How Scientific Discovery Points to a Cosmic Designer

Writer Eric Metaxas presents a brief but cogent version of the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God in a Prager University video. In the video Metaxas discusses how the number of astrophysical parameters that must be met by any planet in order for that planet to be suitable for sustaining life is so high as to make it quite possible that, despite the optimism often expressed in the popular science media, it's quite possible that there are no other planets in our galaxy capable of supporting living things.

He also argues that the exquisitely fine-tuned parameters, constants and forces which comprise the fabric of the universe and which make our universe capable of sustaining life also make it astronomically improbable that a universe like ours would exist solely by chance.

Here's the video:

Actually, the video doesn't even begin to capture the unimaginable precision with which these parameters are set.

If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10^60, the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible.

An accuracy of one part in 10^60 can be compared to firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.

Calculations have shown that if gravity had been stronger or weaker by just one part in 10^40, then life-sustaining stars like the sun could not exist. Life would thus be all but impossible.

To give an idea of the magnitude of this improbability I'll borrow an illustration given by astronomer Hugh Ross in talking about a parameter that's fine-tuned to one part in 10^37. This is such an incredibly sensitive precision, Ross says, that it's hard to visualize.

Here's an analogy: Cover the entire North American continent in dimes all the way up to the moon, a height of about 239,000 miles (In comparison, the money to pay for the U.S. federal government debt would cover one square mile less than two feet deep with dimes.). Next, pile dimes from here to the moon on a billion other continents the same size as North America. Paint one dime red and mix it into the billions of piles of dimes. Blindfold a friend and ask him to pick out one dime. The odds that he will pick the red dime are one in 10^37.

Other parameters are set with an exactitude even more breath-taking. Dark energy, for example, is fine-tuned to one part in 10^120, and the initial distribution of mass/energy at the birth of the universe could not have deviated from its actual value by more than one part in 10^10^123.

And these examples make up only a fraction of the examples that scientists have discovered over the last couple of decades.

So how does one escape the conclusion that this universe had to have been intentionally engineered? We'll discuss it tomorrow.

Death Panels

For a frightening glimpse of what socialized medical care, such as that which the Obama administration and the Democratic party imposed upon us under the Affordable Care Act, would look like in practice read the sad account of little Alfie Evans of England and his parents.

Alfie is an almost three year-old British child who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Here's part of his story:

In January 2016, the eight-month-old baby developed a chest infection and was hospitalized. The prognosis his parents were given at that time was that he would not survive, and they had him christened. He was placed on life support, then recovered from the first infection.

Alfie quickly got sick again, however, and began a cycle of repetitive illnesses and setbacks in Alder Hey, the hospital his parents took him to in order to save his life. Despite numerous requests for transfers to other hospitals, his parents have not been allowed to move his care to a hospital that might be able to better care for or diagnose him. Instead, Alder Hey has sought legal representation with the goal of turning off Alfie’s life support, and giving him medications to help end his life.

His parents are understandably frantic. They believe their son has been misdiagnosed, and they want to move him to another hospital. They certainly don't want life-support turned off. Nevertheless, he was removed from the ventilator, but to the surprise of the medical staff, Alfie kept breathing which has given his parents renewed motivation to return to court to work out another solution.

Meanwhile the Bambino Gesu hospital at the Vatican has offered to treat Alfie for free and even pay for his transportation to Vatican City, but British authorities have declared that Alfie is terminally ill and will die soon, and they'll not allow him to be taken out of the British hospital.

Since the British taxpayers are paying for his treatment the National Health Service and the courts have complete control over Alfie's life. In their system of single-payer socialized medicine the parents have no say over what happens to their child. The courts have ruled that Alfie must be allowed to die.

This is the health care model the Obama administration tried to create here in the U.S., and the model that would almost certainly be imposed upon us when the Democrats next regain control of the White House and Congress.

The fundamental question raised by this case is not whether the medical personnel at Alder Hey are correct in concluding that Alfie will eventually die from his condition, nor is it even whether life support should be withdrawn in cases such as this, although that is an important question.

The most crucial question is whether parents have the right to determine whether or not to maintain that support and remove their child from the hospital to find care for him elsewhere.

In other words, the question is, whose child is this? Does he belong to the parents or to the state? Under the socialist British system the child belongs to the state.

Under Obamacare, or any single-payer system, you, your elderly grandparents, and your children would all belong to the state. Bureaucrats, not you, would decide what kind of care you and your loved ones receive as well as whether you will receive it.

Whoever pays the bills makes the rules and makes life and death decisions for everyone else. That should be unacceptable for free people in a putatively free society.

UPDATE: Alfie passed away this morning.

A Problem with Positivism

A commenter at another blog expresses the basic tenet of the materialist philosophy called positivism. By way of dismissing a biological theory with which he disagrees the commenter remarks that "If you can’t measure it and can’t define it clearly and straightforwardly, it’s not worth thinking about."

Although a lot of thinkers formerly adhered to the commenter's view in the last century, it has some serious, even fatal, difficulties. If it were widely adopted it’d certainly empty life of just about everything that makes human existence endurable. We’d have to acknowledge that thinking about things like love, beauty, justice, meaning, truth, good, God and a host of other matters, is just a waste of time, but it's a desiccated and shriveled view of life that renders topics like these meaningless.

A second problem with this claim is that it's self-refuting, for if it's true then it itself is not worth thinking about since there's no way to subject it to measurement or a clear, straightforward definition.

To be fair, perhaps the commenter meant to offer a criterion for legitimate scientific topics with his claim. Perhaps he was rather sloppy and really meant to say that unless a scientific theory or postulate is measurable and clearly definable it doesn't count as genuine science. Perhaps, but this would then exclude from science a host of assertions that scientists spend a lot of their time thinking about.

It would exclude, for example, every assertion about the origin of life (and even perhaps thinking about life itself), the origin of the cosmos, the evolutionary rise and transmission of behavior, the multiverse hypothesis, as well as axiomatic assumptions universally adopted by scientists like the principle of causality and the principle of uniformity (the idea that the universe is essentially homogenous throughout its extent). It would also make thinking about metaphysical naturalism a "waste of time" since metaphysical naturalism is itself difficult to define "clearly and straightforwardly".

In any case, it doesn't seem as if the positivist's claim that nothing which can't be "measured or clearly and straightforwardly defined is worth thinking about" has much practical value.

Euthyphro's Dilemma Pt. III

Yesterday we took a look at the challenge posed by the Euthyphro Dilemma to those who believe that God's existence is a necessary condition for any meaningful, non-subjective, non-arbitrary ethics. We began by considering the second horn of Plato's famous dilemma which we stated this way:

Is an act morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

In this post I'd like to reflect on the first of the dilemma's two horns: Is good simply whatever God commands such that cruelty or hatred would be good if God commanded it? If so, it seems that good is just the arbitrary choice of the deity which strikes most people as an unacceptable option.

The problem with this part of the dilemma, though, is that if we stipulate that God is omnibenevolent, and that "good" is that which conduces to human happiness, then the suggestion that God could command cruelty or hatred is an incoherent act description. Here's why:

The question of God commanding cruelty presupposes a state of affairs in which a perfectly good being, i.e. one whose essence it is to always do that which ultimately conduces to human well-being and happiness, nevertheless commands us to do something which produces gratuitous suffering and pain. There appears to be a logical conflict in that.

In other words, if goodness is as we've defined it, and if God is perfectly good, then it's logically impossible for cruelty to be part of his nature or for him to command cruelty or anything else which would conflict with ultimate human well-being and happiness. It would require of God that he issue a command that is opposed to his own nature. It'd be like asking whether there is something which a being who knows everything nevertheless doesn't know.

So, the proper answer to the question of whether God commands us to love because love is good or whether love is good because God commands it, seems to me to be: "neither." God commands us to love because it is his desire to have the world conformed to his own essential nature which is love.

If what's been said in this and the previous posts is correct then the Euthyphro Dilemma fails as an objection to the moral argument outlined in the first post in this series. It certainly doesn't succeed in putting the theist in the kind of bind some have thought it does.

