much that people kneel before him wherever he goes.

The tragedy is that these protests actually undermine the possibility of anything being done about the very issue they are supposedly drawing our attention to. The problem of police shootings and excessive use of force has been overhyped, but it is real. (Think Philando Castile, not Michael Brown.) But it’s a problem where people on both sides have been sold simplistic solutions.

A real, detailed debate on how to maintain law and order and keep crime low while also reducing the risk of wrongful police shootings would be dull but profitable. Letting the issue be dominated by a partisan protest culture virtually ensures that nothing of value will be done.

So congratulations, Resistance fighters. You’re going to get Trump re-elected, while preventing progress on the big issue you claim to care about.

The Conflict Between Naturalism and Reason

One of the interesting epistemological developments of the 20th century was the increasingly widespread recognition among philosophers and other thinkers that metaphysical naturalism actually saws off the epistemological branch upon which it had been perched comfortably for the previous three centuries.

Ever since the Enlightenment philosophers inclined toward a naturalistic worldview had touted their devotion to reason and derided those whose beliefs seemed to them to be irrational. They were convinced that they were occupying the intellectual high ground, but in the latter part of the 20th century many thinkers, both naturalists and theists, noting that a naturalistic view of the world entailed a Darwinian account of the origin of human reason, recognized that on Darwinism there's no good basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth.

According to naturalism, evolution, unguided by any intelligent agent, has selected for cognitive faculties in human beings that lead to survival, but survival doesn't necessarily require truth. Indeed, survival could just as easily be enhanced by falsehoods as by truths.

Consider, for instance, a prehistoric society in which a gene mutation causes some people to believe that the more children they produce the greater will be their reward in the afterlife. Those who carry the mutation would tend, on average, to generate more children than those who don't, and since the mutant gene would be passed on to offspring the belief would spread through the population. It would have very high survival value despite its being completely false.

As Barry Arrington at Uncommon Descent notes, this is an awkward state of epistemic affairs for naturalists to find themselves in, but, even so, there are lots of examples of naturalists admitting that natural selection, at least naturalistic natural selection, entails precisely the conclusion that reason has evolved to aid our survival not to discover truth, and especially not metaphysical truth.

Arrington offers a sampling of such quotes:

“[Our] brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” Steven Pinker

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Eric Baum

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Donald Hoffman

"We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favored by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant." Michael Ghiselin

“[N]atural selection does not care about truth; it cares only about reproductive success” Stephen Stich

“Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Patricia Churchland

“We are jumped-up apes, and our brains were only designed to understand the mundane details of how to survive in the stone-age African savannah.” Richard Dawkins

Of course, a further irony in all this is that if the naturalist cannot trust her reason to lead her to truths about her deepest metaphysical beliefs then she has no good grounds for believing that naturalism is true in the first place.

Anyone interested in reading more about the problem of reconciling naturalism with a belief in the trustworthiness of human reason might check out a book by Alvin Plantinga, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th century. The book is titled Knowledge and Christian Belief, and it's a more accessible version of his earlier, more technical treatment of the same subject titled Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism.

What Are We Made of?

A BBC article from a year ago raises the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation something like the Matrix and in the course of discussing the pros and cons of the hypothesis gives an interesting insight into why philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals, like Elon Musk, are entertaining this speculation:

The idea that we live in a simulation has some high-profile advocates.

In June 2016, technology entrepreneur Elon Musk assertedthat the odds are "a billion to one" against us living in "base reality".

Similarly, Google's machine-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil has suggested that "maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high-school student in another universe".

Two basic scenarios have been advanced. In the first, our material universe is "real" but was made by an intelligent agent in some other universe:

Cosmologist Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US has suggested that our entire Universe might be real yet still a kind of lab experiment. The idea is that our Universe was created by some super-intelligence, much as biologists breed colonies of micro-organisms.

There is nothing in principle that rules out the possibility of manufacturing a universe in an artificial Big Bang, filled with real matter and energy, says Guth... Our Universe might have been born in some super-beings' equivalent of a test tube, but it is just as physically "real" as if it had been born "naturally".

However, there is a second, more popular, scenario that seems to undermine our very concept of what everything is made of:

Musk and other like-minded folk are suggesting that we are entirely simulated beings. We could be nothing more than strings of information manipulated in some gigantic computer, like the characters in a video game.

Even our brains are simulated, and are responding to simulated sensory inputs.

The interesting aspect of all this to me is the reason why these scenarios are being advanced. They're an attempt to account for the fact that our universe looks to those who study it like it was engineered by a super-intelligent mathematical genius:

Some scientists argue that there are already good reasons to think we are inside a simulation. One is the fact that our Universe looks designed.

The constants of nature, such as the strengths of the fundamental forces, have values that look fine-tuned to make life possible. Even small alterations would mean that atoms were no longer stable, or that stars could not form. Why this is so is one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

This fine-tuning makes the existence of a universe like ours incomprehensibly unlikely so how can the existence of such a finely-tuned universe as ours be explained? There are two (naturalistic) options. The first is to posit the existence of a multiverse of a near infinite number of different universes.

Given such a vast number of worlds the existence of one like ours goes from astronomically improbable to almost certain. Just as the probability of being dealt a royal flush is very low but is nevertheless certain to occur if one is dealt an infinite number of hands, so, too, given enough different universes in the multiverse one as incomprehensibly improbable as ours is bound to occur.

However, the writer of the article, like most scientists, is not impressed with the multiverse hypothesis:

However, parallel universes are a pretty speculative idea. So it is at least conceivable that our Universe is instead a simulation whose parameters have been fine-tuned to give interesting results, like stars, galaxies and people.

While this is possible, the reasoning does not get us anywhere. After all, presumably the "real" Universe of our creators must also be fine-tuned for them to exist. In that case, positing that we are in a simulation does not explain the fine-tuning mystery.

Right. The simulation hypothesis only pushes the need for an explanation for the fine-tuning phenomenon back a step.

A second argument is that the Universe appears to run on mathematical lines, just as you would expect from a computer program. Ultimately, say some physicists, reality might be nothing but mathematics.

Perhaps the universe is at bottom all math, but where did the math come from?

Some physicists feel that, at its most fundamental level, nature might not be pure mathematics but pure information: bits, like the ones and zeros of computers. If reality is just information, then we are no more or less "real" if we are in a simulation or not. In either case, information is all we can be.

This seems reasonable, but it leaves unanswered a very important question. Since information is the product of minds what is the mind that produced the ones and zeros from which matter is constructed?

The article concludes with this thought:

Does it make a difference if that information were programmed by nature or by super-intelligent creators? It is not obvious why it should – except that, in the latter case, presumably our creators could in principle intervene in the simulation, or even switch it off.

