Quantum Weirdness

Why do some physicists think that the material universe is dependent upon mind? Why do they think that an observation somehow creates a reality which didn't exist prior to the observation?

The following video illustrates a classic experiment that some say proves that materialism, the belief that matter is the fundamental reality, is false. The experiment is compatible with the view that mind is the most fundamental substance and that matter is a product of an observing mind.

One commenter at the Youtube site for this video asserts that all the theories seeking to explain the existence of the universe distill to three possibilities:

1. Either the universe(s) has always existed in one form or another and thus never needed creating because it always existed.

2. Or the universe(s) created itself from nothing where nothing previously existed.

3. Or that a divine entity has always existed and created it through an act of will.

He goes on to say that:

Each of these alternatives is equally outrageous and impossible to believe but one MUST be true. I like to think the first one is true.

I don't think I agree that these are all equally hard to believe. I think the second is much harder to believe than the other two. Be that as it may, the commenter favors the first as a matter of metaphysical preference which is another way of saying that he doesn't really want a divine creator to exist.

Why he's averse to that alternative, he doesn't say, but I think a lot of people, whether theists or naturalists, share his basic outlook. What they believe about the universe, their fundamental worldview, is not a matter of logic or compelling reasons.

It's more a matter of taste, or subjective preference, or aesthetics, and it's very difficult, especially in this pragmatic, postmodern age, to persuade someone whose belief is based on a matter of personal preference to abandon it for the alternative.

Why the West is Worth Defending

It's been my experience that many young people assume the multicultural stance that all cultures are equally valid and that no one in one culture should pass judgment on the practices of other cultures. I think that it's proper to adopt this stance a priori, that is until one has had a chance to examine the practices of other cultures, just as we should not pass judgment on individuals until we have had some experience with the person.

But to hold to the belief that we should never pass judgment either on individuals or cultural practices, even after we have had such experience, is to adopt a kind of moral paralysis.

An example of a practice widespread among Muslim communities, a practice most people would find horrific, is honor killing.

A recent article by a Turkish journalist and political analyst named Uzay Bulut at The Daily Caller presses home the point that this is not just a problem in Muslim countries but a problem in Muslim communities in the West as well.

Ms. Bulut writes about a Facebook post from a Kurdish woman named Karissa who was born and raised in Finland and who tells a very sad story:

I am a 23-year-old Kurdish girl born and raised in Finland. My parents are conservative Kurds from Bashur [Iraqi Kurdistan]. My mother’s from Hewler [Arbil] and my father’s from Kirkuk.

About 4 years ago I decided I couldn’t stand my parents anymore. My parents are Muslim conservatives and they have a tribal mind. I finished high school and after that they wanted to marry me off. I refused a few times until they got violent, so I decided to flee home. I have not had any contacts with my parents for the last 4 years. My entire family threatens me with death messages and if they see me, they will surely kill me or get violent.

“Today I am 23. I finished my dream university and have a great job and I live alone. My parents can contact me when they feel I am more important than their cultural tribal values and religion.

Bulut writes that she was deeply moved by the woman's testimony and decided to learn more about her. She discovered that her family’s physical and psychological abuse against her was so intense and unbearable that she had to leave home. The reason for their pressure was that they feared her “integration into Finnish society.”

Karissa goes on to say that,

Both my parents are very religious Muslims. They were afraid that after I completed high school, I would move out and live a free life like a Finnish woman. They were afraid that I would fall in love with some Finnish guy and be with him. So they got violent. But I never thought about these things. I was thinking about how to get a good education and find a good job.

I was exposed to a lot of violence and ugly epithets. They said they would kill me because I didn’t want to marry. It was so hard for me to go through all of that, but I didn’t know what to do. I was so depressed and felt worthless. Many times, I thought of suicide.

The continuing threats from her family have forced her into hiding:

My family does not know where I live now. If they did, they could send my cousins to kill me or my father himself could kill me. Even the thought that they want to kill me makes me so sad and cry. My workplace is very near to my house, so I do not have to travel a lot.

Karissa's story is not uncommon. In fact she wrote this because she wanted to give hope to the many women around the world who languish in the same situation:

I know many women from the Middle East feel the same way and have the same fate as me. But many don’t have the courage to speak out. I had two female relatives who got shot in Kurdistan because their family members thought their daughters ‘tainted their families’ honor.’ I would want girls who are afraid of fleeing their homes to take the risk and flee.

But they are so afraid of their parents and what their relatives would think of or do to them. And if you are a woman, it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to flee your home and survive in any majority-Muslim country.

Bulut is indignant that Western feminists seem indifferent to the plight of women in the Muslim world:

All of these horrific abuses against girls and women are taking place in Muslim communities while many self-described feminist activists in the West are busy discussing whether or not women should shave their legs or dye their arm pit hair, or what they should do in the face of “slut-shaming,” or why they should stop using “guys” to address “mix-gender groups” or what “non-binary pronouns” should be used for those who identify as neither gender, or both.

In the meanwhile, Muslim or ex-Muslim women across the world are violated or murdered by beatings, beheading, burning, shooting, and torture for daring to make their own decisions about their own lives, such as filing for divorce or rejecting their husband’s offers of reconciliation. In many cases, the perpetrators are released and not punished.

Violence against women is a serious problem in many parts of the world. But in majority-Muslim countries, it is systematic and broadly tolerated. Oppression of women is allowed or even encouraged in Islamic scriptures – the Koran and at the hadith sunnah literature. (For those who are interested, all of these scriptures are easily found on the internet.) And it is no secret that Muslim-majority countries are the worst violators of gender equality.

There's more from Bulut at the link and I encourage you to read the essay. She closes with a powerful indictment of some Western feminists:

For example, a women’s rights activist organization in Turkey called We Will Stop Femicides Platform, issues monthly reports about the girls and women who are murdered or abused, mostly by those closest to them, such as husbands, fathers, brothers, boyfriends, sons, or grandsons. It is mind-boggling that their efforts are largely ignored by feminist academics and activists in the West.

Karissa’s life story is also the reason why − despite all of its flaws − Western civilization is worth defending and fighting for. On the one side, Karissa’s own parents who threaten her with death for wanting to make her own choices. On the other side, there’s Finland, a free and civilized country that provides Karissa with human rights and freedoms, helping her preserve her dignity, regardless of her ethnic origin or religion.

Europe is far from perfect, but it’s still much more culturally, morally and intellectually superior to the Islamic world. And this is what so many Westerners seem to fail to grasp.

Furthermore, the move by some Western feminists to paint Islam as a pioneering force in women’s rights is actually enabling the repression and murder of more Muslim women.

Western feminists have a choice: They can either side with Islamists who oppress and even murder women, or they can honestly recognize the religious motivations behind those crimes and show solidarity with women violated by Muslim men. Sadly, many so-called activists seem to have chosen the former, showing how misguided they are in their thinking. Despite all of their claims, they have chosen to be ultimately uncaring and insensitive regarding women’s rights in order to protect a primitive religion.

If you'd like an example of the people she's talking about you can read about one of them here.

A Strange Place

The universe is a very strange place, stranger than we can imagine. One of the strangest things about it is something Albert Einstein once referred to as "spooky action at a distance." In quantum mechanics there's a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. No one knows how it works, no one really understands it, but every time it's been tested it's been shown to exist, and it's absolutely bizarre.

Here's the nutshell version: Two subatomic particles, e.g. electrons, can be produced from the disintegration of another particle. These daughter particles then travel at enormous velocities away from each other, but they somehow remain connected such that if a property of one of them is changed the same property in the other one changes simultaneously even though any signal sent from one to the other would have to travel at infinite speed to affect the other. This, though, is impossible, so how does the second electron know what's happened to the first? No one knows the answer to this, which is why Einstein, who could never accept the idea of entanglement, called the phenomenon "spooky."