Euthyphro's Dilemma Pt. II

Many philosophy students find themselves confronted with the Euthyphro dilemma, a problem often posed to convince them that God's existence is superfluous for our moral lives. The dilemma gets its name from the fact that it first appears in Plato's dialogue titled The Euthyphro and has popped up frequently in the philosophical literature ever since.

I'd like to share some thoughts on it over the course of the next two posts with the caveat that much of what I say is not original with me and that whatever might be original I offer with the humble recognition that it could well be nonsense.

With that caution in mind let's look at the dilemma. It's often put in the form of the following question:

Is something - love, for instance - morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?

The question seeks to offer theists, at least those who hold to a divine command theory of ethics, two unpalatable choices. If the theist chooses the first option then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

I think, though, that the choices with which the dilemma confronts us are unable to carry the weight placed upon their shoulders. To see why let's start with a definition for "moral good." Let's stipulate that moral good is that which conduces to human happiness and well-being.

It may be argued that we don't need God to know what conduces to human well-being and thus we can know what is good without having to believe in God. This may be true, but it misses the point in at least two ways.

First, our problem is not with recognizing good so much as it is with explaining why God is still necessary for good to exist. Just because we can recognize good without believing in God doesn't mean that God is not necessary for anything to be good. What is good is contingent upon the kind of beings we are, and the way we are is contingent upon God. We have the nature we do because God created us this way. Thus, what conduces to our well-being is a function of God's design. We can no more say that God is irrelevant to our well-being than we could say that just because we know that clean oil is conducive to our car's well-being that therefore the engineers who designed the car are irrelevant to our knowing that we should change the oil periodically. Oil is "good" for the car because that's how the engineers designed the car.

Secondly, even if belief in God is not necessary for one to know or recognize what conduces to well-being it is nevertheless necessary that there be a God, or something like God, in order for us to think we have a non-arbitrary duty to care about the well-being of others. If there is no God there is no moral obligation to concern ourselves with the good of others or to do anything else, for that matter. We may want to help others flourish, of course, but the belief that we should is completely arbitrary. If we didn't care about others, or if we acted against the good of others, we wouldn't be wrong in any meaningful sense.

Just because something is good for others doesn't mean we have a duty to do it, at least not unless we're assuming that we're obligated always to do what conduces to other people's happiness and well-being. But why should we assume such a thing? Where does this obligation come from? Purposeless, mindless natural processes and forces cannot impose moral duties upon us, so why should I not just promote my own well-being and let others fend for themselves? If God is off the table there's no real answer to these questions.

Thus, God's existence is crucial, not so that we can recognize good, perhaps, but rather as a ground for both the existence of good and for whatever duty we have to do good to others.

So, let's return to the dilemma. Consider again the second horn. Does God command love because love is good? Is the good of love independent of God? Does it exist apart from God?

I don't think so. Goodness is an essential element of God's being. Goodness is no more separable from God than the property of having just three angles is separable from triangles. Goodness is ontologically dependent upon God's existence much as sunlight is ontologically dependent upon the sun. If there were no sun, sunlight would not exist. If there were no God then moral goodness as a quality of our actions would not exist. Actions which lead to human well-being would have no moral value any more than a cat nursing her young has moral value even though her act conduces to their well-being. We would not consider the cat evil if it refused to nurse its young, nor, if there is no God, would we be able to judge a man objectively evil if he practiced cruelty.

God commands love because he has made us to be the sort of beings which flourish, generally, when nurtured in love, and he has made us this way because it is his essential nature to be loving. Love is not one thing and God another. God is love.

But what of the first horn of the dilemma? What if instead of God being love, suppose he were hateful and cruel? Would hatred and cruelty then be good? We'll consider those questions next time.

Euthyphro's Dilemma Pt. I

There's a strong case to be made for the claim that if theism is false there are no objective moral duties. If there are no objective moral duties then ethics reduces to the subjective feelings and prejudices of each autonomous individual and the language of right and wrong is meaningless.

Divine Command ethics, particularly of the Judeo-Christian sort, affords a ground for thinking that objective moral duties do exist and that therefore moral discourse makes sense.

Perhaps the strongest criticism of Divine Command ethics, however, is what's called the Euthyphro Dilemma. I wrote about this a few years ago and thought it'd be appropriate to revisit that discussion over the next couple of days.

Here's Part I:

One family of arguments among the dozen or so which, taken together, make a strong case for the claim that theism is a better explanation for our experience of the world than is naturalism or, alternatively, that it's more probable that theism is true than that naturalism is true, are the arguments lumped under the heading of The Moral Argument. One version of this argument goes like this:

1. If there is no God then there are no objective moral duties.
2. There are objective moral duties.
3. Therefore, there is a God.

In this argument God is taken to be a transcendent, perfectly good moral authority who is able to hold us accountable. The argument is not a proof since when faced with it the skeptic has a couple of options:

A. He can reject the first premise and argue that even though there's no God there could still be objective moral duties.
B. He could accept the first premise but deny the second premise and thus embrace ethical subjectivism or nihilism.

Of course, if he accepts both premises he's logically bound to accept the conclusion.

The problem is that, as I argue in my novel In the Absence of God (see link at upper right of this page), either option he selects to avoid having to accept the conclusion creates difficulties. If he chooses A then it's incumbent upon him to show where objective moral duties could come from if not from a divine law-giver. Neither society at large nor the cosmos itself is a suitable source of moral value, and any moral duties the skeptic embraces are arbitrary choices.

If he therefore chooses B and embraces some form of subjectivism he has to recognize that his moral choices are simply an arbitrary preference or taste and that he must forfeit the ability to make judgments of anyone else's behavior which are also based on their own preferences which are no more right nor wrong than his are.

This suspension of moral judgment may sound good to someone of a post-modern inclination, but only until one gets down to cases. If our moral duties are all subjectively imposed we can't say that a child molester or rapist, or even the torture of children is "wrong." The most we can say is that these things certainly seem wrong to us, but if they don't seem wrong to the person doing them then in what sense are they really wrong? The idea that these things are not really wrong for the person doing them is extremely difficult to live with consistently.

The subjectivist option leads at best to moral egoism, i.e. the view that the right thing for me to do is whatever increases my pleasure and contentment in life, and at worst to moral nihilism, i.e. the view that nothing is really right or wrong in a moral sense.

But, the skeptic will reply, relying on God creates problems for the theist as well. One famous attempt to show that the theist is in no better position than is the skeptic with regard to a foundation for morality first appeared in one of Plato's dialogues (The Euthyphro) in which Plato has Socrates pose the following question to an interlocutor named Euthyphro: "Is something morally good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?" This is called the Euthyphro Dilemma because it seeks to confront the advocate of the moral argument with two unpalatable choices between which he must choose.

If the theist chooses the first option, that good is whatever God commands, then presumably had God commanded us to be cruel, cruelty would be morally good, a state of affairs which seems to be at the very least counterintuitive.

If the second alternative is chosen, that God commands us to do what is good, then good seems to be independent of God, existing apart from God, and rendering God unnecessary for the existence of good or "right."

Over the next couple of days I'd like to explain why I think the The Euthyphro Dilemma, for all it's popularity, doesn't do the work that some skeptics think it does. More tomorrow.

Aspiring to the Life of the Mind

In an interesting - and rather unusual - piece in First Things Paul Griffiths gives advice to young people aspiring to the intellectual life. He lists and discusses four requirements of such a life. The first three are these:

1. The aspiring intellectual must choose a topic to which he or she can devote his or her life. Just as one might fall in love with another, so, too, does one often fall in love with an idea or question.

2. An intellectual must have time to think. Three hours a day of uninterrupted time. No phone calls, no texts, no visits. Just thinking and whatever serves as a support for thinking (reading, writing, experimenting, etc).

3. Anyone taking on the life of an intellectual needs proper training. This may involve university study, but it may not.