Well, it certainly does make a difference, depending on who or what the super-intelligent creator actually is, but, that aside, it's a fascinating development that after centuries of trying to expunge any notion of "super-intelligent" minds from our creation narratives, scientists and philosophers have come right back to where things stood thousands of years ago. I'm reminded of the closing lines of Robert Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers in which Jastrow talks about how the attempt to rid science of all non-material causes and to employ only reason in the search for knowledge has ended:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Next on the Agenda: Polyamory

Several years ago, before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in the Oberkfell decision, I commented on VP (see here and here) that I thought the strongest argument against legalizing gay marriage was that if society decides that the gender of those entering into marriage no longer matters there'll be no logical barrier to concluding that neither should the number of people forming a marriage matter.

At that point marriage will be defined as a union of any combination of people who wish to legally unify their lives, and if marriage were to mean pretty much anything it'll no longer have much meaning at all.

There were doubters. Respondents, many of whom supported gay marriage, were nevertheless incredulous that I'd think that anyone would want to be in a group marriage (polyamorous relationship). That would be sick, some said. The courts would never allow it, said others. I, for my part, thought the skeptics were being naive about what people would do if the legal barriers to doing it were dismantled.

I cited in that original post a couple of articles which advocated the legalization of polyamorous marriages, and claimed that pressure would begin to mount in the social mainstream for the recognition of such unions.

Then came yet another article, at CNN this time, to further bolster my prediction.

Janet Hardy argued from the existence of a number of polyamorous relationships among her acquaintances to the conclusion that polyamorous marriage should be legal. Her argument is that traditional families are becoming increasingly scarce and that they're in any case often problematic for the people in them. Thus, we should allow people to form whatever arrangements they feel comfortable with.

I'm not sure how that conclusion follows from those premises, however. She seems to be concluding that because there are these alternative arrangements therefore there ought to be these arrangements, but this commits the fallacy of deriving an ought from an is. She also seems to argue that because traditional marriage has difficulties that we should therefore allow other arrangements, but, of course, these would have difficulties as well.

But set aside these criticisms of Ms Hardy's logic. You may agree with her in thinking this would be a fine development. I'm not arguing the merits of either polyamory or gay marriage in this post. Nor do I want anyone to think or say that to oppose gay marriage is somehow "gay-bashing" or reflects hatred toward gays. That'd be both simple-minded and false.

I'm merely pointing out that once we have changed the laws governing marriage - which has traditionally been seen as a union of one man and one woman - so that the gender of the participants is no longer relevant we have no good reason to resist changing the laws so that the number of participants is no longer relevant as well. At that point marriage, family, and society will have a much different aspect than what it has been throughout most of our history. I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not that will be progress.

After describing some of the arrangements of her friends and a brief mention of some hazards of polyamory Hardy closes with this:

I am sure that many marriage equality opponents reading this are shouting "I told you so!" as their predictions that plural marriage would follow same-sex marriage come nightmarishly true.

Many grew up as I did, in a time and place where the single-wage-earner nuclear family was the unquestioned norm and would like to see their country conform to that unrealistic standard for the rest of history.

But even then, the nuclear family was an uncomfortable fit for many, and an impossible dream for others. The America in which I want my children and grandchildren to live will make room for all kinds of families, and it will offer the same support and benefits -- legally, financially and socially -- to any family that is based on a core of love, consent and mutual responsibility.

That's what "family values" should really be about.

Well, I did tell you so, but I'm not "shouting."

Cool Bird Tricks

An article at Evolution News discusses some recent research into four mysterious phenomena displayed by birds and other animals for which there's no good evolutionary explanation other than the standard assurance that genetic mutation and natural selection can "wave the magic wand" and perform miraculous feats of biological creation.

The first astonishing ability of birds and other organisms is the ability to navigate vast distances east to west by using the earth's magnetic field:

Because each field line on the earth has a particular intensity and angle (inclination or declination), this provides a fixed coordinate system that animals with the right equipment can utilize, even though these values are not always at right angles.... Maybe birds learned this trick from sea turtles, which also use the magnetic field in this way....

In fact, many diverse species - from eels, to birds, to butterflies - migrate. How did this capacity evolve in so many unrelated organisms. It won't do to just wave the wand and intone, "natural selection!" That's an answer that sounds convincing only to those already convinced. To an open-minded, skeptical inquirer it's hardly a compelling explanation for how such a complex mechanism could evolve by chance numerous times in biological history.

Here's another fascinating avian fact:

Ruddy shelducks, when migrating past the Himalayas, can fly as high as 6,800 meters (22,000 feet). That’s 77 percent the height of Mt. Everest and over half the altitude of a passenger jet at cruising altitude.

At only 4,000 meters, oxygen levels drop to half of sea level values. How do the ducks survive the cold and low oxygen?

What conceivable selection pressure acted upon duck populations in their evolutionary past that caused this ability to evolve?

Crows and cockatoos seem locked in a battle for the coveted title of most intelligent bird. New Caledonian crows are known to bend pieces of wire into hooks in order to fish items out of holes. Now, cockatoos seem to have bested them by figuring out ways to bend pipe cleaners into hooks to retrieve a reward or unbend them into straight lines as the experimental setup requires.

Nothing in these parrots’ environment requires working out this kind of problem. The experiments showed variation in the way individual birds solved the challenges, suggesting that they are not relying on instincts, but actually figuring out solutions in real time.

The final amazing phenomenon displayed by birds is shown in the following video clip. Watch it and ponder how these birds all know to turn the same way at precisely the same instant and without colliding? And why do they do this anyway? What's the evolutionary advantage?

Check out the link for more on the details of the research being done on these phenomena.

In general, there are two alternative possible explanations for these remarkable behaviors: Either they're all the astonishing result of blind mechanical processes acting on random genetic mutations over eons of time or they're the product of an intelligent, purposeful design.

Since we know minds can engineer complexity of this sort (e.g. think of a computer) and since we have no experience of unthinking forces producing the kind of information necessary for complex behavior we're left with a question: Which of the two possible explanations requires the most faith to believe?

Responding to Rocket Man

An excellent suggested response to the North Korean nuclear threat comes to us from the Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer in a very informative piece written for National Review Online. In his essay, Meyer denies that there are no good responses to Kim Jong-un (whom President Trump has dubbed "Rocket Man") and his regime's determination to acquire nuclear missiles and to launch them against the U.S. and its allies.

Meyer opens with a prologue:

Many analysts have assumed that the U.S. has only three basic options for addressing the North Korean threat: an offensive first strike, diplomatic initiatives involving China and sanctions, or acquiescence. But the United States has other options that do not require either starting a war, waiting for help from the unwilling, or accepting the vulnerability of U.S. and allied cities to a North Korean missile attack.

Rather than initiating a military strike or continuing to pursue ineffective diplomatic initiatives, the United States can take advantage of recent technological advances to deploy a more effective multi-layered missile defense, including one system perfectly suited to defuse the North Korean crisis.