An excellent 15 minute video featuring physicist Brian Greene explains this quantum weirdness:

An article at Nature discusses a recent test that pretty much clinches the theory that somehow particles that are widely separated from each other, even at opposite ends of the universe, are still in some mysterious way connected so that they can communicate instantaneously with each other:

It’s a bad day both for Albert Einstein and for hackers. The most rigorous test of quantum theory ever carried out has confirmed that the ‘spooky action at a distance’ that the German physicist famously hated — in which manipulating one object instantaneously seems to affect another, far away one — is an inherent part of the quantum world.

The experiment, performed in the Netherlands, could be the final nail in the coffin for models of the atomic world that are more intuitive than standard quantum mechanics, say some physicists. It could also enable quantum engineers to develop a new suite of ultrasecure cryptographic devices.

“From a fundamental point of view, this is truly history-making,” says Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In quantum mechanics, objects can be in multiple states simultaneously: for example, an atom can be in two places, or spin in opposite directions, at once. Measuring an object forces it to snap into a well-defined state. Furthermore, the properties of different objects can become ‘entangled’, meaning that their states are linked: when a property of one such object is measured, the properties of all its entangled twins become set, too.

This idea galled Einstein because it seemed that this ghostly influence would be transmitted instantaneously between even vastly separated but entangled particles — implying that it could contravene the universal rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. He proposed that quantum particles do have set properties before they are measured, called hidden variables. And even though those variables cannot be accessed, he suggested that they pre-program entangled particles to behave in correlated ways.

The recent experiments cited in the Nature article are said to show that Einstein was wrong and that entanglement exists. The universe is indeed a very strange place.

One possible explanation for the instantaneous "communication" between particles light years apart could be provided by the 18th century Irish philosopher George Berkeley. Berkeley believed that the ultimate reality was not matter but mind. If he was right, and if the universe is as he and others have suggested, a kind of idea in the mind of God, then a change in one particle could be instantly perceived and transmitted to the second particle. In other words, the laws of physical nature are not the ultimate laws but are based on higher laws that derive from a non-physical mind.

This may sound very bizarre to many, but it's no more bizarre than the quantum phenomena themselves, and those seem undeniable.

A Maximally Great Being

I visited a website recently on which there was some discussion of the multiverse. One of the claims made was that if the multiverse is real then everything that can happen, i.e. everything that's logically possible, will happen somewhere among the near-infinite worlds that populate the multiverse.

I replied to that claim with the observation that one consequence of this is that if there is in fact a near-infinite number of different universes in which all logical possibilities are somewhere actualized then it follows that there must be a God.

The justification for this claim is that if in the multiverse all possible states of affairs are realized then there must be a world somewhere in the multiverse in which it’s true to say that a maximally great being (MGB) exists.

But if it's true that there is an MGB in one world it follows that this being must exist in every world (otherwise it wouldn't be maximally great), including our own. Since a "maximally great being" is what we mean by "God," it follows that if there's a multiverse then God must exist in our world.

A reader responded with two questions:

1. Since a maximally great individual would have to be the greatest in all possible fields, wouldn’t maximal “greatness” include maximal evil? Are we suggesting that Satan was the Creator?

2. The other problem is that if ... it’s not possible to get – or create – something from nothing then, since there is something, that something must always have existed. And if something has always existed, it was never created, so there is no need for a Creator. Is there?

These are interesting questions. One possible answer to the first is this:

An MGB is a being which possesses all compossible great-making properties (Compossible properties are properties it's possible to possess at the same time without contradiction.). Maximal evil and maximal goodness are not compossible properties. Thus the MGB would be either maximally good or maximally evil, but not both, and there are a number of reasons for thinking that the MGB is not maximally evil. Here's one:

If the MGB were maximally evil it's hard to account for why there would be so much good in the world. If maximal evil created the world it would seem that this world would be an unmitigated hell, and it's clearly not.

A reply to this might be that if the MGB is maximally good then we should expect this world to be heaven, but it's clearly not.

This is so, but the reason there is suffering and evil in the world is largely because of human free will which is bestowed on us because it's an eminently good property to have. A maximally evil being would have no reason to bestow upon us anything that was good. Thus, unlike the evil in this world which is at least partly explicable in terms of free will, goodness in a world created by a maximally evil being would be inexplicable.

We might also note that the problem posed by the first question still leaves the argument for an MGB intact. Even if an MGB could be maximally evil it's still the case that a multiverse entails the existence of a maximally great being, one which is the ultimate cause of all that is.

As for the second question there are also several possible answers. Here are a few: First, cosmologists have shown that the mathematics of eternity require a beginning to the universe. If this is so, then the universe hasn't always existed.

Second, it's true that something (i.e. material substance) doesn't pop into being out of nothing (i.e. the complete absence of anything), but by "nothing" is not meant the complete absence of anything but rather the absence of any pre-existing material substance. An MGB is not material substance but neither is it the complete absence of anything. Rather, it is pure being itself.

Moreover, even if matter were eternal or infinitely old that would not remove the need for a cause of its existence. Since it's possible for matter, as well as the universe that's made up of matter, to not exist, the universe is a contingent entity. However, contingent entities require a non-contingent (i.e. necessary) entity as their ultimate sustaining cause.

The ultimate sustaining cause of the universe must not only be a necessary being (i.e. it doesn't depend on anything else for it's existence), it must also be very powerful (since it has created a universe), very intelligent (since it has designed a universe), non-spatial (since it's outside the spatial universe), and non-temporal (since it's outside the temporal universe).

In other words, it has many of the same properties we attribute to a Maximally Great Being.

The Sizes of Things

I've told my students that the world appears to us as it does because we happen to be the size we are. I've suggested that were we considerably smaller, say, the size of an atom, the world would look much different. What appears solid, for example, would not seem solid at all to an atomic-sized creature (if such a thing were physically possible).

As something of a follow-up to that discussion I thought I'd repost this link to a fun interactive site that you'll find difficult to stop playing with once you start. By moving the scroll bar you can zoom in or out to see how big the universe is compared to our planet and how big we are compared to the smallest parts of an atom.

As you scroll toward the very small notice that it seems as if what we call matter simply ceases to exist. All there seems to be at the most fundamental level are hypothetical entities called strings - incredibly tiny filaments or wisps of energy. But if there's no material substance at the heart of reality is matter just an illusion?

Give the interactive site a try and spend a little time just being amazed. It may take a few seconds to load so be patient.

Libet on Free Will

This post is from the archive but is relevant to a topic we're discussing, or soon will be discussing, in class:

Students of psychology, philosophy and other disciplines which touch upon the operations of the mind and the question of free will may have heard mention of the experiments of Benjamin Libet, a University of California at San Francisco neurobiologist who conducted some remarkable research into the brain and human consciousness in the last decades of the 20th century.

One of Libet's most famous discoveries was that the brain "decides" on a particular choice milliseconds before we ourselves are conscious of deciding. The brain creates an electrochemical "Readiness Potential" (RP) that precedes by milliseconds the conscious decision to do something.

This has been seized upon by materialists who use it as proof that our decisions are not really chosen by us but are rather the unconscious product of our brain's neurochemistry. The decision is made before we're even aware of what's going on, they claim, and this fact undermines the notion that we have free will as this video explains:

Michael Egnor, at ENV, points out, however, that so far from supporting determinism, Libet himself believed in free will, his research supported that belief, and, what's more, his research also reinforced, in Libet's own words, classical religious views of sin.

Libet discovered that the decision to do X is indeed pre-conscious, but he also found that the decision to do X can be consciously vetoed by us and that no RP precedes that veto. In other words, the decision of the brain to act in a particular way is determined by unconscious factors, but we retain the ability to consciously (freely) choose not to follow through with that decision. Our freedom lies in our ability to refuse any or all of the choices our brain presents to us. Or, we might say, free will is really "free won't."