What Griffith has to say about each of these is interesting, but the most interesting part of his essay to me is what he says about the fourth requirement. One who aspires to the life of the mind must have interlocutors, i.e. people with whom one can share ideas. He writes:

You can’t develop the needed skills or appropriate the needed body of knowledge without them. You can’t do it by yourself. Solitude and loneliness, yes, very well; but that solitude must grow out of and continually be nourished by conversation with others who’ve thought and are thinking about what you’re thinking about. Those are your interlocutors.

They may be dead, in which case they’ll be available to you in their postmortem traces: written texts, recordings, reports by others, and so on. Or they may be living, in which case you may benefit from face-to-face interactions, whether public or private. But in either case, you need them.

You can neither decide what to think about nor learn to think about it well without getting the right training, and the best training is to be had by apprenticeship: Observe the work—or the traces of the work—of those who’ve done what you’d like to do; try to discriminate good instances of such work from less good; and then be formed by imitation.

Very well, but such people are not easy to find. Most people don't care at all about the things that fascinate and animate an intellectual. Most people are too preoccupied with the exigencies of making a living and raising a family to care overmuch about ideas or the life of the mind.

Where are such interlocutors to be found? The answer these days, as you must already know, is: mostly in the universities of the West and their imitators and progeny elsewhere. That, disproportionately, is where those with an intellectual life are provided the resources to live it, and that, notionally, is the institutional form we’ve developed for nurturing such lives.

I write “notionally” because in fact much about universities (I’ve been in and around them since 1975) is antipathetic to the intellectual life, and most people in universities, faculty and students included, have never had and never wanted an intellectual life. They’re there for other reasons. Nevertheless, on the faculty of every university I’ve worked at, there are real intellectuals: people whose lives are dedicated to thinking in the way I’ve described here....If you want living interlocutors, the university is where you’re most likely to find them.

Griffiths adds this:

You shouldn’t, however, assume that this means you must follow the usual routes into professional academia: undergraduate degree, graduate degrees, a faculty position, tenure. That’s a possibility, but if you follow it, you should take care to keep your eyes on the prize, which in this case is an intellectual life.

The university will, if you let it, distract you from that by professionalizing you, which is to say, by offering you a series of rewards not for being an intellectual, but for being an academic, which is not at all the same thing. What you want is time and space to think, the skills and knowledge to think well, and interlocutors to think with. If the university provides you with these, well and good; if it doesn’t, or doesn’t look as though it will, leave it alone.

The university’s importance as a place of face-to-face interlocution about intellectual matters is diminishing in any case. Universities are moving, increasingly, toward interlocution at a distance, via the Internet. This fact, coupled with the possibility of good conversation with the dead by way of their texts, suggests that for those whose intellectual vocation doesn’t require expensive ancillaries (laboratories, telescopes, hadron colliders, powerful computers, cadres of research subjects, and the like), they should be one place among many to look for interlocutors.

You should, in any case, not assume that what you need in order to have an intellectual life is a graduate degree. You might be better served by assuming that you don’t, and getting one only if it seems the sole route by which you can get the interlocution and other training you need. That is rarely the case....

Here's his conclusion:

And lastly: Don’t do any of the things I’ve recommended unless it seems to you that you must. The world doesn’t need many intellectuals. Most people have neither the talent nor the taste for intellectual work, and most that is admirable and good about human life (love, self-sacrifice, justice, passion, martyrdom, hope) has little or nothing to do with what intellectuals do.

Intellectual skill, and even intellectual greatness, is as likely to be accompanied by moral vice as moral virtue. And the world—certainly the American world—has little interest in and few rewards for intellectuals.

The life of an intellectual is lonely, hard, and usually penurious; don’t undertake it if you hope for better than that. Don’t undertake it if you think the intellectual vocation the most important there is: It isn’t. Don’t undertake it if you have the least tincture in you of contempt or pity for those without intellectual talents: You shouldn’t. Don’t undertake it if you think it will make you a better person: It won’t.

Undertake it if, and only if, nothing else seems possible.

There's a lot of wisdom in all of this.

Speaking Biologically

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, let us for a moment assume that naturalism, the view that nature is all there is, is correct and that humanity is the product of a long process of blind evolutionary development. If so, let's further consider the question of what men and women are for.

That is, given that we're just evolutionarily advanced mammals what "purpose" do we fulfill? Of course, I put "purpose" in quotes because on the view we're considering there actually is, nor can there be, no genuine purpose for humanity, but let's play along with the idea anyway.

Well, speaking purely biologically, male humans have evolved to serve two primary purposes: First, to spread their genes as far and wide as they can and second, to fight for territory and resources. Any reading of history will confirm that these have always been, and still are, the two main drivers of male behavior.

In modern times, in what we call the civilized world, these behaviors have been sublimated somewhat by sports and other competitive endeavors, but they still underlie most of male behavior.

What about females? Speaking purely biologically - and on naturalism that's pretty much all there is - women have evolved to attract males for mating and to bear and raise the young that result.

This is, of course, a horrid claim in today's PC climate in which any suggestion that the sexual subordination and even oppression of women is natural is guaranteed to provoke howls of outrage, but it's nevertheless correct all the same. That is, it's correct if naturalism is true, and there's a piquant irony in this.

Many of those who would be most repulsed by this description of male and female roles hold to a naturalistic worldview even so. They reject the only metaphysical position which could grant a greater dignity and purpose for both men and women. They reject the traditional theistic view that we are created not solely by natural forces, but by a God in whose image we are.

Having rejected this view they're left with naturalism and are therefore left with the evolutionary view whose consequences they ironically deplore.

Moreover, on naturalism, there's no basis for charging any behavior with being immoral since there's no moral law to be violated. Thus no matter how distastefully men may behave toward women, the most we can say about that behavior is that it offends certain social conventions. We can't say that it's morally wrong.

So, if naturalism is true men who sexually exploit women are simply following an unpleasant evolutionary imperative. Modern women may not like it, but it's hard to see what grounds they have for complaint as long as they themselves continue to adhere to the naturalistic, evolutionary paradigm.

Objectifying Women

Opening the newspaper we're often confronted with what seems to be an epidemic of mistreatment of women in our culture. Stories of a campus rape culture, spousal abuse, and other examples of terrible violence perpetrated against women seem to abound, but the question this all raises is "why?". Why do more men today, more than in previous generations, seem to hold women in such low esteem? Why are women so much more likely to be objectified today than in our grandparents day?

I think a strong case can be made for the claim that the problem is a result of the moral revolution that took place in the 1960s and 70s concerning our attitudes toward sex and violence.

During those decades pornography was mainstreamed and with the advent of the internet it became easily accessible to adolescents. Three generations of young men have thus been raised on ubiquitous pornographic images. This has likely had several undesirable effects. First, it has desensitized men to sexual stimuli. A hundred years ago a glimpse of a woman's lower leg was stimulating. It no longer is because now there's so much more to be seen just about anywhere one looks than merely a shapely ankle.

Consequently, men require stronger and stronger stimuli in order to achieve the same level of arousal as someone who's not exposed to the constant barrage of sexual images. Because of this need for ever more erotic stimuli many men want their women to be more like the women they see portrayed in salacious movies, magazines, and online - they want their women to be sexually voracious playthings, and that desire often has a dehumanizing effect on women. A lot of women simply don't feel comfortable in that role, and that incompatibility can create tension in their relationships. The man feels cheated, the woman feels cheapened and trouble results.

At the same time that pornography exploded in the 60s and 70s, the advent of birth control pills allowed sex to become disconnected from marriage and commitment. Many women were perfectly willing to live with men and give them all the benefits of marriage without demanding of them any kind of permanent obligation. This suited many men just fine. When men could have sex without having to bond themselves to a woman, women were more likely to be objectified and used by men who reasoned that there was no sense in buying a cow as long as the milk was free.

People who give us what we want may be popular as long as the benefits keep coming, but they're not respected. Respect may be feigned, of course, as long as the benefit is imminent but when the benefit no longer seems all that novel or exciting respect often ebbs and the woman often finds herself treated accordingly.