The American ability to project power abroad through its conventional forces — carrier groups, fighter and bomber squadrons, cruise missiles, ground troops, and special forces — remains unrivaled despite sequester-driven budget cuts and the erosion of capability they have caused. Nevertheless, at home American cities stand vulnerable to attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as well as shorter-range missiles launched from submarines or even small ships offshore.

Though North Korea has not yet definitively demonstrated the ability to track and deliver ICBMs on target, the Defense Intelligence Agency now believes that Kim Jong-un has the capability to miniaturize a nuclear device and place it inside an ICBM. Once Kim also acquires more precise targeting capability, cities across the western United States will be vulnerable to his missiles and the president to his nuclear blackmail.

Indeed, current ground-based missile-defense systems, though necessary, are not sufficient to protect U.S. cities from the first-strike capability of several potential adversaries, including soon North Korea. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD) and Aegis ship-based missile-defense systems have demonstrated an impressive accuracy in defending against short-and medium-range missiles of the kind that North Korea could fire at South Korea or Japan.

Nevertheless, these ground based systems cannot stop Chinese, Russian, or North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles from hitting U.S. cities. Russia alone has 1500 sophisticated ICBMs, more than enough to overwhelm the several dozen existing and unreliable ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California.

So, then, given this bleak prospect what should we do? Here's Meyer's proposal:

Consequently, the United States urgently needs to develop and deploy higher altitude and space-based systems for missile defense. Arthur Herman of the Hudson Institute has taken the lead on advocating one such high-altitude system with particular promise for neutralizing the North Korean threat. Known as High Altitude Long Endurance Boost Phase Intercept (or HALE BPI), this system would offer another option besides acquiescence or a high-risk first strike against North Korean missile launchers.

As conceived by Len Caveny, the former director of science and technology at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the HALE BPI system would host anti-missile missiles on existing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that have the capacity for continuous flying for 18 to 40 hours or more (thus, the term “long endurance” in the HALE acronym).

Using sophisticated radar, infrared detection, and “data fusion” technology, these missile-equipped UAVs would circle the Sea of Japan outside North Korean airspace at an altitude of 45,000 feet or more. Upon detection and verification of a missile launch from North Korea, the HALE BPI UAV’s operator on the ground would have time (perhaps a minute or more) to fire a purely kinetic missile, i.e. a missile without an explosive warhead, at the missile in its “boost phase.” Using already existing guidance systems and the pure kinetic energy that can be generated by even a small object moving at an extremely rapid velocity, the missile would destroy a North Korea missile almost as soon as it leaves the launch pad.

Caveny [has] explained that most of the modular technological elements of such a system already exist and that an effective kinetic BPI system could be developed and deployed in two years, or within 12 months if the development of the system were put on an expedited war-prevention footing. Herman, in a series of compelling op-eds and position papers, has argued that such a system offers many benefits for addressing the North Korean crisis and multiple advantages over existing ground-based missile-defense systems that attempt to destroy missiles during their downward “terminal phase” of flight.

The advantages of this kinetic antimissile system are several. Meyer lists five, here are his first three:

First, rising missiles in their boost phase are easiest to detect and destroy. During boost phase, missiles are moving at their slowest velocity, making them easier to shoot down. They also burn more fuel at this point in their trajectory, giving them their hottest infrared signature and making them easier to detect at long range. In addition, missiles in boost phase cannot employ evasive maneuvers or deploy multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (or MIRVs) — unlike descending ICBMs in terminal phase.

Second, destroying missiles in the boost phase ensures that the debris from the kinetic collision and destruction of the warhead will fall safely over the Sea of Japan or even on North Korean territory, a poetically just way of enhancing deterrence and effectively boxing Kim Jong-un’s threat into a confined airspace.

Third, the BPI system currently envisioned by Herman and Caveny would represent only a near-horizon defensive weapon system — one that would not directly threaten the nuclear deterrent of the Chinese. Hosting a boost phase system on a UAV rather than in space would not, therefore, protect against ICBMs launched from countries with large land masses such as China and Russia.

Nevertheless, in the immediate context of the North Korean crisis, such a system would have the advantage of representing a defensive response to a clear provocation. As such, it should not antagonize the Chinese, precisely because it does not compromise their own nuclear deterrence (or offensive capability). Even so, its deployment, like that of the THAAD system, will clearly not please the Chinese. But given that they cannot reasonably object to such a purely defensive system, especially in the current crisis, their displeasure could incentivize them to distance themselves from North Korea or even to pressure their client state to stop further testing of nuclear weapons.

There's much more in his article for those interested in national defense issues and I urge you to read all of it. The proposal to use kinetic munitions to intercept ICBMs during the boost phase is not new. It's been talked about since at least the 1990s, but what's new is that we now have a president who may be inclined to spend the money to implement it.

As Meyer's article makes clear these weapons would only be appropriate for use against a country with a small land area, but that's what North Korea is, and right now they're the biggest threat to the United States.

Because all the R&D has already been done and most of the technology is already available the cost of building such a system would be a measly $25 million out of a $639 billion annual defense budget, and it could be operational in a year if pushed. Can we really afford not to go ahead with it?

Fascism on the Left

In the last year or so, we've heard numerous claims to the effect that the alt-right is a threat to civility and free speech. Charges of "fascism" have been leveled at people from Donald Trump on down to standard political conservatives. Groups on the left, abetted by the progressive media, have given the impression that neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other odious manifestations of fascism are a contemporary threat to our society.

There's much truth to the charge that fascism is a current threat, but the locus of that threat is seriously misjudged. The alt-right is both small and relatively impotent; the most virulent fascists on today's socio-cultural scene are on the left.

It's a technique of radicals, especially radicals on the left, to deflect attention from their own behavior and goals by projecting traits that they themselves exhibit onto those they deem to be their ideological enemies, and it's a technique of fascists everywhere to shout down those who would expose them thereby denying them a public forum for their opinions.

It's also a technique of fascists to use violence to intimidate and harm those who resist and oppose them so that the opposition is cowed into silence and acquiescence.

One of the traditions, indeed, a venerated constitutional right, enjoyed by Americans for over two centuries is the right to freely express political views, but that right is under more serious assault today than at any time in our national history, and the battlefield is our colleges and universities.

Recently U.C. Berkeley spent over $600,000 to provide security for a conservative speaker named Ben Shapiro whose views are mainstream conservative and shared by a majority of Americans. It wasn't a fear that Shapiro's speech would provoke a violent reaction among conservatives that motivated Berkeley to spend the money but rather that it would provoke a violent reaction on the fascist left. Organizations like Antifa and Black Lives Matter have explicitly embraced violence to both further their ends and to suppress opposing viewpoints, and Shapiro's speech was feared to be a ripe target for their brutish tactics.