Egnor's article is a fascinating piece if you're interested in the question of free will and Libet's contribution to our understanding of it.

The End of Naturalism

Denyse O'Leary writes about the end of naturalism or, perhaps more precisely, the end of naturalistic materialism in an essay at Evolution News.

O'Leary points out that in order to maintain faith in naturalism, i.e. the belief that nature is all there is, one has to believe several claims for which there's no empirical evidence whatsoever and which are, at least prima facie, absurd. The claims are these:

• There is a multiverse, that is, an infinite number of universes beyond our own which are undetectable by us.
• Human reason is at best unreliable and at worst an illusion.
• Our sense of being a self is an illusion.
• Our sense that we have consciousness is an illusion.

Here's a quote from O'Leary's article about this last claim:

Michael Graziano tells us ... “Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct.”

Follow the link to see why she says what she does about each of the above assertions.

She might have added to her list of claims the fact that a naturalist must believe that the enormous amount of specific information required to construct the organelles of even the simplest cell somehow arose by chance. It's the equivalent of believing that the information required to construct and run a jet aircraft somehow gathered itself together without any intelligent input from human engineers.

Naturalism is forcing its votaries to jettison the principles of science as it has traditionally been practiced, compelling them to forfeit adherence to scientific objectivity and the demand for evidence. The naturalist believes, for instance, that there is an infinity of universes beyond our own, that life arose against astronomical odds purely by coincidence and through purely mechanical processes. He believes that consciousness, whatever it is, has a physical basis, and he believes all of this without a shred of evidence for any of it. He believes it only because his metaphysical commitments require it. In other words, his belief is an act of blind faith in naturalism.

Naturalism would be laughed off the stage of modern intellectual life were it not for the fact that it's the only alternative to belief in the existence of a transcendent intellect. If one is desperate to avoid the conclusion that such an agent is responsible for the world and for life she will believe whatever is necessary, no matter how contrary to her own experience, in order escape it.

For example, in addition to embracing the extraordinary implausibility of the efficacy of chance to bring about life, in addition to rejecting the aforementioned beliefs in the trustworthiness of reason, the self, and consciousness, a naturalist, to be consistent, should also reject the belief that there's any ultimate meaning or purpose to life, that objective moral values exist, that good and evil are real, that she has free will, and that she has a mind in addition to her brain.

It's all in all a pretty steep price to pay to enable one to avoid the theistic conclusion.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest

In my classes we recently discussed the question of what we mean when we say that something is real? One aspect of our experience we specifically addressed were sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, and sound.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and so on.

After we had moved on to other topics I came across an article that describes how music is transferred to a computer and then to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made in our brains. If there's no ear to hear it, no brain to interpret what the ear hears, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves were picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses were converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals were compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code was written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructed the bits in their proper sequence and transmitted them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relayed the file to a router, where the file was packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembled the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embedded the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, accessed by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converted the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy travelling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all. The music is created by our brain and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation that we experience and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

Just something to think about over the weekend.

Fire and Water

The second in a pair of excellent books by geneticist Michael Denton has just been released, and both are very much worth reading. The first was titled Fire-maker, and the second, just-released work, is titled The Wonder of Water. A non-scientist would have no trouble following and understanding either book.

Each of them provides the reader with fascinating information on almost every page as they examine two commonplace phenomena in our environment, fire and water, and explain that if those two phenomena didn't have precisely the properties they do, life would be either very much diminished, or even impossible.Certainly living things as complex as human beings would be impossible.

In Fire-maker, for example, Denton reflects upon all the properties of planet earth that have to be just right for the phenomenon of fire to exist and then recounts all the physical characteristics of an animal such as human beings that have to be just as they are for that animal to be able to use fire. He then examines what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed. It all just leaves one shaking one's head in amazement.

Here are a couple of related videos that'll give you an idea of what the books are about:

The more we learn about the world in which we live the harder it is to think that it's all just a marvelous coincidence that everything has just the properties it does.

For those who may have a stronger background in science and wish to probe more deeply into these matters, I recommend Denton's earlier book Nature's Destiny.

Origin

I recently finished the highly hyped novel Origin, Dan Brown's most recent effort to undermine theistic belief in general and Catholicism in particular. As in his previous works (The daVinci Code, Inferno, Angels and Demons) assaults on religious belief are embedded in a story, but unlike those earlier efforts, which were genuine page-turners that I found hard to put down, the story in Origin was pretty much a snoozer that I had to force myself to finish.

Despite the publicity given to the book, the best thing I can say about it is that it's possible that it's not the worst book I've ever read. Brown's attacks on theism were confused and sophomoric. It seemed as if he couldn't decide whether his target was belief in God or the expression of that belief in organized religion. He frequently conflates criticism of organized religion with atheism which is disconcerting and misleading since antagonism toward religion is not what makes one an atheist.

Throughout the book he advocates a naive 1960s Darwinism and demonstrates very little familiarity with the debate over biogenesis of the last two decades. He seems totally unaware of the developments in philosophy - particularly philosophy of religion, epistemology, the resurgence of Thomism, and the philosophy of science - which render most of his claims about the obsolescence and imminent demise of religious belief seem as if they were lifted from the mid-twentieth century.

For example, Brown has one of his main characters allege that faith, "by its very definition, requires placing your trust in something that is unseeable and indefinable, accepting as fact something for which there is no empirical evidence." This is, however, a tendentious definition of faith. Faith, as most people understand it, is not placing your trust in something for which there is no empirical evidence but rather placing one's trust in something despite the lack of empirical proof. There is in any case plenty of evidence for the existence of God even if proof that would command the assent of every rational person, including those who are averse to accepting that God exists, is hard to come by.

Brown also has his mouthpiece character predict that, "The age of religion is drawing to a close and the age of science is dawning." This assertion could only be made by someone with a very parochial view of the world. One only need look at what's happening around the globe - in the Islamic world, in Central and South America, in Africa - to see that though religion may be fading among the urban elites in Manhattan, it's doing just fine in much of the rest of the world.

One character in the book informs us that, "There are only two schools of thought on where we came from - the religious notion that God created humans fully formed and the Darwinian model in which we crawled out of the primordial ooze and eventually evolved into humans." This is not only simplistic, it's utterly false. Neither intelligent design advocates nor theistic evolutionists fall neatly into either of these two camps. The Darwinian view excludes any non-natural guidance or influence, but there are a lot of very thoughtful and intelligent people who believe that some kind of guided or intelligently influenced "evolutionary" process accounts for life on earth, even though Brown gives these folks little attention.

Add to these passages, and many others like them, a story line involving characters whose behavior seems totally implausible and an ending which is predictable from about a third of the way through the book, and the reader is left with a disappointing sequel to his earlier novels.

For a story in some respects similar to the one told in Origin and which preceded Origin by a year, The Soul of the Matter by Bruce Buff is, at least to my taste, a better reading choice.

Peas in a Pod

Harvey Weinstein's fall from power and prominence has been fascinating to behold. Once a highly feted movie producer and mega-donor to liberal political campaigns, Weinstein has suddenly become a social and political leper. The well-substantiated allegations of his brutish behavior that have finally managed to percolate to the surface of our national consciousness are truly loathsome. And they raise questions, among which are these:

How many of those in the media, those in Hollywood and those in academia who are now condemning Weinstein for his repeated harassment, and worse, of women who drifted into his orbit have known of his conduct for years and said nothing?

How many of those who knew and said nothing kept silent because Weinstein was on the "right side" of the issues and was a major contributor to Democrat campaigns?

How many of those who are now distancing themselves from Weinstein, who cannot think of adjectives strong enough with which to vilify him, nevertheless not only voted for Bill Clinton, even after his own sexual predations had become well-known, but actively supported and defended him?