Men are naturally promiscuous, they have to be taught to subordinate their natural impulses and to value hearth and family, but our entire culture has conspired in the last forty years to minimize and deride that lesson. So, when many a modern man, unfettered by any profound commitment to a particular woman and children, grows accustomed to the woman he's "dating" she'll begin to bore him, and it won't be long before his eye is cast elsewhere in search of another potential source of sexual excitement.

Along with the decline of traditional sexual morality in the 60s and 70s was the emergence of a radical feminism that castigated the old Victorian habits of gentlemanly behavior. It became quaint, even insulting, for a man to give a woman his seat on a bus or to open a door for her. Men who had been raised to put women on a pedestal - to care for them, provide for them, and nurture them - were told they were no longer necessary for a woman's happiness. In Gloria Steinem's famous phrase "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."

The more vocal feminists also made it clear that women no longer appreciated being treated differently than men. Thus our entertainment culture began depicting women in movies as just as raunchy, coarse, and proficient at killing and mayhem as men, and the idea of a woman being an object of special respect and courtesy because she needed male protection and care became risible.

Some women, oddly, have seemed eager to reinforce this corrosive image of themselves as being just as coarse and vulgar as men - a phenomenon we witnessed in the Women's March on Washington after Donald Trump's election. This, too, dehumanized women by continuing the erosion of the esteem in which their gender had once upon a time been held among men.

As with sex so with violence. The inclination to violence in the male population follows a Bell curve distribution. At some point along the tail there is a line to the left of which lies the segment of the population which represents men who are violent. Most men sublimate and control their natural inclination to violence, but when they are exposed to it over and over as young men, when they amuse themselves with violent movies and video games, when they immerse themselves in violent imagery and themes, they become desensitized to it and tolerant of it.

When they're no longer horrified by violence the population of males undergoes a shift toward that line, spilling many more men onto the other side of the line than would have been there otherwise.

This affects women as much as men, if not moreso, because women are often the victims of male violence. As men become more inclined to violence, as they lose respect for women, as our culture portrays women as sexually insatiable playthings, women become increasingly the victims of male lust, anger and aggression.

It would be well for any young woman who is beginning to get serious about a young man to find out how much of his time he spends on violent movies and computer games and what he thinks about pornography. She'll learn a lot of very valuable information about him if she does.

Hitting the Wall

Science writer John Horgan at Scientific American explores the topic of whether scientific discovery has finally "hit a wall". Horgan wrote a book on this question several years ago titled The End of Science, and he observes that important discoveries are diminishing even as research efforts are multiplying.

It's as if science is approaching an asymptote.

Perhaps mankind has indeed come to the end of what can be learned, but historically the belief that something couldn't be known was often overturned in surprising was soon thereafter. In the 19th century French philosopher August Comte wrote that the chemical composition of the sun would be forever unknowable to us.

A few years later the development of spectroscopic analysis enabled researchers to discover that the sun was mostly hydrogen. This was followed by the discovery of a completely new element on the sun, helium, which led to the realization that the process of nuclear fusion was the source of the enormous energy the sun was producing.

Examples like this and others should make us cautious about predicting the end of discovery.

Perhaps a better way to think of the diminution of scientific progress is not in terms of hitting a wall but in terms of having taken the wrong exit off the interstate and winding up in a cul-de-sac.

Think of the interstate as the metaphysical highway which facilitated so much of the progress of the last five hundred years. Science prospered for centuries because it was nourished by the assumptions of a theistic worldview – that the universe was intelligible because it was created by an intelligent Being and therefore might yield its secrets to reason, that it was not itself sacred and was therefore a fit object of study, and that being a gift of God it was worth studying.

Rodney Stark has written that of the fifty two most productive scientists at the start of the scientific revolution fifty of them were Christians and the majority of these were devout. I doubt that the same could be said today and perhaps the difference in worldview makes a significant difference in one's approach to science.

These theistic assumptions and others were the metaphysical drivers of the work of those who sought to “think God’s thoughts after Him”, and even after Christianity fell into disfavor in the West in the 19th and 20th century the intellectual momentum it had created carried scientific discovery well into the present era.

But as people like Horgan tell us, that momentum seems to be dissipating, and it could well be because naturalism lacks the metaphysical resources to sustain the scientific enterprise, largely because it rules out apriori the possibility that the world is intelligently, intentionally designed. It rules out the possibility that mind, not matter, is the fundamental reality.

Sometimes in science a shift in the way one looks at problems or looks at the evidence can be exceedingly fruitful. Perhaps a shift in our assumption that materialism is the correct metaphysical foundation for science would be like backing out of the cul-de-sac and getting back out on the highway of scientific progress.

Creepy Infiltration

Progressives are all aflutter at the idea of racially or ethnically diverse neighborhoods. They love the idea of Arabs and Asians, blacks, Hispanics and whites all living harmoniously together, grooving to the varied rhythms of the multicultural mosaic and basking in the glow of their own broad-mindedness and self-righteous virtue.

Well, that is until the mosaic includes a business that's associated with those "distasteful" Christians. Then it's, "There goes the neighborhood".

A recent essay in the very upscale glossy The New Yorker sets a new standard for supercilious bigotry and hypocrisy among elitist progressives. The piece is written by Dan Piepenbring who bemoans the "creepy infiltration" into Manhattan by Chick-fil-a restaurants.

What Piepenbring finds intolerable about Chick-fil-a is that its late founder S. Truett Cathy was explicitly Christian and the Christian ethos filters down through, and permeates, the entire corporation. This insufferable fact makes Piepenbring forget all about diversity and tolerance and multiculturalism and all those other admirable progressive virtues. Piepenbring writes:

[T]here’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety.

So why is "suburban piety" a bad thing? Evidently because it consists of a set of values at variance with those of the aristocrats at The New Yorker who, under any other circumstances, would declaim on their love for diversity.

Piepenbring spends time, for instance, criticizing Cathy's opposition to gay marriage, Chick-fil-a's emphasis on community, and, believe it or not, their unconscionable exploitation of cows in their ads, but his and his magazine's ultimate disdain seems directed at the fact that all of this has Christian overtones. Piepenbring and his editors are, when all else has been said, repelled by the notion of a Christian business in Manhattan.

A tweet from the New Yorker makes this pretty clear:

Chick-fil-A’s arrival in New York City feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism.

Yikes! "Infiltration". And "creepy" infiltration, no less, according to the title of the article. And "Pervasive Christian traditionalism", too. Is this a reference to the "distasteful" values of the sort found in every community in this country for the last two hundred years? Why is "pervasive Christian traditionalism" so alarming to the snobbish elites at the magazine?

They don't clearly say, and perhaps I'm making too much of their banal article, but on the other hand ask yourself this question:

If a restaurant chain run by Muslims, Jews, African Americans or Hispanics moved into Manhattan would The New Yorker ever dream of headlining an article on this development by calling it a "creepy infiltration"?

I don't think so either. The business would doubtless be hailed as a wonderful addition to the community mosaic and anyone who thought otherwise would be assumed guilty of bigotry.

Perhaps the same could be said, then, of the attitudes expressed in Piepenbring's silly column.

Aristotle and Nietzsche

Most ethical systems in our contemporary world can probably be subsumed under the names of either Aristotle or Nietzsche. Aristotle thought that human beings had a telos. There was something that man was for, a purpose or an end, for which he was on the earth. Virtuous acts were those which help men achieve their telos. The good life was a life which conformed to the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice - which were objectively right to live by.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, denied that there was any overarching purpose to being human and thus there was no objective moral right or wrong. Morality was all a matter of perspective. It's a matter of how we see things, a matter of individual subjective preference. Thus the ubermensch or overman creates his own values. He rejects the "slave moralities" of theism and embraces the "master morality" of the Promethean man. This is what makes men great, and great men define their own good.

Neither Aristotle nor Nietzsche believed in the existence of a personal moral law-giver which fact makes for an odd state of affairs. Aristotle's telos makes no sense unless the purpose or end of mankind is somehow conferred upon man by a transcendent moral authority. Otherwise, where would such a purpose come from? But if there's no personal law-giver or telos-giver then neither humanity nor individual men have any purpose, and the "virtues" are just arbitrary conventions.