These methods have been employed at many universities across the country. Students, faculty, and speakers at Berkeley, Evergreen, Middlebury and others have all been subject to the thuggery of campus fascists. Events at the University of Minnesota this year as recounted by Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast are another example of how it works:

Madison Faupel is the president of the University of Minnesota's College Republican chapter. Her group sparked controversy last fall when it reserved space and painted a mural on the Washington Avenue Bridge to promote their student group.

Her group settled on three slogans: “College Republicans, The Best Party on Campus,” “Trump Pence 2016,” and “Build the Wall.”

Within an hour, the panels had been vandalized, and protesters had surrounded the panels. Some of the vandalism included the following statements: “STOP WHITE SUPREMACY NOW” and “Hate Speech is not Free Speech.”

The notion that Madison is a white supremacist is about as laughable as the notion that Ben Shapiro is one. In their insistence on tolerance, leftists are increasingly intolerant of anyone who may not like their choice of candidate or political ideas. The charge of "racism" is becoming an easy way to shut down robust political discussion.

Supporting a border wall might be politically incorrect, but it hardly qualifies as “white supremacy” or “hate speech.” Moreover, a border wall does not, in and of itself, denote anti-immigrant sentiment. One can be pro-immigrant—and also believe that a nation must vigorously control its borders. That’s what Madison told me when I asked her why she included the provocative mural.

But frankly, I would be defending her group’s right to post the slogan regardless. College is at least partly about encountering diverse ideas, and free speech is inherently about protecting unpopular speech—especially political speech. Regardless of how you feel about building a wall (I'm against the idea), the president ran (and won) advocating it—and the House recently voted to fund it. This is not an idea wildly outside the political mainstream. In 2006, Democrats like Hillary Clinton supported a border fence. Like it or not, it's a legitimate policy debate.

As the protests grew, so did violent threats against the College Republicans and Madison, in particular. The group's members were scared for their safety on campus. Madison and the rest of the executive board didn’t go out at night and tried to never be alone on campus. Many used campus security to walk home.

This is all troubling enough and illustrates the barbarism of at least some of those who oppose her views, but even the university's administration failed to uphold any commitment to political diversity, tolerance and free speech:

Rather than condemning vandalism and standing up for the First Amendment right of freedom of speech, many supposed adults in the administration instead lashed out at the College Republicans. Heather C. Lou, assistant director of the Multicultural Center for Academic Excellence, said that the panel included a “xenophobic and racist” statement and that “the UMN bias incident team has been contacted.”

Catherine Squires, communications professor and director of the Race, Indigeneity, Gender and Sexuality Studies Initiative, encouraged faculty members to get involved, “especially faculty of color—many of us have been through these sorts of situations when we were students.”

University officials were essentially inciting anger toward a young, female student who pays tuition.The College of Education and Human Development sent out a college-wide e-mail stating: “The rhetoric and xenophobic messaging negatively impacts many of our Latino students, immigrants, and others who see this as an act of hate against non-whites.”

In other words, mob rule has supporters even in the higher administrative echelons of the university. But the intimidation and fear of violence directed at these students was not at an end:

The University of Minnesota did call for a “Campus Climate” conversation about the recent controversial events, but this, too, devolved into chaos. About 15 minutes into the event, more than 200 protesters came into the room chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, racism has got to go,” surrounding those students who had come to the event to engage in a civil conversation.

The protesters took over the stage as the student body president stood at the front of the room with her fist in the air, leading the chants. Students took turns lamenting how their feelings were hurt, how writing “Build the Wall” amounts to hate speech, and how they want to be included in conversations on campus. At the end of the event, one of the protesters stood on stage and asked the crowd if any College Republicans had attended. Madison stood up and raised her hand.

When the “event” ended, she was swarmed by the mob. “They were completely surrounding me; I was unable to leave the event. They were screaming in my face calling me racist, xenophobic, and other unmentionable names. They were aggressive, and I just wanted to get out safely,” said Madison. “One girl was holding another girl back saying, ‘She’s not worth it. Don’t hit her.’”

Later in the semester, Antifa got into the act. You can read about the frightening reprisals they've employed against Faupel at the link.

We normally think of university students as comprising the cream of American society, and many of them are, but the people who are attacking Madison Faupel are the dregs. They don't belong in an environment in which the free exchange of ideas is supposedly valued. They're too intellectually and culturally primitive to appreciate freedom, too eager to deny it to those who do appreciate it, and too fond of violence to be tolerated on our campuses and streets.

Their methods are similar to those of the Nazi brown-shirts of the 1930s, they're every bit as fascistic and evil as their Nazi predecessors and, like contemporary neo-Nazis and Klansmen, they need to be both condemned and ridiculed until they retreat back to the rocks from under which they've emerged.

Fine-Tuning and the Multiverse

Physicist Adam Frank is impressed, as most scientists are, with the degree of fine-tuning scientists are finding in the cosmos. He writes:

As cosmologists poked around Big Bang theory on ever-finer levels of detail, it soon became clear that getting this universe, the one we happily inhabit, seemed to be more and more unlikely. In his article, Scharf gives us the famous example carbon-12 and its special resonances. If this minor detail of nuclear physics were just a wee bit different, our existence would never be possible. It’s as if nuclear physics were fine-tuned to allow life. But this issue of fine-tuning goes way beyond carbon nuclei; it infects many aspects of cosmological physics.

Change almost anything associated with the fundamental laws of physics by one part in a zillion and you end up with a sterile universe where life could never have formed. Not only that, but make tiny changes in even the initial conditions of the Big Bang and you end up with a sterile universe. Cosmologically speaking, it’s like we won every lottery every imaginable. From that vantage point we are special—crazy special.

Indeed, the figure of one part in a zillion hardly begins to capture the incomprehensible precision with which these cosmic constants and forces are set, but lest one conclude that perhaps it's all purposefully engineered, Frank quickly waves the reader away from that unthinkable heresy:

Fine-tuning sticks in the craw of most physicists, and rightfully so. It’s that old Copernican principle again. What set the laws and the initial conditions for the universe to be “just so,” just so we could be here? It smells too much like intelligent design. The whole point of science has been to find natural, rational reasons for why the world looks like it does. “Because a miracle happened,” just doesn’t cut it.

This is a bit too flippant. Intelligent design doesn't say "a miracle happened" as though that were all that's needed to account for our world. ID says simply that natural processes are inadequate by themselves to explain what we're finding in our equations and that the universe shows the hallmarks of having been intentionally engineered by an intelligent agent. Even so, it's ironic that every naturalistic theory of cosmogenesis does say that the origin of the universe was miraculous if we define a miracle as an extraordinarily improbable event that does not conform to the known laws of physics.

So, how do scientists who wish to avoid the idea of purposeful design manage to do so? Well, they conjure a near infinite number of universes, the multiverse, of which ours is just one:

In response to the dilemma of fine-tuning, some cosmologists turned to the multiverse. Various theories cosmologists and physicists were already pursuing—ideas like inflation and string theory—seemed to point to multiple universes.