I think it's a safe assumption that everyone on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and NBC and everyone at The New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times, and almost everyone in Hollywood who is currently voicing their disgust and censure of Weinstein nevertheless supported and even admired Mr. Clinton despite the fact that he was credibly accused by numerous women of acts no less despicable and not much different from those Weinstein has been accused of committing.

One thing these questions about this sordid episode illustrates, besides the moral decadence among our cultural elites, is that many of those who posture as advocates for women actually care more about achieving and holding political power than they do about women. They care more about their social standing than they do about their principles.

I don't know which is harder, to read descriptions of Weinstein's behavior or to listen to people who donated to Clinton and threw their considerable influence behind him expressing their repugnance and loathing of Weinstein's behavior. One wonders how they manage to keep a straight face. One also wonders why anyone bothers to listen to what they have to say.

Shoddy Journalism

A brief article at the Daily Mail on how President Trump is undoing what his predecessor tried to accomplish over his eight year tenure illustrates why one must approach what one reads in the media with a critical eye. The writer begins with this lede:

Brick by brick, the demolition job has begun: since taking office less than a year ago, Donald Trump has launched an all-out assault on the legacy of Barack Obama. Climate, free trade, health care, immigration, foreign policy -- the 45th US president has set about undoing just about everything done by the 44th.

All new presidents, of course, break with their predecessor once in the Oval Office, especially if they come from a rival political party. But what is striking is how systematic the hammer blows to Obama's legacy have been.

And rather than throw his weight behind new policies or projects, Trump has shown a willful desire to unpick, shred and erase everything his predecessor accomplished.

Well, why should President Trump be enacting new policies and projects when the old policies are stifling both our economic, political and religious freedom and diminishing the security of our nation? The assumption here seems to be that a president should allow whatever policies his predecessor enacted to remain in place, no matter how toxic those policies may be to the economic and social well-being of our people. Trump is wise to rid us of impediments to our national safety and flourishing imposed by the Obama administration before he moves on to advocate for other programs.

It's worth noting that each time he buries one of the reforms of the man who sat before him at the "Resolute desk," Trump sounds more like a candidate than a president.

"Reforms" is a word intended to persuade the reader that President Obama's executive orders were wise and needful and that President Trump's EOs are spiteful and reckless. In fact, a number of Mr. Obama's "reforms" were either unwise, illegal or usurpations by the executive branch of authority granted by the Constitution to the legislature. Undoing them simply returns us to the rule of law rather than the arbitrary rule of one man.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership? Within days of taking office, Trump signed an order pulling America out of the free trade accord, the fruit of eight years of negotiations between 12 Asia-Pacific countries, from Chile to Canada and Japan.

"We're going to stop the ridiculous trade deals that have taken everybody out of our country and taken companies out of our country, and it's going to be reversed," Trump said.

If Trump can rescind this deal it's only because it was never codified into law by Congress. The Obama administration signed off on it on its own, but the question that the article never raises is not whether Trump is undoing Obama's agreement but rather whether this agreement and others should be undone. If they should then what Trump is doing is good, if they shouldn't then what he's doing is unwise.

The Paris climate accord? Obama played a leading role in attaining that milestone in the effort to combat global warming.

Trump pulled out of the agreement signed by 195 countries, claiming that it "punishes the United States" and declaring: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."

Again, Trump could not pull us out of this agreement if Congress had approved it. Is it a good deal for the country or isn't it? Why didn't Congress get to act on it? Those are the questions to which the reader deserves an answer, but the article simply passes them by.

What about Obamacare, the signature legislative achievement of Obama's first term? After trying in vain to get Congress to repeal it, Trump is now working to bring about its collapse through the regulatory process.

What Trump has done here is rescind subsidies to big insurance companies that were not provided for in the Affordable Care Act, which Obama unilaterally granted and which a federal judge had declared to be illegal. You wouldn't know that, though, from reading this article.

And the Iranian nuclear accord? The bid to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon in return for a lifting of sanctions more than any other came to represent Obama's approach to world affairs.

"This deal will have my name on it," the Democratic president said shortly before it was concluded. "Nobody has a bigger personal stake in making sure that it delivers on its promise."

While Trump has stopped short of tearing up the Iran deal, as he threatened on the campaign trail, on Friday he warned he could do so "at any time," raising doubts about the fate of an accord born of years of painstaking diplomacy.

Even so, Iran has been cheating on the deal from the day they signed it, a deal that once again, Congress never explicitly approved. Iran is on the road to possessing nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Having already threatened to use them once they have the power to do so, a deal that allows for their acquisition is exceedingly foolish, but there's no discussion in the article of the wisdom of the agreement, no explanation of why it should not be abrogated, just the assumption that if it's an agreement, and if it was arrived at painstakingly and signed onto with other countries, then it must be good.

Historian Jeffrey Engel ... sees no equivalent in recent decades to Trump's systematic application of the simple principle that "if the other guy liked it, it must be bad." To Engel, the explanation is that Trump's electoral base "never accepted fully Barack Obama as their president."

"There was a move among Obama's opponents to delegitimize him and to say that this man is not really president and consequently anything that he did, Trump's base is ready to get rid of," said Engel, who heads Southern Methodist University's center for presidential history in Dallas, Texas.

The possibility that President Obama's lurch toward the socialist left and that his embrace of policies which would diminish America's freedom, influence and power are sincerely rejected by a plurality of Americans as unwise is not even considered by either Professor Engel or the writer of the Daily Mail piece. The dismantling of Obama's executive orders is portrayed as mere spite and vengefulness, while the possibility that it is in fact an honest attempt to pull us out of a national "death spiral" after eight years of national vertigo is blithely ignored.

The Daily Mail has given us in this article a shoddy, careless piece of journalism.

Theories of Time

The class discussion recently turned to questions concerning the nature of time and a student dug out this post from 3/7/2014. Since it addresses some of what we talked about in class I thought it might be worthwhile to run it again:

Anthony Aguirre at Big Questions Online discusses the two theories of time. His discussion is difficult to follow unless one is familiar with quantum mechanics and relativity theory, but he does give a clear explanation of the two basic theories on offer. What he calls below the "Unitary Block" theory is sometimes referred to as the B-Theory of time. What he calls the "Experienced World" is the A-Theory.

When we step back, we thus seem to have two rather different and contrary views of time’s nature. In one, the ‘Unitary Block’, spacetime and quantum states are laid out ‘all at once’, specified once and for all by some set of boundary conditions. Everything at any time is uniquely determined by — and thus implicitly contained in — any other time, and the world exhibits no distinction between past and future.

At the same time, the ‘Experienced World’ we actually inhabit and observe has a very clear distinction between past, present, and future, produces entropy, and allows branching between a single present reality and several possible future realities.

Among knowledgeable and thoughtful people, there seem to be three basic views of this paradox:

1.The Unitary Block is the fundamental, and by implication more true description; things such as the arrow of time, definite experimental outcomes, etc., are emergent phenomena that, if we only could make precise enough computations, could be reduced to ‘nothing but’ the fundamental description.

2.The Unitary Block is wrong in some essential way. A more correct view would be much more like — and much more readily reconciled with — the Experienced World.

3.The Experienced World is more fundamental than the Unitary Block, which is just the correct description of regularities in the Experienced World in very particular regimes.

View 1 is by far the most common amongst my theoretical physicist colleagues, but I’ll make three arguments as to why we should think carefully before embracing it.

His arguments for considering the Experienced World (A-Theory) to be fundamental can be read at the link. One might wonder why scientists even think there is a Unitary Block. The answer has to do with Einstein's discoveries about relativity:

Right now, this second, an old man is exhaling his last breath. Elsewhere, two young lovers exchange their first kiss. Farther afield, two asteroids silently collide. Sunrise comes to a planet orbiting a neighboring star. This very second, a supernova detonates in a faraway galaxy.