Nietzsche is right that in the absence of a transcendent, personal law-giver what constitutes a virtue is just a subjective choice. On Nietzsche's subjectivism the virtues extolled by the Nazis are no more wrong nor right than those embraced by St. Francis of Assisi. They're just different.

If theism is correct, however, if there actually is a God who creates man and endows him with a telos then the moral law and the classical virtues, really are objective and obligatory.

So, the way the theist sees it, Aristotle, by denying a transcendent, personal God, was inconsistent but nevertheless right about there being objective moral duties, and the atheist Nietzsche was consistent but wrong in his denial of objective moral right and wrong.

Father of Modern Progressivism

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was an English thinker who wrote during the turbulent period of civil strife and struggle for power between King Charles I and Parliament. His thoughts on the best political system for avoiding the calamitous consequences of war were put down in a book titled Leviathan (1651).

Leviathan is one of the first books of modern political philosophy. Hobbes' central concern was peace, more specifically how to avoid the calamities of civil war. He began with two principles or axioms from which all else follows:

1. Men are all engaged in a constant struggle for power over others.
2. Men try to avoid death with all their might.

The word "leviathan" means great beast and is used to describe the state or commonwealth as Hobbes saw it. Hobbes' book, historian Peter Ackroyd observes, has been called "the only masterpiece of political philosophy in the English language."

Be that as it may, Hobbes wrote that the worst calamity to befall men is war. In one famous passage he wrote these lapidary words:

In such condition [i.e. civil war], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In a primitive state of nature, He argues, in which there is no government, the condition of man ...

...is a condition of war of everyone against everyone, in which case everyone is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.

And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.

Men in a state of nature are in a constant struggle each with every other for power and each lives in constant fear of violent death. Hobbes' solution is for all men to yield their own individual sovereignty and rights to that of one sovereign (or a committee) of rulers, whose will would govern all.

Once yielded that sovereignty can never be rescinded. There would be in Hobbes' state no such thing as liberty of conscience, which only leads to conflict and violence. The state will determine what religion people will follow. Justice and truth are whatever the sovereign determines them to be. Nothing the sovereign does can be said to be unjust.

This, of course, is big government on steroids. It's the blueprint for the totalitarianisms of the Nazis and communists of the 20th century, and it's the logical endpoint of liberal progressivism, even if many progressives would balk at going so far.

Progressivism is a faith that a government run by highly educated elites will naturally be the best way to prevent conflicts and protect individual rights. The bigger, more massive the bureaucratic state the more power it has over individual lives, the better able it will be to provide for the security and welfare of its citizens.

Government is the progressive's religion, and its book of Genesis is Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

Peter Singer's Utilitarianism

Peter Wicks reviews in First Things a book by Charles C. Camosy titled Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization. Singer, you probably know, is the enfante terrible of ethicists, insisting on a remorselessly consistent application of the utilitarian calculus, particularly in the matter of abortion and infanticide. For example, as Wicks writes:

Singer not only holds that abortion is permissible at all stages of pregnancy, but also notoriously defends the view that there are circumstances in which it would be moral to kill a newborn child.

Singer arrives at this position by running a familiar anti-abortion argument in reverse. The anti-abortion argument is that because a child does not undergo any transformation in the course of being born that could plausibly be supposed to give it a right not to be killed, the unborn have such a right, since to deny this would lead to the absurd conclusion that there is nothing inherently wrong in killing the newly born.

Singer reasons in the other direction and denies that both the unborn and the newly born have a right not to be killed.

In other words, pro-lifers argue that since there's no qualitative difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since killing the born infant is a moral wrong so, too, is killing the unborn. Singer, however, argues that since there's no difference between the born infant and the unborn, and since the unborn has no right to life, neither should the infant. Wick notes that:

Singer believes newborn infants are not yet persons because they lack the rationality and self-awareness required to possess a desire to go on living. It is the thwarting of that desire, rather than the taking of life as such, that he believes accounts for the wrongness of killing in those cases in which killing is wrong.

In the most recent edition of Singer’s Practical Ethics, he writes that strict conditions should be placed on the circumstances in which infanticide is permitted, but “these restrictions should owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.”

This view shocks many, including many who admire Singer for his work on our duties to animals and the world’s poor. But his position is exactly the one that his utilitarian theory implies, and the way that he arrives at that position can serve to illustrate features of the utilitarian approach to ethics that make it attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions that it implies.

There's much more on Singer's utilitarianism at the link and I recommend reading it. Wick is correct when he adds that:

One reason utilitarian ethical thinking proves so persistently attractive even to those who are reluctant to accept the conclusions it implies is that many of us have difficulty imagining what else ethical thinking could be.

Of course, Singer is an atheist, and if he's right about there being no God then it's hard to imagine how anyone could argue that he's wrong about infanticide in particular and utilitarianism in general. The former follows from the latter, and in a godless world one ethical system is just as useful and defensible as another since they're all matters of arbitrary personal preference.

If a society spurns the notion of a transcendent moral authority which establishes right and wrong and to whom we are accountable then there's no reason to prefer utilitarianism over egoism. Utilitarianism says, after all, that we should maximize human well-being and happiness which means that when I act I should take into consideration how my act will affect the happiness of others, but, given atheism, why should I? Why should I care about the well-being of people I don't even know? Why should I not just care about my own happiness and well-being?

Moreover, once we realize that in a godless world egoism (the belief that my well-being is all that matters) is the default position there's no reason not to adopt an ethic of might-makes-right. There's certainly no reason to think that anyone who does adopt such an ethic is wrong to do so. If promoting my well-being is right then whatever I have the power to do is right to do as long as it makes me happy.

When God is banished from ethics, when the divine commands to love God and love our neighbor are deemed obsolete, then society will ultimately devolve to the ethics of the Roman Coliseum or Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games.

That's why it sounds so foolish when atheists like Singer make moral judgments about the treatment of animals or people. When an atheist asserts that X is wrong or immoral all he's saying is that he doesn't like X, but why should anyone care about what he likes?

To that question the atheist can give no answer.

Where Did They Come From?

Syria's military under President Bashar Assad has been once again accused of launching a sarin gas attack on civilians, killing dozens of women and children.

This is not the first time Assad (or someone in Syria) has perpetrated such an attack and the media is rife with moral condemnations of the malignant demon of Damascus, but there are two questions that have received little attention, as far as I can tell, from folks on the left. Whoever is gassing people with chemicals, whether it's Assad's military, ISIS, or some other group (Since the sarin was dropped from a helicopter via barrel bomb it's doubtful that it was anyone outside of Syrian military), why do they still have these poisons and where did they get them in the first place?

The first question is prompted by the fact that back in 2014, President Obama assured us that the Syrians had disposed of almost all of their chemical weapons and would soon be completely rid of them.

“Eighty-seven percent of Syria’s chemical weapons have already been removed, ” Obama said. “That is a consequence of U.S. leadership. The fact that we didn’t have to fire a missile to get that accomplished is not a failure to uphold international norms, it’s a success,” [but] “it's not a complete success until we have the last 13% out.”

The last of the chemicals was expected to be removed within a couple of months, but if that was so, why is the toxic gas that keeps killing people in Syria still there? It seems that someone in Syria has pretty substantial supplies of poison gas and it also seems that, like his repeated promises that Americans would be able to keep their doctors under Obamacare, Mr. Obama's assurance that Syria had emptied their arsenals of WMD was little more than an expedient falsehood.

The second question arises from the fact that when President Bush, relying on intelligence from every intelligence service in the free world, claimed that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons and that this justified invading and deposing Hussein, his opponents on the left were adamant that Mr. Bush had fabricated the evidence and that there were no such weapons in Iraq.

"Bush lied, people died" became the chant (Why, one wonders, did we never hear "Obama lied, people died" over Syria, or Benghazi? Perhaps the chanters cared less about the deaths and more about scoring points against a Republican president.), and, indeed, those chemical stockpiles were never found. Nevertheless, there were numerous reports at the time that Hussein had secretly shipped his weapons to Syria so as to remove the pretext for an American invasion.