Actually, these theories allowed for the existence of other universes, they don't require them, but be that as it may, the advantage of positing a multiplicity of different worlds is that the more different worlds you have the more likely even a very improbable world will become, just as the more times you deal a deck of cards the more likely it will be that you'll deal a royal flush. Frank, though, issues a caveat:

There is, however, a small problem. Well, maybe it’s not a small problem, because the problem is really a very big bet these cosmologists are taking. The multiverse is a wildly extreme extrapolation of what constitutes reality. Adding an almost infinite number of possible universes to your theory of reality is no small move.

Even more important, as of yet there is not one single, itty-bitty smackeral of evidence that even one other universe exists (emphasis mine)....

Finding evidence of a multiverse would, of course, represent one of the greatest triumphs of science in history. It is a very cool idea and is worth pursuing. In the meantime, however, we need to be mindful of the metaphysics it brings with it. For that reason, the heavy investment in the multiverse may be over-enthusiastic.

The multiverse meme seems to be everywhere these days, and one question to ask is how long can the idea be supported without data (emphasis mine). Recall that relativity was confirmed after just a few years. The first evidence for the expanding universe, as predicted by general relativity, also came just a few years after theorists proposed it. String theory [upon which the multiverse idea is based], in contrast, has been around for 30 years now, and has no physical evidence to support it.

I'm surprised Frank doesn't mention the irony in this. Scientists feel impelled to shun ID because it's not scientific to posit intelligences for which there's no physical evidence (set aside the fact that the existence of a finely-tuned universe is itself pretty compelling evidence). Yet, in its stead they embrace a theory, the multiverse, for which, as he readily admits, there's no physical evidence and they think this is somehow more reasonable.

When you're determined to escape the conclusion that the universe is intentional, you'll embrace any logic and any theory, no matter how bizarre, that allows you to maintain the pretense of having avoided the offending view.

Pretty amusing.

Science and Intelligent Design

Despite what you may have learned in high school about the "steps" of the scientific method there's really only one absolute rule in the practice of science: An explanation to qualify as science must be naturalistic.

Whatever a scientist might believe in his or her private life, in professional practice the scientist cannot resort to non-natural causes as explanations for the data they accumulate in their investigations. They thus impose upon themselves a methodological constraint called methodological naturalism (MN).

MN seems a reasonable rule of practice although it leads to at least one difficulty. An investigator never knows when he or she has reached the limits of what naturalistic causes can explain. When naturalistic explanations fizzle out the best a scientist can say is that science is at an end of its ability to explain the phenomena. Unfortunately, too often it's assumed that whatever science can't explain is somehow not worth explaining.

In any case, one of the objections to the theory of intelligent design is that, whatever its philosophical merits, it's not a scientific theory because it necessarily posits an intelligent creator who is not subject to empirical verification or testability, and which is therefore beyond the scope of the rule of methodological naturalism.

This objection is not quite right. Whatever the usefulness of MN may be in the practice of science, the rule is not violated by intelligent design as an article at Evolution News points out. Here's an excerpt:

MN states that science cannot appeal to the supernatural. But ID does not appeal to the supernatural, and thus does not require non-natural causes.

ID begins with observations of the types of information and complexity produced by intelligent agents. Intelligent agents are natural causes that we can understand by studying the world around us. This makes intelligent agency a proper subject of scientific study. When ID finds high levels of complex and specified information, or CSI, in nature, the most it can infer is that intelligence was at work. Because ID respects the limits of scientific inquiry, it does not make claims beyond the data by trying to identify the designer.

Philosopher Stephen Meyer explains:

Though the designing agent responsible for life may well have been an omnipotent deity, the theory of intelligent design does not claim to be able to determine that. Because the inference to design depends upon our uniform experience of cause and effect in this world, the theory cannot determine whether or not the designing intelligence putatively responsible for life has powers beyond those on display in our experience.

Nor can the theory of intelligent design determine whether the intelligent agent responsible for information life acted from the natural or the “supernatural” realm. Instead, the theory of intelligent design merely claims to detect the action of some intelligent cause (with power, at least, equivalent to those we know from experience) and affirms this because we know from experience that only conscious, intelligent agents produce large amounts of specified information.

Many other ID proponents have pointed out that ID only appeals to intelligent causes, not supernatural ones. Michael Behe writes:

[A]s regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newton’s phrase hypothesis non fingo [“I frame no hypothesis”].

William Dembski and Jonathan Wells explain:

Supernatural explanations invoke miracles and therefore are not properly part of science. Explanations that call on intelligent causes require no miracles but cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations.

Now some might argue that ID violates MN by leaving open the possibility of a supernatural designer. It's true that ID leaves open such a possibility. But ID does not claim to scientifically detect a supernatural creator. Again, the most ID claims to detect is intelligent causation. Many (though not all) ID proponents may believe the designer is God, but they do not claim this is a scientific conclusion of ID. In this respect, ID is no different from Darwinian evolution, which claims that if there is a supernatural creator, that would be beyond science’s power to detect.

But is MN a good rule for science? A quote from atheistic cosmologist Sean Carroll in the article suggests that he, at least, is skeptical.

Science should be interested in determining the truth, whatever that truth may be – natural, supernatural, or otherwise. The stance known as methodological naturalism, while deployed with the best of intentions by supporters of science, amounts to assuming part of the answer ahead of time. If finding truth is our goal, that is just about the biggest mistake we can make.

Carroll's words remind me of one of my favorite quotes from a philosopher. The passage is from the American pragmatist William James who wrote that "a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." Metaphysical naturalism is certainly a rule that would prevent us from seeing that there's an intelligence behind the cosmos, if, indeed, that intelligence is really there.

The Walls Don't Work Fallacy

One of the objections opponents of a border wall with Mexico raise against candidate Trump's promise to erect such a wall is that a wall wouldn't work to keep illegal aliens out. A wall would be enormously expensive to build and maintain, the argument goes, and it wouldn't be effective in preventing people from coming into the country illegally in any case.

Well, I don't know if a wall along the southern border would work or not, but the general claim that walls don't work is nonsense. Perhaps the best refutation of the claim is found in Israel which has a security fence that runs for 760 kilometers (about 456 miles) along the West Bank. Most of the fence was constructed between 2002 and 2009 and during that span terror attacks inside Israel declined over 90 percent and related deaths plunged over 98 percent.

The Israeli barrier has had some very unfortunate consequences for people who found themselves walled off from their orchards and fields, but it has certainly been a success in protecting the Israeli people from the intrusions of those who wish to do them harm.

Perhaps the reason open borders proponents raise the "walls don't work" objection to a border wall with Mexico is not because they don't believe it would work, but because they believe it will.

Modernity's Malaise

Philosopher W.T. Stace writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1948 gives a concise summary of how we came to be where we are in the modern world, i.e. adrift in a sea of moral subjectivism and anomie. He asserts that:

The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes"...[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century....They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

....The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world....