And yet ‘this very second’ across the universe apparently does not really exist! Our best fundamental theory of space-time, Einstein’s Relativity, expressly precludes a single, objective definition of simultaneity. Events occurring ‘now’ by one observer’s estimation can — with equal validity — be said to occur at different times according to another observer who is far away and/or in motion relative to the first.

We don’t notice this issue much here on Earth, but it becomes very obvious for example in cosmology, where how one defines ‘now’ can determine whether the universe looks uniform or not, and even if it is finite or infinite!

It's all very fascinating stuff with fascinating implications. For example, if the Unitary Block theory is correct I'm not sure what sense it makes to talk about the age of the universe. Every moment of time would have come into being at the instant that the universe was created. If that's so, then what does it mean to say that the universe is 14 billion years old?

Life Does Not Begin at Conception

An article at The Federalist on the recently released U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) 2018-2022 Plan contains and perpetuates a confusion. Under the heading of Organizational Structure HHS states that:

HHS accomplishes its mission through programs and initiatives that cover a wide spectrum of activities, serving and protecting Americans at every stage of life, beginning at conception.

The author of the Federalist article, Heather Prude, interprets this to mean that HHS affirms that life begins at conception, but whether that's the intent of the drafters of the document or not, that's not what the above passage says. The construction of the sentence is such that it clearly affirms that protection of life will begin at conception.

This is an important distinction because too often the debate over abortion has been muddied over fruitless disagreements about "when life begins," and the concept of a person is confused with the concept of a living entity. The fact is, life is a continuum. It doesn't begin with conception, much less birth.

The gametes produced in the bodies of one's parents are living cells. One's parents are themselves living organisms when they produce those cells. The gametes fuse at conception to produce a living conceptus, which develops into a living embryo, fetus, and ultimately a newborn. There is no stage along the way at which life "begins."

The phrase itself makes no sense biologically since, whether one takes the view of a naturalist or of a theist, life had a single, unique beginning in some event in the remote past and has been unbroken and continuous in leading to each one of us ever since.

The real question is not when life begins, but at what point does a living entity become a legal person subject to all the rights and protections of the law, including the right to life? The HHS document establishes that it will be government policy to assume that the onset of personhood occurs at conception. Prude writes:

The debate over the personhood of unborn children has been a central issue of the abortion debate. Ever since Roe v. Wade in 1973, pro-life advocates have been trying to establish constitutionally protected rights for the unborn. In the ruling’s majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that Roe v. Wade would collapse if “the fetus is a person.”

Modern abortion jurisprudence has unfortunately declared personhood to be a de facto consequence of birth. An individual becomes a person when he or she is born and lacks the right to life prior to that. At least half the country thinks that's a philosophically and biologically indefensible position, and now the HHS for the first time in many decades seems to agree with them.

The document is still a draft and is open to public comment for two more weeks. If it's approved, it will supplant the Obama administration’s previous five-year plan.

Crossing a Line

I'm not one who takes every word that falls from the president's lips seriously. Much of what he says is bluster, much else is a way of sticking his thumb in the eye of his critics, and much else is a way of intimidating those critics.

His recent tweet about reexamining NBC's FCC license is probably all three, but in any case it's not something I think he's serious about.

Even so, it's something he should not have said and needs to reconsider. He often comes close to crossing a line, if not a line demarcating legal from illegal, at least a line separating wise from unwise. This time he crossed the line as David Harsanyi explains:

[I]t’s never appropriate for a person sworn to defend the Constitution to threaten to shut down speech. Not even if that speech irritates him, or undermines his political priorities, or happens to be genuinely fake news.

Trump might have framed his contention in the form of a question, but he’s clearly comfortable with regulatory restrictions on speech. This puts in him league with those who support “fairness doctrines,” those who want to overturn the Citizens United decision, and so on....

[W]hen presidents play around with authoritarian ideas for political gain, a faction of Americans — always a different faction, depending on who is doing the speaking — are either comfortable hearing it or offer rationalizations for it. All the while we continue to abandon neutral principles for political gain. This is especially true on the issue of speech.

Here's what Trump tweeted:

With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!

If President Obama had said something like this about, say, Fox News, conservatives would be apoplectic and justly so. We should therefore certainly call out President Trump when he talks like this. Harsanyi goes on to cite polls which show how respect for free speech rights are eroding on both left and right in this country:

A forthcoming Cato Institute poll not only found that 50 percent of Democrats believe “government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public” but that 53 percent believe defending someone else’s right “to say racist things” is tantamount to “holding racist views yourself.”

It’s a position similar to the one that alleges anyone who supports due process for those accused of rape on college campuses is merely defending rape. Or, for that matter, it’s reminiscent of the position of Democratic senators who argue that Republicans’ demands for due process for gun owners make them no better than terrorists.

Recently, 200 staff members of the American Civil Liberties Union — an organization that bills itself a defender of constitutional rights — complained that the group’s “rigid stance” on the First Amendment was undermining its attempts to institute racial justice. Is this really the choice — liberty or “justice”? For progressives, many of whom are abandoning liberalism, it seems the answer is yes.

But they’re not alone. The Cato poll finds that 72 percent of Republicans would support making it illegal to burn or desecrate the American flag. More than 50 percent of them believe, as Trump once suggested, that those who do should be stripped of their U.S. citizenship. Fifty percent of Republicans believe the press has too much freedom in America. Other polling has found similarly disturbing results.

....what the polls illustrate is that our hierarchy of ideals has changed in destructive ways. Americans find free speech a secondary principle.

.... it doesn’t matter if most journalists now lecturing you about the First Amendment are a bunch of enormous hypocrites. Nor does it matter that their biased coverage has eroded your trust. There is a bigger marketplace for news than ever. Don’t read NBC.

But even if you’re not idealistic about free expression, it might be worth remembering that any laws or regulations you embrace to inhibit the speech of others, even fake-news anchors, can one day be turned on you. This is the lesson big-government Democrats and Republicans never learn.

When Americans invoke their principles only when it's convenient for them and mute their principles when it's their side that's flouting them then others are justified in thinking that our putative principles aren't principles at all. One lesson we should have gleaned from the massive decades-long cover-up by liberals of Democrat mega-donor Harvey Weinstein's predatory sexual behavior is that if we put party before principle we'll inevitably end up looking like phonies and hypocrites.

If we say we treasure the protection of freedom of speech from government intrusion, then we have to protect that right even when we believe the speech is mendacious and outrageous, as it often is on NBC and CNN.

The best antidote is not for the government to shut it down but for ordinary citizens to turn it off.

Basic Epistemology

Professor Laurence A. Moran, a biochemist at the University of Toronto and evangelistic atheist, recently found himself in conversation with a theologian named Denis Alexander. He subsequently posted a critique of their conversation on his blog Sandwalk. Whatever the merits of Moran's overall criticism of Alexander may be he certainly takes a misstep at the start when he says this:

If you believe in such a being [as God] then that conflicts with science as a way of knowing because you are believing in something without reliable evidence to support your belief. Scientists shouldn't do that and neither should any others who practice the scientific way of knowing. Denis Alexander thinks there are other, equally valid, ways of knowing but he wasn't able to offer any evidence that those other ways produce true knowledge.

There are several problems with what Prof. Moran says in this paragraph.

1. He conflates knowing and believing. He oscillates between talking about beliefs and talking about knowledge, but knowledge and belief are not the same thing. One must believe something in order to know it, but merely believing something isn't the same as knowing it. You can believe something and not know it, but you can't know it and not believe it. To be knowledge the belief must be warranted somehow, and it must have a high probability of being true.

2. He assumes evidence is required to justify a belief. That is something he himself apparently believes, but what evidence could he offer to justify believing it? He simply believes this claim without any evidence at all.

Presumably, he means that our beliefs must be supported by sensory evidence, but this is surely false. Scientists as well as laymen hold all sorts of beliefs for which there's no sensory evidence whatsoever.