Here's an excerpt from a piece in The Atlantic in 2012:

Although the story [of a secret transfer of chemical weapons to Syria] was met with general neglect or scorn from the U.S. media, the present director of national intelligence, James Clapper, long ago asserted his belief in such a weapons transfer," he writes. That's true. As director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, Clapper said in 2003 that satellite images showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq to Syria "unquestionably" show that illicit weapons were moved out of Iraq.

Another frequently cited believer in a Saddam smuggling effort is former Iraqi general George Sada, an adviser to the late dictator. "They were moved by air and by ground, 56 sorties by jumbo, 747, and 27 were moved, after they were converted to cargo aircraft, they were moved to Syria," he told Fox News in 2006.

If this is indeed what happened, it would account for the strong consensus among the world's intelligence agencies that Hussein did in fact possess such weapons as well as why they were never found. It would also explain how Syria came to have the caustic chemicals that are today being rained down upon women and children in Syrian cities and towns.

Of course, don't except the leftists and media progressives who were so dogmatically certain that Bush was a liar to reconsider their judgment, and don't expect them to blame Obama for misleading the world about the fate of these weapons in Syria. Those would be naive expectations.

When the left has ideological enemies to punish and friends to support whatever must be said to accomplish their goals, whether it's objectively true or false, is in their minds completely justified.

Closed Minds

When I was working my way through my undergraduate years universities were considered the one place you could go in our society where you could be sure debate was free and open and all ideas were appropriate topics for consideration. That, however, was then and this is now and today's universities are rapidly earning a reputation as the most closed-minded citadels of bigotry in our culture.

Harvard professor Ruth Wisse elaborates in a column in the Wall Street Journal:

There was a time when people looking for intellectual debate turned away from politics to the university. Political backrooms bred slogans and bagmen; universities fostered educated discussion. But when students in the 1960s began occupying university property like the thugs of regimes America was fighting abroad, the venues gradually reversed. Open debate is now protected only in the polity: In universities, muggers prevail.

Assaults on intellectual and political freedom have been making headlines. Pressure from faculty egged on by Muslim groups induced Brandeis University last month not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women's rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation. This was a replay of 1994, when Brandeis faculty demanded that trustees rescind their decision to award an honorary degree to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In each case, a faculty cabal joined by (let us charitably say) ignorant students promoted the value of repression over the values of America's liberal democracy.

Opponents of free speech have lately chalked up many such victories: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly prevented from speaking at Brown University in November; a lecture by Charles Murray canceled by Azusa Pacific University in April; Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national-security adviser under the George W. Bush administration, harassed earlier this month into declining the invitation by Rutgers University to address this year's convocation.

Most painful to me was the Harvard scene several years ago when the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, celebrating its 50th anniversary, accepted a donation in honor of its former head tutor Martin Peretz, whose contributions to the university include the chair in Yiddish I have been privileged to hold. His enemies on campus generated a "party against Marty" that forced him to walk a gauntlet of jeering students for having allegedly offended Islam, while putting others on notice that they had best not be perceived guilty of association with him.

Universities have not only failed to stand up to those who limit debate, they have played a part in encouraging them. The modish commitment to so-called diversity replaces the ideal of guaranteed equal treatment of individuals with guaranteed group preferences in hiring and curricular offerings.

There's much more at the link. The left uses the American commitment to free speech and the first amendment like the Greeks used the wooden horse at Troy. Free speech is nothing more than a tool to be used as long as it's useful, but as soon as the left has acquired sufficient power they discard the tool and deny it to everyone else. It's a classically fascist tactic and it's rampant on the left.

It'll strike some as strange, perhaps, that one place you can go today and advance almost any idea, as long as it's done respectfully and tastefully, is almost any Christian church. Generally speaking churches are among the most open venues for the free exchange of ideas in our culture, and the reason is not hard to discern. When one believes that those with whom one disagrees are nevertheless people loved and created by God in his image, one is duty-bound to treat them and their ideas with respect.

Moreover, when one has been inculcated with the ideals of humility and kindness, when one believes that God expects this of them in their dealings with others, one is less likely to be arrogant and insulting.

As the modern university drifts further and further from these ideals we might expect that it will become more and more intolerant while, ironically enough, defending its intolerance in the name of tolerance.

Why We Need Philosophy

Robert Tracinski has written some wise words on the topic of the importance of philosophy in these times.

Whether we're consciously aware of it or not each of us adopts a particular philosophical view of life and the world. We do this as individuals and we do it corporately as a society. To study philosophy is to consciously examine the views we're adopting and to ask ourselves and others whether they make sense.

Here's a portion of what Tracinski writes:

The primary purpose of philosophy is to offer guidance for one’s life. It asks questions like: How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? How do we know what is right or wrong? What is the moral purpose of our lives? Do we have a choice over our personality and control over our destiny? When we say philosophy talks about “the meaning of life,” that’s not an understatement. These are the kinds of questions that, depending on the answers, can give meaning and coherence to the course of our lives.

They also make a tangible difference in how we live it. If you don’t think you have control over your life—if you think everything is determined by your genes, upbringing, God or “the system, man”—then you’re not likely to take much action to improve your life. So the questions philosophy deals with are the kind of questions that really matter.

What philosophy does for a single person’s life, it also does for the political life of a nation. If we want to make America great again, for example, we need to know what “greatness” is and how to achieve it. We need to know what government can do, ought to do, and shouldn’t do. All of these questions have huge, life-and-death consequences.

Politics is about ideas and power. Philosophy asks us to follow our ideas to their logical conclusion to see whether those endpoints are really best for ourselves and our nation. It helps us to consider how power should be exercised in a society that aspires to justice.

In that regard, there are whole schools of philosophy—including the ones dominant today—that undermine the role of philosophy itself. They are helping to turn us into an unphilosophical country with an unphilosophical political culture.

The dominant schools today are essentially subjectivist. They encourage you, Oprah-style, to assert “your truth,” which is valid because you feel it, so there’s no need to listen to anyone else. The subjectivists have cultivated a reputation for being “open-minded” and freewheeling, but this actually shuts down discussion. ... this is how we get the peculiar dogmatism of political correctness [according to which]...[t]here is no universal truth, just your ‘perspective,’ as a trans person of color or a left-handed lesbian tugboat worker, or whatever.

And no one else is entitled to question your perspective. It’s true because it’s true for you. If you are aggrieved, the very fact of your grievance validates itself.

If that’s the case, what’s the point of discussing any of it? It’s not for others to question or for you to explain. You just scream out your rage and frustration, and they have to cave.

In other words, so much of what passes for "dialogue" today is merely emotive venting (see the video here, for example). People often are unable or unwilling to give a rational defense of what they believe so they substitute yelling, name-calling, intimidation, censorship, and/or violence, all of which are tacit admissions that they have no good reasons for their beliefs and cannot persuade others to accept them but can only impose them on others by refusing others the opportunity to analyze, debate and promote an alternative point of view.

We see this often whenever matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, evolution, climate change, or politics arise in the classroom or in informal discussions. As soon as an opinion is raised which clashes with conventional orthodoxy, especially the orthodoxy of the left, the dissenter is treated like a heretic or a social leper.

In some cases on university campuses where the heretics have been grad students they've been expelled from their degree programs, when they've been faculty members they've sometimes been denied tenure or their classes have been disrupted. In cases where the dissenters from the approved opinion have been invited speakers they've often been disinvited or shouted down or even assaulted.

Tracinski continues:

When we disregard philosophy, when we don’t used reasoned debate to examine our moral and political assumptions, then all that’s left is some kind of appeal to emotion. When you appeal to emotion, as most people do these days, then the only people you can gather to your side are those already inclined to feel the same emotions you do. You end up appealing only to people like you, to those with the same background and upbringing.

College-educated blue staters will agree with college-educated blue-staters. Blue-collar red-staters agree with blue-collar red-staters.

Actually, in today’s politics, the responses are even narrower, because so much of the political debate is based on an appeal to our emotions about a particular person. Do you love or hate Hillary Clinton? Do you love or hate Donald Trump? That’s all you need to know to determine where you stand in a partisan fight, and even on public policy.