The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws....[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless. A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man....Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values....If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative.

On one point I would wish to quibble with Stace's summary. He writes in the penultimate paragraph above that, "If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions."

I think, however, that if our moral rules derive from the universe they're no more binding or authoritative than if they are our own inventions. The only thing that can impose a moral duty is a personal being, and the only being that has the authority and ability to impose an objective moral duty is one that transcends human finitude. Neither the universe nor any entity comprised of other humans qualifies.

Unless God exists there simply are no objective moral duties. Thus, if one believes we all have a duty to be kind rather than cruel, to refrain from, say, rape or child abuse or other forms of violence, then one must either accept that God exists or explain how such obligations can exist in a world where man is simply the product of blind, impersonal forces, plus chance, plus time.

Put simply, in the world of Darwinian naturalism, no grounds exist for saying that hurting people is wrong. Indeed, no grounds exist for saying anything is wrong.

It's not just that modernity and the erosion of theistic belief in the West has led to moral relativism. It's that modernity and the concomitant loss of any genuine moral authority in the world leads ineluctably to moral nihilism.

This is one of the themes I present in my novels In the Absence of God and Bridging the Abyss which you can read about by clicking on the links at the top right of this page.

Optimistic Nihilism

As I've discussed with my students, it's my opinion that metaphysical naturalism entails nihilism. Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all there is, that nothing else exists beyond the physical, material world of atoms and molecules.

It's the view, in the words of Carl Sagan, that "The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be." Nihilism is the view that nothing in life matters, there's no meaning nor value, especially moral value, to be found because there's no basis for it if naturalism is true.

A student linked me to a short, six minute video in which the producer takes note of viewer complaints that the nihilism of his previous videos was too existentially depressing. He therefore seeks in the present video to offer a more optimistic, upbeat version of nihilism. It's not clear that he succeeds, or that he even could succeed.

The first three minutes or so are given to an elaboration upon the reasons for thinking, on naturalism, that life is meaningless. The narrator then gives the viewer a "pep talk" on how we should respond to our bleak existential condition. In short, the message is that there's no real point to anything we do in this godless universe, but we should try to make the best of it anyway:

The points made throughout the video, once one gets beyond the happy talk and thinks seriously about them, are melancholy. Here's a recap:

Nothing we do matters, the narrator asserts, but that means that all of our mistakes, blunders and bad acts don't matter (3:50). If this is true, what follows is that there's no reason not to yield to temptations to do bad things. None of those bad acts, acts which harm others, for example, really matters and there's no eternal accountability for how we live so why should we not do what we desire to do?

The video claims (4:05) that our individual life is all that matters, but, if so, what's being offered to us is a justification for egoism, the view that I should always put my own interests ahead of the interests of others. On egoism what's right is what gives me happiness, satisfaction and pleasure and what's wrong is whatever diminishes my happiness, satisfaction and pleasure.

Every tyrant was an egoist, every act of barbarism and evil was done by people who were putting their own interests first. If our life is all that matters then might makes right and whatever someone has the power to do would not be objectively wrong to do no matter how much it harmed others.

This egoism is evident in the narrator's rather preposterous claim (4:15) that we dictate the purpose of the universe.

The narrator goes on to insist that life doesn't matter, but that we can insert meaning into it by having good feelings, and experiencing nice things like music, friends, and video games (4:30). We should take consolation from the fact that we are part of the universe, the thinking part, but how this can be consoling is hard to see.

It's a bit like encouraging a dying friend to take comfort in knowing that soon as his body disintegrates his atoms will be recycled into the earth and perhaps eventually be taken up into some other living thing.

In sum, do good things, have fun, be happy and try to make others happy (4:55). Do whatever makes you feel good, and you get to decide whatever this is (5:45). Of course, if this is so, then no one can say that the person who feels good by raping, torturing, stealing, and lying is doing anything wrong. After all, we get to decide what makes us feel good and none of our bad deeds matter anyway.

Such is the world that the "optimistic nihilist" would have us inhabit, but, in fairness to him, it is indeed the best he or anyone could come up with if naturalism is true.

The Next Phase

An interesting article in the LA Times gives readers some insight into the progress of the war against Islamic extremists in the Middle East. As more ISIL-controlled cities like Mosul and Tal Afar in Iraq have fallen to U.S. backed forces an enormous trove of intelligence data has been seized which has in turn revealed much about the terrorists' command structure, personnel and aspirations for future terrorist acts in Europe and elsewhere.

The author of the article, W.J.Hennigan, writes:

U.S. intelligence analysts have gained valuable insights into Islamic State’s planning and personnel from a vast cache of digital data and other material recovered from bombed-out offices, abandoned laptops and the cellphones of dead fighters in recently liberated areas of Iraq and Syria.

In the most dramatic gain, U.S. officials over the last two months have added thousands of names of known or suspected Islamic State operatives to an international watch list used at airports and other border crossings. The Interpol database now contains about 19,000 names....

Not only is this intelligence cache massive, it has the further advantage of being reliable. Interrogations of captured prisoners doesn't always produce accurate or complete information but phone logs and video aren't fabricated or intended to deceive anyone.

U.S. officials said they have gleaned planning ideas and outlines of potential operations rather than ongoing terrorist plots. But they also have gathered details into the group’s leadership and the hierarchy of fighters under command.

The biggest windfall came from what officials said were meticulous Islamic State records about the foreign fighters who arrived since convoys of black-flagged militants first stormed out of northern Syria and into Iraq in 2014, capturing large parts of both countries and the world’s attention.

The records include their names, aliases, home countries and other personal information....

A phone from the pocket of a dead fighter often includes phone numbers that can assist counter-terrorism investigations far afield. Indeed, intelligence recovered from the battlefield since 2015 has led to arrests or broken up plots in at least 15 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and Canada, officials said....

The data has also given analysts a good indication where ISIL will try to make their last stand:

U.S. officials say Islamic State has lost 60% of the territory it captured in 2014, and its force has been halved to about 15,000 fighters. The recent intelligence indicates that they are concentrating forces and shifting their operations base to the Middle Euphrates River Valley, which lies between Iraq and Syria.

An estimated 8,000 fighters have moved to the valley, which stretches more than 150 miles from Deir el Zour in eastern Syria down to Rawa in western Iraq. They include most of the group’s leaders and their families, as well as key aides for administrative functions.

A U.S. special operations task force tracked and killed three leaders, who allegedly oversaw weapons research and drone operations, in the valley this week, officials said. In all, more than 35 military commanders, weapons production experts, financial facilitators and external attacks plotters have been killed there in the past year.

Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that when ISIL is defeated that the war against Islamic terror will be at an end. The Islamists are convinced that Allah is on their side and that any defeats are just temporary. They believe they have a Koranic mandate to kill the infidels wherever they find them, and, since so many refugees have been admitted into Europe, where they find them is potentially almost every city in Western Europe and North America.