Many believe, for instance, that life originated purely naturalistically although there's not a shred of evidence that it did or that such an origin is even physically possible. They often seek to avoid the implications of cosmic fine-tuning by promoting the existence of a multiverse for which there's no empirical evidence. They believe that life exists elsewhere in the universe, and spend their careers searching for it, despite the utter lack of any evidence for such life. They believe that it's wrong to falsify data on a scientific paper, but cannot explain scientifically why anything at all is wrong.

Put another way, I can know that I'm experiencing pain even if I have no way to prove it to you; I can know that, despite much evidence against me, I'm innocent of a crime of which I've been accused; I can know that as a young boy I found a dollar bill, though I'd be helpless if asked to present evidence of the fact.

These are all things that I can know despite my inability to produce evidence that I could offer to anyone else, especially to someone predisposed to doubt me.

If Prof. Moran were to reply that I have the evidence of my own internal states, the subjective experience of pain, the assurance of my innocence, the memory of finding the money, and that these states count as evidence, he'd be putting himself in an awkward position. He'd have to explain why these states warrant the relevant beliefs, but the internal assurance one might have of experiencing God does not warrant believing that God exists.

3. He's simply mistaken to assert that there's no reliable evidence to support theism. It's been argued on this site for the past fifteen years that as Pascal said, there's enough evidence to convince anyone who's not dead set against it. Alvin Plantinga gives a couple dozen arguments for theism among which, in my opinion, the best are certain forms of the cosmological, moral, and cosmic fine-tuning arguments as well as the argument from the contingency of the universe.

I'm sure Professor Moran is a fine biochemist, but perhaps he'd do well to stick to his field and avoid dogmatic philosophical pronouncements.

For a more extended critique of Prof. Moran's argument against Alexander see philosopher V.J.Torley's discussion here.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

Physicist Sir James Jeans, contemplating the fact that the universe seems so astonishingly conformable to mathematics, once remarked that God must be a mathematician. He was prompted to make this remark because it would be a breathtaking coincidence had the mathematical architecture of the cosmos just happened to be the way it is by sheer serendipity.

Here's a lovely video that illustrates just one example of how mathematics seems to lie at the fundament of the universe. The video describes how the geometry of nature so often exhibits what's called the Fibonacci sequence:

In 1959, the physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner described the fact that mathematical equations describe every aspect of the universe as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics."

Mathphobic students may wince at a statement like this, but it gets even worse.

Physicist Max Tegmark has more recently claimed that the universe is not only described by mathematics, but is, in fact, mathematics itself.

To suggest that everything ultimately reduces to a mathematical expression is another way of saying that the universe is information. But if so, information doesn't just hang in mid-air, as it were. Behind the information there must be a mind in which the information resides or from which it arises.

In either case, so far from the materialist belief that matter gives rise to everything else, it seems more likely that matter is itself a physical expression of information and that the information expressed by the cosmos is itself the product of mind.

In other words, it just keeps getting harder and harder to agree with the materialists that matter is the fundamental substance that makes up all reality. Materialism just seems so 19th century.

Columbus Day

Yesterday was Columbus Day here in the U.S. and the protests and disdain expressed by some for the holiday made me think of a book I read several years ago. The book is titled The Destruction of the Indies, and reading it was a stomach-churning experience. It was written by a Spanish priest named Bartholomo de Las Casas' and is an eyewitness account of the horrors inflicted upon the native American people in the West Indies by the Spaniards in the 16th century.

I thought of that book when I read of the Columbus Day protests by people who see Columbus as the initiator of the terrible oppression inflicted upon native Americans. I think the record regarding Columbus himself is a bit ambiguous, and I don't have too much sympathy for those who wish to efface his memory. Indeed, it's easy to suspect some of them of ulterior motives, but, be that as it may, neither have I sympathy for those who wish to replace Columbus Day with what they're calling "Indigenous Peoples' Day."

In the first place, there are no indigenous people, or if there were, they're lost to history. The Indians who the Spaniard explorers encountered and often massacred had themselves driven out, slaughtered or assimilated other groups who preceded them hundreds or even thousands of years before.

But more importantly, if the Spanish Conquistadors were unimaginably savage and cruel, and they were, many of the Indians they conquered (though not all) were their equals in barbarity. Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto illustrates this disturbingly well. So does an essay by Michael Graham at The Federalist.

About the Indians the Spanish encountered in the New World Graham writes:

[I]f we really want to commemorate horrifying, unspeakable violence and oppression in the Americas, I’ve got the perfect holiday: “Indigenous People’s Day.” “Long before the white European knew a North American continent existed, Indians of the Northern Plains were massacring entire villages,” says George Franklin Feldman in the book Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America: A History Forgotten. “And not just killed, but mutilated. Hands and feet were cut off, each body’s head was scalped, the remains were left scattered around the village, which was burned.”

When thinking of pre-Columbian America, forget what you’ve seen in the Disney movies. Think “slavery, cannibalism and mass human sacrifice.” From the Aztecs to the Iroquois, that was life among the indigenous peoples before Columbus arrived.

For all the talk from the angry and indigenous about European slavery, it turns out that pre-Columbian America was virtually one huge slave camp. According to Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865, by Tony Seybert, “Most Native American tribal groups practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.”

“Enslaved warriors sometimes endured mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle. Some Indians cut off one foot of their captives to keep them from running away.”

Things changed when the Europeans arrived, however: “Indians found that British settlers… eagerly purchased or captured Indians to use as forced labor. More and more, Indians began selling war captives to whites.”

That’s right: Pocahontas and her pals were slave traders. If you were an Indian lucky enough to be sold to a European slave master, that turned out to be a good thing, relatively speaking. At least you didn’t end up in a scene from “Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom.”

Ritual human sacrifice was widespread in the Americas. The Incas, for example, practiced ritual human sacrifice to appease their gods, either executing captive warriors or “their own specially raised, perfectly formed children,” according to Kim MacQuarrie, author of The Last Days of the Incas.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, were more into the “volume, volume, VOLUME” approach to ritual human slaughter. At the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs performed a mass human sacrifice of an estimated 80,000 enslaved captives in four days.

Nor was the bloodlust and oppression limited to Central and South America:

According to an eyewitness account of “indigenous peoples” at work—in this case, the Iroquois in 1642, as observed by the Rev. Father Barthelemy Vimont’s The Jesuit Relations—captives had their fingers cut off, were forced to set each other on fire, had their skin stripped off and, in one captured warrior’s case, “the torture continued throughout the night, building to a fervor, finally ending at sunrise by cutting his scalp open, forcing sand into the wound, and dragging his mutilated body around the camp. When they had finished, the Iroquois carved up and ate parts of his body.”

Shocked? Don’t be. Cannibalism was also fairly common in the New World before (and after) Columbus arrived. According to numerous sources, the name “Mohawk” comes from the Algonquin for “flesh eaters.” Anthropologist Marvin Harris, author of “Cannibals and Kings,” reports that the Aztecs viewed their prisoners as “marching meat.”

The native peoples also had an odd obsession with heads. Scalping was a common practice among many tribes, while some like the Jivaro in the Andes were feared for their head-hunting, shrinking their victims’ heads to the size of an orange. Even sports involved severed heads. If you were lucky enough to survive a game of the wildly popular Meso-American ball (losers were often dispatched to paradise), your trophy could include an actual human head.

The lesson in all this is that there is no race of people who is exempt from the human inclination toward savagery. White, black, brown and yellow, no race is free from the stain of a deeply corrupted human nature. As Graham points out, racism, violence and conquest are part of the human condition, not just the European one.

If Europeans have managed to dominate and oppress others at some points in their history it's not because they're more evil but because for the last thousand years or more they've been more technologically advanced. Every other group has behaved in exactly the same cruel fashion whenever they've been more powerful than their neighbors.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously observed that,

[T]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

He could have added "races and ethnicities" to that first clause.