The end of the road for the appeal to emotion is the kind of tribalism and cult of personality we see in today’s politics.

The only cure for it is philosophy.

Dads Make a Difference

One of the chief concerns of many Americans, including those who are socially liberal, is domestic violence and abuse. The irony of this concern is that the high rates of domestic turmoil we've witnessed over the last several decades may largely be the result of successful attempts by liberals to weaken the traditional family structure.

W. Bradford Wilcox at The Federalist has a column in which he in effect makes the politically incorrect claim that the safest place in our society for women and children is in a home in which the biological father is present. He writes:

[V]iolence against women (not to mention their intimates and children) is markedly rarer in families headed by married parents regardless of how well-off or well-educated mom is.

We can speculate about the precise mechanisms—is it the commitment, the stability, the mutual support, the kinship ties, or the sexual fidelity marriage fosters more than its alternatives?—that accounts for this empirical link. But what should be clear to analysts willing to follow the data wherever it leads is this: a healthy marriage seems to matter more than money when it comes to minimizing the scourge of domestic violence in American families.

Wilcox develops his argument by citing a study that includes this graph:

The disparity depicted in this chart is rather startling. Wilcox adds:

[H]omes headed by never-married, separated, or divorced mothers are about five times more likely to expose children to domestic violence, compared to homes headed by married, biological parents. What’s more: family structure outweighs education, income, and race in predicting the odds that children witness domestic violence in the home.

Women and children are in much greater jeopardy when the male in the household is not married to the woman than when the male is the woman's husband and the father of her children.

The left has been telling us since the sixties that the traditional family is an oppressive, patriarchal social structure that women and children are often better off without and that other arrangements are at least as conducive to their flourishing as is the traditional structure. Well, we've largely abandoned the traditional structure, the data are in, and the results are not anything the left is likely to boast about.

Historical Smoking

This past weekend my wife and I thought about going to go see Chappaquiddick, the new release that documents Ted Kennedy's responsibility for the death of a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969. Kopechne was a passenger in a car Kennedy drove off a bridge into a shallow pond near the town of Chappaquiddick.

He escaped and could have rescued her but chose not to. She was trapped in the car for several hours until all the air was used up and she asphyxiated. It must've been a horrible, terrifying death and Kennedy did nothing to help her.

I changed my mind about going, however, when I heard a promo for the movie on the radio that warned viewers that the film had "disturbing images, strong language, and ... historical smoking." Historical smoking?

Well, I was completely triggered by the thought of seeing people smoking, even historical people, and fearing that I might freak out in the movie theater when somebody lit up a cigarette on screen, I thought I better not go. Watching someone from 1969 smoke would be an emotionally wrenching experience, and the very thought of it induced something of a panic attack. I wanted to retreat to a safe space somewhere with my emotional support parrot to soothe my anxieties.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how much historical drinking there is in the film - and historical dope-smoking. Being that the movie's about the Kennedys I'll bet it's a lot, but apparently the people who wrote the promo weren't worried that drinking and dope-smoking, even historical drinking and dope-smoking, would freak anybody out since the promo doesn't mention it.

So we didn't go. Besides, I know how the story ends. The creep who lets a girl drown because he's either a coward or worried about his political career, or both, goes on to become the "Lion of the Senate" and one of the Democratic party's all-time most beloved heroes. Pretty nauseating.

I wonder how the media, which did all they could to cover up for Kennedy after the death of Kopechne, would've reacted had Donald Trump run Stormy Daniels off a bridge after having downed a few historical drinks. Do you think they'd do their best to ignore the story? Me neither, especially if they found out that he'd been smoking tobacco while driving the car.

Pixels Made of Mind

A couple of months ago I did several posts (2/15, 2/16, 2/19) on panpsychism, the view that every particle of matter in the universe possesses at least a rudimentary consciousness. I recently unearthed an older post based on a New York Times article on panpsychism, and thought I'd share it:

Philosophers and scientists have been perplexed for centuries by the phenomenon of human consciousness. There seems to be no plausible explanation for how it could have arisen in the evolutionary scheme of things and no explanation for how conscious experience - our sensations, beliefs, doubts, hopes, etc. - could be produced by a brain made of nothing but unthinking atoms.

The quandary has led some philosophers back to a view that has actually been around for a long time, the view that somehow every particle of matter contains a tiny bit of consciousness or mind. Mind, in this view, pervades the entire cosmos. This is called panpsychism.

I came across an article on panpsychism written in 2007 by Jim Holt for the New York Times in which Holt lays out the basic problem:

Most of us have no doubt that our fellow humans are conscious. We are also pretty sure that many animals have consciousness. Some, like the great ape species, even seem to possess self-consciousness, like us. Others, like dogs and cats and pigs, may lack a sense of self, but they certainly appear to experience inner states of pain and pleasure.

About smaller creatures, like mosquitoes, we are not so sure; certainly we have few compunctions about killing them. As for plants, they obviously do not have minds, except in fairy tales. Nor do nonliving things like tables and rocks.

All that is common sense. But common sense has not always proved to be such a good guide in understanding the world. And the part of our world that is most recalcitrant to our understanding at the moment is consciousness itself. How could the electrochemical processes in the lump of gray matter that is our brain give rise to — or, even more mysteriously, be — the dazzling technicolor play of consciousness, with its transports of joy, its stabs of anguish and its stretches of mild contentment alternating with boredom?

This has been called “the most important problem in the biological sciences” and even “the last frontier of science.” It engrosses the intellectual energies of a worldwide community of brain scientists, psychologists, philosophers, physicists, computer scientists and even, from time to time, the Dalai Lama.

Imagine that, like the images on a computer screen, the physical world consists of pixels embedded in a material substrate. But these are not pixels made of chemicals like those on your monitor, but rather they're pixels made of mind. If you can imagine this you are on your way to grasping the panpsychist hypothesis:

So vexing has the problem of consciousness proved that some of these thinkers have been driven to a hypothesis that sounds desperate, if not downright crazy. Perhaps, they say, mind is not limited to the brains of some animals. Perhaps it is ubiquitous, present in every bit of matter, all the way up to galaxies, all the way down to electrons and neutrinos, not excluding medium-size things like a glass of water or a potted plant.

Moreover, it did not suddenly arise when some physical particles on a certain planet chanced to come into the right configuration; rather, there has been consciousness in the cosmos from the very beginning of time.

This view is not popular among those who hold to a naturalistic metaphysics for the simple reason that naturalists are leery of anything that sounds suspiciously like an attempt to reinsert God back into the universe from which he was banished by modernity, and the panpsychist view certainly swings the theistic gate wide open. Moreover, naturalists are often materialists - i.e. they believe that matter (and energy) are all there is, there's no room for an immaterial substance such as mind in the materialist's world-picture.

Yet the problem of how to explain consciousness haunts the discussion. It's like the elephant in the middle of the room that can't be ignored. Whether the solution turns out to be panpsychism or some version of mind/body dualism, it seems clear that materialism is gently being shoved in the direction of the boneyard of obsolete ideas.

There's more on Holt's article on panpsychism at the link.

Inequality Is Wrong

New Scientist recently ran a story (paywall) that was titled Inequality: How Our Brains Evolved to Love it, Even Though We Know it's Wrong. Because the article requires a subscription I didn't read it so it'd be unfair to assume too much about it, but the title itself is puzzling.

Even though I don't want to assume too much, I am going to assume that the editors of New Scientist, or at least many of their readers, lean metaphysically in the direction of naturalistic materialism. That is, I'm going to assume they hold to the view that nature is all there is and that all of nature is ultimately explicable solely in terms of matter and the laws which govern its behavior.

If I'm wrong in my assumption, I apologize at the outset.

But assuming that I'm correct I have a couple of questions for New Scientists' editors.

Doubtless they explain in the article what they mean by inequality, but whatever is meant by it, how do we know it's wrong? In order to know that X is wrong there must be some objective moral frame of reference to which we can compare X to see if it conforms to that standard. On naturalistic materialism, however, there are no objective moral reference frames, there are only subjective preferences and biases.