This conflict will last until either the West surrenders or until Muslims convince their co-religionists that their jihad is un-Islamic. Neither alternative, but especially the second, seems likely to happen any time soon.

Indeed, between the two, it seems much more probable that the West would weary of the constant fighting and capitulate to the will of Islamic political influences already in their midst.

Fine-tuning and the Multiverse

A couple of years ago Dennis Prager wrote a fine piece on the multiverse theory at National Review Online. I commented at the time that I thought it interesting that a social commentator has written a column on an esoteric metaphysical/scientific topic in a political journal of opinion like NRO. Perhaps it's indicative of the broad relevance of this hypothesis to everyone interested in matters deeper than the name selected by Kim and Kanye for their baby.

Prager starts with this:

Last week, in Nice, France, I was privileged to participate along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants — from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, among other American and European universities — included believers in God, agnostics, and atheists.

It was clear that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a “Goldilocks universe,” in which both the arrangement of matter at the cosmic beginning and the values of various physical parameters — such as the speed of light, the strength of gravitational attraction, and the expansion rate of the universe — are just right for life. And unless one is frightened of the term, it also appears the universe is designed for biogenesis and human life.

This is indeed indisputable. Prager cites several scientists on the matter:

Michael Turner, astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and Fermilab: “The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimeter in diameter on the other side.”

Paul Davies, professor of theoretical physics at Adelaide University: “The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.

Roger Penrose, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, writes that the likelihood of the universe having usable energy (low entropy) at its creation is “one part out of ten to the power of ten to the power of 123.” That is “a million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion zeros.”

Steven Weinberg, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics, and an anti-religious agnostic, notes that “the existence of life of any kind seems to require a cancellation between different contributions to the vacuum energy, accurate to about 120 decimal places.” As the website explains, “This means that if the energies of the Big Bang were, in arbitrary units, not:

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

But instead:

100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

There would be no life of any sort in the entire universe.”

How do those at pains to attribute all this to serendipity account for it? Some say that one cannot posit an Architect of the universe who designed it this way intentionally because such an explanation is not scientific. This is a dodge of course. It can only be true if we equate science with metaphysical naturalism, but if science is the pursuit of truth wherever the evidence leads then it's foolish, as the philosopher William James once noted, to discount some truths, if they're really there, just because we're following a rule that doesn't allow us to see those kinds of truths. Prager puts it this way:

Unless one is a closed-minded atheist (there are open-minded atheists), it is not valid on a purely scientific basis to deny that the universe is improbably fine-tuned to create life, let alone intelligent life.

Additionally, it is atheistic dogma, not science, to dismiss design as unscientific. The argument that science cannot suggest that intelligence comes from intelligence or design from an intelligent designer is simply a tautology. It is dogma masquerading as science.

So what other moves are available to the naturalist who blanches at the prospect of a finely-tuned universe?

They've put forward the notion of a multiverse — the idea that there are many, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes.

If there are an infinite number of universes and if all logically possible laws of physics are exemplified in that ensemble then every possible universe, no matter how improbable, must exist somewhere in that infinite assortment. Ours is a possible universe, of course, so, no matter how unlikely, it exists. No big deal. But, as Prager observes, there is not a shred of evidence of the existence of these other universes — nor could there be, since contact with another universe is impossible.

Therefore, only one conclusion can be drawn: The fact that atheists have resorted to the multiverse argument constitutes a tacit admission that they have lost the argument about design in this universe. The evidence in this universe for design — or, if you will, the fine-tuning that cannot be explained by chance or by “enough time” — is so compelling that the only way around it is to suggest that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes.

There are several ironies in this. One is that scientists who demand empirical evidence for the claim that a Designer exists avoid the evidence, the fine-tuning of the cosmos, by embracing a hypothesis for which there is not only no empirical evidence but for which there couldn't be empirical evidence.

Another irony is that trying to negate astronomical improbabilities by invoking astronomical numbers of worlds pretty much destroys the ability of science to rule out anything on the basis of probability.

For example, suppose there is a one in a quadrillion chance that someone playing a roulette wheel will pick the same number ten times in a row and win all ten times. Which is more likely, that the game was rigged or that the player defied the odds? If we live in a multiverse consisting of far more than a quadrillion universes it could be that we live in a universe in which the one in a quadrillion event actually happens. We cannot conclude that the wheel was probably rigged because in the multiverse anything that is possible to happen will happen in some world, so how do we know that our world isn't the one in which this event happens?

In other words, in the multiverse, unless something is logically impossible it's inevitable that it occur somewhere. Why not here? Ironically, for the atheist who takes refuge in the multiverse in order to avoid the Fine-Tuner, miracles, the bete noire of atheists, are inevitable in some world so why think ours is not that world?

Moreover, as critics of the multiverse hypothesis have pointed out, there's no known mechanism for pumping out these universes but if something is generating them it must itself be fine-tuned. Since this universe-maker transcends the worlds it creates it must be super-natural so how is it any more fit as an object of scientific speculation than an Intelligent Designer?

If you have the time you might want to watch this lecture by Robin Collins, one of the world's foremost philosophers working on cosmic fine-tuning and the multiverse theory.

Letter to a Young Woman

Over the years I've run this post several times and it has proven to be very popular. Since the young woman to whom it was originally written is getting married today I thought it might be appropriate to run it again on her wedding day.

Hi Princess,

I've been thinking a lot about the talk we had the other night on what happiness is and how we obtain it, and I hope you have been, too. I wanted to say a little more about it, and I thought that since I was going to be away, I'd put it into a letter for you to read while I'm gone.

One of the things we talked about was that we can't assess whether we're happy based on our feelings because happiness isn't just a feeling. It's more of a condition or quality of our lives - sort of like beauty is a quality of a symphony. It's a state of satisfaction we gain through devotion to God, living a life of virtue (honesty, integrity, loyalty, chastity, trustworthiness, self-discipline), cultivating wholesome and loving relationships with family and friends, experiencing the pleasures of accomplishment in career, sports, school, etc., and filling our lives with beauty (nature, music, literature, art, etc.).

One thing is sure - happiness isn't found by acquiring material things like clothes and toys. It's not attained by being popular, having good looks, or being high on the social pecking order. Those things seem like they should make us happy, especially when we're young, but they don't. Ultimately they just leave us empty.

To the extent that happiness is a feeling we have to understand that a person's feelings tend to follow her actions. A lot of people allow their feelings to determine their actions - if they like someone they're friendly toward them; if they feel happy they act happy - but this is backwards.

People who do brave things, for instance, don't do them because they feel brave. Most people usually feel terrified when in a dangerous situation, but brave people don't let their feelings rule their behavior, and what they do is all the more wonderful because it's done in spite of everything in them urging them to get out of danger. If they do something brave, despite their fear, we say they have courage and we admire them for it.