Running the Film Backwards

A student recently dug this old post out of the archive and I thought I'd re-post it:

There is a universally accepted principle of thought which says that given a choice between multiple explanations for a phenomenon the preferred explanation is the one which is simplest and fits all the facts.

Mathematician Granville Sewell at Evolution News and Views invites us to imagine a scenario which illustrates this principle:

A high school science teacher rents a video showing a tornado sweeping through a town, turning houses and cars into rubble. When she attempts to show it to her students, she accidentally runs the video backward .... [T]he students laugh and say, the video is going backwards! The teacher doesn’t want to admit her mistake, so she says: “No, the video is not really going backward. It only looks like it is .... and she proceeds to give some long, detailed, hastily improvised scientific theories on how tornadoes, under the right conditions, really can construct houses and cars.

At the end of the explanation, one student says, “I don’t want to argue with scientists, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to explain if you ran the video the other way?”

That's the simplest explanation for the phenomena in the video, certainly simpler than the teacher's contrived explanation, and thus it should be preferred.

Sewell wants to relate this to the problem of undirected Darwinian evolution.

Imagine, he writes, a professor describing the final project for students in his evolutionary biology class. “Here are two pictures,” he says. “One is a drawing of what the Earth must have looked like soon after it formed. The other is a picture of New York City today, with tall buildings full of intelligent humans, computers, TV sets and telephones, with libraries full of science texts and novels, and jet airplanes flying overhead.

Your assignment is to explain how we got from picture one to picture two .... You should explain that 3 or 4 billion years ago a collection of atoms was formed by pure chance with the ability to duplicate itself, and these complex collections of atoms were also able to pass their complex structures on to their descendants generation after generation, even correcting errors that crept in.

Explain how, over a very long time, the accumulation of genetic accidents resulted in greater and greater information content in the DNA of these more and more complicated collections of atoms, and how eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design buildings and computers and TV sets, and write encyclopedias and science texts....

When one student turns in his essay some days later, he has written, “A few years after picture one was taken, the sun exploded into a supernova, all humans and other animals died, their bodies decayed, and their cells decomposed into simple organic and inorganic compounds. Most of the buildings collapsed immediately into rubble, those that didn’t, crumbled eventually. Most of the computers and TV sets inside were smashed into scrap metal, even those that weren’t, gradually turned into piles of rust, most of the books in the libraries burned up, the rest rotted over time, and you can see see the result in picture two.”

The professor says, “You have reversed the pictures! You did it backwards” “I know,” says the student, “but it was so much easier to explain that way.”

That's the problem with Darwinian evolution. The idea that blind chance and the laws of chemistry alone could have conspired to create a living cell, or produce a process as extraordinary as butterfly metamorphosis, or create a structure as unimaginably complex as a human brain requires so many assumptions and ad hoc explanations, so much suspension of incredulity, that it's far simpler, and much more in keeping with our everyday experience, to posit that these things were the intentional product of an intelligent mind.

Otherwise, Sewell concludes, the process is like a movie running backward. The whole of biological history is as improbable as assuming that purposeless, undirected forces like tornadoes could actually cause scattered debris to assemble into complex, well-integrated structures.

Of course, people will often believe what they want most fervently to be true. If that means believing the equivalent that a computer, complete with operating system, can be constructed out of mindless chaos well, then, they'll believe it.

Strange How Things Sometimes Work Out

Sometimes things in life work out in ways completely unforeseen and unforeseeable. Just when it seems nothing good can come of one's life, when we've all but given up hope that anything we do will amount to anything worthwhile, sometimes something wonderful happens.

The following is taken from a book by Robert Petterson titled The Book of Amazing Stories. The excerpt is titled The Chambermaid’s Choice and it truly is an amazing story:

Maria had hoped that her second marriage would make for a better future. Though born the daughter of a cook, she had dreams of being in high society. But at sixteen, she fell madly in love with a nobleman’s valet. When they married, she consigned herself to be dismissed as one of the serving class. After Maria gave birth to a son, her valet husband died. At age eighteen she was a grieving widow and a single mother. Not long after, her little boy died too.

Then she got a second chance at love [with a musician]. But when her young musician took her home to meet his prominent family, they looked down their haughty noses at this girl from the serving class. His father would ever after refer to her as “the chambermaid.” Her husband’s family would always view her as an inferior interloper. It was no wonder that Maria’s second marriage soon soured.

She later referred to her life as “a chain of sorrows.” The couple’s first child died six days after he was born. The “chambermaid” would bury five of her eight children. But her worst heartache was watching the decline of a husband who enjoyed the tavern more than practicing his music. If he wasn’t in a drunken stupor, he was with other women.

Then the beatings began. After he took advantage of her in one of his brutal rages, Maria discovered she was pregnant.

She determined that she wasn’t about to bring a child conceived by rape into her miserable world. She found her way to a woman who traded in concoctions that induced miscarriage.

Three drops of that deadly liquid would kill her baby. Any more might end her life too. She dumped it all into a cup of tea. But before she was able to drink it, the cup was accidentally knocked off the table. At first she was hysterical. Then she resigned herself to the fact that God must have a purpose for her unwanted child.

He turned out to be a strange little boy, often reclusive and unresponsive. But he did have his family’s love for music. When a local teacher took him on as a piano student, no one imagined that she was gaining a prodigy.

Maria was forty years old when Wolfgang Mozart allegedly declared that her son was destined for greatness. Two months later, the teenage prodigy rushed home to be at her deathbed. She told her son that giving birth to him was the best thing she ever did in her unhappy life.

We should all be grateful that Maria van Beethoven did not abort little Ludwig, a child of rape who would grow up to write the world’s greatest symphonies.

Maria's life, like that of so many others in her day and in ours, was tragic, yet out of her tragedy she gave the world a wonderful gift. Her son's symphonies, especially the fifth and the ninth, as well as many of his concertos, are marvelous, but his life, too, was tragic. He went deaf while he was still at the height of his powers, allegedly from beatings he received from his father as a child. Yet out of his sufferings he produced works of astonishing beauty.

Reading this I was reminded of a few lines from Kierkegaard who asked, "What is a poet? A poet," he replied to his question, "is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them they sound like beautiful music."

Gun Deaths

It's easy to think that in the wake of Las Vegas and other episodes like it that the country is rife with firearm-facilitated murders. It's also easy to draw the conclusion, listening to some precincts of the nation's media, that the bulk of these homicides are committed by white men. The statistics, however, don't bear out either of these assumptions.

The website FiveThirtyEight has an article which explains what the state of affairs concerning gun deaths actually is in the United States. I encourage you to read the article which is accompanied by an interesting interactive graphic.

Here's a summary:

The media tend to focus on terrorism, mass shootings, police officers killed in the line of duty, and police shootings of civilians, but these are a relatively small fraction of the 33,000 deaths.

Mass shootings are rare. The majority of gun deaths in America aren’t even homicides, let alone caused by mass shootings. Two-thirds of the more than 33,000 gun deaths that take place in the U.S. every year are suicides, 85% of whom are male and, of these, half are men over 45.

Homicides account for about a third of all gun deaths (about 12,000) per year. Half of homicide victims are young men and two thirds of them (roughly 4000) are black, most of whom are murdered by other young black men with guns that they possess illegally.

Accidents and domestic violence, though another relatively small fraction of total gun deaths, make up the balance.

It would seem from numbers like these that if we're serious about addressing gun deaths we need to focus primarily on the epidemic of hopelessness that causes people to take their own lives and on the epidemic of gang violence that plagues our urban centers.

Everything else, as important as it is, simply leaves the heart of the problem untouched.