On naturalism when someone says, for example, that racism, murder, or political corruption are wrong all they're doing is emoting. They're saying something like, "I really don't like racism, murder or political corruption."

Moreover, inequality is the natural, expected outcome of the evolutionary process. Evolution by its very nature generates inequalities of all sorts. Why should anyone think that one evolutionary by-product, inequality among humans, is any more or less wrong than any other unless those by-products are being compared to some higher moral standard? How can we say that kindness is right and cruelty is wrong if both are simply the products of impersonal processes like random mutation and natural selection?

If our fondness for inequality is merely a product of evolution then to declare that it's wrong is a lot like declaring that our fondness for sweet tasting foods is wrong. Nothing that has resulted from a blind, impersonal process like evolution can be either right or wrong. It just is.

We like to think that the evolution of sympathy or kindness is good and the evolution of greed, racism and aggressiveness is bad, but how can we justify such an assessment if there's no higher standard to which we can compare these things? And on naturalism, of course, there is no higher moral standard. All there are, ultimately, are atoms jiggling in the void.

Rescuing the Humanities

It's become something of a pastime among members of humanities faculties to bemoan the decline of the humanities in our institutions of higher learning, and it certainly is ironic that although most universities were founded to instill in students a love for literature, an appreciation of history, a facility with philosophy and so on, they have over the last few decades evolved into factories for turning out students with skills in the STEM disciplines.

Meanwhile, humanities enrollments have shrunk, and administrators are dropping humanities majors because they can't afford to keep idle faculty on the payroll.

Part of the reason for this unfortunate state of affairs, of course, is that a humanities degree doesn't reward a student up to her ears in student loan debt and trying to start a family (Joke: What's the difference between a history major and a large pizza? The pizza can feed a family of four.), but there are other reasons why the humanities have lost their way in our colleges and universities.

Notre Dame Sociologist Christian Smith unleashes a passionate rant against what he says is the BS (it means what you think it does) that's drowning higher education and includes in his indictment a number of reasons which apply specifically to the humanities.

BS, Smith declares, is, inter alia:

• the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.
• the farce of what are actually "fragmentversities" claiming to be universities, of hyperspecialization and academic disciplines unable to talk with each other about obvious shared concerns.
• the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games.
• a tenure system that provides guaranteed lifetime employment to faculty who are lousy teachers and inactive scholars, not because they espouse unpopular viewpoints that need the protection of "academic freedom," but only because years ago they somehow were granted tenure.
• the shifting of the "burden" of teaching undergraduate courses from traditional tenure-track faculty to miscellaneous, often-underpaid adjunct faculty and graduate students.
• the fantasy that education worthy of the name can be accomplished online through "distance learning."
• the institutional reward system that coerces graduate students and faculty to "get published" as soon and as much as possible, rather than to take the time to mature intellectually and produce scholarship of real importance — leading to a raft of books and articles that contribute little to our knowledge about human concerns that matter.
• the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance.
• the ascendant "culture of offense" that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university leaders’ confused and fearful capitulation to that secular neo-fundamentalist speech-policing.
• the invisible self-censorship that results among some students and faculty, and the subtle corrective training aimed at those who occasionally do not self-censor.
• the anxiety that haunts some faculty at public universities in very conservative states about expressing their well-considered but unorthodox beliefs, for fear of being hounded by closed-minded students and parents or targeted by grandstanding politicians.
• the standard undergraduate student mentality, fostered by our entire culture, that sees college as essentially about credentials and careers (money), on the one hand, and partying oneself into stupefaction on the other.
• the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the "practical" enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy.

Mark Bauerlein at First Things also laments the decline of the humanities, but from a somewhat different angle:

This (the declining interest among students in humanities courses) puts humanities professors in an uncomfortable position. They must become entrepreneurs, and they don’t know how.

You know that’s true because of the directions the humanities have taken over the years. Does anybody who isn’t a true believer think that intersectionality theory is going to increase enrollments? How many nineteen-year-olds will be drawn to Queer Theory? When a student who loved Jane Austen in high school enters English 200 with great expectations, only to be hectored about imperialism and sexism in Victorian England, she likely won’t come back. Or, to take another popular claim among the humanists, how many students will say in earnest, “Hey, they teach critical thinking over there—that’s exciting—I’m in!”?

Bauerlein's right, of course. The proliferation of boutique courses that appeal mainly to disaffected students and which are "taught" by radical professors who actually despise the traditional humanities disciplines are like bad money that drives out good. More than that, the better students don't want to take classes which will do nothing to make them more marketable and will often only embitter them toward that - values, country, race, gender, or religion - which they're hectored into believing is oppressive and unjust.

Bauerlein goes on to say this:

Humanities professors have forgotten the first principle of undergraduate study in the humanities: inspiration. Students come because the material compels them. They may love modern novels, or a high school teacher may have turned them on to Renaissance art or the Civil War. They want greatness and beauty and sublimity. Professors should tell students that they have on their syllabi the works of the ages.

Why not play up the classics? Forget critical thinking, workplace readiness, and verbal skills. Highlight Hamlet, Elizabeth Bennet, and the Invisible Man. Reach out to freshmen with an invitation to the Pantheon of genius and talent. March in to college curriculum meetings and announce that everyone must take a course in Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Mozart. Take students to dinner and pass along your enthusiasm in a non-class setting....

That’s what it will take to reverse the slide, and I hope my colleagues realize it.

I hope so, too. Nothing enriches a student's mind and stirs the soul like good literature, history and philosophy taught by someone who deeply loves his or her discipline.

Evolution and Ethics

VJ Torley at Uncommon Descent comments on a passage from Thomas Huxley's essay Evolution and Ethics (1893) in which Huxley, otherwise known as "Darwin's bulldog," puts his finger on one of the chief difficulties with trying to establish a naturalistic basis for ethics.

One popular candidate for such a ground is the evolution of our species, but Huxley, his arrant fealty to Darwinian evolution notwithstanding, illuminates the hopelessness of this strategy:

The propounders of what are called the “ethics of evolution,” when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution.

I have little doubt, for my own part, that they are on the right track; but as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

Huxley's right, of course. If the inclination to be kind and tolerant has evolved in the human species then so has the inclination to be selfish, violent, and cruel. So if evolution is to serve as our "moral dictionary" what grounds do we have for privileging kindness over cruelty? Both are equally sanctioned by our evolutionary history and thus we can't say that either is better or more right than the other.

Huxley goes on to dispense with the notion that the evolutionary development of our ethical sensibility can provide us with some sort of guide to our behavior.

There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so-called “ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittest’; therefore men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection.

The problem is that, for naturalists, the processes of nature are the only thing they can look to for moral guidance. Having rejected the notion that there exists a transcendent, personal, moral authority, the naturalist, if he's to avoid nihilism, is left trying to derive ethics from what he sees in nature, which leads to what I regard as the most serious problem with any naturalistic ethics: There's simply no warrant for thinking that a blind, impersonal process like evolution or a blind, impersonal substance like matter, can impose a moral duty on conscious beings.

Moral obligations, if they exist, can only be imposed by conscious, intelligent, moral authorities. Evolution can no more impose such an obligation than can gravity. Thus, naturalists (atheists) are confronted with a stark choice: Either give up their atheism or embrace moral nihilism. Unwilling to do what is for them unthinkable and accept the first alternative, many of them are reluctantly embracing the second.

Consider these three passages from three twentieth century philosophers:

I had been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality….

I experienced a shocking epiphany that religious believers are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality….

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of child molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Joel Marks, An Amoral Manifesto

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The world, according to this new picture [i.e. the picture produced by a scientific outlook], 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. W.T. Stace, The Atlantic Monthly, 1948

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We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality. Kai Nielson (1984)

What these thinkers and dozens like them are saying is that the project of trying to find some solid, naturalistic foundation upon which to build an ethics is like trying to find a mermaid. The object of the search simply doesn't exist, nor could it.