Well, happiness is like courage. You should act as if you're happy even if you don't feel it. When you do act that way your feelings change and tend to track your behavior. You find yourself feeling happier than you did before even though the only thing that has changed is your attitude.

How can a person act happy without seeming phony? Well, we can act happy by displaying a positive, upbeat attitude, by being pleasant to be around, by enjoying life, by smiling a lot, and by not complaining. Someone who has a genuine smile (not a Paris Hilton smirk) on her face all the time is much more attractive to other people than someone whose expression always tells other people that she's just worn out or miserable.

One other thing about happiness is that it tends to elude us most when we're most intent on pursuing it. It's when we're busy doing the things I mentioned above, it's when we're busy serving and being a friend to others, that happiness is produced as a by-product. We achieve it when we're not thinking about it. It just tags along, as if it were tied by a string, with love for God, family, friends, beauty, accomplishment, a rewarding career, and so on.

Sometimes young people are worried that they don't have friends and that makes them unhappy, but often the reason they don't, paradoxically, is that they're too busy trying to convince someone to be their friend. They try too hard and they come across to others as too insecure. This is off-putting to people, and they tend to avoid the person who seems to try over-hard to be their friend. The best way to make friends, I think, is to just be pleasant, friendly, and positive. Don't be critical of people, especially your friends, and especially your guy friends, either behind their backs or to their faces. A person who never has anything bad to say about others will always have friends.

Once in a while a critical word has to be said, of course, but it'll be meaningless at best and hurtful at worst, unless it's rare and done with complete kindness. A person who is always complaining or criticizing is not pleasant to be around and will not have good, devoted friends, and will not be happy. A person who gives others the impression that her life is miserable is going to find that after a while people just don't want to hear it, and they're not going to want to be around her.

I hope this makes sense to you, honey. Maybe as you read it you can think of people you know who are examples of the things I'm talking about....

All my love,

Dad

DACA

The president has received a great deal of criticism from Democrats and even from some Republicans for winding down President Obama's 2012 executive order which granted temporary resident status to young immigrants brought illegally into this country. The program was called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and affects almost 800,000 people. For an excellent summary of what DACA does and why President Trump has rescinded it see this piece at CNN.

The criticism of President Trump's decision is misplaced as Rich Lowry argues at National Review. It is not the president's prerogative to circumvent Congress in creating immigration law, which is precisely what President Obama did when he made DACA official policy. Indeed, he did it after acknowledging on numerous occasions that he lacked the legal authority to do so, which makes his criticism of President Trump's order to undo DACA awfully hypocritical.

President Obama also stressed that what he was doing in creating DACA was only temporary and that eventually Congress would have to pass legislation to resolve the status of the so-called "Dreamers."

All President Trump has done is to tell Congress that Obama's original order was expiring, and that it's time for them to do their job by passing legislation that addresses the situation that the Dreamers find themselves in. The president, after all, is not a monarch who can create law through arbitrary exercises of executive power. We're a nation of laws, a Republic in which the people decide through their elected representatives what our immigration policy should be.

Trump ended DACA because he promised in the campaign that he would and because a number of states were threatening to sue the federal government over DACA, a suit they would very likely have won because DACA was, according to most analysts, an unconstitutional executive usurpation of Congress' authority by President Obama. That even liberal Democrats recognize this was made clear on a segment of a show on MSNBC, which is probably the most progressive/left of the cable news outlets.

On the show the host repeatedly challenged a Democrat congressman who supports DACA to explain how it meets constitutional muster. The congressman could not, or would not, answer the question:

The DACA young people, some of whom are actually in their thirties, are in a tough spot and Congress should find a compassionate way to resolve their predicament without doing an injustice to all those who seek to come into this country the proper way. Congress would find a lot of support for leniency in this country if they also insured that our immigration laws would henceforth be rigorously enforced.

A good start would be to cut federal funding to any municipal entity or school that prevents immigration authorities from doing their jobs.

Asking the Wrong Question

An article by Brandon Withrow at The Daily Beast broaches a topic we've been discussing in my classes recently, but unfortunately the article asks, and answers, the wrong question. The question it asks is whether one can be good without God.

Presumably, the intent of the question is to inquire whether one can be good without believing in God. The answer to that, of course, is a qualified, "of course," but that's neither a particularly interesting nor a particularly controversial question. The interesting question is not whether belief in God is necessary for people to act this way or that but rather whether God's existence is necessary for there to be moral good and bad, right and wrong, in the first place. Michael Egnor, commenting on the Daily Beast article, puts it like this:

If God does not exist, you cannot be good. You cannot be evil. You can’t conform or fail to conform to any transcendental standard, because if there is no God, there are no transcendental standards. There is no Moral Law if there is no Moral Lawgiver.

If there is no God, there are merely opinions and consequences of acting on opinions. We may label certain opinions “good,” but that’s just our opinion. What we really mean by calling something “good” is that we like it. Which is fine, as long as we understand that “good without God” is just a metaphor for “something I (or we) like.” If there is no God, all of our “moral” decisions are just opinions — perhaps opinions we like, or opinions we don’t like — but neither good nor bad.

If God does exist, but you don’t believe in Him, then of course you can be “good without God”, in the sense that you can be good without believing in God. It is central to the moral theology of all the great faiths that non-believers may act in accordance with Moral Law without belief in God and even without knowing Moral Law in any formal sense. The Moral Law is written in our hearts, theists universally agree, and we feel the weight of morality whether we believe in God or not.

But even this doesn't say quite enough. The heart of the matter is this: If God does not exist anyone can adopt whatever values please or satisfy them. If they wish to live kind, honest, peaceful lives they certainly can, but the crucial point is that had they chosen to live by the opposite values - to be selfish, cruel, deceitful, and violent - they wouldn't be wrong. They'd just be different than they are.

As I discuss with my students, without an objective standard or reference point of moral right and wrong we're like astronauts floating in outer space trying to ascertain which direction is up. With no objective referent there simply is no up or down and likewise, without an objective standard there's no moral good or evil. This is what needs to be stressed in columns like Withrow's at The Daily Beast, but unfortunately in such columns it's distinction that's usually missed entirely.

Instead the focus is on questions like whether serial killers are more likely to be theists or atheists, but this is a question of relatively minor importance. After all, just because one is a theist doesn't mean he/she will know what's right. Nor does it mean that even if they know what's right that they'll do it.

What's important is that if their belief about God is correct then there is something that is right, but if their belief is incorrect then right and wrong have no objective significance. To say something is wrong is to say nothing more than that the individual doesn't like it. Murder is no different for human beings than it is for a cat that kills a mouse. It's neither moral nor immoral. It's just the way things are.

In the absence of God morality is simply an expression of personal preference or taste. It matters not whether the act is something like rape, racism, child abuse, or whether it is an act of self-sacrificial kindness, the act itself has no objective moral content unless there really is an objective moral authority which has the power not only to promulgate moral laws but also the power to enforce them.