Stephen Paddock and Richard Dawkins

I know that few thoughtful people take Lena Dunham seriously, but still.... Dunham tweeted yesterday that the Las Vegas massacre Monday night was about gender, race, and capitalism. She didn't explain exactly how it was about these things, although I suppose that since the perpetrator of this awful atrocity was a well-to-do white male perhaps in her mind that's proof enough that his sickening rampage was somehow about capitalism, race and gender, I don't know.

I do know, though, that Stephen Paddock's crime was clearly about nihilistic evil, and I do believe that evil incubates most comfortably in a society which denies its existence. Sad to say, there are a lot of very smart people in the West who are in denial about the existence of evil. Richard Dawkins, for example, has written that "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Why do Dawkins and so many other thinkers who share his worldview believe that there's ultimately "no evil and no good"? They believe it because it's the logical consequence of the naturalism and materialism which they embrace. If matter is all that exists then human beings are nothing more than a collocation of atoms and molecules - we're just material stuff, and material stuff, by itself, is neither good nor evil. It just is.

But, someone may reply, this particular arrangement of atoms named Stephen Paddock has caused a great deal of pain to other arrangements of atoms, doesn't that make it evil? Well, why should it? If a virus or a tiger cause pain to a human being is the virus evil? Is the tiger?

The answer, of course, is no. There can only be evil if there is an objective set of moral principles which apply uniquely to humans and to which humans will be held accountable. On naturalism, though, moral principles are not objective, they don't exist as anything other than convenient fictions which we invent to help us to get along together in society, nor is there really any way to hold someone truly accountable, except in the most transient sense, who commits an act that we are viscerally repelled by.

In other words, on naturalism not only is there no objective moral right and wrong, neither is there any real justice. People like Paddock who cause untold suffering end their lives in a painless instant while the suffering they caused endures in the hearts and minds of the families he has harmed for the rest of their lives. There's no justice in that.

Human beings, however, have a basic conviction that there really is an objective moral standard, and we harbor in our hearts a deep yearning for justice. Yet, if naturalism is true the former is false and the latter is absurd. Only if naturalism is false can our intuition that Paddock did something grossly evil Monday night be correct, and only if naturalism is false can we cling to any plausible expectation that justice will ultimately prevail for people like him and his victims.

Like Dawkins' quote suggests, one can believe that naturalism is true or one can believe that the Las Vegas slaughter was evil, but one can't believe both.

Free Speech Is on the Ropes

A recent study by YouGov polled adults across the nation on their views of free speech. The results are both instructive and troubling.

For example, respondents were asked whether it's ever appropriate to use violence to shut down a speaker. Twenty two percent support at least shouting the speaker down with Democrats much more likely to support the tactic than Republicans (35% to 14%). This is very disappointing inasmuch as it's tantamount to an utter rejection of civility in our politics.

A second question asked which would they prefer between a “positive” learning environment on campus that prohibits speech that’s considered “offensive or biased against certain groups of people” and an “open” learning environment where students are exposed to all types of speech. Forty five percent of Democrats preferred restricting what they considered offensive speech to 37% of Republicans who would prefer that option.

The Democrat percentage was heavily influenced by the fact that many black and Latino voters support it — strongly in the case of blacks (50/20), more marginally in the case of Latinos (44/32).

Gone are the days, apparently, when liberals would freely quote the alleged words of Voltaire who supposedly declared that though he might despise what you say, he would fight to the death for your right to say it. Liberals today, or many of them, are declaring instead that if they despise what you say they'll fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.

Those who believe in liberty and the freedoms guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights, who believe that the best way to combat a bad idea is with a good argument, have a lot of work to do, especially among those who once upon a time were the staunchest defenders of free speech.

Naturalism and Evil

The horror in Las Vegas late Monday night was yet another reminder of how deep lies the depravity in the human psyche. That a man could for no apparent reason whatsoever wantonly wreak such profound pain on so many families is a manifestation of the ugliness and evil which hold so many human hearts in their grip.

Kenneth Francis, in a fine piece at the New English Review, offers some insight into the depravity we're witnessing with alarming frequency in our culture.

Francis writes:

The German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) spoke of the ramifications of ‘murdering’ God. In his Parable of the Madman, he wrote:

. . . All of us are his [God] murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

Nietzsche would have been aware that without God, humans are prone to the worst cruelty imaginable, even to our animal ‘friends’. It is alleged that after seeing a horse being whipped in the streets of Turin, Italy, he had a mental breakdown that put him in an asylum for the rest of his life. Nietzsche is reported to have run over to the horse and held it in his arm to protect it before he collapsed to the ground. Such cruelty, devoid of morality and human compassion, knows no bounds.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the barbarity humans are capable of. The protagonist in the novel, Raskolnikov, has a glass of vodka, but he’s not used to drinking alcohol. He then staggers to a park and immediately goes to sleep. He dreams that he is back in his childhood, aged seven, and as he is walking with his father, he sees a drunk trying to make his old horse pull a wagon full of people.

When the crowd laugh at him struggling, the drunk peasant becomes furious and begins beating the horse so brutally that the others begin to do likewise by using crowbars and iron shafts. The old horse at first tries to resist, but soon it falls down dead. The boy in the dream, devastated and in great sorrow, throws his arms around the horse and kisses it. All through the dream the owner of the horse is shouting that he can do what he wants with the mare because he owns her.

One would have to have a heart of freezing steel to not be deeply saddened by this poignant passage of human savagery, despite it being fiction. Anyone who hurts a human or animal for fun or pleasure is a degenerate psychopath. But wait a minute: there is no psychopathy or degeneracy if the universe is made entirely of determined matter. All we are left with are chunks of atoms bumping into one another. And, on Naturalism, some of these chunks end up shattering other molecules in motion in the chaotic maelstrom of the material universe spinning ultimately into oblivion: the final heat death of the cosmos.

In such a hellhole, there is no creator to save us—and no objective morals or values!

Nietzsche’s death of God also leaves us with no absolute truth, meaning, ... right or wrong. We are left rudderless trying to keep afloat in a sea of moral relativism with all its dire ramifications. Can any sane person really act as if atheism were true?

The late atheist scholar at Yale University, Arthur Leff, realising the ramifications of atheism and trying to justify morality, said:

. . . As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved . . . There is in the world such a thing as evil.

Indeed there is, but only if there are objective moral values, and those can only exist if there is a transcendent moral authority which establishes them and holds human beings accountable to them. The naturalist has a choice. He can hold onto his naturalism or he can hold onto his belief that evil exists. He can't do both.

Islamism

The biggest threat to the safety and freedom of those living in the West today is an extreme form of Islam called Islamism. The ambition of its votaries is to impose strict Islamic law, sharia, on the entire world, including Europe and the United States.

These fanatics realize that they can't persuade Westerners to adopt Islam and sharia through the free exchange of ideas and rational argument because their religion, based as it is on a strict fundamentalist totalitarianism, has very little appeal to people who are accustomed to the freedoms enjoyed in the West for the last two and a half centuries.

Their hope, therefore, is that by overwhelming democratic states with refugees and other immigrants who will eventually be given the right to vote they can gradually acquire sufficient political power to enact the strictures of sharia legislatively.

If and when they succeed the very freedom they exploited to gain their ends will be abolished and people will one day awaken to find themselves under the thumb of an alien theocracy with the power to dictate every aspect of their lives and to compel everyone to conform to the teachings of the Koran on pain of death.

Meanwhile, the Islamists know that in the postmodern West the highest values of millions of people are mere peace and security. Believing in little else, these people would rather submit to the dominance of the Islamists than live in constant fear. Thus, the will to resist the capitulation of the West to the Islamo-fascists is being steadily eroded, especially in Europe, by acts of terror committed by Islamists willing to die in order to sap whatever confidence remains among Westerners in their values and institutions.

We're often told that terrorists are a small number of those who adhere to Islam, and in relative terms that's probably true, but in absolute terms they number in the millions.

Prager U. has a helpful primer on Islamism which packs a lot of facts into a five minute video. Give it a look: